He smiled at her expression. “What?” he said.
“Nothing.” She lit a fresh Marlboro.
“No, c’mon.”
“Forget it.”
“No, go ahead.”
She puffed her cigarette at the very corner of her mouth. She shrugged. “You’re funny, that’s all.”
“I am, it’s true. That’s me all over.”
“Not, like, a laugh riot. You know what I mean.”
“Okay,” said Bishop. “Like how?”
“Well…I mean, you look at me like that…I can tell you want me…”
“Shit, I give that away, do I?”
“Yeah, you’ve made that abundantly clear, thanks. But you never say…”
“What?”
“Anything.”
“Like…”
“Li-ike…‘Oh, Honey, you’re so bee-yootiful!’ ” She imitated rapture with a roll of her eyes. “ ‘Oh, Honey, I can’t get enough of you. Mm, mm, mm, you’re my sweetum sugar-pie!’ Like that.”
Bishop stopped smiling. He didn’t answer. He knew she was joking, but it was as if she’d seen too much of him somehow. Because he’d just been thinking about that, about how he couldn’t get enough of her. How he could never get enough of her to get what it was he wanted. And what the hell was that anyway? What did she have that some other piece wouldn’t?
“Oh, good answer, Cowboy,” she said when he’d been silent for a while.
“Is that what Cobra used to say?” Bishop asked her. It came out hard. “ ‘Oh, Honey, you’re so beautiful?’ ”
“No-o. Cobra used to say—” She did a good impression of the outlaw’s grinning, insinuating tone. “He used to say, ‘That is pure, one hundred percent pussy you got on there, Honey girl!’ ”
Bishop nodded slowly. “He had a certain sophisticated charm, all right.”
“Oh, now you’re all pissed off, I can tell.” She smiled, a surprisingly sweet smile, trying to cajole him back.
Bishop shrugged as if he didn’t care.
“Stop,” she said. “You don’t have to be jealous of Cobra.”
“I guess not,” said Bishop. “Seeing he’s dead and all.”
“That’s right. You shot him in the face, didn’t you? You bad thing.” Their eyes met. She was still smiling that sweet smile. “You shot him.” She set her coffee mug on the windowsill as she said it this time. She took a last long drag off her Marlboro. “Right. In. The face.” She dropped the butt in the mug. Bishop heard it sizzle. He saw a wisp of smoke drift up over the mug’s rim.
She got up out of the chair. She came toward him. “You bad thing.”
Bishop wanted her helplessly. There was no way to hide it—he was already hard under the covers. He wanted her, and he wanted to hurt her for making him helpless like that.
But he looked at her face, and what the hell. He wanted to fuck her a lot more than he wanted to hurt her.
She stepped to the edge of the bed. “What I’ve been wondering,” she said, “these past few days—”
He looked up at her. He was still holding his coffee mug. He’d forgotten it was in his hand.
“What I’ve been wondering,” Honey said, “is, did you do it for me? When you pulled the trigger—when you shot him in the face—did you do it so we could be together? I’d like that, y’know.”
Her eyes were smoky. Bishop looked into the smoke. He swallowed. He managed to shake his head. “He threw down on me,” he said hoarsely.
“Oh…come on.”
“That’s the way it was. He had a cop’s machine gun. He opened fire. I wouldn’t’ve…” He lost track of the rest of the sentence, forgot what he was going to say.
Honey knelt on the bed, crawled over the blankets toward him. “That’s not what I think,” she told him. “I think you did. Even if he did throw down on you, I think you really did it for me. I think you did it so we could be together. And I think you would’ve done it anyway, no matter what. So there.”
She took the mug out of his hand and he let her. She reached across him to set it on the bedstand. Her face and her hair filled his vision, and he caught that scent again and was helplessly hard. It flashed through his mind that Weiss had told him…but he forgot what it was that Weiss had told him. And anyway, to hell with Weiss. Weiss was okay, Weiss was a decent guy and all. But basically, to hell with him.
