The narrow road wound upward through the trees. Jim Bishop twisted the Harley Fat Boy down a gear, amping the throttle, taking the curves at speed. Visor up, he felt the cool air on his face. He felt the dappled shadows washing over him.
The bike leaned hard into turn after turn. His hips leaned with it, his torso drawing over as counterweight. It felt to him as if it were all one motion, the bike and his body. He climbed higher and higher along the rutted switchback.
Through the pines that clustered on the mountainside came glimpses of the bay below. The water lay broad and steely and bright in the still summer air. Sometimes as he climbed, Bishop caught sight of the orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge shouldering their way out of the billowing fog that clung to the base of the headlands. Sometimes he caught sight of the city skyline across the water; against the distant backdrop of the aqua sky, it rose and fell like a kind of visible music.
Bishop felt still and easy in himself, riding up the mountain. It always seemed good to him to be going fast.
The Graham house appeared suddenly on his left. It was sunk down low off the road, the top of its slanting roof gray through the tree cover. Bishop swung his bike onto the driveway, corkscrewed steeply around and down into deeper shade. At the bottom of the drive was a three-car bay. Sputtering, the Harley came to a stop at the rear fender of an emerald green Z3. To the Beamer’s right was a silver Mercedes SL500. The third bay was empty. The third car, the wife’s car, was gone, Bishop thought. Graham wanted to meet with him alone.
Bishop killed the engine, dismounted. In the sudden quiet, there was nothing but sparrow song and the rattle of the zippers on his open leather jacket. His black boots thudded heavily on the path of white gold slate that led him under the redwood branches. The boots thudded even louder on the patio tiles.
He stood at the back door under the flat overhang of the roof. The inner door was open. The screen door rattled as he rapped his knuckles on the jamb.
More quiet, more sparrow song. And then footsteps came clapping briskly on the tiles inside. It was Philip Graham himself who pulled back the screen to let him in.
Graham was tall. He towered over Bishop. He had a blocky build, wide at the waist and the shoulders, but he was trim and fit, a fellow who spent plenty of time at the gym. His hair—even now, here, in private—was as perfect as it was in the newspaper photos. Rich, full, red-brown, it looked as if it had been combed into place one strand at a time. He was in his late forties, but his features were youthful, vigorous. He had a lot of chin especially, which made him appear forthright. His big rimless glasses magnified his eyes and gave them a perpetual expression of startled disapproval, like a minister frozen in the moment he caught his wife with another man. He was dressed casually—in khaki slacks and a yellow polo shirt—but nothing about him was casual. He shook hands as if he were going for the state handshaking championship.
“Thanks for coming,” he said brusquely. He looked straight into Bishop’s eyes as he said it. “Come on inside.”
The house’s interior was several million dollars’ worth of rustic simplicity. Graham led Bishop across a sprawling living room of aged tile floors and raw wood ceiling beams. As they went, Bishop scoped a massive fireplace and shapely furniture set against stone-faced walls and broad windows.
“I’m sorry to drag you up here on a Sunday morning like this,” Graham was saying. “I figured this way we’d have some time alone together. Obviously I don’t want anything put in writing or said over the phone.”
At the far end of the room, he drew open a sliding glass panel. The two men stepped out onto a broad deck. Now they were looking down the mountainside at a panorama of the bay, from the pillowy fog round the Golden Gate across the sweep of the San Francisco skyline to the red roofs and white stone of the campus in Berkeley.
Graham showed Bishop to a cushioned chair. Bishop sat with the sparkling vista at his shoulder. He waited while Graham fussed at a round wrought iron table, stacking the papers he’d been working on, shutting down his laptop. Then Graham poured two glasses of ice water—everything done with precise motions, with thin-lipped concentration. He gave one of the glasses to Bishop and sat down with the other in his own chair, facing him.
Bishop drank a little, slouching, his legs stretched out, his motorcycle boots crossed at the ankle. He hadn’t shaved that morning and there was sandy stubble on his jaw. He looked surly and defiant and he knew it. He wondered if it bothered the straitlaced Graham. For no particular reason, he sort of hoped it did.
He lit a cigarette. He liked the way Graham’s eyes flicked to it, disapproving. He blew the smoke out nice and slow.
“So—” Graham cleared his throat. “You’ve found my daughter.”
Bishop nodded. “She’s with a motorcycle outlaw named Randolph Tweedy. He goes by the name of Cobra.”
