The Hanged Man's Song

said.
    >>> “I HATE surprises,” LuEllen said. And she did—whenever she was working, she was a meticulous planner. Our planning on Carp had not been the most meticulous.
    “Lost the laptop,” John said. “But we sure as shit got some answers: Carp did it, and he’s got it.”
    We heard another siren and then another cop went by.
    “Keep running, Jimmy James,” I said. “The hounds are on your ass.”

Chapter Nine
    >>> AFTER THE FIASCO at Carp’s, we retreated to the motel to think it over. If this had been a thriller novel, we would have tried trolling the back roads, looking for Carp, and might even have found him. But this wasn’t a novel, and since we weren’t cops, and didn’t know the town, we had no resources for tracking him. Even if we located him, he had a gun and we didn’t. Nor did we have a way to get one quickly, if we wanted one.
    “If we find him again, we need to surprise him, disarm him, and grab the laptop,” John said. “If we’d known for sure what helooked like, we could’ve grabbed him at the trailer before he had a chance to get the gun.”
    “We should have researched him before we tried to grab him,” LuEllen said. “At least, we should have found a picture of him.”
    “Yeah. We blew it,” John said. To me: “What do you want to do?”
    “Go out on the ’net and do what we should have done before—research him,” I said.
    “When he shot at you guys, I could barely hear the shots,” LuEllen said. “He was inside. There wasn’t anybody else around, and with everybody using air-conditioning, it’s possible nobody else heard the shots. If nobody called the cops and pinpointed Carp’s place, we might be able to get back inside.”
    “That’d be a last resort,” I said.
    “It might be full of stuff that would tell us where he’s going—if the cop sirens chased Carp away, and nobody heard the shots.”
    I looked at John and he nodded.
    >>> “THE other thing,” LuEllen said. “I hate to keep harping on it, but I can’t see any downside to telling somebody that Bobby is dead. If we don’t, they’ll start going after people they think might be associated with him. Might know something. There’s no way to tell where that would stop. The thing is, Carp is fucking with politicians. You know how they hate that.”
    John shrugged. “I don’t see a huge problem with telling somebody. Except, who’d believe us?”
    “There’s one person I can think of.” I looked at LuEllen. “Rosalind Welsh.”
    LuEllen thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. She’d do.”
    “Who’s she?” John asked.
    We’d only met Welsh once, I told him, during a spot of trouble that led to a car getting melted in a Maryland shopping center garage while LuEllen and I stole a van from a housewife, and black helicopters—well, sort of a greenish-black . . .
    “Just green,” LuEllen said.
    . . . green helicopters landed in the parking lot and people ran around like ants and waved their arms until the fire trucks came.
    “She works for the National Security Agency,” LuEllen said to John. “She’s a security expert, not a computer freak. She’s too heavy by fifteen pounds. She thinks Kidd’s name is Bill Clinton.”
    “Hmm,” John said. “Sounds perfect.”
    We decided to make the call that night—I had all of Rosalind Welsh’s phone numbers, unless she’d moved or died, and I was sure she’d be happy to hear from me. First though, we needed to find a Radio Shack.
    If there weren’t such things as Radio Shack stores, I probably would have become a humble shepherd, instead of the hardened criminal and painter that I am. But there are Radio Shack stores, and after the discouraging session with John and LuEllen, I looked at my watch, and figured I had about twenty minutes to get to one.
    Fortunately, there are as many Radio Shacks in the New Orleans area as there are blues singers: I ran in the door of my favorite store five minutes before closing, gathered up most of what I needed—a screw-on N-type female chassis mount connector, a little roll of 12-gauge copper wire, some solder, a pigtail with an N-type male connector at one end, and the cheapest wire cutters, tape measure, and soldering iron I could find—and carried it to the counter.
    The clerk recognized me as a one-time regular. He looked over my purchases, rang it up, and asked cheerfully, “Gonna do some war-driving?”
    “Huh?” I said as I paid him.
    “Ah, you know,” he said. He was too