Honey settled on top of him, gently. Her eyes went wide and her lips formed an O when she felt him under the covers. She laughed and kissed him, very gently. “Now it’s just the way I wanted it, Cowboy. It is. He’s gone and we’ll get his money and we’ll go somewhere. It’s so, so perfect. Come on. It is. It’s okay. Not everyone’s supposed to be like everyone else. You did it and we’ll get his money and we’ll go somewhere and just be us. Oh, Jesus, Jesus!”
Bishop wrapped his arms around her, rolled her over onto her back. Blind and furious to have the thing in her that was her and only her and that he could never have, he went into her hard, as hard as he could.
That was the way she liked it.
Forty-Five
Weiss was driving north out of the city. Passing the Sausalito bluffs just then. Watching the lowering sky, catching glimpses of the water.
It was late afternoon. The clouds were gathering dark and burly on the tops of the headlands. The bay was choppy with whitecapped waves, and its depths looked thick as blood.
Weiss followed the curl of the highway west toward the edge of the open ocean. He knew what he was looking for now. He also knew that he would probably never find it. But what else could he do? He had nothing else—nothing but a feeling, his instinctive sense of other people’s lives. That wasn’t enough for him; he didn’t trust it. Down-to-earth cop type that he was, he wanted more logic, more proof. Whatever there was to see, he wanted to see it for himself.
It’s not just what one person’s making up in his head, after all. It’s what the other person’s making up, too. It’s what that makes up when you put the two things together.
Those were the words that had brought him here in the first place: the words of wisdom I’d delivered in my conversation with him the night before. They had started him thinking. Thinking about Brinks and Arnold Freyberg and how they’d imagined each other. Thinking about himself and how he’d imagined Julie Wyant and the whores he hired to act his imagination out. And thinking about Bishop—mostly he started thinking about Bishop. Because it was then he finally saw what was bothering him, worrying him, nagging him with so much urgency.
Bishop had fallen for Honey Graham—and no one knew what it was that she imagined. No one knew what she dreamed or what she wanted. No one, when you came right down to it, knew who she was at all. Her father had spent his money to find her. Weiss had turned a blind eye to keep Bishop on her trail. And Bishop—Weiss could see how he wanted her, how she’d reached him. But who was she? How did she really feel about him? What was she after? No one had even bothered to ask.
Weiss knew her history. He had Bishop’s report. He’d heard how the rich girl had crawled naked through mud to collect a drug dealer’s hundred-dollar bills. Then she’d ridden backseat to a killer—and then she’d switched to Bishop when the law closed in. There was a logic to it, Weiss could feel that, but he couldn’t quite put it together. He couldn’t quite figure her out.
And then he could.
Or he thought he could. He thought maybe he was beginning to get a sense of the pattern of her actions. But it was just another of his inspirations. He couldn’t be sure of it. So here he was, driving off the highway now, headed up a rising road, stopping at a rustic pinewood toll booth.
There was a ranger in the booth, a short, big-breasted young lady with a homely face as round as a pie plate. Weiss reached out his car window to show her his photographs.
“You seen either of these two?” he asked.
The ranger studied them, first the newspaper photo of Beverly Graham, then Mrs. Cobham’s snapshot of Harold Spatz. She shook her head, handed them
back. It was what Weiss expected. If they’d been here, it would’ve been more than a month ago now.
He waved in thanks. Drove on.
He chugged up the side of the mountain. The big trees closed over him. The big clouds tumbled low. He parked near the gift shop and visitor’s center, a slanting rhombus of pine and glass. There was another ranger there, inside—a strapping man. And there was an older woman with frosted hair working the cash register. Weiss showed them the pictures, too. They shook their heads, too, just like the ranger in the toll booth. Then he showed them a page of Harold Spatz’s sketchbook. “The Beach from Lost Trail.” The ranger pointed to the spot on a big green map taped to the wall.
“You might want to be careful going up there now,” he said. “Weather looks like it’s deteriorating pretty fast.”
Weiss returned to his Taurus. Drove on.
