Damnation Street

26.

Next he broke into Weiss's apartment. He flipped the lock with a credit card. Stepped inside. Shut the door behind him.

The living room was in shadow. The window shades were half-drawn, blocking out the morning light. He could hear the traffic out on Russian Hill, but it was quiet inside. The unstirred dust of days hung in the air. The place felt abandoned.

Bishop stood just within the doorway. He gave the room what pilots call a block scan, moving his eyes over ten degrees of arc at a time. He started with the corner to his left. An open kitchen door. The white tile of the room beyond. The toaster on the counter. His gaze moved on another ten degrees. A desk, a swivel chair, a computer, a phone, the answering machine with its red answer light burning: no messages.

He went around the room like that, shifting his focus from one object to another. He looked at the wing chair in an alcove across from him, facing the bay window. There was a small round table by one arm. There were pale rings in the table's brown surface, stains left by the bottom of a glass. Bishop could picture Weiss sitting in the chair, looking out the bay window, sipping his Macallan.

The corner of his mouth twitched. Fucking Weiss, he thought. His gaze moved on.

To his right, he could see the foot of the bed through the bedroom door. The bed was neatly made, the bedspread smooth. Moving on, he saw, on the wall directly at his shoulder, a mirror and another chair. That was the end of the scan.

He went to the desk. He sat down in the swivel chair. The first thing he noticed was the cell phone, Weiss's cell phone, lying right there next to the computer keyboard. Bishop turned it over. The battery was gone. Weiss wanted to make himself that much harder to trace.

Bishop turned the computer on. As he waited for the machine to boot, he pulled open the desk drawers one by one. There wasn't much there. In one drawer he found a box of bullets but no gun. Weiss must've taken his old service revolver with him, that old snub-nosed. 38 he had. There was a twinge in Bishop's gut when he thought of Weiss going after the specialist with his old. 38. The specialist with his SIG and his 1911 and his armor-piercing Saracen. He made a face. He slid the drawer shut hard.

He diddled with the computer for a while, but he was no hacker. Weiss had a code on his case files and his mail. Everything else was business letters, home accounting, that kind of thing. No clues to where he'd gone. The phone answering machine wasn't any help either. Bishop pressed the replay button, but all the messages had been erased.

He pushed back from the desk. Crossed the thin hemp rug. Went into the bedroom. Not much there either. A stack of magazines on the bedside table. Baseball Digest, Sports Illustrated, Baseball America, Newsweek, Law and Order. A book on the bottom of the pile: Let Freedom Ring. He picked up the remote, turned on the television at the foot of the bed. The voice of the anchorwoman was startling in the long-standing silence. FOX News. He turned the set off again.

He went out, back across the living room, back across the thin hemp rug, into the kitchen. He took a quick glance around. Banged through the cabinets. Brought down a drinking glass. He held the glass under the faucet and ran a thin layer of water onto the bottom. He carried the glass back into the living room.

He sat in Weiss's wing chair. He put the glass on the little round table by the chair's arm. He brought his cigarette pack and his plastic lighter out of the slash pocket of his leather jacket. He lit a cigarette. Pressed his head against the chair back and smoked, looking out through the bay window-through the bottom panes, the panes that weren't covered by the half-drawn blinds.

Outside, in the bright, cold morning, the wind was moving in the plane trees. There was a steep hill falling away from a grassy square, town house by town house lining the street, bay window after bay window, descending. On the sidewalk just across from him, a thick-set workman pushed a dolly past the hilltop. A young woman in a white sweater strode into the wind with great determination. On the street a blue station wagon rolled past, then a red coupe, then a green one. There were long moments between the cars when the corner was empty and still.

Bishop raised the Marlboro and pressed it between his lips. Weiss must've sat in this chair in the evenings, he thought. Drinking his scotch, looking out at the hill. Watching the dusk fall over the city. Alone. Watching the dark.

He drew smoke. He let it trail out of his mouth slowly. What did Weiss think about, sitting here? Did he think about the whore? Alone here, night after night, drinking, watching the dark. Or was it the killer he thought about-the killer out there somewhere, watching him, hunting for her?

