The Devil's Code

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 peckerwood 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 useful—and 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?”
    I turned and she turned with me, smiling, saying, “Yadda yadda yadda,” and then, “All right, I got him. He’s not a cop, unless he’s some kind of federal spook that I don’t want to know about.”
    “He’s not a cop,” I said. “He could be private security. He could be a major asshole.”
    The people at the funeral were starting to look around, ready to start moving as soon as the last handful of dirt was dropped in the grave. LuEllen said, “Let me give you a peck, say good-bye,” and I leaned over and she gave me a peck on the cheek and started for her car, lifting a hand to wave good-bye as she went.
    She was the first to go; her car was only fifty feet down the cemetery lane. She popped the trunk with a remote key, pulled out a shoulder bag, tossed it across the front seat, started the car and drove away. I turned, casually, saw the man in the gray suit still standing there, but faced in a different direction, looking ninety degrees away from us. The last handful of dirt went in the grave, and Lane shook hands with a couple of people, and took the arm of a guy who, with his wife, had driven her to the cemetery: their oldest friends, Jack’s and Lane’s, and from what I’d seen, nice people.
    As Lane started moving toward the car, the man in gray started to move, down away from the stone where he was standing. I couldn’t see a car—it was apparently behind an evergreen-covered knoll, out of sight. LuEllen had only had a couple of minutes to set up, andI wasn’t sure if she was ready yet. Nothing to do about it,