Dynamite Road

by Andrew Klavan

  “Good,” Hirschorn said again. He slapped the folder shut. “Good.” He pushed off the desk with both hands. Stood up. “I hope you’re beginning to see that I run a strong operation across the board.” He came around to the leather armchair again. He sat down again where he could lord it over Bishop. “Because I’m about to ask you to join that operation in a way that could cost you your life.”

  He said it like that. Very melodramatic. Bishop raised an eyebrow. “My life is worth a lot to me.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars?”

  “Yeah, that’d cover it.”

  “For a day’s work.”

  Bishop nodded. “Fine.”

  “Fortunately, all the preliminaries have been taken care of. All the materiel and so forth that had to be transported—all that’s been done. What I need you for is one flight, one last flight in two days’ time. Are you up for that?”

  “Can you give me any details?” Bishop asked.

  “Not one.”

  “Okay. For a hundred thousand dollars, sure.”

  Hirschorn nodded. He was not smiling his charming smile anymore beneath the iron moustache. His blue eyes were no longer twinkling. He was watching Bishop, calculating, studying Bishop’s reactions as he went on. “Here’s what you’ll have to do,” he said. “Meet me at the airport at six tomorrow. We’ll fly to a location. Once we’re there, you’ll be told more about what you have to do, as much as you need to know. Once you’re told, you will not be able to leave the location or communicate with anyone outside for any reason whatsoever until the job is complete. You understand? I’m sorry to have to take all these precautions. I’m sure you’re a good guy, very trustworthy. But I don’t know you. I have to be careful. This associate of mine…Well, he has exacting standards…exacting standards,” he repeated faintly. And something about this, about the way he said it, made Bishop take notice. There was fear in those words, he was almost sure of it. Hirschorn was afraid of this associate of his. Bishop remembered Weiss’s e-mail: There seems to be a connection between these people and a major whack specialist sometimes called Shadowman.…

  “Let’s just say I’m uncomfortable making last-minute changes in an operation this complicated,” Hirschorn continued. “For you the bottom line is: I’m letting you in on a good deal. But once I do let you in, I have to make certain you keep your mouth shut. That’s the way it is.”

  Bishop nodded. He was thinking, Jesus Christ, what a sucker play this is. Because it was, let’s face it. It was a sucker play right down the line. He was supposed to let himself be taken off to a secret location. Kept out of touch until the job was done. What the hell did he think they would do with him then, when the job was done? Pay him? Just hand him his hundred thou, let him walk away? A guy they didn’t know, didn’t trust? Bullshit. A hundred thousand dollars for a day’s work is a lot of money. A single bullet to the brain was much cheaper, much safer all around.

  Oh man, Bishop thought. Weiss is going to go nuclear when he hears about this. Weiss would pull him off the case the second he found out.

  Well, he was just going to have to make sure Weiss didn’t find out until it was too late to stop it.

  “There’s one more thing,” Hirschorn said. He sat very still in the leather chair. He sat with his hands on his lap, his fingers intertwined. He sat relaxed. But Bishop sensed the tension in him. He sensed—could almost hear—the man’s nerves thrumming like a bowstring. Hirschorn went on quietly: “If this is not something you want to do, I understand. There’s no problem, no hard feelings. But the time to decide is now. Once I take you in, once I let you know the details of the assignment, there’ll be no going back, no getting out.”

  Bishop sat sunk in the leather sofa, his hand on his aching stomach, his eyes deep, his face gray. A sucker play, he kept thinking. A sucker play right down the line.

  “If you get on that plane with me tomorrow,” Hirschorn told him, “you’re coming home with a hundred thousand dollars in your pocket—or you’re not coming home at all. Do you understand me?”

  Again, Bishop nodded. He thought: Jesus Christ. He said: “Yeah, I understand you.”

  “Are you in?” Hirschorn asked him.

  “Yeah,” Bishop said. “I’m in.”

