Damnation Street Read online

  The man himself gave nothing away. Except for his eyes, he was average-looking. In fact, his features were so ordinary, the Frenchman thought they would be difficult to describe. He wore colorless slacks and a bland striped shirt. A khaki windbreaker zipped at the bottom. Everything so plain, so commonplace, it was almost a form of camouflage. Like a ghost, he thought. Everything like a ghost. Invisible.

  The customer slowly laid the Saracen back in its case, back in the space cut for it in the cushioning gray foam. He sat in the straight-backed metal chair with his shoulders slightly hunched, his hands clasped between his thighs. He looked from one open case to another, one weapon to another. He said nothing. He just sat and looked with his mannequin eyes.

  The Frenchman waited, sweating. Finally, he couldn't take it. "Three," he said again, just to say something.

  The customer nodded almost imperceptibly. His voice was toneless.

  "Yes," he said.

  3.

  The blue afternoon had dimmed and it was evening now. Mist was gathering and making halos around the street-lamps. The man who called himself John Foy walked under the haloed lamps. He carried his three guns in a brown paper bag, rolled up so he could grip it in one hand, his right hand, held down by his side.

  He walked along Eighth Street, and it was as the Frenchman said of him: he was invisible. Even the gutter bums didn't ask him for a handout. Boozing at the curb outside the liquor store, squabbling in a litter of torn tickets near the betting office exit, sleeping in bags and boxes in the doorways between the bail bondsmen and the diner, they didn't even look at him as he went by. No one did. No one ever did.

  He walked past unnoticed and then, unnoticed, he was gone. Off the streets, climbing a narrow stair between peeling gray walls. In at a scarred brown door. Entering a room with one curtained window.

  He brushed the light switch up as he shut the door. There was a single bulb in the ceiling covered by a frosted glass plate. It gave off a sickly yellow glow, making hard shadows of the moths and flies that had been caught in the plate and died there. The glow showed a small room, two wooden chairs with foam cushions, a TV on a scratched wooden bureau, and a sagging single bed pushed against the grimy wall.

  Murder had been good to the Shadowman. He'd made millions at it over the years. But he dwelled in places like this almost always, one place like this after another. Restless, indifferent, and anonymous, he came and stayed awhile and moved on. He would be gone from this room before morning.

  He shuffled slowly to the bed. He was breathing a little harder after his climb up the stairs. There was a sheen of sweat on his nondescript face. He sat down on the edge of the bed wearily. He set the brown paper bag on his knees. He opened it, peered inside it like a schoolboy wondering what his mother had packed for lunch. He drew the guns out one by one. The SIG, then the .45, then the Saracen. He laid them neatly on the bed side by side.

  Grunting, he bent over. He reached down under the bed. He drew out a battered brown leather briefcase. He set this by his thigh, on the side of him opposite the guns. He worked the case's snaps. Opened it. There was a laptop inside, the machinery set into the case so that the lid held the monitor and the base the keyboard. He turned the computer on.

  While it booted, he stood. He peeled off his windbreaker, draped it over the back of a chair. Stripped off his shirt, draped it over the windbreaker. He went to the closet, opened it. There was a mirror on the inside of the door. The man who called himself John Foy looked soft with his shirt on, but bare-chested, the muscle showed, corded, rippling, and powerful.

  In the closet, on a shelf chest-high, there was a suitcase. He opened it, took out the silicone vest. It was heavy, fifteen pounds at least. He had had it made by a special-effects company in Los Angeles. It was decorated with painted latex and hair—yak hair, they'd told him. Whatever it was, the vest looked and felt exactly like human flesh.

  He put the vest on, slipping it over his shoulders, fastening it in back. It blended smoothly with his own body, rising as a false paunch below his breasts and curving back down to end at his waist. It had a subtle effect. It added only about ten pounds or so to the look of him.

  There was more stuff like this in the suitcase: silicone overlays and prosthetics to make his face and arms look a little fatter, too, so the whole image would fit together. But he didn't need them now. For now, this was enough. He walked back to the bed, trying to move naturally with the extra weight on him.

  He picked up the Saracen from where it lay beside the other two guns. The Frenchman was a babbling idiot, but he was right about this weapon. It was incredibly light, incredibly small, especially for a gun so powerful. It slipped easily through the slit in the silicone vest. It nestled snugly in the foam pouch fitted inside.

