Damnation Street wab-3

by Andrew Klavan

  Damnation Street

  ( Weiss and Bishop - 3 )

  Andrew Klavan

  Damnation Street

  Andrew Klavan

  Part One

  The Case of the Distant Daddy's Girl

  1.

  Paradise was a crap town. With the summer tourists gone, the main street was deserted after nightfall. Trash rattled along the gutters, blown by the harbor wind. Darkened storefronts stared into the emptiness beyond the far sidewalk. Somewhere in that emptiness, the ocean waves crashed down and whispered away.

  Scott Weiss walked past the shops, heading for his hotel. He was a man in his fifties, a big man with a paunch. He had a sad, ugly face. Deep bags under world-weary eyes. A bulbous nose. Sagging cheeks. Unkempt salt-and-pepper hair. He wore a gray overcoat. He kept his hands in the pockets, his broad shoulders hunched. The shop windows reflected him as he went past them leaning into the wind.

  His hotel was the only hotel on the street. It was two stories, clapboard, yellow with white trim. It had white pillars holding up a balcony with a white rail. Weiss moved under the balcony to the front door. The door was glass. His reflection was there too. He looked into his own mournful eyes as he approached it. He pushed inside.

  The hotel lobby was paneled in oak, stained a deep brown. There was a fire in the large fireplace. There was a heavy oak reception counter in front of the manager's office. There was no one behind the counter, no one anywhere in the lobby. The door to the office was closed.

  Weiss stood at the counter and rapped his knuckles on the wood. He waited. The office door opened and a woman came out. She was about forty, short and chesty, frazzled, blond. She was wearing yellow slacks and a purple turtle-neck, a cheerfully loud combination. She hesitated when she saw Weiss. Something flickered in the look she gave him. Whatever it was, it passed. She came ahead to the counter, stood across from him.

  "Chilly out there tonight, isn't it?" she said. Her voice was toneless. She didn't look up at him. "Two thirteen," she said, and turned to the cubbyholes on the wall behind her to fetch his key.

  Weiss had a knack for reading people. He could tell what they were thinking. He could often guess what they would do. Sometimes the smallest gesture could give him what he needed.

  Now, for instance, he could see that the woman behind the counter was scared.

  He took the room key from her pale fingers. The woman pressed her lips together. It looked like she wanted to say something, to tell him something, to warn him maybe about what was waiting for him upstairs. But how could she? How could she know who the good guys and bad guys were, what was safe, what wasn't? It was smarter for her to just keep her mouth shut. So that's what she did.

  Weiss smiled at her with one corner of his mouth. He wanted her to know it was all right. "Good night," he said.

  The woman tried to answer, but it didn't come off.

  Weiss moved away from her. He walked to the wooden stairs. He felt the woman watching him as he went. The hotel windows knocked and rattled in the wind. He climbed heavily up to the second floor.

  He trudged along the second-floor gallery. He shifted the room key into his left hand. His right hand slipped inside his overcoat, inside his tweed jacket, to his shoulder holster. He wriggled out his old snub-nosed. 38. It wasn't much of a gun, a real antique at this point. A relic from his days on the SFPD, back before they shifted over to the Berettas. Slow and inaccurate, it wouldn't be much use against the man who was after him. The man who was after him was a professional, a genuine whack specialist. If he wanted Weiss dead, he would make Weiss dead, ancient. 38 or no. Still, Weiss liked the feel of the gun in his hand. Better than nothing. He kept it pressed against his middle as he went down the gallery.

  He reached the room, two thirteen. He tried the knob, but the door was locked, just the way he'd left it. He unlocked it. He pushed it in.

  The room was dark. He stood where he was, on the threshold. He reached in and felt along the wall for the light switch. He found it, flicked it up. Nothing. The light did not come on.

  Weiss felt his heart beat harder. He cursed silently. Maybe that's all the specialist wanted. Maybe he was watching from somewhere, spying on him, playing with him, cat and mouse. Maybe he just wanted to see Weiss pale and sweating and scared.

  Well, congratulations, he thought. You sick schmuck.

