Andrew Klavan - Damnation Street

Bishop went on looking ironic, looking cool. But he felt that urgency spreading through him, growing deeper. He felt something else as well. 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."

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.