There was a back door, somewhere out of sight, or he’d gone out a window: Carp was there, the laptop under his arm, a power cord trailing away. He was climbing into the Corolla and when I rolled to my feet he pointed the pistol at us, and we both dodged back, toward the back of the trailer, and he started the car with his computer hand and rolled out and down the street, and a second later was gone in the twilight.

JOHN looked at me. “You okay?”

“I’m okay, you hit?”

“No, no.”

Then LuEllen arrived and we climbed in the car and she took off, fast for the first hundred feet, then slowing, slowing, and then she asked, “Was that a gun?”

“That was a gun,” I said. I felt like I could start shaking. “That was Carp. He’s somewhere out ahead of us in that Corolla.”

“Wasn’t very loud,” she said. “Maybe a.22.”

“Even a.22’ll shoot your ass off,” John said. Then, “Maybe not your whole ass.”

Two minutes later, we were back on the street, heading toward I-10. We were coming up to a gas station and I saw a “Telephone” sign. “Pull over, there,” I said. We’d only been out of the place for three or four minutes.

I got on the phone, dialed 911, and when the emergency center came up, I shouted, “There’s been a shooting at 300 Quince Street in the Langtry mobile home park. There’s a guy shot. He’s hurt real bad. I gotta go, I gotta go.”

The woman at the other end was calling, “Wait, wait,” when I hung up.

Most 911 centers will show a phone number and location when you call. We got out of there as quickly as we could, losing ourselves in traffic.

“What was that all about?” John asked.

“I’m hoping they’ll send a cop car or two.” Then we heard the first siren, and we all shut up to watch a squad car zip by, going in the other direction. “I’m hoping it’ll keep Carp on the run. I hope he thinks he shot a cop.”

“I just hope nobody got our plates in there,” LuEllen said.

“I didn’t see anybody close enough to do that… or curious enough,” I said.

“I thought that motherfucker had shot you, Kidd,” John said. “You went down like a dropped rock.”

“No damage,” I said.

“I HATE surprises,” LuEllen said. And she did-whenever she was working, she was a meticulous planner. Our planning on Carp had not been the most meticulous.

“Lost the laptop,” John said. “But we sure as shit got some answers: Carp did it, and he’s got it.”

We heard another siren and then another cop went by.

“Keep running, Jimmy James,” I said. “The hounds are on your ass.”

Chapter Nine

AFTER THE FIASCO at Carp’s, we retreated to the motel to think it over. If this had been a thriller novel, we would have tried trolling the back roads, looking for Carp, and might even have found him. But this wasn’t a novel, and since we weren’t cops, and didn’t know the town, we had no resources for tracking him. Even if we located him, he had a gun and we didn’t. Nor did we have a way to get one quickly, if we wanted one.

“If we find him again, we need to surprise him, disarm him, and grab the laptop,” John said. “If we’d known for sure what he looked like, we could’ve grabbed him at the trailer before he had a chance to get the gun.”

“We should have researched him before we tried to grab him,” LuEllen said. “At least, we should have found a picture of him.”

“Yeah. We blew it,” John said. To me: “What do you want to do?”

“Go out on the ’net and do what we should have done before-research him,” I said.

“When he shot at you guys, I could barely hear the shots,” LuEllen said. “He was inside. There wasn’t anybody else around, and with everybody using air-conditioning, it’s possible nobody else heard the shots. If nobody called the cops and pinpointed Carp’s place, we might be able to get back inside.”

“That’d be a last resort,” I said.

“It might be full of stuff that would tell us where he’s going-if the cop sirens chased Carp away, and nobody heard the shots.”

I looked at John and he nodded.

“THE other thing,” LuEllen said. “I hate to keep harping on it, but I can’t see any downside to telling somebody that Bobby is dead. If we don’t, they’ll start going after people they think might be associated with him. Might know something. There’s no way to tell where that would stop. The thing is, Carp is fucking with politicians. You know how they hate that.”

John shrugged. “I don’t see a huge problem with telling somebody. Except, who’d believe us?”

“There’s one person I can think of.” I looked at LuEllen. “Rosalind Welsh.”

LuEllen thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. She’d do.”

“Who’s she?” John asked.

We’d only met Welsh once, I told him, during a spot of trouble that led to a car getting melted in a Maryland shopping center garage while LuEllen and I stole a van from a housewife, and black helicopters-well, sort of a greenish-black…

“Just green,” LuEllen said.

… green helicopters landed in the parking lot and people ran around like ants and waved their arms until the fire trucks came.

“She works for the National Security Agency,” LuEllen said to John. “She’s a security expert, not a computer freak. She’s too heavy by fifteen pounds. She thinks Kidd’s name is Bill Clinton.”

“Hmm,” John said. “Sounds perfect.”

We decided to make the call that night-I had all of Rosalind Welsh’s phone numbers, unless she’d moved or died, and I was sure she’d be happy to hear from me. First though, we needed to find a Radio Shack.

If there weren’t such things as Radio Shack stores, I probably would have become a humble shepherd, instead of the hardened criminal and painter that I am. But there are Radio Shack stores, and after the discouraging session with John and LuEllen, I looked at my watch, and figured I had about twenty minutes to get to one.

Fortunately, there are as many Radio Shacks in the New Orleans area as there are blues singers: I ran in the door of my favorite store five minutes before closing, gathered up most of what I needed-a screw-on N-type female chassis mount connector, a little roll of 12-gauge copper wire, some solder, a pigtail with an N-type male connector at one end, and the cheapest wire cutters, tape measure, and soldering iron I could find-and carried it to the counter.

The clerk recognized me as a one-time regular. He looked over my purchases, rang it up, and asked cheerfully, “Gonna do some war-driving?”

“Huh?” I said as I paid him.

“Ah, you know,” he said. He was too tall, too skinny, and had spent twelve seconds getting dressed for work that morning. Maybe less. “Or maybe you don’t need a Lucent gold card.”

“What’s that about?” I asked.

“About ninety dollars,” he said.

I took two fifties out of my billfold and stood there. He disappeared into the back for a minute, then came back with a Lucent card in the kind of Ziploc bag usually used to hold marijuana and cocaine… and maybe peanuts and raspberries and other legal stuff, for all I know. He handed me the card and I handed him the money and said, “Keep the change,” and he put it in his shirt pocket.

“If you go about nine blocks that way, there’s an all-night supermarket that sells Dinty Moore beef stew,” he said for the extra ten dollars. “I recommend the can. It’s just about perfect for a waveguide. And the area around Tulane is your happy hunting ground.”

“You are a prince among men,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

Did I mention the service at Radio Shack?

I STOPPED at the supermarket, got the can of Dinty Moore and a can opener, drove back to the motel, and built the antenna. The worst part was trying to flush the cold beef stew down the toilet: it just didn’t want to go. John stood there, grimacing at the bowl, flushing it over and over, saying, “Man, that’s nasty. It looks like somebody was really sick.” A bright orange ring-around-the-bowl was still there the next morning.