The Devil's Code (9 page)

“Making it look like they were here for the high-value stuff . . . laptops, cameras. Making it look like junkies,” I muttered.

“Goddamn animals.”

The cops were decent about it. They told her there wasn’t much they could do, absent any indication of who might have broken in. They apologized, as though it were their fault, told her to get better locks, and left.

Lane and I spent the next ten minutes teasing out the consequences of the burglary. There were a couple. If the people who took the disks were worried about what Jack knew, and were willing to kill him to keep his mouth shut, then the same might apply to Lane. On the other hand, they might look at the disks and conclude that nothing on them was worth killing for—that another death would just draw attention to them. Flip a coin.

LuEllen called, and I told her about the burglary: “The cops are gone, we’re gonna have a war council.”

“I’ve got a room at the Holiday Inn,” she said. “I’ll change clothes and come over . . . listen, you don’t have a package, do you?”

“No.”

“Maybe . . .”

“Yeah.”

L
uEllen had reverted to her usual dress by the time she arrived at Lane’s: jeans and cowboy boots, and an orange silk blouse under a jean jacket. She had the figure of a gymnast to go with the jeans: she looked spectacular, if you like cowgirls. She brought along a roll of 35mm Polaroid color slide film, a compact Polaroid film-development machine, a single-slide cabin projector, and a box of empty slide holders. She popped the film out of the camera, and we sat around the kitchen table while she developed it, cut out the individual frames, and snapped the frames into the plastic slide holders.

“If she’s gonna be around here, she’s gonna need somebody looking out for her,” LuEllen said, talking to me as if Lane weren’t there.

I nodded. “You know who I’m thinking about? I’m thinking about John Smith. He’s in on this already, and he lived in Oakland. I bet he’d know somebody.”

“Who’s John Smith?” Lane asked.

“He’s a guy, an artist,” I told her. “He was a young kid in Oakland back in the early seventies when the Black Panthers were going. He’s still out there on the left, still knows a lot of hard people.”

“How’d you meet him?”

“We helped him organize a Communist revolution in the Mississippi delta,” I said.

“Unsuccessfully, I take it.”

“No, no, it worked out fine,” LuEllen said. That might have been an overstatement. Bobby had convinced us that there might be some money involved in overthrowing a little strong-arm dictatorship in a small town of the Mississippi River. By the time we finished, we’d made some money, all right, and our friends were running the place, but there was blood on the ground, and some of the dead were good people. LuEllen doesn’t always seem to remember that part of it; or she does, but finds no point in dwelling on it. She looked at me. “So we call him.” She’d finished with the film, got the little cabin projector, plugged it in, and projected a slide against the white front of Lane’s refrigerator.

“That’s the guy,” I said. “I’d bet on it.”

Lane shivered and said, “He looks mean.”

She was right. He had that thick-necked, tight-mouthed linebacker look, with a crew cut to make the point. “I’m sure he is,” I said.

The next slide showed the same man caught as he climbed into a red Toyota Camry with California plates. I jotted down the number: “Who does Camrys?” I asked LuEllen.

“Hertz,” she said.

“Time to make some calls,” I said.

L
uEllen and I drove out to the pay phone again, and I hooked up my laptop, called Bobby and gave him the tag number for the Camry:
“Rental car, could be Hertz. Need to know the driver’s name and anything else you
can find. Driver probably lives in Dallas area, probably flew into San Francisco in the last day or two. Dump to my cache site, I’ll pick it up later. Plan to call John Smith for some help, talk to him.”

Then we called John.

“Kidd, goddamnit, it’s been a while . . .” He pulled his mouth away from the phone long enough to yell, “You guys be quiet for a minute, okay? Daddy’s on the telephone—hey, Marvel, it’s Kidd.” Then he was back: “What’s up?”

Then Marvel picked up, and I said, “How’s the commie state senator?” and she laughed and the bullshit rolled on for a few minutes. Then LuEllen wanted to talk, and we had a long-distance old-home week. I finally took the phone back and said, “Listen, John, we’ve got a problem out here in California—we’re in Palo Alto—and I was hoping you might be able to hook me up with somebody.”

“What kind of trouble?”

