He rubbed his head. He made a big show of it. He grimaced, as if the pain were killing him. Then he flinched and moved his hand to his belly. He showed Weiss a rueful smile.
"You really clocked me, Weiss," he said. "I feel kind of sick."
"That's tough," said Weiss.
The killer made a face again. It was all a big show. He didn't feel sick. His head hurt, but his belly was fine. He just wanted Weiss to get used to him putting his hand on his midsection like that. Soon he would reach inside his raincoat and rub his fingers back and forth over his shirt, and Weiss would get used to that too. Then he would reach into his shirt, reach through the slit cut in the T-shirt underneath, reach into the pocket of his body vest, and pull out the Saracen. Then Weiss would be dead.
Good, he thought. The rage ate at him, burned him. Good.
Weiss shifted the .38 into his left hand, picked up the phone with his right. He pressed the buttons—9-1-1—then held the handset to his ear.
A woman's voice, sleepy, drawling: "Police emergency."
"Oh Jesus," the killer murmured. He grimaced. He bent over as if he were gagging. He clutched at his belly. Slipped his hand inside his shirt, rubbing his stomach.
Weiss's eyes flicked down to follow the hand. He kept the gun on him. But the killer took a deep breath as if the pain had passed. He brought his hand out of the shirt again. It was empty.
The woman's voice again: "Hello? Police emergency."
"Get somebody over here," said Weiss. "I'm holding an intruder. I took two guns off him."
"What's your location, sir?"
"Damned if I know. You got my number on your computer, right?"
"Hold on, sir, stay on the line with me..."
"Just track it down," said Weiss. "Just get here."
He hung up the phone. Shifted the gun back to his right hand.
"I think I'm gonna puke," said the killer. He bent forward. His hand went inside his shirt again.
Weiss watched him, deadpan. He didn't care if he puked or not. He kept the gun on him, but his mind was distracted. He was thinking about Julie, about her face and the smell of her and the way she pressed his arm as she went by him.
He shook it off. Some things were like that, that's all. You saw them and you thought you would die if you didn't have them, but you could never have them and you didn't die, not from that anyway. Olivia Graves was right: Julie had some kind of knack for being whatever a man wanted her to be. It was a whore's talent, the talent she'd learned while seducing her mother's boyfriends so that they'd leave her little sister alone.
Once again the man who called himself John Foy took a deep breath as his pain seemed to pass. He straightened, his hand still resting on his middle. He offered Weiss another smile, a weak, bland, anonymous smile.
Weiss could see the rage and hatred in his eyes.
The killer rubbed his belly, pretending he felt sick. This time he slipped his hand into his shirt a little farther. His fingertips touched the razor slit in the cotton of his T-shirt. He knew he could reach into the slit fast, go fast into the pocket of the bodysuit. He knew he could get the gun fast and come out with it fast.
But not yet. Weiss was still watching too closely, still keeping the gun trained on him.
The killer gave a tight laugh—the sort of laugh you give when you're in pain but you're trying to laugh anyway. "Bet they're over an hour away," he said.
Weiss blinked at the sound of his voice. The killer could see his mind had drifted. He'd been thinking of something else. Good.
"The cops," the killer said. "I bet they won't be here for over an hour."
Weiss shrugged. "You got some other appointment?"
The killer flinched and clutched his stomach, made a big show of it. "No," he said, almost gasping. "No."
"Me either," said Weiss.
The killer groaned. Yet again he reached into his shirt. Weiss's eyes followed the movement, but his own hand remained loose on the .38. He was getting used to it now. Good. The killer's rage was so strong, he could hardly wait anymore. He wanted to do this. But he brought his hand out empty yet again.
"You let her go," he said.
"She did her part," said Weiss.
"Now it's just you and me, right?"
Weiss didn't answer.
The Shadowman grinned, clutching his belly. "You'll never have her that way."
Weiss didn't answer.
