The Hanged Man's Song

talking to his staff director about making a deal with Carp, so we think Carp may have contacted him and Krause is disposed to deal. Do you have *anything* more on Carp location? Anything would help? If not, we may abandon Washington.
    Twenty minutes later we got:
Nothing more. Sorry. Will check everything, will monitor Krause if I can. Stay in touch.
    “He never asks what happened at Griggs’s place,” LuEllen said. “Because he knows what happened.”
    “And he sort of kisses us off. He’s gonna call Krause,” I said.
    >>> TEN minutes later, we were staked out two blocks apart, on opposite ends of Carp’s parking lot, in the two rental cars. LuEllen had pointed me at the Corolla, and I’d cruised it once, just to make sure I had it. Then we settled down to watch.
    >>> WE WAITED three hours, staying in touch with the walkie-talkies. I had a couple of books in the car, the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and LuEllen had some papers and a stack of magazines. Still, it got hot, even with the car windows down. I worried about attracting attention, just sitting there doing nothing, but nobody even glanced my way. LuEllen spotted a cop car coming from her end of the block, ducked before it got to her, called me, and I rolled up the window and slid down out of sight until it was safely past. That was the only cop we saw.
    We had two false alarms, heavyset men walking into Carp’s parking lot carrying briefcases. Sitting there waiting, I had time to think about how out-of-shape Americans were getting: a few thin people walked by, but it seemed that seventy or eighty percent of the people I saw were overweight, sometimes grossly overweight.
    I watched a short woman who might have weighed two hundred fifty pounds making her way down the sidewalk with a shopping bag, and wondered if she had any thought or care of what she was doing to her heart—that she might as well have been walking around town carrying a half-dozen car batteries. Then LuEllen beeped: “Wake up, bright eyes.”
    And here was Jimmy James Carp, pushing a mountain bike across the parking lot; a black nylon briefcase hung by his side, on a shoulder strap. He opened the car door, popped the trunk from inside, had a little trouble taking the front wheel off the bike, then put the wheel and the rest of the bike in the car trunk, along with the briefcase. A moment later, he rolled out of the parking lot and LuEllen called, “Coming your way.”
    I went out ahead of him to the first big cross street and took a left toward Washington. He was a half-dozen cars behind me, also in the right-turn lane. He followed me obediently around the corner, and I called and said, “On Quaker.”
    LuEllen: “I saw him turn. I’ll be around in a sec.” Then: “I’m around, I’ve got him.”
    I accelerated, putting more cars between us, but we were coming to a freeway access. I didn’t want to go on before him, so I pulled into a Wendy’s parking lot and drove around the building just in time to see him go by the entrance. LuEllen was still on him and I pulled out behind her. We were both behind him now, and we followed him onto I-395 and headed north.
    “Slow way down,” LuEllen called to me. “He’s going about forty-five. I think he’s looking for people going slow behind him. I’m trying to fade back.”
    I slowed down to forty, and LuEllen faded on him, and he got off I-395 and swung between the Pentagon and Arlington cemetery, along the Potomac and then across a bridge toward the Lincoln Memorial. Just across the river, he dropped off the highway onto a riverside street and headed north. I caught a street sign that said Rock Creek Parkway.
    >>> FOR the first mile or two, there was enough traffic to cover us. Carp was still moving slowly, but maybe, I thought, that was the way he drove. We went up the river, past people in rowing shells, past a single sailboat heading upstream under power, and then into the ravine that was the lower end of Rock Creek Park. Traffic disappeared, and before long, I was the next car behind Carp.
    “I’m gonna have to get out,” I called to LuEllen. “I’m getting off at the next street. You stay back as far as you can.”
    “Okay.”
    Rock Creek Park must be several miles long; it’s the designated body-dumping spot for the Washington metro area. The lower end of the park is a narrow, steep-sided, heavily wooded ravine. In places, the boulder-filled creek runs precisely through the middle of it, with