Now the black man screamed No!, now the black man shouted, Get out, motherfucker, and Carp, a big-boy at thirty, felt the explosion behind his eyes.

Carp stood over him, sweating, shirt stuck to his broad back, breathing heavily, angry adrenaline burning in his blood, listening, hearing nothing but the rain ticking on the tin roof and the soprano in the unintelligible Italian opera; smelling the must and the old wood of the house tainted by the coppery odor of blood. He was pretty sure he knew what he'd done but he said, "Get up. C'mon, get up."

Carp was a big man, too heavy for his height, round-shouldered, shambling. His eyes were flat and shallow, his nose was long and fleshy, like a small banana. His two-day beard was patchy, his brown hair was lank, mop-like. Turning away from the body, he went first for the laptop.

Right from the start, his search seemed to have gone bad. He'd located Bobby's care-giver, and the guy wasn't exactly the sharpest knife in the dishwasher: Carp had talked his way into the man's house with an excuse that sounded unbelievably lame in his own ears, so bad that he couldn't believe that the man had been trusted with Bobby's safety. But he had been...

From my kitchen window in St. Paul, over the top of the geranium pot, I can see the Mississippi snaking away to the south past the municipal airport and the barge-yards. There's always a towboat out there, rounding up a string of rust-colored barges, or a guy heading downstream in a houseboat, or a sea plane lining up for take-off. I never get tired of it. I wish I could pipe in all the sounds and smell of it, leaving out the stink and groan of the trucks and buses that run along the river road.

When all the bullshit is dispensed with, I am an artist — a painter — and for most of my life, in the eyes of the law, a criminal, though I prefer to think of myself as a libertarian who liberates for money.

The Wisteria was a casino and hung off a pier on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, between Biloxi and Gulfport. Designed to look like a riverboat, it was the size of a battleship. Sweeping decks of slot machines, which would take everything down to your last nickel, sucked up most of the space. There were also three restaurants, two bars, and a poop deck for the low-return games.

My friend LuEllen had come along. She actually liked casinos, and I needed the help. She was also doing therapy on me: she referred to my lost-love as Boobs, and had worked out a complete set of verbs and adjectives based on that root word. The day before, in the Wisteria's fine-dining restaurant ("The best surf-and-turn between New Orleans and Tallahassee") she'd held up a glob of deep-fried potato and said, "Now there's one boobilicious tater-tot."

The job: Miss Young Republican Anita Nosere, who was, from the pictures I'd seen of her, fairly boobilicious herself, got her money from her mother. Her mother was managing director of a syndicate that owned the Wisteria. Congressman Bob had been told that the casino was skimming the take, thus shorting both the U.S. government and the state of Mississippi on taxes. The skim was one of those simple-minded things that are almost impossible to spot if the casino does it carefully enough.

Exactly what we did was, we dropped dollars — and quarters and nickels — into slot machines and counted the return, and then ran the results through a statistics package. We wanted 98 per cent confidence that we were less than half of a percent off the true return. We therefore needed to take a large random sample of machines and had to run enough coins through each machine that we'd get a statistically accurate return on each.

That was not a problem with LuEllen. I'd known her for a decade, spent hours rolling around in various beds with her, and still didn't know her real last name or where she lived. I knew everything about her but the basic, simple stuff.

LuEllen and I were staying in separate rooms at the Rapaport Suites on I-10, one of those concrete-block instant motels with a polite Indian man and his wife at the front desk, a permanent smell of cigarette smoke in the curtains, and a dollar-a-minute surcharge on the telephone. The place wasn't exactly bleak, it was simply nothing. I can't even remember the colors, which were chosen not to show dirt. My room was a cube with a can, a candidate for existential hell. And we couldn't get out.

We had just finished a three-hour session with the slots, and after freshening up — taking a leak, I guess — LuEllen came down to my room, pulled off her cowboy boots, and sprawled on the bed to read a Barron's.