"I had her," the Shadowman said.
Weiss snorted.
"I bet you think about that," said the killer. "I know you do. That's what this whole deal is. I had her and you didn't. That's what all this is about."
"I guess you're a big man," said Weiss.
"I had her."
"I know what you did to her."
"She wanted it that way."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah."
"Anyway, I had her, that's what I'm saying."
"So you're a sick fuck, so what?"
"So I had her."
"Ah, you're a sick fuck."
"You know what I'm saying," the killer said. "You know what I'm talking a—" He grunted, pretended to flinch. He put his hand in his shirt and rubbed his stomach. This time Weiss didn't even watch his hand.
Good, the killer thought. It was almost time.
Weiss pressed his lips together. He was sorry he'd said anything. He should've known better than to start up with that shit. But he couldn't help it. He had his own anger. It felt like a fist had hold of his gut and was twisting it. When he thought about Julie, when he thought about the killer, when he thought about the look of her just now and the way she touched his arm and the way the killer was ... Well, he had his own anger.
She had a habit of becoming whoever men wanted her to be.
Yeah, so what? Weiss thought. That's how she kept the bastards off her little sister.
But that was what bothered him. Her little sister was in the clear, her little sister was fine—so why did she go on with it? Why did she keep on whoring? Even when she was a kid, the routine wouldn't have worked forever. Eventually, no matter what she did, no matter how good she was, her mother's dealer boyfriends would've wanted more, would've wanted to go after little Olivia too. Julie must've known that.
You think you understand everything, but you don't understand anything.
Then suddenly Weiss did understand. With his stomach churning, it suddenly came to him—came to him as if it had been hidden in the back of his mind all along: why Julie went on whoring, how she knew where to find her father, why Olivia was angry at her sister, even though she'd saved her from the men who would surely have raped her.
He understood all of it.
The killer watched him. He saw Weiss's eyes close and open. He saw the tip of his tongue touch his lips. The detective's mind was wandering. He was thinking about something else. His focus was slipping. The man who called himself John Foy could see it. He could see that his moment was almost here.
He did the whole show one last time. He groaned. He gritted his teeth. He bent forward. He put his hand inside his shirt and pushed it all the way through the slit in his T-shirt. He rubbed his belly and slipped his hand in farther, into the pocket of his bodysuit.
He touched the handle of the Saracen.
***
It was Julie, Weiss thought. His stomach was churning, and he thought: it was Julie—thirteen-year-old Mary Graves. She had learned to play the whore for her mother's men. She had kept them off her little sister by offering them herself. She had learned to be whatever they wanted, and at first she thought that would be enough. But finally she must have realized: nothing was enough. There was no holding the men off forever. Eventually, they would go after the younger girl too. That was just how things worked. Bad men did bad things, and if you didn't stop them, they did more bad things and more.
Thirteen-year-old Mary Graves couldn't stop the bad men, but she could make it so they would go away.
So it was Mary—it was Julie—who picked up the clawhammer, who
went on tiptoe into her mother's room, up to the bed where her mother lay sleeping...
Weiss felt he was there. He slipped into her feelings. He felt the weight of the hammer—her father's heavy hammer—as the child lifted it with both hands. He felt the quickening arc as she brought the thing down on her sleeping mother's forehead. And brought it down again. And again. Until the forehead caved in. Until the blood spurted, then burbled out in a steady flow onto the white pillow.
Now there would be no more bad men...
You don't understand anything.
But Weiss understood. He understood Charles Graves—Andy Bremer. He hadn't run away because he was guilty. He ran because he wanted to look guilty. If the police caught him, if they grilled him, if he confessed, he would make a slip, miss a fact: they would know he was lying. But if he ran, the cops would just assume he'd done the murder. He coached the children in what to say. The cops would believe them because they were just kids. A little girl doesn't crush her own mother's head with a clawhammer. It was obviously the missing father who had done it. The cops would assume he was guilty and spend their resources hunting for him. He ran to protect Julie, and he called her, checked on her, to make sure she was safe. They played out the lie together. She never lost touch with him.
