It was still morning, just the tail end of morning, when Bishop got back to the apartment in Berkeley. There was a lot on his mind, a lot racing through his mind. Cobra had told him the plan for the Big Job and there was Honey to consider and Mad Dog’s death—all of it jumbled together. He had to make sense of it. He had to figure out what he was going to do next.
He shut the door behind him. Trod wearily down a little hall. He dropped his leather jacket on the floor as he went. Stripped his T-shirt off, dropped that, dropped his jeans. He was naked by the time he padded into the bathroom. A trail of clothes lay in the hall behind him.
The bathroom was cramped, mildewed. The light here was pale and yellow. There was an old claw-footed tub in one corner. Bishop high-stepped into it. He turned the shower on. Stood under the nozzle. The shocking cold water spat down his back, turned shocking hot. He bowed his head and let it stream over him.
It was a difficult business, he thought. He had to get Honey away. That was the main thing. That was his assignment. But it wasn’t enough. He had to get her out clean, out clear. If she just walked, Cobra would come after her. No matter where she went, no matter how long it took, he would find her, bring her back or kill her, just like he said. Then there was the law to worry about—they’d want her, too. And there was Weiss to worry about, with all his copstyle rules and cop-style justice. It was hard to know where Weiss would stand. It was all hard, all complicated. A difficult business.
He turned off the shower. Grabbed a towel off the stack on the hamper. Dried himself on his way down the hall to the bedroom, leaving a trail of water where the trail of his clothes left off.
He pulled jeans and a T-shirt out of an old dresser. Pulled them on. Padded barefoot back to the living room.
He set his palmtop up on the table again with its portable keyboard in place. He had to start with Weiss. He had to get Weiss in on it. He fetched his cigarettes while the little machine booted up. He sat down at the table. Lit a smoke. Set it to burn in a tinfoil ashtray. He positioned his hands on the palmtop’s keys.
Weiss, he typed. And then he stopped. Drew back his hands. He would have to tell him about Mad Dog. This wasn’t going to be easy.
He set his fingers back on the keys. Took a breath—
The door buzzer sounded. Bishop cursed. He took the palmtop off the keyboard. Dumped both pieces in the table’s drawer. The door buzzer sounded again. Bishop went to the door and swung it open.
There was Honey, standing in the hall.
It was a thrill to see her. He let no sign of it cross his face, but it was a jolting thrill. She’d dumped the barebellied biker chick look. She was wearing a crisp white blouse, khaki slacks. She looked like the kid in her father’s snapshots. The all-American girl. His feeling for her washed over him as if he had forgotten it. But he had not forgotten it.
He stood back. She walked in past him with a glance. He took a breath of her scent as she went by. Maybe she noticed. Anyway, she smiled.
He shut the door. Came out of the foyer to lean against the living room archway. From there, he watched her walk to his table. He watched the curve of her slacks as she bent forward. She took the cigarette from the tinfoil ashtray. She turned to face him. Perched herself on the table. Brought his cigarette to her lips.
“So what are you?” she asked him. “Are you, like, a cop?”
Bishop shook his head, his gaze moving over her. The big windows were at her back. From where he stood, she was framed in the rectangle of the billboard outside, positioned next to the gigantic woman in the bank advertisement, her gigantic smiling face.
She took a drag of smoke. Narrowed her eyes at him. “So then my father sent you.” She sniffed, turned away, crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “I hope he’s paying you well.”
“Pretty well, yeah,” Bishop said. “I guess he doesn’t want to see his daughter go to prison.”
“You mean he doesn’t want the media to see his daughter go to prison. He doesn’t want his daughter making any headlines that might mess up his chance at a Senate seat.”
“Hey, listen, you want to give your Daddy a hard time? Pop some X and fuck your brains out like the other girls, okay? If you gotta do twenty-five just to get his attention, he’s probably not worth it.”
Honey laughed. It was low, throaty, mirthless. “Are you always such a prick?”
“Yeah,” said Bishop. “Why?”
She didn’t answer. She shook her head. Sat perched on the table with her hands braced against the edge. She considered her feet. She was wearing black straps. She scratched the instep of her left foot with the toe of her right shoe. “I was there, all right?” she told him. “I was at the Bayshore Market. I wasn’t inside with the others. I didn’t have a gun or anything. But I was there. I drove the truck.”
Leaning in the archway, Bishop’s expression remained as it was: arrogant, ironic, impassive. Shit, he thought.
“So what can you do for me?” she asked. “What’s the deal?”
Bishop came off the archway. Moved across the room to her. Took a Marlboro from the box on the table. He tapped the filter on his wrist, packing the tobacco. He looked down into her face.
“I can take you back to Daddy,” he told her. “His lawyers’ll protect you. If they can’t protect you, his money’ll make you disappear.”
“I could go back to Daddy myself.”
“You could,” said Bishop. “But what about Cobra?”
“That’s right,” she said. “What about him?” She was close to Bishop. He could breathe her breath. “I leave him, he’ll come after me. If he finds me with someone else, he’ll kill me. Nothing would stop him.”
“I’ll stop him,” said Bishop. “I’m in on his big job. I’ll set him up, have the cops take him down red-handed. By the time he gets his ass out of Pelican Bay, he won’t remember his own name, let alone yours.”
