“Cards won’t help us,” I said.

“Just try them,” she said. “For me. So I won’t worry.”

“Or you’ll worry more,” I said.

“Just try them.”

There’s a word for what LuEllen can be, in Yiddish or Hebrew-Russian-English or whatever: the word’s nudnik. The best definition I’ve ever heard came from an Israeli professor of archaeology: “It’s a person who is like a woodpecker sitting on your head, all the time pecking you.”

SO I got the cards out, my tarot cards, a Rider-Waite deck. I’m not exactly a scientist-I was trained as an engineer-but I’ve studied the philosophy of science, and I’m a true believer. The tarot, as a predictive system, is the same sort of superstitious nonsense as astrology. The deck is useful as a gaming device, though, and that’s how I use it.

Like this: when we are forced to deal with complicated problems, when some of the facets of the problem are unknown or unreachable, we deal with them in terms of past experience. That’s almost inescapable. But approaches that are useful with some problems don’t work with others. The tarot deck, when used as a gaming system, pushes you outside past experience and encourages you to think of new ways to deal with it.

Say, for example, you were involved in a complicated business transaction and that the group you were dealing with, the opposition, consisted of six members, five men and a woman. You begin doing tarot spreads and see a number of indications of female influence.

This does not mean that the deck correctly predicts female influence in the transaction, but suggests that you should sit back and think about the woman on the other side, who might otherwise seem to be just another functionary. Why is she there? What specific influences does she have? Is there some way to approach her that would help with your deal?

This has nothing to do with the supernatural-it’s simply a human way, and a fairly subtle way, to game a problem.

LuEllen doesn’t believe that. She believes that I’m tapped into the Other Side. At one time she’d hassle me for a daily reading, until finally she asked me to do a spread on how long she’d live. I did a spread, and came up with ninety-four years.

“That’s not bad,” she’d said.

“Yeah, but this card”-I’d tapped the Tower, I believe-“suggests that the last fifty years will be in the high security unit at the Valley State Prison in California.”

“Kidd,” she’d sputtered, “you, you gotta, what are you talking…”

“Made you look,” I said. She didn’t bother me so much after that.

I CARRY a deck with me, in an old wooden box, wrapped in a piece of silk, just like the gypsies tell you to do. Because LuEllen showed signs of slipping into a nudnik state, I did two quick tarot spreads on the motel room telephone table.

Like most tarot spreads, the results were complicated. What should have been a clear outcome in both spreads, the final resolution card, was, in both cases, self-contradictory.

“The Hanged Man,” LuEllen said, tapping the card with an index finger. She knows the cards well enough to pick out the major arcana. “The Hanged Man comes up twice, as the final resolution, and you’re saying that you don’t know what it means?”

“It’s not a very useful outcome for gaming,” I said.

“You’re not lying to me?” She looked at me suspiciously. “It doesn’t mean we’re going to die together in an automobile accident on the way to Jackson?”

“No.” I pulled the cards together, wrapped them in the silk cloth, and put them back in the box. “The Hanged Man indicates a kind of suspended animation, a suspense between two states-a waiting state. Transition, maybe. Okay, so Bobby’s dead and everything is in transition. Well, duh. We already know that.”

“It doesn’t even hint at what’s going to happen?”

“LuEllen, the cards do not predict anything.”

“Yeah.” She crossed her arms, looked at me with exasperation. “You always say that, then it turns out that they always do.”

“There have been some coincidences, but that’s all they were.”

“Coincidences, my ass. Let’s go. You can tell me more about this Hanged Man on the way to Longstreet.”

LONGSTREET is on the Mississippi River northwest of Jackson. There isn’t much there, but there is one critical thing: a bridge. That by itself gives the town a regional importance. Bridges are uncommon on the lower Mississippi. People can go their entire lives never seeing towns that might be only a mile away, across the river, but fifty miles away by road.

Longstreet was a tough place to get to from Beaumont. The trip took most of the day, even cooking along in the Olds. LuEllen’s a good driver, and she’d rather drive than ride, so she spent most of her time behind the wheel. I plugged in the laptop and continued to dig through the DVDs.

“The pattern is, he encrypted everything but inconsequential stuff,” I said. “If the same pattern holds with the laptop, then we’re good.”

“That cheers me up. But even if he does have some stuff, it’d hardly be on me, do you think?” She was paranoid about personal security. She’d led a long life as a thief, including some fairly outrageous episodes, and had never done time, never been arrested, never been fingerprinted.

“Not unless…”

“What?”

“Bobby knew where we were sometimes. Exactly where, and exactly when. There’s a tiny chance that he had us photographed, just out of curiosity.”

“You think?”

“No. I don’t think so,” I said after a moment. “For one thing, he knew who I was, exactly, and he could get a picture of me on-line. That show at the Westfeld Gallery last winter had an online catalog along with the regular one. You could get my picture there. Still can. So I think we’re good, or you’re good, but man-I’d like to get that laptop. John’s worried, too. His friends, you know… Bobby may have some details on them, too.”

“Political stuff.”

“Yeah.” We rode along for a minute. “You know, you sometimes get these charismatic assholes, the racist preachers and bigot politicians who are too smart to join the Klan or the Nazis. They can do a lot of damage, especially in local elections, school boards, and so on. Sometimes you think, If there was only some way to make them go away. I’ve always wondered if John’s people, and maybe Bobby, didn’t make some of these guys go away. For good.”

“You mean, kill them?”

“That’s a harsh word, kill.”

“Ah, jeez.”

WE ALSO had time in the car to consider our individual guilt as involved the previous night’s sexual episodes; and there was some. LuEllen had been seeing a Mexican guy, a modern-dance teacher, at the university in Duluth. She was drawn to the dark-eyed tribe… but she said she considered the attachment to be purely temporary. She might consider all attachments purely temporary, even me; she was a lot like a cat.

I was in a different situation. Even though Marcy had broken it off, I was sure I’d precipitated it, and then I’d jumped straight into the sack with an old flame.

I said all of this to LuEllen, who immediately brightened up. Women, in my experience, are the social engineers of the human race, and love to analyze and dissect relationships. Even their own. All that began a conversation that meandered through our relationship and all the people we’d known since we first got together, and why we couldn’t seem to stay together.

LuEllen argued against guilt. She said we were old enough friends, and had had on-again, off-again sex for so long that it no longer counted as infidelity. It was more like a hug, she said. What she’d done was the emotional equivalent of first aid.

“It didn’t feel like a hug,” I said. “You were barking like a dog. Anytime somebody’s barking like a dog, you can be pretty sure it’s not a hug.”