LuEllen slid in beside him, on the wound side, and Rachel, carrying a plastic Wal-Mart shopping bag full of clothes, got in the front passenger seat.

I had no idea where Carp had gone. Never saw a Corolla. And at that point, didn’t much care.

LuELLEN looked at the bullet hole and said, “There’s no pulsing blood, but he’s bleeding. What do you want to do?”

“Get back to Longstreet,” John said. “I can handle it if I can get back home.”

“That’s six hours, man.”

“Doesn’t hurt that much yet. Put a pressure bandage on it back at the motel.”

“I’ve got some Vicodin at the motel,” LuEllen said, looking at me. “We could get back to Longstreet, if he doesn’t bleed to death.”

“Is he gonna bleed to death?” I asked. Rachel was now kneeling on the front seat, looking wide-eyed at John over the seat back.

“I don’t think so,” LuEllen said. “Not if we keep some pressure on it. He may be down a pint when we get there.”

SO THAT’S what we did: checked out of the Baton Noir, a pressure bandage, made out of a fresh towel, tight against the wound. Couldn’t speed: had to stay right on the limit. On the way north, when we were clear of New Orleans, John placed a long-distance call to Memphis and asked to talk with Andy. He had to wait for a moment, and then said, “Hey, man, this is John. I been bit. Uh-huh. Went in right in the triceps, not too bad, there’s no artery bleeding, but it didn’t come through.” He explained the bandages, and where we were. “We’re about five hours out from Longstreet, coming up from New Orleans. I’d appreciate it if you could have George come down and take a look. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. That’d be good. Some shit this chick gave me, um, Vicodin, and it doesn’t hurt much. Uh-huh. I’ll see you then.”

We didn’t talk much. I was focused on driving, and John was trying to sleep. We caught snatches of news from various talk-radio stations and it was all about the Norwalk attack; that and the upcoming high school football season. At one point, John said, “Jesus, this is boring,” and then, “Carp said we should tell Krause to stay away from him. That’d have to be the senator. Head of the committee.”

“Carp said that?” LuEllen asked. “I didn’t hear that.”

Rachel said, “He asked me if a Mr. Krause had called, or somebody from the government, and I thought he meant you because he said it was a white man and a black man together.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him that a white man and a black man came and said they was Bobby’s friends, and they were looking for Bobby.”

John exhaled and said, “Not good.”

“He was gonna kill me, man,” Rachel said. “He said he’d shoot me right in the eyeball, and he would have. He’s a crazy man. And he does want to fuck me.”

ONCE in Longstreet, we paused at the local Super 8 just long enough for LuEllen to check in. LuEllen didn’t want to see any new faces-she’d already seen too many that day, and there wasn’t any point to her coming along. After she had a room, John and I and Rachel continued to John’s place. A new Chevrolet was parked in the driveway, and Marvel was pacing around in the yard. When she saw me coming, she ran up to the car window and looked in the back and saw John and jerked open the door and cried, “How bad? George is here, how bad?”

MARVEL was angry and unhappy and scared, and also worried about Rachel, never quite understanding from me what was going on with the girl. George, as it turned out, was a doctor, a big squared-headed, square-chested guy who might have been a tight end in another life, and he was prepared to operate right in the house. He frowned when he first saw me, a white guy, but never asked a question.

John was the calmest of us all, and took some time to explain to Marvel the exact situation with Rachel. As he did that, George was checking his blood pressure: checked it once, checked it again, then nodded. “Good blood pressure,” he said to Marvel.

When that was done, John told Marvel to go away-“Go anywhere, I just don’t want you fussin’ around”-and we went into the kitchen, where George had spread a sterile sheet on the kitchen table.

After washing John’s arm with an antiseptic, George gave him a blocking shot, pulled on some sterile plastic gloves and a mask, and went to work on the arm. He didn’t have any X rays, but he seemed familiar with gunshot wounds, and located the.22 slug with a probe. He had to work it awhile, with a variety of small tools that would have looked at home on a dentist’s tray. In twenty minutes he’d winkled the slug out into his glove.

“Gonna hurt like heck in the morning,” he told John. “I’ll give you some stuff to take, some painkillers and antiseptics, but it’s still gonna be sore.”

There was more to it than that-especially on Marvel’s side, because she was royally pissed-and sometime after two o’clock, I went down to the Super 8 and fell into bed next to LuEllen.

THE next morning, first thing, without bothering with security, I went out on the Super 8 phone line and checked my mail-boxes.

There was nothing from the ring, but there was a letter from Bobby.

Kidd:

I’ve been gone for a while now. I assume that I’m dead, though maybe I’m just too sick to stop this from going out. Here is the important thing: a good friend of mine, who calls himself Lemon, has a selected set of my working documents, and will continue my operation now that I am gone. He does not know you or of you (unless you have a connection that I don’t know about) but will take you as a client. To sign on with him you need to identify yourself as 118normalgorgeousredhead at [email protected] and provide him with a dump address. I leave that to you, if you want a new hookup. He’s not a bad guy and has substantial resources. Anyway, good luck and good-bye; it’s been interesting working with you.

– Bobby

That gave me a chill: a voice from beyond, more or less.

LuEllen got the same chill. “Dead people should stay dead. You shouldn’t be talking to people after you’re dead.”

“He might not be completely dead.”

“What?”

“He’s like Janis Joplin or Frank Sinatra. I heard ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ on the radio the night I drove up to Jackson. Janis is dead, but I never knew her personally, and I keep hearing her song, so to me, it’s the same as if she was still alive. Her song keeps going.”

“Yeah, but this… I mean, the guy’s talking to you, personally.”

GEORGE, the doctor, had gone home. No longer worried about another person seeing her face, LuEllen came with me to John’s. Marvel ushered the kids out into the yard, where they wouldn’t hear it, and said-shouted-something like this at us:

“I don’t know what the three of you could have been thinking of. What the fuck could you have been thinking of? You already got shot at once. You already got your asses shot at in the trailer. Why did you think he wouldn’t shoot you again? You knew the crazy motherfucker had a gun, because he already shot at you. Why didn’t you call the cops? Fuck this laptop. What was going on in your stupid heads? Is there anything in there at all? Look at this silly motherfucker sitting at the kitchen table with a big bandage on him and that shit-eating grin on his face like some watermelon-eatin’ coon in a goddamned travelin’ show. Oh, Lord, why does Thy servant have to put up with this shit? Why is that…”

You get the idea.

JOHN was okay. He was going to be okay, though George was right: he hurt like hell. And Rachel was okay. She and Marvel had come to an understanding, and she sat at the kitchen table with John, pounding down the Cream of Wheat, enjoying the Marvel show. After we got Marvel calmed down-calmed down wasn’t exactly the idea, but quieted down, anyway-I went back to the motel and continued mining Carp’s laptop, going online to look for names, places, dates. LuEllen went visiting, out to see a farmer friend who lived across the river. She came back in the early afternoon and told me that the Norwalk attack was getting more and more play, and that there was virtually nothing else on television.