He maneuvered as close to the peak as he could, but the paved roads only reached so far. In the end, he found himself trudging up the mountain on foot. Under redwoods that skyrocketed to the very belly of the gathering storm.
It was hard climbing. The ground was spongy and damp. The ascent was steady, sometimes steep. Weiss’s wind was good and his legs were strong from walking the hills of San Francisco, but he was way out of his element here. He followed the trail, head down, breath heavy. It was a big chore for him. A big, probably useless chore.
But he couldn’t help it. He had to keep going. He had to see whatever there was to see.
After a while, he lifted his eyes to gauge the distance left. And even he—days later, in his office, in his chair, with his feet up—had to admit the sight was magnificent. The rough-jacketed trees rose up so straight and swiftly into heaven they were like so many prayers, so many prayers solidified into spires, spires that broke startling out of the mossy tangle of branches in the underbrush as if they were the remnants of a lost city, a lost city of the spirit and its prayers. And the clouds above them. The black, black clouds. Churning and muttering at the tower tops. They were so low it seemed he might walk right into them. It seemed he might discover giant gears in there, and pulleys and presses, and sweat-streaked musclemen in their midst: a whole great skyborne factory of making and destruction—
“Uy,” Weiss muttered. Well, he was no outdoorsman. And he still had a ways to go.
He toiled on. He met no one going up or coming down. Not in this weather. Even the birds had stopped singing. Even the insects made no sound. The air itself had grown weirdly silent, weirdly green. A faint irritation of electricity was everywhere.
Finally he saw it. A break in the tree line ahead and above. An opening vista of dark sky. The top board of a railing visible. And a descending side trail off to the right that the ranger had told him about.
He followed that smaller path. It corkscrewed down steeply. For a moment, the forest grew clammy and shadowy and close. And still, unnervingly silent.
Then, very suddenly, the land ended. One more step and he was on a promontory of earth and stone. It jutted out, dizzying, into the wind over the Pacific.
Below, far below, there were rocks rising out of the water. One enormous formation, cleft in two jagged halves, seemed to reach up nearly to his shoe soles. Others had lower peaks and looked like distant mountains. Some just barely showed their domes above the whitecaps. The waves smacked against them all, hurling spray, then retrieving the falling mist as they snaked back foaming through the crevices and sank again into the body of the sea.
Weiss fought off vertigo. He felt as if he were standing on the farthest effort of the continent. With his feet planted wide and his arms lifted slightly from his thighs for balance, with his tie and jacket whipping and fluttering in the strong air, he had to force himself to look down.
He did look down. He saw the living image of Harold Spatz’s sketches. He recognized the curl of the cliffs around him, the reach of branches into his eyeshot, the rocks—more than anything, the shape of the rocks below. They were all in the pictures.
He stood there a long time. A long time, in spite of the first rumble of thunder. After coming all this way, he didn’t even turn to search the surrounding ground. What was he going to find there? A pair of moss-covered tickets to Reno? A cheap engagement ring discarded in the dirt? An uncorked bottle of sparkling wine?
All right, he’d look—eventually. Before he left, he’d take a good long look around. He had to do that, too. But right now, just standing there, just squinting through the wind, he thought he saw enough. He thought he saw everything.
He saw Harold Spatz. He pictured the pimply-faced boy as he’d barely dared to sketch himself, walking in his special place with the special woman who had unaccountably come into his life. Standing with her out here at the edge of everything. And she coming toward him, her face uplifted to his, her hands pressing lightly against his chest.
The whole scene was clear in Weiss’s imagination. The girl with her fingers on the boy’s shirtfront, the boy working up the courage to propose. He saw the swift and unexpected motion of her slender arms. He saw Spatz stumbling backward. Poor, spotty Harold Spatz, with the taste of the best kiss he’d ever had still on his mouth—hardly able to relinquish his hopes so he could understand that he was falling—hardly willing to reshape his lips so he could scream before he hit the rocks and died.
