The Hanged Man's Song

radio off so I could think, but all I could do was go round and round about Bobby. What had happened tohim? What were the implications, if he was dead? Where were his databases, and who had them?
    Bobby had backed me up in a number of troubling ventures. People had died, in fact—that they’d most often deserved it didn’t change the fact of their death. Say it: of their killing. Bobby knew most of the details in the destruction of a major aerospace company. He knew why the odd security problems kept popping up in Windows. He knew why an American satellite system didn’t always work exactly as designed. He knew how a commie got elected mayor of a town down in the Delta.
    He had worked with John. John had been a kind of black radical political operator all through the deep South, especially in the Delta. He didn’t talk about it, but he was tough in a way you didn’t get by accident; and he had scars you didn’t get from playing tennis.
    So Bobby knew too much for our good health. He knew stuff that could put a few dozen, or even a few hundred, people in prison. Maybe even me.
    Thirty miles south of Jackson, I ran into a thunderstorm—what they call an embedded storm, though I wouldn’t know it from an unbedded storm. The rain came down in marble-sized bullets, lightning jumped and skittered across the sky, and I could feel the thunder beating against the car, flexing the skin, like the cover on a sub-woofer.
    I hoped John had made it all right. He had a treacherous route into Jackson, mostly back highways through rural hamlets, not a good drive in bright sunlight. I’d met John on one of my special jobs, set up by Bobby, a job that ended with me in a Memphis hospital. The scars have almost faded, but I still have the dreams. . . .
    Still, we’d become friends. John had been an investigator with a law office in Memphis, and, underground, an enforcer of some kind for a black radical political party—and at the same time, an artist, like me. Instead of paint, John worked in stone and wood, a sculptor. He’d begun making money at it, and had started picking up a reputation.
    >>> THAT last thirty miles of bullet-rain took forty minutes to drive through, and it was nearly two in the morning when I arrived in Jackson. I pulled into the La Quinta, stopped under a portico, and hopped out. Before I could walk around the car, John came through the door. He was wrapped in a gray plastic raincoat and was smiling and said, “Goddamnit, I’m glad to see you, Kidd. I was afraid you’d gone in a ditch.” He was a black man, middle forties, with a square face, short hair, broad shoulders, and smart, dark eyes.
    As we shook hands in the rain, I said, “Picked a good fuckin’ night for it.”
    “If you don’t have to pee . . .”
    “I’m fine, but I’d like to get a Coke.”
    He stuck his hand in his pocket and produced a can of Diet Coke. “Still cold. Let’s go.”
    >>> AS SOON as he’d come into town, figuring that I’d be later, he’d gone around to convenience stores until he found one that sold a city map. In his room at the La Quinta, he’d spotted Bobby’s house and blocked out a route. “We’re a ways from wherewe need to be,” he said. He pointed down a broad street that went under the interstate. “Go that way.”
    I went that way and asked, “How’s Marvel?”
    “She’s fine. Up to her ass in the politics. Still a fuckin’ commie.”
    “Nice ass, though,” I said. Marvel was his wife, but John and I had met her at the same time, and I had commentary privileges.
    “True. How ’bout LuEllen?”
    “She’s with me, down in Biloxi, but we’re not in bed. I’ve, uh, I’d been, uh, seeing this woman back home. She broke it off a couple of weeks ago. I’m kinda bummed.”
    “You were serious?” He was interested.
    “Maybe. Interesting woman—a cop, in fact.”
    A moment of silence, then, “Bet she had a nice pair of thirty-eights, huh?”
    We both had to laugh at the stupidity of it. Then I said, “What about Bobby?”
    “I don’t know,” John said. “He sounded good—I mean, bad, but good for him—last time I talked to him. That was like two weeks ago, one of those phone calls from nowhere.”
    “No hint of this.”
    “Nothing. I tried to remember every word of what he said, when I was coming over here, and I can’t remember a single unusual thing. He just sounded like . . . Bobby. Hey, turn left at that stoplight.”
    >>> JACKSON, Mississippi, may be a