The Devil's Code

drawer, and a broken Rolex watch given her by her ex-husband.
    “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 youcan 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