The Hanged Man's Song

out that Robert Fields was Bobby, and if Welsh doesn’t tell them, then we’ll have to. Carp ain’t walking away from this thing.”
    “We don’t even know that Carp’s the guy who killed Bobby. Maybe it was these two guys,” LuEllen suggested.
    “Oh, bullshit.” I swallowed most of a wing. “These guys were a couple of schmucks. And we know Carp is nuts. When we were in the trailer, the first time we ever saw him, he jumped up and fired a gun at John and me without ever asking who we were or where we were from. Nuts.”
    “Okay, he’s nuts,” she said. “There are a couple things we’ve got to know, though, that we don’t know yet—the biggest one is, is Carp working for someone? If he’s working for someone, then he may have already given the computer away. Or given upcopies. And we may run into more trouble than we think, if we ever find him.”
    “Yeah . . . maybe we’ll figure out something tomorrow.”
    “Hope he doesn’t pop something else on the news,” LuEllen said. “He’s already got a feeding frenzy. What more does he want?”
    >>> WE SPENT a little time fooling around that evening, in sort of a sad way, and in the quiet after the sex, LuEllen told me why she was thinking of quitting her life.
    “No big deal, it was just a TV show. I was down in Texas and they showed this thing about women in prison. They were all doing long terms for murder and . . . well, murder, mostly—and I started thinking that I could end up like them. Just one fuck-up. One alarm that I don’t see, or maybe a booby trap or I get hurt, somehow. I’d be in there. It wasn’t the jail so much that looked bad, it was the women. They all looked really messed up. Hurt. They looked sad . . . the saddest people you can imagine. I’d hang myself before I got that way.”
    There wasn’t much to say. She was right, it could happen. To either of us.
    She went on: “The saddest thing was the day their kids could come visit, and how happy they were to see their kids. Some of the kids didn’t even seem to remember their moms that well. And sometimes the women thought their kids might be coming and then they wouldn’t show up and they’d just sit in a corner and cry. And I thought, I don’t even have anybody who’d come to see me if I was inside.”
    I said, “LuEllen, you know—”
    “You couldn’t come,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you see me that way, even if you wanted to. But I was thinking, if I got caught, nobody would even know who I was. Know my name. Nobody but a couple of people I went to junior high school with. Nobody would even know.” She sat up suddenly. “My life has been okay so far. I didn’t have a lot of choices. It was this or maybe be a practical nurse like my mom, running pans of shit around a nursing home.”
    “You’re too smart for that.”
    “In this country, smart isn’t enough. You’ve got to be taught right, from the start. You’ve got to get that education, or have money from your parents, you just . . .” She flopped back on the bed. “I don’t know. But I’ve gotta find something else to do. I still get the rush, I still get high on it, when I’m inside somewhere, but I gotta get out of this before it’s too late.”
    That made for a great night’s sleep. That and recurring dreams that featured an overweight man facedown in the street. . . .
    >>> THE next day was a Saturday. We both woke early, twitched around a little, trying to get that last little patch of sleep, and I finally gave up and found the remote and clicked on the TV. The Menu screen came up with the day, date, and time. I hadn’t been paying attention, and when they registered with me, I said, “Saturday. Damnit. If nobody gets our e-mail, we won’t get any passwords back.”
    “I bet political people check their e-mail every five minutes,” LuEllen said. She sat up and stretched. “Let’s get breakfast and then go see.”
    While she cleaned up, I clicked around to the local channels, looking for news. I found it, but there was nothing about the shooting the night before. We went out, ate French toast—she was overly cheerful, and maybe a little embarrassed about the talk the night before, revealing herself like that—and then we got on-line at our big wi-fi building.
    LuEllen was right about political people. They check their e-mail. Seventeen replies had come in to the dump site. I transferred them to Carp’s machine, then called into the first number of the DCC