Andrew Klavan - Damnation Street

"Fuck with us and we'll feed you your knees," he said tensely.

Bishop snorted. He glanced over at the brown-skinned gunman from the bedroom. "Feed me my knees?" he said. "What kind of threat is that? What kind of cheap operation is this anyway?"

The brown-skinned gunman shrugged wearily. "What can I tell you?" He had a smooth, mellow voice, no accent, just northern Cal. "Listen, this isn't really a gun play, Bishop, awright? Our guy just wants you to come with us, no problem. It's not a killing thing. Really."

"Come on, come on, let's go," said the arm breaker. "You wanna do this on your feet or on your face?"

"Is this guy, like, an intern or something?" Bishop asked the brown-skinned gunman.

The brown-skinned gunman laughed.

That made the arm breaker angry. Twitching, looking this way and that, he moved in on Bishop. "Oh yeah. Give me an excuse. Make me happy. Give me a reason to put you down."

Bishop took his gun away and smacked him in the nose with it.

"Ow!" said the arm breaker. "Jesus! Fuck!" He grabbed his face with his hand. Blood flowed out of his nose, ran between his fingers.

The brown-skinned gunman sighed. "Morris, you are such a fucking knucklehead."

"Oh. Oh shit," said Morris, cupping his hands under his nose to catch the blood.

Bishop gave Morris's Glock to the brown-skinned gunman. "Thanks," the brown-skinned gunman said. He slipped it into the pocket of his windbreaker, still shaking his head. "You ready?" he asked Bishop.

"Whatever," said Bishop. "If we're going, let's go."

The windows in the limo's backseat were blacked out: the side windows and the rear window and the glass partition that sealed off the front. They were all blacked out so Bishop couldn't see where they were going. That's why they'd come for him at gunpoint probably. Bishop wouldn't have gotten into a blind spot like that if he hadn't been at the point of a gun.

Morris, the knucklehead, was driving, out of sight. He'd been casting a lot of dark looks at Bishop ever since Bishop had busted his nose, so Bishop was glad to be rid of him. The brown-skinned gunman rode in the back. The kid knew what he was doing. He sat against the opposite door, as far from Bishop as possible. He held the gun close to his waist, pointed at Bishop but out of Bishop's reach. Bishop knew if he tried to take it, he'd be blown into the middle of next Thursday.

The brown-skinned gunman didn't say anything. He didn't even seem to be watching Bishop, although Bishop knew he was. After a while it sort of got to Bishop, sitting back there with no one talking, nothing to look at.

Just to break the silence, he said, "So is this about Adalian?"

The brown-skinned gunman didn't answer.

But it was. It was about Adalian. About half an hour after they started out, Bishop felt the limo slow, heard the growl of a motor, an electric door being rolled back. The car bumped forward and the door rumbled closed behind it. The car stopped and the brown-skinned gunman said, "Let's go."

Bishop stepped out into a windowless warehouse. Shelves stacked with brown boxes lined the wall. There was a man with a clipboard talking to a man sitting on a forklift. Other than that, the place was empty.

Morris got out of the driver's seat. He was still giving Bishop dark looks. His nose was swollen and red. His lips were puffy. The dark looks just made his face ridiculous, like the face of an angry child. He drew his Glock again. The brown-skinned gunman had given it back to him after Bishop took it away.

The three men walked across the concrete floor, their footsteps echoing. Bishop and the brown-skinned gunman walked side by side. Morris walked behind them with both his gun barrel and his dark looks trained on Bishop's spine. They reached a white door. The brown-skinned gunman knocked. Someone inside said, "Yeah?" The brown-skinned gunman opened the door and stood back to let Bishop enter.

He came into a small office. It was crowded with metal shelves. The shelves were stacked with books and papers. There was only one man in the room and it was Adalian. He was standing behind a scarred wooden desk, holding a piece of paper up in front of his reading glasses. He was a big, heavyset man who might have been athletic once but had gotten out of shape. He had a large head with black-and-silver hair. He had a hawklike face that was not quite handsome. His gray eyes had a certain flatness to them, like a one-way mirror on the mirrored side. He was about fifty-five years old.

