The Devil's Code

said.
    “Gotta be.”
    “What is it with them?”
    “I don’t know; but they must have spotted me coming online last night, and set up to back-trace our entry tonight. Took them an hour to do it and get here . . . Christ, Lane and Green probably thought that was us at the door, coming back with coffee.”

 21 
    L uEllen and I had been in jams before. I don’t know whether it was simply experience, or some essential defect in our personalities, that allowed us to carry on as efficiently as we did. To get the laptop, to get out. To do it without talking about it or hesitating.
    If I’ve ever been seriously attached to any one person in my adult life, it was LuEllen. But if she’d been in that motel room, and if I’d walked back to find her dead on the yellow bedspread, then, God help me, I believe I would have reacted the same way. And if I’d been dead, and she’d looked in, it would have been the same. No rage, no horror or fear or even sorrow. Efficiency. Get the laptop. Get the gun. Get out. Assess the damage.
    The rage and sorrow comes later.
    But it comes.
    O n the way out, in the car, LuEllen kept coming back at me about fingerprints: that’s where we could hang up. If I’d left my prints behind, they could put a face with them—I’d been thoroughly and repeatedly printed in the Army—and the other witnesses at the motel would confirm it.
    But I didn’t think I’d left any. LuEllen and I had done all this before, operating out of remote sites, and you go in thinking about not leaving prints. If you get sloppy about it, then you’ll always leave a few. The only hard thing I’d touched was the phone and the room key-card, which I still had in my shirt pocket. Still, we both ran the whole night through our heads, picking out each move we’d made. After a while, I let out a breath and said, “I’m good.”
    “So am I, except that the clerk saw me when I checked in.”
    “Yeah, but Lane looked sort of Latino and half the people around there looked Latino. I bet the clerk identifies her as the woman who checked in, because she looked like a lot of other women who checked in. And her face is shot up . . . Good thing I didn’t check us in, with Green being black. Then they’d know. ”
    “Maybe Green won’t cover for us.”
    “He couldn’t give them too much. He doesn’t know who we are, really.”
    “He could find out. Or give the cops enough information that they could.”
    “I don’t know. I think Texas is a felony-murder state. If he says he doesn’t know what was going on, that he was simply a hired bodyguard for Lane, who was doing something with her computer . . . If he says that, he’ll kick clear. If he lets them know that he knew what Lane was doing, then she would have been killed in the course of committing a crime, and that might make a case against him for felony murder.”
    “So he can’t talk.”
    “He wouldn’t—if he knows all this.”
    “So let’s call Bobby; maybe he can get the word back.”
    W e called Bobby from a pay phone. When he came up on the laptop, I wrote:
C ALL ME NOW VOICE LINE : EMERGENCY .
    He called back five seconds after I was off. I’d only talked to him on a voice line a couple of times. The only thing I knew about him was that he was a black guy, who I thought lived someplace in the Mississippi River South. He had one of those soft Delta accents, and was tied into a lot of interesting black people who, in the sixties, would have been called activists, or maybe, in that part of the world, agitators.
    “What happened?” he asked, without preamble.
    I gave it to him as succinctly as I could, then said, “Somebody’s got to get with Green. A lawyer, who cantell him to stick with the ignorant bodyguard story. If he lets on that he knew Lane was committing a crime, then they might . . .”
    “Felony murder,” Bobby said. “Bad for you, bad for me.”
    “Yeah. Somebody’s got to get in touch.”
    “I can handle that,” Bobby said softly. “How are you?”
    “We’re good, but we’re clearing out. We don’t think anybody will be looking for us too hard, but just in case . . . we’re gonna run down, to, ah, Austin.”
    “Check in from there.”
    “Talk to you,” I said, and hung up.
    “Austin?” LuEllen asked.
    “It’s a big city with lots of people coming and going,” I said. “Other than Dallas, it’s about the closest big city to Waco.”
    “Corbeil’s ranch.” She was quiet for a while, then