The Hanged Man's Song

that.”
    Rachel said, “He asked me if a Mr. Krause had called, or somebody from the government, and I thought he meant you because he said it was a white man and a black man together.”
    “What’d you tell him?”
    “I told him that a white man and a black man came and said they was Bobby’s friends, and they were looking for Bobby.”
    John exhaled and said, “Not good.”
    “He was gonna kill me, man,” Rachel said. “He said he’d shoot me right in the eyeball, and he would have. He’s a crazy man. And he does want to fuck me.”
    >>> ONCE in Longstreet, we paused at the local Super 8 just long enough for LuEllen to check in. LuEllen didn’t want to see any new faces—she’d already seen too many that day, and there wasn’t any point to her coming along. After she had a room, John and I and Rachel continued to John’s place. A new Chevrolet was parked in the driveway, and Marvel was pacing around in the yard. When she saw me coming, she ran up to the car window and looked in the back and saw John and jerked open the door and cried, “How bad? George is here, how bad?”
    >>> MARVEL was angry and unhappy and scared, and also worried about Rachel, never quite understanding from me what was going on with the girl. George, as it turned out, was a doctor, a bigsquared-headed, square-chested guy who might have been a tight end in another life, and he was prepared to operate right in the house. He frowned when he first saw me, a white guy, but never asked a question.
    John was the calmest of us all, and took some time to explain to Marvel the exact situation with Rachel. As he did that, George was checking his blood pressure: checked it once, checked it again, then nodded. “Good blood pressure,” he said to Marvel.
    When that was done, John told Marvel to go away—“Go anywhere, I just don’t want you fussin’ around”—and we went into the kitchen, where George had spread a sterile sheet on the kitchen table.
    After washing John’s arm with an antiseptic, George gave him a blocking shot, pulled on some sterile plastic gloves and a mask, and went to work on the arm. He didn’t have any X rays, but he seemed familiar with gunshot wounds, and located the .22 slug with a probe. He had to work it awhile, with a variety of small tools that would have looked at home on a dentist’s tray. In twenty minutes he’d winkled the slug out into his glove.
    “Gonna hurt like heck in the morning,” he told John. “I’ll give you some stuff to take, some painkillers and antiseptics, but it’s still gonna be sore.”
    There was more to it than that—especially on Marvel’s side, because she was royally pissed—and sometime after two o’clock, I went down to the Super 8 and fell into bed next to LuEllen.
    >>> THE next morning, first thing, without bothering with security, I went out on the Super 8 phone line and checked my mail-boxes.
    There was nothing from the ring, but there was a letter from Bobby.
Kidd:
    I’ve been gone for a while now. I assume that I’m dead, though maybe I’m just too sick to stop this from going out. Here is the important thing: a good friend of mine, who calls himself Lemon, has a selected set of my working documents, and will continue my operation now that I am gone. He does not know you or of you (unless you have a connection that I don’t know about) but will take you as a client. To sign on with him you need to identify yourself as 118normalgorgeousredhead at [email protected] and provide him with a dump address. I leave that to you, if you want a new hookup. He’s not a bad guy and has substantial resources. Anyway, good luck and good-bye; it’s been interesting working with you.
    —Bobby
    That gave me a chill: a voice from beyond, more or less.
    LuEllen got the same chill. “Dead people should stay dead. You shouldn’t be talking to people after you’re dead.”
    “He might not be completely dead.”
    “What?”
    “He’s like Janis Joplin or Frank Sinatra. I heard ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ on the radio the night I drove up to Jackson. Janis is dead, but I never knew her personally, and I keep hearing her song, so to me, it’s the same as if she was still alive. Her song keeps going.”
    “Yeah, but this . . . I mean, the guy’s talking to you, personally.”
    >>> GEORGE, the doctor, had gone home. No longer worried about another person seeing her face, LuEllen came with me to John’s. Marvel ushered the kids out into the yard, where they