LuEllen caught the tone and looked over my shoulder. She knew about Bobby, so I let her look. "Uh-oh. Who's romeoblue?"

Bobby is the deus ex machina for the hacking community, the fount of all knowledge, the keeper of secrets, the source of critical phone numbers, a guide through the darkness of IBM mainframes. As with LuEllen, I didn't know his real name or exactly where he lived; but we'd done some business together.

The Gulf Coast could probably be a garden spot, but it isn't. It's a junkyard. Every form of scummy business you can think of can be found between I-10 and the beach, and most every one of them built the cheapest possible building to do the business in. It's like Amarillo, Texas, but in bad taste.

"That's it?" LuEllen asked, when I'd dropped the word.

The ring had been set up by Bobby. A group of people that he more-or-less trusted were each given one segment of his address. If anything should happen to him — if his system went unresponsive — we'd each dump our "word" at a blind e-mail address.

"You think he's dead? Bobby?" LuEllen asked. We'd been visiting a particular ice-cream parlor, named Robbie's, about three times a week. The place was designed to look like a railroad dining car, but had good sundaes, anyway. We'd just pulled into the parking lot, to the final thumps of the Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction on the radio, when she asked her question.

The guy who ran the ice-cream parlor wore a name-tag that said Jim and a distant look, as though he was wishing for mountains. A paper hat perched on his balding head, and he always had a toothpick tucked in one corner of his mouth. He nodded at us, said, "The regular?" and we said Yeah and watched him dish it up. Lots of hot chocolate. The sundaes cost five dollars each, and I'd been leaving another five on the table when we left. Jim was now taking care of us, chocolate-wise.

Bobby had a degenerative disease, although I had no clear idea of what it was. The ring had been set up to take care of things should he die or suffer a catastrophic decline. If he went slowly, the ring wouldn't know until the very end. At the last extreme, we would have all gotten files of information that he thought we might individually want — a kind of inheritance — and he would have erased everything else.

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."

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.

When I told her, LuEllen frowned, looked out the window at the slanting rain. "It's a bad night for driving fast."

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.

Thirty miles south of Jackson I ran into a thunder storm — what they call an embedded thunderstorm, though I wouldn't know it from an unbedded storm. The rain came down in marble-sized bullets, lighting 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.

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 grey plastic raincoat and was smiling and said, "Goddamn it, I'm glad to see you, Kidd. I was afraid you'd gone in a ditch." He was a black man, middles forties, with a square face, short hair, broad shoulders, and smart, dark eyes.

Jackson, Mississippi, may be a perfectly nice place, assuming that we weren't in the best part of it. The part we were in was run-down and maybe even run-over. Some of the houses that passed through our headlights seemed to be sinking into the ground. Driveways were mostly gravel, with here and there a carport; otherwise the cars, big American cars from the 80s and 90s, were parked in the yards.

I pulled into the driveway, up close to the house, and before I killed the lights, noticed a wheelchair ramp going up to a side door from the carport. The neighborhood was poor, but the lots were large and overgrown. The neighbors to the left could see us, if they were interested, and the people across the street might get a look, but there were no lights in the windows. Working people, probably, who had to get up in the morning.

Bobby's house was a mix of old and new. The entire house had wooden floors — board floors as in old southern farmhouses — covered in the dining room by a semi-threadbare oriental carpet that looked as though it came from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century. But it wasn't cheap; it fit the room well and looked inherited. A dozen plants were scattered through the half-dozen rooms, including five or six orchids, one blooming with gorgeous white flowers like a spray of silvery moons. An upright piano sat in one corner of the living room, the keyboard cover up, sheet music for Cole Porter's I Get a Kick Out of You perched on the music stand. There was all the usual stuff — a big TV, game cartridges, a stereo system with a CD player and maybe a thousand jazz and classical CDs, and a modern turntable for vinyl records, and three or four hundred records to go with the turntable. He liked Elvis Presley, I noticed, along with all the big Blues masters.