  He stepped into the room. He shut the door behind him. An act of defiance: to hell with the dark. The dark got thicker. The curtains were closed, only a pale beam from a streetlamp fell through the crack between them. Weiss moved in that light from shadow to shadow. He made his way to the bathroom, reached inside. When he flicked the switch, the bulb worked, the light came on in there, glinting off the white tile walls. That lit his way back to the main room, to the desk lamp and the bedside lamp. He turned those on as well.

  The room was empty. A small wood-paneled room, crowded with a bed and a weathered writing table.

  Weiss holstered his gun. He moved to the bed, sat down on the edge of it, letting out a sigh. His heart beat hard for a few more seconds, then it eased. The back of his neck felt damp against his overcoat collar.

  Might've been nothing. Nerves. The hotel clerk might really not have been afraid at all. He might've imagined it. The lightbulb might have blown out on its own. The killer might never have been in the room at all.

  Didn't matter. He was here, sure enough. Somewhere. Somewhere close. Watching him. Listening to him. Dogging every step.

  Weiss's bottle of scotch, his Macallan, was on the writing desk, beside the blotter. After a while he got up, stripped off his overcoat, dumped it on the bed. He fetched a water glass from the bathroom. He sat at the desk and poured himself a measure of whiskey. He lifted the glass to his mouth with his left hand. Held it there and let the scent sting his nostrils. With his right hand, he reached into the pocket of his jacket and drew out his picture of the whore.

  He laid the photograph on the desk, on the blotter, framed against the green felt. He sipped his scotch and looked down at her.

  She was one goddamned beautiful whore, all right. Julie Wyant, her name was. She had red-gold hair and blue eyes. She had an ivory-and-rose complexion. She had a dreamy gaze. Weiss liked that about her especially: her dreamy, faraway gaze.

  Weiss didn't know much about her, but he knew what there was to know. She had worked out of San Francisco. She was especially popular with middle-aged men. Some guys reach a certain stage of life, and they get all syrupy and nos talgic. She appealed to guys like that. She was gentle and a little spacey, and she had a face like an angel. Her face seemed to remind these men of girls they used to imagine when they were young, girls they made up before they knew real girls. She reminded Weiss of that kind of girl too.

  Anyway, she had caught the attention of a professional killer, a whack specialist the newspapers liked to call the Shadowman. Weiss knew this guy. He'd been after him since his cop days. The specialist spent one night with Julie. He hurt her-a lot-that was love's sweet song to this sick piece of shit. He hurt her, then he told her he wanted to keep her with him forever.

  Julie believed him. That's why she vanished.

  She had phoned Weiss once, at his apartment in Russian Hill. It was the only time he had ever talked to her. She had phoned him and begged him not to try to find her. She knew about Weiss. She knew he was considered one of the best locate men in the business. He could find people because of that way he had of reading them, of guessing what they would do. And she knew he had been hunting the Shadow-man for years. Julie was afraid he would come after her in order to draw the killer out into the open. She was afraid he would find her and then the killer would find her too. So she had phoned Weiss and begged him not to look for h
er.

  Weiss had traced the phone call to a pay booth here in Paradise. That's how he knew where to start looking.

  Weiss sipped his scotch. He studied the picture. She was one goddamned beautiful whore. He wondered if maybe that's why he was here. Maybe it wasn't because of the killer but just because she had an angel's face and it reminded him of the girls he'd made up in his mind when he was younger. Or maybe it was the fact that his business-his private detective agency back in San Francisco-was failing and he needed to get away. Whatever the reason, he had left the business behind-he had left everything behind-and come here to find her.

  And the killer was following him. Watching him. Listening to him. Dogging his every step, just as Julie had said he would. Weiss was pretty sure there were tracking devices in his car, maybe even in his clothes. He didn't bother looking for them. If he took them out, the killer would just put them back again. The killer was following him, that's all there was to it. When Weiss found Julie, the killer would find her too, just as she had said.

  And then they would settle it. Weiss and the Shadow-man. They would settle it between them.