Bishop tried to think the way Weiss would. If he was going to catch up to the old man, if he was going to stop the specialist, he had to get into their heads-just like Weiss would. He had to get a sense of what they were planning, what they wanted.

He thought about the killer. He thought about him buying three guns from the Frenchman. It was a lot of hardware, powerful stuff. Just to kill off one middle-aged private eye. What was that about?

Bishop lowered the cigarette. He tipped an ash into the water glass on the table. The ash hissed softly, spread and sank, lay black and cold at the glass's bottom. He considered it. Something came to him. A scenario. A reason for the three guns.

Weiss and the killer were different kinds of people-not just because Weiss was a good guy and the killer was a psycho piece of shit. The ways they approached things were different. Weiss had that magical trick he did, that thing where he guessed what you'd do before you'd do it. He'd pulled that on Bishop any number of times. It was annoying as hell, but it worked, no question.

The killer-nobody knew much about him, but from what they'd seen in the past, he was more the methodical type. He made plans. He laid out elaborate strategies and followed them precisely, step by step. He waited patiently-he had endless patience. Then, when he set his machinery into motion, he was relentless, unstoppable.

But Weiss had stopped him once. The last time Weiss and the killer tangled with each other, Weiss's instinct had been one step ahead of the killer's plans. So this time the killer wanted to make sure it was the other way around. This time the killer was planning for Weiss to outguess him.

Bishop smiled around the filter of his Marlboro. That was it. The three guns. The killer was planning for the moment when Weiss would get the better of him. He was planning for Weiss to get in on him somehow and take his gun away-take his gun and search him like the ex-cop he was and find the second gun too. The killer must've come up with some way to hide the third gun, so Weiss wouldn't find it. That would be the Saracen-small, accurate, powerful. He was planning for Weiss to outguess him and take two of his guns away. Then he would kill him with the Saracen.

Bishop narrowed his eyes, peering through the drifting smoke. It was good, he thought. It was a good plan. Simple, but very smart. It would probably work too.

So that was the killer. Bishop had gotten into the killer's mind, just like Weiss would. Now he had to do the same to Weiss himself.

How was he going to figure out where Weiss was? How was he going to get to him before the killer did? Weiss knew everything about finding people-it stood to reason he knew how not to be found. He'd left his cell phone behind. He probably loaded up on cash before he left. He probably wasn't using credit cards or ATMs. He was staying off e-mail. Staying off the phone…

Then it came to him. Another breath of smoke rolled out of his mouth, this one in a billowing rush. It joined the cloud hanging heavy in the still, close air before his eyes.

The message machine.

Bishop darted the butt of his cigarette into the glass. It spit and died with a trailing wisp. He pushed out of the wing chair. He went back to Weiss's desk.

There was the message machine, the red light burning. No messages. They'd all been erased. But Bishop had called the apartment himself, just as he'd told Sissy. He'd left Weiss a message yesterday and now it was gone. That meant Weiss must've phoned in from somewhere, must've picked up the message and erased it. It was careless of him. It was not the kind of mistake he usually made. But maybe he hoped the hooker would contact him here, or maybe there was some information he was waiting for. Maybe he just didn't think anyone would break into his apartment like this. Whatever it was, he'd given himself away.

Bishop picked up the desk phone. He called a lady cop he knew. He flirted with her for about forty-five seconds, then asked her to get him the record of incoming calls to Weiss's apartment.

Then he went out, leaving the glass with the cigarette stub on the table by the wing chair, leaving the smoke hanging in the musty room.

Moments later he was on his Harley. He motored back across the bay. The wind was on his face. The sun lay broken, dazzling, on the wind-rough water. He could already feel that cool, metallic presence in him-that presence that meant violence was coming.

When he got to Berkeley, he checked his palmtop. There was a message waiting. The lady cop. There had only been a few calls to Weiss's apartment, she said. All of them were local, except for one. That one call came from the Saguaro Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona. Room 414. It had come in only a couple of hours ago.

Bishop smiled to himself again. It was that easy. The Saguaro Hotel in Phoenix.

All he needed now was an airplane and a gun.