The Hanged Man's Song

off and turned to me. “Guy’s voice.”
    “So let’s go take a peek.”
    “Didn’t . . . mmm . . . sound like Carp. I only heard him for that one minute at Rachel’s, but he seemed kinda squeaky. High-pitched. This guy had some hormones. His whole attitude was sorta . . . cool.”
    “I dunno,” I said. And I didn’t.
    >>> MARY GRIGGS lived in a small brick apartment building in the Ballston area of Arlington, an upwardly mobile neighborhood with a little rolling contour, a four-acre park in the middle of it, the whole thing almost as green as Longstreet. The day was insufferably hot and humid. By contrast, the park looked pleasant and cool, with big spreading trees and what I took to be government workers sitting on the park benches eating their bag lunches.
    We left the car a block off the park, down toward a busy street. LuEllen had spotted a deli as we went in, and we stopped and got sandwiches—apparently the source of the government sandwiches and white paper bags—carried our own lunches up the block and across the street to the park, found a bench where wecould see the front of the Griggs apartment building, and nibbled on the sandwiches. Off to our left, a woman was lying on a blanket, reading a book. A bunch of kids were sliding down a curvy slide at a playground, and a park worker was changing a net at a beach-volleyball court that featured real ankle-deep yellow sand.
    Because I was carrying a gun, I’d worn a sport coat, despite the heat, and had the revolver in the left breast pocket. There might have been a little fullness on that side, but nothing obvious. Still, I could feel the weight hanging off my chest.
    “That kind of building,” LuEllen said, looking at Griggs’s apartment, “is the worst of all possibilities.”
    “Worse than a Saddle River jeweler’s house with a hundred-thousand-dollar alarm system?”
    “In some ways,” she said, launching into a burglar’s analysis. “You have an insider in the jeweler’s house, so you eventually figure out a way to handle the system. You’ve got somebody telling you when the house will be more or less empty, and even if it’s not empty, you can spot the people still inside. But you get a place like this, people are coming and going all the time—nobody knows who’ll be coming and going, or why. It’s random. And the building is older so it’s probably got relatively thin walls: if you have to break a door, somebody’ll hear you. Or they’ll see the damage. Plus, everybody inside probably recognizes strangers.” She took a bite out of her sandwich and studied the building.
    “Just don’t tell me you’d go in over the roof,” I said. She liked ropes and climbing.
    “I was just thinking that was a possibility,” she admitted. “You avoid a lot of issues that way. And look at the windows. They’re the old-style windows that open, with a twist-lock. You poke ahole through the glass, twist the lock, slide it up, and you’re in. You don’t meet anybody in the hallways, you don’t have to break any doors. No visible damage.”
    “Of course, you have to get on the roof.”
    “That can be done.” She studied it some more. A guy in a funny old-fashioned snap-brimmed hat strolled by, led by a bulldog on a leash. The guy took a good look at LuEllen; the bulldog sniffed what I assumed was a bed of pansies—they looked like the African violets in Strom’s sink from the day before, but in lighter colors, and with more variety—and then lifted a leg and peed on them.
    I was following them on their path through the park when I saw the guy with the binoculars. I casually turned back to LuEllen and said, “If you look past the back of my head, you’ll see a guy in a blue shirt looking at us with binoculars. Either that, or he’s looking at a really low bird.”
    She turned toward me and laughed, threw back her head, and said, “I see him. Yup. Who is it? Somebody tagged us? How did that happen? So now what? We run?”
    “Maybe not run, but we go. I’ll wad up the sandwich bag and walk over to the trash can to throw it in, and you can sit here. Then I’ll call you over, like I’m looking at something. That’ll get us a hundred feet toward the car.”
    “I hope he doesn’t have a camera. I hope he doesn’t have a long lens. I hope he doesn’t have our faces.”
    “Just binoculars so far,” I said. When people look at you with binoculars, or shoot your picture with a long lens, they unconsciously take a