Shotgun Alley

by Andrew Klavan

  Instead, the stranger had scrambled to his feet. He’d come in low and fast before anyone caught sight of him. Now he unleashed a vicious side snap of his leg that sent his heavy motorcycle boot smack into the bridge of Mad Dog’s nose.

  This genuinely annoyed Mad Dog. He had been a good sport up to now, but that just wasn’t funny. He clutched the bottom half of his face and he could feel the blood coursing out of his nostrils over his upper lip. Plus the stranger continued to attack, standing over him, grabbing his hair, looking for all the world as if he were planning to drive his thumb down into Mad Dog’s eye.

  Mad Dog’s famous chair fell over backward as he erupted to his feet. At the same time, he threw his massive arms out and knocked the stranger away. The stranger went dancing back a few steps, stumbled, and dropped hard onto his ass.

  Mad Dog stood a moment. He waggled his head, trying to clear it. When he looked around, the stranger had gotten up again, had drawn himself up into a fighting stance.

  A low rumble started in Mad Dog’s unfathomable depths, and in another instant it had risen through him and burst from his mouth in a ferocious bellow of rage. He charged at the stranger, three hundred pounds of psycho biker intent on ripping the smaller man to shreds as if he were a paper doll.

  The Outriders were out of their seats on the instant. They may not have been an official gang, but they followed the biker code. If one fought, they all fought together, right or wrong. Even as Mad Dog cannonballed into his enemy, they were up and ready to join the battle.

  Then the battle was over. The Outriders gaped. Cobra, Charlie, and Shorty stood frozen in their places. Honey, Meryl, and Selene looked on from their chairs with their jaws hanging slack.

  Mad Dog was now lying curled on his side. He was motionless except for his heaving breath. Spittle dribbled out between his broken teeth, and the blood from his nose made a spreading puddle on the floor.

  The stranger stood over him, pulled back again into his stance. He bounced on his toes, watching the rest of them, waiting for the rest of them to come.

  Cobra looked at him. Lifted one eyebrow. Cocked his china little, frowning with appreciation. “Pretty good,” he said.

  “Thanks,” said the stranger.

  “No, I mean it. That was awesome.”

  “Hey, well, really, thanks a lot.”

  “Of course, we still have to beat the shit out of you.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s a biker thing.”

  “I understand.”

  But the bust-up that followed was hardly the stuff of song and story. Most of the drinkers at the other tables quit spectating about halfway through. The band—the guitar and harmonica boys—never even left off rehearsing, and there were a couple of offbeat moments when the brawl was accompanied by a riff of rollicking bluegrass music just like the brawl in that western movie might’ve been.

  The three bikers rat-packed the new guy, jumped him all together. It was quick and ugly—but not entirely one-sided. The stranger really was tough. Outnumbered as he was, he still managed to put some definite hurt on his opponents. He dropped Charlie and all his muscles with a knee kick, and drove the wind right out of Shorty with a solar plexus blow. He even blackened Cobra’s eye with a quick piston of his elbow. In fact, he gave all three of them such a workout before they brought him down that by the time they were circled around his balled-up body aiming kicks at him with their steel-tipped boots they didn’t have much energy left for it.

  After a while, the stranger, his arms protecting his head and neck, managed to wriggle himself under a table where they couldn’t get at him. The raging Charlie hurled the table away, but the stranger then managed to scoot under another one, a booth this time that was fastened to the wall. The bikers’ kicks didn’t reach him too well under there, and though Cobra climbed onto one of the booth seats and shot some punches down at him, those didn’t do much damage, either.

  Finally, the bikers were just exhausted. They figured fuck it, they’d made their point. They left the stranger lying where he was and swaggered away.

  They went over to Mad Dog, tried to revive him. The three of them working in concert got him sitting up, propped against a wall. Mad Dog’s eyes opened, kind of rolled around at them for a second or two. Then he vomited. Beer and tacos mostly, a couple of undigested bennies. The other bikers let him go, disgusted. He slid down the wall to lie on his side again.

  Angrily slapping the puke off their jeans, the Outriders walked back to their seats and their women. They sat down again and took up their beers.