Her hair stirred, strayed across her cheek, as she made a little motion with her head. Her eyes were scared, the way they had been in the Alley. Her lips were glossy and dry the way they had been then. He felt the same feeling for her rising in him. Strong. Too strong. He tried to keep it down.
“That’s not good enough,” she said. “Prison’s not good enough. You know Cobra. He’ll find me. He’ll get someone to find me.”
“No. That’s not the way it works.”
“It is. It is with him.”
“You go back to Daddy. He goes to slam. That’s the deal.”
“No. He’ll find me. He’d never stop. My father can buy off the law, but not him.”
“Then what?” he asked her. “What do you want?”
She studied him, tried to gauge him. The pink tip of her tongue showed at one corner of her mouth. Bishop watched it as it moved across to the other corner.
“You gotta kill him, Cowboy,” she said finally. ’That’s the only way. You know it is. You gotta kill him. I’ll only be safe if he’s dead.”
Bishop paused, the unlit cigarette half lifted to his lips. He didn’t know why it made him so hot when she said that, but it did. He had to force himself to take his eyes off her. That fresh, sweet, elegant face.
He stuck the cigarette in his mouth. He laughed as he lit it. The smoke blossomed out around the both of them. “Man, that’s cold. That’s ice cold. You two have a spat over a couple of girls and now you want me to whack the guy?”
“It’s not about that, about last night. I just know him, that’s all. If I leave him now, if I let him go down, he’ll never stop hunting me.”
“So it’s that easy, huh? Just ‘Kill him.’ After the way you used to crawl all over him, too.”
Honey shrugged. “I liked him.” Her eyes were on his. Her gaze was steady through the cigarette smoke. “I liked the way he did me.”
“Yeah, the way you liked that drug dealer, that Santé?” Bishop’s voice was harsher than he meant. His longing for her was back full force. He couldn’t stop it. It made him angry again. It made him want to hurt her again. “I hear you used to crawl around in the mud for him, fetching his hundred-dollar bills.”
Her cheeks went red, but she stuck her chin up at him. “I liked the way he did me, too.”
Bishop smoked. He met her gaze. Every second he looked at her made him ache. But in the end, he shook his head. “No.”
“You have to,” she told him.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s murder,” said Bishop.
“So what? You killed Mad Dog.”
“That was self-defense.”
“Well, this can be self-defense, too.”
Bishop hesitated. Brought his cigarette to his lips nice and slow, pulled off it nice and slow, let out a nice, slow breath of smoke. “No,” he said.
She watched him. She watched him a long time. Then she smiled. “That’s funny.”
“What is?”
“You are. That you won’t do it.”
“What’s so funny about that?”
“Because you want to.”
He leaned forward. He crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray. He could feel strands of her hair against his temple as he did. He could feel the soft cloth of her sleeve brush his forearm.
“Look at you,” she whispered. “You want to so bad.”
“To kill him?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“To prove you’re better.”
“Better at what?”
“You know. Better at being what the two of you are.” She laughed. It went through him. “So why won’t you? He would.”
Bishop didn’t answer. He didn’t have an answer. He was just looking at her. He just wanted to have her or hurt her or something.
“I could go to him tomorrow,” she said. “I could go to him right now. Kiss him on the cheek and whisper, ‘Kill him.’ You’d be dead. So what’s to stop you?”
Bishop’s expression of irony and arrogance was still in place, but it was getting stale. It was simply plastered on now, as if he’d forgotten to take it off. A habit more than anything. He opened his mouth to answer her—he had to answer her—but there was no answer still. He still didn’t have one.
And Honey kept at him. “It’s like how you want me,” she said. “It’s the same thing. The way you just stand there and want me. Like a little boy, drooling outside the candy shop without a quarter to his name. Cobra would’ve just reached out and done me. In fact, he did reach out. That’s just the way it happened. He did me hard, too. I like to get done hard. I like to—”
Bishop was not prepared for the strength of it, the pentup power of it and its rushing release. It was as if he hadn’t known himself how hungry he was for her. Holding her fast against himself, kissing her fast, it made him feel almost crazy, almost blind with the heat. He wanted to let her go and be himself again, but he couldn’t let her go. He couldn’t even let her go long enough to get to the damned bedroom. He was still kissing her, clinging to her as she wrestled the jeans off him. His hands were frantic at the waist of her slacks. The slacks’ front button popped off as he worked them down. Dimly, he heard it patter on the floor.
He kissed her neck and the front of her blouse, and his hands went under her blouse. She struggled out of her panties while he kissed her. Then he hoisted her onto himself and propped her against the nearest wall, the living room wall.
He rammed into her crazy hard. He looked at her as he did. She was still in her blouse, her white schoolgirl blouse, and the sight of her dressed like that made him even wilder.
Bishop rammed into Honey, and she writhed as if in pain against the wall. He thought of the girl in the snapshots at her father’s house and that was the end of it.
Later, when she had gone, he sat shirtless at the table by the window. He put his palmtop and the keyboard together again. He lit another cigarette and put it in the tinfoil ashtray just as he had before. He positioned his fingers on the keyboard. He thought a long time before he started typing.
Then Weiss, he wrote, something happened.