I gave him a quick and slightly vague answer, and mentioned Bobby. He didn’t press for details, since he knew what we all did for a living, and finally said, “I don’t know a guy, but I know a guy who’d know a guy.”

“That’s cool. We can pay whatever.”

“Probably be at least two hundred dollars a day, don’t ask, don’t tell.” Cash, no tax.

“Fine. Let me give you the phone number . . .” I gave him Lane’s number and John said somebody would call that afternoon. “Listen,” I added, “if
you
need to get in touch, drop mail at Bobby’s. But don’t call that number yourself; things could get tricky.”

H
ome?”

LuEllen shook her head. “We need to go into San Francisco . . . the Jimmy Cricket Golf Shop, and Lanny Rose’s Beauty Boutique. I got directions.”

“Golf shop?”

“Yeah. I’m taking up the game. And I want to look good while I’m playing.”

J
immy Cricket—he claimed that was his real name—was a nicely weathered gent wearing a black Polo sweatshirt over a golf shirt and jeans, with tassels on his loafers. He was regripping a Ping driver when we came through the door. He smiled and asked, “What can I do for you folks?”

“Weenie called you earlier today,” LuEllen said.

“The Gray twosome,” he said, as though we’d just shown up for our tee-time, “I thought you were a single.”

“Nope,” LuEllen said, “Mr. and Mrs. Gray. Weenie said to tell you that all cats are gray in the dark.”

“Okay. Well, Weenie’s word is good with me. If you’ll step into the back . . .”

We went through a flip-up countertop into the back room. Cricket extracted a tan duffel bag from a pile of empty golf-club shipping boxes, placed it on a workbench, and dug out five rag-wrapped hand guns: four .357 Magnum revolvers and a 9mm semiauto. “I brought the auto just in case,” he told LuEllen.

“We’re not gonna need it,” she said. She picked up
one of the guns, flipped out the cylinder, pointed it at one of her eyes, and held her thumbnail under the open chamber, to reflect light back up the barrel. Picked up another and did the same thing. “Can’t tell much, but they look okay.”

“They’re all perfect mechanically,” Cricket said. “They are clean and cold.”

LuEllen looked at all five, then pushed one at Cricket and asked, “How much?”

“Six.” He wouldn’t come down on the price but he threw in two boxes of shells, one of .38 Special and one .357. On the way out the door LuEllen spotted a pair of shooter’s earmuffs, and gave Cricket another ten dollars.

“Now we can play guns,” she said.

L
anny Rose’s Beauty Boutique looked like it was permanently closed, with fifteen-year-old pastel green “Walk-Ins Accepted” signs fading and badly askew in the windows. LuEllen insisted on banging on the door anyway, and a minute later, Lanny peered out from behind the “Closed” sign. He saw us, popped the door, and said, “Jesus Christ, you almost knocked the front of the bidnis in.”

“Weenie said the world looks better through rose-colored glasses,” LuEllen said.

“Yeah, yeah, fuck a bunch of weenies,” Lanny said, but he pushed the door open a bit, and LuEllen and I followed him through the gloomy beauty parlor into a back room. When we got there, he was hanging a pale blue drape on a wall, using pushpins.

“Stand there. Smile, but only a little,” he said.

I stood, and he took my picture, twice, with a Polaroid passport camera. Then he took two pictures of LuEllen and said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

LuEllen said, “I think I’ll come along and watch.”

She had her hand in her pocket, and Lanny said, “Weenie promised you wouldn’t be no trouble.”

“We won’t be; I’m just coming along to watch,” LuEllen said. “My friend will sit out here in front and read a magazine.”

They were gone for twenty minutes. I sat in a dusty beauty-parlor chair and read a story in a four-year-old
Cosmo
about how women can keep their men interested by learning the latest in blow-job techniques—the techniques themselves were described blow by blow, so to speak, by a panel of successful New York advertising and media women. I was not only convinced, I was supportive.

When LuEllen and Lanny came back, Lanny was complaining. “I never make copies of
any
faces. Weenie knows that.”

“I don’t trust Weenie,” LuEllen said.

Back in the car, she handed me four cards: two Texas driver’s licenses, and two credit cards. One credit card matched each license. “Will they stand up?”

