The Devil's Code

fuck for a few seconds, sighed, stood up, got my bag out of the overhead bin, and stowed the tarot deck. Thought about it for a second, then dug out the little eight-cake Winsor & Newton watercolor tin and my sketchbook. I got a glass of water from the stewardess and started doing quick watercolor sketches of Lane, the cabin, and the two business guys across the aisle.
    The closest business guy looked like a salesman—balding, pudgy, triple-chinned, exhausted. He sat head-down and dozing, his red, yellow, and black necktie splashing down his chest and stomach like a waterfall. The guy behind him was just as exhausted, but was too thin, his skull plainly carving the shape of his head. I got three good ones of the two of them, the thin manlike death’s shadow behind the fat one. I struggled to get the red necktie right, working the planes as it twisted down his shirt.
    A stewardess stopped to watch for a few minutes, then disappeared into the front of the plane. A couple of minutes later, the copilot came back, watched for a while, said he did a little watercolor himself, and asked me if I’d ever seen the cockpit of a D9S at night. I hadn’t, and he showed me the way.
    I did a half-dozen sketches of the crew at work, and left them behind: they all seemed pleased, and so was I. In the twenty years after I got out of college, I don’t think I went a day without drawing or painting something, except during a couple of hospital visits; even then, when I could start moving, the first thing I did was ask for a pencil.
    In all those years, the work got tighter and tighter and tighter, until I felt like I hardly had the muscle to pick up a pencil or a pen or a brush: I could wear myself out in an hour, just moving a brush around. Then I broke through. The brush got lighter, and the work became fluid. The actual breakthrough came during a rough visit to Washington, D.C. I’d left behind the Washington nightmares—hadn’t had one for a couple of years, now—but the fluidity seemed to hang around . . .
    I got back to my seat, restowed the Winsor & Newton tin and the sketchbook, and buckled up for the landing. When the wheels came down, Lane started, stirred, woke up and yawned, covering her mouth with a balled fist, pushed up the window shade, and looked out at the lights of Dallas and then, as we turned, of Fort Worth.
    “My mouth tastes like something died inside it,” she said, her voice a little husky. A good voice to wake up to. She looked me over: “What’d you do? Sit there and stare at the seat back?”
    “Not exactly,” I said.
    Going out the door, the stewardess squeezed my arm and said, “Thanks so much, you’re really good.” Lane looked like she might drop dead of curiosity as we walked up the ramp, but then she finally asked, “What was that all about?”
    I said, “Oh. You know . . .”
    “Be a jerk,” she said. But she was smiling.
    W e stayed overnight at a Marriott. Early the next morning, she was pounding on my door, and at nine o’clock, we were headed down to Dallas police headquarters. Lane wanted me to go inside with her, but I don’t talk to cops when I can avoid it. She went in alone, a little pissed. Twenty minutes later, she was back, and told me about it as we drove back to the hotel.
    The cops had been pretty straightforward about it, she said. “I got into their faces a little bit, but they wouldn’t budge. This guy I talked to said Jack was into something tricky. That’s the word he used. Tricky. ”
    “And that’s what they’ve got? That’s all? That he was doing something tricky?”
    “No.” She was reluctant to talk; I had to pry it out of her. “They say they traced the gun he supposedly used. It was stolen in San Jose six years ago.”
    “Uh-oh,” I said.
    “Yeah. I kept saying Jack would never use a gun, and they kept saying, then how come the gun came from San Jose?” She was looking up at me with her dark eyes, pleading with me to understand that what the cops had said was all bullshit. “They said, ‘AmMath framed him using a gun that was stolen six years ago in San Jose? How did they do that?’ ”
    “Good question,” I said.
    “Jack would not shoot anybody,” Lane insisted.
    “You can’t always tell what somebody will do when he’s cornered, and he thinks that his life may be ruined. Or that he might go to prison,” I said. “Or maybe he thought the guard was about to shoot him, and it was self-defense.”
    She didn’t want to