The Devil's Code

could look at us, where they could see the burns, we were in trouble.
    A purely selfish reaction: because Lane hurt. I’d found some Solarcaine in a drugstore, and she’d smeared it on the burns, and she’d taken a half-dozen ibuprofen, though we weren’t sure they’d help much. That was about the best we could do before we left for the airport.
    At the check-in counter, Lane hung back, the shy Little Woman in a long-sleeved blouse, head down, while I handled the tickets. On the plane, she sat on the aisle, and got up twice to go to the bathroom, to lather on more of the Solarcaine.
    “You okay?” I asked after the second trip.
    “I’ll make it,” she said through her teeth.
    “The ibuprofen . . .”
    “Didn’t help much,” she said. “I hope I don’t scar.”
    “It doesn’t look that bad,” I said. “I . . .”
    She held up the bottom side of her arm, and showed me a half-dozen blisters the size of quarters.
    “I’m afraid to lance them, ’cause of infection,” she said.
    “Ah, Jesus . . .”
    Halfway through the flight, I half-stood and looked around. The woman in the seat in front of Lane was asleep, her mouth hanging open. There was nobody behind us, and the guy across the aisle had spread across two seats, and had his head propped uncomfortably against a window shade.
    “You know,” I said quietly, “the police know we left Dallas this evening and the house burned down before we left. They’re gonna want to talk to you.”
    “Oh, boy. You’re right.”
    “You’re gonna have to lie a little,” I said.
    “I’m gonna have to lie a lot, ” she said.
    “You can pull it off if you think about it,” I said. “You’ve gotta be surprised and you’ve gotta be pissed. It’s their fault—the cops’ fault—that the place burneddown. You told them that something was going on, that your brother had been murdered. You gotta yell at them.”
    “Not yell. But I’ll be mad. I am mad,” she said. “Somebody did murder him.”
    “You gotta insist that you go back to Dallas, and you have to demand to look at the hard drives on the computers. That might keep them from having a local cop come around to talk to you. There’s no reason for them to suspect that you were burned in the fire, there’s no reason for them to think that they have to see you right away. And you do have to stay here for the funeral.”
    “So it depends on how long it takes the burns to heal,” she said.
    “Yes. But you can’t stall them: you just have to be busy. You have to leave them with the impression that you’re pissed off and you’re gonna be back in their faces as soon as you have the time.”
    She thought about it for a minute, then said, “I can do that.”
    “Cops aren’t dummies. Not most of them, anyway.”
    “Maybe he won’t be the same guy I talked to last time. I mean, I talked to a different cop the first time. . . . That’d make it easier.”
    “Whoever it is, you’ve got to be careful, and you’ve got to be real. Cops got built-in bullshit detectors,” I said.
    At San Francisco, we picked up her car from a satellite lot and drove south to Palo Alto, went straight to her house, dumped the luggage: “Emergency room,” I said.
    “I’ve got a doctor I see . . .”
    “Emergency room is right now, and it’s anonymous, and it may stop the pain,” I said.
    She didn’t argue.
    W e even managed to get a little sleep that night.
    At ten o’clock in the morning, after five hours in bed, I heard somebody knocking around in the house. I rolled off the bed—I’d crashed in her spare room—and pulled on my jeans and T-shirt. She was in the kitchen, making coffee.
    “How is it?”
    “Hurts,” she said. She’d gotten cleaned up, as best she could, but said that water hurt the burns. She was wearing loose khaki pants with a long-sleeved cotton peasant shirt, and again I could sense just a dab of the flowery French scent. She smelled terrific, and looked terrific in the peasant blouse, if you didn’t know that she was dressed to hide new burns.
    Her face was all right; the burn there resembled a bad sunburn, and would heal soon enough. Her arms were the worst of it. The doc had lanced the blisters the night before, to relieve the pressure, but they were filling again.
    “The anesthetic doesn’t help?” I asked. She’d gotten a spray-on topical anesthetic at the hospital. The doctors had said it was stronger than the Solarcaine.
    “Helps for a while,” she