“Unless you’re busted, in which case they’ll get your prints anyway,” she said. “They’re both real people, and the accounts are real, although we don’t know the credit limits or the billing dates. We could use them in an emergency, but then they’d only be good until the guy’s next bill came in.”

“Bobby could get us credit limits and billing dates,” I said.

“Might be worth doing . . .”

On the way to Lane’s, LuEllen launched a little philosophical discussion.

“You know, Kidd, you told me once that revenge doesn’t make any sense, because the dead guy won’t know what you’re doing and won’t care, because he’s dead. So what I’m wondering is,
What are we doing?
Jack won’t know, and Jack won’t care.”

“We’re not really doing it for Jack anymore,” I said. “We never were, really. We’re doing it for us. They just pissed us off by killing Jack.”

“Not me, especially. I only met him that once. Nice guy, but . . .”

“Then
I’m
pissed about Jack, and you’re coming along because of
me.
And I don’t have much choice. I’m involved in this somehow, and I’ve got to find out what’s going on. I don’t want that crew-cut asshole and his pal showing up at my house someday, tidying up some loose end that I don’t even know about.”

“So I’m involved only because you’re involved—and because you say so.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“That’s pretty smug. What if I opted out?”

“You won’t. You couldn’t stand not knowing what happened,” I said.

“You’d tell me.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I’d never say a single word about it. I’d deny all knowledge.”

“Bullshit,” she snorted.

“So you’re in?”

She let her eyes float to the tops of her eye sockets, and then said, “For a while.”

A
t Lane’s, we ate Lean Cuisines—I had three of them, an appealing mix of Teriyaki Stir-Fry, Swedish Meatballs, and Mesquite Beef—and then LuEllen took Lane and the revolver down to the basement.

“I hate the goddamn things,” Lane had said, when LuEllen showed her the gun.

“They’re the ubiquitous tools of modern life. Even if you don’t like them, it behooves you to know how to use one,” LuEllen said.

“Oh, boy.”

Fifteen minutes after they went down to the basement, a single shot cracked through the house. I jumped up, peeked out the windows all around. Nothing moving. I stuck my head down the basement door, “Jesus, LuEllen . . .”

Bang! A second one, and I nearly jumped out of my shoes.

“All done,” LuEllen called. The smell of burnt gunpowder coursed up the stairwell, and a minute later, LuEllen appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “Had to squeeze off a round or two so she’d have a sense of the recoil.”

“Well, knock it off, for Christ’s sakes, it’s louder than hell up here,” I said.

“Aw, once or twice, no problem,” she said.

They were still down in the basement when the
phone rang. I picked it up and a soft male voice said, “Could I speak to Mr. Kidd?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Lethridge Green. I’m a friend of a friend of a man named John. I was told you have a body to guard?”

“Yes. In Palo Alto, although there might be some travel.”

“I get two hundred fifty dollars a day plus any expenses,” Green said.

“That’s fine.”

“How long would the body need to be guarded?”

“I don’t know. Not just a couple of days, though—anything from a couple of weeks to a couple of months.”

“Good. Don’t ask, don’t tell?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“I can be there in two hours, if you’d like me to start tonight.”

“That’d be a relief,” I said. “We’re sort of afraid to leave the body alone.”

“Then I will come directly.”

T
hen I will come directly.

Not exactly what I’d expected from hired muscle, but then, with John, you never knew exactly what you might get . . .

 8 

A
few minutes after talking to Green, I went out and checked my cache with Bobby, to see if he’d gotten anything on the guy at the cemetery. He had. He’d run the plate back to Hertz, dug through their computer, and come up with the credit card and license information on the renter: A Lester Benson, of Dallas, using a corporate American Express card issued to AmMath. The car had not been checked in yet.

Lester Benson: hadn’t seen that name before.

There was no hint of a second man in any of the Hertz information, but Bobby was looking through airline reservation files to see if he could spot Benson’s seat from Dallas to San Francisco, and then determine who might have been sitting next to him.

I left a note asking him to find everything he could
on AmMath and to dump all the information to my mailbox.

L
ethridge Green was standing on Lane’s porch, knocking on the door, when I pulled up. Green looked like a big Malcolm X—tall, too slender, intent, with round gold-rimmed glasses, short hair, and a solemn, searching intensity.

