I'm not superstitious. More than that: I refuse superstition. Ghosts and goblins and astrology and numerology and phrenology and all the New Age bullshit of mother goddesses and wicca; the world would be a happier place if it'd die quietly.

Tarot is different. Tarot iscan bea kind of gaming system that forces you out of a particular mind-set. Let's say you're trying to. oh, say, steal something. Your mind-set says X is a danger and Y is a danger, but the tarot says, "Think about Z." So you start thinking about things outside of the mind-set, and when you finally do the entry, you've considered a whole spread of possibilities that otherwise would have gone unsuspected.

Nothing magic about it; and it will definitely save your ass.

So I did one quick spread, of my own invention, working toward a key card. The card came up.

The Devil. Interesting.

I sat looking at the evil fuck for a few seconds, sighed, stood up, got my bag out of the overhead bin, and stowed the tarot deck. Thought about it for a second, then dug out the little eight-cake Winsor amp; Newton watercolor tin and my sketchbook. I got a glass of water from the stewardess and started doing quick watercolor sketches of Lane, the cabin, and the two business guys across the aisle.

The closest business guy looked like a salesmanbalding, pudgy, triple-chinned, exhausted. He sat head-down and dozing, his red, yellow, and black necktie splashing down his chest and stomach like a waterfall. The guy behind him was just as exhausted, but was too thin, his skull plainly carving the shape of his head. I got three good ones of the two of them, the thin man like death's shadow behind the fat one. I struggled to get the red necktie right, working the planes as it twisted down his shirt.

A stewardess stopped to watch for a few minutes, then disappeared into the front of the plane. A couple of minutes later, the copilot came back, watched for a while, said he did a little watercolor himself, and asked me if I'd ever seen the cockpit of a D9S at night. I hadn't, and he showed me the way.

I did a half-dozen sketches of the crew at work, and left them behind: they all seemed pleased, and so was I. In the twenty years after I got out of college, I don't think I went a day without drawing or painting something, except during a couple of hospital visits; even then, when I could start moving, the first thing I did was ask for a pencil.

In all those years, the work got tighter and tighter and tighter, until I felt like I hardly had the muscle to pick up a pencil or a pen or a brush: I could wear myself out in an hour, just moving a brush around. Then I broke through. The brush got lighter, and the work became fluid. The actual breakthrough came during a rough visit to Washington, D.C. I'd left behind the Washington nightmareshadn't had one for a couple of years, nowbut the fluidity seemed to hang around.

I got back to my seat, restowed the Winsor amp; Newton tin and the sketchbook, and buckled up for the landing. When the wheels came down, Lane started, stirred, woke up and yawned, covering her mouth with a balled fist, pushed up the window shade, and looked out at the lights of Dallas and then, as we turned, of Fort Worth.

"My mouth tastes like something died inside it," she said, her voice a little husky. A good voice to wake up to. She looked me over: "What'd you do? Sit there and stare at the seat back?"

"Not exactly," I said.

Going out the door, the stewardess squeezed my arm and said, "Thanks so much, you're really good." Lane looked like she might drop dead of curiosity as we walked up the ramp, but then she finally asked, "What was that all about?"

I said, "Oh. You know."

"Be a jerk," she said. But she was smiling.

We stayed overnight at a Marriott. Early the next morning, she was pounding on my door, and at nine o'clock, we were headed down to Dallas police headquarters. Lane wanted me to go inside with her, but I don't talk to cops when I can avoid it. She went in alone, a little pissed. Twenty minutes later, she was back, and told me about it as we drove back to the hotel.

The cops had been pretty straightforward about it, she said. "I got into their faces a little bit, but they wouldn't budge. This guy I talked to said Jack was into something tricky. That's the word he used. Tricky."

"And that's what they've got? That's all? That he was doing something tricky?"

"No." She was reluctant to talk; I had to pry it out of her. "They say they traced the gun he supposedly used. It was stolen in San Jose six years ago."

"Uh-oh," I said.

"Yeah. I kept saying Jack would never use a gun, and they kept saying, then how come the gun came from San Jose?" She was looking up at me with her dark eyes, pleading with me to understand that what the cops had said was all bullshit. "They said, 'AmMath framed him using a gun that was stolen six years ago in San Jose? How did they do that?' "

"Good question," I said.

"Jack would not shoot anybody," Lane insisted.

"You can't always tell what somebody will do when he's cornered, and he thinks that his life may be ruined. Or that he might go to prison," I said. "Or maybe he thought the guard was about to shoot him, and it was self-defense."

She didn't want to hear about it, and after we'd snarled at each other for a few minutes, I let it go. "So that's itthey got a gun."

"There were a couple more things," she said, reluctantly. Then, "Watch it!"

I hit the brakes; a blue Toyota pickup chopped us off just as we headed up a freeway on-ramp. He never knew I was there. I shook my head, and said, "Asshole," and then, "Listen, Lane, you gotta tell me everything they said. I don't want to have to drag it out of you. I'm supposed to be on your side."

"It's all bullshit. You should've come in, then you could have heard it for yourself."

"What're the other things?"

The cop had explained that there were three doors into the secure areatwo of them alarmed. The third door came out of a short hallway connected to the system administrator's office, and the main entrance of his office was well down the hall from the secure area. But if you knew which doors were wired with alarms, you could force the door into the system administrator's office, which had the corridor leading directly into the secure area. That one locked from the system administrator's side, so it would not have to be forced. An outsider trying to intrude into the secure area would not know any of that, and would be stuck with trying to find a way around the alarms.

"What else?"

"It turns out that the guard wasn't responding to anything. He was making his regular rounds. Another guy, this security guy, was on his way to his office, and they went up together in the elevator, and the guard noticed that the door to the office suite had some damage around the door knob. So they went in." She stopped, shaking her head.

"So what they're saying is, it wasn't like there was a sudden shooting and then a bunch of explanations. It was just a guard's routine trip through the building."

"It still could have been set up," she said, stubbornly.

"Yeah, but, boy." Didn't sound good.

I concentrated on driving for a couple of minutes, getting us out of a pod of Texans headed up the freeway in what seemed to be a test of Chaos Theory: you sensed an order in their driving, but you couldn't say exactly what it was. I could see the Toyota pickup at the head of the pack, like the lead dolphin.

After the shooting, Lane said, the police went to a house Jack had rented, with a second security man from AmMath, and found a bunch of computer disks"Two of them were in a pair of shoes in the closet, which doesn't sound like Jack at all"and a lot of other unauthorized stuff from AmMath, including manuals and confidential information about the Clipper II. AmMath wanted to take it, but the cops wouldn't give it to them: instead, they called in the FBI.