Nobody said, “If she’s still alive.”

JOHN had mentioned during the ride from Greenville that his kids were staying with their grandmother overnight, and maybe for a couple of nights, to clear out some space. I didn’t ask what he meant by that, the space comment, because we were talking about three things at once, but an hour after we got in, a couple of black guys arrived at the house. They were not particularly big or prepossessing, but you probably wouldn’t want to fight either of them. They were smart, and smiling, and said hello to John and gave hugs to Marvel, and went back to a third bedroom like they’d been there before.

A half hour after the first two guys arrived, another two came in. Two more arrived before midnight. More talk, a few bottles of beer, lots of ice water and Cokes for three of them who were former alkies:

“They could just be ditched in a hotel or motel anywhere up and down the highway.”

“Fat white guy with a beard and a little black girl? A real little black girl? I don’t think so, he doesn’t want to be noticed and Rachel’s smart, she’ll holler her head off first chance she gets.”

“… got the same problem with any kidnapping, how do you trust each other to make the trade?”

“The other question is, is this laptop worth saving?”

“It’s not the laptop, man. It’s Bobby and all the rest of it.”

“Cut our losses.”

“Can’t cut Rachel.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

DURING the course of the conversation, I told them about the last time I’d seen Carp, as he rode off on his mountain bike to make the deal with Krause. They all listened carefully, and then one of them, Kevin, said, “So he’ll try something tricky with us, too. Maybe the bike, maybe something else.”

I said, “When I talk to him tomorrow, I’ll make the point that we’ve all got trouble if this trade caves in. We’ve got trouble because he knows my name, some of what we’ve done, and our association with Bobby. So we can’t go to the cops. And he’s got trouble because we know he killed those two guys at his apartment, and he killed Bobby, and he can’t go to the cops. I’ll tell him we just want Rachel back and I’ll trade the laptop because I can’t get into the laptop anyway.”

“The question is, where does he make the trade?” asked a man called Richard. “What’s the tricky thing that he’s gonna do? We’ve got five cars, and we all got cell phones, so we can talk, but if he sees us chasing him, and he’s got something tricky going, and shakes us, what do we do? Then we’re really fucked.”

We argued about that for a while, and with all the talk of tricks, a thought popped into my head. “John, do you have a decent map?”

He had a county map, and one of the other guys had a big Rand McNally map book, and together they worked well enough. We spread them out on the kitchen table and the others gathered around as I pulled my finger down the curlicue of the Mississippi.

“Look at this. This could be the trick. If he has me go to someplace pretty far north or south of town… and if he bought a canoe or a boat, or stole one, or rented one… If he leaves his car on the other side of the river, paddles across, meets me, gets the laptop, and then paddles back to his car… we’d never catch him. We’d all be stuck over here, on the wrong side. If he takes us twenty miles downriver, it’d take the best part of an hour just to get back to the bridge and down the other side where he was.”

“How long you think to paddle across?” one of the guys asked, tapping his finger on the blue line of the river. “I don’t know shit about canoes.”

“If he knows what he’s doing, ten minutes,” I said. “Two minutes in a powerboat.” I pointed at a couple of narrow points, where the river looked like it was no more than a half-mile across. “He wouldn’t pick one of the wider parts. And he’d get himself all set before he calls us.”

“That’d be a good trick, the river thing, ” John said, “if it’s not too obvious.”

“I can’t think of anything else. If he tries the bicycle thing… he’d still have to get to his car sooner or later. And when I think about it, around here, I believe he will try to do the exchange out in the countryside. If he just does the bike, we could figure out where the car has to be. Not that many roads. We could choke him off almost anywhere.”

By one o’clock in the morning, we’d worked out a plan. We’d put two cars on each side of the river, each a few miles north or south of town. When Carp got me moving to a rendezvous, the cars on my side would move toward the meeting point, hanging a few miles off. The cars on the other side of the river would run parallel to us.

At the rendezvous, if he ran us around to more spots, the cars would maintain the interval. Once I met Carp, if he was on foot, or on his bike, or near the river, the people in the cars would look at his location as I called it in, and figure out where he’d most likely park his car.

“I’m not going to give him the actual files-I mean, they’ll be the actual files, but they’ll be re-encrypted so his keys won’t work,” I said. “He won’t be able to tell the difference until he actually tries to open them. By then, we’ll know if he double-crossed us on Rachel.”

Marvel objected. “But you’d have double-crossed him first. What if he kills Rachel because of it?”

“He’s gotta have the laptop with the files or he’s done,” I said. “If we double-cross him and he double-crosses us, and he manages to get away from us… he’ll call us back. He’s gotta have the files. But if he has both the files and the keys, and he’s still got Rachel-then he can do whatever he wants.”

“No computer files are worth that much,” Marvel said. “Not worth a child.”

“People have already died for this one-three people that we know of, and he tried to kill us,” I said. “Carp is nuts. You think killing Rachel, getting rid of her as a witness… you think that would bother him?”

After a couple moments of silence, I got my stuff together and said good night. Marvel had gone off to the kitchen and was banging silverware around, although she hadn’t cooked anything. Before I left, I stopped and said to her, “I’m sorry about this mess-I can’t tell you how sorry I am. We’ll get her back.”

“You better get her back,” Marvel said. As I stepped away, she added, “She was only here for what, a week? But she fit in with the family. And now, where is she? Some crazy guy’s got her.”

“But that really wasn’t us. The crazy guy was talking to her before we ever met her,” I said.

“You don’t feel like any of this is… our fault?”

I exhaled, wagged my head, and said, “Yeah. Some of it is. I feel like shit. But… we’ll get her.”

She patted me once on the back as I went out, on down to the motel. In the motel room, I transferred the critical files and the keys to my own notebook, then re-encrypted the files on Bobby’s computer, deriving new keys, which I erased. No one, including me, could now open the files on Bobby’s laptop.

I took two Ambien and got six hours of bad sleep. Rachel’s face kept floating up out of the dark; I didn’t want to think about her with Carp.

THE next morning, on the way back to John’s, my cell phone rang. The day before, I’d been expecting LuEllen to call, and got Carp. This time I was expecting Carp, and got LuEllen.

“You about back?” she asked, without even a hello.

I took a second to recalibrate on the voice. “I’m in Longstreet,” I said. “We’ve got a big Carp problem.”

“Oh, no.”

I worry about talking on cell phones-they’re radios of a kind-but I gave her a slightly cleaned-up version of what had happened. She was silent, and then said, “You’re gonna handle it.”

“Best we can,” I said.

“There’s nothing I can do.”