The Devil's Code Read Free

backwards, and saw the flashes from Hart’s weapon straight over his head, WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM . . .
    Goodie didn’t count the shots, but his whole world seemed to consist of noise; then the back of his head hit the carpet and his mouth opened and he groaned, and his body was on fire. He lay there, not stirring, until Hart’s face appeared in his line of vision: “Hold on, Larry, goddamnit, hold on, I’m calling an ambulance . . . Hold on . . .”

 2 
    T he Canadian winter arrived on Friday morning.
    Bleak Thomas and I had been fishing late-season northern pike along the English River, sunny days and cold, crisp nights, the bugs knocked down by the frost, pushing our luck down a lingering Ontario autumn.
    The bad weather came in overnight. We’d gotten up to a hazy sunshine, but by nine o’clock, a dark wedge of cloud was piling in from the northwest. We could smell the cold. It wasn’t a scent, exactly, but had something to do with the sense of smell: you turn your face to it, and your nose twitches, and you think winter.
    The bad weather was no surprise. We’d seen it on satellite pictures, forming up as a low-pressure system in the Arctic, before we left the float-plane base five days earlier—but waiting for the plane on the lastmorning, looking at our watches as we listened for the noisy single-engine Cessna 185, with nickel-sized snowflakes drifting in from the northwest . . . maybe we began to wonder what would happen if the plane had gone down. And if there’d been a mix-up, and the people at the base thought we’d gone down with it.
    Winter was long in northwest Ontario, and Bleak Thomas probably wouldn’t taste that good. Bleak might have been thinking along the same lines, with a change of menu. When the Cessna turned the corner at the end of the lake, like a silver wink, and the roar of the aircraft engine rolled across the water, Bleak said, “Only an hour late.”
    “Really? I thought he was a little early.” I yawned and stretched.
    “Sure,” Bleak said. “That’s why you chewed your fingernails down to your armpits.”
    The pilot was in a hurry. He taxied up to the rickety dock, pushed along by a gust of snow. Bleak and I threw our gear onboard, and we were gone, bouncing across the whitecaps and into the air. The pilot didn’t bother to check that the boats had been rolled or that the fire was dead in the potbellied stove; he took our word for it. Ten minutes after takeoff, we broke out of the snow and he said, “Good. I always land better when I can find the lake.” Then, to me, “You got some woman calling about every ten minutes.”
    “Yeah? Did she say what her name was?” I was thinking LuEllen because she was the only woman I knew who might want to get in touch in a hurry. But the pilot said, “Lane Ward.”
    I shook my head. “Don’t know her.”
    “Well, she knows you and she’s hot to talk,” the pilot said. We were half-shouting over the noisy clatter of the engine. “She didn’t say what about. She says she’s traveling and doesn’t have a call-back number.”
    He didn’t have much to say after that. We all concentrated on the lakes and canyons flicking by eight hundred feet below. In three weeks, the pilot would need skis to land. A few miles out of the base, as the pilot slipped the plane sideways to line up with the long axis of the lake, Bleak leaned forward from the backseat and said, “We were getting a little worried about you, back there.”
    “Had a little trouble with the plane, getting off this morning,” the pilot said. “I was warming her up and the prop come off.” We both looked out at the prop and then over at the pilot. He just barely grinned and said, “That joke was old when Pontius was a pilot.”
    The pilot’s wife’s name was Moony. She was a leftover hippie with a toothy grin, paisley shifts, and a little weed growing in the window box. After thirty years of cooking for fly-in fishermen, she still couldn’t put