“What about Rachel?”

“Stay on the phone. Drive south. We’ll handle this.”

“How far south?” I asked for John’s benefit.

“Not far.”

“Okay. If it’s not far.” I drove south, thirty miles an hour. Thirty seconds, and he said, “Pull over on the right shoulder when you see the red flag tied to the bush on the left side. Just pull over.”

I saw the red flag, a kerchief. I pulled over. “What now?”

“Look back the way you came.” I looked and saw him pedaling his mountain bike along the left shoulder, talking into his cell phone. “You can see me. I’m not holding a gun. If you do anything to me, Rachel is gonna starve out there.”

“All right, I can see you. I’m giving you the goddamn laptop,” I snarled. “Just come and get it. You want me to get out now?” More for John.

“Get out.”

“I’m getting out,” I said.

THE sun was blistering, but the day, this far out in the country, was absolutely silent except for faraway car sounds; I could smell the ragweed cooking in the sun. Carp was forty yards away from me, on the bike, not moving, but balanced on it. No chance to run him down. He held up a piece of paper and spoke into the phone. “Map of where Rachel is at. If you go there, and yell around, she’ll call to you. I marked the old store where the path starts, you can’t miss it.”

I held up Bobby’s laptop. “This is the laptop. What do you want to do?”

“Leave the laptop. Leave it on the side of the road. I’ll look at it, and if it’s right, I’ll put the map down. If you do anything, I’ll run, and you’ll never hear from me again. And Rachel won’t hear from you.”

“Cut your fuckin’ head off,” I shouted into the phone.

“Yeah, yeah… leave the laptop.”

I CROSSED the highway and left the laptop on the side of the road, then crossed back and pulled away in the car, south for another forty or fifty yards. He slowly rode down the shoulder behind me, to the laptop. I’d turned the laptop on in the car. He picked it up, flipped open the top, looked at it, hit a few keys, then closed it and put the map on the shoulder, weighed down with a couple pieces of gravel. A car zipped past, the driver looking at us curiously; but he kept going.

Carp was on the bike again, and he rode away from me and said into the phone, “You can get the map.” He sounded gleeful. The phone went dead, and as I watched, he took the bike off the road, down the short slope of the shoulder and onto what must have been a path that ran down to the levee, across the end of one of the farm fields. I picked up Marvel’s phone.

“He’s left the map, and he’s off the road riding down to the levee. I’m about a half-mile south of Universal. He’s doing the river thing.”

“We’re closing on the other side. We’re coming in on the other side,” John said back.

I BACKED along the shoulder until I was opposite the map, then walked over and picked it up. As I did, Carp crossed the levee and disappeared down the other side, into a forest of cottonwoods. From where I was standing, I could see a narrow path through the weeds, leading down to the levee. Local fishermen, I thought.

The map consisted of two pieces of paper: A Xerox of a road map, pinpointing a crossroads ten miles west of Longstreet, and a little south, probably fifteen road miles from where I was. The second piece was a hand-drawn map starting at the crossroads. There was a square, with the notation, “old abandoned schoolhouse,” and another, with an arrow, that said, “power-line easement back into the woods.” It appeared that the map would take you about a mile and a half off-road. The thing looked so good I began to believe that we were gonna get Rachel back.

“I got the map,” I called to John.

“He’s got a boat. The guys on the other side can see him, he’s got a jon boat with a motor, he’s putting the bike in the boat. They can’t find his car. They say they don’t see a car over there.”

“Gotta be there somewhere. Watch him, he may have a gun.”

“How about Rachel?”

“He said she’s chained up in the woods. I got a map. I’m going.”

“Where?”

I told him, and I heard him talking with Marvel, and he said, “Fifteen minutes. We’ll see you there.”

I HAD to go four miles north before I could get a crossroad out of the valley that would take me west toward Rachel. On the way, John called. “He’s running down the river, he’s not coming across.”

“Shit. What’s he doing? Can the guys still see him?”

“They can see him, but they don’t know where he’s going. He’s on their side, just under the levee.”

“Must’ve hid the car somewhere that wasn’t straight across,” I suggested.

“They’re still on him, and Marvel and I are on the way out to you.”

A MOMENT later, he called again. “Shit. He’s crossed back over the river. That’s his second trick, that’s his second trick. He faked us out. He’s leaving the boat, he’s getting out of the boat, he’s on the bike.”

I could hear him shouting into a second cell phone. “Gotta stay with him. Henry, get back south, get back south, his car’s gotta be down there somewhere. Kevin, you go on down toward Greenville, get moving… I know, I know… but that’s the only way you’re gonna get ahead of him if he keeps going south… I know.”

Henry was the driver of the car that had been south of me. He’d closed in when the trade took place, and when Carp crossed the river, had started back to Longstreet, and the Longstreet bridge. Now Carp was south of him, and nobody was south of Carp, and on the same side of the river.

“We’re gonna lose him,” I shouted into the phone, helpfully.

“No, no, no,” John shouted back.

Then I heard him on the other phone, just his side of the conversation. “You see it? You see it? Get down south, keep going, Henry, keep going.” And to me: “Henry spotted the Corolla. Carp’s not there yet. Henry’s going on ahead.”

Okay. Now we had Carp between two cars. Two cars with smart guys. I couldn’t hear it, but I assumed that they were tagging him.

In the meantime, I closed on the crossroads where Rachel was-two left turns, to get me around a lopsided net of gravel roads, into the old abandoned schoolhouse.

John and Marvel were already there, sitting in their car, looking at their map. I stopped, got out, jogged to John’s driver’s-side window, the sun burning down on my shoulders. “Let me see the map,” John said.

I gave him the map. It was all very clear: we were at the right spot. We squabbled about it for a minute, quacking like a gaggle of geese, but that did no good.

There was no schoolhouse. There was no power line going back into the woods.

There was nothing but a burning hot gravel crossroads, with cotton fields stretching away on all four corners, stretching away forever. The kind of crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil.