Shotgun Alley

by Andrew Klavan

  Twelve

  “You got some pair of eyes on you, Cowboy,” Cobra said all of a sudden. That’s what he called Bishop—Cowboy, because of the way he’d come into the bar that first night. He spoke nice and easy, and he was smiling around the mouth of his beer bottle—but he was gazing at Bishop with a flat, unsmiling gaze, a dangerous gaze. “You get a good look at her, did you?”

  Bishop dropped the stub of his cigarette. He rose slowly from where he’d been kneeling and crushed the filter under his boot. He wiped his hands on his rag. “A man’s got eyes, Cobra. The world just sort of comes in through ’em.” He smiled back, gazed back.

  There was a long silence. It hung in the room between them like the smell of the chemicals and the feel of the heat. Shorty had his bald head down now. He seemed to be studying the parts of the intake kit on the floor in front of him, waiting to see which way this would break.

  Cobra swigged his beer. “I guess that’s true enough,” he said.

  Bishop started toward him, slow, still smiling, unafraid. Cobra sat on his milk crate, tensed for action, watching him come.

  Bishop reached him, reached out to the worktable behind him. He hoisted the two bottles of Rock. He carried the two brews over to Shorty, handed him one.

  Cobra relaxed, wagged his screwdriver at the other man’s back. “The trick is, you gotta know what you’re seeing. Just like I told Honey. A man’s gotta know how to take it apart.”

  “Whatever.” Bishop ambled back to his bike.

  “Hey, look at this face,” said Cobra. “Would I lie to you?” He had a way of talking, Bishop noticed, as if everything he said were a big joke—as if it were a joke and not a joke at the same time. Bishop guessed he was the sort of guy who would kid and grin like that until the second he killed you.

  “A man’s gotta know how to take things apart,” he said again. “A girl, like Honey—a woman—you know, a woman can look at one thing, then another. This thing, that thing. A little baby makes her laugh, a dying hound dog makes her cry. ‘Oh, poor doggie, boo-hoo, boo-hoo.’ You know. Someone has a wedding, she thinks that’s all good. Someone takes someone down, she thinks that must be bad. Women can be like that. That’s how they are. But a man’s gotta see the whole picture. He’s gotta see the whole picture and then break it into its pieces.”

  “You’re a very philosophical individual,” Bishop drawled. He tipped his beer up and drank deep. It was good—good and cold in the suffocating heat. He gasped out of it. “Your insights rock my world.”

  Shorty drank, too. Sat cross-legged, the bolts and bracket forgotten on the floor in front of him. His glance went to and fro, Bishop to Cobra.

  “Go on, go on,” said Cobra, in that way he had, as if it were a joke but not a joke. “Go on and chortle derisively. Scoff and mock, even gibe, if you so will. But this is no shit, my brother. And I tell you true: You want to ride with me, you gotta know why I ride.”

  Bishop dragged his palm over one half of his face, then the other, flicking the sweat away. “You mean it’s not all vroom-vroom, bang-bang?”

  “Vroom-vroom, bang-bang. Jesus.” Cobra looked at Shorty, a comical, questioning look, a look that said, What do I do with this fellow? Do I chuckle good-naturedly at his jeering taunts? Or do I slit his belly open and watch his guts slither out onto the floor?

  In the end, apparently he decided to chuckle good-naturedly. “No-o,” he said, as if explaining to a child. “It’s not all vroom-vroom, bang-bang. It’s gotta mean something, bro. It’s gotta make a—a…”

  “A statement?” Shorty offered.

  “A point, a statement, right,” Cobra said. “Because, see, in this funny old world of ours, every day in every way, you got people shoveling shit on you. Do this, be like this, you gotta be like that, do that. And most fools—most fools, man, they never get out from under it. And, see, that—that’s the difference between a cage driver mentality and a biker, the way a biker thinks. The cage driver, he’s always wrapped around in his little box, you might say. He’s tootling down the highway, yo de yo de yo, but he can’t see where he’s going, he can’t feel it. It’s just happening to him. But a biker, man, a biker, he’s jamming in the wind. He’s one with the beast that carries him. He’s in control, always asking himself, Do I gotta do this? Why do I gotta? Who says so? Why don’t I just go where I want to go and be who I am?”