He was wearing slacks and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, a blue tie loosened at the neck. His jacket was draped over the back of a cheap office swivel chair. Ketchum had said he was the devil, but he didn't look like the devil to Bishop. He looked like a businessman, any self-made businessman. You could tell just by his expression that he had that self-made businessman attitude, that bristling certainty about himself: Hey, if I'm not right all the time, how come I've made so much money? That's the sort of guy he looked like to Bishop, not the devil at all.

Adalian glanced up from the page he was reading. He looked at Bishop over the top of his glasses-and got a load of Morris's throbbing red beezer out of the corner of his eye. "What the hell happened to you?" he asked the arm breaker.

Morris could only answer with a lame gesture.

"I broke his nose," said Bishop helpfully. "He was getting on my nerves."

"Oh yeah? What was he, talking tough?"

"Yeah-and badly."

"I know. He does that."

"Threatened to feed me my knees."

"Feed you your knees?" said Adalian. He peered over his glasses at Morris now. "Does that even mean anything? What does that even mean?"

Morris could only make the same lame gesture.

Adalian sighed. "I don't know. What can I tell you?" he said to Bishop.

Bishop nodded in sympathy. "Good thugs are hard to find nowadays."

"You can say that again." Bishop didn't, and Adalian held a hand out toward a chair in front of his desk, an old steel-framed chair with torn green cushioning. "Have a seat," he said. "You smell like shit, by the way."

"Thanks. I've been in lockup for two days. Your boys didn't give me a chance to shower." Bishop lowered himself into the chair.

Adalian lifted his sharp chin to the gunmen. Bishop glanced over his shoulder to see them leaving, closing the door. As he did, he caught a whiff of himself. He did smell like shit, it was true.

When he faced front, Adalian was settling his big out-of-shape body into the swivel chair on the other side of the scarred wooden desk. He peeled his glasses off and tossed them down onto the blotter. "So," he said. "You saved my son's life. That was my son-the whiny little dickhead-you saved his life in county."

"Right. So I heard."

"So I owe you." Adalian gave him a hawklike glance from under one bushy white eyebrow. "What do you want?"

"That's a pretty big question."

"Give a big answer, then." He gestured at the shabby little office as if it held a glittering display of worldly pleasures. "Anything you're likely to think of I can probably supply."

"Thanks, but I don't really need anything."

"That's not what I asked you." Adalian leaned forward, forearms on the edge of the desk, hands together, fingers intertwined: the pose of a captain of industry eye-locking an underling for a heart-to-heart. "You wanna hear what I know about you? You wanna hear what the word is about you on the street?"

Bishop shrugged.

"You were military," Adalian said. "Some kind of bigtime black-ops killer shit, no one knows what. But you got all the weapons skills and hand-to-hand skills. Plus you can fly pretty much anything. Plus you can drive pretty much anything. All things being equal, you oughta be a valuable player, government, private, whatever you want. The only problem is you're all psycho inside-I guess 'cause of the war shit and everything. So you got yourself into some small-time trouble, broke into a house, kidnapped a family, whatever. And Weiss, back when he was a cop, let you off with a beating, right? 'Cause you've got all those medals, and everyone knows Weiss is Mr. Born on the Fourth of July and all that shit. So now you're his lapdog, running around helping old ladies across the street or whatever it is you do for him. A private eye. They still call it that? Whatta you, take pictures of jerks fucking other jerks' wives, shit like that?" Adalian parted his hands, an almost priestly gesture. "Hey. To each his own. Don't get me wrong. And I know Weiss. We all know Weiss. I like him. I admire him. Hell, he put me away for seven months once, and it was my own judge on the bench at the time. Guy's incorruptible-plus some good friends of mine make a lot of money off his hooker habit. No, listen, really, if I had another life, I'd wanna come back as a guy like Weiss. I really would."