Shotgun Alley

by Andrew Klavan

  He wandered down a dark hall. Found a bathroom. Pissed. He wandered down a dark stair. Found the living room: an epic wreckage. Bottles, bags, pizza boxes, CDs strewn all over the furniture. And Shorty, fully dressed, splayed out in a big old leather recliner, fast asleep. There was a dead soldier of tequila under his boot heels, an Xbox controller held loosely in his hand. He must’ve ditched his old lady at some point and joined them.

  Tipping up his beer bottle, Bishop wandered on.

  He came to the doorway of a room stacked with boxes. Computers, radios, TVs. Stolen shit. Jacked off some truck or out of some warehouse somewhere. Who the hell knew what these asswipes were into?

  You’re one of us.

  Yeah, right. Bishop peeled off the jamb, slouched on into the kitchen. He sure wished he hadn’t killed Mad Dog, though. It was a weight on his gut. He shouldn’t have gotten so carried away in the moment. He shouldn’t have crossed the line.

  He came into an old-fashioned country kitchen. Big black gas stove. Black-and-white tiling on the floor and the walls. Kind of weird the way everything was in its place in here. As if it were the one room in the whole house no one had entered.

  But there was what he was looking for: a door, a screen door to the outside. A chance to get some fresh air, yeah. He was going to puke or pass out if he didn’t.

  Thick-headed, weak-bellied, he rolled on through. Came out atop a short flight of concrete steps overlooking the backyard.

  The air felt good, all right. Cool and damp and refreshing. He breathed it in gratefully. Sipping his beer, surveying the yard. It was a misty, shifting landscape. Twisted oaks stood ghostly in the fog. Yellow leaves stirred on the grass at his feet like autumn stirring. And pale, sturdy fingers of sunlight stretched down from the unseen sky, fading to nothing before they ever reached the earth.

  He looked to the far side of the half acre. The mist was thickest there. It churned and drifted as if it were a living mass. Dark shapes rose out of it and sank away in a sort of dance of coming and going. He watched it a while in a morose and dreamy daze.

  And soon, and slow by slow, he became aware there was a figure—a figure at the center of it. A human form, sharply present and then spectral and dim and then sharply present again, hunkered in the morass like a garden gargoyle. It took a moment before Bishop realized it was a living man.

  Cobra.

  Bishop came down the steps, ambled across the lawn toward him. Another memory began to nag at him. Something had happened. Something important. About Cobra. About Cobra and Honey…

  That’s right: They had had a fight. A bad one. A loud one, anyway. It happened when the other girls turned up. Everyone was stoned and the girls started grinding to some classic White Trash and Honey had seen how things were going and she started screaming over the blasting music, saying she wasn’t one of Cobra’s whores, she wasn’t going to be treated like one of Cobra’s whores. Cobra cursed her. He was drunk as hell by then. He said he’d fuck whoever he wanted, when he wanted. He was a free man. Honey had stormed out, her blonde hair flying behind her. Bishop remembered that: her blonde hair flying. A minute later, in the lull between “Let’s Get It On” and “I’ve Got News,” they’d heard her pickup’s engine kick over. They’d heard the truck bounding down the long dirt driveway to the road below.

  Well, Bishop thought. That was good. That was something anyway. A memory to lift his spirits, a little counterbalance to the sorry-ass business of killing Mad Dog. Honey and Cobra had had a flame-out. That was excellent. Bishop’s offer to take her away from all this might be looking a lot better to her now.

  After Honey was gone, Bishop remembered, Cobra had started to party hard. He drank hard and prowled around the middle of the floor and made a speech about some bullshit or other. We’re, like, the edge, we’re, like, the new thing, we’re, like, the old, the oldest thing again. Like brothers, man, like all brothers bonded together against everything, against all the so-called rules and codes. It’s just us instead now. From now on. Everything is us, just who we are. We’re men. We’re men. Then he roared like an animal, shaking his two fists at the ceiling. Finally he staggered off to his bedroom with one of the girls in tow, a narrow-hipped teenager with a glance full of thrilling mischief.

  And now here he was out here, squatting on his heels in the grass. Wearing only his underwear, his white briefs. His body was all ropy muscle, but it seemed gaunt and fragile somehow.