  “That was good,” said Shorty.

  “It was,” Cobra said. “A nice change from drinking. Sometimes you need a little break like that so you can come back refreshed.”

  “Uh…yeah,” said Shorty, clueless.

  “Oh, he elbowed you in the eye,” said Honey, brushing her fingertips over Cobra’s darkening bruise.

  “Y’know, I noticed that, too,” he told her. “In fact, overall, I’d have to say he had a very hostile attitude.”

  She was about to answer, but she didn’t answer. She stared instead. Cobra followed her stare, and then he stared. And then Shorty and Charlie and their women stared. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

  The stranger was climbing out from under the table. Standing. Coming toward them. One eye swollen shut. Blood running from his brow all over the side of his face. Lips all mashed up. Legs unsteady. Walking tilted over, clutching at his side.

  The bikers kept staring, and he kept coming. Then he stopped. Reached down. Lifted Mad Dog’s chair off the floor. Set it at the table. And plunked himself into it again.

  At that point, the barmaid brought over the beer Mad Dog had ordered.

  Now, the barmaid was a lady in her thirties and, maybe on account of her unhealthy habits, she was not as pretty as she once had been. But though her features were growing coarse, she still had a glamorous cascade of dyed blonde hair, and her tight T-shirt and tight jeans showed off massive round breasts, long legs, and a tight backside, all of which, she made sure, were jutting and shivering and swaying like a gelatin cuckoo clock as she approached. The whole way over, she squinted through her mascara at the fallen Mad Dog. She didn’t bother to hide her satisfaction at the sight of him down there, either. Once, not that long ago, the barmaid had made the mistake of dancing with Mad Dog. He had forced her out into the back alley and raped her. He’d given her a couple of grams of coke to keep her quiet, but it was really fear that shut her up—she knew he’d have killed her if she’d ever even thought about going to the cops. Anyway, the point is, she hated the fat bastard. She gave him a hard time whenever she dared, as much as she dared. And now, with a flourish, she plunked his beer down in front of the stranger.

  And she said, “On the house, baby.”

  It obviously hurt the stranger to smile at her with his mashed-up lips, but he tried. He wrapped his bloody hand around the glass.

  The barmaid gave a bold glare to the others at the table. Then she clocked her way back to the bar.

  They paid her no mind. Cobra and Honey, Shorty and Meryl, Charlie and Selene. They were still busy staring at the stranger. They’d stopped talking. Stopped drinking. They didn’t even have any expressions on their faces. They were just sitting there, staring at the stranger.

  The stranger took a careful sip of his beer. Cobra blinked. It was another second or two before he could gather his thoughts, get his head together. Finally, he made a gesture toward the glass in the stranger’s hand.

  “Y’know,” he said, “that’s Mad Dog’s beer.”

  “Is it?” said the stranger thickly. He lifted the glass to his busted mouth. Tilted it up. Drained the contents to its foam.

  He clapped the glass down on the table. He laughed.

  And Cobra laughed. And the rest of them started laughing, too.

  Four

  At about three o’clock that morning, the stranger staggered into his Berkeley apartment. He was drunk as hell b
y this time. Sick as hell and hurting bad. The taste of vomit was in his throat, and he was beginning to wonder if maybe he’d cracked a rib. Plus his guts were in a jumble. Plus his face was a fucking mess.

  He shut the door. He groaned. He leaned against the wall wearily, watching the dark room spin.

  It had been a good night. From the first moment he’d walked into Shotgun Alley. He still remembered—he could still recall—the feeling of it. Knowing the fight was coming, everything inside him bright and still and clear. And then dropping that psycho Mad Dog—that was pure pleasure. And so was drinking with Cobra, who was a smart and funny guy. And watching Honey, running his eyes over Honey, thinking about how fine it would feel to peel those jeans off her…

  Leaving out the part about getting kicked to shit, it had been a good night all around.

  But he was finished now, wiped out. Hurt, drunk, sick, the rest of it. He wanted to drop down onto the bed like a tree falling. He wanted to sleep right through his hangover and into the night to come. If there was one thing he didn’t want, it was to sit down and write a goddamned report to his goddamned boss.

