The Devil's Code Read Free Page A

together a decent meal. Clients would take her flapjacks down to the lake and skip them off the water like rocks. When they sank, the fish wouldn’t touch them.
    Moony offered to throw together a quick lunch, but we hastily declined, jumped in the rented station wagon and drove down to Kenora. Six hours later, we were walking up the stairs at the local-carrier ramp at Minneapolis–St. Paul International.
    I been on worse trips, I guess,” Bleak said.
    His way of saying he’d had a good time. Bleak was a furniture maker, who got a thousand dollars for a chair and fifteen thousand for one of his hand-carved, ten-place craftsman-style walnut dining sets. He gave most of the money away, through the Lutheran Social Services. Bleak believed that craftsmen who got rich got soft, a sentiment I didn’t share. Not that he was a religious fanatic: he was on his fifth wife, and all five of them had been excellent women. And as we walked up the stairs into the terminal, he spotted a dark-haired woman standing at the top and said, quietly, “Look at the ass on this one, Kidd.”
    “Jesus, Bleak, you can’t talk like that in Minnesota,” I muttered; and looked.
    “Intended purely as a compliment,” Thomas said, under his breath.
    The woman turned, and was looking us over as we climbed the steps, taking in the duffels and gear bags and rod tubes. She checked Bleak for a minute, the way a lot of women check Bleak—he had long black hair and was bronzed like an Indian guide—then her eyes drifted back to me. As we crossed the top of the steps, she asked, “Are you Kidd?”
    “I am,” I said.
    “I’m Lane Ward.” She looked like her father might have been Mexican. She had the black hair and matching eyes, and the round face; but she was pale, like an Irishwoman. She stuck out her hand, and I shook it, and picked up the faintest scent: something light, flowery, French. “I’m Jack Morrison’s sister.”
    “Jack,” I said. “How is he?”
    “He’s dead,” she said. “He was shot to death a week ago today.”
    That stopped me. I looked at Bleak and he said, “Yow.”
    T he parking garage at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport is under permanent reconstruction, a running joke perpetrated by the Metropolitan Airports Commission. Since parking is impossible, we’d all taken taxis in. Bleak would take a cab down south of the cities to his workshop, and Lane and I got a cab to my place in St. Paul.
    “How’d you know I was Kidd—that Bleak wasn’t me?” I asked, as we waited for a cab to come up.
    “You looked more like a criminal,” she said.
    “Thanks. But I’m an artist.”
    “Oh, bullshit. I know about Anshiser,” she said. “I know what you and Jack did.”
    That she knew about Anshiser was disturbing. Anshiser had been a rough operation which, in the end, had taken down a major aircraft corporation. If I’d known Jack would tell her about it, I wouldn’t have worked with Jack. But then, that might not be realistic. All kinds of people knew a little bit about what I did. They just didn’t know each other so they could compare notes. “You think I look like a criminal?”
    “You look tougher than your friend, with your . . . nose.”
    Hell, I’ve always thought I was a good-looking guy.Forty-something, six feet and a bit, hardly any white in my hair, and I still have all of it. The nose, I admit, had been broken a couple of times and never gotten quite straight. I thought it lent my face a certain charm. “It’s part of my charm,” I said, wounded, as the cab came up. I held the back door for her.
    “Jack said you can be charming . . . if you wanted to be. He said you didn’t want to be, that often.” She got in the cab, and I slid in beside her.
    “What happened to Jack?” I asked.
    “Let’s wait until we get over to your place,” she said, her eyes going to the back of the driver’s head.
    T hough winter was on the way, for the moment it was still in Ontario. St. Paul’s