The Devil's Code

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 upone 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