Lane had taken a sip of coffee, winced, and asked something, but thinking about Clipper II, I missed it. "Huh?"

She repeated the question. "Do people kill for software?"

"Not me. But Windows is software, and it made the creator a hundred billion dollars. In parts of some cities, you could get a killing done for twelve dollars ninety-five. So some software could get some killing done," I said. We both thought about that for a minute. Then, "If it really happened like you say it didhang on, let me finishif Jack shot somebody, it wasn't for the software, necessarily. It was to keep from getting caught and maybe sent to prison. Prison in Texas."

"But you know and I know," she continued, "that Jack didn't shoot anybody. Since somebody shot the guard, there had to be somebody else in the room when Jack was shot, even though the company says nobody else was there but the guard and another security man."

"Maybe one security guy shot the other to make it look like Jack shot first."

I said it in a not-quite-joking way, but she took it seriously: "No, I thought about that. But the guard who was shot was hurt bad. The bullet went right through his lung. He's an old guy and he almost died on the way to the hospital."

"So the whole thing holds together."

"Almost too well," she said. "There aren't any seams at all. They searched Jack's house and found some supposedly secret files on a Jaz disk hidden in a shoe. Very convenient. That really nailed it down. The only thing that doesn't work is the shooting. Jack hated guns. They scared him. He wouldn't even pick one up."

She was getting hot: I slowed her down with a straight factual question. "What was he doing in Dallas?"

"A contract job," she said. "He'd been there three months and had maybe another three to go. AmMath had a couple of old supercomputers, Crays, that they'd bought from the weather service, and they were having trouble keeping them talking. Jack had done some work on them years ago, and they hired him to straighten out the operating software."

I said, "Huh," because I couldn't think of anything wiser.

"Ask me why I came to see you," she said.

"All right. Why'd you come to see me?"

"First, to ask if you were in Dallas? Ever? With Jack?"

"No." I shook my head: "Jack and I haven't worked together for two years."

"You're sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. He rewrote some software for me." So I'd be able to plug into a Toyota design computer anytime I needed to. "Two years ago. November."

"Then what's this mean?" She dug in her purse and handed me a printout of an e-mail letter. "Look at the last couple of lines."

I scanned all of it. Most was just brother-sister talk about their father's estatetheir parents were both dead now, their father dying nine months back.

The last two lines of Jack's letter said, "I'm into something a little weird here. I don't want to worry you, but if anything unusual should happen, get in touch with Kidd, okay? Just say Bobby and 3ratsass3."

If you look in the shaving mirror in the morning and ask what you've become, and the answer is "Artist amp; Professional Criminal," then you may have taken a bad turn down life's dark alley. While other people were wistfully contemplating the grassy fork in "The Road Not Taken," I'd lurched down a gutter full of broken wine bottles, and kicked asses and people telling me to go fuck myself. Nobody to blame, really.

Well, maybe the Army. The Army had left me a roster of dead friends, a vicious dislike for bureaucratic organization, and a few unusual skills. And hell, it was interesting. At least I'm not stuck in a garret somewhere, with a pointy little beard and a special rap for victim women, trying to peddle my paintings to assholes in shiny Italian suits. At least I'm not that.

What I am, is an artist. A painter I make decent money from it. But even though I was working harder than ever, my productionartists actually talk about things like productionhad been falling over the years. I'd always been a little fussy about what I sold, and I'd gotten fussier as I'd gotten older, so even as my prices went up, my income actually declined a little. The year before, I'd sold six paintings. I'd gotten a little more than $300,000, but let me tell you about the taxes.

Or maybe not. I sound a little too Republican when I get started on taxes.

In any case, I still worked at my night job. I stole things. Computer code, schematics for new chips or new computers, designs for new cars. I suppose I could have stolen jewelry or cash, but I wasn't interested in jewelry or cashand besides, that kind of thievery didn't pay as well as my kind.

I knew that for sure, because my best friend is a woman named LuEllen, who was exactly that kind of thief: she stole cash and jewelry and com collections and even stampsor anything else that was portable and could easily and invisibly be turned into cash. LuEllen and I had known each other since I caught her trying to break into another guy's apartment in my building. That was several years ago. Ever since, we'd been friends and sometimes more than friends.

Even with that history, I had no idea what LuEllen's real last name was, or where exactly she lived. She was comfortable with my ignorance

I'm not exactly embarrassed by the night job, though I've often thought I'd give it up if I could make nine paintings a year instead of six. Then again, I might not. If I were French, and philosophical, I might even argue that "professional criminal" wasn't that far from "freedom fighter."

But there was always that skeptical face in the mirror, the face that asked whether freedom fighting should generate large amounts of expendable income I could say-"Hey, even freedom fighters gotta eat." But what do you do when the face in the mirror asks, "Yeah, but should freedom fighters get condos in New Orleans and painting trips to Siena and fishing jaunts to Ontario and season tickets for the Wolves?"

Being neither French nor philosophicalrather, a believer in the Great God WYSIWYG, that What You See Is What You GetI had no ready answer for the question, except.

You gotta shave faster.

I did not immediately believe, or believe in, Lane Ward; believe that I was getting what I was seeing. "Let me get out on the Net for a couple of minutes," I said.

"Check me out?" Ward asked.

"See if I've got mail," I said, politely.

" '3ratsass3' sounds like a password," she said. "So who's Bobby?" She had large, dark eyes. I'd first thought maybe Mexican, with an Irish complexion. Now I was thinking Oriental, one of the robust-yet-delicate Japanese ladies of the Hiroshige woodcuts. Something about the eyebrows. I would like to draw her, from a quarter angle off her face, to get the brow ridge, the cheekbone, and the ear. I didn't say that.

"Bobby runs an information service," I said. An information service for people like me, I might have addedbut I didn't add it. " '3ratsass3' is probably the password on one of Bobby's mailboxes."

"So let's see what's in it." She looked around. "Where's your computer?"

"In the back."

I've been in the apartment for a while. I own it, part of a deal the city of St. Paul had going years ago, to bring people back downtown. I've got a tiny kitchen with a small breakfast nook off to one side; a compact living room with a river view; a workroom with maybe three thousand books, two hundred various bits and pieces of software, and, most of the time, three or four operating computers; a studio with a wall of windows facing northeast; and a bedroom. On the way back to the workroom, Lane paused in the door of the studio, looked up at the wall of windows, the big beat-up easel and all the crap that goes with painting, and asked, "What's this?"