The Hanged Man's Song

tall, too skinny, and had spent twelve seconds getting dressed for work that morning. Maybe less. “Or maybe you don’t need a Lucent gold card.”
    “What’s that about?” I asked.
    “About ninety dollars,” he said.
    I took two fifties out of my billfold and stood there. He disappeared into the back for a minute, then came back with a Lucent card in the kind of Ziploc bag usually used to hold marijuana and cocaine . . . and maybe peanuts and raspberries and other legal stuff, for all I know. He handed me the card and I handed him the money and said, “Keep the change,” and he put it in his shirt pocket.
    “If you go about nine blocks that way, there’s an all-night supermarket that sells Dinty Moore beef stew,” he said for the extra ten dollars. “I recommend the can. It’s just about perfect for a waveguide. And the area around Tulane is your happy hunting ground.”
    “You are a prince among men,” I said. “Have a nice day.”
    Did I mention the service at Radio Shack?
    >>> I STOPPED at the supermarket, got the can of Dinty Moore and a can opener, drove back to the motel, and built the antenna. The worst part was trying to flush the cold beef stewdown the toilet: it just didn’t want to go. John stood there, grimacing at the bowl, flushing it over and over, saying, “Man, that’s nasty. It looks like somebody was really sick.” A bright orange ring-around-the-bowl was still there the next morning.
    After cleaning the beef-stew can, I went online to an antenna site with a calculator, did some figuring, and with the soldering iron put together a nice little wi-fi antenna. Wi-fi stands for “wireless fidelity” and works as a high-frequency wireless local network—it’s cheap, and it allows several people, in several different places around the house, office, or classroom to use the same Internet connection. It’ll probably be obsolete by tomorrow, but today, it was spreading around the country like a rash. Usually, the range is limited to just about the area of a big house. With an antenna, though . . .
    Normally, I wouldn’t ride on somebody else’s Internet connection, simply because it wasn’t necessary. Connections are a dime a dozen, if you’re legal. Most Starbucks have a wi-fi connection. But the Carp problem made me nervous, and if I rode on somebody else’s network connection, there’d be no way to backtrack our inquiries. And it would be faster than doing it from the motel: working over a telephone hookup was like having water drip on your forehead.
    The kid at the Radio Shack store had recommended the Tulane area as a happy hunting ground, but I had a different idea. I’d found that lots of warehouses use wi-fi because warehouses are constantly involved in inventory movements, and those movements are often uploaded via the Internet to central control offices. Few of them have any kind of protection.
    LuEllen and I took I-10 out toward Kenner and New Orleans International, LuEllen driving while I watched the laptop, and eventually we found a truck stop parking lot next to what looked like a warehouse, where we got a strong signal from a wi-fi network.
    And it was a fast one, maybe a T-1 line. In the next hour, I pulled every bit of information I could out of the National Crime Information Center, out of credit agencies and insurance companies, and from three different credit card companies. When I was done, I still didn’t have a photograph of Jimmy James Carp, but I had a different kind of picture, and it was one that scared us.
    >>> “THE guy might be working for the Senate Intelligence Committee,” LuEllen blurted to John, when we got back to the Baton Noir. John was stretched on his bed, watching CNN. “He might be a spy or something.”
    He sat up, dropped his feet to the floor. “What?”
    “The last job I can find for him, the last one that paid Social Security taxes, was the U.S. government, and the reference number traces back to the Senate Intelligence Committee,” I said.
    “The government killed Bobby?”
    “I don’t know—the Social Security payments stopped a month ago, but if he’s fucking around with the intelligence community, that might not mean anything,” I said. “On the other hand, that didn’t look like a government operation out at the trailer park. If the feds knew what was on that computer, they’d have it locked in a vault somewhere.”
    “It feels bad, though,” LuEllen said.
    “Tell you something,” John said,