Her cheeks went red, but she stuck her chin up at him. “I liked the way he did me, too.”
Bishop smoked. He met her gaze. Every second he looked at her made him ache. But in the end, he shook his head. “No.”
“You have to,” she told him.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s murder,” said Bishop.
“So what? You killed Mad Dog.”
“That was self-defense.”
“Well, this can be self-defense, too.”
Bishop hesitated. Brought his cigarette to his lips nice and slow, pulled off it nice and slow, let out a nice, slow breath of smoke. “No,” he said.
She watched him. She watched him a long time. Then she smiled. “That’s funny.”
“What is?”
“You are. That you won’t do it.”
“What’s so funny about that?”
“Because you want to.”
He leaned forward. He crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray. He could feel strands of her hair against his temple as he did. He could feel the soft cloth of her sleeve brush his forearm.
“Look at you,” she whispered. “You want to so bad.”
“To kill him?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“To prove you’re better.”
“Better at what?”
“You know. Better at being what the two of you are.” She laughed. It went through him. “So why won’t you? He would.”
Bishop didn’t answer. He didn’t have an answer. He was just looking at her. He just wanted to have her or hurt her or something.
“I could go to him tomorrow,” she said. “I could go to him right now. Kiss him on the cheek and whisper, ‘Kill him.’ You’d be dead. So what’s to stop you?”
Bishop’s expression of irony and arrogance was still in place, but it was getting stale. It was simply plastered on now, as if he’d forgotten to take it off. A habit more than anything. He opened his mouth to answer her—he had to answer her—but there was no answer still. He still didn’t have one.
And Honey kept at him. “It’s like how you want me,” she said. “It’s the same thing. The way you just stand there and want me. Like a little boy, drooling outside the candy shop without a quarter to his name. Cobra would’ve just reached out and done me. In fact, he did reach out. That’s just the way it happened. He did me hard, too. I like to get done hard. I like to—”
Bishop was not prepared for the strength of it, the pentup power of it and its rushing release. It was as if he hadn’t known himself how hungry he was for her. Holding her fast against himself, kissing her fast, it made him feel almost crazy, almost blind with the heat. He wanted to let her go and be himself again, but he couldn’t let her go. He couldn’t even let her go long enough to get to the damned bedroom. He was still kissing her, clinging to her as she wrestled the jeans off him. His hands were frantic at the waist of her slacks. The slacks’ front button popped off as he worked them down. Dimly, he heard it patter on the floor.
He kissed her neck and the front of her blouse, and his hands went under her blouse. She struggled out of her panties while he kissed her. Then he hoisted her onto himself and propped her against the nearest wall, the living room wall.
He rammed into her crazy hard. He looked at her as he did. She was still in her blouse, her white schoolgirl blouse, and the sight of her dressed like that made him even wilder.
Bishop rammed into Honey, and she writhed as if in pain against the wall. He thought of the girl in the snapshots at her father’s house and that was the end of it.
Later, when she had gone, he sat shirtless at the table by the window. He put his palmtop and the keyboard together again. He lit another cigarette and put it in the tinfoil ashtray just as he had before. He positioned his fingers on the keyboard. He thought a long time before he started typing.
Then Weiss, he wrote, something happened.
Twenty-Seven
Weiss. Something happened. I’m getting the girl out. But we need SFPD in on it. Cobra’s gotta go down or he’ll come after her…
It was a strange e-mail, Weiss thought. The tone of it bothered him. That Something happened. That wasn’t like Bishop. It was too agitated, too feverish. Instinctively, with that knack he had, Weiss knew it was because of the girl. And he figured—enviously—that Bishop must’ve shtupped her by now. But so what? He shtupped every girl. Guy was a walking shtup-machine. It never seemed to get him so jazzed up before.
Something happened.
