Andrew Klavan - Damnation Street

Sissy wrapped her arms around him. She pressed her face against his shirt. He held her. She wanted to ask him what was going to happen, but it seemed like a childish question. How should he know? So she just pressed against him, breathing the smell of him, rank and comforting.

"I just feel like everything's falling apart," she said again.

He patted her back awkwardly.

She drew away. She looked at Bishop. "He was coming to help you," she said.

"Yeah, I figured. In fact, do me a favor, will you. Tell him that when he comes around. Tell him I figured that."

"He said you'll get killed if you do this alone."

"It'll be all right."

She faced him. Showed him her tears, her mottled cheeks. She knew it affected him. He was very soft for her.

"It's not all right, Scott," she said. "Look at what happened to Jim."

He looked. He nodded. "It'll be all right," he repeated.

Sissy put her arms around him again, pressed to him again, held him hard. "He said this man-this man you're after-Jim said he'll kill you."

"Eh," said Weiss. "He's not gonna kill me so fast."

She laughed, crying against him.

She felt his grip on her loosen. She held on tighter, refusing to let him go. Gently, he pushed her away.

She looked up at his mournful features. "Will I be able to reach you?"

"No. Not for a while."

"But what if…?"

"I'll be back soon."

"Scott…"

"I'll see you, Sissy. Take care of things here, okay?"

"Scott…"

He lifted one of his huge hands and patted her head clumsily. "All right," he said. "That's it. I'll see you."

He took a last look at Bishop. Then he moved slowly out of the room.

Sissy watched him until he was gone. Then she watched the door. Then she sighed deeply.

Then she walked slowly over to Bishop's bed and sat down beside it in Weiss's chair.

For the first time, Weiss sensed a watcher on the road behind him. Sunrise was still a couple of hours away, but the traffic outside Phoenix was already getting thicker. Lines of big, rumbling semis crowded the right lane. Scattered white headlights glared in the rearview mirror. Cars streamed past him on either side. Red taillights receded into the night beyond the windshield.

Weiss drove to the top of a hill and down the far slope into the desert. The sprawling, glittering city disappeared from view behind him. There was nothing now for miles and miles but the other cars and the broken white line slapping up under his front fender. He drove. And after about half an hour, he picked one car out in his side-view: one pair of headlights that had been with him, behind him, too long, at the same distance from him too long.

What the hell? he wondered. Maybe the killer just didn't care anymore. Now that they'd met in the airport, now that they'd spoken together. Maybe it didn't matter to him anymore whether he was invisible or not. Maybe. Weiss doubted it, though. Invisible was the way he was. Anonymous was the way he was. This was something else. An open threat? Incompetence? Stupidity? Who the hell knew?

Anyway, he was too tired to work it out. He'd been up all night. His mind was thick with exhaustion. It was full of whispers-the friendly, conversational voice of the Shadowman.

You think it'll be clean? It will not be clean.

He was haunted by images of Bishop lying still as stone. He needed to get some sleep.

He drove another hundred miles. That was all he had in him. He pulled off the highway into a rest stop. There was a parking lot lit by sodium streetlamps, picnic tables on a strip of grass, restrooms and vending machines housed in a concrete bunker with a cheap rock veneer. He parked the Taurus to one side of the bunker. He cracked the window to get some air. The smell of disinfectant wafted to him from the toilets.

He pushed the driver's seat back. He rested there, waiting, watching the side-view. It took about half a minute for the other car to show.

In the pink glow of the sodium lights, he could see it was a little Jap rental, a Hyundai, puke green. He watched it pull into a far corner of the lot, into a slanted space at the end of a long row of parked semis. He closed his eyes. That was it. He had to sleep.

But he couldn't sleep, not at first. Too much crap still going on in his head. The killer's voice, the images of Bishop, Sissy-poor Sissy and her lonely-heart tears. He forced himself to think of something else. The Graves family. The girls, Mary and Olivia; their father, Charles; their mother, Suzanne. What was he getting wrong about them? He went back to work on it, trying to figure it out as if it were a puzzle. He thought it would help him sleep.

He couldn't sleep. He sat back in the reclining seat with his eyes closed. He thought about what Olivia Graves had said about her sister Mary: Julie Wyant.

She had a habit of becoming whoever men wanted her to be. I suppose that makes her the perfect whore, doesn't it?

There was anger in her voice, Weiss thought, but not just anger. There was guilt too. She was angry at her sister because she felt guilty about what her sister had done, what her sister had done for her sake.

The scene floated through Weiss's mind like a daydream. The mother, Suzanne Graves, drugged stupid in her house in Akron. The tough tattooed men gathering in her living room while her husband was out trying to drum up work. They brought her booze; they brought her crystal. They traded the drugs for her body.

But that wouldn't have been enough. It never was, nothing was. After a while the men's eyes would've wandered to the daughters too, the little girls.

She was always beautiful, Olivia Graves said. Men of a certain mind-set have always fallen in love with her at first sight, even when she was a girl.

That was not just anger, not just guilt either, thought Weiss-that was jealousy too. Sibling jealousy, crazy and everlasting. Men of a certain mind-set-these dealers, these tattooed thugs-they had supplied Suzanne Graves with drugs in exchange for sex with her, and then for sex with her daughter. But not with both her daughters. Just the older one, the beautiful Mary. Somewhere in Olivia's ten-year-old brain she was jealous about that, jealous that the men wanted her sister more than her.

She had a habit of becoming whoever men wanted her to be.

The perfect whore, thought Weiss. Sure she was. Because thirteen-year-old Mary must have realized that the men wouldn't stop with her. Why should they? Suzanne would give them anything to get her supply. They would go on and rape the little sister too eventually. Mary knew she had to take care of little Olivia. That's what Mary did, that's how she was. So she did what she had to do to keep the men off her, to keep her sister safe. She taught herself how to be whatever each man wanted. She turned herself into the perfect whore. She kept the men busy, kept them away from Olivia. And now Olivia Graves lived with that, with the guilt and the anger and the weird, unfinished jealousy. She lived with what her sister had become-had become for her sake-had become so that she could have the life she had.

Weiss opened his eyes. He stared at the windshield, at the pink glow on the glass from the sodium lights. It all felt like a weight on him just then. A great heavy weight, all of it. Bishop lying in the hospital, and the rage in the Shadow-man's friendly voice, and Sissy's lovelorn weeping, and thirteen-year-old Mary Graves forced to whore herself for a bunch of thugs to keep her ten-year-old sister safe. Weiss sat and stared at the windshield, and he was weighted down by what people were, by the things people did to one another.

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

He closed his eyes again. What didn't he understand? How Julie knew where her father was when he was supposed to have deserted her to become a fugitive. Why Julie went on whoring now that Olivia was grown up and free. Who that fucking idiot was following him in the puke green Hyundai…