Read The Devil's Code for Free Online

I.”
    “Executing a guy because he’s working on ClipperII . . . that doesn’t sound like socially retarded geeks,” I said.
    “Oh, no?” she asked. “Then who else could it be? Murdering somebody over a chip—not even a real chip? And who else would care, besides geeks?”
    “The Mafia?”
    “Oh, bullshit.” She rolled her eyes.
    “It’s too . . . physical.”
    She put her hands on her hips: “Look at yourself, for Christ’s sakes, Kidd. You’re some kind of aging jock-nerd-engineer-fisherman-artist with a broken nose. What if it’s somebody just like you, with a taste for blood?”
    No answer to that. The question was urgent, if the feds and spy people and God knew who else were tearing up the countryside, because Bobby was on the list. And so was I. I was “k.”
    L ane kept going back to Jack’s letter.
    “Where’s the safest possible place?” she asked.
    “Somewhere I could get at them, I guess.” I had an idea, but wasn’t about to show it. Not until I knew her better. “Maybe he shipped them somewhere. I’ve got a bunch of mailboxes, scattered around. I’ve even got one at AOL.”
    “Check them.”
    I went back online, checked them, and came up empty. Lane was reading Jack’s letter again. She snapped it with a fingertip and said, “One thing that bothers me about the letter is the line about not taking any wooden pussy.”
    “Wooden what?” I’d barely noticed the line.
    “Pussy. The thing that bothers me is, I don’t think Jack talked like that. Are we sure this is from Jack?”
    I had to laugh, because it sounded exactly like Jack; and exactly the kind of thing that Jack would never say around, say, a sister, or any other woman. “Yeah, he did talk that way, sometimes,” I said. Then: “Is it possible that you really didn’t know Jack as well as you thought you did? That he might have a life that you didn’t know about. Maybe involving guns?”
    “No,” she said positively. “I mean, I’m sure he did things I don’t know about, that he’d hide from me. He got along very well with a certain kind of ditzy chick. Maybe he’d say pussy— he just didn’t say it to me. But with the guns, we’re talking basic, rock-bottom personality. He didn’t shoot anybody.”
    “Okay.” Then I noticed something a little odd. “You say he was killed on Friday?”
    “Yes. Friday night.” She caught the puzzled look as I read the letter again. “Why?”
    “Because the letter was time-stamped on Sunday—the Sunday before he was killed. He said he was going in then . . .”
    “What have I been telling you? There’s something seriously wrong with the whole thing.”
    W e talked about the possibilities; and in the back of my head, there was that “k” floating around out there. The feds were looking for k . . .
    S o are you going back to Dallas with me?” she asked, eventually.
    “You’re going back?”
    “I’ve got to. I’ve got to sign papers and everything, when they’re done with him.” Another tear popped out and I turned away: I don’t deal well with weeping women. I tend to babble. “So are you going? I made a reservation for you. I could really use somebody to lean on . . .”
    “Yeah, yeah, okay,” I said. “But don’t cry, huh? Please?”
    She’d made a reservation for that same night, on the last plane out. I took a moment to go downstairs to tell Alice to watch after the cat, and then I went back out on the Net and read everything I could find on Firewall: there was a ton of stuff, but mostly bullshit. Then I went to my box at Bobby’s, and found a picture and a note. The picture was of Lane Ward, looking nice in a professorial business suit, a wall of books in the background. The note said, Her only brother was JM.
    Finally, I called the Wee Blue Inn in Duluth, on a voice line, and got Weenie, the owner-bartender. He’s a toothpick-chewing fat man with a steel-gray butch; an apron that he laundered every month, whether it needed it or