Weiss gazed down at the man who called himself John Foy—he gazed down and held the gun on him—but his mind was far away, on Julie now. He couldn't put it into words exactly, but he saw what had happened to her, to her and her whole family. They'd been frozen in time, stuck in the moment of Suzanne Graves's murder, repeating the moment of the murder endlessly, endlessly. Andy Bremer had a different name, a different life, but he was still Charles Graves taking the blame for his wife's killing, paying off the blackmailing Adrienne Chalk, not just to protect Julie, but as penance for the things he had allowed to happen in his house. Olivia Graves had grown up, had gone to school, had gotten a profession, but she was still the little girl full of anger and envy and terror and guilt at what her sister had done on her behalf.
And Julie. Julie went on living the life she had lived before the moment she picked up the hammer; she had gone on whoring, had gone on becoming whoever men wanted her to be, as if she could somehow convince herself that the moment had never happened, that the hammer had never come into her hands.
Weiss gazed down at the killer. He understood why Julie had waited for him here, why she hadn't run away. Because she had never left that old moment and the old truth had at last come back to find her: bad men do bad things, and they'll do more bad things forever unless you stop them.
Once again she had done what she had to do. She had waited here. She had picked up the hammer. Only this time the bad man was the man who called himself John Foy. And this time the hammer was Weiss.
Weiss let out a long sigh. His hand—his gun hand, went slack. The .38 strayed from its target. It pointed down at the floor.
He lifted his body to one side, reached his left hand into his trench coat pocket.
"It's gonna be a long wait, Foy," he said. "Have a cigarette."
Good! the killer thought.
It was the perfect moment. The .38 was pointed away from him. Weiss was lifted clumsily in the chair, reaching into his trench coat pocket for his cigarettes. The killer's hand was already inside the pocket of the body suit. His fingers wrapped themselves around the butt of the Saracen.
In one clean, lightning-quick instant, he pulled the pistol free.
Weiss, his left hand in the pocket of his trench coat, took hold of the 9mm SIG Sauer he had put there: the killer's other gun.
The killer brought the Saracen to bear. So quick, Weiss had no time to move. So quick, the killer himself had no time to think.
Then, as the barrel of the gun came around, as the sight centered on Weiss's chest, he did think.
He thought: Wait a minute! The son of a bitch doesn't smoke!
Weiss shot him. He shot him with the gun in his trench coat pocket, the killer's own gun. The blast was loud as hell. The 9mm slug ripped into the Shadowman's chest and blew a hole the size of a man's fist out the back of him. The blood and flesh and shattered bone spattered on the wall behind him.
The Shadowman gaped, a sick, startled look on his face. He dropped backward onto the floor, hard, like a post falling over. He lay on his back and stared up at the ceiling. His mouth opened and closed.
Weiss watched him, deadpan.
He was dying. The killer could feel it. He was dying fast. His mind was racing crazily, trying to grasp what had happened to him. Have a cigarette, Foy. It was a trick ... Weiss had known ... Somehow Weiss had guessed even about the Saracen. He had tricked him. Tricked him and shot him—Christ, he'd shot him right to fucking death—and with his own gun and in self-defense ... He was fucking dying and Weiss was free, free with nothing to fear from the law, with nothing to fear at all.
The killer's rage and the helplessness of his rage felt like white-hot fire. He couldn't stand it. It was worse than anything.
The tower. He had to climb into the tower in his mind. He had to get to the blue peace up there and breathe. Down here there was nothing but the fire of his rage, waves of fire pounding him, surrounding him, an ocean of fire that went on forever, fire and pain and red lips laughing. He tried to climb, to get away. But he couldn't. He was too weak. The calm, blue, serene spaces were too high, too far away. He was stuck down here in the burning ocean of his rage.