  Bishop nodded solemnly. “That is some very symbolical shit, Cobra.”

  “Symbolical shit, exactly!” Cobra raised his beer high again, presiding from his crate again. “The cage driver, he’s just thinking what he’s told to think. I gotta do the honesty thing. Gotta be honest. Gotta do the peace thing, be peaceable. Gotta do the boy-and-girl thing, that whole dance. Bring the lady a pretty flower, say please to her, tell her pretty please. The biker, he’s saying, Fuck that shit. Why do I gotta do that shit? Why?”

  “Amen,” said Shorty, saluting with his bottle.

  Cobra reached back behind him. Set his beer down on the table. Angled a sharp eyebrow up at Bishop as he went on. “The biker says, hey, the government rips me off, right? The corporations, they rip me off. Everybody from the suit in his office to the little ratfuck who runs the corner store, they’re ripping me off. How come I’m the one gotta be honest? A cop pushes me around, gives me shit, cracks my head. How come I’m the one gotta be peaceable? See what I’m saying? Some bitch wags her ass at me, got her ta-tas hanging in my face till I can’t think. How come I gotta play nice, bring her flowers, say pretty please? You gotta dissect that shit, that’s what I’m saying. You gotta take all that shit apart until it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just words, that’s all. Somebody else’s words. Once you know that, then you’re free, see. Then you’re jamming in the wind.”

  Cobra tossed his screwdriver into his toolbox. Leaned forward on his crate to lift the float bowl off his carb.

  Bishop drank. He didn’t answer. He’d grown tired of thinking up snide remarks. Cobra had that effect on people. He went on and on until they ran out of things to say, until they just sat silent, just listened to him. Bishop drank and watched him work, watched his hands, rough hands, gnarled fingers lifting the bowl. He found his mind drifting back to Honey, thinking about how Honey moved when Cobra’s rough hands went over her. Bishop wondered if she liked it when Cobra ranted like this.

  Cobra set the bowl down on a cinder block to the side of him. “Every single thing, you gotta take it to pieces,” he said quietly, sure of his audience now. He lowered one of those hands into his workbox. Selected a flathead. Brought it out. Cocked the point of it at Bishop. “You wanna ride with me, Cowboy, you gotta know that. You gotta know what it means to jam. You gotta take it apart. You gotta take it to the limit.”

  “I gotta take a leak,” Bishop said. He was sick of this.

  Cobra snorted, shook his head. Looked his comical look at Shorty again. Shorty laughed and shrugged. Cobra flipped the flathead in the air and caught it. Set to undoing the main jet.

  Bishop strolled across the garage to the house door. Went through.

  He stepped into a laundry room. It was close and crowded here, not much space between the washer/dryer against one wall and the plastic baskets stuffed with clothes against another. But Bishop was relieved to get out of the fumes in the garage. He was relieved to get away from all that talk, too. The fumes and the talk—they were beginning to make his head feel thick, to make his thoughts sluggish.

  He edged out into a hallway. He could hear a television. He figured Honey must be watching. He followed the sound.

  At the end of the hall, he came to the threshold of the living room. A big messy room with old faded furniture. Faded Harley posters on the wall. Clothes and old food cartons and copies of Easy Rider magazine tossed onto chairs, into corners. And there she was.

  Honey was lying on a tatty brown sofa. She was lying on her side, staring at the TV. The voices coming from the TV were serious and stilted. Bishop couldn’t see the screen, but it sounded like a soap opera
. Honey stared at it with an empty expression as if it just happened to be there where she was looking. She had her hand under her cheek like a sleeping child. Her face wasn’t sweet and pouty the way it had been in the garage with Cobra. It was gray and dead in the TV light. She had the leather jacket pulled close around her.

  Bishop leaned on the jamb of the entryway. He sipped his beer and took a good long look at her. His gaze traced her hair and her small white hands against the black leather. It lingered on a corner of the pink underwear showing between her legs, and then went on down over her bare hips, her thighs.

  After a while, she sniffed. She barely glanced at him.

  “What?” she mumbled.

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  She watched TV. “That’s just not smart, you know.”

  “No?”

  “Uh uh.”