There was more to it this time. This time, the girl had gotten to him…
Weiss was still mulling it over the next morning. Silent as he rode shotgun out to China Basin in Ketchum’s battered Impala. The e-mail had gone on to describe Bishop’s plan for bringing down Cobra. And it was a good plan, but it left a lot of questions. Like: Was Beverly Graham at the Bayshore Market? Bishop didn’t say, but what if she was? What if Cobra implicated her after his arrest? Would she cut a deal with the DA and testify? Would Philip Graham agree to that if it meant she did time, if it meant he lost an election?
And then there was the other little matter, the last two lines of the e-mail.
BTW, that guy Cobra wanted whacked took care of himself, drove off the Wildcat into the canyon. You might want to tell Oakland to fish him out of the woods.
Oh, Weiss had all kinds of questions. He just wasn’t sure he wanted any of his questions answered.
Ketchum slid the car to the curb next to a construction site. A framework of concrete and rebar spread over an acre of rubble and dust. He came in too fast as always. The tire struck the curb hard; the old blue junker jolted. Weiss sighed.
“What?” said Ketchum angrily.
The two men unfolded themselves on their opposite sides, their doors clunking shut in turn.
The sky was clear today. The sun was a jagged medallion burning low over the water. But it seemed almost a decoration out there, an indifferent fire that gave no heat. The wind came off the basin hard and cold. Litter danced and rattled over the chunks of stone strewn along the ground.
Weiss and Ketchum walked side by side, cutting across the corner of the site. They were dressed almost alike, like cops, dark jackets and slacks, white shirts, striped ties. One of them huge and hulking, the other small and wiry, one white, one black, they moved in step. Their hands were in their pockets, their shoulders hunched. Their jackets flapped in the wind. Their black shoes crunched on the gravel.
Ketchum was still with the SFPD, an inspector. Still pretty much the man he was when Weiss and he were partners. He still scowled most of the time, still cursed the world and all its creatures in his guttural rasp of a voice. He was scowling now. He was pretty much always scowling.
The two men went without speaking about half the way. Then Weiss said, “So? Did Oakland find the body?”
That was all it took to set Ketchum off; that was the match to the tinderbox. “Fuck yes, they found the body,” he snarled. “Punk weighed three hundred pounds, he was kind of hard to miss. They brought him out of the woods this morning; said it was like hauling a dead cow up a mountain.”
Weiss nodded, no expression, just the usual brooding hangdog of a face.
“You wanna know where you went wrong?” Ketchum went on. “I used to think your mistake was letting Bishop off with a beating. But now I think: You just didn’t beat him hard enough. Prick was still breathing when you walked away—that’s where you went wrong. I told you, Weiss, you spare the rod, you spoil that boy.”
“It’s not Bishop’s fault,” Weiss said, without much conviction, with his stomach starting to churn over the whole affair. “The asshole drove off the road. Bishop just reported it.”
“Oh. Okay. Okay. I believe that. Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t I take the word of a psycho dirtbag piece of shit like Bishop? Asshole drove off the road. Right. So how come there’s two pairs of skid marks? How come there’s a gun like a
cannon with a bullet discharged?”
“Who the fuck knows, Ketch? I don’t know. The guy was biker trash. He shot a gun off. He drove into the canyon. He was probably stoned halfway to kingdom come.”
“That’s not the point. I’m not saying the Bay Area lost one of its finest citizens—”
“His handle was Mad Dog,” Weiss said. “What do you have to do before a bunch of bikers call you that?”
“So what? So Bishop can kill him? That’s good, Weiss. I like it. Something pisses Bishop off, he kills it. ’Less it has a cunt, then he fucks it. It has a cunt and pisses him off, I guess he fucks it then kills it. The Bishop Plan for a Better Tomorrow. Man, I’m trying to tell you something: You gotta cut that dickhead loose before he drags you into a world of pain.”
Weiss gave a dismissive groan. Trudged along. He didn’t need Ketchum for a conscience. He had his own conscience. Saying pretty much the same things.
