The Hanged Man’s Song Read Free Page A

everything about her but the basic, simple stuff.
    At this point, we were not in bed. I don’t know exactly what she was doing, in her head, but I was just drifting along, dropping coins, thinking about painting and sex and listening to the rain fall on the casino roof, the car roof, and the motel roof, thinking about getting back to St. Paul and the serious work.
     
    LuELLEN and I were staying in separate rooms at the Rapaport Suites on I-10, one of those concrete-block instant motels with a polite Indian man and his wife at the front desk, a permanent smell of cigarette smoke in the curtains, and a dollar-a-minute surcharge on the telephone. The place wasn’t exactly bleak, it was simply
nothing.
I can’t even remember the colors, which were chosen not to show dirt. My room was a cube with a can, a candidate for existential hell. And we couldn’t get out.
    Rain had been falling since the day we arrived. A hurricane was prowling the Gulf, well down to the south, but had gotten itself stuck somewhere between Jamaica and the Yucatán. The storm wasn’t much, but the rain shield was terrific, reaching far enough north to cover half the state of Mississippi. We’d been kept inside, Noseres to the grindstone.
    And life was looking grim for the mother-daughter duo. The numbers said they might be skimming two percent.
     
    WE HAD just finished a three-hour session with the slots, and after freshening up-taking a leak, I guess-LuEllen came down to my room, pulled off her cowboy boots, and sprawled on the bed to read
Barron’s.
    She’s a slender dark woman with an oval face, a solid set of muscles, a terrific ass, and a taste for cocaine and cowboy gear, to say nothing of the odd cowboy himself.
    “Numbers?” she asked, without looking at me.
    “Yeah.” I was sitting with my head thrust toward the laptop screen, the classic geek posture, and my neck felt like it was in a vise. “How about a back rub? My neck is killing me.”
    “You haven’t been very attentive to me and I’m not sure a back rub would be appropriate,” she said. She turned a page in
Barron’s
. “Or any other kind of rub.”
    “You wanna do the fuckin’ numbers?”
    “I’m not getting paid the big bucks.”
    “Yeah, big bucks…”
    She sighed and tossed the
Barron’s
on the carpet; she was basically a good sport. “All right.” She popped off the bed, came over and went to work on my back. She has powerful thumbs for a small woman. “Wanna go out for a hot-fudge sundae?”
    “Sure. Keep working, let me check my e-mail.” She was knuckling the muscle along my spine, right at my shoulder, and I rolled my head and punched up the e-mail program on my laptop, and went out, at a dollar a minute, to see what I could see.
    An alarm came up for one of my out-of-sight e-mail addresses. Spam, probably, but I looked. No spam-it was a note from a man I didn’t know, who called himself
romeoblue
.
    The e-mail said, “Bobby down. Drop word. Ring on.”
    “Motherfucker,” I said, as I read it. I didn’t believe what I was seeing.
    LuEllen caught the tone and looked over my shoulder. She knew about Bobby, so I let her look. “Uh-oh. Who’s
romeoblue
?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How does he know Bobby?”
    I knew the answer to that, but I avoided the question. LuEllen and I trusted each other, but there was no point in being careless. “Lots of people know Bobby… Listen, now we
gotta
go out. I gotta make a call.”
     
    BOBBY is the deus ex machina for the hacking community, the fount of all knowledge, the keeper of secrets, the source of critical phone numbers, a guide through the darkness of IBM mainframes. As with LuEllen, I didn’t know his real name or exactly where he lived; but we’d done some business together.
     
    THE Gulf Coast could probably be a garden spot, but it isn’t. It’s a junkyard. Every form of scummy business you can think of can be found between I-10 and the beach, and most every one of them built the cheapest