Damnation Street

18.

In the town, on the dark street of houses, the man who called himself John Foy slipped back behind the wheel of the blue rental car. His brown suede windbreaker was thin and the night was cold, but he was sweating all the same.

He sat a long time, just breathing, just gazing out through the windshield with his strangely flat eyes. He did not see the things he was gazing at. He did not see anything outside himself. He was thinking about his tower. He was up in his tower in the calm and empty sky. The red waves of his rage were crashing, crashing against the base of the tower far below. He sat behind the wheel of the car and breathed.

The man who called himself John Foy liked to think of himself as a cool professional. We all have our self-deceptions; this was his. He liked to think of himself as a dispassionate tradesman who did what he did without emotion, without anger or remorse. The truth was very different. In truth, the killer was all rage. What in someone else might be a self or a soul in him was rage alone. There was nothing else there. Sometimes he remembered his boyhood, the wounds and blood and the faces laughing, and he thought he felt sorry for the child he'd been. But he didn't, not really. Really, that was just his rage disguising itself in a sentimental form. Other times he felt a lofty, almost intellectual competence in his work, a sense of himself as a living clockwork of plans and action. But that was also just an illusion-an illusion created by his rage.

When these forms and illusions failed him, when the rage rose red in him as nothing but itself, it was agony. It felt as if he were being burned and strangled at the same time. It felt as if some consuming flame within him and the choking malevolence of the cruel world without had become one thing. It was unbearable. He went away from it, climbed away. Up into his tower to stand there, empty, in the empty sky.

It was several minutes before he could come back to himself. Slowly then, his surroundings took shape through the windshield. He was in a garage, the rented Chrysler 300 squeezed in next to a large motorcycle. It was dark, but he could make out the bike and the silhouettes of shelves on the walls, power tools, paint cans, small glass jars.

He had spotted the garage and turned in, headlights off, only seconds before Weiss came around the corner behind him. He had leaped from the car and hidden there, crouched in the shadows, waiting to see what Weiss would do. When Weiss got out of his car to search the street for him, he had come out into the driveway. He pretended to throw garbage in the can to draw Weiss's eyes away from the garage and the blue Chrysler.

It'd been a risky move. If Weiss had caught on, he would've had to kill him. He had had his hand wrapped around the compact. 45 in the suede windbreaker's pocket the whole time. He had thought, any moment, he would have to pull the trigger, blow a hole in Weiss's paunch.

That's what enraged him-how close the situation had come to going out of control. If he had killed Weiss, the search would've been over. There would be a time for that, but not yet, not before he found the girl. He needed Weiss to find her. He needed Weiss for that way he knew things he shouldn't have been able to know. It should never have been that close-standing there face-to-face with him like that, holding the. 45 in his windbreaker pocket; it had been a mistake, that's all. Another careless mistake, like buying the guns from the Frenchman. And what infuriated him more than anything was that he wasn't sure exactly what the mistake had been.

He had been as close as a breath to Weiss over a dozen times, and Weiss had never noticed him before. No one ever noticed him. He relied on that. He relied on his talent for invisibility, the way he could be with people unseen and then come upon them suddenly, like death-just like death. So what had gone wrong this time? The car wasn't the problem. The car was good. An obvious rental, a tourist car. It fit perfectly outside a motel. The man who called himself John Foy had sat in the car in the motel parking lot with complete confidence. From there it had been easy to use his laser mike to read the vibrations on the office glass, to pick up Weiss's conversation with the motel clerk word for word. He was even able to see the two of them, clear and close, using a pair of powerful Epoch binoculars. He could even read Adrienne Chalk's address in Reno when Weiss wrote it down on the motel pad.

Weiss had come out of the office quickly, but the man who called himself John Foy was ready for him. He was driving away as Weiss came through the door. He should've been able to leave inconspicuously, without being spotted. He'd planned the whole thing perfectly. He had it all worked out in his mind.

Somehow, though, Weiss did spot him. Infuriating. Because Foy didn't know how he did it. Maybe his invisibility was slipping. Maybe Weiss's eyes were somehow adjusting to him, the way eyes adjust to the dark. Maybe Weiss would soon be able to see him anywhere, pick him out of a crowd…

No, that was crazy, paranoid thinking. That's what Weiss did to him. Weiss got inside his head, made him doubt himself. Weiss made him feel that, with all his plans and experience, he was still always a step behind. He had felt that way even before this, outside the empty house, when he was listening to Weiss talk to Andy Bremer. He had heard that conversation word for word too, watched it too, the same as the one at the motel. He hadn't missed anything-but he felt somehow he had. He felt as if something had passed between the two men without their even speaking and he had missed it. That was the sort of thing Weiss made him worry about. Infuriating.

Before the naked rage could build in him again, he grabbed the car's ignition key, grabbed it and twisted it hard to start the Chrysler's engine. He backed out of the garage. He had to plan his next move. That would calm him. He had to think, he had to be cool, dispassionate, a living clockwork.

He thought. He thought maybe he should go back to Andy Bremer's house. He would break in and tie the family up. He would go to work on one of them, one of the children-the girl probably. He would work on her slowly while the others watched and listened to her screaming through her gag. He wouldn't ask them anything. He would just work on the girl while they watched and listened until the girl was dead. Then he would start on the boy. And then-then he would ask them. While he was working on the boy, he would ask them what they knew about Julie. Whatever unspoken business had passed between Bremer and Weiss, he would find out soon enough what it was.

He pointed the car down the street and cruised slowly past the houses to the stop sign at the corner. There was no hurry. He knew where Weiss was going. There was plenty of time to make a stop at Bremer's. Maybe he would even find out enough to go after Julie himself.

But maybe not. Maybe not-and, as Weiss had told Bremer in the house, if the man called John Foy killed the Bremers, Weiss would call off the search. That was the unspoken deal between them, the silent agreement between Weiss and the man who called himself John Foy. Foy would stay in the background. He wouldn't cause trouble or harm the people Weiss spoke to. As long as there was no trouble, Weiss would go on and find Julie, and so Foy would find Julie too. Weiss knew it was going to happen like that, knew they would find her together, but as long as there was no trouble until then, he could tell himself that it would turn out all right. As long as there was no trouble, he would go on, he would find her, even if he had to lie to himself about how it would end. He would go on and he would find her because he had to, because he couldn't stop himself. Just like Foy. It was the same for both of them.

The man who called himself John Foy brought the Chrysler around the corner and headed back for the four-lane. Reluctantly, he gave up the idea of going to Bremer's house. He would've liked to. He would've liked to watch Weiss's face when he learned what happened to them. He would've liked to pay Weiss back for the way he made him feel and for the fact that he needed him to find the girl. But there were other ways to get at Weiss, even now. Weiss wasn't the only one who knew things. The man who called himself John Foy knew something too. He knew a way that he could pay Weiss back.

So it was all right. It was fine. He could start planning again, planning like clockwork. Here was the four-lane, just ahead. He would leave the Bremers alone and go on to Reno with Weiss. He would change cars before he got there. He would change his appearance in the small ways that changed everything: different clothes, different hair, a different way of moving. He would become invisible again. He would be close to Weiss, as close as a breath, and Weiss wouldn't see him. And he would make his plans to pay Weiss back for the way he made him feel and for the fact that he needed him to find the girl.

The Chrysler turned onto the four-lane. The man who called himself John Foy let his foot grow heavier on the gas. The car gathered speed. He was going fifty when he passed the Super 8 Motel, the last business on the street. The city lights fell away behind him quickly.

Darkness and the desert closed in around the windows.