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not; and who always smells like greasy hamburgers and barbequed onion rings. I said, “This is the guy from St. Paul. I need to talk to LuEllen.”
    “She’s off right now,” he said. “I can take a message.”
    LuEllen was always off. Weenie theoretically paid her $28,000 a year as a waitress, and she paid taxes on the $28,000 plus $6,000 in tips. In reality, Weenie stuck the tax-free $28,000 in his pocket and sent LuEllen the W-2 form. Weenie was her answering service. The W-2 form explained to the government how she paid for her house, wherever that was.
    “Tell her that Stanford was killed,” I said. “The funeral’s set for Santa Cruz next Wednesday. I’m going to Dallas, but I’ll be in Santa Cruz for the funeral.”
    “I’ll tell her,” Weenie said. “That’s Stanford, like in the university.”
    On the way out the door, on the way to the airport, I stopped, Lane already in the hall, went back to the workroom and got a small wooden box made in Poland. I stuck it in my jacket pocket. Just in case.
    A t the airport, I picked up the major papers, and as soon as we were off the ground, began looking for Firewall stories. They all carried at least one, but nothing on the front page. Firewall appeared to be suffering media death.
    While I read, Lane kicked back and slept. She was not a large woman and could snuggle into the seat like a squirrel on a pillow. I stared at the seat in front of me for a while, and when she was asleep, took the wooden box out of my pocket. Inside, I kept a Ryder-Waite tarot deck wrapped in a silk cloth.
    I’m not superstitious. More than that: I refuse superstition. Ghosts and goblins and astrology andnumerology and phrenology and all the New Age bullshit of mother goddesses and wicca; the world would be a happier place if it’d die quietly.
    Tarot is different. Tarot is—can be—a kind of gaming system that forces you out of a particular mind-set. Let’s say you’re trying to . . . oh, say, steal something. Your mind-set says X is a danger and Y is a danger, but the tarot says, “Think about Z.” So you start thinking about things outside of the mind-set, and when you finally do the entry, you’ve considered a whole spread of possibilities that otherwise would have gone unsuspected.
    Nothing magic about it; and it will definitely save your ass.
    So I did one quick spread, of my own invention, working toward a key card. The card came up.
    The Devil. Interesting . . .
    I sat looking at the evil fuck for a few seconds, sighed, stood up, got my bag out of the overhead bin, and stowed the tarot deck. Thought about it for a second, then dug out the little eight-cake Winsor & Newton watercolor tin and my sketchbook. I got a glass of water from the stewardess and started doing quick watercolor sketches of Lane, the cabin, and the two business guys across the aisle.
    The closest business guy looked like a salesman—balding, pudgy, triple-chinned, exhausted. He sat head-down and dozing, his red, yellow, and black necktie splashing down his chest and stomach like a waterfall. The guy behind him was just as exhausted, but was too thin, his skull plainly carving the shape of his head. I got three good ones of the two of them, the thin manlike death’s shadow behind the fat one. I struggled to get the red necktie right, working the planes as it twisted down his shirt.
    A stewardess stopped to watch for a few minutes, then disappeared into the front of the plane. A couple of minutes later, the copilot came back, watched for a while, said he did a little watercolor himself, and asked me if I’d ever seen the cockpit of a D9S at night. I hadn’t, and he showed me the way.
    I did a half-dozen sketches of the crew at work, and left them behind: they all seemed pleased, and so was I. In the twenty years after I got out of college, I don’t think I went a day without drawing or painting something, except during a couple of hospital visits; even then, when I could start moving, the