Damnation Street wab-3

by Andrew Klavan

  Bishop nodded politely, but he didn't believe it for a second. He thought if Adalian had another life, he'd want to come back as Adalian only with even more money.

  "But let's be realistic here," Adalian went on. He sat back now in his chair, hooking a thumb in his belt, making little motions in the air with his free hand. "I'm not that guy. And-and this is the point I'm getting to-neither are you. I mean, come on, what is that? What kind of small-ball life is that for a big-league player like yourself? Are you starting to see what I'm saying?"

  "No," said Bishop.

  "I'm saying you should be working for me."

  Well, this was a day full of surprises. Bishop wasn't expecting that at all. "Oh," he said.

  "This," Adalian said, with another grand gesture at the crummy little room, "this is what you might call your natural habitat. Being my guy is the job you were born for. So I'm gonna give it to you. That's how I'm gonna pay you back for rescuing my piss puddle of a son."

  Bishop sat still, in his usual slouch, with his usual ironic half smile on his face. He gazed at Adalian's hawklike features through his pale eyes and gave nothing away. But he was interested. He was thinking: Yeah. Maybe. Why not? He was out of work. He couldn't survive forever without a paycheck. He couldn't even survive a very small part of forever. And Adalian was probably right. This was probably the sort of thing he was made for in the end. It was like his fate catching up to him or something like that.

  "What kind of job are we talking about?" he asked.

  Adalian made that little motion-a little circular motion in the air-with his hand. "What do you mean what kind of job? A job for me. Doing what you do. Being who you are. Expressing your inner Bishop, whatever. Good money too. Real money. Genuine happy-time cash. Plus whatever else you feel like. Girls? I run girls'll suck your dick so hard, your socks'll come through it. You like to travel? I got business in Thailand, Russia, China now, the Middle East. Plus there'll be plenty of the kind of psycho violent stuff you get your rocks off on, and you won't have Weiss hanging over you, wagging his finger or whatever. Plus the next time that what's-his-name, the nigger, Ketchum-next time he rousts you, you can beat the living shit out of him on me, and he won't be able to do a goddamned thing about it. How's that sound?"

  Bishop was still sitting in that way he sat, still smiling that way he smiled. And the truth was, it sounded pretty good. The way he was feeling-fuck Weiss, fuck Ketchum, fuck everything-it sounded like just what the doctor ordered.

  "Come on, Bishop," Adalian said. "You don't belong with a guy like Weiss. Guys like Weiss, they mess with a man's head. They think they make the rules of the world. I mean, I'm talking philosophically here, if you can understand me. A guy like Weiss: you cut a man's heart out for the fucking government, he gets all misty-eyed, calls you a hero. You do it for me, suddenly you're the bad guy." He gave an elaborate shrug and made a sound with his lips like pffft. "Where the hell is that written? It's just him. It's just the way he looks at it. So you look at it another way; I look at it another way. So what? He got on you about that bitch, I'll bet, didn't he? That bitch in the papers who got charged with murder. I'll bet he got way down on you for that."

  For all his self-control, Bishop couldn't keep the answer from showing itself in his eyes. Not that Weiss had said anything to him about the girl, but he didn't have to. Bishop figured he knew where Weiss stood.

  Adalian pointed a finger at him and laughed. "Eh? Eh? What did I tell you? He gets in your head; he fucks with your brain. Weiss, see, he's not open-minded. He needs to be more open-minded. This is San Francisco, right? This is a very open-minded town. That's why I've done so well here."

  Bishop frowned, considering. He had often thought similar sorts of things himself.

  Adalian sat back in his chair, folded his hands over his belly as if he'd just finished a satisfying meal. "So what do you say? Good work. Good money. Good-bye bullshit. What's not to like?"

