The hospital wasn’t far, a gleaming box of white stone and shining glass near the border of Oakland. Weiss tried to take Brinks’s arm as they walked together across the parking lot. She stiffened, so he let her go, lumbered along beside her instead, his hands in his pants pockets. Dwarfed by his giant frame, she clopped over the asphalt in her thick heels, staring forward, clutching her purse in front of her like a squirrel with a nut. Her narrow, attractive features were set fast, lined. She looked nervous. She looked grim.
They found Arnold Freyberg alone in a room on the third floor. By now, he had shriveled nearly away. He was lying very still in bed, breathing on his own, but breathing hard. The sagging flesh seemed to have melted off him, and only a patina of translucent skin was left to cover his skeletal frame. His hands were lifted up to his chest as if to clutch the edge of his bedsheet, but the strength to clutch the sheet was gone; the hands lay limp. The eyes alone still lived—they were staring, motionless, but the fear in them made them live.
Weiss walked M.R. Brinks to the door. She signaled him with a touch of his elbow and he stayed there in the hall, on the threshold. She went into the room alone.
Weiss watched her move to Freyberg’s bed. There was a plastic chair nearby. She pulled it up to the bedside and sat down. She sat primly, her back straight, her knees clamped together, her purse held upright on her thighs. Her lips pressed to a thin line as she gazed down at the fading figure where he lay fighting for breath.
I will remake you into your body, he had written to her, Weiss remembered. Lips and nipples and clefts. You will have no hopes, no anxieties. No thoughts, no philosophy. Only flesh, only sensation.
“Arnold,” she said. Her voice was steady. “Arnold, it’s me, I’m here.”
Freyberg’s big eyes blinked in slow motion. Painfully, he drew in a rattling gasp. “Marianne?” he whispered.
He couldn’t turn to look at her, but with a tremulous effort he lifted his hand.
Professor Brinks swallowed hard. Carefully she set her purse down on the floor by her chair. Then she took Freyberg’s hand in both her own. She brought it to her lips. She bowed her head over it. She closed her eyes.
Weiss turned from the door and walked away.
He drove back alone. Down University Avenue, toward the bridge. Nearing the water, he stopped at a red light. He sat waiting there, thinking nothing, tapping his finger on the steering wheel. He gazed absently through the windshield. There was the sign for Interstate 80 just ahead.
The freeway ran in two directions, west over the bridge, back into the city, and up toward Richmond and San Rafael, where it met the 101 heading north. It was the 101 that went eventually to the town called Paradise.
Weiss gazed at the sign. Once again, he felt that chill of premonition on the back of his neck. He thought of the Shadowman, the killer who had sworn he would hunt Julie Wyant forever. His eyes went nervously to the rearview mirror.
He’ll be watching you now all the time, every second, she had told him. If you come to find me, he’ll follow you and he’ll find me first.
Weiss looked back at the freeway sign. West across the bridge. East and north to the 101, to Paradise.
The light turned green. Weiss started driving.
Author’s Note
Shortly after I graduated college and before I returned east to begin my career as a thriller writer, I worked for a time at a private detective agency, Weiss Investigations. When after many years I decided to write about some of my experiences at the Agency, I found I could do it best in the form of a novel, sticking as close to the facts as I could but dramatizing incidents from various people’s points of view. I included myself as a first-person narrator only in those rare moments when my actions had any bearing on events or my speculations served to deepen the reader’s understanding of why I’d depicted one character or another as I had. The result was a book I called Dynamite Road. For all it was presented as fiction, I believe it to be the first full account of the facts behind what the media later dubbed the North Wilderness Assault.
In any case, my publisher seemed to feel it was interesting enough to merit a sequel, so here it is. This second book takes place shortly after the first, but it’s concerned with a completely different investigation, a story in itself. Still, obviously, something as explosive as the business at North Wilderness doesn’t leave people untouched. Life went on and the work of the Agency went on, but Weiss’s fascination with Julie Wyant, the mystery of the murderous Ben Fry, the overhanging threat of the Shadowman—these continued to weigh on all of us to varying degrees all through that summer after the assault took place. Whenever these matters come up in this book, I take pains to supply the reader with the information he needs to understand what they’re all about—a sort of “in our last exciting episode” kind of reminder. But if you missed it, feel free to go out and buy a copy of Dynamite Road to get the full backstory. It might inspire you to know that I’m the sole support of an absolutely adorable wife and two heart-wrenchingly lovable children.
Finally, viewers of those sensationalistic true crime shows that seem to saturate cable television schedules will probably be pretty quick to guess the real identity of the woman I’ve called here Beverly “Honey” Graham. They’ll also notice that there are plenty of details of her story that the cable shows missed and that a lot of those details are—to use the vernacular of the genre—“shocking” and “scandalous” and “include strong sexual and violent content.” You may wish, for curiosity’s sake, that I hadn’t chosen to fictionalize Beverly’s actions and had just laid out the facts about her involvement with the malicious gang of killers I’ve renamed the Outriders. And I don’t blame you. It’s very juicy stuff, and you’ll naturally want to know which parts are real and which I made up.
Nonetheless, I decided to write this second book using the same novelistic techniques I employed in the first and for the same basic reason. American audiences, I’m always being told, want their protagonists to be “likable”: i.e., mildly flawed but basically righteous, the way most of us see ourselves. As the people in this story are real people, however, and as I’ve attempted to portray them honestly, they may from time to time be seen to let their righteousness slip a little. Their behavior may occasionally strike the reader as wrongheaded or selfish, angry, confused, small, even vicious. In short, they may appear less like the way we see ourselves than the way we actually are. By using a fiction writer’s methods to climb inside the minds of hard men like Weiss and Bishop or a neurotic like Sissy or even a lost soul like Beverly herself, I’m hoping to “argue their case” before the public, to convince readers to accept them as I accepted them when I knew them way back when: in the full flesh of their humanity, the way you and I might hope to be accepted in our own hours of need or judgment.
But having said that, I maintain, as I did with Dynamite Road, that this is the way things happened. Beverly, Cobra, the Outriders, the sex, the violence, the shattering and bloody outcome—all of it—it’s all real.
Acknowledgments
My deep thanks to Oakland Police Sergeant Fred Mestas, motorcycle maven Larry Mousouris, newswoman extraordinaire Sherry Hu, Private Detective Lynn McLaren, Santa Barbara Senior Deputy District Attorney Ron Zonen, computer expert Chris Soriano, and my excellent assistants Wendy Miller and Sarah Pariso.
My further and likewise deep thanks to my agent, Robert Gottlieb at Trident Media; Tom Doherty and Robert Gleason at Forge; West Coast agents Chris Donnelly and Brian Lipson at Endeavor; publicist Kim Dower of Kim-From-LA; and my beloved wife, Ellen.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SHOTGUN ALLEY
Copyright © 2004 by Andrew Klavan
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
&
nbsp; 175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3957-7
Shotgun Alley Page 26