Damnation Street

  The pictures on the TV snapped him out of it. They showed the hotel and the broken window through which Bishop had fallen. The camera panned down from that to the swimming pool, to show how long a fall it was. There were still traces of blood in the water, or what looked like blood. The camera zoomed in on it.

  The newsman didn't know the name of the man who had been shot. The police hadn't identified him yet. But Weiss suspected it was Bishop from the first. Then, when the newsman said the victim had been wearing a leather jacket, Weiss knew for sure.

  He was not prepared for what he felt, for the weight of it. It was the end of something and he knew it. There would be no more second chances. He set his beer down on the bar, his hand trembling. He set some money down. His vision was blurred.

  "Hey," said the waitress. "Are you okay?"

  Weiss waved her off. He lumbered out of the bar with his head down, his back bent. He looked like a sick old man.

  38.

  He was there, at Bishop's bedside, when Sissy and I walked into the hospital room. We had come through Vegas on the last plane out. It was nearly 3 A.M. when we finally arrived.

  The hospital room was a double, two beds. The bed nearer the door was empty. Bishop was in the other bed, the one nearer the window. Weiss was sitting in a chair pressed right up against the bed's side. His big form was hunched over Bishop where he lay. For a moment, right after we first walked in, we could hear him murmuring to the fallen man, a steady stream of words, indistinguishable. Then he must've sensed we were there, because he fell silent.

  We waited. Without turning around, he said aloud, "I'm glad you came."

  I hung back by the door. I felt I had no business being there with the three of them. I had only come because Sissy was such a wreck, in no condition to travel alone. Now I let her move to the bed without me.

  "The hospital called," she said softly. "I was the only number they could reach."

  Weiss nodded. "I guess I've been out of touch."

  He turned. Glanced at me over his shoulder, then looked steadily up at her. He was an awful sight. Old and exhausted and pale. After a night of crying, Sissy didn't look much better. They gazed at each other a long, long moment, appalled, I think, at the pitiful spectacle they made. They were always very fond of each other, these two.

  Sissy said, "How is he?"

  They both turned to look down at the man on the bed.

  Bishop lay on his back in an unconsciousness so deep he seemed almost inanimate. The handsome tough ironic face was drained of every expression. It was drained of color. It seemed made of stone. A white sheet covered him to his waist. A white patient's gown covered his torso. There was a tube full of something running into one of his arms, another in the other, a counter of some kind clicking off the doses, a monitor running his numbers with an occasional beep. He didn't even look like himself. He didn't even look like a man. He looked like part of the machinery, pulsing but lifeless.

  "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, Sis
sy. 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 something 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.