Andrew Klavan - Damnation Street

He lay there with his arm across his forehead. He didn't see the cracks in the ceiling anymore. He saw her face. He saw her in her agony and tears, the way she'd been when he was with her. His cock grew hard; his breath grew short, as he remembered. He should've found her by now. He would've found her, if it hadn't been for Weiss. Weiss who somehow guessed his plans, who held him up, who gave her time to get away. Now, she was gone, just gone. He'd looked. She was nowhere. He was a man who knew how to find people too. He had tracked down plenty of running targets in his day. But this was different. She was different. Other targets had connections, people they loved, money they needed, places they had to be. Other targets stopped running after a while, convinced they'd eluded him. Not her. In a way, she was as anonymous as he was. She had no history. She had no family. She made her living off her body so she could go anywhere and travel light. She had made exactly one phone call that he knew of since she had vanished from the city. One phone call from Paradise. There, the trail ended.

For him-the trail ended for him. But not for Weiss. Weiss, in some way and for some reason the man who called himself John Foy didn't understand, had picked up a new trail. He was moving from Paradise now to a town called Hannock to the east. He would be there by morning.

The man who called himself John Foy would be there too. Because Weiss knew things. He guessed things. He found people who couldn't be found. And the girl would not run away from Weiss, the way she ran away from him.

The man groaned very softly, one hand moving to his groin. That feeling-that bad, red, hot feeling-it was getting worse in him, redder, hotter. Because of her. Because he was thinking about how he'd had her, the things he did to her, how he would've had her again, if it wasn't for Weiss…

He closed his eyes. He dug his fingers into his cock, dug them in until it hurt, until his cock grew soft again. Then he lay still, breathing, breathing. He imagined a tower. It was a trick he had taught himself to keep the bad feelings away. When he could think, when he could plan, when he could do his work, it was like a wheel in his mind was turning. It was like the wheel powered a lamp, and his mind was bright and clear. But sometimes, like now, his mind stopped, the wheel stopped, and the lamp went out. Then bad feelings and bad thoughts closed in on him from the corners like scrabbling rats. Laughing voices, red rage, red blood, a little boy crying-like rats scrabbling out of the corners when the dark came down.

So he would think of a tower, a tall castle tower. He would daydream himself up its winding stairs and into its battlement. At the top he felt aloof and calm, and the bad thoughts and feelings washed against the tower base far below, the red rage like a tide, the tears like rain, but far below where they couldn't touch him. After a while the laughing voices would quiet. The slanting rain of infant tears would cease. The tide of rage would recede, and he would be able to think again and make plans again and start the wheel turning.

Hannock, he thought. That was the plan. He would follow Weiss to Hannock. He would follow Weiss, and Weiss would follow the girl, and he would find her.

In the end, thought the Shadowman, they would all meet face-to-face.

Jim Bishop, meanwhile, was at a bar. He was leaning on the rail, his hand around a mug of beer. Behind the bar, above the mirrored shelves of liquor bottles, there were three TVs set high on the wall. There were baseball games playing on two of the TVs. There was news playing on the other one. On the news there was a video of a beautiful blond girl-a teenager-in handcuffs. A deputy was holding her arm at the elbow, lowering her into a squad car outside the Redwood City courthouse. The sound on the TV was off, but the caption told the story: the girl had been charged with four counts of felony murder. The squad car drove out of sight with the girl and the deputy inside.

Bishop smiled his sardonic smile. He lifted his beer mug, toasted the television news, and drank. He did not love anyone, but he did have sort of a thing for the blond girl on the news. She had had a way of bringing him to the cold, still border of himself whenever he was inside her. He would've done a lot for the chance to get a few more hits at her. He would've stolen money. He would've fucked over Weiss, who was not only his boss but his only friend. Whatever excuse for a code of honor he still had, he would've shredded it on the spot. Hell, he'd been planning to do all those things and more. But before he could get through the list, she had set him up to be killed. That pretty much put an end to the affair-that, or maybe just the fact that she'd gotten herself arrested.

Bishop set his beer down. Leaned on the rail. Went on smiling his sardonic smile. Grimacing, he worked his right shoulder around a little. It still throbbed from where the girl's psycho lover had stabbed him after she'd set him up. He was supposed to be taking painkillers for it. He was drinking the beer instead.

He'd been drinking beer for several days, in fact. He'd been in a lot of bars during that time, an endless series of bars it seemed. This one was-where?-in the Noe Valley somewhere. It was one of those Irish pubs that had dolled itself up for the young professional class. There were wrought-iron chandeliers and butcher-block tables all over the place. A lot of Tiffany-style glasswork around the windows. The light was too bright, the wood was too blond. And everyone seemed to be wearing cable sweaters and brand-new jeans and drinking large bowl-like glasses of white wine or beers with slices of lime in them.

Slices of lime! Well, if you wanted to go from bar to bar forever, you had to take the good with the bad.

Bishop lifted his mug again. As he did, he noticed that a woman had planted herself on the stool next to him. He glanced at her over the mug's rim while he drank. She was his age, thirty or so. Appealing in a desperately unmarried-businesswoman sort of way. She had shoulder-length brown hair and large brown eyes. A nice shape in her tight-fitting brand-new jeans and her likewise tight-fitting cable sweater.

Bishop decided he would take her somewhere and have her. This was a talent of his: he could pretty much have any woman he wanted. Who knows why? Something about his being a cold-hearted bastard seemed to drive the girls wild with desire.

He wasn't tall but he was well-built, square-shouldered, muscular. He had a thin, fine nose and pale, almost colorless eyes. His lips had that sardonic smile on them more or less all the time. He stood out in this crowd tonight, his jeans faded and no sweater on but a gray T-shirt under his leather motorcycle jacket instead.

"You want a drink?" he asked the woman.

She looked him over. "Yeah, sure," she said.

He lifted his chin at the bar guy, an owlish part-timer in big square glasses.

"I'll have what he's having," said the woman.

Bishop drained his mug. "I'll have what I'm having too," he said.

The bar guy brought them beers. The woman raised her mug to Bishop. She wanted Bishop to clink mugs with her, so he raised his mug and clinked. They both drank.

"So," he said then, "what's your story?"

"Well…" She licked the foam from her lips and considered. "My name is Heather, first of all. I'm a financial consultant at Howard Paycock, which is a firm in town. I've been in the city about a year, and before that I lived in Seattle, which is also where I went to school. How about you?"

"Well," said Bishop, with a thoughtful frown. "My name is Jim. I'm a private detective with Weiss Investigations-or I was until I screwed over my boss for some stolen cash and a couple of hookups with a killer bitch who set me up to be murdered. Before that, I was actually kind of a hero, but I lost my faith in things, which, if you're a hero, doesn't leave you with a whole lot besides your addiction to violence and the habit of putting yourself in life-threatening situations. So that's pretty much it." He shrugged. He sipped his beer through the silence that followed.