Andrew Klavan - Damnation Street

He woke up suddenly. He felt as if no time had passed at all. But there, beyond the rest-stop bunker, were brown hills and a vista of slate-gray clouds above them. The dawn of a dismal day.

He dragged a hand over the thick stubble on his jaw. He yawned, looking in the side-view mirror. The green Hyundai was still there, for fuck's sake, nestled small amid the giant semis like a tortoise sleeping with dinosaurs.

Weiss shook his head. Who is this fucking idiot? he wondered.

He pushed out of the car. Went around to the trunk. Dug his toiletry kit from his traveling bag. Carried it into the bunker men's room. He pissed, shaved, brushed his teeth, washed his face. Then he went outside to take care of this Hyundai clown.

What was so fucking stupid about the guy was where he'd parked. With all those huge trucks around him, Weiss could get to the Hyundai easily without the driver seeing him. He took his time. Went back to his car. Tossed his toiletry kit back into the trunk. He walked over to the rest-stop cabin and pretended to read the map hanging on its wall.

From there it was easy to move behind the trucks. Enormous as he was, Weiss didn't even have to duck or stoop down or anything. He just strolled casually behind truck after truck, and in a few seconds, he was right beside the Hyundai, ready to pounce.

Three steps in the open and he was at the car door. The idiot driver never saw him coming. The door wasn't even locked. Weiss yanked it open. He grabbed the driver by the shirt collar and yanked him out. He looked him in the face.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," he said.

Exasperated, he shoved me against the side of the car.

"Oof. Ow," I said.

Getting slammed into the Hyundai knocked the wind out of me. Also, I banged my elbow. It really hurt. Really. I rubbed it, wincing.

Weiss stared off into the mountains and the distant clouds. A cool wind moved over him, damp with the coming rain. He shook his head.

"Shit," I said, rubbing my elbow. "Am I, like, the worst private eye ever or what?"

"What the fuck are you doing? You dumb fuck. You're following me? What the fuck?"

"Bishop told Sissy you'd be killed if you did this alone," I said.

Weiss gave a short laugh. "So what? You want to get killed too?"

I looked down at my sneakers. "I thought-you know, with Bishop out of commission-I thought maybe I could help out."

All right, it sounded ridiculous even to me. But I couldn't tell him the whole truth. I couldn't tell him about Emma and what she'd said. I couldn't tell him how much I loved her, and how she only wanted a man she could admire, and how I had to find some way to become admirable so she could love me back. I'd been thinking and thinking about it, thinking about what makes a man admirable, what makes him worthwhile. I'd been thinking about how you can feel worthwhile, but if you really look at yourself maybe you're not. That's why I broke it off with Sissy. So I could be more honest, more worthwhile.

Then the news about Bishop came. Then I saw Bishop for myself, lying there on the bed, his face the color of death. I saw him and I kept thinking about what I had to do.

After that I left the hospital. I went back to my puke-colored Hyundai. I planned to get a hotel room and fly home, just as Sissy had told me to do.

But I didn't. I sat behind the wheel of the car instead. I looked out through the windshield. I watched the hospital for a long time. I saw one ambulance and another and an- other come screaming out of the desert city in rapid succession. I watched them pull up tight before the big glass emergency room doors. Attendants carried the sick out of the backs on stretchers. And there were other attendants pushing sufferers in wheelchairs into the lobby too.

I could see the lobby through the glass. I could see the patients sitting in plastic chairs, waiting for their doctors. Their faces looked haggard. They looked pensive. They looked afraid. These were people, I told myself, who were kind and unkind to others in their lives, who cheated and played fair. They were people who worried about whether they were going to get promoted at their jobs and whether they were going to get home in time to watch their favorite television shows. They were people who argued over who was right and who left out the milk that had gone sour.

I didn't think they were worried about the milk now or their promotions or their television shows.

Which I guess brought my mind back to Bishop. Lying as I'd seen him, with that shocking, colorless face. And Weiss, too, sitting over him with his shoulders slumped and his wise, saggy features emaciated and gray. I thought about both of them and the things that had happened in these dramatic months since I had graduated university and come to work with them at the Agency. They were troubled men. I knew that. Weiss with his whores and his incurable solitude. Bishop with his penchant for violence, his cold heart. They were lost men in many ways. But I admired them. I admired them both.

I sat in my Hyundai and thought some more about what makes a man admirable.

Then, when Weiss came out of the hospital, I followed him.

I couldn't tell him any of that now, here in the rest stop in the Arizona desert. But of course, it was always difficult to figure out how much you had to tell him and how much he already knew.

In any case, he said, "Get back in the car. Get out of here. This isn't a story. You could get hurt. Go home."

"I don't want to go home," I said. "I know it's not a story. Let me help you."

"You can't help me."

"I'm not afraid," I lied. "Let me do something. Please."

I thought that was it; it was over. I thought he was going to jam me back inside the car like he was packing an overstuffed suitcase. I thought he'd grab me by the scruff of the neck, shove me behind the wheel, and kick my ass for good measure before he slammed the door and sent me on my way.

To this day I don't know what was going through his mind. Maybe he understood what it was I needed from him. Or maybe he simply saw that he could use me for his purposes. I don't know. But to my absolute amazement, he nodded once.

"All right," he said. "You wanna follow me? Follow me. Only stay right behind me this time, so you're not so conspicuous."

He went stomping angrily back to his car. I jumped-eagerly-into mine.

We drove north together out of Arizona. We wound through Nevada, through a glum wilderness, the sky gray the whole time, a long time, and nothing anywhere but dust and scrub and barbed wire. We stopped for gas in places that looked as if they rose out of the barren earth only once every century. We bought sandwiches wrapped in plastic, sandwiches made by people who had long since died. We never said a word to one another. We got out of our cars and gassed up and got back in our cars and drove on and never said a word. I kept the Taurus's rear bumper right in front of me. I hardly looked at anything else. I hardly saw the daylight rise and fall behind the clouds. I felt the night come quickly, but I wasn't sure when.

The hours passed. I had been excited for a while and fearful for a while, but now I was just tired and dazed with driving. I noticed a glow in the distance, a low dome of light below the clouds at the vanishing point. I didn't think much of it at first, but it turned out to be a town. Soon the blackness at the car's windows was broken by a billboard, then a gas station, then a sign for a trailer park. Then the town rolled up over the edge of the land. Union City.

It started to rain as we came off the highway. Weiss stopped the Taurus at a red light on the main drag. I pulled up behind him. I turned on the windshield wipers. Peered through the sweep of them at a desolate stretch of road. Mournfully bland restaurants and motels, hole-in-the-wall casinos, car dealerships, mini-marts. Block after block of them, side by desperate side. I stared down the narrowing corridor, wondering what would happen next, waiting for the light to change.