The Devil's Code

“Jesus, Kidd, nobody’s blown a safe since Bonnie and Clyde. He’ll cut it open with a lathe.”
    She dropped me at the hotel and took off. As I got out, I said, “Cruise control.”
    “Absolutely.”
    When you’re running, you always want to run on cruise control. Get out on the Interstate, set your speed two miles an hour above the speed limit, and no cop on earth will look at you. If you’re not on cruise control, your adrenaline will eventually get to you and you’ll go flying past some cop at a hundred and ten, and it’ll feel like forty-five.
    W ith LuEllen gone, I walked six blocks to a drive-in phone on the edge of a gas station parking ramp, checked in with Lane, and afterward got online with my dump box.
    Lane was almost as cranked as LuEllen.
    “What’d you get? How come you’re not up here?”
    “We don’t know what we got. It’s in a safe and we’ve got to cut it open. LuEllen’s taking care of that tonight, but she won’t be back until morning.”
    “How about the computer?”
    “We should be online with him. I’m going to check in a few minutes.”
    “Damn it, Kidd, it freaked me out, even though we were outside. Freaked me out. Something for the memoirs.”
    “Better fuckin’ not,” I said. “This is not even for your memories.”
    The dump box was a mailbox I’d set up especially to take everything Corbeil typed on his computer terminal. There was nothing in the box. I hadn’t expected anything. Corbeil, the social butterfly, the model-dater,wouldn’t be back until late, if at all, unless somebody found the broken door.
    F inally, I went out to Bobby. He had nothing more to offer on Jack’s Jaz disks, but was certain that the attack on the IRS was coming from Europe.
G OT SOME NUMBERS IN G ERMANY AND ID’ D ZOMBIE COMPUTERS HERE IN S TATES THAT ARE FEEDING ATTACK . W ILL PASS ALONG TO NSA CONTACT AND TRY TO STEER HER FROM OLD NAMES .
    S HE ’ S NO WIZARD . Y OU MAY BE PUTTING TOO MUCH HOPE IN STUPID PEOPLE .
    M UST PUSH THEM OFF . T HEY STILL THRASH AFTER OLD NAMES .
    T AKE CARE .
    A ND YOU .
    I got to bed a couple of hours before dawn, still worrying about LuEllen. I got three hours of sleep, and, still groggy but unable to keep my eyes closed, got out of bed and nearly fell on my face. I’d felt a little creaky the night before, but now every muscle in my body was screaming at me. That goddamned safe. I know what muscle-pulls feel like, and I had what some docs called micro-pulls, the kind you get shoveling snow off a sidewalk. No major muscles, but hundreds of tiny pulls.
    I hobbled into the bathroom, took six ibuprofen out of my dopp kit, swallowed them, shaved, and then spentfifteen minutes in a scalding shower. You’re supposed to use ice, rather than heat, but this was ridiculous: I’d have to bury myself in a snow drift to chill everything I’d pulled. The heat made it feel better, anyway.
    I was toweling off, slowly, when I got the sudden feeling—a premonition without the negative vibe—that LuEllen had just gotten back. I walked over to a window, opened a slit in the curtain, and looked down at the hotel parking lot. Yet another wonderful day, sunny, but with that early-morning dryness that we don’t see in Minnesota. LuEllen was not in sight.
    So much for premonitions. As I finished toweling off, I had another one: I’d just seen something important, but I didn’t know what. What was it? I wandered around, looked out the window again, looked at myself in the mirror, looked at the towel. What the hell was it?
    I couldn’t figure it out, gave up, and got dressed, slowly. My back and underarms hurt the worst, and the inner thighs weren’t good. My hair didn’t hurt at all, but that was the only bright spot. I was leaving the room, going for breakfast, when I had a third premonition, this one about LuEllen again. I went back to the window, looked out, and saw the black Pontiac GrandAm rolling into a parking spot. An accurate premonition—if you have enough of them, and look often enough, you’ll always have a good one. I watched her walk into the hotel, and five minutes later, opened the door as she came down the hallway.
    “Saw you in the parking lot,” I said. “How’d it go?”
    “You got a big industrial lathe, cutting a safe is like cutting cheese,” she said. She pushed the door shut. “Ifyou can mount it and turn it, you can cut it.” Then she stepped up to give me a big kiss, and I winced.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “That fuckin’