I had hoped that he’d go that way, in peace. Quietly. He apparently had not.

Of course, it was also possible that the feds had landed in a silent black helicopter, kicked in the door, and slid down his chimney and seized him before he could enter his destruct code, and that they were now waiting for us in an elaborate trap, armed to the teeth with all that shit that they spend the billions on-the secret hammers and high-tech toilet seats.

But I didn’t think so. I thought Bobby was dead.

BACK at the motel, I tried to work on the casino stats. I had a feeling I better get them done, just in case the Bobby problem turned into something ugly. Trouble tapping at the line. Every few minutes I’d check my e-mail. Two hours later, I picked up an alarm from another one of my invisible addresses: “Call me at home-J.”

“Gotta go back out,” I told LuEllen. She was bent over the bed with a lightweight dumbbell, doing a golf exercise called the lawn mower pull. “Got a note from John.”

“Is he part of the ring?” she asked, doing a final three pumps. She knew John as well as I did.

“I’d always assumed he was, but we never talked about it,” I said. “He’s not like the rest of us.”

“Not a computer geek.”

“I’m not a computer geek,” I said. “Computer geeks wear pocket protectors.”

“You’ve got five colors of pens, Kidd,” she said, pulling on her rain jacket. “I saw them once when I was ransacking your briefcase.”

“I’m an artist, for Christ’s sakes,” I said.

JOHN lived in a little Mississippi River town called Longstreet. He and his wife and LuEllen and I were friends. I’d stop and see them a couple times a year, as I migrated up and down the Mississippi between St. Paul and New Orleans. LuEllen would stop if she was stealing something nearby.

I called him from a Conoco: gas stations with pay phones should get a tax break. He answered on the first ring.

“John, this is Kidd, calling you back,” I said. Rain was hammering on the car, and I could see a discouraged-looking redneck behind the plate glass of the station window.

“You know about Bobby?” John asked. He had a baritone voice, calm and scholarly, with a trace of a Memphis accent.

“I know he’s down. Are you a member of the ring?”

“I’m the guy who puts the words together. Do you have a pen?”

“Just a minute.” I got out a pen and found a blank page in a pocket sketchbook. “Okay.”

“Here’s his address.”

“You sure you want to give it to me?”

“Yes. Just in case something happens… to me. Ready? Robert Fields, 3577 Arikara Street, Jackson, Mississippi 38292. Or it might also have been Robert Jackson, 3577 Arikara Street, Fields, Mississippi 38292, except that there isn’t a Fields, Mississippi, as far as I can tell.”

“The name I had for him, the rumor I had, was that his name was Bobby DuChamps-French for ‘fields.’ ”

“That’s the name I had,” he said. “What’s an Arikara?”

“An Indian tribe, I think. Did you try to call him?”

“Can’t find a phone number.”

“Yeah, well-he might not have one of his own,” I said. “He didn’t need one, since he practically owned the phone company.”

“That’s what I figured. Listen… I checked airlines from St. Paul into Jackson -”

“I’m down by Biloxi,” I said, interrupting. “Between Biloxi and Gulfport.”

“Really?” His voice brightened. “Could you meet me in Jackson? You could be there in three hours, right up U.S. 49. It’ll take me an hour and a half at least. It’s raining like hell up here.”

“Down here, too.”

“But I got bad roads. Kidd, I need some backup. We gotta try to do this before daylight.”

I thought about it for a minute. This could be a bad move, but John was an old friend who had helped us through some hard times. I owed him. “All right. Where do you want to hook up?”

“I got a room at the La Quinta Inn, which is just off I-55. It’s what, almost ten o’clock now. See you at one?”

“Soon as I can get there,” I said.

WHEN I told her, LuEllen frowned, looked out the window at the slanting rain. “It’s a bad night for driving fast.”

“I gotta go,” I said.

“I know.” A couple of seconds later, “Shoot. I put some Chanel on. Now it’s wasted.” She stood on her tiptoes and gave me a soft peck on the lips, her hands on my rib cage. She did smell good; and I knew she’d feel pretty good. “You goddamn well be careful.”

Some things to think about on my way north: sex and death.

THE NIGHT WAS AS DARK as Elvis velvet, with nothing but the hissing of the tires on the wet pavement and the occasional red taillights turning off toward unseen homes. I listened to the radio part of the way, a classic rock station that disappeared north of Hattiesburg, fading out in the middle of a Tom Petty piece.

As the radio station faded, so did the rain, diminishing to a drizzle. I turned the radio off so I could think, but all I could do was go round and round about Bobby. What had happened to him? What were the implications, if he was dead? Where were his databases, and who had them?

Bobby had backed me up in a number of troubling ventures. People had died, in fact-that they’d most often deserved it didn’t change the fact of their death. Say it: of their killing. Bobby knew most of the details in the destruction of a major aerospace company. He knew why the odd security problems kept popping up in Windows. He knew why an American satellite system didn’t always work exactly as designed. He knew how a commie got elected mayor of a town down in the Delta.

He had worked with John. John had been a kind of black radical political operator all through the deep South, especially in the Delta. He didn’t talk about it, but he was tough in a way you didn’t get by accident; and he had scars you didn’t get from playing tennis.

So Bobby knew too much for our good health. He knew stuff that could put a few dozen, or even a few hundred, people in prison. Maybe even me.

Thirty miles south of Jackson, I ran into a thunderstorm-what they call an embedded storm, though I wouldn’t know it from an unbedded storm. The rain came down in marble-sized bullets, lightning jumped and skittered across the sky, and I could feel the thunder beating against the car, flexing the skin, like the cover on a sub-woofer.

I hoped John had made it all right. He had a treacherous route into Jackson, mostly back highways through rural hamlets, not a good drive in bright sunlight. I’d met John on one of my special jobs, set up by Bobby, a job that ended with me in a Memphis hospital. The scars have almost faded, but I still have the dreams…

Still, we’d become friends. John had been an investigator with a law office in Memphis, and, underground, an enforcer of some kind for a black radical political party-and at the same time, an artist, like me. Instead of paint, John worked in stone and wood, a sculptor. He’d begun making money at it, and had started picking up a reputation.

THAT last thirty miles of bullet-rain took forty minutes to drive through, and it was nearly two in the morning when I arrived in Jackson. I pulled into the La Quinta, stopped under a portico, and hopped out. Before I could walk around the car, John came through the door. He was wrapped in a gray plastic raincoat and was smiling and said, “Goddamnit, I’m glad to see you, Kidd. I was afraid you’d gone in a ditch.” He was a black man, middle forties, with a square face, short hair, broad shoulders, and smart, dark eyes.

As we shook hands in the rain, I said, “Picked a good fuckin’ night for it.”

“If you don’t have to pee…”

“I’m fine, but I’d like to get a Coke.”