Graham lifted his forthright chin at that, then let it fall. He turned to stare blankly out at the bay. “Cobra,” he said softly. “Now there’s a name to warm a father’s heart. ‘Daddy, I’d like you to meet Cobra.’ And I take it when you say she’s ‘with’ this Tweedy, you mean…”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
Graham went on contemplating the view. He shook his head. “Incredible.”
But after a few more seconds of silence, he straightened decisively. He faced Bishop again, his elbows on the chair arms. He rubbed his hands together and finally clasped them. Raised his index fingers in a steeple. Tapped the steeple thoughtfully against his thin, frowning lips.
“All right,” he said, all business now. “I hired you to find her and you did. Good job. So here we are. My wife and our other daughters won’t be back from church for at least an hour. Let’s hear what you’ve got. And please don’t waste any time sugarcoating it, whatever it is. Just get to the point, tell it straight.”
“Good enough,” said Bishop, with his mocking smile. He rolled his cigarette hand over, showing the open palm, as if to say he would hide nothing. “Bottom line, Tweedy’s a bad guy.”
“I already guessed that.”
“Yeah. But he’s a very bad guy.”
“You mean he has a criminal record.”
“Nah. Not much. Mostly piddly-shit biker stuff. Disturbing the peace, drug possession. You know. But his rep is hardcore. Hardcore. As in, two years ago he was booted out of the Hell’s Angels because they thought he was too unstable, too violent. You understand what that’s like? That’s like…” Bishop searched for a way to phrase it.
Graham said, “I understand.”
“It’s like getting kicked out of Los Angeles for being too shallow.”
“Yes, I understand. Go on.”
“The word is he has a jones for violent crime. Home invasion, armed robbery, carjack—the sort of caper that tends to irritate your average lawman, draws his attention, if you see what I mean. On top of that, Cobra’s got a bad habit of going off on short notice. That’s why his handle’s Cobra, ’cause he strikes like that. You know: snap, you got a dead civilian on your hands; snap, he pounds some gas jockey into a sack of broken bones. There’s one story he stabbed an Arizona traffic cop with a bayonet just for giving him the usual biker hassle. That stuff’s no good for the regular gangs. It means manhunts, APBs. They don’t need that kind of aggravation. It interferes with them selling drugs and kicking the shit out of each other and so on.”
No reaction from Graham behind his lifted forefingers. Only the rise and fall of his polo shirt as he breathed.
“What else can I tell you? He’s charismatic,” Bishop went on. “Smart, funny, charming. And he’s got a nice little line in horseshit philosophy which—” The ladies seem to like, he almost said. But he remembered in the nick of time that they were talking about Graham’s daughter. He took a drag on his cigarette to cover the hesitation. Blew the smoke out and said, “Which, you know, attracts people to him. Right now, he’s got a gang of four or five guys pretty much like himself. Bikers the clubs didn’t want, couldn’t handle. People call them the Outriders because they’re barred from the gangs. But they don’t wear a name of their own. Cobra’s careful about that. He wants to keep it informal. No charter, no patch. Obviously he doesn’t want any trouble with the Angels, or with any of the others. My guess is he’s got his own thing going on and he doesn’t want it screwed up with any gang warfare.”
“His own thing going on,” said Graham sourly. “You mean like robberies and carjacks and…snap.”
Bishop gave a wave of his cigarette. “I haven’t found that out yet.”
Graham’s hands settled to his armrests now. He gripped the rests so that the muscles on his forearms corded. His mouth twisted in a sneer of distaste, just a quick one, there and gone. That was it. After all the bad news, that was all the emotion he showed.
Bishop was impressed with that. He respected it. Graham came off as kind of a stiff, but he was a pretty cool case when you got down to business. It wasn’t just his daughter at stake here. There was a political angle, too. Graham was a businessman, ran his own investment firm, had lots of cash, family cash, cash of his own. But he was ambitious. He wanted to run for U.S. Senate next year. And according to Weiss he had a pretty good chance of winning. Bishop couldn’t remember just then if he was a Democrat or a Republican or what he stood for. He couldn’t’ve cared less. He had no interest in politics himself—true believers made him laugh. Still, he could appreciate the problem: It wasn’t likely to help Graham’s campaign any if his daughter got herself busted in the company of a bunch of violent sociopaths. This was a tough spot for the guy. He had a lot on the line. Bishop respected him for taking it like a man.