But Ketchum kept going all the same, shaking his head, grumbling half to himself in his rumbling voice. “Think you’re gonna lead him to the light of righteousness. Think you’re gonna turn him into you. He’s gonna turn you into him, that’s what’s gonna happen. Punk’s a fucking animal…”
Which sent Weiss’s thoughts, meanwhile, off on their own tangent, a private guiltfest. About Bishop’s e-mail. About the questions he didn’t want answered. And about how Bishop was counting on that, on Weiss not asking, not wanting to know. Because if Beverly Graham did go home to her father, and if she wasn’t implicated in the Bayshore Market killings, and if Randolph “Cobra” Tweedy went to prison for life and couldn’t bother her anymore—well, then Philip Graham would surely be one satisfied customer, and Weiss would surely be able to look forward to a lot more business from a lot more VIPs. Which was a pretty damn miserable piss-poor excuse for giving someone like Bishop a free hand.
“A man is what he is,” muttered Ketchum, as his rant and Weiss’s parallel meditations turned back into each other. “You can’t change that.”
They reached the far edge of the site. They stood together on the border of the rubble-laden field. They were looking down a street that led to the water. It was lined with a few low buildings, old structures that sagged toward each other, making a narrow corridor between. At the end of the corridor, there was a wharf. To the left lay an empty lot with, behind it, a plain of mud and marshland, a barren stretch of dirt and tidewater set against the sea. Broken posts and boards and stretches of old piers slanted up from its black, unstable earth: the ruin of a harbor. The open water glimmered in the distance beyond.
Shivering off a chilly blast of wind, Weiss lifted his chin toward the street across the way. There was a gray warehouse on the corner. A big one. It had a sign on the side of it, the paint peeling. CHINA BASIN STORAGE.
“Okay, so what’s this shit now?” Ketchum asked him. His coat made a loud snapping noise as the wind whipped it.
“Bishop says they’re going in here midnight Thursday night,” Weiss told him.
“And these are the Bayshore Market doers.”
“That’s what he thinks.”
“But he’s not sure.”
“He’s pretty sure, Ketch.”
Ketchum snarled in disgust. “Okay. So they go in.”
“There’s supposed to be a locker full of cash. A dropoff. A link. Cigarettes, money, drugs. There’s a one-day lag before the pickup to make sure it’s safe. That’s when they go in. There’s supposed to be millions.”
“Yeah, there’s always supposed to be millions. What about security?”
“They’ve got the alarm codes, the lock codes, everything. It sounds like an inside job. That’s why Bishop thinks we should hang back. We go in early, the gang might get word, call it off.”
“Any guards?”
“Two, sometimes three, armed with nightsticks. The gang plans to kill all of them.”
Ketchum let his breath out in a long ssssshhh. “I don’t know. I don’t like it, Weiss. I could just pick these mother-fuckers up and sweat ’em on Bayshore. One of ’em would crack.”
Weiss shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Take them in the act, you get a lot of leverage. You’re gonna need it to get someone to roll over on Tweedy.”
Ketchum studied the warehouse, narrow-eyed. And Weiss—who wanted like anything for the Bayshore killers to go down—could tell that his old partner wanted them, too, wanted Cobra especially with a great want.
Still, he hesitated. Gave Weiss a canny sidelong glance. “What the hell kind of case is this anyway? What’s Bishop on?”
Weiss answered with a noise: puh. He wasn’t telling that. “It’s something different, something else. He just stumbled on the Bayshore angle. Figured he’d give you a chance to nail these guys, that’s all.”
Ketchum sneered. “Yeah, he just bubbles over with generosity, that Bishop. He’s a giving, bubbly kind of guy, if ever there was one.”
Weiss didn’t bother to answer that.
The two men stood silently. They gazed at the warehouse across the way. Weiss’s mind drifted to the e-mail again. Something happened. A lot of questions…
But the low thunder of Ketchum’s voice broke into his thoughts.
“One day, I’m gonna do you a favor,” the cop said. “One day, I’m gonna take Bishop down. I’m gonna get him on some of this bullshit he pulls, and I’m gonna send him away. Five years, maybe ten, maybe the whole quarter. For your sake and for the sake of the city of San Francisco.”
