The Hanged Man's Song

also possible that he was directly in touch with Carp—maybe that’s why Carp was so confident about flicking that little fly out there, about dragging Rachel in front of Bobby’s computer eyes.
    >>> AS FOR Jimmy James Carp, he was gone and he wouldn’t be back.
    John and his friends had split up, going their own ways, after we got Rachel back. When John arrived at the house, he was grim as the reaper himself. He said, “Hi,” in a quiet voice, when he came through the living room, and I nodded toward the bathroom. Marvel and Rachel had been inside for the best part of an hour. I could hear them talking and sometimes, crying.
    John knocked on the door, talked with them for a minute, then came back into the living room. “That jerk,” he said. He was calmenough. He went to the refrigerator and got out a beer and popped the top. “You want one of these?”
    “Yeah, I’ll take one,” I said. The beer tasted pretty good, cold and spiky against the heat. “She’ll be okay,” I said. “Marvel will fix her.”
    “She might grow up to be okay, but she’s not okay right now,” he said, tipping the bottle up.
    “How did you get Carp to tell you where she was?”
    “He made the mistake of thinking death was the worst thing that could happen to him,” John said. I opened my mouth to ask another question, but he tipped the bottle toward me and said, “Don’t ask, okay? Those guys you saw . . .”
    “What guys?”
    He nodded. “Exactly.”
    He took another calm pull on the bottle, looked at it, and then screamed, “That motherfucker,” and he pitched the bottle right through one of the plate-glass windows on the front of the house, which blew out as though it had been hit by a bomb.
    Marvel came wide-eyed out of the bathroom: “What was that?”
    “Window broke,” John said.
    All right.
    >>> THAT evening, as the sun was going down—and after we’d gone to the hardware store for glass and putty and I showed John how easy it is to replace a window—John, Marvel, Rachel, and I headed for Memphis, all jammed into John’s car. They dropped me at the airport, where I caught a plane back to Cleveland, toretrieve my car. They went on to see a doctor, not George, but a lady friend of George’s, who’d give Rachel a complete exam. Nobody said anything about it, but if Rachel had been made pregnant . . .
    That’d be just about the final little chip of horror in the story. The doctor would make sure that wouldn’t happen.
    On the way, Rachel confirmed what I thought but hadn’t mentioned, about how Carp had found her. She’d been going to the Longstreet library with her laptop, and from there, she logged into her regular baby-hacker chat rooms with her baby-hacker name. If you knew what you were doing—and with most programs, it’s really easy—you could track that back to her location.
    >>> L U ELLEN was at my apartment when I got back to St. Paul from Cleveland. I walked in the door and she called, “Kidd? In the kitchen.” I dropped my bag in the hallway and found her eating a toasted bagel with cream cheese. The red cat was sitting on the kitchen counter, next to her, licking his chops. Cream cheese was one of his favorites.
    “So what happened?” she asked.
    I told her. All of it.
    “Fuck him,” she said about Carp.
    >>> TWO days later—this is while the DDC was still operating—I found her file in a DDC computer under the tag Betty 47. “Betty,” as it turned out, was intelligence-speak for an unidentified female. The file contained partial fingerprints from her carand a dozen photographs taken by a concealed camera in the room where she’d been detained.
    “They did a good job hiding the camera,” LuEllen said. “I never saw a thing. And I looked.”
    “Some of the lenses are the size of pinheads,” I said.
    I downloaded the photographs, went out to the FBI files and picked up another dozen surveillance photos of a dark-haired woman named Harriet. With a few hours of tedious work in Photoshop, I replaced LuEllen’s face with Harriet’s, while leaving LuEllen’s body and the room backgrounds. The fingerprints were replaced with a set picked at random from the FBI files.
    Is she safe? I don’t know. There may be hard copies, or optical-disk copies, of all the stuff on LuEllen. You can’t get into somebody’s desk drawer from a computer.
    Am I safe? I don’t know that, either. I do have reason to believe that they don’t know who I am. Not yet, anyway—because if