Graham let out a long sigh, as if he’d been holding his breath for several minutes while he thought things over. His eyes, enlarged behind the rimless lenses, kept that startled, disapproving expression. They gave nothing away.
“What about my daughter?” he asked. “Other than being Tweedy’s…‘squeeze,’ or whatever. Where exactly does she fit in with all this? Has she been accomplice to any crimes to your knowledge? Has she been personally involved in anything illegal?”
“I don’t know that yet, either.” Bishop let the last of his cigarette fall to the deck’s red cedar. He crushed it into the shiny stain with one boot. Graham watched the process grimly—but then, he hadn’t offered Bishop an ashtray, so what the hell. “I’ve started to work my way into the gang,” Bishop told him. “And Tweedy’s taken a liking to me. But it’s still early. It’s gonna take some time before he cuts me in, lets me know what they’re up to.”
“Well, I can already guess what sort of thing they’re up to. It’s unlikely to be charity work.”
Bishop snorted. “True enough. And look, it’s your money. I can find out more or I can walk away. Whatever you want me to do.”
Graham fixed him with that politician’s look again, that look dead center. He seemed about to speak. Then he stopped himself. Then he said, “Come here for a minute. Come with me.”
He rose swiftly from his chair. Stood waiting until Bishop did the same. He opened the glass panels again, strode back into the house. Bishop followed. Down a narrow hall to a closed door.
Graham opened the door, let Bishop step through. Came in behind him, and pulled the door shut.
Bishop looked around. This was the daughter’s room, Beverly Graham’s room. Or it had been, anyway, before she’d gone. There was a big bed with a lacy white canopy hanging from its tall posts. There were heart-shaped pillows and stuffed animals on the lacy white spread. There were jewelry boxes on the dresser top, and the dresser was hand-painted with pink fringes and yellow stars. There were posters of faggy rock boys on the wall. Posters of peace symbols and rainbows and suchlike.
Graham aimed his big chin at the photographs—a crowd of snapshots on a vanity table, some framed, some stuck in the mirror, some pinned to a bulletin board hanging on the wall.
“Look at her, Mr. Bishop…Jim. That’s what she was. I mean, till a year ago. That’s what she was.”
Bishop looked and—well, what was she? She was a girl, an American girl. A rich one, a clean one, a happy one by all the looks of it. She’d been a cheerleader. She’d been to the prom. She’d draped her arms over other girls’ shoulders and had someone take their picture making funny faces. She’d gotten dressed up and dolled up and shrieked and laughed with too many best friends to count. And she seemed to’ve saved every picture of herself as a child that had ever been taken by anyone anywhere.
Bishop worked his gaze from one photo to another. And, sure enough, they had an effect on him. But it probably wasn’t the effect Graham intended.
Bishop thought it was sexy to see her like that. To see her as a child in frilly pink, as a coltish schoolgirl in a pleated skirt; to see her with her blue eyes sparkling and her cheeks rouged and her blonde hair piled up for some dance or other, or with the school letter on her sweater for the big game. Bishop hadn’t known a lot of girls like Beverly Graham, not up close. The clean, rich, happy ones—they mostly kept their distance from guys like him. It was sexy for him to see her the way she’d been and to think about her the way she was now, as “Honey,” climbing up her biker’s sleeve in Shotgun Alley, with her lips pursed and her clean, rich, fresh American face all smoke, all hunger.
“She ran away once before,” her father said. “I didn’t tell you that, did I?”
Bishop shook his head.
“A year—not even a year ago. She took off one morning. It was three months before we tracked her down. Know where she was when we found her? She was living with a drug dealer who called himself Santé.”
Bishop looked at the cheerleader, at the girl in the silver-blue prom dress decked with an orchid.
“A drug dealer,” he said. “Is that right?”
“Oh, not a street thug or anything. In fact, I understand he’s quite successful in his field. Has an estate down south, in Santa Ynez somewhere. Hundreds of acres of prime real estate. Apparently he keeps a mud pit in one area, not far from the house, and when he’s bored, I’m told, he dumps a garbage can of hundred-dollar bills into the mud and then sends his various girlfriends in there to fish them out. The girls are naked, of course, and our Mr. Santé and his friends sit on the veranda and watch them and take bets on which girl will collect the most hundreds.”
Bishop looked at the cheerleader now, with her breasts pushing against the school letter. He imagined her in the mud pit naked, fighting other naked girls for hundred-dollar bills. Whew, he thought. Then he forced himself to stop imagining.
