"Painting?"
"No, no." He slowed for a moment, letting a woman in an old canary yellow Ford Pinto squeeze in front of us. Traffic in Memphis is usually tangled, especially when you get close to the water. The heat didn't help, and the people who weren't sealed in air-conditioned cars were driving with an air of desperation. "I make things. Out of wood and glass and rocks and clay, from down along the river."
"Sell it?"
"Shit," he said in disgust.
"I'd like to see it."
He looked over at me for a moment. "Maybe."
We lapsed back into silence. Ten minutes later we were on a narrow two-lane highway lined with recapped tire joints and motels with signs that said TRUCKERS WELCOME. Memphis was disappearing in the rearview mirror.
"Where're we going?" I asked.
"Downstream," he said. We were running along the river in the gathering evening twilight. "It'll take a while. Town of Longstreet."
"What's in Longstreet?"
He didn't answer. Instead, he braked and turned into a roadside convenience store. When we'd stopped, he said, "I want to get Cokes and ice. I've got a cooler in the trunk."
"Get a six-pack of beer, too," I said. I took a five-dollar bill out of my pocket, passed it to him, and asked again, "What's in Longstreet?"
"A problem. Maybe some trouble. A lot of hate."
"A garden spot," I said.
"It's in the fuckin' Delta," he said, as if that explained everything. "There could be some money in it."
"That sounds interesting," I said.
"Yeah. Bobby thought it might."
While he was in the store, I considered the possibility that Bobby had dipped into my IRS files. I hadn't decided one way or the other when John returned. He stashed the cooler on the backseat, and we each popped a can of Coke. It was a small piece of camaraderie and seemed to loosen him up. He started answering questions.
"Where's Bobby?" I asked, as John barely beat a tractor-trailer onto the highway. "In Longstreet?"
"I don't know. I never met him," John said, sounding a little puzzled. "I thought you'd know."
"No. I've never met him face-to-face."
"Huh. I wonder if anybody's ever met him face-to-face."
"Somebody must have. He's got to eat. You're a computer jock?"
"No. I work for a legal services company, investigations. The company's got a computer system, with electronic mail. One day I got a piece of mail from Bobby. About a case I was working on – he'd read about it in the papers, developed some information from data bases. He gave me a number to call on the computer gizmo-"
"Modem."
"Yeah. I called, and we've been going back and forth ever since. Five years. I even got my own computer so I could talk to him. privately. He can get anything. Crime reports, credit records, secret research you'd never see. I don't know where he gets it, but it's always right."
"Data bases," I said. "He's a genius with them. But that still doesn't tell me about Longstreet."
There'd been a kid named Darrell Clark, John said, fourteen and computer smart. A friend of Bobby's. Knew his math. Knew his logic. At least, that's what Bobby said. Bobby sent him a book called A Primer for the C Language along with a pirated copy of a C compiler. Darrell came back three days later with a sophisticated Mac II program. Sent him Assembly Language for the Mac II. Talked to him in a month and got back an assembler program of breathtaking complexity.
"The kid was smarter than Bobby. That's what Bobby says."
"You keep saying was," I said. "What happened to him?"
"Longstreet cops killed him." John tipped his head for a mouthful of Coke. "They say Darrell came at one of them with a knife and the other one had to shoot. Everybody knows it's bullshit. What really happened was, they thought Darrell was a purse snatcher and they shot him by mistake. In the back. With a machine gun."
"Jesus. A mistake?"
"They had this new toy, this machine gun. The cop had to try it out. Blew the kid all over the railroad tracks."
"So what happened to the cop?"
"Nothing. That's why we're going down there," John said. He glanced over at me. "Darrell Clark won't get justice. His family won't. The town is sewn up tight by an old-time political machine. The cops are near the center of it, and they won't let their man get taken down."
We lapsed into silence again. He seemed to be waiting for a comment, but I had none to offer. The problem with dead people is simple enough. They're dead. There's no point in getting revenge for a dead man because the dead man won't know and can't care.
John was waiting, though, so I eventually gave him a question. "What do you want me to do?"
He was driving easily, one-handed. "We needed somebody who knows about politics, about information, and about security. Bobby says you've done a lot of computer work for politicians, that you're good at planning, and you know about security."
"So you want me to figure out how to get these cops? Why don't you find an NAACP lawyer, get the kid exhumed, and file a federal suit?"
"Because we don't want the cops," John said. "Fuck the cops."
"What do you want?"
"We want the machine. In fact, we want the town," he said, his voice gone low and tight. "That's what we want you to do, Kidd. We want you to take down the whole fuckin' town."
CHAPTER 2
We were driving down the river in the long twilight of the summer solstice, a pale witches' moon hung in front of us. Every few minutes we'd go through a raft of river air, cool, damp, smelling of mud and dead carp and decaying vegetation. I watched the moon ghosting through the evening clouds as John laid it out, simply and clearly. They wanted me to destroy the town's political machine, any way I could do it, and leave it in the hands of their friends. Then I asked him another hard question, and he answered that one, too.
When he stopped talking, I cranked back the car seat and closed my eyes, half in contemplation, half in dream.
A long time ago I'd been an idealist of sorts. Somewhere along the line-Vietnam is the conventional answer, but I'm not even sure that's right anymore – the idealism scraped off. After I'd asked him the first hard question, "What do you want me to do?," I'd asked the second: "Why should I do it?" Why should I take any risks for a dead kid I never knew?
"Revenge," John said. He hadn't hesitated. He and Bobby had seen the questions coming and had rehearsed the answers. "Bobby said he was one of you – computer freaks."
"That's not enough," I said. "Good people die all the time."
"Friendship," said John, checking the second item on a mental list. "Bobby's your friend, and he needs your help. He'll do something whether you're there or not. He really doesn't know how. He could fuck himself up."
I shook my head. "I'm sorry. I can't put my ass on the line for something as thin as that. Bobby's a friend, but only on the wires. If he wanted me to do some computer code, illegal code, that'd be one thing-"
"Money," John interrupted. "Lots of it. The town is papered with corruption cash. You could probably figure out a way to grab some of it. And since nobody can talk about where they got it. there'd be no comebacks."
"Money," I said, looking out the window, maybe a little bitter. "Everybody's reason."
"To tell you the truth, it bothers me to think you'd do it just for money," he said. "Mercenaries tend to be. unreliable." He sounded as if he knew.
"I wouldn't do it just to have money, but in this country, today, money is freedom. Anybody who tells you different is bullshitting you," I said, looking over at him. "Freedom's worth chasing."
He nodded. "So you'll do it?"
"Lots of money?"
"Could be," he said.
"I'll talk about it," I said.
The uneasy half dream was shattered when we bounced across a set of railroad tracks. I opened my eyes on a dark town of unpainted shacks, huddled in a grove of dense, overbearing pin oaks. Here and there the ghostly moonlight broke through the canopy of leaves, etching web forms on the shacks, like the work of an enormous spider. We were through the place in less than a minute. If I hadn't later gone through it in daylight – REZIN, POP. 240 – I might have remembered the town as a hallucination, a dreamed remembrance of an Edgar Allan Poe story.