Damnation Street

35.

By this time Weiss was sitting in the airport. He was eating cashews from a striped paper bag. He had found a secluded place in a corner by a window. He was seated in a molded blue plastic chair, one of a double row of chairs bolted to an iron stand so that the two lines of seats faced in opposite directions. The terminal was quiet at the moment. The rest of the chairs in the double row were empty.

He watched the jets landing and lifting off into the twilight. He watched them deadpan, as if he were in a trance. He munched away at the cashews mechanically. He hardly noticed how his stomach burned and churned. He hardly noticed there was something in the heart of him very much like fear. He watched the jets. He found them a restful sight.

The big terminal pane was thick and the runways were far across the field so that even the hefty seven-sevens seemed to come and go silently. The silence, in turn, made the jets seem graceful, made them seem to float to the tarmac or glide up from the ground into the deepening blue. Weiss watched, lifting cashews to his lips, chewing the nuts like cud, as landing lights like the first stars grew brighter, closer, and the jets that carried them took shape out of the folding dusk. He watched these jets touch down as others taxied into position for takeoff. Then he watched those begin their roll along the centerline toward the sky.

He wished he were going somewhere. Anywhere. Home or far away. It didn't matter. He yearned for his armchair by the bay window and a glass of Macallan, but he also ached to be in a new place, a small town maybe, where the air smelled of wood fire at sunset and people smiled at you as they passed you on the sidewalk of an evening, walking their collies or their Irish setters or whatever the fuck they walked in towns like that. How the hell should he know? He'd lived in cities all his life.

He sighed and dipped his hand into the paper bag again. It was striped red and white like the popcorn bags he sometimes got at ball games. He liked that. He liked ball games. He wished he were at a ball game now.

Outside, a short-hop twin-engine wafted smoothly into the air. Heading for Albuquerque maybe, or maybe LA. Weiss's eyes followed it. What the hell was he doing here, he asked himself. He couldn't even remember anymore why he'd started out. Some bullshit about the Agency, the business going sour. Something about Bishop fucking up his livelihood after he had given him so many chances to go straight. Something about being older than he ever meant to be and about that otherworldly look in Julie Wyant's eyes. Mary Graves's eyes.

Why are you doing this?

Olivia Graves had asked him the same question. She came into his mind now. He thought about her. Her professional manner, her standoffish clothes. Her psychologist pose in the sling chair, legs crossed, hands on her raised knee. Ever since he'd left her, something had been nagging at him about their conversation. Not about what she'd said to him, about what he'd said to her, about the way he'd laid out the Graves family story. It hadn't seemed as sound to him somehow when he spoke it out loud in Olivia's office as it had when he was thinking about it to himself in his car.

You think you understand everything, but you don't understand anything.

What didn't he understand? The bond between the Graves sisters. The father's bond to them both. If Charles Graves-Andy Bremer-had abandoned the girls after killing their mother, if he had become a fugitive and disappeared, how did Julie know where he was? How had she known where to call him? And if Julie had become a whore to get Olivia out of the foster system, to pay her way through school, why did she go on with it after Olivia was on her own? Why was Olivia so angry with her-and so bound to her? Why were they all so bound up together?

Something about the Graves family didn't make sense to him. Something about the scenario he'd laid out in his mind didn't make sense.

He sat. He thought about it. He ate his cashews. He watched the planes. In some distant part of him, he was dimly aware of his stomach churning, aware of the time passing as he waited for what was on its way, dreading it.

He watched the horizon, where wisps of clouds turned red, turned gray. The sky darkened. He sat and watched it in a kind of trance.

Then, just as night fell, he came to himself as if from a great way off. A sense of sourness had washed over him suddenly. A stale, rotten heat seemed to spread all through him. He had a weird, nauseating, panicky feeling, as if he'd woken up inside his own coffin, underground.

He swallowed a chunk of cashew, swallowed hard. He understood. The time had come. The Shadowman was here.