Weiss stood silent. He kept his sad eyes on China Basin Storage.
“But for now,” Ketchum said, “tell him we’ll do it. When these bastards break into the warehouse? Tell him we’ll be there.”
Twenty-Eight
Something happened.
Weiss drove alone across the Bay Bridge. Eastward, out of the city. It was only early afternoon, still bright outside, but down on the lower deck, with the upper roadway blocking out the sky, it was shadowy and somber. Traffic was unbroken, slow but steady, five lines of cars in five lanes. Weiss’s Taurus chugged along in the queue at a deliberate pace so that the bridge’s side rails whisked by the window in a soporific rhythm and the natural light flickered over the dash in a monotonous counterbeat and the upper tier flashed past the top of the windshield, all very hypnotic. After a while it seemed as if the car drove itself. Weiss was barely there in spirit, pensive behind the wheel.
Something happened. I’m getting the girl out…
But what? he wondered. What happened? Was it, as he suspected, the girl, in fact? Had Bishop fallen in love with her? Weiss liked to think that that was possible, that Bishop could fall in love, make a life with some nice girl. But under the circumstances, he had to admit, it was a whole lot easier to imagine him simply snakebit by someone as hellbound as himself. Especially if another man had her first. Especially if it was a man like Cobra.
The Taurus rolled on and the side rails whisked by and the light flickered and the upper tier raced overhead. And Weiss in his Weiss-like way did not so much analyze the situation as get a sense of it, a general inner impression. He saw Bishop on one side—on his side—and Cobra on the other, like a shadow soul. And the girl in between the two of them. And what a girl. A girl like that? A ruined princess like Beverly Graham? She might’ve been the woman Bishop would’ve won if he were the man he might’ve been. And Weiss could almost feel—he could feel—Bishop’s yearning not just to have her, but to win her away from his rival, to win out yet again in that man-on-man competition that seemed forever undecided in some arena of his mind.
He did not think but somehow knew that the death of Mad Dog had been part of that competition. And he did not know but somehow feared that this plan to take down Cobra—this plan he had just helped arrange with Ketchum—was part of it, too.
The car broke out from under the roadway. The sky was suddenly dazzling in the windshield. The boxes and modest towers of the city’s lowlands fanned out around him. The white stone and red slate rooftops of the university cam
pus rose before him into the misty hills.
Weiss blinked as if awaking. His thoughts or his intuitions or whatever they were became scattered, fragmented. One minute he was thinking of Bishop and Honey Graham and Cobra—a sort of tableau with the men on either side and the girl in the middle—and then the tableau was himself and Julie Wyant and Ben Fry, the Shadowman. He fell into a daydream, one of his usuals: about running up a flight of steps, kicking down a door, trading gunfire with the Shadowman and carrying Julie to safety. From there, the scene shifted to the predictable clichés, Weiss and his missing whore locked together—as he’d imagined it now for days—in several positions inspired by those erotic letters, those e-mails to Professor Brinks.
In that way, Weiss’s reason for coming here to Berkeley slowly swam back to the forefront of his consciousness. The letters. Brinks. Arnold Freyberg.
Library research by Sissy and some expert tracking by Hwang the Computer Guy had now more or less confirmed my lead. It was all but certain that Freyberg, the disgruntled professor of William Blake and Wilfred K. Green hounded out of his job by Marianne Brinks, among others, was the e-mails’ author. If Weiss had wanted to, he could’ve simply delivered this information to his client at this point. He could’ve left it up to the lovelorn Professor Brinks to decide what to do next. He should’ve, probably, according to the rules of the trade.
But he wasn’t going to. He told himself he had to make sure first. He had to confront Freyberg in person and make absolutely certain he had the right man. That’s what he told himself. But really, it was that protective routine of his again. He was positive Brinks was setting herself up for a heartbreaking rejection, a big-time romantic disaster, and he wanted to be able to prepare her for it if he could, even talk her out of going forward if he had to.
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