"We're not really doing it for Jack anymore," I said. "We never were, really. We're doing it for us. They just pissed us off by killing Jack."

"Not me, especially. I only met him that once. Nice guy, but."

"Then I'm pissed about Jack, and you're coming along because of me. And I don't have much choice. I'm involved in this somehow, and I've got to find out what's going on. I don't want that crew-cut asshole and his pal showing up at my house someday, tidying up some loose end that I don't even know about."

"So I'm involved only because you're involvedand because you say so."

"That's right," I said.

"That's pretty smug. What if I opted out?"

"You won't. You couldn't stand not knowing what happened," I said.

"You'd tell me."

"No, I wouldn't. I'd never say a single word about it. I'd deny all knowledge."

"Bullshit," she snorted.

"So you're in?"

She let her eyes float to the tops of her eye sockets, and then said, "For a while."

At Lane's, we ate Lean CuisinesI had three of them, an appealing mix of Teriyaki Stir-Fry, Swedish Meatballs, and Mesquite Beefand then LuEllen took Lane and the revolver down to the basement.

"I hate the goddamn things," Lane had said, when LuEllen showed her the gun.

"They're the ubiquitous tools of modern life. Even if you don't like them, it behooves you to know how to use one," LuEllen said.

"Oh, boy."

Fifteen minutes after they went down the basement, a single shot cracked through the house. I jumped up, peeked out the windows all around. Nothing moving. I stuck my head down the basement door, "Jesus, LuEllen."

Bang! A second one, and I nearly jumped out of my shoes.

"All done," LuEllen called. The smell of burnt gunpowder coursed up the stairwell, and a minute later, LuEllen appeared at the bottom of the stairs. "Had to squeeze off a round or two so she'd have a sense of the recoil."

"Well, knock it off, for Christ's sakes, it's louder than hell up here," I said.

"Aw, once or twice, no problem," she said.

They were still down the basement when the phone rang. I picked it up and a soft male voice said, "Could I speak to Mr. Kidd?"

"Speaking."

"This is Lethridge Green. I'm a friend of a friend of a man named John. I was told you have a body to guard?"

"Yes. In Palo Alto, although there might be some travel."

"I get two hundred fifty dollars a day plus any expenses," Green said.

"That's fine."

"How long would the body need to be guarded?"

"I don't know. Not just a couple of days, thoughanything from a couple of weeks to a couple of months."

"Good. Don't ask, don't tell?"

"Exactly," I said.

"I can be there in two hours, if you'd like me to start tonight."

"That'd be a relief," I said. "We're sort of afraid to leave the body alone."

"Then I will come directly."

Then I will come directly.

Not exactly what I'd expected from hired muscle, but then, with John, you never knew exactly what you might get.

A few minutes after talking to Green, I went out and checked my cache with Bobby, to see if he'd gotten anything on the guy at the cemetery. He had. He'd run the plate back to Hertz, dug through their computer, and come up with the credit card and license information on the renter: A Lester Benson, of Dallas, using a corporate American Express card issued to AmMath. The car had not been checked in yet.

Lester Benson: hadn't seen that name before.

There was no hint of a second man in any of the Hertz information, but Bobby was looking through airline reservation files to see if he could spot Benson's seat from Dallas to San Francisco, and then determine who might have been sitting next to him.

I left a note asking him to find everything he could on AmMath and to dump all the information to my mailbox.

Lethridge Green was standing on Lane's porch, knocking on the door, when I pulled up. Green looked like a big Malcolm Xtall, too slender, intent, with round gold-rimmed glasses, short hair, and a solemn, searching intensity.

"Mr. Green?" I pushed through the door. "Come on in."

"You're Mr. Kidd," he said, as he stepped inside. His eyes took in the room, and LuEllen and Lane on the couch, and the.357 on the end table next to LuEllen's hand. "I see a gun. What's the situation here?"

"Somebody killed my brother, and somebody burglarized my house this afternoon." Lane started.

"Did you call the police?"

"Yes. They think it was burglars attracted by my brother's funeral."

"You don't think so?"

"I know it wasn't. We even know who it was; but not exactly why."

Green held up a finger: "Before you tell me anything else, maybe we should take the first security precaution."

"What?" Lane asked. We all looked at him expectantly.

"Pull the drapes," he said.

After we'd pulled the drapes, Lane gave him the storynot all of it, but most of it: her brother being killed in Dallas in suspicious circumstances, the funeral, the burglary at her home. She told him about the fire, but didn't mention that we were there. She told him about our record search through Hertz, and the two names we had so far: William Hart, mentioned by Jack, and Lester Benson, from the Hertz records. "We're afraid they might come backthat they might think that Jack passed information to me, or computer files."

"Did he?"

Lane looked at me, and I nodded. "Yes. He sent me some Jaz disks. A Jaz disk is a high-capacity storage."

"I know what a Jaz disk is," he said. "What's on it?"

"Everything from memos to computer games to a lot of gobbledygook that we haven't had time to figure out. That we might not be able to figure out," I said. "Whatever it is, we think Jack might have been killed to keep it private. The shoot-out might have been a setup."

"The guard took a slug as part of a setup?" he asked skeptically.

"The guard didn't see anything," I said. "As far as he knows, he might have been shot by the Easter Bunny. He opens the door and, boom, he's down. The other guy supposedly fires four times and Jack's killed. The guard didn't see a thing."

"Why didn't you just give them back? The disks?"

"That might not help; because we know about them, and we can't erase that. Then there's this group called Firewall." I explained Firewall, as much as I knew about it.

"You're starting to scare me," Green said. "If this is some kind of government thing, the FBI or the CIA or one of those other alphabet agencies. I mean, I don't want to be protecting a bunch of terrorists or spies or something."

"Do we look like terrorists? I'm a college professor," Lane said.

"A lot of terrorists start out as college professors," he said.

"Well, I'm not one of them," she snapped. "I'm just scared."

"We're not asking you to crawl down a sewer pipe with a bomb in your mouth," I said. "Just keep her healthy."

"That's it? All I do is keep them off her?"

"That's it. And if it gets heavy, call the cops. We already did that once, and these guys ran for it. Which tells you where they are."

"For how long?" he asked.

"For a while. Two or three weeks, anyway. She's gonna have to make a trip to Dallas. In a couple of weeks, these guys should have figured out that if she had anything, they'd know about it, one way or another."

He looked at me for a few seconds, a steady gaze, and finally nodded: "You're lying a little. But if that's the basic idea of what's going on, I'll take the job."

Green got a hard-shell suitcase out of his car and I cleared out of the guest room. "I'll get a room in LuEllen's motel tonight," I said. "It'll have a clean phone line. I'll get with Bobby about AmMath and we'll start looking for Firewall."