Damnation Street

24.

Later it came to him, in the desert, in the dark. He knew what he had to do.

He'd been driving for hours and hours by then. Pushing on, relentless, through relentless emptiness. Rain came be- fore night fell, a slashing downpour. Then night fell under stuttering thunder. Awesome threefold barbs of lightning jagged from the core of the vast sky to the horizon. The desolate land lit up-endless desolation at every window, in all directions-and then vanished into desolate darkness… the sheeting rain on the windshield… the wipers working back and forth.

Weiss drove on, tired, tired. It was hard going. Hard to see anything, hard to make any time. Hour after hour, slogging through the rain. He gripped the wheel, peered into the night.

He thought about Julie.

The Graves family had been poor. That's what Chalk's old newspaper stories said. The father, mother, and two daughters lived in a cramped, dilapidated house on the edge of the east city. The father had worked in a tire warehouse before the company shut down. Afterward, he mostly did odd jobs, off the books, hauling and lifting for whatever outfit would use him. The mother, Suzanne, was a drunk and a meth addict-a whore, too, when she needed money for the drugs. Otherwise, she worked in the local Hoffman's department store from time to time.

The kids, Mary and Olivia, were thirteen and ten.

The neighbors said Mary took care of her little sister. She played mother to her, made sure she ate, made sure she got to school most days. She took Olivia to their room and hid there with her when the parents fought. The parents fought a lot, the neighbors said. Suzanne brought men to the house when her husband was out-long-haired, tattooed toughs in the drug trade. Charles suspected what was going on, and that's what started the fighting. The police had been called in once or twice to break it up.

No one was very surprised when Suzanne woke up dead one morning. She was supposed to go to work that day, and her girlfriend found her body when she came to pick her up. "It was like a broken watermelon, her head; stuff all over the pillow," the girlfriend told the papers. Everyone said it was shocking, but no one was very surprised.

The husband and daughters were thought missing at first. There was some talk about a drug deal gone sour, a kidnapping, and so on. But it turned out the girls were standing outside Olivia's elementary school, unharmed, waiting patiently for the doors to open. Their father had dropped them off there just before dawn. Then he'd driven away. The police found his pickup later that evening. He himself was never seen again. The children didn't seem to know what had happened.

Weiss gripped the wheel, peered into the night. The Taurus pushed through the spattering rain. Weiss thought about the Graves family, Charles and Suzanne, Mary and Olivia. After a while this thing happened to him, this thing that was always happening. He began to live through the story as if he were in someone else's mind. It was strange. It just came over him. It was part of that weird Weissian knack of his, that knack of knowing who people were, knowing what they would do. He found himself feeling his way through the past as if he had been there, as if he had been Charlie Graves-Charlie Graves who became Andy Bremer-an odd-jobbing lowlife who hammer-killed his junkie wife and became a prosperous churchgoing family man. Weiss could feel how the one kind of man always lived inside the other somehow, the family man lived inside the lowlife all along. Maybe Charlie Graves didn't know it at first. He married Suzanne and, at first, it was all right. But if Suzanne was anything like her half sister, she was a seething, vicious bitch. Savage to her husband, making fun of him when he was down. Smacking the kids around. Drunk, drugged. Bringing the tattooed drug dealers into her house and trading with them, a ride inside her for some booze, some coke, some meth. Charlie could've lived with it, maybe, Weiss felt. Lived with it or just skipped out and left it behind. But there was this other man inside him, this better man. And this man, this Andy Bremer, looked out through Charlie's eyes and saw his kids, his daughters. He saw the looks on their faces. He saw ashes and powder on the living-room rug and half-eaten food on the sofa. He smelled the sex stench of strangers, his wife's perfume. And those looks-even in his sleep, he saw those looks on the two girls' faces. It wasn't enough just to leave. He had to get free. He had to get them all free and he had no money and no place to go and he couldn't even think with the bitch screaming at him the minute he came through the door…

The rain thundered down on the Taurus and the thunder rolled and the desert lay invisible at every window. Weiss's right hand closed tight on the steering wheel, but he felt the wooden handle of the clawhammer in his hand.

Afterward, when the hammer slipped from his fingers, there would've been nothing left for Charlie Graves but the shabby reality of the thing: his wife's crushed skull, the brains on the pillow, the splayed female body, which he had known. And the girls, the two little girls, huddled together in one of their beds, clinging to each other against the horrible noises from the next room, wide-eyed when he opened the door and the wedge of light fell on them, on the looks on their faces…

By then Charlie Graves was gone, was dead, as dead as his wife. He had killed himself killing her. He went through the rest of it like an animated corpse. He hurried his daughters out of the house, drove them to the elementary school in the predawn dark, turning the steering wheel, pressing the pedals mechanically. He left them at the schoolhouse door with a monotone good-bye. And he drove away and kept driving, the life of Charlie Graves falling from him like rotten flesh with every mile, until he reached California and was Andy Bremer at last.

Weiss let him go. He turned in his mind back to the children. The two girls in the school doorway. Fatherless, motherless, alone. Mary took care of Olivia. She always had, that's how she was. Even later, even after she became the whore Julie Wyant, Weiss had heard she was still like that. She had an otherworldly air of tenderness about her-that's what made lonely middle-aged men fall in love with her, that and the otherworldly beauty of her face.

So she took care of Olivia. But then Olivia was taken away. The state, Child Protective Services, foster homes: the two girls were separated. That's why Mary Graves "went bad, ran off," as Adrienne Chalk put it. That's why she became the whore Julie Wyant. She needed to make enough money to save her sister from the system, take care of her, put her through school so she could become a counselor or psychologist or whatever she was. Julie would not have left her sister behind. She would've gone on taking care of her as long as she could. Weiss didn't know how he knew this, but he knew it.

And that's why he knew what he had to do.

He was coming to the end of his search. Olivia was out there. In Phoenix, up ahead, where the lightning touched down. It had taken Weiss and his instincts to get this close to her-that's why the killer had hung back till now, stayed out of it, trailed behind him like a cloud of dust. But now that she was found, the rest would be easy. If anyone knew where Julie was, Olivia did, her sister did. There was nothing to keep the specialist from questioning her himself.

Weiss gripped the wheel, peered through the windshield. Pushed the Taurus on through the downpour.

It was time to meet with him, to meet with the killer. There was no other way to protect Olivia. It was time to talk with the specialist face-to-face. Just as he had in his dreams last night. Just as he had in his nightmares.

He drove on. He crossed through the rain into Arizona. He thought about the Graves family. He thought about his dreams. He knew what he had to do.

He had to meet the Shadowman.