  Weiss sipped his scotch. He studied the picture, looked into those dreamy, faraway eyes. He remembered how she had begged him-begged him in her warm voice to stay away. He had tried to do what she wanted. He really had tried.

  But in the end, he couldn't help himself.

  2.

  "Three," said the Frenchman.

  The customer said nothing. He snapped open the clasps on one of the black aluminum briefcases on the desk between them, the first case, the one to his left. He opened the lid and peered inside.

  The Frenchman stole a glance at him, at his eyes. Strange eyes. Not cold or cruel or deadly. Just empty. Like a machine's. No, like a mannequin's. The Frenchman felt a chill in his belly.

  He went on: "Very wise, very strategic." He knew he was babbling, but he couldn't stop. Those eyes. He needed to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was his own. "Your ordinary policeman feels a great satisfaction when he finds the first. He thinks himself, oh, very smart. When he finds the second, he is a law-enforcement genius. That is the end of it, almost always. No one searches for three."

  The customer said nothing. He lifted the gun from the case. It was a 9mm SIG P210 with a modified mag release, the most accurate 9mm available. The customer turned it over in his hand, letting the daylight play on it.

  The light was pouring in through the high windows on the wall behind the Frenchman. It fell in two broad beams on the men and the desk between them. They were in an office on the second story of a red-brick town house. It was small, cluttered. The customer was sitting in a tubular steel chair. The Frenchman sat in an old, tattered green swiveler. The desk was big, wooden, marked with cigarette burns and scars. All around them, broken crates, cardboard boxes, catalogs and mail were jumbled and piled up on carpet the color of static. There were no decorations, no pictures. Just the piled-up garbage against the white plaster walls.

  The Frenchman watched the customer for another short while. The chill in his belly grew chillier by the second. Finally, he'd had enough. He swiveled around, his back to the other man. He looked out the window.

  Like a ghost, he thought. Despite the cool of the autumn day, he felt his armpits beginning to run under his pearl-buttoned cowboy shirt. He puffed his cheeks, blew out a breath. The man has the eyes of a ghost.

  The Frenchman was no work of art himself. He wasn't French either-he was Belgian, but the sort of people he dealt with couldn't handle the distinction. Gnomish, hunched, sallow, he had damp lips and rheumy yellow eyes under a wispy blond comb-over. He was sixty-seven, but he dressed younger, wore jeans and the white cowboy shirt and a blue bandanna tied around his turkey-gullet throat. Sometimes he suspected this sort of outfit made him look ridiculous. Jeans riding just beneath his tits. A cowboy shirt misshapen by his sunken chest and his bulging, flaccid belly. But what could he do? This was San Francisco, a young town. You wanted to do business here, you had to look jaunty. This was as close to jaunty as he could get.

  He heard the clasps of the second briefcase snap open behind him. The customer was looking at the. 45 now. A 1911 retooled into a compact powerhouse. Shoot a man in the guts with that at close range, and there'd be nothing left in the middle of him. He'd just be a head on top of a pair of feet.

  The Frenchman waited, killed another minute looking out at the bright blue day. Across the street were the pastel town houses of Haight-Ashbury, a half-block row of them. A young mother pushed a stroller along the sidewalk beneath. The Frenchman savored the shape of her breasts in her orange sweater. As he watched her pass, a chorus of men's shouts rose to him through the floor.

  " Heeyai! Heeyai! Heeyai! "

  A deep sound, a strong sound. He drew it into himself with a breath.

  It was coming from the dojo directly beneath him, on street level. It was his dojo. They were his men. They were big, muscular brutes, real bully boys, black belts all of them, not just black but with red stripes and Japanese letters and God knew what else. They were practicing their martial arts, going through their motions and routines, chopping the air with their hands, kicking the air. Shouting like that.

  " Heeyai! Heeyai! "

  They were the Frenchman's security system. Nice and legal, nothing he had to pay off the cops for. And there was no way to get to the stairs except through them. Usually just the sound of their voices, their presence, made the Frenchman feel safe up here.

  Not today, though. Not with this one.

  He heard the third briefcase snap open. He swiveled back around to face the other man.