  Bishop wasn't sure why he hesitated. It wasn't anything that Ketchum had said about his dying in prison or anything. He was already pretty well sure he was going to die in prison one way or another. This way might be fun, at least. It sounded like his sort of thing. He took to heart what Adalian said about Weiss and his stifling rules and his dis- approving attitude. That had always bothered him. Still, he hesitated. This-this job Adalian was offering him-this was exactly what Weiss had been trying to keep him from. This was exactly where Weiss had seen him going when he'd dragged him out under the Golden Gate Bridge that night and beat him senseless and advised him not to live out his life as a piece of shit. Bishop got pissed off at Weiss sometimes, but Weiss was all right, more or less. Somewhere deep down, he sort of hated to disappoint Weiss after Weiss had gone and made a project of him and everything.

  So he didn't answer right away. He sat there thinking.

  That made Adalian impatient. Adalian was a busy man. He only had so much time for this back-and-forth shit. You were either in or out. He leaned forward on the desk again. He dropped his voice to an intimate just-between-you-and-me tone. "Hey," he said. "Let me be frank with you on another score. Speaking strictly careerwise? Weiss is not exactly a long-term proposition anyway."

  Bishop shifted in his chair. He worked the corner of his lip under his teeth. "What do you mean?"

  "I'm just saying. If you're looking to invest in the future, his is limited."

  "What do you mean?" Bishop said again.

  "How clear do I have to be?" said Adalian.

  "Clear," said Bishop. "What do you mean? You mean there's a whack on him or something? There's a contract out on Weiss?"

  Adalian only shrugged, as much as to say, You said it, not me.

  Bishop fell silent again another second or two. This also was news. And it probably had a much different effect on him than Adalian intended. It bothered him. It bothered him more than he wanted to admit or even to feel. An electric sense of urgency fanned out from his belly, up through his chest. He was worried about Weiss, about Weiss getting whacked-just the sort of ordinary human emotion he never expected from himself, that always caught him off guard. Only his natural instinct for cool allowed him to speak in his usual ironic drawl. "Hell, what's that about? Is this because he put you away? You gonna whack him because of the seven months he put you away for?"

  "What?" said Adalian. "Oh no, hell no. I'm not like that. I'm not a spiteful person. Weiss did his job, that's all. Me, I move on, I look to tomorrow. This isn't about me."

  "So what's it about? What, did you hear this?"

  "Sure. A man in my position. You know, I pick things up; I hear things, yeah."

  "So it's a rumor," said Bishop. He was inclined to disbelieve it. Aside from the hookers, Weiss was clean. You never get hit if you're really clean, or almost never.

  Adalian still didn't really understand how this was working on Bishop. He thought if he could prove what he was saying, Bishop would see there was no future with Weiss and take the job with him. "You know the Frenchman?" he said.

  "The Belgian guy, sure."

  "I referred a guy to him."

  "So?"

  "A guy I know. A guy who did some work for me."

  "A specialist," said Bishop. "A whack guy…"

  "He was stocking up for a job."

  "Did he say it was Weiss?"

  Adalian slowly shook his head. "We didn't talk particulars." He relaxed back into his chair again, a little knowing smile on his lips like a cat sitting by an empty goldfish bowl. He waited for Bishop to figure it out.

  And Bishop did figure it out, some of it anyway. He figured out which specialist they were talking about. He knew how much Weiss wanted the guy, and he knew how much the specialist wanted Weiss. He knew about the missing whore too, some of it. He knew the whore was between them. He knew if they were going to come down to it, it was going to be over the whore.

  Bishop went on looking ironic, looking cool. But he felt that urgency spreading through him, growing deeper. He felt something else as we
ll. He was irritated. He was pissed off-pissed off at Weiss. If the specialist was gunning for him, then Weiss must've made a move to find the whore. That's what the specialist was waiting for; that's the only thing that would bring him out into the open. What the hell was Weiss thinking? Did he think he could take this mutt down, finish it off between them-and maybe get a couple of flutter-eyed thanks from the whore in the bargain? That would be stupid. Stupid? It would be fucking nuts. Weiss was a street cop, a door-to-door desk-and-paper man. Tough and all that, fine up against some liquor-store shooter. But not this guy. He was no match for this guy. Man-to-man against the specialist, he would get himself killed and the whore probably with him.