  The man who called himself John Foy put his shirt back on. He tucked it in as he went to stand again before the closet mirror. He nodded once at what he saw there. The vest looked entirely natural. It made him just a little fatter, and it hid the gun completely. Not only that, when he pressed on it, even when he pressed in hard, he felt only what seemed to be human flesh. The foam, and an extra layer of rubber, made it impossible to tell the gun was there.

  Your ordinary policeman feels a great satisfaction when he finds the first, the Frenchman had said. He thinks himself, oh, very smart. When he finds the second, he is a law-enforcement genius. That is the end of it, almost always. No one searches for three.

  A babbling idiot, no doubt about it. Weiss was no ordinary policeman. Weiss knew things. He guessed things. That was the whole point.

  The man who called himself John Foy had a gift for moving through the world unseen. He had worked in cities all over the West, from the coast to the Mississippi, and yet he had left barely a trace of himself anywhere. No one knew his real name. Even the people who hired him didn't know what he looked like. The cops in the cities he'd been in, the state cops, the feds—none of them even knew he existed.

  But Weiss knew. Weiss had somehow guessed. The man who called himself John Foy didn't know how he did it, but he did.

  He examined himself in the mirror. Turned this way, that. He pressed the silicone vest from every angle, as hard as he could.

  He nodded again. He didn't think Weiss would guess about the third gun.

  Satisfied, he looked back at the bed, at the computer in the briefcase. It was up and running now. The monitor showed a twice-divided screen, four separate readouts. One would pick up the GPS tracker on Weiss's car when it was in range; another would map the pulses coming from the bird-doggers sewn into his belt, jacket, and shoes. The other two were for listening devices: phone taps, cell tracking, the distance mikes that could pick up voices through concrete, and the laser that read the vibrations on window glass. All of them checked out, up and running.

  He was ready to return to the hunt.

  He packed up his things slowly, methodically. The computer under the bed. The vest back in the suitcase. The guns inside their paper bag with two holster straps wrapped around them. The bag he put in the suitcase too. Before he shut the suitcase lid, he looked down at the bag, his expression distant, even a little sad. It had been a mistake to get the guns from the Frenchman, he thought. Three guns from one man. A man like that. It was just the sort of thing he never did. He had always spread his business out. He had always covered his tracks obsessively. Once, he had traveled to four different cities just to get the pieces for a single weapon. He had been that cautious at his best. Always planning, always anonymous, always invisible.

  But that was over. Everything was over. Everything except the girl. And Weiss.

  He shut the suitcase. He plodded back to the narrow bed. He lay down on it, shirtless. He laid his arm across his forehead and looked up at the chaotic web of cracks in the plaster ceiling. Thinking about the Frenchman, about the guns, about the girl, about Weiss—it had all begun to give him a bad feeling, a red, hot feeling spreading through his center. He was making a lot of mistakes now. He knew that. He
was getting careless. Because of her. Because nothing mattered to him anymore except having her again. He couldn't think beyond that. He couldn't make his usual perfect plans.

  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.

  4.

  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.

  It was a long silence. Then the girl said, "Wow. Interesting."

  Thirty-five minut
es later, they were in her apartment three stories above Alvarado Street. She was bent naked over some sort of work desk, and Bishop, cupping her breasts in his hands, was driving into her from behind. She was digging it in a big way and was actually beginning to wonder if there really might be such a thing as love at first sight. Bishop was beginning to wonder if there might be a cold piece of chicken or some leftover Chinese in her refrigerator because he hadn't eaten anything but pretzels since forever.

  She cried out his name. He grunted the name of the girl on the TV news.

  That's when the cops came for him.

  5.

  Bishop would've known those pounding footsteps anywhere. How the hell had they found him here? He was irritated and thrust into the gasping financial consultant with a muttered curse. He thrust again, stubbornly—again and again—and managed to finish just as the cops started pounding on the apartment door.

  "Open up! Police!"

  "Oh my God!" said the financial consultant—Bishop couldn't remember her name.

  Anyway, he was already pulling out of her. He yanked his jeans off a chair, started stuffing himself back into them. At the same time, Heather—Heather; that was it—she was twisting off the desk, stumbling backward, covering her breasts with one hand and her crotch with the other. She stared at the door, open-mouthed. Then at Bishop. Then at the door.

  The police started pounding again.

  "Open up! Let's go! This is the police!"

  Heather's mouth opened and closed a few times. Then she shouted, "Just a minute! I'm not dressed!"

  The police went right on pounding.

  Heather glanced at Bishop. He was hopping around, trying to get his boot on. "Hurry up!" she whispered at him fiercely. She snatched her jeans up off the floor, shouting at the same time: "I said just a minute! I'm getting dressed!"