The Hanged Man's Song

a small dinette table and the line of cupboards on the opposite wall. The garbage bag was jammed with pizza boxes, corn-curl sacks, instant dinner cartons, and microwave popcorn bags, and that’s what the place smelled like: like every kind of stale cheese you can think of.
    The next room along was the living room, with the furniture arranged to focus on a large-screen TV. Most of the furniture had a patina of dust, and the room was littered with paper: the New York Times, the LA Times, tabloids, popular science magazines, a facedown copy of Penthouse. An all-in-one stereo sat on a corner table, with a couple dozen CDs. On the wall, somewhat askew, was a full-color framed copy of the Praying Hands.
    There were two bedrooms along a single hallway in the back: the first was a woman’s room, not much neater than the rest of the place, and even dustier. The second bedroom belonged to Carp. A dozen computer books and manuals were scattered on the floor around the bed, all but two on IBM hardware. One of the others dealt with encryption, and the last one was an O’Reilly’s Guide to the C++ language.
    I moved the pack to the back door, closed and locked the door, and we started tearing through the room. We didn’t take long: we’d done this before. In two minutes, I had a ream of paper—old bills, new bills, bank statements, notes, employment records—a dozen floppy disks, and a half-dozen recordable CDs. I was loading it into our backpack when LuEllen, who’d moved back out to the front room, said, “Hey.”
    I poked my head out of the bedroom. “What?”
    “Laptop,” she said.
    “What?” I went out, and sure enough, a Toshiba notebook sat under the edge of the couch. The power supply was still plugged into the wall. It looked exactly like somebody had been lying on the couch with the laptop on his stomach, while watching TV, had shut down the laptop and then pushed it under the couch so it wouldn’t be stepped on. I know that because I’d done it about a thousand times. We pulled the plug and took it.
    “Bobby’s?” LuEllen asked. “Is that too much to expect?”
    “Yeah, that’s too much,” I said, as we put it with the pack. “Baird said Bobby’s was an IBM. And this one doesn’t have a built-in optical drive. It’s a travel machine like my Vaio. Bobby’s was probably a lot heavier, with a bunch of built-in stuff. He didn’t travel.”
    We’d been inside for five minutes at that point and my internal egg timer was telling me to get the fuck out. Same with LuEllen. “Unless you’ve got something special to look at . . .”
    “Let’s go,” I said. That’s when we heard a car’s tire crunching on the gravel outside.
    LuEllen touched my arm and moved to a window. She could see out through a crack in the blind, and she hissed at me, “Two guys,” and then, “Coming to the door.”
    I couldn’t see out, but I glanced at LuEllen’s face: she seemed pleased. She liked this shit, because it cranked her up, and she lived for the crank.
    She pointed to the bedroom, and we tiptoed to the back door, hardly daring to breathe. The thing is, houses give off vibrations—footfalls, weight shifts, voices. Mobile homes, which aremore lightly built than regular houses, are the worst. At the back, LuEllen put her hand on the doorknob, and we waited. The idea is to open your door at the same time the other person is entering the other one; the noise and vibrations cancel each other out.
    But they didn’t come in. They knocked, loudly. We heard them talking, and then one of them crunched around to the back, and a second later, knocked on the door where we were standing. The knob rattled—LuEllen lifted her hand when she realized what was happening—and then the guy crunched back around the house.
    I moved to the window and peeked out. Two guys: one black, one white, both wearing short-sleeved dress shirts and khaki slacks. They looked like hot, out-of-shape office workers, both too fleshy and with careful, thirty-dollar haircuts. The white guy, blond, pink-faced, chubby, had a tidy spade-shaped soul patch, the kind worn to demonstrate cool; he was probably taking saxophone lessons somewhere. The black guy was wearing a pink cotton shirt, and he looked terrific.
    They were talking, nervously, I thought, then they looked up and down the street, as if checking for somebody they might interrogate. Then they got in the car, bumped back onto the road, and left. I read their license number to