'Well, for one thing, I have just gone through the strangest seventy-two hours of my life and it's made me think I badly need a man of your, uh, talents.'
'You need some drywall installed?' Rex laughed. In the background other people yelled amid the whine of screw guns. When Rex spoke again, his voice was low, serious, and all business. 'Let me step outside.'
Newly paved asphalt hissed beneath my pickup's tires. The sun baked my face through the windshield as I passed a cotton gin with a dozen rusty, wire-sided trailers beside it with lint tangled in the mesh.
'Talk to me,' Rex said finally 'Don't leave anything out.'
So I started with the attack on my boat and made my way past the shock at Chris Nellis's house in Topanga Canyon to LAX with Jasmine.
'I've got all her stuff in the back,' I concluded as I neared Tchula, one of those grinding third-world poverty pockets in the Delta.
'I'm headed to Greenwood to meet Jasmine at her office.'
'Watch your back there, my man.'
'How so?'
'The Mississippi Justice center sits right in the crosshairs of the Snowden-Jones housing project; that whole area's a drive-by shooting gallery.'
'How'd you know that?'
'You don't think I've got turnips for brains, do you? Of course I know where the office is. It was one of the first places I scoped out after the shooting at your mama's funeral. And Snowden-Jones is infamous; it's always in the news. Makes Oakland look like Beverly Hills.'
'I should have figured-'
'Yep, you should have. Did you think the shooting at the cemetery was a fluke?'
'The cops think so.'
Rex snorted. 'Of course they do! Those poor bastards have their hands full. A bunch of country boys and they've got more crack and drug murders per capita than the pros in the big city. They have to think that because they haven't got time to think of anything else.'
'But you have, right?'
'That's right, pod-nah.'
I slowed for a light as I got into Tchula proper.
'And?' I prompted him as the light turned and I followed traffic through the main part of town.
'Well, for one thing, all the people who usually know everything about everything don't know jack about nuthin' here.'
'Well, that's helpful,' I said as I hit the brakes. Immediately in front of me, a battered midsixties land yacht painted in twelve shades of rust and primer came to a sudden stop right in the middle of Highway 49 as the four occupants spotted a young black man walking along the shoulder they wanted to chat with. The pedestrian's face went wide with fear until he recognized the Pontiac's occupants as friends and not driveby assailants. I steered around the Pontiac.
'So did you ever piss off anybody in the military?'
'Every day.'
'Well, look who's helpful now.'
'Meaning?'
'Meaning, the word is Vanessa Thompson was not killed by anybody in the community. And there are people around there asking questions about you.'
The skein of dread in my gut yanked another knot tighter. I told him about my conversation with Vince Sloane.
'That's bad my friend, but it gets worse.'
'Hard to imagine.'
'Yeah, but get this: from what I can gather, the people asking the questions are military types.'
I thought back to the helicopter and the military inflatables.
'This really makes no sense, no sense at all.'
'Like your last three days make sense?'
I let that sink in as the road sign for Egypt plantation came up.
'So what do we do?' I asked.
'What do you mean 'we,' kemo sabe?' Rex laughed, then said, 'Keep your head down; keep asking questions. I'll finish up this drywall job here in Eastover by tomorrow, and I'll put all my time into helping you,'
I thanked him, said I needed a good wingman more than ever, then said good-bye.
I checked my various voice-mail boxes and found multiple, increasingly hostile message from the LAPD, and a raft of messages from Sonia, increasingly frightened and indignant. I thought of nothing reasonable to say to either of them and decided to think first instead.
CHAPTER 35
Greenwood loomed quickly ahead, and according to the map I had printed off the Internet, Jasmine's office was on Main Street, straight ahead at the looming cloverleaf. But Rex's warning about the dangerous neighborhood made me worry about parking there because stealing my laptop-which had my life on it-would be child's play.
So I took the ramp for west 82 instead and followed it over the steep viaduct spanning the mainline railroad tracks. I dialed Jasmine's cell phone as I came down to a red light where the highway made its way through a congested strip area lined with motels, fast-food restaurants, muffler shops, and other outskirts establishments.
Again she didn't answer, so I left another voice mail. The light turned green and I pressed on. The local newspaper, the Greenwood Commonwealth, passed by on the left and, next to it, the EZ-Sleep Suites.
I turned toward the EZ-Sleep and drove past a small brick building whose sign identified it as a cancer treatment outpatient clinic. The building was surrounded by people scattered in ones and twos smoking cigarettes.
The motel lobby was alive with the faint spicy fragrances of ginger, turmeric, cumin, and lime, which made my mouth water and reminded me it was after noon and I had eaten nothing in the past eighteen hours of travel other than Lilliputian bags of peanuts and pretzels. A middle-aged Indian man checked me in and directed me around the corner to my room.
As I parked near the stairs and got out, I noted a line of white panel vans with ladders on the roof and signs on the side marking them with the name of a large national contractor that laid and installed fiber-optic cables. Down at the far end of the building, people in orange shirts gathered in conversation, obviously the contractor's people here on extended assignment.
I lugged my laptop bag and duffel up to my room on the second floor and dumped them on the nearest bed, cleared off a table for my computer, connected it to the phone's data port, and turned it on. I entered the BIOS- level password, then plugged in a USB flash drive that governed the automatic encryption and decryption of everything on the hard drive. Without the flash drive plugged in, the hard drive was impenetrable to anyone save those with access to a supercomputer and advanced code-breaking software.
With this done, I connected to the internet and began downloading all my spam and e-mail. Next, I knelt beneath the desk, unscrewed the plastic faceplate from the electrical outlet, and replaced it with an invention of my own: a sturdy metal faceplate with an attachment point for a hefty security cable, which I secured to my laptop and set the combination. To steal my laptop, a thief would have to rip the entire electrical outlet junction box from the wall. Then I plugged in the laptop's AC power supply.
E-mail was still downloading by the time I finished settling in, so I stood in the door of my room for a moment looking out at the field behind the hotel. The heat of the day blushed my cheeks like staring into an open oven. Over to my left, next to the stairs, big red wasps with plump bellies filled with sting and pain hovered near a cranny under the eaves. Experience told me if I risked a closer look, I'd find a big paper nest filled with fat white larvae waiting to be more red wasps. I remembered long ago as a child using the garden hose nozzle at full blast to knock
