'So what? She's still dead.'
'Right. She's still dead.'
He tossed the envelope onto the bed. Adrienne Chalk seized it, clutched it to her breast protectively. Weiss walked back around the bed to the window. He looked out and down on the street of strip joints, the blinking signs. Femme Fatale. Gangster Pete's. What a world. He checked his gray Taurus, sitting at the curb, dull and dependable as an old nag under the blinking sign for The Black Hand. He scanned the faces of passersby, looking for that one face he could not remember.
Finally, he turned to Chalk. Propped his butt on the windowsill. Looked her over.
It made her nervous. 'Who are you?' she said. 'Who sent you, if Bremer didn't? What're you gonna do to me?' It was more than nervous. Weiss could see she was really scared now. She didn't know anymore what he was here for. Maybe he wanted to move in on her, shake her down, steal her stuff. Maybe he even wanted to kill her. She didn't know.
Good, Weiss thought. Let her worry. It'd make it easier to get the whole story out of her.
'You're something, all right,' he said. 'You're a real piece of work. I gotta hand it to you. Seventeen years ago, Bremer kills his wife and gets away with it. Runs off, changes his name, gets married again, starts a new life. And all that time, you look for him; you hunt him down. Seventeen years you wait for the chance to put the squeeze on him.'
'I didn't look for him,' said Adrienne Chalk. She kept her eyes on Weiss all the while, watching him, scared, not knowing what he was here for, what he would do. 'I wouldn't've known where to start. One of those things just happened. You know the way things happen sometimes? A couple of years ago, I saw Charlie's picture in the paper. Some kind of convention, some kind of charity thing. The Children's Charity, that was the name of it. People from all over the country were in Albuquerque for it, and there was some guy from Reno there. So they had him, the guy from Reno, they had him in the local paper. And in back of him-in the picture in back of him-there was Charlie, big as life. With one of those name tags, you know. Andy Bremer. So I went on the computer and found him. That was it. It just happened.'
Weiss laughed. 'Beautiful. So the guy's giving to charity-you figure he must have money, right? You go to California; you find him with his new name and the wife and the house and everything. It's a perfect setup. Enough of this penny-ante shit, right? Bremer has to pay you real money and keep paying you or else you send him to the Graybar.'
Adrienne Chalk gave a jerky, nervous shrug, always eyeing him. 'Well, why should he just get away with it? Right? All his Mr. Nice Respectable shit. Like you said. He's got the house, the wife, the kids. He's got money enough to give it away to charity. I mean, my sister's fucking dead.'
'Your sister's dead!' Weiss sneered. What a skank. What a piece of work. 'Your sister's dead-you go to the police.'
'What good is that to me? The police. My sister's dead and he gets the good life? What're the police gonna do?'
He shook his head. 'You're something. You really are.'
'Look,' she said. Her tone changed suddenly, went softer. 'Look. Who are you? What do you want? You want money? I mean, we can work something out. I got this, I got a couple other things going. We could even work together on some of this.' She lifted her chin. She posed her tits for him again. 'You might like working with me, you know. There might be benefits…'
'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' said Weiss. 'You'll blow me; you'll cut me in-whatever. Fuck you. Here's what I want. This woman, your sister, Suzanne. She had two kids, right? Two daughters. The newspaper doesn't say their names.'
'The daughters?' Chalk said-there was a hopeful, calculating note in her voice. She hadn't been thinking about the daughters. She didn't care about the daughters. If Weiss was here about them, maybe it would be all right. 'Mary and Olivia-Livy.'
'Mary and Olivia. What happened to them? Where are they?'
Adrienne Chalk hesitated. Weiss could practically hear her thinking. Trying to figure what she could get out of him for this. 'How would I know about that?' she said.
'You know,' said Weiss. 'This didn't just happen. You kept tabs, kept watch. Sat on top of it until it broke right for you. You're the sister. The aunt. Bremer killed his wife and booked it, left the kids behind. It would've been easy for you to find out where they went, keep watch on them, in case maybe he got in touch.'
Chalk seemed about to lie again but must've given up on it. 'You see a lot yourself, don't you?'
'Where are they?'
'What's in it for me?'
'I go away.'
She snorted.
'All right,' said Weiss. 'I don't go away. I go to the police. Bremer goes down for murder; you go down for blackmail. It's nothing to me.'
That got her. She thought it through. 'How do I know you won't tell the cops anyway?'
'Because why would I? I just want the girls. You and Bremer can torture yourselves to death, for all I care. You deserve each other.'
Adrienne Chalk thought it through some more. 'They took the daughters into homes,' she said then. 'After Suzanne was killed and Charlie booked it, the daughters got taken into foster homes, and like that. The older one, Mary, she went bad, ran off. I don't know where she is. I don't, I swear. The younger one, Livy, Olivia, she's in Phoenix. She's a-whattaya call it?-like a counselor, a shrink or something.'
'Olivia Graves-is that still her name?'
'Yeah, that's right. She's not married or nothing. Olivia Graves.'
Weiss pushed up off the windowsill. 'Thanks,' he said. He took Adrienne Chalk's revolver out of his pocket. He tossed it onto the bed. It bounced on the mattress next to her legs.
In a flash Adrienne Chalk threw the envelope aside and pounced on the gun. She snapped it up with both hands. She pointed it dead at Weiss. 'You never should've slapped me, you son of a bitch,' she said. She pulled the trigger.
Weiss was already walking to the door. He already had his hand in his jacket pocket again. When the hammer of the 500 snapped down, he paused and turned. He shook his head. He brought a fistful of bullets out of his pocket. He flung them in Adrienne Chalk's face. One hit her; the rest flew all over the room, pattering on the wood floor.
'What a skank,' Weiss muttered.
The bullet that hit Adrienne Chalk fell on the mattress and rolled under her knee. She was furiously trying to dig it out, get ahold of it, trying to shove it into one of the cylinder's chambers as Weiss left the apartment and shut the door behind him.
24.
Later it came to him, in the desert, in the dark. He knew what he had to do.
He'd been driving for hours and hours by then. Pushing on, relentless, through relentless emptiness. Rain came be- fore night fell, a slashing downpour. Then night fell under stuttering thunder. Awesome threefold barbs of lightning jagged from the core of the vast sky to the horizon. The desolate land lit up-endless desolation at every window, in all directions-and then vanished into desolate darkness… the sheeting rain on the windshield… the wipers working back and forth.
Weiss drove on, tired, tired. It was hard going. Hard to see anything, hard to make any time. Hour after hour, slogging through the rain. He gripped the wheel, peered into the night.
He thought about Julie.
The Graves family had been poor. That's what Chalk's old newspaper stories said. The father, mother, and two daughters lived in a cramped, dilapidated house on the edge of the east city. The father had worked in a tire warehouse before the company shut down. Afterward, he mostly did odd jobs, off the books, hauling and lifting for
