The Devil's Code

could be lost in traffic in fifteen seconds.
    A gift shop was open just inside the hospital’s front doors, and I bought a bouquet of bright yellow flowers that looked something like daisies, but with a plastic sheen and a harsh odor. They came in a green glass vase; the whole thing looked cheap, but somehow right. I asked at the information desk for Morris Kendall’s room, got the number, and went up.
    The door to Green’s room was open, and a grim, heavyset woman was sitting in a chair looking into a bed at the far end of the room. There were two beds in the room. I could see only the end of the bed closest to the door, where I presumed Green must be. Nobody told me that his room was only semiprivate. Goddamnit. I went on to 350 and found Morris Kendall in what appeared to be a coma, dying all by himself, a drip running into an arm that was pockmarked with needle sticks. I put the flowers on a sidetable and tried not to look at him.
    After a couple of minutes, I went back out to the hallway and paced for a while. The woman was still sitting there, unspeaking, clutching a purse on her lap. Shelooked like she disapproved of this whole hospital thing. I went and sat with Morris for a couple more minutes, and in those two minutes, decided that when I got old, I’d lay in a lethal supply of sleeping pills, just in case. I didn’t want to end like this . . .
    P eople were coming and going in the hall, and I kept looking for the heavyset woman; fifteen minutes after I got there, I was rewarded: she went by the door, walking with purpose, clutching her purse with both hands. I checked the hallway—a little cluster of a man and two kids, all, from their looks, from the same family, were gathered by a doorway fifty feet down—and stepped around the corner into Green’s room.
    Green was in the first bed, separated from the other by a pull curtain. A television was bolted into the far corner of the room, tuned to the romance channel. Green rolled his head toward me when I walked in. I turned my hands palm-up in a question, and raised my eyebrows; he shrugged, but put a finger to his lips. I stepped over next to his bed and put my head close to his. He whispered, “What are you doing here?”
    “Needed to talk. Are you okay?”
    “I will be. Gonna be in physical therapy for a few weeks.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Not as sorry as I am. I was supposed to cover Lane. She’s dead.” He looked ineffably sad when he said it.
    “I need to know about the two guys. Were they both shooting?”
    “Yeah, big time. Didn’t bother with silencers or any of that shit. I think it might have been a pickup, but when they saw me, it was just boom-boom-boom . You got the computer?”
    “Yes. I need to know what the guys looked like. You hit one of them.”
    “Not bad, I don’t think. Maybe even ricocheted him. The short guy knocked me down first thing through the door, right on my ass into the bathtub . . . Not a goddamned thing I could do but keep pulling the trigger.”
    “Good thing for you that the tub was there.”
    “You got that right. I don’t think—” but he thought anyway, for a second, for probably the ten-thousandth time—“I don’t think I could have saved her.”
    “Not a chance,” I said. “These guys: What’d they look like?”
    “They were two mean white boys; nylons over their heads so you couldn’t see them very well. But in good shape, thin and hard. I think, real short hair; I couldn’t tell for sure, but that was the impression I got. One was maybe six-two or -three, the other was maybe three inches shorter than that, but a little thicker. You’d notice if you saw them together. I shot the short one.”
    “All right. Are you headed back to Oakland?”
    “I guess. I’d be happy to stay, but I don’t know what good I’d do you.”
    “No, no. What we need the most is for you to go back to Oakland and do absolutely what you’d do if everything was just like you said it was. You’re a bodyguard who doesn’t know anything about anything. Goback, do therapy, go for walks, get laid. If the feds are still interested, you gotta bore them.”
    He nodded: “That’s what I’ll do.”
    From the other side of the curtain, a man’s voice croaked, “Hey, Leth, you mind if I switch this over to Cinemax? I think they got one of them car-wash movies on.”
    “Go ahead,” said Green. “I could use a car-wash movie.”
    I stuck a hand out, shook Green’s, and went out the door. Down the