Damnation Street wab-3

by Andrew Klavan

  "He's bad," said Weiss in a voice infinitely weary. "The doctor said he's lucky to still be alive. But he's very bad." He rubbed his chin as if he was thinking. His cheeks were dark with stubble. "The bullets… I've seen this before. Bullets are strange things. They do strange stuff inside you. Like they go into you and they have a mind of their own. It's-crazy. Anyway, they had to…" His shoulders lifted as he took a deep breath through his nose. "They had to take out his spleen. Then there was some vein-I forgot what she called it. Ill… Illy…"

  "Iliac."

  "Yeah, the iliac vein. This big vein. One of the bullets sliced it. He lost a lot of blood. She-the doctor-she said his heart stopped beating three times on the table."

  "Oh Christ," said Sissy. "Oh Christ."

  Weiss laughed miserably. "Yeah. Yeah."

  She took a breath. "Well-I mean: is he gonna make it?"

  Weiss lifted his hand by way of a shrug. "His chances aren't so good, she said, the doctor said. You know, he's fighting. He's a tough guy but… It's not so good."

  Sissy lifted both her hands to massage her eyes. "Does he have any family? Do we know? Does he have parents or anything?"

  "No, I don't know," said Weiss. "His father's dead, I think. I don't know."

  They were both silent then, hanging over the injured man. As if they had nothing else to say about him but didn't feel right talking about anything else.

  After a while Sissy seemed to remember I was there. She looked over her shoulder at me and smiled briefly.

  "You don't have to stay."

  I was about to protest, but then I realized: she didn't want me there. Neither of them wanted me there. I was just passing through their lives on the way to a life of my own. This was too real to them for me to stand by watching, making a story of it in my head.

  "You can go get yourself a hotel room, put it on the Agency," Sissy said. "You can fly out in the morning. I'll get home all right."

  I nodded. "Okay."

  "Thank you-for negotiating the planes and everything, getting us here. I appreciate it."

  I nodded again. I nodded at Bishop. "Good luck," I said.

  I left.

  For another long time after I was gone, Weiss sat stoop-shouldered over Bishop. Sissy stood over him. He lifted his eyes to her.

  "You look like crap, Sis," he said. He moved his head to- ward the door through which I'd gone. "What happened? He dump you?"

  She gave a sniffling laugh. She rolled her eyes, fighting tears. "It has been a really, really, really bad night," she said. "It ought to win some sort of bad-night award."

  Weiss frowned down at Bishop again, at the empty marble face. "Well," he said. "He was right. To end it. That's the right thing."

  She barely got the words out. "Is it?"

  "Oh yeah. Sure. Sure it is. It was no good. He's just a kid."

  "I know." She laughed, starting to cry again. "It was very nice, though."

  "Yeah. Sure. But he's just a kid, Sissy. That's no good."

  A sob broke out of her. She put a hand over her mouth. "I'm sorry. It's so stupid. With poor Jim…"

  "No, no, no."

  "I just feel like everything's falling apart."

  Weiss nodded without a word and Sissy cried.

  Weiss went on nodding. "Well…," he said then. He stood up slowly. He wasn't wearing a jacket, she noticed, just slacks and a polo shirt. He seemed massive dressed like that. He shuffled toward her, his paunch leading the way. He towered above her.

  Sissy wrapped her arms around him. She pressed her face against his shirt. He held her. She wanted to ask him what was going to happen, but it seemed like a childish question. How should he know? So she just pressed against him, breathing the smell of him, rank and comforting.

  "I just feel like everything's falling apart," she said again.

  He patted her back awkwardly.

  She drew away. She looked at Bishop. "He was coming to help you," she said.

  "Yeah, I figured. In fact, do me a favor, will you. Tell him that when he comes around. Tell him I figured that."

  "He said you'll get killed if you do this alone."

  "It'll be all right."

  She faced him. Showed him her tears, her mottled cheeks. She knew it affected him. He was very soft for her.

  "It's not all right, Scott," she said. "Look at what happened to Jim."

  He looked. He nodded. "It'll be all right," he repeated.

