The Hanged Man's Song

the motel, I tried to work on the casino stats. I had a feeling I better get them done, just in case the Bobby problem turned into something ugly. Trouble tapping at the line. Every few minutes I’d check my e-mail. Two hours later, I picked up an alarm from another one of my invisible addresses: “Call me at home—J.”
    “Gotta go back out,” I told LuEllen. She was bent over the bed with a lightweight dumbbell, doing a golf exercise called the lawn mower pull. “Got a note from John.”
    “Is he part of the ring?” she asked, doing a final three pumps. She knew John as well as I did.
    “I’d always assumed he was, but we never talked about it,” I said. “He’s not like the rest of us.”
    “Not a computer geek.”
    “I’m not a computer geek,” I said. “Computer geeks wear pocket protectors.”
    “You’ve got five colors of pens, Kidd,” she said, pulling on her rain jacket. “I saw them once when I was ransacking your briefcase.”
    “I’m an artist, for Christ’s sakes,” I said.
    >>> JOHN lived in a little Mississippi River town called Longstreet. He and his wife and LuEllen and I were friends. I’d stop and see them a couple times a year, as I migrated up and down the Mississippi between St. Paul and New Orleans. LuEllen would stop if she was stealing something nearby.
    I called him from a Conoco: gas stations with pay phones should get a tax break. He answered on the first ring.
    “John, this is Kidd, calling you back,” I said. Rain was hammering on the car, and I could see a discouraged-looking redneck behind the plate glass of the station window.
    “You know about Bobby?” John asked. He had a baritone voice, calm and scholarly, with a trace of a Memphis accent.
    “I know he’s down. Are you a member of the ring?”
    “I’m the guy who puts the words together. Do you have a pen?”
    “Just a minute.” I got out a pen and found a blank page in a pocket sketchbook. “Okay.”
    “Here’s his address.”
    “You sure you want to give it to me?”
    “Yes. Just in case something happens . . . to me. Ready? Robert Fields, 3577 Arikara Street, Jackson, Mississippi 38292. Or it might also have been Robert Jackson, 3577 Arikara Street, Fields, Mississippi 38292, except that there isn’t a Fields, Mississippi, as far as I can tell.”
    “The name I had for him, the rumor I had, was that his name was Bobby DuChamps—French for ‘fields.’ ”
    “That’s the name I had,” he said. “What’s an Arikara?”
    “An Indian tribe, I think. Did you try to call him?”
    “Can’t find a phone number.”
    “Yeah, well—he might not have one of his own,” I said. “He didn’t need one, since he practically owned the phone company.”
    “That’s what I figured. Listen . . . I checked airlines from St. Paul into Jackson—”
    “I’m down by Biloxi,” I said, interrupting. “Between Biloxi and Gulfport.”
    “Really?” His voice brightened. “Could you meet me in Jackson? You could be there in three hours, right up U.S. 49. It’ll take me an hour and a half at least. It’s raining like hell up here.”
    “Down here, too.”
    “But I got bad roads. Kidd, I need some backup. We gotta try to do this before daylight.”
    I thought about it for a minute. This could be a bad move, but John was an old friend who had helped us through some hard times. I owed him. “All right. Where do you want to hook up?”
    “I got a room at the La Quinta Inn, which is just off I-55. It’s what, almost ten o’clock now. See you at one?”
    “Soon as I can get there,” I said.
    >>> WHEN I told her, LuEllen frowned, looked out the window at the slanting rain. “It’s a bad night for driving fast.”
    “I gotta go,” I said.
    “I know.” A couple of seconds later, “Shoot. I put someChanel on. Now it’s wasted.” She stood on her tiptoes and gave me a soft peck on the lips, her hands on my rib cage. She did smell good; and I knew she’d feel pretty good. “You goddamn well be careful.”
    Some things to think about on my way north: sex and death.

Chapter Three
    >>> THE NIGHT WAS AS DARK as Elvis velvet, with nothing but the hissing of the tires on the wet pavement and the occasional red taillights turning off toward unseen homes. I listened to the radio part of the way, a classic rock station that disappeared north of Hattiesburg, fading out in the middle of a Tom Petty piece.
    As the radio station faded, so did the rain, diminishing to a drizzle. I turned the