  Twenty-Nine

  That afternoon, Weiss drove down the coast to Half Moon Bay. It was bright and windy by the ocean. Forests of high pines dipped and swayed on the rolling hills all around him. Pearly clouds scudded over the dazzling sea, visible through the trees. But Weiss rumbled by in his gray Taurus, ignoring the scenery once again, grumbling to himself once again because Bishop and his latest e-mail—once again—were making a hellhole of his entire digestive system.

  Situation here’s unstable. Chris Wannamaker’s coming apart. He and I had it out and Hirschorn definitely got the word on it….

  All of which was bullshit. Bullshit every word. Weiss had told him—told him in no uncertain terms: Do not go undercover into Hirschorn’s op; do not. But—Weiss could read between the lines—that was exactly what the renegade op was doing. Why else would he have “had it out” with Chris Wannamaker if not to humiliate him in front of Hirschorn, to set himself up as a possible replacement? And then what? A lot of unknowable stuff: when Kathleen will crack and spill to her husband, how he’ll react, which way Hirschorn will break.…Which, when translated into Non-Bullshit, even into Semi-Bullshit, meant the whole situation could explode any minute. If Kathleen decided she couldn’t bear the guilt of her affair. Or if she wanted to use the affair to end her marriage. And if Chris found out she’d been feeding Bishop information. Or if Hirschorn found out…

  Weiss wasn’t sure which felt worse just then: his anger or his guilt. His anger at Bishop for endangering his own life and the lives of the people around him. Or his guilt because he, Weiss, wasn’t going to stop it.

  Time’s short. That’s what Bishop had written. And that was it, that was exactly it. Time was short. Weiss felt it too. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen soon. And while Weiss had no idea what the hell it was, there were other pieces of the thing that were starting to come together for him. And, the more he understood, the less he liked the look of it.

  He had a strange, intuitive method of working, Weiss did. I’ve sometimes thought he was an artist in his way. He had this talent for getting into people’s heads. Strangers, people he’d never even met. He could think his way into them, imagine what they’d done, what they would do. Then, almost without his knowing how it happened, a possible scenario would come to him, a narrative of past events or the events that might happen next.

  It was that way with him now. The death of the wealthy criminal, Cameron Moncrieff. The suicide of Moncrieff’s gardener, Harry Ridder. The possible suicide of Moncrieff’s caregiver, Julie Wyant. The imprisonment of Moncrieff’s lover, Whip Pomeroy, now trading away the secrets of his life’s work to keep himself in protective custody, to keep himself out of the reach of the Shadowman. It was all beginning to make a kind of sense to Weiss, the individual minds and purposes interlinking to form a single picture.

  And with that sense came a feeling of urgency, of fear. He wasn’t sure why. In some way—some way he couldn’t quite name—it had something to do with Julie Wyant. Even though she was supposed to be dead, even though the police were sure she was dead and even though he himself thought she was probably dead as well, he couldn’t shake her, couldn’t shake the thought of her. He had this image, this fantasy about her stuck in his mind. He saw himself running up a flight of stairs. He had to hurry. Every second counted. There was a door up ahead of him. Locked, bolted from the inside. He had to break it down, a single splintering kick. And then there she was. He was just in the nick of time to save her. She was lying on the bed with her red-gold hair splayed out like a halo around that angel face. She was gratefully looking up at him with those fathomless eyes. She was reaching out to him…

  Well, anyway. That was what he felt. Just like in the fantasy. He felt he had to mo
ve, be quick, that every second counted. Which is why he would not risk taking Bishop off the case. Why he would live with the anger and the guilt both, not to mention the stomachache. And why, also, he was driving to Half Moon Bay.

  Cameron Moncrieff’s lawyer—the “good old-fashioned lowlife mouthpiece” Peter Crouch—had been surprisingly difficult to find. He was said to have retired after Moncrieff’s death but no one seemed to know where exactly he’d gone to. More to the point, maybe, no one seemed to really care. Crouchy had no friends. He had never met a man who liked him. A potbellied, slovenly drone with a monotone voice and a face made slick and beady with avarice, only the drug dealers, pimps, extortionists, loan sharks and hit men he defended could tolerate him at all, and those just barely, just when they could use him. No one waved good-bye when he suddenly handed off his cases, packed up his office and left town, no one shed a tear or was even glad. It simply didn’t matter.

