Damnation Street

14.

Weiss hit Hannock that same day and started tailing a man named Andy Bremer. He hated following people. It was boring and sleazy. You sat in a car and drank coffee till you needed to piss so badly you thought it would kill you. Then, without fail, just as you decided to go find a bathroom somewhere, your subject started moving and you had to hold it in and go after him. Finally, your bladder on fire, you ended up watching the poor bastard try to steal something he shouldn't steal or buy something he shouldn't buy or fuck someone he shouldn't fuck-in other words, you watched him trying to find some pathetic version of happiness even as you knew all the while that he would never be happy ever again precisely because you were watching him and were going to tell the person who hired you, who was probably the person your subject least wanted told. Fucking was the worst. Standing outside some hotel window, needing to piss, snapping pictures of some guy's hairy ass bouncing up and down between some girl's open knees. Weiss had a romantic streak. He knew full well this moment might seem like hearts and flowers inside the guy's head, inside the girl's head too. But outside the hotel window, it was just a bouncing ass and open knees. Some photographs. A screaming spouse. Alimony. Misery all around.

With Andy Bremer, he wasn't even sure he was trailing the right guy. It was just one of his Weissian hunches that had brought him here. And while his hunches were almost always right, he almost never trusted them. They were too vague, too unscientific. He wished he could write out the facts on a whiteboard or something and look them over and tap the pen against his chin and reach his conclusions through logic and deduction. But he never could. He just knew what he knew, so he never felt certain of it.

In Paradise, for instance, he started with the fact that Julie Wyant had called him from a pay phone. There were other calls made from that pay phone as well, but somehow he just had a hunch they weren't hers. He figured she wasn't using a cell phone because it would be too easy to locate. He figured she wouldn't use the same pay phone twice for a similar reason-Weiss might trace the call she'd made to him and find out who she'd called next. So using an old contact at the phone company from his police days, he collected some calls from other pay phones in the area, calls that had been made within an hour or so of the call to him. There weren't that many pay phones around anymore, but he still managed to come up with more than thirty calls. The call to Andy Bremer in Hannock caught him somehow. He wasn't sure why. It was made about the right time and Bremer lived in the direction Julie was traveling and-well, it just caught him. It was one of those Weiss-type things.

So he set off for Hannock, to the northeast. It was a little oasis of oak and evergreens and clapboard ranches on the edge of the desert. It was pleasant and shady, but every street seemed to end in dust. The dust ended at the snowcapped Sierra Nevada rising in the distance against a sky made pale by a scudding mist of clouds. With all that nature and emptiness everywhere, the town felt to Weiss like the frontier outpost it had once been. It was the kind of place that made him itch to be elsewhere. He was a city boy through and through.

He drove his drab Taurus down the deserted morning streets, past open playing fields and a silent flat-roofed school and into deeper shadows under clustered junipers. At the end of one tree-lined lane, he parked outside Bremer's house. It was a gray two-story with gingerbread trim on a peaked roof, one of the few two-story houses in the neighborhood.

No one was awake yet inside. Weiss drank a Styro of coffee he'd picked up at a gas station food mart on the edge of town. He watched the house. He wondered if the specialist was watching him or just tracking him from somewhere nearby. He checked up and down the shadowed street. There were cars parked along the curb. He didn't see any people in them, but he knew the killer was out there somewhere. Just a question of where, that's all.

Sipping his coffee, he read the pages he had printed off the Internet, off the computers in the hotel in Paradise. There was a biography of Bremer from a United Way site and some pictures from his real estate home page. Every time Weiss read the material, his stomach grew more sour and he became more convinced he was following the wrong guy. Bremer looked squeaky clean. A family man in his mid-sixties. Small, barrel-chested, energetic-looking. A Realtor. Married to what looked like his second wife, a slim, pert, attractive lady in her forties. Two kids: a girl maybe six, a boy maybe seven.

Weiss finished the coffee. He hauled a leather case up off the floor. He unzipped it and took out his camera, a Canon Rebel. He screwed on a 300mm zoom. He peered through the lens into Bremer's kitchen window. It was a nice, clear view.

The man himself came into the kitchen around half past seven in the morning. His son and daughter were clamoring at his heels. The kids sat at the kitchen table, the boy playing with a toy car, the girl with a doll. They gabbed at their father while he made a pot of coffee. Then he started to stir up some waffle mix in a metal bowl.

After a while the wife came in, wearing a bathrobe. She kissed her husband and poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot. She drank the coffee leaning against a counter, watching the kids shovel waffles into their mouths. She laughed as they scraped the last drops of maple syrup off their plates. Bremer washed the dishes, meanwhile, and chatted with the missus over his shoulder.

" Uy, " Weiss groaned to himself. Wrong place. Wrong guy. A bad hunch, a waste of time.

Maybe Bremer wasn't what he seemed, but he sure seemed to be what he seemed. Everyone has secrets and everyone lies. But mostly it's nothing. Mostly they're just hiding things that make them feel small and sad. They have less money than they pretend, less sex. They drink more than they say. They watch more TV. They use drugs and pretend they don't. They look at pornography and pretend they don't. They steal in one way or another. Their kids are going bad. They're ashamed of their dreams.

