The Hanged Man's Song

they’d find the keys. I’d find a better hiding place as soon as I got home.
    Home . . . What if Carp had called Krause back, had given him my name and my license plate number, and some thugs were waiting in my apartment to take me down? I got paranoid thinking about it, and finally called the old lady who lived downstairs from me—a painter, and a good one, who took care of the cat when I was gone—to check on the apartment and to tell her I was on my way back.
    “Means nothing to me. You can stay away as long as you want.” She loudly crunched on a carrot stick or piece of celery, and said while she was chewing, “I put the cat through the garbage disposal two days ago, the stinky thing, and stole your Whistler. What else do you have that I need?”
    “How about a real sense of humor?” I suggested.
    She was ragging on me, which was good: she knew everything that happened in the apartment building, so there probably weren’t any thugs waiting on the landing.
    >>> THE rest of the evening was spent systematically going through the last five files, figuring out exactly what was there. An index helped, but the entries were often cryptic in themselves—just a couple of words or initials that Bobby would recognize.
    At one o’clock in the morning, I popped an Ambien to take me down, and got six hours of good sleep. Sometime before nine o’clock the next morning, I was again crossing the rolling greenlandscape of Ohio, heading toward I-80, which would take me into Chicago.
    I hadn’t thought much about Carp—what he might be doing—since I’d last seen him on his bicycle outside Rock Creek Park. He was in hiding, I thought. I’d also lost track of the murder investigation in Jackson, which I resolved to check into that night. If the feds didn’t winkle him out pretty soon, I’d start messaging the FBI myself.
    At ten o’clock, or a little after, I stopped at a Dairy Queen to get an ice-cream cone. I was leaning against the car’s front fender, munching the dipped-chocolate coating off the ice cream, when I heard the phone ring in the car. LuEllen.
    I scrambled to get inside without dripping ice cream on the upholstery, got the phone, and punched it up. “Yeah?”
    Child’s voice, shaky, and thin, as if she were some distance from the phone’s mouthpiece: “Mr. Kidd? He took me on the way to the liberry.”
    “What?”
    “He took me on the way to the liberry. He wants Bobby’s laptop.”
    Shit. Not LuEllen. It was Rachel. “Where are you, honey? What’re—”
    “Kidd? This is James Carp.”
    Like getting whacked in the forehead. “Carp?”
    “I assume you’re the one who took the laptop out of my car. Pretty smart. I want it back. I’ll trade you.”
    “What’re you talking about?”
    “The laptop. And Rachel, here. I’ve got her, and I’m going to keep her until I get the laptop. But there’s a deadline. I assumeyou’re still in Washington. I want you down here near this place, Longstreet, as soon as you can get here. Tonight? Tonight, I think.”
    “I’m not in Washington,” I said. “I can’t get there tonight. I’m in my car in the middle of nowhere.”
    “Then get somewhere,” he snapped. His voice had a high, squeaky quality, as though it were on the edge of cracking; as though he were on the edge of cracking. “I’ll tell you this. This is what I’m going to do. I’m gonna stick this girl so far out in the woods that you’ll never find her. Out in the wilderness. I’m gonna chain her to a tree. If you fuck with me, I’ll never go back, and you’ll never find out where she is.”
    “I’ll get you the laptop, but I can’t get there tonight,” I said. My voice was scared, and I didn’t care if it showed; maybe it was better that it showed. And I was lying like a motherfucker, trying to buy time. “I’m way up in West Virginia. I can get there maybe tomorrow afternoon. Honest to God, I’m out in the sticks. I’ll get to an airport, try to find a flight that’ll get me into Memphis, and I’ll get a car from there. But don’t put her out in the woods. If you put her out in the woods and she dies, you’ll get the death penalty. You still might be clear with the cops.”
    “Oh, bullshit. They know I killed Bobby. The only thing that’ll get me clear is that laptop, and the files. If I have that, they’ll talk. They’ll let me go off somewhere and play with myself. Otherwise, I’m toast. You try to jump me, I swear to God I’ll put a gun in my