Free The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sandford

arrested, never been fingerprinted.
    “Not unless…”
    “What?”
    “Bobby knew where we were sometimes. Exactly where, and exactly when. There’s a tiny chance that he had us photographed, just out of curiosity.”
    “You think?”
    “No. I don’t think so,” I said after a moment. “For one thing, he knew who I was, exactly, and he could get a picture of me on-line. That show at the Westfeld Gallery last winter had an online catalog along with the regular one. You could get my picture there. Still can. So I think we’re good, or you’re good, but man-I’d like to get that laptop. John’s worried, too. His friends, you know… Bobby may have some details on them, too.”
    “Political stuff.”
    “Yeah.” We rode along for a minute. “You know, you sometimes get these charismatic assholes, the racist preachers and bigot politicians who are too smart to join the Klan or the Nazis. They can do a lot of damage, especially in local elections, school boards, and so on. Sometimes you think,
If there was only some way to make them go away
. I’ve always wondered if John’s people, and maybe Bobby, didn’t make some of these guys go away. For good.”
    “You mean, kill them?”
    “That’s a harsh word, kill.”
    “Ah, jeez.”
     
    WE ALSO had time in the car to consider our individual guilt as involved the previous night’s sexual episodes; and there was some. LuEllen had been seeing a Mexican guy, a modern-dance teacher, at the university in Duluth. She was drawn to the dark-eyed tribe… but she said she considered the attachment to be purely temporary. She might consider
all
attachments purely temporary, even me; she was a lot like a cat.
    I was in a different situation. Even though Marcy had broken it off, I was sure I’d precipitated it, and then I’d jumped straight into the sack with an old flame.
    I said all of this to LuEllen, who immediately brightened up. Women, in my experience, are the social engineers of the human race, and love to analyze and dissect relationships. Even their own. All that began a conversation that meandered through our relationship and all the people we’d known since we first got together, and why we couldn’t seem to stay together.
    LuEllen argued against guilt. She said we were old enough friends, and had had on-again, off-again sex for so long that it no longer counted as infidelity. It was more like a hug, she said. What she’d done was the emotional equivalent of first aid.
    “It didn’t feel like a hug,” I said. “You were barking like a dog. Anytime somebody’s barking like a dog, you can be pretty sure it’s not a hug.”
    “I was
not
barking like a dog,” she said. “You know what you’re doing? You say stuff like that to be funny, and to take the importance out of things. But this is pretty important, since you really liked the woman… not that I ever knew what you saw in her, her being a cop and all. But you knew
six months ago
that she wanted a kid, and you knew her time was running out, and you were stringing her along in your continuing quest to get the milk without buying the cow.”
    “That’s a disgusting phrase; I bet it’s from Wisconsin.”
    “You’re doing it again, making light,” she said.
    “I was not stringing her along,” I insisted, though the phrase touched a guilty chord. “She never even brought the subject up. It’s just when I saw her around kids…”
    “You were stringing her along,” LuEllen said with satisfaction. “That’s my last word on that. Well. Maybe not my last word…”
    Nudnik.

Chapter Seven
    LONGSTREET IS SO GREEN that it hurts your eyes to look at it. Green, humid, and hot, a Delta town, a jungle, smelling of blacktop and spilled peach soda, melting bubble gum and dead carp, curdling exhaust from old cars; not as bad a combination as it might sound.
    The town is laid out along a high point on the Mississippi -not too high, maybe forty feet above mean high water where Main Street parallels the