Damnation Street

4.

Jim Bishop, meanwhile, was at a bar. He was leaning on the rail, his hand around a mug of beer. Behind the bar, above the mirrored shelves of liquor bottles, there were three TVs set high on the wall. There were baseball games playing on two of the TVs. There was news playing on the other one. On the news there was a video of a beautiful blond girl-a teenager-in handcuffs. A deputy was holding her arm at the elbow, lowering her into a squad car outside the Redwood City courthouse. The sound on the TV was off, but the caption told the story: the girl had been charged with four counts of felony murder. The squad car drove out of sight with the girl and the deputy inside.

Bishop smiled his sardonic smile. He lifted his beer mug, toasted the television news, and drank. He did not love anyone, but he did have sort of a thing for the blond girl on the news. She had had a way of bringing him to the cold, still border of himself whenever he was inside her. He would've done a lot for the chance to get a few more hits at her. He would've stolen money. He would've fucked over Weiss, who was not only his boss but his only friend. Whatever excuse for a code of honor he still had, he would've shredded it on the spot. Hell, he'd been planning to do all those things and more. But before he could get through the list, she had set him up to be killed. That pretty much put an end to the affair-that, or maybe just the fact that she'd gotten herself arrested.

Bishop set his beer down. Leaned on the rail. Went on smiling his sardonic smile. Grimacing, he worked his right shoulder around a little. It still throbbed from where the girl's psycho lover had stabbed him after she'd set him up. He was supposed to be taking painkillers for it. He was drinking the beer instead.

He'd been drinking beer for several days, in fact. He'd been in a lot of bars during that time, an endless series of bars it seemed. This one was-where?-in the Noe Valley somewhere. It was one of those Irish pubs that had dolled itself up for the young professional class. There were wrought-iron chandeliers and butcher-block tables all over the place. A lot of Tiffany-style glasswork around the windows. The light was too bright, the wood was too blond. And everyone seemed to be wearing cable sweaters and brand-new jeans and drinking large bowl-like glasses of white wine or beers with slices of lime in them.

Slices of lime! Well, if you wanted to go from bar to bar forever, you had to take the good with the bad.

Bishop lifted his mug again. As he did, he noticed that a woman had planted herself on the stool next to him. He glanced at her over the mug's rim while he drank. She was his age, thirty or so. Appealing in a desperately unmarried-businesswoman sort of way. She had shoulder-length brown hair and large brown eyes. A nice shape in her tight-fitting brand-new jeans and her likewise tight-fitting cable sweater.

Bishop decided he would take her somewhere and have her. This was a talent of his: he could pretty much have any woman he wanted. Who knows why? Something about his being a cold-hearted bastard seemed to drive the girls wild with desire.

He wasn't tall but he was well-built, square-shouldered, muscular. He had a thin, fine nose and pale, almost colorless eyes. His lips had that sardonic smile on them more or less all the time. He stood out in this crowd tonight, his jeans faded and no sweater on but a gray T-shirt under his leather motorcycle jacket instead.

"You want a drink?" he asked the woman.

She looked him over. "Yeah, sure," she said.

He lifted his chin at the bar guy, an owlish part-timer in big square glasses.

"I'll have what he's having," said the woman.

Bishop drained his mug. "I'll have what I'm having too," he said.

The bar guy brought them beers. The woman raised her mug to Bishop. She wanted Bishop to clink mugs with her, so he raised his mug and clinked. They both drank.

"So," he said then, "what's your story?"

"Well…" She licked the foam from her lips and considered. "My name is Heather, first of all. I'm a financial consultant at Howard Paycock, which is a firm in town. I've been in the city about a year, and before that I lived in Seattle, which is also where I went to school. How about you?"

"Well," said Bishop, with a thoughtful frown. "My name is Jim. I'm a private detective with Weiss Investigations-or I was until I screwed over my boss for some stolen cash and a couple of hookups with a killer bitch who set me up to be murdered. Before that, I was actually kind of a hero, but I lost my faith in things, which, if you're a hero, doesn't leave you with a whole lot besides your addiction to violence and the habit of putting yourself in life-threatening situations. So that's pretty much it." He shrugged. He sipped his beer through the silence that followed.

It was a long silence. Then the girl said, "Wow. Interesting."

Thirty-five minutes later, they were in her apartment three stories above Alvarado Street. She was bent naked over some sort of work desk, and Bishop, cupping her breasts in his hands, was driving into her from behind. She was digging it in a big way and was actually beginning to wonder if there really might be such a thing as love at first sight. Bishop was beginning to wonder if there might be a cold piece of chicken or some leftover Chinese in her refrigerator because he hadn't eaten anything but pretzels since forever.

She cried out his name. He grunted the name of the girl on the TV news.

That's when the cops came for him.