  Adalian was still stuck on the other thing, the thing about the job. "So what do you think?" he said, breaking into Bishop's thoughts. "You're my guy now, right? I pay you back for my piss-head kid; you work for me and get the life you were made for. Yes? No? What do you say?"

  Bishop stood up. The second he saw it-saw the way Bishop stood-Adalian understood his mistake. He threw his hands up and let them fall until they slapped the chair arms. He made a big show of gaping at Bishop with an open mouth. "Oh, come on," he said. "Don't tell me."

  Bishop made a little gesture of regret, a lifting of the hand, a shrug. He would've liked to take the job. He really would've. "You can consider us clear for your kid," he said. "You paid me back with the tip on Weiss, the stuff about the Frenchman."

  "Aw, come on, Bishop," Adalian said. "Whatta you think you're doing? You think you're gonna stop this. You're not gonna stop this. Believe me. I know this guy. This guy did work for me. He'll kill you, Bishop, even you, so help me. What do you think? You think you're gonna, like, redeem yourself? Make good with Weiss over the girl? Save his life, get back in his good graces. Believe me. This guy will plain kill you. You and Weiss both."

  "I'll see you, Adalian," Bishop said.

  "I'll see you. I'll identify your body, how's that? And don't expect any help from me with the Frenchman either. You're on your own there."

  Bishop only lifted his chin by way of farewell. He walked to the door.

  "And take that shower," Adalian said behind him. "I'm serious. You fucking stink. You dumb fuck."

  Bishop waved without looking back. He stepped out into the main bay of the warehouse. The limo was still there, waiting for him. The brown-skinned gunman was leaning against the hood, smoking a cigarette. The other gunman, the arm breaker, Morris, he was nowhere to be seen-and then suddenly he was. Suddenly he stepped out of a shadow along the wall at Bishop's shoulder. He was hunched and angry-eyed, his bruised face flushed. He had his Glock drawn. He had it pressed close to his side, the bore leveled at Bishop.

  "This isn't over between you and me," he snarled. "We'll settle up and it's gonna cost you in blood."

  Bishop took his gun away and smacked him in the nose with it. He left him writhing and screaming on the ware- house floor and walked over to the brown-skinned gunman. He handed the brown-skinned gunman Morris's gun.

  "Drive me back to my place," he said. "I got stuff to do."

  14.

  Weiss hit Hannock that same day and started tailing a man named Andy Bremer. He hated following people. It was boring and sleazy. You sat in a car and drank coffee till you needed to piss so badly you thought it would kill you. Then, without fail, just as you decided to go find a bathroom somewhere, your subject started moving and you had to hold it in and go after him. Finally, your bladder on fire, you ended up watching the poor bastard try to steal something he shouldn't steal or buy something he shouldn't buy or fuck someone he shouldn't fuck-in other words, you watched him trying to find some pathetic version of happiness even as you knew all the while that he would never be happy ever again precisely because you were watching him and were going to tell the person who hired you, who was probably the person your subject least wanted told. Fucking was the worst. Standing outside some hotel window, needing to piss, snapping pictures of some guy's hairy ass bouncing up and down between some girl's open knees. Weiss had a romantic streak. He knew full well this moment might seem like hearts and flowers inside the guy's head, inside the girl's head too. But outside the hotel window, it was just a bouncing ass and open knees. Some photographs. A screaming spouse. Alimony. Misery all around.

  With Andy Bremer, he wasn't even sure he was trailing the right guy. It was just one of his Weissian hunches that had brought him here. And while his hunches were almost always right, he almost never trusted them. They were too vague, too unscientific. He wished he could write out the facts on a whiteboard or something and look them over and tap the pen against his chin and reach his conclusions through logic and deduction. But he never could. He just knew what he knew, so he never felt certain of it.