  Sissy put her arms around him again, pressed to him again, held him hard. "He said this man-this man you're after-Jim said he'll kill you."

  "Eh," said Weiss. "He's not gonna kill me so fast."

  She laughed, crying against him.

  She felt his grip on her loosen. She held on tighter, refusing to let him go. Gently, he pushed her away.

  She looked up at his mournful features. "Will I be able to reach you?"

  "No. Not for a while."

  "But what if…?"

  "I'll be back soon."

  "Scott…"

  "I'll see you, Sissy. Take care of things here, okay?"

  "Scott…"

  He lifted one of his huge hands and patted her head clumsily. "All right," he said. "That's it. I'll see you."

  He took a last look at Bishop. Then he moved slowly out of the room.

  Sissy watched him until he was gone. Then she watched the door. Then she sighed deeply.

  Then she walked slowly over to Bishop's bed and sat down beside it in Weiss's chair.

  Part Five

  House of Dreams

  39.

  For the first time, Weiss sensed a watcher on the road behind him. Sunrise was still a couple of hours away, but the traffic outside Phoenix was already getting thicker. Lines of big, rumbling semis crowded the right lane. Scattered white headlights glared in the rearview mirror. Cars streamed past him on either side. Red taillights receded into the night beyond the windshield.

  Weiss drove to the top of a hill and down the far slope into the desert. The sprawling, glittering city disappeared from view behind him. There was nothing now for miles and miles but the other cars and the broken white line slapping up under his front fender. He drove. And after about half an hour, he picked one car out in his side-view: one pair of headlights that had been with him, behind him, too long, at the same distance from him too long.

  What the hell? he wondered. Maybe the killer just didn't care anymore. Now that they'd met in the airport, now that they'd spoken together. Maybe it didn't matter to him anymore whether he was invisible or not. Maybe. Weiss doubted it, though. Invisible was the way he was. Anonymous was the way he was. This was something else. An open threat? Incompetence? Stupidity? Who the hell knew?

  Anyway, he was too tired to work it out. He'd been up all night. His mind was thick with exhaustion. It was full of whispers-the friendly, conversational voice of the Shadowman.

  You think it'll be clean? It will not be clean.

  He was haunted by images of Bishop lying still as stone. He needed to get some sleep.

  He drove another hundred miles. That was all he had in him. He pulled off the highway into a rest stop. There was a parking lot lit by sodium streetlamps, picnic tables on a strip of grass, restrooms and vending machines housed in a concrete bunker with a cheap rock veneer. He parked the Taurus to one side of the bunker. He cracked the window to get some air. The smell of disinfectant wafted to him from the toilets.

  He pushed the driver's seat back. He rested there, waiting, watching the side-view. It took about half a minute for the other car to show.

  In the pink glow of the sodium lights, he could see it was a little Jap rental, a Hyundai, puke green. He watched it pull into a far corner of the lot, into a slanted space at the end of a long row of parked semis. He closed his eyes. That was it. He had to sleep.

  But he couldn't sleep, not at first. Too much crap still going on in his head. The killer's voice, the images of Bishop, Sissy-poor Sissy and her lonely-heart tears. He forced himself to think of somethin
g else. The Graves family. The girls, Mary and Olivia; their father, Charles; their mother, Suzanne. What was he getting wrong about them? He went back to work on it, trying to figure it out as if it were a puzzle. He thought it would help him sleep.

  He couldn't sleep. He sat back in the reclining seat with his eyes closed. He thought about what Olivia Graves had said about her sister Mary: Julie Wyant.

  She had a habit of becoming whoever men wanted her to be. I suppose that makes her the perfect whore, doesn't it?

  There was anger in her voice, Weiss thought, but not just anger. There was guilt too. She was angry at her sister because she felt guilty about what her sister had done, what her sister had done for her sake.

  The scene floated through Weiss's mind like a daydream. The mother, Suzanne Graves, drugged stupid in her house in Akron. The tough tattooed men gathering in her living room while her husband was out trying to drum up work. They brought her booze; they brought her crystal. They traded the drugs for her body.

  But that wouldn't have been enough. It never was, nothing was. After a while the men's eyes would've wandered to the daughters too, the little girls.

