The Devil's Code

again, and again. Then hurried around behind it, got the compass, checked to make sure the direction hadn’t changed: it hadn’t. I went back to the dish andchecked the azimuth as many times as I could until the dish was pointing at the local horizon, up the hill, and suddenly stopped. After taking the last azimuth, I ran around and checked direction again. Still the same. When I give the numbers to Bobby, I should have a straight line running through the sky from just north of west to just south of east, and even with the crude measurements of the protractor, should be able to give him a reasonably close approximation of times and azimuths.
    At the top of its arc, the dish stopped moving for thirty seconds, then slowly began turning, more to the north this time, as the dish began to come down in its arc. At the end of the movement sequence, it was pointing at the horizon at about 320 degrees, or about 30 degrees further north than before. I noted that, packed up my stuff, took the elastic off the dish, and walked south about fifteen feet, and whispered, “LuEllen?”
    A moment later, she was next to me: “Get it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I heard you clunking around.”
    “Not too much, I hope.”
    “Not too bad . . . are we good?”
    “Unless you’d like to take a little walk.”
    “You’re the boss.”
    M oving slowly, stopping often to use the night glasses, and staying as far away from the groups of cows as we could, we walked toward Corbeil’s farmhouse. We sat on one hillside for fifteen minutes, taking the whole country in, then crossed a wash and climbedthe other side; and from there, we could see Corbeil’s clearly.
    “No dish,” I muttered to LuEllen.
    “So let’s go. We’ve been here too long.”
    “Let’s head over that way for a couple of hundred yards first, and then head back,” I said.
    “That way” was east, toward the eastern edge of Corbeil’s land. We first crossed back to the hill behind us, to get a little more distance between us and the house, and followed the backside of the ridge for four or five hundred yards. When the GPS put us three-fourths of the way across, we turned back up the hill. When we got to the crest, we looked down, and there, in a little hollow, was another dish.
    “That’s three,” I whispered.
    We crossed down to it, and I marked it on the GPS, and did a quick measurement: 320, just like the last one. Waiting. I considered waiting until it started to move, but we were running down. “Let’s go.”
    We took better than an hour to get back to the truck. We approached it slowly, listening, loaded up as quietly as we could, backed out, and headed south toward the highway. Once on the road, LuEllen said, “Nice night for a picnic.”
    “I’m a little kicked,” I said. She was driving, and I added, “When we get down to that old farmhouse, off on the side, if there aren’t any lights, stop at the end of the driveway; just for a second.”
    There were no lights, and she stopped. I stuck the GPS out the window, got a quick read, noted it, and said, “Let’s go home.”
    W e took the county road south, then Highway 185 east, past Corbeil’s ranch. As we passed the ranch, we saw two men walking out to a car in the driveway. One of them glanced at us as we went by.
    “That guy . . .” LuEllen said. “The one on the right.”
    “Yeah. He’s limping.” We continued down the highway, and looking back, I saw the car pull out of the driveway, following. A few miles on, we stopped at an intersection before turning south toward Waco. The car followed, again.
    “Still behind us?”
    “Yeah, but they would be. There’s no place else to go.” They didn’t seem to be coming after us with any urgency. “Slow down a little; bring it down to about fifty-seven or fifty-eight,” I told her.
    She lightened up on the gas, and the car, a Buick, slowly crept up on us. When they were off our back bumper, they hung there for a while, then, at a flat spot, kicked out around us and accelerated away. I had the glasses ready, and picked out the tag number on the Buick.
    “Guy didn’t look at me,” LuEllen said.
    “Why should he? We’re just another truck on the open highway. Even paranoia has its limits.”
    “For amateurs,” LuEllen said. “Not for me. We wipe this truck, and take it back first thing tomorrow morning. Before the DMV opens, in case he can check the plate.”
    “Of course,” I said.

 23 
    W e went back to Bobby that night, and I