The Hanged Man's Song

particular position that gives them away. A guy looking at you with binoculars, for example, will have his armsand hands in almost a perfect triangle, elbows out, fists meeting in front of his eyes. Photographers, on the other hand, scrunch their arms together as they support the camera and lens, and their faces are completely obscured by the camera body. When you see either one of them, you won’t mistake the positions for anything else.
    I got up, took LuEllen’s bag, made a little show of scrunching it up. She pulled her feet onto the park bench, while I strolled toward the trash basket. I dumped the bag, did a double take at something, then waved LuEllen over.
    She got up and strolled toward me. I was looking at her, and past her. The guy with the binoculars was gone. “We better hurry,” I told her when she came up. “He’s out of sight.”
    She nodded and we turned, walked a little way toward the edge of the park, and then I turned and walked backward with her, saying, “Yadda yadda yadda yadda,” so that I appeared to be talking with her, but still couldn’t pick up the guy with the binoculars. “Okay,” I said. “Time to move faster.”
    She nodded and we both started jogging down the diagonal sidewalk to the corner, the car a block farther on. At the cross street I looked back at the park, but didn’t see anything—and then Carp broke out of a little copse of trees a scant seventy yards away. He was running fast, for as big as he was, a pair of binoculars dangling from his neck, and he had a gun in one hand.
    “He’s coming,” I said. “It’s Carp and he’s got the gun.” LuEllen looked the same way and we broke into a hard run. Carp was about as close to us as we were to the car. He hip-checked a Cadillac in the street as we ran down the sidewalk toward the car, and I said, “We’re gonna slow down getting in and getting started.” Ipulled the car keys out of my pants pocket and handed them to her. “You drive. If he opens up on us, I’ll slow him down.”
    She didn’t say anything: that would have been a waste of time. She was moving, breaking off the sidewalk to run between two parked cars, then up the street toward the driver’s side of our car. Carp broke around the corner deli when we were still twenty yards away from it. Then LuEllen was inside and I dragged open the passenger-side door, slipping the revolver out of my jacket pocket, and she shouted, “Get in,” and Carp, now forty yards away, slowed to a walk, brought his weapon up, and fired at me.
    I wasn’t aware of the slugs going by—you can actually hear them go by if you’re far enough from the blast of the gun, a whip-snap sound. That’s if you’re not preoccupied by something else, like shooting back. I was shooting back, carefully, taking my time, aiming everything into a tree next to him. I could see people far down the street, and while I didn’t think the .38 would reach that far, I didn’t want to kill some old lady or her dog.
    I fired four shots and suddenly he stopped shooting, looked at his gun, looked at me. I took a step toward him and he turned and ran back around the corner.
    I jumped in the car and said, “Go,” and LuEllen ripped out of the parking space and we were down the street, fast for the first hundred yards, down to the corner, then we were around the corner and away. As we went, I was looking out the rear window. He was gone.
    “You shot at him,” LuEllen said in her calmest voice, which she uses only when she’s intensely cranked.
    “Not exactly. I shot an elm tree to death. Can’t shoot him until we get the laptop. Sure as shit slowed him down, though.”
    “You’re okay?”
    “Never touched me,” I said. “He fired every shot he had, I think. Six shots, probably. It’s not like doing Quake in your basement.”
    “Jesus.”
    “He was too far away,” I said. “Too freaked out. I was trying to be careful to hit the tree and I was shaking like a leaf.”
    “You’re still shaking like a leaf. You’re talking about a hundred miles an hour.” She started to laugh. “I don’t think anybody saw us. All those people sitting in the park, and when I looked back there was nobody down the street or on the street. I don’t think anybody saw us. And we were right in the middle of everything.”
    “Fuckin’ crazy,” I said. “If somebody saw him running with that gun . . . Wouldn’t have got a good look at us, anyway.”
    She laughed some more, started driving