  But it had started to matter to Weiss. Crouch was there when Cameron Moncrieff had died. Just as Harry Ridder was there, as Julie Wyant was there. Crouch was the only one who was there and who was still, as far as anyone knew, alive. So Weiss needed to find him. And, being Weiss, he did.

  He found his house at least. A modest remodeled farmhouse off the highway at the edge of town. Secluded, set back from a winding road on a patch of grass at the edge of a fallow pumpkin field. A homey old two-story clapboard with a swing on the front porch. The swing, wind-stirred, creaked and swayed comfortably as Weiss came up the porch steps to the front door.

  He knocked on the door and waited. He had tried to phone ahead but there was no answer. A local police detective had told him that the farmhouse was unoccupied but that a handyman continued to keep the grounds and do repairs to the exterior. The handyman told him Crouch had the bank pay his bills automatically. As long as he got his money, he said, he did his job.

  No one came to the door so Weiss tried it. Locked. He’d figured that. He drew a palm-sized leather case from his inside jacket pocket. Selected a pick from the case and worked it into the keyhole.

  He picked the lock in a moment. Stepped inside. He was in the living room. It was dark and cool. The furniture stood quiet and cozy. Stuffed chairs with floral upholstery, sofas, a braid rug. An ottoman by the empty fireplace.

  Windows were cracked open. The wind squeezed through. Dust balls stirred on the floor. Dust swirled in the air and tickled Weiss’s nose. He heard things. Scrabbling. Mice or rats in the wall.

  Some old cop instinct woke in Weiss and he went very still inside.

  He stepped through doorways. A guest room, a dining room, a downstairs parlor. A kitchen with a southern window. A wedge of light lay yellow there on the green linoleum floor. Weiss could see rat damage in the tiles at the corners and where the legs of the brown kitchen table were gnawed white. He opened the cupboards. No food, nothing. He heard a gurgling. The refrigerator. Apparently the electricity bills were still being paid too. He pulled open the refrigerator door. Empty.

  The whole floor was empty, the upstairs too. A bedroom with a bed neatly made, a study with dusty books, a dusty computer on a dusty desk. Nothing else. Just the pitter-patter in the walls. It kept running ahead of him like the footsteps of an escaping ghost.

  Weiss would’ve left, in fact, if it weren’t for that thing inside him, that still cop thing. It niggled at him and he stayed on, cruised through the rooms yet another time. That’s how he stumbled on the trapdoor.

  It was in the downstairs parlor. He felt it shift beneath his feet when he stepped on a little rectangle of shag rug. He kicked the rug aside, stooped down. Pulled on the iron ring.

  Creaking hinges. A dark descent on rickety stairs. Another door. He had to fight to open it. When he did, he heard a little kiss of released air.

  The big man had to bow his head low to duck through the entry. Inside, it was cool and very dry. He noticed that especially, how dry it was. He felt along the wall, found a light switch. The lights came on and then he understood. The racks, the bottles, the thermostat on the wall: It was a wine cellar.

  That explained the state of the body.

  After so many months, the atmosphere in the sealed room had had an ugly effect on the corpse of Peter Crouch. It had mummified him, turned his skin to a thin, brown leather. He looked like some kind of skeletal beast, especially the way he was hanging there, chained naked and spread-eagle to one of the wine racks on the opposite wall. His ribs had burst through their covering, the bones of his hands were also visible under the taut, shiny flesh. But his face was still weirdly alive, weirdly recognizable. The egg-shaped head, the stray wisps of hair in their lousy comb-over. The eyes as lifeless, black and hard as ever. The cheeks, though—the cheeks had been white and flaccid before and now they were taut and dark. At first, Weiss thought it was that—the tautness of the cheeks—that had pulled Crouch’s lips so wide, that bared his teeth in that wild, mirthless grin.

  But no. The longer he stood there, the more he considered the cadaver’s condition, the more he came to feel that Crouch had been preserved exactly as he’d died: with his mouth jacked open to let out his screams.

