“Not that I can think of. Are you okay?”

“I’m paranoid. Honest to God, I’m paranoid. I’m afraid to go to shopping centers because of that face-recognition stuff. There are cameras everywhere you look.”

“I’ll talk to you about it when I get back,” I said. “Where’re you going to be?”

“I was thinking… your place.”

“You know where the key is.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Nope. I’m flattered. I gotta get off this phone because Carp might call-but I’ll call you when we’re done here.”

“I’ll wait.”

JOHN, Marvel, and I sat around in the living room, watching television, for better than three hours, with no contact. Marvel didn’t entirely believe in air-conditioning, so all the windows and doors were open; they had a small vegetable garden out back, with a dense twenty-by-twenty-foot patch of sweet corn, and I could smell the corn in the warm air filtering in across their back porch. John’s friends were already out on the highways on either side of the river, both north and south, waiting. I kept looking at the river maps, trying to figure the odds.

Here’s the thing about the river, down South. After a catastrophic flood back in the late 1920s, the lower Mississippi was penned up behind levees. The levees weren’t built right at the water line, but followed the tops of the riverbanks, often hundreds of yards back from the normal high-water mark. A few towns, at major crossing points, remained open to the river, but most of the towns shut the Mississippi away.

If you travel south along the Mississippi through Arkansas, Mississippi, or Louisiana, you’ll hardly ever see the river, though you may only be a few hundred feet away for tens and dozens of miles. Conversely, if you’re traveling on the river itself, you may see the rooftops of any number of small towns over the distant levees, but you can’t get to them without walking through tangled, overgrown floodplain, marsh, bog, and backwater.

And if you ever need to find a poisonous snake in a hurry-rattlesnake, copperhead, cottonmouth-the strip between the levee and the water, anywhere between Memphis and New Orleans, is just the spot.

MAYBE I was crazy about this river-crossing thing. I was sure it would occur to him, but if he thought about it long enough, it would also occur to him that he’d be a sitting duck for a powerboat, out there in the middle of the river. By eleven o’clock, I’d convinced myself that he wouldn’t try crossing the river: he’d get himself lost in the woods, instead. Maybe try cutting cross-country on that trail bike. As far as we knew, he didn’t have the money to try anything more sophisticated.

My phone rang. We looked at it as though it might be a cottonmouth, and it rang a second time, and I snatched it off the end table where it was sitting. “Yeah?”

“You in Longstreet?”

“Just got here,” I said. “I’m beat, I can barely see. If we’re gonna do this, let’s do it.”

“You got the laptop?”

“Yes. But I got a couple of things to tell you. We think you might be planning to double-cross us on the girl. We’re gonna give you the laptop, but don’t double-cross us. You don’t know exactly what you’ve gotten into with us, but if you hurt Rachel, we’ll find you, and you won’t be given a free phone call. We’ll cut your fuckin’ head off. You understand that?”

“Fuck you. Bring the laptop.”

“Look, there’s no point in a double-cross.”

“I’ve thought of all that. So listen: You know where Universal is?”

“Universal? What is it?”

“It’s a town, fifteen miles south of Longstreet. A cafe, a gas station, a feed store. Ask your friends.”

I looked at John. “A town called Universal?”

He nodded. “Down south.”

I went back to Carp: “Okay. They know where it is.”

“Go down there. Stay off your cell phone. If you leave right now, you should be there in about twenty-one minutes, from your friend’s door. I will call you on your cell phone in twenty-one minutes.”

“Rachel…”

“I’ll tell you about Rachel next time I call.” And he was gone.

BEFORE I got out of there, John pointed to the town on the map. “There’s a whole line of hills off there, all tree-covered. I’ll bet he’s up in the woods, where he can look right down into the town. And look at this-just a little south of there is one of the river’s narrow spots, where it goes around Cutter’s Bend, and the highway on the other side runs close. He’s gonna do the river trick.”

“I gotta go,” I said. “You get everybody ready. Marvel, I’m gonna need your cell phone.”

She gave me the phone, but asked, “Why?”

“Because I want to be able to talk to you guys while I’m talking to him on my cell. I want you to be able to hear what I’m saying to him. I’ll call John on your phone when I’m a few miles out, and keep talking while I go in and wait for him to call on my phone.”

We were out the door as I explained, and I got in the car and waved. John was already talking on his phone, bringing the guys who’d gone north back into the action.

THE highway south from Longstreet has been featured in blues, jazz, country, and even rock tunes, from musicians running up and down the river between Memphis and New Orleans, stopping off in Baton Rouge, Natchez, Vicksburg, Greenville, and Helena. The highway’s an old one, a cracked patchwork of tarmac and concrete, with lots of wiggles-half of them, it seems, known as “dead man’s curve” by the locals-and mostly used for short runs, since they put in I-55 to the east.

I wasn’t alone on the highway, when I headed south, but the nearest car in front of me was a half-mile away, and there was nobody in my rearview. Every minute or so, I passed cars coming the opposite direction, which meant that two-mile spacing might be typical.

The day was hot: August in the Delta. Heat waves and six-foot mirages hung over the roadway. A line of low hills ran parallel to the river, but well back from it, at Longstreet; but as I got farther south, the river and highway turned into the hills, tightening the valley. Ten miles south of Longstreet, the bottoms of the hills came right down to the road. The levee was a half-mile away, with a few narrow farm fields-cotton and beans-using up the space between the road and the levee. I called John on Marvel’s cell phone, got him, then dropped the cell phone onto the seat between my legs where I could talk down into it. “Just coming into Universal now,” I said, a few minutes later. “No call yet.”

Universal was a dusty spot in the road, three buildings and an old postwar galvanized steel Quonset hut that appeared to have been long abandoned. The Quonset hut had a small sign on its side, the name of its maker, apparently-Universal-which answered one question I had about the place. I pulled into the parking area in front of the Universal Cafe, and my cell phone rang. “Got a call,” I said to the phone between my legs.

I picked up my own phone and clicked it on. Carp: “Get the laptop and start walking down the highway.”

“Walking down the highway?” I repeated, mostly for John. “Listen, James, we gotta get something straight. I’m not going to put myself where you can kill me and get the laptop and keep Rachel. I’m not walking anywhere.”

“I’m not going to kill you, for Christ’s sakes.” He squeaked, sounding exasperated.

“I’m sorry, James, I can’t trust you. Tell me where to go and leave the laptop, and I’ll do it.”

“Your girl is already chained out in the woods. Nobody’ll ever find her-just some hunter ten years from now will find a skeleton chained to a tree.”

“And somebody will find your goddamn head in a wastebasket,” I said. “I wasn’t kidding about that.”

A moment of silence. Then: “Okay. Drive south some more. Slow. I’ll tell you when to stop, I’ll tell you where to put the laptop. I’ll be watching you.”