  Bishop stood over him. Cobra didn’t turn or look his way. He just went on peering out into the mist.

  They were at the border of a ridge, Bishop saw. The ground dropped down steeply just beyond. Through the shifting gray curtain, Bishop caught glimpses of the city stretched out below them, the broad plain of white buildings colored orange and rose with the morning light. The bay lay beyond them. He got only a hint of it. And only a hint also of the blue sky that lay out there beyond the bay. But as far as he could make out, it was clear as could be on the flatlands and the water. It seemed the fog was all up here, all gathered on the high ground.

  Now at last, Cobra looked up at him.

  Whoa, Bishop thought.

  The outlaw was ashen. His face was sunken, ravaged. It looked like a skull but with bloodshot eyes. The flesh of his cheeks hung slack as if it were melting off him. The vee of his mouth hung slack, and there was drool glistening at the corners. His head bobbed slightly on his neck as if he were an old man, too weak to hold it steady.

  “Man,” said Bishop with a gesture of his bottle, “you look like I feel.”

  “Oh, bullshit, Bullshit to that, compañero.” Cobra sneered irritably. “You don’t fucking feel like this. Believe me. You don’t have the insight to feel this bad. Comprende? Mr. Vroom-Vroom Bang-Bang. This is deep, bleak shit here. This is dark-night-of-the-soul-style shit. You gotta know something to be where I am, dude. You gotta be somebody all the way down to the ground.”

  Bishop gestured again, by way of a shrug. “Well, ’scuse my ass,” he said. “I thought you were just out here mooning over some pussy.”

  “Oh, fuck her. What, you think this is about Honey? What do you think? You think she’s gone and I’m out here crying? You think I let my old lady tear out over a couple of spare hardbellies?”

  “Beats me,” Bishop answered mildly. “She didn’t look too pleased, you gotta admit.”

  Cobra gave a single miserable snort. “Fuck her,” he repeated in a mutter. “She can go if she wants. She can go anytime she wants. Long as she comes back when I call her. She comes back or I drag her back. She knows it, too.” He pointed a finger up at Bishop. “And everyone else better know it. You hear me? You all better remember what I told you last night in the Alley. Don’t give me that what-the-fuck stare, man, I’ve seen you eyeball her. And eyeball away. It’s a free country. But don’t you go near her unless you’re tired of living. There aren’t enough miles in the road to put between us, dude, so help me, you go near her.”

  “Whatever,” Bishop said.

  Cobra lowered his finger. Lowered his shoulders. Turned again, the energy gone out of him. In his gargoyle crouch, his forearms resting on his raised knees, he went back to brooding on the depths of the fog. “Man,” he said heavily. “Man oh man. Everything I fuck turns to shit. Everything I touch gets fucked. What the fuck’s the point? You know? You try to do something with your fucking life, you try to make your life about something…Why don’t women get that? Why do they always wanna make everything small again? She thinks I’m just gonna live and die, just live and breed and die?”

  Bishop rubbed his eyes. His head hurt and his brain was running on slow. What the hell was Cobra talking about, anyway? And what was he—Bishop—what was he doing here? He was supposed to be doing something, wasn’t he? Sure he was. It wasn’t as if all this were real. Him and the gang and Cobra. It was bullshit. It was just another assignment for Weiss and the Agency. What with Mad Dog dying and with the booze last night and the crystal and him and Charlie upstairs on the mattresses humping t
he hardbellies in syncopation, things had gotten all weird and dreamy for a little while there. It had almost started to feel as if he’d actually become part of this whole business. Like Cobra said: One of us.

  But no way, not hardly. There was something else. Something he was supposed to be doing here. The job. That’s it: the big job. He was supposed to find out about this big job Cobra was planning to pull off.

  “A man wants to be…part of something,” Cobra grumbled on to the shifting mists. “Part of something big, you know. It’s not about…it’s not about what you do. The little shit you do. Y’know? It’s about—what it means. What it all means.”

  “I thought you already had this covered,” Bishop said. “All this big-time shit. That’s what you told me. You had some big job all lined up already. Big plan, big money, that’s what you said. Shit, that’s what I’m here for, I know that much.”

