The Hanged Man's Song

opposite the map, then walked over and picked it up. As I did, Carp crossed the levee and disappeared down the other side, into a forest of cottonwoods. From where I was standing, I could see a narrow path through the weeds, leading down to the levee. Local fishermen, I thought.
    The map consisted of two pieces of paper: A Xerox of a road map, pinpointing a crossroads ten miles west of Longstreet, and a little south, probably fifteen road miles from where I was. The second piece was a hand-drawn map starting at the crossroads. There was a square, with the notation, “old abandoned schoolhouse,” and another, with an arrow, that said, “power-line easement back into the woods.” It appeared that the map would take you about a mile and a half off-road. The thing looked so good I began to believe that we were gonna get Rachel back.
    “I got the map,” I called to John.
    “He’s got a boat. The guys on the other side can see him, he’s got a jon boat with a motor, he’s putting the bike in the boat. They can’t find his car. They say they don’t see a car over there.”
    “Gotta be there somewhere. Watch him, he may have a gun.”
    “How about Rachel?”
    “He said she’s chained up in the woods. I got a map. I’m going.”
    “Where?”
    I told him, and I heard him talking with Marvel, and he said, “Fifteen minutes. We’ll see you there.”
    >>> I HAD to go four miles north before I could get a crossroad out of the valley that would take me west toward Rachel. On the way, John called. “He’s running down the river, he’s not coming across.”
    “Shit. What’s he doing? Can the guys still see him?”
    “They can see him, but they don’t know where he’s going. He’s on their side, just under the levee.”
    “Must’ve hid the car somewhere that wasn’t straight across,” I suggested.
    “They’re still on him, and Marvel and I are on the way out to you.”
    >>> A MOMENT later, he called again. “Shit. He’s crossed back over the river. That’s his second trick, that’s his second trick. He faked us out. He’s leaving the boat, he’s getting out of the boat, he’s on the bike.”
    I could hear him shouting into a second cell phone. “Gotta stay with him. Henry, get back south, get back south, his car’sgotta be down there somewhere. Kevin, you go on down toward Greenville, get moving. . . . I know, I know . . . but that’s the only way you’re gonna get ahead of him if he keeps going south. . . . I know.”
    Henry was the driver of the car that had been south of me. He’d closed in when the trade took place, and when Carp crossed the river, had started back to Longstreet, and the Longstreet bridge. Now Carp was south of him, and nobody was south of Carp, and on the same side of the river.
    “We’re gonna lose him,” I shouted into the phone, helpfully.
    “No, no, no,” John shouted back.
    Then I heard him on the other phone, just his side of the conversation. “You see it? You see it? Get down south, keep going, Henry, keep going.” And to me: “Henry spotted the Corolla. Carp’s not there yet. Henry’s going on ahead.”
    Okay. Now we had Carp between two cars. Two cars with smart guys. I couldn’t hear it, but I assumed that they were tagging him.
    In the meantime, I closed on the crossroads where Rachel was—two left turns, to get me around a lopsided net of gravel roads, into the old abandoned schoolhouse.
    John and Marvel were already there, sitting in their car, looking at their map. I stopped, got out, jogged to John’s driver’s-side window, the sun burning down on my shoulders. “Let me see the map,” John said.
    I gave him the map. It was all very clear: we were at the right spot. We squabbled about it for a minute, quacking like a gaggle of geese, but that did no good.
    There was no schoolhouse. There was no power line going back into the woods.
    There was nothing but a burning hot gravel crossroads, with cotton fields stretching away on all four corners, stretching away forever. The kind of crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil.

Chapter Twenty
    >>> WE WERE STANDING next to the car, triple-checking the map we’d been given by Carp with our own maps, when John’s cell phone rang. He listened for a minute, then said, “Twenty minutes,” and hung up.
    To Marvel, he said, “I’m going with Kidd. You go on back to the house in case somebody calls about Rachel.”
    “What’s going on?” she asked.
    “Nothing, yet.