“Mr. Green?” I pushed through the door. “Come on in.”

“You’re Mr. Kidd,” he said, as he stepped inside. His eyes took in the room, and LuEllen and Lane on the couch, and the .357 on the end table next to LuEllen’s hand. “I see a gun. What’s the situation here?”

“Somebody killed my brother, and somebody burglarized my house this afternoon . . .” Lane started.

“Did you call the police?”

“Yes. They think it was burglars attracted by my brother’s funeral.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I know it wasn’t. We even know who it was; but not exactly why.”

Green held up a finger: “Before you tell me anything else, maybe we should take the first security precaution.”

“What?” Lane asked. We all looked at him expectantly.

“Pull the drapes,” he said.

A
fter we’d pulled the drapes, Lane gave him the story—not all of it, but most of it: her brother being killed in Dallas in suspicious circumstances, the funeral, the burglary at her home. She told him about the fire, but didn’t mention that we were there. She told him about our record search through Hertz, and the two names we had so far: William Hart, mentioned by Jack, and Lester Benson, from the Hertz records. “We’re afraid they might come back—that they might think that Jack passed information to me, or computer files.”

“Did he?”

Lane looked at me, and I nodded. “Yes. He sent me some Jaz disks. A Jaz disk is a high-capacity storage . . .”

“I know what a Jaz disk is,” he said. “What’s on it?”

“Everything from memos to computer games to a lot of gobbledygook that we haven’t had time to figure out. That we might not be
able
to figure out,” I said. “Whatever it is, we think Jack might have been killed to keep it private. The shoot-out might have been a setup.”

“The guard took a slug as part of a setup?” he asked skeptically.

“The guard didn’t see anything,” I said. “As far as he knows, he might have been shot by the Easter Bunny. He opens the door and, boom, he’s down. The other guy supposedly fires four times and Jack’s killed. The guard didn’t see a thing.”

“Why didn’t you just give them back? The disks?”

“That might not help; because we know about them, and we can’t erase that. Then there’s this group called
Firewall . . .” I explained Firewall, as much as I knew about it.

“You’re starting to scare me,” Green said. “If this is some kind of government thing, the FBI or the CIA or one of those other alphabet agencies . . . I mean, I don’t want to be protecting a bunch of terrorists or spies or something.”

“Do we look like terrorists? I’m a college professor,” Lane said.

“A lot of terrorists start out as college professors,” he said.

“Well, I’m not one of them,” she snapped. “I’m just scared.”

“We’re not asking you to crawl down a sewer pipe with a bomb in your mouth,” I said. “Just keep her healthy.”

“That’s it? All I do is keep them off her?”

“That’s it. And if it gets heavy, call the cops. We already did that once, and these guys ran for it. Which tells you where
they
are.”

“For how long?” he asked.

“For a while. Two or three weeks, anyway. She’s gonna have to make a trip to Dallas. In a couple of weeks, these guys should have figured out that if she had anything, they’d know about it, one way or another.”

He looked at me for a few seconds, a steady gaze, and finally nodded: “You’re lying a little. But if that’s the basic idea of what’s going on, I’ll take the job.”

Green got a hard-shell suitcase out of his car and I cleared out of the guest room. “I’ll get a room in LuEllen’s motel tonight,” I said. “It’ll have a clean
phone line. I’ll get with Bobby about AmMath and we’ll start looking for Firewall.”

“Okay,” Lane said. She reached out and touched the .357 on the table. Green asked, “You know how to use that?”

“I just shot a big stack of phone books down in the basement,” she said. “LuEllen told me if I need to, just point it and keep pulling the trigger until I run out of bullets.”

Green sighed and said, “Nuts.”

I
wasn’t sure I liked leaving them alone in Lane’s house. If they were targets, they were just sitting there. It’s easy to get lost in America, for a few days or weeks, anyway, and if you try hard enough,
nobody
can find you. But sitting ducks . . .

There was a momentary awkwardness while I was checking into the motel. LuEllen and I had spent quite a bit of time together, and probably would again in the future, and she wasn’t involved with anybody and I wasn’t
that
involved, but the awkwardness went away and I checked into a separate room. She came down ten minutes later with a couple of beers while I was talking to a guy named Rufus Carr in Atlanta.

