The Devil's Code

man.
    “How’s it going, Larry?” Hart asked.
    “Slow night,” Goodie said.
    “That’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?” Hart asked.
    “S’pose,” Goodie said.
    “When was the last time you had a fast night?”
    Goodie knew he was being hazed and he didn’t like it. The guys from TrendDirect were fine. The peoplewith AmMath, the people from “Upstairs,” were assholes. “Most of ’em are a little slow,” he admitted. “Had some trouble with the card reader that one time, everybody coming and going . . .”
    The elevator bell dinged at the tenth floor and they both got off. Goodie turned left, and Hart turned right, toward his office. Then Hart touched Goodie’s sleeve and said, “Larry, was that lock like that?”
    Goodie followed Hart’s gaze: something wrong with the lock on Gerald R. Kind’s office. He stepped closer, and looked. Somebody had used a pry-bar on the door. “No, I don’t believe it was. I was up here an hour ago,” Goodie said. He turned and looked down the hall. The lights in the security area were out. The security area was normally lit twenty-four hours a day.
    “We better check,” Hart said, dropping his voice.
    Hart eased open the office door, and Goodie saw that another door, on the other side, stood open. “Quiet,” Hart whispered. He led the way through the door, and out the other side, into a corridor that led to the secure area. The door at the end of the hall was open, and the secure area beyond it was dark.
    “Look at that screen,” Hart whispered, as they slipped down the hall. A computer screen had a peculiar glow to it, as if it had just been shut down. “I think there’s somebody in there.”
    “I’ll get the lights,” Goodie whispered back. His heart was thumping; nothing like this had ever happened.
    “Better arm yourself,” Hart said. Hart slipped an automatic pistol out of a belt holster, and Goodie gulpedand fumbled out his own revolver. He’d never actually drawn it before.
    “Ready?” Hart asked.
    “Maybe we ought to call the cops,” Goodie whispered.
    “Just get the lights,” Hart whispered. He barely breathed the words at the other man. “Just reach through, the switch is right inside.”
    Goodie got to the door frame, reached inside with one hand, and somebody screamed at him: “NO!”
    Goodie jerked around and saw a ghostly oval, a face, and then WHAM! The flash blinded him and he felt as though he’d been hit in the ribs with a ball bat. He went down 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