  She was always beautiful, Olivia Graves said. Men of a certain mind-set have always fallen in love with her at first sight, even when she was a girl.

  That was not just anger, not just guilt either, thought Weiss-that was jealousy too. Sibling jealousy, crazy and everlasting. Men of a certain mind-set-these dealers, these tattooed thugs-they had supplied Suzanne Graves with drugs in exchange for sex with her, and then for sex with her daughter. But not with both her daughters. Just the older one, the beautiful Mary. Somewhere in Olivia's ten-year-old brain she was jealous about that, jealous that the men wanted her sister more than her.

  She had a habit of becoming whoever men wanted her to be.

  The perfect whore, thought Weiss. Sure she was. Because thirteen-year-old Mary must have realized that the men wouldn't stop with her. Why should they? Suzanne would give them anything to get her supply. They would go on and rape the little sister too eventually. Mary knew she had to take care of little Olivia. That's what Mary did, that's how she was. So she did what she had to do to keep the men off her, to keep her sister safe. She taught herself how to be whatever each man wanted. She turned herself into the perfect whore. She kept the men busy, kept them away from Olivia. And now Olivia Graves lived with that, with the guilt and the anger and the weird, unfinished jealousy. She lived with what her sister had become-had become for her sake-had become so that she could have the life she had.

  Weiss opened his eyes. He stared at the windshield, at the pink glow on the glass from the sodium lights. It all felt like a weight on him just then. A great heavy weight, all of it. Bishop lying in the hospital, and the rage in the Shadow-man's friendly voice, and Sissy's lovelorn weeping, and thirteen-year-old Mary Graves forced to whore herself for a bunch of thugs to keep her ten-year-old sister safe. Weiss sat and stared at the windshield, and he was weighted down by what people were, by the things people did to one another.

  You think you understand everything, but you don't understand anything.

  He closed his eyes again. What didn't he understand? How Julie knew where her father was when he was supposed to have deserted her to become a fugitive. Why Julie went on whoring now that Olivia was grown up and free. Who that fucking idiot was following him in the puke green Hyundai…

  He woke up suddenly. He felt as if no time had passed at all. But there, beyond the rest-stop bunker, were brown hills and a vista of slate-gray clouds above them. The dawn of a dismal day.

  He dragged a hand over the thick stubble on his jaw. He yawned, looking in the side-view mirror. The green Hyundai was still there, for fuck's sake, nestled small amid the giant semis like a tortoise sleeping with dinosaurs.

  Weiss shook his head. Who is this fucking idiot? he wondered.

  He pushed out of the car. Went around to the trunk. Dug his toiletry kit from his traveling bag. Carried it into the bunker men's room. He pissed, shaved, brushed his teeth, washed his face. Then he went outside to take care of this Hyundai clown.

  What was so fucking stupid about the guy was where he'd parked. With all those huge trucks around him, Weiss could get to the Hyundai easily without the driver seeing him. He took his time. Went back to his car. Tossed his toiletry kit back into the trunk. He walked over to the rest-stop cabin and pretended to read the map hanging on its wall.

  From there it was easy to move behind the trucks. Enormous as he was, Weiss didn't even have to duck or stoop down or anything. He just strolled casually behind truck after truck, and in a few seconds, he was right beside the Hyundai, ready to pounce.

  Three steps in the open and he was at the car door. The idiot driver never saw him coming. The door wasn't even locked. Weiss yanked it open. He grabbed the driver by the shirt collar and yanked him out. He looked him in the face.

  "Oh, for fuck's sake," he said.

  Exasperated, he shoved me against the side of the car.

  40.

  "Oof. Ow," I said.

  Getting slammed into the Hyundai knocked the wind out of me. Also, I banged my elbow. It really hurt. Really. I rubbed it, wincing.

  Weiss stared off into the mountains and the distant clouds. A cool wind moved over him, damp with the coming rain. He shook his head.

  "Shit," I said, rubbing my elbow. "Am I, like, the worst private eye ever or what?"

  "What the fuck are you doing? You dumb fuck. You're following me? What the fuck?"

