The Hanged Man's Song

needed. Or, rather, I may have needed it, but it wasn’t what I so desperately wanted. What I wanted I got at eleven o’clock; I almost ruptured an appendix getting to the phone.
    >>> “YEAH,” I said. LuEllen had known where I’d be; and she’d call me through a hotel switchboard, so there wouldn’t be anything on my cell phone.
    “It’s me,” she said. She sounded tired. “I’m near that narrow lane, the one we used to check for tails the last time we were here. The airplane time. You remember? I don’t want to say the name. Nobody could have followed me this far. I went to a Goodwill store and bought clothes and dumped all of my stuff, every stitch, and my shoes, so I’m not bugged.”
    “Are you okay?”
    “Mmm. Physically. Otherwise, I’m pretty screwed up. They put me in a room and every once in a while, somebody would come in and ask a question. I didn’t say one fuckin’ word to them. Then they came and got me, put me in a car, drove around for a while, gave me a hundred dollars, dropped me off, and told me to get lost. I don’t know where I was in the room, it was like an office building, but I don’t know where.”
    “They got your car?”
    “Yes. They’ll have my prints. I didn’t see anybody take a picture. They . . . they weren’t real cops. They were something else. I thought maybe Army—some of them had those funny white-sidewall haircuts.”
    “Okay. So I’ll cruise the lane in exactly twenty minutes. You got your watch?”
    “No, I dumped everything. But I know twenty minutes.”
    “You come in at the same time I do, so you’re moving. I’ll flick the lights when I come into the street.”
    “See you.” She really did sound beat.
    >>> I GOT her twenty minutes later, on a narrow one-way lane that we’d once used to make sure that nobody was behind us. I went into the lane slowly, blinked my lights, and crawled through, worried sick that she wouldn’t be there.
    She was. She stepped out from behind some kind of evergreen, next to a low stone wall and a garbage can, and held up her hand and I slowed and she got in.
    “You look like you just got out of Vogue, ” I said.
    “Shut up and drive,” she said. I was still wound tight as a grandfather clock, afraid that a black federal car would suddenly block the way, and guys with guns would come parachuting out of the trees.
    But they didn’t. Six blocks down the road and around a few corners, and she said, “Pull over.”
    “What?” I looked in all the mirrors and saw nothing.
    “I need a squeeze,” she said. “Really bad.”
    I pulled over and we spent a little time just squeezing each other, though modern cars aren’t built for it. Christ, I’d been worried. I’d been so worried. . . .
    “You got me back,” she said.

Chapter
Seventeen
    >>> L U ELLEN DISAPPEARED into the bathroom, taking her cosmetics bag with her, leaving the Goodwill clothes on the floor. She said she expected to be in there awhile. I gathered up the clothes and stuffed them in a sack. We could drop them somewhere the next day.
    With the bathwater running in the background, with LuEllen home and well, I went back to Bobby’s computer, the laptop I’d taken from Carp’s car. I’d been poking at it during the afternoon, while I waited to hear from LuEllen. What I’d found was curious.
    The files that had been on Carp’s computer, the blackmailfiles, were there, all right, as were the encrypted files. But some of the encrypted files had been decrypted. He’d made notes: This from File 23, Indexed as MRG Cleanup: and there was the Norwalk virus file.
    The question that plagued me was, how had he decrypted it? Where had he gotten the decryption keys? Bobby’s laptop had the encryption program right there, out front, and it was a good, solid commercial program that would essentially produce an uncrackable file.
    From the bathroom, LuEllen said, “Oh, Jesus,” and I looked up, then rolled off the bed, went to the bathroom door, and poked my head inside.
    “What was that?”
    “My ass hitting the hot water. Close the door, you’re letting the cold air in.” I took a longer lingering look before I backed out. She’d put some bubble bath in the water, and it smelled good; and some pink parts were poking out of the bubbles, fairly artfully, I thought. She said, “Your look is lingering.”
    “I wanted to make sure you were physically okay,” I said.
    “What do you think?”
    “I’ll need a closer look.” I shut the