  But his goddamned boss would be expecting it when he came in to work in the morning. And when he thought of the old man’s weary, heavy face, of those hangdog eyes and their expectations…

  Aw, fuck him, he thought.

  But the truth was, he didn’t want to disappoint him.

  So with another groan, he reached over and flicked up the light switch. He tried to lift his head off the wall and look around him, narrowing his eyes against the glare.

  The apartment was big and mostly empty. A bed in the next room, a table and some chairs in here. Nothing on the wall, no pictures, nothing personal. It was a sublet, just another short sublet. He never stayed anywhere long. He lived in motion, from one place to another. Something in him always racing like an engine. Anything began to feel like home and he was history, he was a trail of dust.

  He pushed himself upright. Started across the room. He shed his leather jacket as he went, dropped it on the floor. He made his crabbed, wounded way over to the table by the window. Settled into the chair there, wincing, holding on to his side. With his free hand, he opened the desk’s front drawer. He wrangled out the palmtop computer he had in there, plus a portable keyboard. He hooked them together, working hunched forward, baring his teeth in pain.

  While the palmtop booted up, his eyes sank closed. Unseen, the world spun lazily round. His stomach yawed. He had to jack his eyes open fast. He looked out the window to steady himself. A pretty woman’s gigantic face—a billboard advertising a bank—grinned brilliantly down on Telegraph Avenue. On the sidewalk below her, trash skittered past a beggar asleep in a cardboard box. The scene went in and out of focus, dipped and turned—Christ, he was plowed. He stared at it, waving in his seat like a cornstalk in the breeze. He stared at it till it came straight.

  “Awright, awright,” he muttered then.

  He hauled his attention to the palmtop. He placed his quaky, blood-encrusted fingers on the keys. He thought for a minute. And then one corner of his swollen mouth lifted. That ironical smile.

  Weiss, he typed carefully. I’m in.

  Five

  Foof, thought Scott Weiss. Bishop. You crazy fuck. You’re killing me here.

  He read the e-mail over, unconsciously moving his hand to his stomach. This op of his was going to give him an ulcer one of these days.

  Weiss. I’m in. The gìrl is with them. Attached at the crotch to this Tweedy character, the one who calls himself Cobra. I’ll have to poke a wedge in between them and fast, it looks like—they’re a bad bunch and they talk like they’re working on some kind of big job. I’ll check with the client, see how he wants to deal. Too beat up and boozed up to think it out right now. The Angel Withers connect was solid, btw, thanks. Talk to you. JB

  Weiss swiveled back and forth a little in his chair. He went on massaging his paunch with his hand. Did Bishop do this shit to him on purpose? he wondered. Use those phrases? Joined at the crotch? Poke a wedge in between them? Poke a wedge! Oh hell, of course he did it on purpose. It amused him to taunt Weiss with his sexual exploits, with all his exploits. Getting boozed up and beat up. Poking in his wedge.

  For fuck’s sake, Bishop.

  Bishop knew—he had to know—that this was a big client for Weiss, a big case for Weiss Investigations. He knew Weiss would disapprove of him pulling his usual stunts and bullshit. The women, the fights, the cool disregard for any rule anywhere. And he knew Weiss would feel like an old woman because he did disapprove.

  And maybe he knew the worst of it, too: that under all the disapproval, Weiss envied him. Sure. Weiss was Weiss; he couldn’t kid himself. He envied Bishop for the way women lay down for him and the way Bishop didn’t care, especially the way he didn’t goddamn care…

  His intercom buzzed. Weiss clicked the e-mail shut, shaking his head. He swiveled to the phone, pressed the button. He heard the receptionist, Amy.

  “Professor Brinks is here.”

  “All right,” said Weiss. He gave a heavy sigh. “Send him in.”

  Six

  The professor turned out to be a woman, though. Forty maybe. Small and lean but sturdily built—or sturdy-looking, anyway—in a no-nonsense navy pantsuit with a jacket tailored to hide her torso in slashing angles and straight lines. She was pretty enough, Weiss thought, but in an awfully severe sort of way. Elegant, narrow features framed by straight black hair. Quick, fierce, challenging brown eyes.