  Part Three

  The Identity Man

  Thirty

  The scotch tasted good and the whore was beautiful. But Weiss felt heavyhearted, unsettled, on edge.

  He sat in the chair by the bay window. The chair was turned to face the room. His back was toward the night and the city. He was looking at the girl. For some reason, even her beauty rankled him.

  Her hair was red, just what he’d asked for. Not golden silky red-blond like Julie Wyant’s but still lightish red, as close as Casey could come on short notice. And she had the sweet face he’d wanted. A warm smile, fine, high cheekbones, a pixie chin. Weiss sipped his whiskey. Watched her as she began to undress. Watched with that saggy, hangdog expression of his. Unsettled, edgy. Afraid.

  Afraid, that was the word. It was the dead lawyer that’d done it. Crouch hung up to dry in his own wine cellar. The coroner who came to take him away said it looked as if he’d been tortured. The cops were none too pleased about that. They were none too pleased that it was Weiss who’d found him either. They’d kept the detective around for hours, worked him as if he were a perp. And all the while the sense of urgency in him was building. Crouchy dead. Ridder dead. Julie Wyant…

  He kept picturing himself charging up the stairs. Kicking down the door. Saving her in the nick of time. He kept thinking about that. And he was afraid.

  The hooker peeled a strap down over her shoulder. She glanced at him sidelong. Licked her lips. It was supposed to be provocative but it just annoyed him. He never liked that phony, porno, come-hither shit. They were supposed to know that.

  She began to breathe heavily. She caressed her own breast.

  He made an impatient gesture, brushing the whole business away.

  “You don’t have to do all that,” he said.

  The girl dropped the act at once. “Oh yeah, sorry, they told me. I forgot.”

  “It’s all right,” said Weiss. “Just get undressed.”

  She did—quickly now, matter-of-factly, as if he weren’t there. She tossed her dress carelessly over the arm of the sofa. Then, in her bra and panties, she spread her hands for him, a comic flourish: ta-da.

  “How’s that?” she said.

  “That’s fine,” said Weiss. “Fine.”

  She shook her head. “You oughta just get married. You’d be a lot happier.”

  The ice in his scotch glass tinkled as Weiss shifted in his chair. He shouldn’t have asked for the red hair, he thought. That was stupid of him, childish. He was bound to be disappointed. You couldn’t imitate that color, not the real thing, that red-tinted gold.

  “I was,” he said. “Married, I mean. And I wasn’t. I mean, happier.”

  “Well, you try again, that’s all,” said the whore. “Find some nice girl to take care of you and give a shit sometimes. A guy like you? Come on.”

  “I don’
t know. Maybe you’re right.”

  “All the girls say what a great guy you are. I’m serious. You’ve got a really good reputation.”

  Weiss smiled faintly. “Well…That’s nice to hear.”

  “You’re a romantic, I’ll bet that’s what it is,” the whore said. “One of these guys—you’re into your fantasies more than you’re into real life.”

  “Damn it,” said Weiss. “I told Casey: No more psychology majors.”

  She had a pretty laugh. “Very funny. I’m going for my MBA, so ha ha.”

  She reached back and unhooked her bra. Nice breasts, excellent breasts, first-rate. Round, high, large pink aureoles. Weiss caught his breath, sure enough, at the sight of them. But even now he was distracted, half his mind on that flight of stairs, that locked door…Every second counted.

  The whore came to him. Still in her panties but with her breasts bare. She knelt on his chair, her knee between his legs. Stroked the hair above his ears and kissed his face gently. Weiss put his scotch aside. Brushed the girl’s flesh with his fingers. He was stirred down deep by the softness of her. But she whispered: “Hey, you, your mind’s wandering.” She crooked a finger under the big detective’s chin, tilted it up till his eyes met hers. “I want your complete attention.”

  Weiss drew her down onto his lap. Hid his face against her and let her stroke him. Buried his face in the soft dark of her.

  “Mm, now you’re with me,” said the whore, caressing him.