The Devil's Code

safe. I pulled every muscle in my body.”
    “The penis is a muscle.”
    “It’s pulled,” I said. Then: “You seem pleased. Maybe even chipper.”
    She dug in her pocket and took out something glittery, held out her fist, and I cupped my hand underneath it. She dripped a platinum-and-diamond necklace into it. “Remember that model chick we saw going into his place? She wasn’t wearing it going in. She kept touching it coming out. Looked too nice to be an outright gift. I thought it might be in there.”
    “How much?”
    “Lots. I called my guy in Georgia, and he said he could probably get me a hundred and a half. They’re all small, one-carat, but they’re top quality, like the necklace was made to sell. A bank account.”
    “That was it? The necklace?”
    “Nope.” She grinned. “He had forty thousand in cash, all in hundreds.”
    “Computer disks, printouts . . .”
    She shook her head. “Nothing like that. Some personal papers—a mortgage, birth certificate, his passport. I brought it all back, but I don’t think there’s anything for you. There was enough to make it worthwhile for somebody like me to hit him.”
    “So maybe he’ll be less likely to look at the computer.”
    “Maybe. I’ll tell you, Kidd, you’ve gotten me in some shit over the years, but we’ve always made money, huh? Every time.”
    “Just lucky, I guess.”
    She tagged along for breakfast and then said she needed a nap. Having her sleepy made me sleepy, and we went back to her room, put out the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and slept into the afternoon. Green called at three o’clock and asked what the hell we were doing.
    W e ate dinner together. Green took a look at Corbeil’s passport as we were waiting for the meal, and said, “Travels a lot. Extra pages.” He folded the extra pages out like an accordion. “Travels in the Middle East. And India.”
    “One of those been-everywhere, done-everything guys,” LuEllen said.
    The food arrived and Green started looking at the mortgage, which he said wasn’t a mortgage at all, but a contract-for-deed, which I said was the same thing, and LuEllen said, “Not quite.”
    Finally, during the dessert, Green folded up the mortgage paper, tossed it on the table, and said, “He’s got something strange going with a ranch.”
    “A ranch?”
    “Yeah. A private sale, looks like. A contract-for-deed. He paid seven hundred and fifty thousand up front, and then a thousand a year for ten years, and he can pay the last ten thousand anytime.”
    “That sounds weird,” I said. “He paid three-quartersof a million up front, but couldn’t come up with the last ten grand?”
    “Makes no sense,” Green said.
    “Sure it does,” said LuEllen. She had a glob of ice cream on a spoon and was licking it, like an advertisement for fellatio.
    “Well, tell us, Miss Sucking on a Spoon,” Lane said.
    “If you get a contract-for-deed, the final ownership doesn’t pass to you until you make the last payment.”
    “So?”
    “So that means the ranch is still in the seller’s name. What’s his name?”
    Green picked up the contract-for-deed and looked at it: “Fred Lord.”
    “See, Fred Lord sells it to Corbeil, and Corbeil still has to pay a few bucks to totally own the land, but he gets the full use of it, but only Lord’s name appears on tax records, land records, and so on. It’s a dodge.”
    “He doesn’t want people to know he’s got a ranch?” I asked. “We ought to look at it. Where is it?”
    “McLennan County, wherever that is,” Green said. “Twelve hundred and eighty acres. Two square miles. Corbeil-land.”
    L ane wanted to go take a look right away. “What else are we going to do?”
    “Monitor my drop box,” I said. “We need that computer more than we need a ranch.”
    “How do we know that?” Lane demanded. “I feel like we’re getting bogged down. It’s been three weekssince Jack was killed. I don’t think anybody cares anymore. Except us.”
    “And the people chasing after Firewall,” I said.
    “Ah, Firewall,” she said. She batted the thought away, like a gnat. “They’ll find these kids, and that’ll be it.”
    “I wish it was true,” I said, “but I don’t think it is.”
    We talked about Firewall for a couple of minutes, about the technique of the attack on the IRS and the use of the zombie computers. We also talked for a few minutes about her talks with the cops, which were set for Monday morning, sixteen hours