  "Remarkable, isn't it?" he heard himself saying. His accent sounded overdone and oily even to himself. "The very latest thing."

  Again, the customer answered nothing. He only lifted the Saracen and held it before him in his open hand.

  "You see the size? It hardly covers your fingers. And the weight, you feel that?" the Frenchman rattled on. "One and a half pounds loaded. Delayed blowback. Very low felt recoil. But it can pierce standard body armor at three hundred meters. I've seen it done."

  The customer ignored him. He never took that strange, empty gaze from the weapon. He worked the slide. Jacked the magazine.

  "Twenty rounds," the Frenchman said. "In a weapon that size. Imagine. Twenty."

  The customer ignored him.

  The Frenchman felt the sweat trickling down his sides. What the hell was this guy anyway? Some kind of specialist, obviously. A good one too-you could tell just by the way he handled the weapons. But if he was so good, why did he need so much hardware? And the Saracen-that would stop a tank. What was he going up against, an army? Who was he so afraid of?

  Adalian had referred him. That was good. That meant security was guaranteed. Usually it also meant you were dealing with businessmen, men concerned with nothing but profit. That was the way the Frenchman liked it. It was cleaner, safer. But three guns? The Saracen? That smacked of a passion job, possibly even something political. Much messier stuff, much more likely to blow out of control, attract attention. The Frenchman wished he had questioned Adalian more closely at the outset. As it was, all he knew about the customer was his name, the name he went by: John Foy.

  The man himself gave nothing away. Except for his eyes, he was average-looking. In fact, his features were so ordinary, the Frenchman thought they would be difficult to describe. He wore colorless slacks and a bland striped shirt. A khaki windbreaker zipped at the bottom. Everything so plain, so commonplace, it was almost a form of camouflage. Like a ghost, he thought. Everything like a ghost. Invisible.

  The customer slowly laid the Saracen back in its case, back in the space cut for it in the cushioning gray foam. He sat in the straight-backed metal chair with his shoulders slightly hunched, his hands clasped between his thighs. He looked from one open case to another, one weapon to another. He said nothing. He just sat and looked with his mannequin eyes.

  The Frenchman waited,
sweating. Finally, he couldn't take it. "Three," he said again, just to say something.

  The customer nodded almost imperceptibly. His voice was toneless.

  "Yes," he said.

  3.

  The blue afternoon had dimmed and it was evening now. Mist was gathering and making halos around the street-lamps. The man who called himself John Foy walked under the haloed lamps. He carried his three guns in a brown paper bag, rolled up so he could grip it in one hand, his right hand, held down by his side.

  He walked along Eighth Street, and it was as the Frenchman said of him: he was invisible. Even the gutter bums didn't ask him for a handout. Boozing at the curb outside the liquor store, squabbling in a litter of torn tickets near the betting office exit, sleeping in bags and boxes in the doorways between the bail bondsmen and the diner, they didn't even look at him as he went by. No one did. No one ever did.

  He walked past unnoticed and then, unnoticed, he was gone. Off the streets, climbing a narrow stair between peeling gray walls. In at a scarred brown door. Entering a room with one curtained window.

  He brushed the light switch up as he shut the door. There was a single bulb in the ceiling covered by a frosted glass plate. It gave off a sickly yellow glow, making hard shadows of the moths and flies that had been caught in the plate and died there. The glow showed a small room, two wooden chairs with foam cushions, a TV on a scratched wooden bureau, and a sagging single bed pushed against the grimy wall.

  Murder had been good to the Shadowman. He'd made millions at it over the years. But he dwelled in places like this almost always, one place like this after another. Restless, indifferent, and anonymous, he came and stayed awhile and moved on. He would be gone from this room before morning.

  He shuffled slowly to the bed. He was breathing a little harder after his climb up the stairs. There was a sheen of sweat on his nondescript face. He sat down on the edge of the bed wearily. He set the brown paper bag on his knees. He opened it, peered inside it like a schoolboy wondering what his mother had packed for lunch. He drew the guns out one by one. The SIG, then the. 45, then the Saracen. He laid them neatly on the bed side by side.