Andrew Klavan - Damnation Street

"No, no, no," I heard myself say hoarsely. I put my hand on her hand as she tried to push the T-shirt up. I drew it out from underneath the cloth and held it. I looked into her sweet blue eyes. "You're going to have to fire me," I told her.

She gave a sort of half laugh. She half thought it was a joke, half knew it wasn't.

"You're going to have to kick me out of the Agency."

"What are you talking about, goofy? What's the matter? You sound so serious all of a sudden."

"It's the professor," I said, holding on to her hand, looking into her eyes. I inclined my head toward the novel on the bedside table. "McNair."

"What about him? Do we have to talk about this now?"

I brought her hand down and held it against my heart. She must've felt how hard my heart was beating. She looked to where our hands were, and I saw fear come into her eyes.

"Yes," I said. "We have to."

Well, she knew right away what was coming. It had happened to her too many times for her not to know. For one more second, I considered letting it go until another day. But really, there was no stopping now.

"I can't do what the professor hired me to do," I said. "I took the case under false pretenses. It was the damnedest coincidence, an incredible coincidence, him coming in, him asking me to follow his daughter. I never should've taken the case-because I already knew her."

"You already…?"

"I was already in love with her."

Her gaze, which had clung for all these moments to our hands, our hands pressed to my heart, now flickered back to me, my face, my eyes.

"Emma McNair," I said. "I love her, Sissy."

She crumbled. Just like that. It was horrible. I wished she would've handled it any other way. I wished she would've hit me. I wished she would've given me the hell I deserved. But it was like watching one of those buildings you see get demolished with dynamite on the TV news sometimes. She just collapsed inward, just slipped to her knees by the side of the bed, dropped her head into her folded arms, and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Every now and then, she would look up and plead with me. She would clutch at my arm, beg me to stay with her. Again and again, she asked me: What was wrong with her? Why didn't I love her? Why couldn't I just please love her, just please try?

Who knows what mealy-mouthed garbage I answered her with. Mostly, I lay there and watched her, watched the shuddering top of her head, guilt-ridden and appalled. If I could've magically melted through the mattress and reappeared at a nearby saloon with a whiskey in my hand, believe me, I would've. It was unbearable. It went on and on and on.

After maybe about twenty minutes-twenty minutes that felt like an hour and a half-the phone began to ring. The phone was right near us on the bedside table, right by McNair's book. It was white and, yes, fluffy: it had this strip of fluffy stuff glued to the top of the handset. Sissy usually turned the ringer off when we made love, but she hadn't gotten around to it yet tonight. It rang very loudly. It startled me.

Sissy, though-she didn't even seem to hear it. She didn't lift her face from her arms or try to choke back her sobs or anything. She cried and cried, clutching and kneading the soaked bedspread beneath her. The phone kept ringing and ringing.

Finally, I had to grab the damn thing myself.

"Hello?"

I couldn't hear the woman on the other end of the line at first-Sissy was weeping too loudly. "I'm sorry?" I said.

I stroked Sissy's hair, hoping it would quiet her, but she only seized my hand in both her hands and held it against her wet cheek. I had to pull free so I could press the heel of my palm to my ear, so I could hear.

The woman on the other end of the line spoke for less than a minute. She spoke in a professional tone of regret. When I hung up, my hand was shaking.

I guess my reaction was visible on my face-I guess she could hear it in my voice, because when I spoke Sissy's name, she looked up at once-and as soon as she saw me, her sobs began to slow at last.

Wiping her nose with her knuckle, she managed to force some words out. "What? What's the matter? What's happened?"

"That was a hospital in Phoenix," I told her. "Yours was the only number they had."

Sissy stared at me, dazed and exhausted.

"It's Bishop," I said. "He's been shot."

"Oh my god!"

"They think he's dying, Sissy."

By this time Weiss was sitting in the airport. He was eating cashews from a striped paper bag. He had found a secluded place in a corner by a window. He was seated in a molded blue plastic chair, one of a double row of chairs bolted to an iron stand so that the two lines of seats faced in opposite directions. The terminal was quiet at the moment. The rest of the chairs in the double row were empty.

He watched the jets landing and lifting off into the twilight. He watched them deadpan, as if he were in a trance. He munched away at the cashews mechanically. He hardly noticed how his stomach burned and churned. He hardly noticed there was something in the heart of him very much like fear. He watched the jets. He found them a restful sight.

The big terminal pane was thick and the runways were far across the field so that even the hefty seven-sevens seemed to come and go silently. The silence, in turn, made the jets seem graceful, made them seem to float to the tarmac or glide up from the ground into the deepening blue. Weiss watched, lifting cashews to his lips, chewing the nuts like cud, as landing lights like the first stars grew brighter, closer, and the jets that carried them took shape out of the folding dusk. He watched these jets touch down as others taxied into position for takeoff. Then he watched those begin their roll along the centerline toward the sky.

He wished he were going somewhere. Anywhere. Home or far away. It didn't matter. He yearned for his armchair by the bay window and a glass of Macallan, but he also ached to be in a new place, a small town maybe, where the air smelled of wood fire at sunset and people smiled at you as they passed you on the sidewalk of an evening, walking their collies or their Irish setters or whatever the fuck they walked in towns like that. How the hell should he know? He'd lived in cities all his life.

He sighed and dipped his hand into the paper bag again. It was striped red and white like the popcorn bags he sometimes got at ball games. He liked that. He liked ball games. He wished he were at a ball game now.

Outside, a short-hop twin-engine wafted smoothly into the air. Heading for Albuquerque maybe, or maybe LA. Weiss's eyes followed it. What the hell was he doing here, he asked himself. He couldn't even remember anymore why he'd started out. Some bullshit about the Agency, the business going sour. Something about Bishop fucking up his livelihood after he had given him so many chances to go straight. Something about being older than he ever meant to be and about that otherworldly look in Julie Wyant's eyes. Mary Graves's eyes.

Why are you doing this?

Olivia Graves had asked him the same question. She came into his mind now. He thought about her. Her professional manner, her standoffish clothes. Her psychologist pose in the sling chair, legs crossed, hands on her raised knee. Ever since he'd left her, something had been nagging at him about their conversation. Not about what she'd said to him, about what he'd said to her, about the way he'd laid out the Graves family story. It hadn't seemed as sound to him somehow when he spoke it out loud in Olivia's office as it had when he was thinking about it to himself in his car.

You think you understand everything, but you don't understand anything.

What didn't he understand? The bond between the Graves sisters. The father's bond to them both. If Charles Graves-Andy Bremer-had abandoned the girls after killing their mother, if he had become a fugitive and disappeared, how did Julie know where he was? How had she known where to call him? And if Julie had become a whore to get Olivia out of the foster system, to pay her way through school, why did she go on with it after Olivia was on her own? Why was Olivia so angry with her-and so bound to her? Why were they all so bound up together?