“Fortunately, I was able to convince Santé that his life would be less complicated without having me for an enemy,” Philip Graham went on. “He cut her loose. She called me from a mall in Santa Barbara, crying, broke. She has no money of her own. I’ve made sure of that. Don’t ask me what happened to all those hundreds she pulled out of the mud.”
Bishop tore his gaze from the pictures. Looked at the man. The lights were off in the room. The house, low on the hillside, didn’t get much sun through the foliage, so it was gray in here and shady. It was hard for Bishop to read Graham’s expression. For all he could tell, it didn’t seem to’ve changed much.
Graham squared his shoulders. Continued, stalwart. “I drove down to pick her up myself. Brought her home. She actually seemed grateful at first. I thought maybe she’d learned her lesson. She moved back in, applied to some schools. I think she even started seeing some nice young man from the city. Then…” Graham’s voice trailed off.
Bishop considered. Slowly, he drew his hand over his stubbly cheek. “Like I said, Mr. Graham, it’s your money. What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to get her the fuck out of there,” Graham answered quietly. “That’s what I want. I want you to get her away from this Cobra and out of there before she gets herself into real trouble. And before she embarrasses me by getting her face on television or in the newspapers.”
“Well, yeah, I can see how you’d want that. The question is, how’m I supposed to pull it off? She’s nineteen years old. Legally, she can be with whoever she wants.”
“I don’t give a shit how old she is. She’s my daughter. I don’t want her to get killed. Or beaten up or arrested. And I don’t want my life derailed because some smart reporter happens to spot her on the back of this punk’s motorcycle. I want her taken away from Cobra quickly. And I want it done quietly. And I want it done this time so it stays done.”
“Well…” Bishop scratched at his stubble again. “I don’t think you can scare Cobra off like you did with Santé—he doesn’t have enough to lose. You could try to buy him off.”
Graham pressed his lips together. “No.”
“Right,” said Bishop. “Right. If the media got ahold of that, you’d be finished.” He shrugged. “Look, I could toss her over my shoulder and carry her out, but from what you tell me, it’s a pretty sure bet she’d just take off again. No offense or anything, but she’s climbing up this ratbag like ivy. Unless you’re planning to lock her in a tower somewhere, if I drag her out against her will, she’ll be back with him in a week.”
Graham made a soft, derisive noise. “Why do you think I brought you in here?” he said. “Why do you think I wanted you to see these pictures? You think I give a shit if you cry over my daughter’s lost innocence? I wanted you to see who she was—and what she is: a spoiled, rebellious little girl who thinks she can hurt me and break away from her past by demeaning herself with violent, dangerous men.”
Graham shifted. Looked down at Bishop from his greater height. Matched Bishop gaze for gaze in the shadows. The little girl and the cheerleader and the prom queen—none of that mattered now. There were just the two of them, the two men, eyeball to eyeball.
“You strike me as a pretty dangerous man yourself,” Graham said.
Now Bishop—Bishop was a pretty cool case, too, no one cooler. But even he hesitated here for a second. “What…what do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. You said it yourself: She’s an adult, a free woman. You can’t drag her out or bluff her out or buy her out. She needs to be given a reason to walk away. She needs to be…convinced.” He didn’t bother to hide the scorn in his voice. “I’m a very good judge of character, Mr. Bishop…Jim. You strike me as just the sort of man who could convince her.”
Bishop stared another second, then nearly laughed out loud, very nearly. Of course, he had been thinking about fucking Honey Graham from the first second he set eyes on her. That was Bishop, that’s what he did. He fucked anything fuckable whenever he got the chance. Still, it hadn’t occurred to him that her father might actually pay him to do it, might actually hire him to seduce her away from Cobra.
“Once she left him for someone else, I doubt a man like Cobra would take her back again,” Graham said.
Bishop blinked. “Uh…no. No, you’re probably right about that.”
“Well, I want you to see to it that she leaves him for you. And this time, when she comes crawling back, abandoned and broke, I’ll handle it right. Get her out of the country. Switzerland maybe. Put her in a school somewhere. Somewhere she won’t be able to hurt herself—or if she does, she won’t be able to embarrass me.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Bishop murmured.
“It is. It is a plan,” said Philip Graham. “That is, if you think you can do it.”
There was some more of this man-to-man eyeball bullshit. Then Bishop did laugh once. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I can do it.”
“Good,” said Philip Graham. He threw open the door to his daughter’s room. “Do it.”