“I just want to look at the system,” she said sullenly.
“I don’t know about Wal-Mart, but I can suggest a piece of social engineering that’ll get you in.”
“Like what?”
“If I tell you, you’re on your own,” I said. “And you can’t call Carp.”
“Let’s have it,” she said. “And I’ll want those three numbers, too.”
“When I know you can’t hurt us. Do you have a chat name?”
“Yes. You can get me anytime.” I got her AIM name and told her I’d call back.
“So tell me how to get into Wal-Mart.”
I told her. John was watching while we talked, and finally he asked, “Where’s your mother?”
“She took off with Leon-her boyfriend. She told me to go over to my aunt’s, but my aunt said she didn’t know nothin’ about it, so I come back here and I been waitin’ ever since.”
“You don’t know where they went?”
“Said it was to Hollywood, to dance, but she’s dreamin.’ She’s gonna go out there and whore around, just like here. Nobody’s gonna pay her to dance. Or Leon neither.”
“The lady next door said they’re gonna rent the apartment to somebody else,” John said.
“I’ll figure that out when I get there,” Rachel said, but she was worried.
John shook his head, looked at the girl, then at me, then said, “Shit.”
BACK in the car, with all the windows down and the air conditioner running full blast, John said, “This isn’t gonna work. I gotta do something about the kid.”
“Like what?”
“Take her with me. We can leave the number with her aunt, for when her mom gets back.”
“I don’t think her mom is coming back,” LuEllen told him. “But taking her with you… John, you ought to talk to Marvel, first.”
John finally went back with some money, pushed his way into the house, and left it with her.
“She can get something to eat, anyway,” he said, miserably, when he got back. “I only had a hundred bucks. How in the fuck could somebody ditch a kid like that?”
“She’s probably on her way to CompUSA,” I said. “Computer memory is better than food, at that age.”
We turned a corner, and all three of us looked back: nothing good could happen to that kid, not as things were.
WITH Carp’s name and phone number, I suggested to John that we access a local analog database and see if we could come up with an address.
“Which database?” John asked. He was hot, unhappy, and mopped his forehead with a paper towel he’d taken out of the Willowby kitchen. “You got a number?”
“It’s an old, old, old geek joke,” LuEllen said, sounding deeply bored. “He means, we look in the phone book.”
“You can kiss my analog,” John said to me. He looked out the window. “How can it be so hot here? I thought Longstreet was hot.”
“It’s not the heat,” I began, earnestly.
“Shut up,” LuEllen said.
We took a while finding a phone book, but finally got one at a shopping center. While LuEllen went off and got three cinnamon rolls, I found one Carp in the White Pages-a Melissa Carp, in Slidell, which was on the opposite shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The phone number was right.
“We’re on a roll,” John said. “Let’s go right now.” On the way over, still looking out the window, he said, “That fuckin’ kid.”
WE HEADED up to Slidell on I-10, not one of the nation’s scenic roads. The Carp place was a mobile home in a mobile-home neighborhood on the east side of town, or maybe out of town, to the east. From the street, nothing was visible except a chin-high concrete-block wall, over which we could see the tops of the homes and willowy-looking trees clogged with Spanish moss.
“These places are a problem,” LuEllen said, as we cruised by. “I know people who live in places like this. Everything is close together and the streets are more like lanes, and you can’t get in and out fast, and everybody sees you coming and going.”
“That’s encouraging,” John said.
“And they’re pretty segregated,” LuEllen said. “The ones I’ve been in, anyway. If this is a white park, you’re gonna be noticeable, John.”
“Even better.”
IN THE end, we drove through just at dusk, looking for the right place. All the streets were named after trees, like Cherry, Chestnut, Olive, and Peach. As LuEllen had suggested, the lots were small, and cut at odd angles to each other, some neatly kept, some not. We went past a couple who were barbequing on a small grill, then wandered past a double lot with an aboveground pool to one side of the home; we saw a few young kids here and there, and one older kid blading along the main drag, hands locked behind his back, earphones cutting him off from the world. Other than that, the streets were mostly empty, probably because it was still so hot.
The streets were marked, at least, and we found Quince Street at the southeast corner of the neighborhood, a loop that ran just inside the concrete-block wall. The Carp place was a once-forest-green mobile home, now sun-faded, with a white roof, closed-curtained windows, and a rickety carport at the far end. A dusty red Toyota Corolla squatted in the carport. Light could be seen through a back window, but the front of the place was dark.
“What do you want to do?” LuEllen asked.
“How about if we drive around for two minutes, figure out these roads, then you take the car while John and I brace the guy? We look enough like cops.”
“I wonder who Melissa Carp is? Mother? Wife? Ex-wife? Sister?”
WE DROVE around until we were oriented, then LuEllen dropped us off a hundred feet down the street from Carp’s. Most of the homes around us showed lights, or the bluish-white glow of TVs. I could hear somebody playing an old Cream recording called “Strange Brew” somewhere down the block; other than that, it was all the hum of air conditioners.
“If I was a cop, walking up to doors like this would scare the shit out of me,” John muttered as we walked up a flagstone walk to Carp’s front door. I knocked, and the door rattled in its frame, and we felt a change from inside, as though something not quite audible had been going on, and now had stopped. Maybe, I thought, somebody had stopped typing.
Then footsteps. A curtain moved. Whoever looked out-the window was dark, and he was invisible-could see only John, because I’d moved to the other side of the door, away from the window. Then more footsteps inside, and the inner door rattled, and finally a man looked out.
He was younger than we were, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, large, with a fatty, football-shaped face, a long, fleshy nose, and a thatch of brown hair. He hadn’t shaved, and a wispy beard showed on his jowls and under his full lips. He had small eyes, and he blinked at us and then asked, “Who’re you?”
“Are you James Carp?” John asked.
His forehead wrinkled. “Uh, that’s my brother.”
“Is he here?” John asked.
He was about to lie to us. I could see it in his face. “He’s uh, back in the… he’s in the back.”
“We really need to talk to him,” John said. John sort of wedged himself in the doorway. “It’s really pretty important.”
“I’ll, uh, go and get him,” the man said.
He pushed the door mostly shut, looked at us one more time, and John said, “That’s you, isn’t it, Jimmy James?”
CARP broke for the back of the mobile home and John and I went after him. We crunched into each other trying to get through the door, and then, once inside, in the dark, I hit the front edge of the folding table and almost went down-a near fall that might have saved my life, because as I was twisting off to the side, Carp, in the back, fired three quick shots at us with a pistol.
I continued down, hearing the gunfire and seeing the muzzle flashes, and heard John crash out through the door and I thought, He’s hit, and I scrambled that way and fed myself through the door like a snake.