  Sure, Weiss thought, with Bishop still on his mind, he gets the teenaged sexpot, I’m stuck with the Dragon Lady.

  He was already coming around his desk to meet her, but she strode to him at once, direct, forceful. She had an enormous briefcase strapped over her padded shoulder, and she clapped it to her with one hand as she thrust the other toward him. Her hand was tiny in Weiss’s bearlike paw, yet she gripped him hard, shook tersely, once, like a man would.

  It was a big show of assertiveness, but it had the opposite effect on Weiss than she’d probably intended. Poor Weiss, ex-cop though he was, was cursed with an idealized view of women. He thought of them as naturally tender and gentle-hearted. Had a deep yearning to protect them from evildoers, embarrassment, wind, weather, whatever else. As he looked down at the professor from his great height, his sourness over Bishop’s e-mail was swept aside by a sense of melting sympathy. He felt the lady must be in real trouble for her to try so hard to seem strong. That’s just the way he was—nothing got his Lancelot mojo working faster than a damsel in distress.

  “My appointment sheet said ‘Mr. Brinks,’ ” he told her as he showed her to a chair.

  “M.R.,” she answered with a cold flicker of a smile. “Professor M. R. Brinks. It happens a lot.” She didn’t tell him what the initials stood for. Her first name was Professor, as far as he was concerned.

  “My mistake. Why don’t you have a seat…Professor.” She did. And Weiss walked back around his desk to resettle in his huge high-backed leather swiveler. He steepled his fingers. Went to and fro slightly. “How can I help you?”

  The professor already had her briefcase in her lap. She was snapping it open before he spoke. She drew out a manila envelope, slapped it down onto Weiss’s desktop, pushed it across the surface at him.

  “I’m being sexually harassed. By e-mail. For the past nine months, someone has been sending pornographic letters to my computer. Those are copies of some of them, portions of some of them, anyway. I want to hire you to find out who’s sending them.”

  It came out just like that, all business, terse and dry. If she was embarrassed by this situation at all, she sure didn’t show it. But that didn’t register with Weiss. He simply assumed she was embarrassed. He assumed she was being curt to cover her natural feminine reticence about such a delicate matter. Again, that’s how he was.

  So he let the envelope lie where she’d left it. He didn’t want to make things any more awkward for her by reading the obscene e-mails in f
ront of her.

  “Are the letters threatening in any way?” he asked.

  “Not directly, no. But, as you’ll see, they go out of their way to depict me in humiliating and submissive situations. The implication of a threat is definitely there.”

  Weiss gazed at her a long moment. “Uh huh,” he said then. “Have you complained to your Internet provider? Or contacted the police?”

  “No, I haven’t.” Her dark eyes flashed. “Obviously I wanted this dealt with as discreetly as possible. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come to a private detective.”

  “Uh huh,” said Weiss again, after another pause. “And what is it you want me to do exactly?”

  “Well, I thought I made that clear. I want you to find out who’s sending me the e-mails.”

  “And then?”

  “And then…give his name and address to me. I’ll decide on the appropriate action from there. I’m sorry—I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about this.”

  Weiss continued to gaze at her. She would find, as all clients found, that there was no getting through the deadpan expression on his saggy features, in his basset-hound eyes. There was often no getting through the sympathy in him, either. In fact, the tougher she played it, the snappier she got, the more he felt the poor creature must need his help.

  He even found her endearing somehow. Her rigid little figure bristling and ferocious there in her chair. He was touched by the way she refused to be intimidated by her situation or her surroundings. She was just a bit of a thing, after all, and the office was so big. Everything in it was big, built to Weiss’s dominating proportions. The ceiling was high. The floor space was vast. The desk was vast. The leather swivel chair behind it was enormous. Even the clients’ armchairs were blocky and massive. One wall of the room was made up of soaring arched windows. The morning sunlight streamed in through them like burly temple columns. And outside, across Market Street, a row of sculpted stone buildings served as foreground to the glass and steel towers of the greater skyline beyond them, making it seem as if the office opened up on that side to include the entire city.