“You’re okay?”

“Never touched me,” I said. “He fired every shot he had, I think. Six shots, probably. It’s not like doing Quake in your basement.”

“Jesus.”

“He was too far away,” I said. “Too freaked out. I was trying to be careful to hit the tree and I was shaking like a leaf.”

“You’re still shaking like a leaf. You’re talking about a hundred miles an hour.” She started to laugh. “I don’t think anybody saw us. All those people sitting in the park, and when I looked back there was nobody down the street or on the street. I don’t think anybody saw us. And we were right in the middle of everything.”

“Fuckin’ crazy,” I said. “If somebody saw him running with that gun… Wouldn’t have got a good look at us, anyway.”

She laughed some more, started driving too fast and I had to slow her down. “What a rush,” she said. “What a rush.”

Chapter Fourteen

WE DROVE A HALF-MILE or so, taking it easy, watching for anything that was moving fast. Three or four minutes out, I turned LuEllen around and we went back into the neighborhood, looking for the Corolla. We didn’t find it, nor did we see Carp again. Life went on around the park-there were no cops, no people standing around scratching their heads. We both turned toward a running body, but it was a kid, having a good time. We’d given a gunfight, and nobody came.

“Let’s go to a zoo or something,” LuEllen said. She was manic, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks pink. “Let’s go on a hike. Let’s go for a run. Let’s do something. We gotta get out of that hotel room. I can’t think in there anymore.”

“Maybe we could, uh…” I was struck by a thought.

After a moment LuEllen said, “What?”

I looked out the car window at a large woman in a poppy-orange blouse, leading, on a leash, a dog the size of a biscuit. “Just drive, don’t talk to me.”

I kicked the seat back as far as it would go, put an arm over my eyes, and tried to work it out. Doing the numbers. Thinking about the tarot, about the King of Cups reversed. At some point LuEllen asked, “You all right?” I could feel the wheels bumping along the road, feel us rolling to a stop at a light-feel LuEllen looking at me.

Five minutes, doing the numbers, and then LuEllen said, “C’mon, Kidd. What happened? You’re not having a stroke?”

I exhaled, cranked the seat back upright, and looked out the window. We were at a little business intersection and I could see the Washington Monument ahead and off to the left, a white arrow against the blue sky. Nice day. “That motherfucker.”

“Who?”

“Carp is Lemon.”

We sat halfway through a red light before she noticed. As we went through, she said, “Tell me.”

“We get a note out of the blue-doesn’t have to be from Bobby, just has to be from somebody who knows Bobby is dead. Doesn’t demand contact, just allows us to make it on our terms, so that we feel safe. Guides us into Washington. John’s black and I’m white, and the two guys who went to his apartment…”

“Black and white.”

“And it was almost dark, and he was waiting for us, a black-and-white pair. He knew we’d be coming because he gave us the address, and he knew at that point that we weren’t from the government, because we’d responded to his e-mail. He knew we were Bobby’s pals because we told him so. He knew we’d check the address he gave us, to see if it was really Carp’s. We did. It’s the same technique he used to get Bobby. It’s like fly-fishing. You throw the fly out there, let it drift, wait for a strike.”

“But he-”

“Yeah. His big mistake-this must have really mind-fucked him-was that he didn’t know that there were two groups looking for him, that there were two black-and-white pairs. He must’ve thought that if two unknown people from Minnesota and wherever else got shot in a bad neighborhood, who could connect it to his apartment? But he kills a couple of government guys who were going to his apartment, so now…”

“He’s screwed.”

“Well. Maybe they can’t prove it. He was wearing that wig; he’ll have been reported as a blond.”

She thought about it for a minute “And he didn’t know John was shot…”

“Right. He didn’t know that for sure. He was already running when he pulled the trigger. And if he slowed down when he realized he wasn’t being chased, and circled back and looked at the car, he would have seen John walking out and getting in with the rest of us. And that’s where he got the tag number off the car.”

“Then, after the miss at his apartment, after he sees in the paper that he got the wrong guys, he sets us up,” she finished. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “Ah, shit.”

“Yeah. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’d say it’s at least ten to one that Carp and Lemon are the same guy.”

“We were chumps.”

“That’s not the major problem. I mean, we’re not dead, anyway. The major problem is, he contacted me. By name. He knows who I am.”

I was looking at her, and she turned her head and I saw something like fear in her eyes. “That’s… doesn’t get any worse than that.”

“Not this side of being dead. But we’ve gotta get back online. I can check this.”

THE state of Minnesota allows anyone to check anyone else’s license plate, but requires you to identify yourself before the information is released. Your name is then put on the file, and the person whose plate you pulled is notified. That’s if you go in the front door. I never did, and I didn’t think Carp-Lemon-would be likely to go in the front door, either. But…

“How can you tell?” LuEllen said, peering at the laptop screen as I went online and dialed into the DMV.

“There’s a counter. You’d really have to tear up a system to beat it.” I got the plate database, checked my tag number. My name and address came up. The counter said the information had been accessed the night of the collision at Rachel Willowby’s apartment.

“There it is,” I said. “He had to have seen the car at Rachel’s place. That’s the only way he could have known.” It was a queer feeling. I’d been so careful, for so long, so unbelievably, unhealthily careful, that to have somebody crack my cover was like having your house burglarized.

“That fucker. He set us up.” A hint of admiration in her voice? She snapped her fingers as she remembered the tarot connection. “That was the tarot card. Remember? That was the-”

“King of Cups, reversed. Yeah, that popped into my head back at the park. Coincidence jumps up and bites you on the ass.”

“You been bit on the ass so many times you’re lucky to have an ass left,” she snorted. “When are you gonna believe? You’re some kind of fuckin’ gypsy spook or something.”

“No. No.” I shook my head. “No, it’s just superstition. But it’s… interesting.”

“What do we do?”

“Maybe what he did to us,” I said slowly. “I gotta think about it. He doesn’t know that we know.”

“What if he looks at your DMV records again and sees that somebody else has checked them. He’ll know it was you, and he’ll know why.”

“We’re not dealing with a sure thing,” I said. “It’s all murky. Let’s go walk around the Mall and see if we can figure something out.”

WE FIGURED something out, all right. What we figured out took an hour of talk-argument-working over the problem of the DDC group, the existence of the laptop and what that might mean, and the fact that Carp had identified me.

Our strategy unwound like this:

LuEllen asked a simple question: “Why don’t we just call him up and make a deal? Find out what he wants? We know that he killed Bobby and we could give the FBI a trail that leads to him-Baird saw him, and so did Rachel. We’ve got a big stick.”

“So does he. He knows who I am.”

“Right. So you should be safe with each other’s information. We call him up, tell him we want to look at the laptop-nothing more, we just want to look at it, meet at some safe, open place and make sure there’s nothing on it that incriminates us. After that, we walk away.”