Part Five
The Cobra’s Treasure
Forty-Six
The storm followed Weiss down the mountain. He heard it growling at his back. He looked over his shoulder to see it whipping the high treetops. He heard the first gouts of rain hit the trail like footsteps behind him. He went down quickly, bracing against the slope.
He was breathless by the time he reached his Taurus. He yanked the door open. Slid behind the wheel as fast as he could squeeze his big body in. Just as he shut the door, the downpour came. The rain spattered against his windshield on great, heaving gusts. Then, the first outbreak over, it hammered down steadily.
“Woof,” Weiss said.
He switched on the ignition, switched on the heat. But he left the wipers off and for a while he just sat there. He watched the patterns the water made running over the glass. He watched the storm behind the patterns, driven by the driven wind.
She was like that, he thought. Honey Graham. The patterns, the storm…He couldn’t have put her into words exactly, but he felt he knew her now.
She probably hadn’t planned her long-term progress, not at first. The pattern had simply emerged as she was driven forward by the laws of her character, the laws of her desires. She had two desires: tough guys and money. She learned to use one to get to the other.
She craved her ice-hearted, ice-eyed men. Santé, Cobra—Bishop, too. She got her thrills from their offhanded domination of her. But she also saw how her submission ensnared them. And she saw how that could be useful to her.
It was strange stuff. They treated her rough and she manipulated them and it was all somehow of a piece, all one interaction. With Santé, she crawled naked in the mud—and, at the same time, she teased the location of the dropoff locker out of him, the place where millions in cash were waiting to be picked up. Maybe he’d dumped her like her father said. But Weiss suspected she’d walked away on her own. To go home for a while. Home where it was safe, where she could think, where she could plan her next step.
She needed to get the warehouse alarm codes first. She found an easy stooge in Harold Spatz. She coaxed the codes out of poor Harold, but she had no use for him aside from that. He wasn’t cruel or daring enough for her. So she shoved him off his special cliff into that ocean view he loved—it was the only way to make sure he’d keep his mouth shut after he found out he’d been used. Then she was ready to move on.
Weiss didn’t know how she’d found Cobra, but it probably wasn’t all that hard. She must’ve hung out around the bars and the bikers and the thugs until she settled on her perfect thief. Weiss could imagine how she’d climbed, adoring and obedient, onto the back of the outlaw’s bike, how
she’d sat nodding at his feet while he spewed out his dipstick philosophy, how she’d fawned over him in front of his gang—and how she drew him into a raid on the warehouse.
It almost worked. He almost brought home Santé’s millions to her. Weiss wondered if Cobra would’ve survived long after that or if he would’ve gone to bed with Honey one night and woken up the next morning dead. He’d never know. Before the outlaw could pull off the job, his time ran out. Bishop showed up. He had tracked her down and was sure to bring the police in his wake—and if he didn’t, the next detective would. She could see that Cobra was finished, and she had to improvise. As much as she must’ve hated to abandon all that money—the money she didn’t have, the money her father refused to give her, the money that meant freedom for her—she knew she needed to get out, to avoid the closing dragnet. So she gave herself to Bishop…
Weiss gazed through the rain on the windshield.
She gave herself to Bishop, he thought. He thought: Why? Why Bishop? Why not just go home to Daddy like she did before? What could Bishop do for her?
The answer came to him quickly. She needed Bishop to get rid of Cobra—Cobra, who would hunt her down as long as he was alive.
Weiss’s hand moved to his stomach. It was turning sour in there. He told himself Bishop could not have planned Cobra’s escape from the warehouse raid. He told himself again that Bishop would not have killed Cobra unless Cobra had fired first. Still, he could feel what it was like for Bishop, standing there with the gun, standing there with his rival on his hands and knees in the water…
Weiss sighed. What a mess. What a fucked-up case.
He fished his cell phone out of his pocket. Held down the number two. He heard the machine-gun rapid tones of the speed dialer. Then he heard a nasty, rasping, angry growl.
“This is Ketchum.”
“It’s Weiss.”
The cop snorted. “Shit, I was just gonna call you.” This happened to them a lot.
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