  "Bishop told Sissy you'd be killed if you did this alone," I said.

  Weiss gave a short laugh. "So what? You want to get killed too?"

  I looked down at my sneakers. "I thought-you know, with Bishop out of commission-I thought maybe I could help out."

  All right, it sounded ridiculous even to me. But I couldn't tell him the whole truth. I couldn't tell him about Emma and what she'd said. I couldn't tell him how much I loved her, and how she only wanted a man she could admire, and how I had to find some way to become admirable so she could love me back. I'd been thinking and thinking about it, thinking about what makes a man admirable, what makes him worthwhile. I'd been thinking about how you can feel worthwhile, but if you really look at yourself maybe you're not. That's why I broke it off with Sissy. So I could be more honest, more worthwhile.

  Then the news about Bishop came. Then I saw Bishop for myself, lying there on the bed, his face the color of death. I saw him and I kept thinking about what I had to do.

  After that I left the hospital. I went back to my puke-colored Hyundai. I planned to get a hotel room and fly home, just as Sissy had told me to do.

  But I didn't. I sat behind the wheel of the car instead. I looked out through the windshield. I watched the hospital for a long time. I saw one ambulance and another and an- other come screaming out of the desert city in rapid succession. I watched them pull up tight before the big glass emergency room doors. Attendants carried the sick out of the backs on stretchers. And there were other attendants pushing sufferers in wheelchairs into the lobby too.

  I could see the lobby through the glass. I could see the patients sitting in plastic chairs, waiting for their doctors. Their faces looked haggard. They looked pensive. They looked afraid. These were people, I told myself, who were kind and unkind to others in their lives, who cheated and played fair. They were people who worried about whether they were going to get promoted at their jobs and whether they were going to get home in time to watch their favorite television shows. They were people who argued over who was right and who left out the milk that had gone sour.

  I didn't think they were worried about the milk now or their promotions or their television shows.

  Which I guess brought my mind back to Bishop. Lying as I'd seen him, with that shocking, colorless face. And Weiss, too, sitting over him with his shoulders slumped and his wise, saggy features emaciated and gray. I thought about both of them and the things that had happened in these dramatic months sinc
e I had graduated university and come to work with them at the Agency. They were troubled men. I knew that. Weiss with his whores and his incurable solitude. Bishop with his penchant for violence, his cold heart. They were lost men in many ways. But I admired them. I admired them both.

  I sat in my Hyundai and thought some more about what makes a man admirable.

  Then, when Weiss came out of the hospital, I followed him.

  I couldn't tell him any of that now, here in the rest stop in the Arizona desert. But of course, it was always difficult to figure out how much you had to tell him and how much he already knew.

  In any case, he said, "Get back in the car. Get out of here. This isn't a story. You could get hurt. Go home."

  "I don't want to go home," I said. "I know it's not a story. Let me help you."

  "You can't help me."

  "I'm not afraid," I lied. "Let me do something. Please."

  I thought that was it; it was over. I thought he was going to jam me back inside the car like he was packing an overstuffed suitcase. I thought he'd grab me by the scruff of the neck, shove me behind the wheel, and kick my ass for good measure before he slammed the door and sent me on my way.

  To this day I don't know what was going through his mind. Maybe he understood what it was I needed from him. Or maybe he simply saw that he could use me for his purposes. I don't know. But to my absolute amazement, he nodded once.

  "All right," he said. "You wanna follow me? Follow me. Only stay right behind me this time, so you're not so conspicuous."

  He went stomping angrily back to his car. I jumped-eagerly-into mine.

  41.

  We drove north together out of Arizona. We wound through Nevada, through a glum wilderness, the sky gray the whole time, a long time, and nothing anywhere but dust and scrub and barbed wire. We stopped for gas in places that looked as if they rose out of the barren earth only once every century. We bought sandwiches wrapped in plastic, sandwiches made by people who had long since died. We never said a word to one another. We got out of our cars and gassed up and got back in our cars and drove on and never said a word. I kept the Taurus's rear bumper right in front of me. I hardly looked at anything else. I hardly saw the daylight rise and fall behind the clouds. I felt the night come quickly, but I wasn't sure when.