John Sandford - The Devil's Code

"I've been telling you that."

"Yeah, but I didn't believe you," I said. "There was too much weight on the other side. But if Jack knew about the security system on Sunday, he would have turned it off before he went in. If he found out about the system between Sunday night and Friday night, he'd have known he was in troublethat the camera would have picked him up. If he knew all that, then why didn't he add anything to the letter he sent me? If they scared him, and he knew he was in trouble."

"I just thought of something else," Lane said. "They say he broke into the secure area on Friday night. Well, if he went in there on Sunday night. why didn't he have to break in that time? Why was the first break-in on Friday, when we know he was there on Sunday?"

"One of the first things we do is try to figure out how to get into a place without anybody knowing," I said. "LuEllen and I talked to Jack about that, a little, about not leaving a mark. that's why I looked for the house key at Jack's place. Better to ease your way in, than to break something, and he knew that." I took a turn around the kitchen, working it through, finally shook my head. "I can see how they could have set it up. It'd take two guys, but they'd have to be brutal assholes to shoot that old man, the guard."

"Two guys came to burn down the house," she said. She said it quietly, like a scholar making the killing point.

"Goddamnit," I said after a while. "I think they killed him."

We sent the second copies of the Jaz disks off to Bobby's friend John Smithalso a friend of mine, and an artist himselfand I spent the next two days trying to find something that made sense on the Jaz disks, and working along the edges of the bay, with watercolor. Salty water has a different quality from fresh water, a heavier, more viscous feel. The heaviness was compounded by the light, which was very green and hard. I never got it quite right.

Lane stayed at the house, getting ready for the funeral, doing a little telecommuting and some restless reading. She also spent some time poking through the Jaz disks, but neither of us found much.

Three days after the fire, the blisters on her arms were drying to unsightly splotches of itchy dead skin, while the redness under her neck had begun to fade to brown. I brought in meals during the day, and in the cool evenings we walked out to dinner at a dimly lit Italian place, where the burns wouldn't be visible.

The funeral took place on a beautiful California morning, fifty people gathered in an old-fashioned Spanish-style stucco chapel, where an Episcopalian priest said all the right words with the right dignity The women cried, the men shook hands and Harry Connick Jr's "Sunny Side of the Street" played through the sound system as Jack's childhood friends carried his casket out the side door

LuEllen walked in the door a few seconds after the service started. I almost didn't recognize her in the New York black dress, hat, and wraparound sunglasses. She lifted a hand to me and slipped into a pew across the way. Lane didn't noticeshe was out of it, struggling through the worst week of her life, struggling to get her older brother into the ground

At the end of the service, Lane went to the front door to shake hands. LuEllen drifted over to me and said, "Bummer."

I said, "Yeah," and then, "You're looking nice. The black dress."

"I was working in New York," she said LuEllen was something of a chameleon. In black, without lipstick, with her close-cropped frosted-blond hair, she could have been a London model, except that she was too short, and her shoulders a tad too wide. When she put on Western shirts, the kind with the arrows at the corners, and cowboy boots, you'd swear she'd come straight back from hauling hay out to a horse barn in Wyoming, a rosy-cheeked good-time country girl. In Miami, she could have been a drug dealer's bimbo, in San Diego, a slightly used Navy wife on the lookout for a Coronado Island admiral

But she was a lot more than all of that.

"Anything good?" I asked

"Coin dealer. Let it go. Way too much protection." She looked around with the kind of eye-drooping, stand-back attitude she tended to develop after a couple of weeks of pushing her way around Manhattan

"Not like you need the money," I said

"Not yet, anyway," she said. She nodded at Lane. "Who's the chick? Jack wasn't married, was he?"

"His sister. Lane Ward "

"Oh, yeah, when you look at her close, you can see it." She looked at Lane and then back up at me. "Too much makeup for my style," she said

"There's a story behind it." I told her about the house and the fire. "So she's flash burned on her neck and arms and the cops want to talk to her. We're trying to bullshit our way through the funeral, then get her out of sight until she's healed."

"Gotta hurt," she said. LuEllen was unimpressed by pain, her own or anybody else's.

"It does. The doc said it'd take eight or ten days to heal, so we've got a while to go."

"Can we talk with her around?"

"I think so, but I haven't given her anything on you at all, except your first name, and I'll keep it that way."

"All right," she said. Then "You getting laid?"

"Not by Lane, if that's what you're asking "

"By who?"

"Software lady back in the Cities. We're building a computer together." I couldn't see her eyes, but I could tell they were rolling.

"Nerd love," she said

"Nerd love," I agreed. "How about you?"

"Nothing right now. I've been working pretty hard. I did a hundred and seventy thousand in Miami a couple of months ago, scared myself brainless."

"Come close?"

"Not to getting caught, but the people. bunch of pecker wood meth manufacturers. If they'd figured me out, they would've cut me up with a chainsaw, and I shit you not."

Sometimes LuEllen and I were in bed, sometimes not. She had a taste for slender, dark-haired Latin men with big white teeth. I'm not any of that. We hadn't been in the sack for a while, but I expected that she'd be back. Or I would, or something. We'd probably be buried next to each other, sooner or later: funeral thoughts.

On the way out of the church, I introduced her to Lane, who smiled and nodded, and we went outside. I'd driven Lane to the church in her car, but she'd ride to the cemetery with friends. I decided to go with LuEllen, and pick up Lane's car on the way back.

"You know what wouldn't be a bad way to go?" LuEllen asked, on the way out to the cemetery. "You know your time has come, it's all over. Go up in the North Woods in the wintertime, where there are wolves around. You sit down, take your coat off, and chill out. Wouldn't hurt. You'd just go to sleep, and instead of rotting, you'd be a dinner for the wolves. Something usefuland you'd wind up as a wolf yourself, sort of."

"Wouldn't hurt as long as the wolves didn't get there early," I said.

"That's really romantic," she said.

"Or you'd probably wind up getting eaten by field mice. Voles."

"Shut up, Kidd."

Half the people at the church followed to the cemetery. Jack was buried in a smoothly curving piece of the earth framed by a dozen small redwoods; nice spot. The funeral was one of those where, after the coffin is let down into the ground, the bystanders walk by and toss a handful of dirt into the grave. We filed past, LuEllen a step ahead of me, and when I turned past the top of the grave, saw a thick-necked man in a suit and sunglasses standing a hundred yards away, half concealed behind a granite gravestone.

I'd seen him once before, I thought: outside the house in Dallas, his face silhouetted by a streetlight.

"Got a problem," I muttered to LuEllen. "You got your cameras?"

"In the car," she said. She looked right at me, too smart to look for trouble.

"I'm gonna turn, and if you look past my shoulder, you'll see a guy in a gray suit and black sunglasses, about a hundred yards off. What are the chances of getting a shot?"