  In Paradise, for instance, he started with the fact that Julie Wyant had called him from a pay phone. There were other calls made from that pay phone as well, but somehow he just had a hunch they weren't hers. He figured she wasn't using a cell phone because it would be too easy to locate. He figured she wouldn't use the same pay phone twice for a similar reason-Weiss might trace the call she'd made to him and find out who she'd called next. So using an old contact at the phone company from his police days, he collected some calls from other pay phones in the area, calls that had been made within an hour or so of the call to him. There weren't that many pay phones around anymore, but he still managed to come up with more than thirty calls. The call to Andy Bremer in Hannock caught him somehow. He wasn't sure why. It was made about the right time and Bremer lived in the direction Julie was traveling and-well, it just caught him. It was one of those Weiss-type things.

  So he set off for Hannock, to the northeast. It was a little oasis of oak and evergreens and clapboard ranches on the edge of the desert. It was pleasant and shady, but every street seemed to end in dust. The dust ended at the snowcapped Sierra Nevada rising in the distance against a sky made pale by a scudding mist of clouds. With all that nature and emptiness everywhere, the town felt to Weiss like the frontier outpost it had once been. It was the kind of place that made him itch to be elsewhere. He was a city boy through and through.

  He drove his drab Taurus down the deserted morning streets, past open playing fields and a silent flat-roofed school and into deeper shadows under clustered junipers. At the end of one tree-lined lane, he parked outside Bremer's house. It was a gray two-story with gingerbread trim on a peaked roof, one of the few two-story houses in the neighborhood.

  No one was awake yet inside. Weiss drank a Styro of coffee he'd picked up at a gas station food mart on the edge of town. He watched the house. He wondered if the specialist was watching him or just tracking him from somewhere nearby. He checked up and down the shadowed street. There were cars parked along the curb. He didn't see any people in them, but he knew the killer was out there somewhere. Just a question of where, that's all.

  Sipping his coffee, he read the pages he had printed off the Internet, off the computers in the hotel in Paradise. There was a biography of Bremer from a United Way site and some pictures from his real estate home page. Every time Weiss read the material, his stomach grew more sour and he became more convinced he was following the wrong guy. Bremer looked squeaky clean. A family man in his mid-sixties. Small, barrel-chested, energetic-looking. A Realtor. Married to what looked like his second wife, a slim, pert, attractive lady in her forties. Two kids: a girl maybe six, a boy maybe seven.

  Weiss finished the coffee. He hauled a leather case up off the floor. He unzipped it and took out his camera, a Canon Rebel. He screwed on a 300mm zoom. He peered through the lens into Bremer's kitchen window. It was a nice, clear view.

  The man himself came into the kitchen around half past seven in the morning. His son and daughter were clamoring at his heels. The kids sat at the kitchen table, the boy playing with a toy car, the girl with a doll. They gabbed at their father while he made a pot of coffee. Then he started to stir up some waffle mix in a metal bowl.

  After a while th
e wife came in, wearing a bathrobe. She kissed her husband and poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot. She drank the coffee leaning against a counter, watching the kids shovel waffles into their mouths. She laughed as they scraped the last drops of maple syrup off their plates. Bremer washed the dishes, meanwhile, and chatted with the missus over his shoulder.

  " Uy, " Weiss groaned to himself. Wrong place. Wrong guy. A bad hunch, a waste of time.

  Maybe Bremer wasn't what he seemed, but he sure seemed to be what he seemed. Everyone has secrets and everyone lies. But mostly it's nothing. Mostly they're just hiding things that make them feel small and sad. They have less money than they pretend, less sex. They drink more than they say. They watch more TV. They use drugs and pretend they don't. They look at pornography and pretend they don't. They steal in one way or another. Their kids are going bad. They're ashamed of their dreams.

  Weiss was sure Bremer had his secrets too, told his lies just like everyone. But sitting in his Taurus, peering through his camera into the guy's kitchen window, it seemed pretty unlikely that this was a man who got phone calls from hookers on the run from contract killers.

  After breakfast the Bremer family got dressed and went to church. Weiss followed them there. When they were safely inside, he returned to their empty house and went in.