Weiss sipped his scotch. He studied the picture. She was one goddamned beautiful whore. He wondered if maybe that's why he was here. Maybe it wasn't because of the killer but just because she had an angel's face and it reminded him of the girls he'd made up in his mind when he was younger. Or maybe it was the fact that his business-his private detective agency back in San Francisco-was failing and he needed to get away. Whatever the reason, he had left the business behind-he had left everything behind-and come here to find her.
And the killer was following him. Watching him. Listening to him. Dogging his every step, just as Julie had said he would. Weiss was pretty sure there were tracking devices in his car, maybe even in his clothes. He didn't bother looking for them. If he took them out, the killer would just put them back again. The killer was following him, that's all there was to it. When Weiss found Julie, the killer would find her too, just as she had said.
And then they would settle it. Weiss and the Shadow-man. They would settle it between them.
Weiss sipped his scotch. He studied the picture, looked into those dreamy, faraway eyes. He remembered how she had begged him-begged him in her warm voice to stay away. He had tried to do what she wanted. He really had tried.
But in the end, he couldn't help himself.
2.
'Three,' said the Frenchman.
The customer said nothing. He snapped open the clasps on one of the black aluminum briefcases on the desk between them, the first case, the one to his left. He opened the lid and peered inside.
The Frenchman stole a glance at him, at his eyes. Strange eyes. Not cold or cruel or deadly. Just empty. Like a machine's. No, like a mannequin's. The Frenchman felt a chill in his belly.
He went on: 'Very wise, very strategic.' He knew he was babbling, but he couldn't stop. Those eyes. He needed to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was his own. 'Your ordinary policeman feels a great satisfaction when he finds the first. He thinks himself, oh, very smart. When he finds the second, he is a law- enforcement genius. That is the end of it, almost always. No one searches for three.'
The customer said nothing. He lifted the gun from the case. It was a 9mm SIG P210 with a modified mag release, the most accurate 9mm available. The customer turned it over in his hand, letting the daylight play on it.
The light was pouring in through the high windows on the wall behind the Frenchman. It fell in two broad beams on the men and the desk between them. They were in an office on the second story of a red-brick town house. It was small, cluttered. The customer was sitting in a tubular steel chair. The Frenchman sat in an old, tattered green swiveler. The desk was big, wooden, marked with cigarette burns and scars. All around them, broken crates, cardboard boxes, catalogs and mail were jumbled and piled up on carpet the color of static. There were no decorations, no pictures. Just the piled-up garbage against the white plaster walls.
The Frenchman watched the customer for another short while. The chill in his belly grew chillier by the second. Finally, he'd had enough. He swiveled around, his back to the other man. He looked out the window.
Like a ghost, he thought. Despite the cool of the autumn day, he felt his armpits beginning to run under his pearl-buttoned cowboy shirt. He puffed his cheeks, blew out a breath. The man has the eyes of a ghost.
The Frenchman was no work of art himself. He wasn't French either-he was Belgian, but the sort of people he dealt with couldn't handle the distinction. Gnomish, hunched, sallow, he had damp lips and rheumy yellow eyes under a wispy blond comb-over. He was sixty-seven, but he dressed younger, wore jeans and the white cowboy shirt and a blue bandanna tied around his turkey-gullet throat. Sometimes he suspected this sort of outfit made him look ridiculous. Jeans riding just beneath his tits. A cowboy shirt misshapen by his sunken chest and his bulging, flaccid belly. But what could he do? This was San Francisco, a young town. You wanted to do business here, you had to look jaunty. This was as close to jaunty as he could get.
He heard the clasps of the second briefcase snap open behind him. The customer was looking at the. 45 now. A 1911 retooled into a compact powerhouse. Shoot a man in the guts with that at close range, and there'd be nothing left in the middle of him. He'd just be a head on top of a pair of feet.
The Frenchman waited, killed another minute looking out at the bright blue day. Across the street were the pastel town houses of Haight-Ashbury, a half-block row of them. A young mother pushed a stroller along the sidewalk beneath. The Frenchman savored the shape of her breasts in her orange sweater. As he watched her pass, a chorus of men's shouts rose to him through the floor.
' Heeyai! Heeyai! Heeyai! '
A deep sound, a strong sound. He drew it into himself with a breath.
It was coming from the dojo directly beneath him, on street level. It was his dojo. They were his men. They were big, muscular brutes, real bully boys, black belts all of them, not just black but with red stripes and Japanese letters and God knew what else. They were practicing their martial arts, going through their motions and routines, chopping the air with their hands, kicking the air. Shouting like that.
' Heeyai! Heeyai! '
They were the Frenchman's security system. Nice and legal, nothing he had to pay off the cops for. And there was no way to get to the stairs except through them. Usually just the sound of their voices, their presence, made the Frenchman feel safe up here.
Not today, though. Not with this one.
He heard the third briefcase snap open. He swiveled back around to face the other man.
'Remarkable, isn't it?' he heard himself saying. His accent sounded overdone and oily even to himself. 'The very latest thing.'
Again, the customer answered nothing. He only lifted the Saracen and held it before him in his open hand.
'You see the size? It hardly covers your fingers. And the weight, you feel that?' the Frenchman rattled on. 'One and a half pounds loaded. Delayed blowback. Very low felt recoil. But it can pierce standard body armor at three hundred meters. I've seen it done.'
The customer ignored him. He never took that strange, empty gaze from the weapon. He worked the slide. Jacked the magazine.
'Twenty rounds,' the Frenchman said. 'In a weapon that size. Imagine. Twenty.'
The customer ignored him.
The Frenchman felt the sweat trickling down his sides. What the hell was this guy anyway? Some kind of specialist, obviously. A good one too-you could tell just by the way he handled the weapons. But if he was so good, why did he need so much hardware? And the Saracen-that would stop a tank. What was he going up against, an army? Who was he so afraid of?
Adalian had referred him. That was good. That meant security was guaranteed. Usually it also meant you were dealing with businessmen, men concerned with nothing but profit. That was the way the Frenchman liked it. It was cleaner, safer. But three guns? The Saracen? That smacked of a passion job, possibly even something political. Much messier stuff, much more likely to blow out of control, attract attention. The Frenchman wished he had questioned Adalian more closely at the outset. As it was, all he knew about the customer was his name, the name he went by: John Foy.
The man himself gave nothing away. Except for his eyes, he was average-looking. In fact, his features were so ordinary, the Frenchman thought they would be difficult to describe. He wore colorless slacks and a bland striped shirt. A khaki windbreaker zipped at the bottom. Everything so plain, so commonplace, it was almost a form of camouflage. Like a ghost, he thought. Everything like a ghost. Invisible.
The customer slowly laid the Saracen back in its case, back in the space cut for it in the cushioning gray foam. He sat in the straight-backed metal chair with his shoulders slightly hunched, his hands clasped between his thighs. He looked from one open case to another, one weapon to another. He said nothing. He just sat and looked with his mannequin eyes.
The Frenchman waited, sweating. Finally, he couldn't take it. 'Three,' he said again, just to say something.
The customer nodded almost imperceptibly. His voice was toneless.