  For another moment, Cobra crouched there, muttering at the fog, wallowing in his exquisite dejection. Then, as if he’d just gotten the joke, he made a noise, a sort of chuckling noise deep in his throat. He laughed. Suddenly, loudly, hoarsely: “Ha, ha!” He slapped his knee. He pushed off his knee and stood out of his crouch, his ravaged face coming level with Bishop’s. The fog vortexed behind him and haloed his head with a circle of sunlit sky.

  “Jigger my zesty carbuncles if you aren’t dead right, my brother,” he said. His face was still an ashen mess, a skull of melting flesh, but now his bloodshot eyes were bright. He grabbed hold of Bishop’s neck the way he had last night on the edge of the canyon. “Wiggle my mossy lingam if you aren’t dead-on, one hundred percent correctamento. You bring me back to myself, dude. Big plan, big money. That’s it. That’s it exactly. Right?” The circle of sky opened, and the sunshine fell on both of them. “We have to get ready for that. Honey, too. She won’t miss that. I know she won’t want to miss that. And you—” His hand cracked smartly as he slapped Bishop’s naked back. “I guess you’ve paid your dues, haven’t you? Huh? With poor old Mad Dog? I guess last night you sure as shit paid your dues.” He slung his arm around Bishop’s shoulder, “It’s time to tell you all.”

  Twenty-Six

  It was still morning, just the tail end of morning, when Bishop got back to the apartment in Berkeley. There was a lot on his mind, a lot racing through his mind. Cobra had told him the plan for the Big Job and there was Honey to consider and Mad Dog’s death—all of it jumbled together. He had to make sense of it. He had to figure out what he was going to do next.

  He shut the door behind him. Trod wearily down a little hall. He dropped his leather jacket on the floor as he went. Stripped his T-shirt off, dropped that, dropped his jeans. He was naked by the time he padded into the bathroom. A trail of clothes lay in the hall behind him.

  The bathroom was cramped, mildewed. The light here was pale and yellow. There was an old claw-footed tub in one corner. Bishop high-stepped into it. He turned the shower on. Stood under the nozzle. The shocking cold water spat down his back, turned shocking hot. He bowed his head and let it stream over him.

  It was a difficult business, he thought. He had to get Honey away. That was the main thing. That was his assignment. But it wasn’t enough. He had to get her out clean, out clear. If she just walked, Cobra would come after her. No matter where she went, no matter how long it took, he would find her, bring her back or kill her, just like he said. Then there was the law to worry about—they’d want her, too. And there was Weiss to worry about, with all his copstyle rules and cop-style justice. It was hard to know where Weiss would stand. It was all hard, all complicated. A difficult business.

  He turned off the shower. Grabbed a towel off the stack on the hamper. Dried himself on his way down the hall to the bedroom, leaving a trail of water where the trail of his clothes left off.

  He pulled jeans and a T-shirt out of an old dresser. Pulled them on. Padded barefoot back to the living room.

  He set his palmtop up on the table again with its portable keyboard in place. He had to start with Weiss. He had to get Weiss in on it. He fetched his cigarettes while the little machine booted up. He sat down at the table. Lit a smoke. Set it to burn in a tinfoil ashtray. He positioned his hands on the palmtop’s keys.

  Weiss, he typed. And then he stopped. Drew back his hands. He would have to tell him about Mad Dog. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  He set his fingers back on the keys. Took a breath—

  The door buzzer sounded. Bishop cursed. He took the palmtop off the keyboard. Dumped both pieces in the table’s drawer. The door buzzer sounded again. Bishop went to the door and swung it open.

  There was Honey, standing in the hall.

  It was a thrill to see her. He let no sign of it cross his face, but it was a jolting thrill. She’d dumped the barebellied biker chick look. She was wearing a crisp white blouse, khaki slacks. She looked like the kid in her father’s snapshots. The all-American girl. His feeling for her washed over him as if he had forgotten it. But he had not forgotten it.

  He stood back. She walked in past him with a glance. He took a breath of her scent as she went by. Maybe she noticed. Anyway, she smiled.

  He shut the door. Came out of the foyer to lean against the living room archway. From there, he watched her walk to his table. He watched the curve of her slacks as she bent forward. She took the cigarette from the tinfoil ashtray. She turned to face him. Perched herself on the table. Brought his cigarette to her lips.

  “So what are you?” she asked him. “Are you, like, a cop?”