  He looked her up and down again. “Funny. It feels right to me somehow.”

  Honey sighed. She shifted, rolled over, almost onto her back. The jacket fell halfway open, showing him her panties and the curve of her breast. She regarded him sleepily. The images from the TV soap opera moved in her eyes.

  “You better run along now, son, before you hurt yourself,” she said. “There’s a good boy.”

  Bishop laughed.

  Honey rolled over onto her side again, facing the show. She seemed to forget he was there.

  Bishop looked her over another long, lazy moment. He thought about the cheerleader and the prom queen in the photographs, the all-American girl. There was something about seeing her like this, no question. She made him pulse inside. It took an effort, finally, to push off the jamb, to move away from her, back down the hall. He carried it like a weight inside him, how much he wanted her.

  He came through the laundry room, back into the garage. Still thinking about her. Still feeling that pulse.

  And Cobra said, “So? What about it, brother?” He was done with the jet, screwing the bowl back on.

  Bishop walked slowly to his bike without answering. He didn’t want to hear any more out of Cobra now. He was sick of Cobra talking. He set his beer on the cinder block. Picked up his rag. Idly stroked the chrome on his long cannon-style pipes. “What about what?” he muttered.

  “Well…you heard the talk,” said Cobra. “You ready to walk the walk? You ready to take things apart like I was saying?”

  Bishop frowned down at his chrome. Touched a streak on it. “Whatever,” he said. “Sure. What’ve you got?”

  “Hey, I’m serious, man. You gotta be ready to jam with me here.”

  Bishop took his Marlboro box out of his jeans pocket. Shot a fresh cigarette between his lips. He thought about Honey and Cobra, the way Honey was with him. He was just about ready for Cobra to shut the fuck up. “I’ll jam. What’ve you got?” he said again.

  Cobra paused, screwdriver in hand. He gave Shorty a meaningful glance. He went into his T-shirt pocket, took out a cigarette of his own. “I got all kinds of things, Cowboy. If you’re up for it. I got big doings, my brother. Big money, big plans. No more of this grabbing-a-handful-here-and-there shit. We’re taking it by the armload this time. The armload plus a duffel and maybe a couple of saddlebags to boot”

  “All right,” said Bishop evenly.

  “Yeah, I know it’s all right,” said Cobra. “It’s plenty all right. It’s all right and change.” He paused to light up. Spoke again with the cigarette still in his mouth, with the smoke rolling up around the V-shaped ridges of his V-shaped face. “But I gotta know that you’re all right. Understand? That you’re ready to do like we talked about. To take things apart. To do what’s gotta be done no matter what someone tells you the rules are.”

  “Come on, Cobra. Lay it out, man. What’ve you got?”

  “Mad Dog,” said Cobra. “You know what I’m saying? Dude’s a problem for me, problem for you.”

  “I got no problem with Mad Dog,” Bishop told him.

  Shorty laughed dully where he sat—huh, huh, huh—his big shoulders shaking. His bald dome glinted in the light from the ceiling bulb as he lifted his head, poured beer into his white grin. He came out of the drink sloppily. Wiped his mouth on his shoulder. “Mad Dog’s sure as hell got a problem with you,” he said. “You took his fucking chair.”

  Bishop snorted. “Oh yeah. His chair.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Cobra. “Dude says he’s gonna kill you, man. He’ll do it, too. I know him. He’s all fucked up anyway. Meth and bennies and coke, all kinds of shit. He don’t know what he’s doing. He don’t know where he is half the time. That’s the part that’s my problem. Last job we went out on, the brother fucked up everything.”

  “Strangled some hardbelly ’cause she looked at him cross-eyed,” Shorty said, chuckling. He didn’t catch the warning glare from Cobra and he went on. “Man, we had to clean up after him big time, if you know what…” Then he did catch the glare and his voice trailed away.

  Bishop stayed cool. He was good at that. He kept his expression easy and smooth. But he knew right off: This was the massacre at the Bayshore Market they were talking about. The market’s owner and three teenagers shot dead. Robbers made off with an undisclosed amount of cash. No new leads, no one saw a thing. It was big news a couple weeks back.

  So that was Cobra and the Outriders. And Bishop wondered: Was it Honey, too? Had she been there with them when it all went down? How deep into this was she?