“How’s Monger doing?” I asked Rufus.

“You’re talking to a pentamillionaire,” he said.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“I got five million bucks in the bank, m’ boy,” he said. Rufus was a fat red-haired man who affected a bad W. C. Fields accent. “Until I have to pay taxes, anyway.”

“It works?” I asked.

“Of course it works; I told you it’d work.”

“I knew that,” I said.

“Yeah, bullshit. You were one of the naysayers. You were one of the guys who said Rufus was going to be eating frozen cheese pizza for the rest of his life. Well, I’ll tell you what, pal, it’s nothing but order-out pepperoni and mushroom from now on. And a private booth at Taco Bell.”

“I’ve got a favor to ask. Could you mong some stuff for me?”

“On what?”

“You know about Firewall?”

“Yeah?”

“The rumors are weird. Could you just pick up a few of the bigger sites where you see the rumors, and mong them?”

“Is there any money in it?” he asked.

“Fuck, no. But I won’t burn your house down.”

“Well, thank you, General Sherman. Am I going to get in trouble?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “But this whole Firewall thing is getting totally out of hand.”

“You’re right; it’s my patriotic duty. Besides, I’m not doing anything else.”

“Can I call you tomorrow?”

“Sure. I’ll put it on the trail right now, and get it back tomorrow morning,” he said.

W
hat’s ‘mong’?” LuEllen asked, when I hung up. She was sitting on the bed with a beer bottle.

“Monger. It’s a rumor-tracking program,” I said. “Rufus built it for some securities companies. They use it to bust day traders who try to spread rumors to move the stock market.”

“It works?”

“Hell, he’s a pentamillionaire,” I said.

N
ext I got back onto Bobby: he had some preliminary company stuff on AmMath, mostly public information pulled out of various open databases. More interesting was his news on Firewall.

Got a new list supposedly with Firewall. They are: exdeus, fillyjonk, fleece, ladyfingers, neoxellos, omeomi, pixystyx. Friends give me two hard IDs near you. Fleece is Jason B. Currier, 12548 Baja Viejo, Santa Cruz. Omeomi is Clarence Mason of 3432 LaCoste Road in Petaluma.

We’d gotten a map with the car; I went out and got it, and checked. Mason was maybe an hour or an hour and a half away, up north of San Francisco in Marin County. Currier was practically across the street. All part of the Silicon Valley culture that’s grown up around San Francisco like a bunch of magic mushrooms.

“So we’re gonna find these guys,” LuEllen said.

“First thing tomorrow.”

I
’m not an easy sleeper; I kicked around the bed overnight, getting a couple of hours here and another hour there, with fifteen minutes of wide-awake worrying in between. I don’t like big, arrogant organizations that push people around, or manipulate them, or extort them—but I don’t see it as my personal obligation to stop them. I just go my own way. I fish and paint and lie in the sunshine like a lizard. I might steal something from one of them, from time to time, software or schematics or business plans, but I’m very careful about it.

The whole AmMath business was not my style. I liked Jack Morrison. He was a good guy, as far as I knew, but I really didn’t know that much about him. Maybe that whole thing about “k” was bullshit; maybe he made it up to pull me into whatever he was doing at AmMath. Maybe
he
put the rumors out. And Lane herself was a computer freak: maybe she was involved with Firewall.

But if not, “k” was cause for concern. It was not a computer identity as such, it was just an initial, and there may be ten thousand people on the Net who sign themselves with a k. The same with Bobby and Stanford—there are probably a thousand Stanfords out on the Net. And I would imagine that there are quite a few people calling themselves Fleece, although omeomi is not quite as generic. The troubling thing was the
grouping.
I had heard most of those names at one time or another. I even knew what a couple of them did, although I didn’t know who they were.

Computer people, a lot of them, have the same
attitude I do toward bigness, toward bureaucracy, toward being pounded into round holes. They don’t like it. Maybe there was a Firewall, and maybe some of these people were in it, and because
they
were, then
I
was suspect . . .

Paranoia is good for you, if you’re a crook; but it doesn’t make life any easier.