  Bishop shook his head, his gaze moving over her. The big windows were at her back. From where he stood, she was framed in the rectangle of the billboard outside, positioned next to the gigantic woman in the bank advertisement, her gigantic smiling face.

  She took a drag of smoke. Narrowed her eyes at him. “So then my father sent you.” She sniffed, turned away, crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “I hope he’s paying you well.”

  “Pretty well, yeah,” Bishop said. “I guess he doesn’t want to see his daughter go to prison.”

  “You mean he doesn’t want the media to see his daughter go to prison. He doesn’t want his daughter making any headlines that might mess up his chance at a Senate seat.”

  “Hey, listen, you want to give your Daddy a hard time? Pop some X and fuck your brains out like the other girls, okay? If you gotta do twenty-five just to get his attention, he’s probably not worth it.”

  Honey laughed. It was low, throaty, mirthless. “Are you always such a prick?”

  “Yeah,” said Bishop. “Why?”

  She didn’t answer. She shook her head. Sat perched on the table with her hands braced against the edge. She considered her feet. She was wearing black straps. She scratched the instep of her left foot with the toe of her right shoe. “I was there, all right?” she told him. “I was at the Bayshore Market. I wasn’t inside with the others. I didn’t have a gun or anything. But I was there. I drove the truck.”

  Leaning in the archway, Bishop’s expression remained as it was: arrogant, ironic, impassive. Shit, he thought.

  “So what can you do for me?” she asked. “What’s the deal?”

  Bishop came off the archway. Moved across the room to her. Took a Marlboro from the box on the table. He tapped the filter on his wrist, packing the tobacco. He looked down into her face.

  “I can take you back to Daddy,” he told her. “His lawyers’ll protect you. If they can’t protect you, his money’ll make you disappear.”

  “I could go back to Daddy myself.”

  “You could,” said Bishop. “But what about Cobra?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “What about him?” She was close to Bishop. He could breathe her breath. “I leave him, he’ll come after me. If he finds me with someone else, he’ll kill me. Nothing would stop him.”

  “I’ll stop him,” said Bishop. “I’m in on his big job. I’ll set him up, have the cops take him down red-handed. By the time he gets his ass out of Pelican Bay,
he won’t remember his own name, let alone yours.”

  Her hair stirred, strayed across her cheek, as she made a little motion with her head. Her eyes were scared, the way they had been in the Alley. Her lips were glossy and dry the way they had been then. He felt the same feeling for her rising in him. Strong. Too strong. He tried to keep it down.

  “That’s not good enough,” she said. “Prison’s not good enough. You know Cobra. He’ll find me. He’ll get someone to find me.”

  “No. That’s not the way it works.”

  “It is. It is with him.”

  “You go back to Daddy. He goes to slam. That’s the deal.”

  “No. He’ll find me. He’d never stop. My father can buy off the law, but not him.”

  “Then what?” he asked her. “What do you want?”

  She studied him, tried to gauge him. The pink tip of her tongue showed at one corner of her mouth. Bishop watched it as it moved across to the other corner.

  “You gotta kill him, Cowboy,” she said finally. ’That’s the only way. You know it is. You gotta kill him. I’ll only be safe if he’s dead.”

  Bishop paused, the unlit cigarette half lifted to his lips. He didn’t know why it made him so hot when she said that, but it did. He had to force himself to take his eyes off her. That fresh, sweet, elegant face.

  He stuck the cigarette in his mouth. He laughed as he lit it. The smoke blossomed out around the both of them. “Man, that’s cold. That’s ice cold. You two have a spat over a couple of girls and now you want me to whack the guy?”

  “It’s not about that, about last night. I just know him, that’s all. If I leave him now, if I let him go down, he’ll never stop hunting me.”

  “So it’s that easy, huh? Just ‘Kill him.’ After the way you used to crawl all over him, too.”

  Honey shrugged. “I liked him.” Her eyes were on his. Her gaze was steady through the cigarette smoke. “I liked the way he did me.”

  “Yeah, the way you liked that drug dealer, that Santé?” Bishop’s voice was harsher than he meant. His longing for her was back full force. He couldn’t stop it. It made him angry again. It made him want to hurt her again. “I hear you used to crawl around in the mud for him, fetching his hundred-dollar bills.”