'Yes,' he said.
3.
The blue afternoon had dimmed and it was evening now. Mist was gathering and making halos around the street-lamps. The man who called himself John Foy walked under the haloed lamps. He carried his three guns in a brown paper bag, rolled up so he could grip it in one hand, his right hand, held down by his side.
He walked along Eighth Street, and it was as the Frenchman said of him: he was invisible. Even the gutter bums didn't ask him for a handout. Boozing at the curb outside the liquor store, squabbling in a litter of torn tickets near the betting office exit, sleeping in bags and boxes in the doorways between the bail bondsmen and the diner, they didn't even look at him as he went by. No one did. No one ever did.
He walked past unnoticed and then, unnoticed, he was gone. Off the streets, climbing a narrow stair between peeling gray walls. In at a scarred brown door. Entering a room with one curtained window.
He brushed the light switch up as he shut the door. There was a single bulb in the ceiling covered by a frosted glass plate. It gave off a sickly yellow glow, making hard shadows of the moths and flies that had been caught in the plate and died there. The glow showed a small room, two wooden chairs with foam cushions, a TV on a scratched wooden bureau, and a sagging single bed pushed against the grimy wall.
Murder had been good to the Shadowman. He'd made millions at it over the years. But he dwelled in places like this almost always, one place like this after another. Restless, indifferent, and anonymous, he came and stayed awhile and moved on. He would be gone from this room before morning.
He shuffled slowly to the bed. He was breathing a little harder after his climb up the stairs. There was a sheen of sweat on his nondescript face. He sat down on the edge of the bed wearily. He set the brown paper bag on his knees. He opened it, peered inside it like a schoolboy wondering what his mother had packed for lunch. He drew the guns out one by one. The SIG, then the. 45, then the Saracen. He laid them neatly on the bed side by side.
Grunting, he bent over. He reached down under the bed. He drew out a battered brown leather briefcase. He set this by his thigh, on the side of him opposite the guns. He worked the case's snaps. Opened it. There was a laptop inside, the machinery set into the case so that the lid held the monitor and the base the keyboard. He turned the computer on.
While it booted, he stood. He peeled off his windbreaker, draped it over the back of a chair. Stripped off his shirt, draped it over the windbreaker. He went to the closet, opened it. There was a mirror on the inside of the door. The man who called himself John Foy looked soft with his shirt on, but bare-chested, the muscle showed, corded, rippling, and powerful.
In the closet, on a shelf chest-high, there was a suitcase. He opened it, took out the silicone vest. It was heavy, fifteen pounds at least. He had had it made by a special-effects company in Los Angeles. It was decorated with painted latex and hair-yak hair, they'd told him. Whatever it was, the vest looked and felt exactly like human flesh.
He put the vest on, slipping it over his shoulders, fastening it in back. It blended smoothly with his own body, rising as a false paunch below his breasts and curving back down to end at his waist. It had a subtle effect. It added only about ten pounds or so to the look of him.
There was more stuff like this in the suitcase: silicone overlays and prosthetics to make his face and arms look a little fatter, too, so the whole image would fit together. But he didn't need them now. For now, this was enough. He walked back to the bed, trying to move naturally with the extra weight on him.
He picked up the Saracen from where it lay beside the other two guns. The Frenchman was a babbling idiot, but he was right about this weapon. It was incredibly light, incredibly small, especially for a gun so powerful. It slipped easily through the slit in the silicone vest. It nestled snugly in the foam pouch fitted inside.
The man who called himself John Foy put his shirt back on. He tucked it in as he went to stand again before the closet mirror. He nodded once at what he saw there. The vest looked entirely natural. It made him just a little fatter, and it hid the gun completely. Not only that, when he pressed on it, even when he pressed in hard, he felt only what seemed to be human flesh. The foam, and an extra layer of rubber, made it impossible to tell the gun was there.
Your ordinary policeman feels a great satisfaction when he finds the first, the Frenchman had said. 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.
A babbling idiot, no doubt about it. Weiss was no ordinary policeman. Weiss knew things. He guessed things. That was the whole point.
The man who called himself John Foy had a gift for moving through the world unseen. He had worked in cities all over the West, from the coast to the Mississippi, and yet he had left barely a trace of himself anywhere. No one knew his real name. Even the people who hired him didn't know what he looked like. The cops in the cities he'd been in, the state cops, the feds-none of them even knew he existed.
But Weiss knew. Weiss had somehow guessed. The man who called himself John Foy didn't know how he did it, but he did.
He examined himself in the mirror. Turned this way, that. He pressed the silicone vest from every angle, as hard as he could.
He nodded again. He didn't think Weiss would guess about the third gun.
Satisfied, he looked back at the bed, at the computer in the briefcase. It was up and running now. The monitor showed a twice-divided screen, four separate readouts. One would pick up the GPS tracker on Weiss's car when it was in range; another would map the pulses coming from the bird-doggers sewn into his belt, jacket, and shoes. The other two were for listening devices: phone taps, cell tracking, the distance mikes that could pick up voices through concrete, and the laser that read the vibrations on window glass. All of them checked out, up and running.
He was ready to return to the hunt.
He packed up his things slowly, methodically. The computer under the bed. The vest back in the suitcase. The guns inside their paper bag with two holster straps wrapped around them. The bag he put in the suitcase too. Before he shut the suitcase lid, he looked down at the bag, his expression distant, even a little sad. It had been a mistake to get the guns from the Frenchman, he thought. Three guns from one man. A man like that. It was just the sort of thing he never did. He had always spread his business out. He had always covered his tracks obsessively. Once, he had traveled to four different cities just to get the pieces for a single weapon. He had been that cautious at his best. Always planning, always anonymous, always invisible.
But that was over. Everything was over. Everything except the girl. And Weiss.
He shut the suitcase. He plodded back to the narrow bed. He lay down on it, shirtless. He laid his arm across his forehead and looked up at the chaotic web of cracks in the plaster ceiling. Thinking about the Frenchman, about the guns, about the girl, about Weiss-it had all begun to give him a bad feeling, a red, hot feeling spreading through his center. He was making a lot of mistakes now. He knew that. He was getting careless. Because of her. Because nothing mattered to him anymore except having her again. He couldn't think beyond that. He couldn't make his usual perfect plans.
He lay there with his arm across his forehead. He didn't see the cracks in the ceiling anymore. He saw her face. He saw her in her agony and tears, the way she'd been when he was with her. His cock grew hard; his breath grew short, as he remembered. He should've found her by now. He would've found her, if it hadn't been for Weiss. Weiss who somehow guessed his plans, who held him up, who gave her time to get away. Now, she was gone, just gone. He'd looked. She was nowhere. He was a man who knew how to find people too. He had tracked down plenty of running targets in his day. But this was different. She was different. Other targets had connections, people they loved, money they needed, places they had to be. Other targets stopped running after a while, convinced they'd eluded him. Not her. In a way, she was as anonymous as he was. She had no history. She had no family. She made her living off her body so she could go anywhere and travel light. She had made exactly one phone call that he knew of since she had vanished from the city. One phone call from Paradise. There, the trail ended.
For him-the trail ended for him. But not for Weiss. Weiss, in some way and for some reason the man who