  “So I figure you kill him,” Cobra said.

  It broke into Bishop’s thoughts. He met the outlaw’s eyes.

  “Solves your problem, solves mine,” Cobra said. He smiled, the crags of his face arching upward. Like it was all a big joke and not a joke at the same time. “You can consider it sort of an initiation. You know, a trust and brotherhood thing. Before I take you under my wing and make you rich as God and all. You gotta show me you can jam, man. You gotta show me you can take it apart.”

  Bishop and Cobra regarded each other across the garage. The smoke from their cigarettes met between them. It hung in the air like clouds, and Cobra’s words hung in the air. Cobra smiled, and Bishop thought about Honey. He thought about the way she moved in his hands, the way she listened to his words. If she was into this, if she had been at the Bayshore, he could use that. He could use that to steal her away.

  “You gotta kill him if you wanna be one of us,” Cobra told him.

  Bishop shrugged. “Whatever’s good,” he said.

  Part Two

  Mad Dog and English Majors

  Thirteen

  Weiss sat brooding in his high-backed chair. He swiveled slightly back and forth, his elbow on the armrest, his cheek pressed into his fist. The pressure of his knuckles scrunched his dreary face, mashed the bags beneath one eye up toward one bushy brow. The other eye, wide, seemed all the more baleful. With that one baleful eye, he gazed upon Sissy Truitt.

  She sat across from him in one of the client’s chairs. I was there, too, seated next to her in the other. Sissy had a folder on her pleated skirt. The cover was open; the obscene e-mails to Professor Brinks lay visible, complete with Sissy’s markings in red ink. She and I had come to tell Weiss what clues we had gleaned from our readings of the letters.

  “Well, I don’t blame her one bit for coming here,” Sissy said in her gentle whisper of a voice. “I mean, these letters are just disgusting, aren’t they? They’re assaultive, demeaning. Just sick. I mean, the images! I don’t know how she stood it as long as she did.”

  Weiss answered nothing. His heavy heart grew heavier with every word. Sick. Disgusting. Assaultive. He listened to her with half a mind while the other half obsessively replayed his weekend: the whores he’d called for, the things he’d done with them. What the hell had come over him? he wondered. What the hell had he been thinking? But he already knew. It was those letters, that’s what it was. The images in those damn letters. They had put ideas in his head. Sick. Disgusting. Assaultive.

  Eesh, he thought.

  “The one thing I think we ca
n say for certain is that whoever thought this stuff up is a truly foul individual,” sweet Sissy went on. “The things he describes are just so…dehumanizing. Sadistic. They’re all about dominating her, forcing her into all these sexual acts. Reducing her to…just a piece of meat. It’s obvious, he’s just some angry, threatened little man who wants to turn the professor into a helpless object—you know, some sort of doll he can use for his pleasure. Obviously the first thing we ought to do is go through the sex offender registry. This guy is definitely a pervert.”

  She had the most delicate features, Sissy did, the most golden hair, the warmest blue eyes you can imagine. She had a musical laugh, that little wisp of a voice. And though she was well into her thirties, she wore these schoolgirl clothes—cardigans and pleated skirts—that gave her a beguilingly innocent, maidenly air. She was so gentle usually, so kind, sympathetic. She had this way of listening to you, when you were talking, with a sort of maternal tilt of her head as if you were the most fascinating person in the whole world. She was one of Weiss’s top operatives because everyone trusted her, everyone told her everything. And Weiss himself—well, of course, he just adored her, idolized her. To have her say these things—and to think about the whores, what he’d done with the whores…

  Usually—normally—his trysts with Casey’s girls were very decorous, gracious even. He was one of their favorite clients, always generous with his money, always modest in his requests. It was just their company he wanted, after all. Just the touch of a woman. The smell, shape, hair, voice. He’d never had more than one at a time before. And he’d never, ever done anything like he had this weekend. All because of those letters. Those fucking letters. What, what, what had he been thinking?

  “Also, I think we really ought to have a serious talk with Professor Brinks,” Sissy whispered on. “Try to change her mind about going to the police. I mean, she really should, Scott. The man who wrote these e-mails could definitely be dangerous.”