Weiss was sure Bremer had his secrets too, told his lies just like everyone. But sitting in his Taurus, peering through his camera into the guy's kitchen window, it seemed pretty unlikely that this was a man who got phone calls from hookers on the run from contract killers.

After breakfast the Bremer family got dressed and went to church. Weiss followed them there. When they were safely inside, he returned to their empty house and went in.

Wary of nosy neighbors, he approached the place carrying a clipboard as if he were going to read a meter or take a survey or something. He had a set of burglar picks in the pocket of his tweed jacket, but it turned out he didn't need them. The door was unlocked. He walked right in.

The massive man had to step gingerly across the living room. The Bremer boy's superheroes and the girl's dolls littered the tan carpeting. Weiss reached the stairs. He went up to the second floor. He went down a hall and found Bremer's study, his computer, his cabinets. He turned the computer on.

The computer had no security system. The passwords were stored right on the machine. Weiss went through Bremer's word-processing files and e-mails. Bremer served on the church vestry and worked on a committee for the local United Way. His son had had a problem with a bully at school. His wife had had a breast cancer scare but was all right. The real estate business was on the upswing. There were other things, this and that. But nothing about Julie Wyant. Nothing about the Shadowman.

Weiss blew out a long, weary breath. He turned his attention to the desk drawers. He found manila folders full of credit card statements. He laid them on the desk and paged through them. Here finally, there was one small item that caught his attention: an American Express charge for a night at a Super 8 Motel on the edge of town. The charge had been made one week ago. Checking back, he found another Super 8 charge two months before. When he dug up the records for another two months back, there was the Super 8 again.

There was an oak close by the study window. A goldfinch perched on one of its naked twigs. Weiss glanced up from the pages in his hand when he heard the bird's triple chirp and trill. It was a pretty yellow bird, a cheerful sight. His gaze rested on it absently and then wandered back to the room.

He was sitting in the cheap leatherette swivel chair behind Bremer's desk. The desk was a battered crescent, the walnut veneer chipped away in places to show the plywood underneath. The surface of the desk was crowded with framed snapshots of Mrs. Bremer and the two children. Left and right of the desk, there were scribbled crayon drawings thumbtacked to the wall paneling. Weiss's gaze lingered on one of them: four stick figures-Mommy, Daddy, sister, brother-standing under a rainbow hand in hand.

The picture made Weiss feel bad: lonesome and low-down. The whole place made him feel like that. He had no business being here. The empty house around him felt like a stage in a closed theater when the play's over and the actors and the audience are gone. It was charged with traces of an intimate energy that belonged to the people who had been here and left. It was not meant for him. For him, the place was hollow, echoing, dead. He would've liked a family like Bremer had. He was the family type. He would've liked a wife who leaned against the kitchen counter and drank coffee and chatted, children who gabbled at him. But he was never any good with women. He thought too much of them, in spite of everything he'd seen. He'd even had a wife once-a poisonous snake of a woman, the whole thing had been a disaster-and still he held on to his high romantic notions. Somehow that made the simple things impossible for him. The only women he had these days were whores.

He went on gazing at the crayon drawing without really seeing it. He held the pages of the Amex statements drooping from the fingers of one hand. Why did a man get a room in a Super 8 in his own hometown, he wondered distantly. For an affair maybe, but there were plenty of innocent explanations too. It might've been for a visiting friend or relative, or for a night away from the kids with his wife, or for a business associate. Weiss moved his hand up and down as if weighing the pages. It probably had nothing to do with Julie Wyant. But it stuck with him, all the same.

A clock chimed somewhere downstairs, bringing him back to himself. The Bremer family would be home soon. Weiss put the pages back in their folders, filed them away. Switched off the computer. Grunted out of the chair and lumbered out of the study. Trudged downstairs. He stepped out of the house into the cool morning. He left the door unlocked just as he'd found it.

He drove slowly through the neighborhood, past sidewalks overshadowed by oak trees and the occasional yellowing sycamore, past low houses on half-acre lawns. He came to the Bremers' church on the corner of a broad thoroughfare. There was a grassy median in the middle of the road, early traffic whizzing by on either side. He parked outside the church and waited.

The church had a square tower of brown brick with narrow arched windows and battlements on top like a castle. With the car window down, Weiss could hear the people singing hymns inside. Now and then, he checked the rearview mirror, looked right and left out through the windows, checking to see if he could spot the assassin he knew was watching him, trailing him. There was nothing. The whizzing traffic. An old couple, bent-backed, arm in arm, walking away from him on the sidewalk. A woman on the median waiting for a bus.

Weiss turned back to the church. He sighed and waited. He still felt sordid and depressed. He was on the wrong trail. Wrong guy. Wrong place. But he kept thinking about the charges for the Super 8 Motel. That held him.

The last hymn ended. The minister came out of the church and stood in the entryway. Then the people came out, shaking his hand as they left. There was Bremer with his wife and children in the exiting crowd. The children wore paper crowns they must've made in Sunday school. Bremer and the minister shook hands and smiled and spoke together a moment. Then Bremer took his wife's hand. The children ran laughing in front of them toward their car, a red Buick SUV Mrs. Bremer belted them inside the car, and her husband held the passenger door open for her. Then he went around to the driver's side. He got in and the SUV drove off.

By now Weiss had to take a piss pretty badly. He hated following people.

He started up the Taurus and went after the Bremers.