“He’s gotta have the laptop with the files or he’s done,” I said. “If we double-cross him and he double-crosses us, and he manages to get away from us… he’ll call us back. He’s gotta have the files. But if he has both the files and the keys, and he’s still got Rachel-then he can do whatever he wants.”
“No computer files are worth that much,” Marvel said. “Not worth a child.”
“People have already died for this one-three people that we know of, and he tried to kill us,” I said. “Carp is nuts. You think killing Rachel, getting rid of her as a witness… you think that would bother him?”
After a couple moments of silence, I got my stuff together and said good night. Marvel had gone off to the kitchen and was banging silverware around, although she hadn’t cooked anything. Before I left, I stopped and said to her, “I’m sorry about this mess-I can’t tell you how sorry I am. We’ll get her back.”
“You better get her back,” Marvel said. As I stepped away, she added, “She was only here for what, a week? But she fit in with the family. And now, where is she? Some crazy guy’s got her.”
“But that really wasn’t us. The crazy guy was talking to her before we ever met her,” I said.
“You don’t feel like any of this is… our fault?”
I exhaled, wagged my head, and said, “Yeah. Some of it is. I feel like shit. But… we’ll get her.”
She patted me once on the back as I went out, on down to the motel. In the motel room, I transferred the critical files and the keys to my own notebook, then re-encrypted the files on Bobby’s computer, deriving new keys, which I erased. No one, including me, could now open the files on Bobby’s laptop.
I took two Ambien and got six hours of bad sleep. Rachel’s face kept floating up out of the dark; I didn’t want to think about her with Carp.
THE next morning, on the way back to John’s, my cell phone rang. The day before, I’d been expecting LuEllen to call, and got Carp. This time I was expecting Carp, and got LuEllen.
“You about back?” she asked, without even a hello.
I took a second to recalibrate on the voice. “I’m in Longstreet,” I said. “We’ve got a big Carp problem.”
“Oh, no.”
I worry about talking on cell phones-they’re radios of a kind-but I gave her a slightly cleaned-up version of what had happened. She was silent, and then said, “You’re gonna handle it.”
“Best we can,” I said.
“There’s nothing I can do.”
“Not that I can think of. Are you okay?”
“I’m paranoid. Honest to God, I’m paranoid. I’m afraid to go to shopping centers because of that face-recognition stuff. There are cameras everywhere you look.”
“I’ll talk to you about it when I get back,” I said. “Where’re you going to be?”
“I was thinking… your place.”
“You know where the key is.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Nope. I’m flattered. I gotta get off this phone because Carp might call-but I’ll call you when we’re done here.”
“I’ll wait.”
JOHN, Marvel, and I sat around in the living room, watching television, for better than three hours, with no contact. Marvel didn’t entirely believe in air-conditioning, so all the windows and doors were open; they had a small vegetable garden out back, with a dense twenty-by-twenty-foot patch of sweet corn, and I could smell the corn in the warm air filtering in across their back porch. John’s friends were already out on the highways on either side of the river, both north and south, waiting. I kept looking at the river maps, trying to figure the odds.
Here’s the thing about the river, down South. After a catastrophic flood back in the late 1920s, the lower Mississippi was penned up behind levees. The levees weren’t built right at the water line, but followed the tops of the riverbanks, often hundreds of yards back from the normal high-water mark. A few towns, at major crossing points, remained open to the river, but most of the towns shut the Mississippi away.
If you travel south along the Mississippi through Arkansas, Mississippi, or Louisiana, you’ll hardly ever see the river, though you may only be a few hundred feet away for tens and dozens of miles. Conversely, if you’re traveling on the river itself, you may see the rooftops of any number of small towns over the distant levees, but you can’t get to them without walking through tangled, overgrown floodplain, marsh, bog, and backwater.
And if you ever need to find a poisonous snake in a hurry-rattlesnake, copperhead, cottonmouth-the strip between the levee and the water, anywhere between Memphis and New Orleans, is just the spot.
MAYBE I was crazy about this river-crossing thing. I was sure it would occur to him, but if he thought about it long enough, it would also occur to him that he’d be a sitting duck for a powerboat, out there in the middle of the river. By eleven o’clock, I’d convinced myself that he wouldn’t try crossing the river: he’d get himself lost in the woods, instead. Maybe try cutting cross-country on that trail bike. As far as we knew, he didn’t have the money to try anything more sophisticated.
My phone rang. We looked at it as though it might be a cottonmouth, and it rang a second time, and I snatched it off the end table where it was sitting. “Yeah?”
“You in Longstreet?”
“Just got here,” I said. “I’m beat, I can barely see. If we’re gonna do this, let’s do it.”
“You got the laptop?”
“Yes. But I got a couple of things to tell you. We think you might be planning to double-cross us on the girl. We’re gonna give you the laptop, but don’t double-cross us. You don’t know exactly what you’ve gotten into with us, but if you hurt Rachel, we’ll find you, and you won’t be given a free phone call. We’ll cut your fuckin’ head off. You understand that?”
“Fuck you. Bring the laptop.”
“Look, there’s no point in a double-cross.”
“I’ve thought of all that. So listen: You know where Universal is?”
“Universal? What is it?”
“It’s a town, fifteen miles south of Longstreet. A cafe, a gas station, a feed store. Ask your friends.”
I looked at John. “A town called Universal?”
He nodded. “Down south.”
I went back to Carp: “Okay. They know where it is.”
“Go down there. Stay off your cell phone. If you leave right now, you should be there in about twenty-one minutes, from your friend’s door. I will call you on your cell phone in twenty-one minutes.”
“Rachel…”
“I’ll tell you about Rachel next time I call.” And he was gone.
BEFORE I got out of there, John pointed to the town on the map. “There’s a whole line of hills off there, all tree-covered. I’ll bet he’s up in the woods, where he can look right down into the town. And look at this-just a little south of there is one of the river’s narrow spots, where it goes around Cutter’s Bend, and the highway on the other side runs close. He’s gonna do the river trick.”
“I gotta go,” I said. “You get everybody ready. Marvel, I’m gonna need your cell phone.”
She gave me the phone, but asked, “Why?”
“Because I want to be able to talk to you guys while I’m talking to him on my cell. I want you to be able to hear what I’m saying to him. I’ll call John on your phone when I’m a few miles out, and keep talking while I go in and wait for him to call on my phone.”
We were out the door as I explained, and I got in the car and waved. John was already talking on his phone, bringing the guys who’d gone north back into the action.
THE highway south from Longstreet has been featured in blues, jazz, country, and even rock tunes, from musicians running up and down the river between Memphis and New Orleans, stopping off in Baton Rouge, Natchez, Vicksburg, Greenville, and Helena. The highway’s an old one, a cracked patchwork of tarmac and concrete, with lots of wiggles-half of them, it seems, known as “dead man’s curve” by the locals-and mostly used for short runs, since they put in I-55 to the east.