Fading, he was seized with fear...
***
Weiss stood slowly out of the armchair. He felt sick to his stomach. He hadn't known it would end like this until it did. Or maybe he had. Maybe he had known and he hadn't faced it. Anyway, now that it was done, he wasn't sure why he'd done it. He wasn't sure why he'd done any of it from the start. Was it to get Julie free or to get himself free or just because the killer pissed him off? He didn't know. Or maybe he did. Anyway, he felt sick to his stomach.
He moved past the dying killer. He went to the door. He took hold of the knob.
"You told..." The killer tried to speak. He coughed. He gasped. Weiss glanced back at him. The killer lay staring up at the ceiling. There were bloody bubbles on his lips. "You told me you weren't a killing man," he whispered finally.
Weiss watched death pass over the other man's face like a shadow. He pulled the door open.
"I lied," he said.
He stepped out into the rain.
* * *
Epilogue
It was one of those nights—the last one of those nights—when Weiss and I sat alone together in his office. He was in the huge leather swivel chair behind the massive desk. I was in one of the two blocky armchairs the clients used. The halls were dark around us and the other offices empty. Weiss's desk lamp surrounded us with light, a little island of light in the pool of shadows. At the big arched windows on one wall, the skyline rose and fell, its pale glow seeping into the violet sky. The snap and rattle of the streetcars down on Market drifted up to us. The high winter wind made the panes knock in their frames. I had that sense, that sense I often had on nights like this, that Weiss and I were sitting in the one still corner of the cold and frantic world.
Weiss kept a bottle of Macallan in his desk drawer, just as if he were a detective in one of the old novels. He had poured us each a glass of scotch, and now the bottle stood on the desk between us, glowing amber in the lamplight.
I swirled the whiskey in my glass. I drew in the scent of it.
"It's a wonderful thing to imagine," I said.
Weiss laughed softly.
***
We were talking about Bishop. He was getting better, stronger, all the time. Two weeks before, he had left the hospital in Phoenix and come back to a rehab center in San Francisco. They held him there for a few days, until the insurance ran out. He was still too weak to take care of himself, so Sissy took him in.
It was, as I said, a wonderful thing to imagine. All the dangers Bishop had faced, all the adventures he'd had, the things he'd done,
and the things we thought he might have done—none was more amazing to conjure in the brain than the mental image of him sunk in the white fluffy recesses of Sissy's apartment, lying all but helpless amid white fluffy valentine pillows and a white fluffy comforter while the white fluffy cats made a bed of him.
I admit I felt a little jealous when I thought of it—a little. Sissy would lavish all her tenderness on him, and I knew well how tender Sissy could be. She would coddle and nurse him, feed him and mop his fevered brow until he had to get well just to keep from killing her.
The outcome seemed to me inevitable. Bishop's wounds would heal. His vigor would seep back into him, then flow back in a strengthening stream. Alone with Sissy and with few distractions, he would become increasingly aware of the sweetness of her smile, the delicacy of her features, the whiteness of her skin—the smell of her; she smelled great, as I think I've already had occasion to mention. She would come and go from the kitchen, from the bathroom, bringing whatever he needed for his comfort, and he would watch her come and go. The girlish whisper and the maternal endearments that annoyed him at first would soon come to reveal what was true gentleness in her. He would think: she was really not so bad, not half-bad, after all.
As for Sissy—well, I can't imagine anything so trivial as her experience with me would have lessened one little bit her propensity for the Impossible Man. Bishop's helplessness, his gratitude, his slowly growing realization of her undeniable charms would all work their magic on the pent-up longings of her over-romantic nature. She would begin the familiar process of convincing herself that he was other than he was. She would tell herself that she had overstated his detachment and aggression, unfairly denied his charisma and heroism, and momentarily lost faith in the possibility that a man's personal defects might be reformed by the love of a good woman.
Damnation Street Page 26