That night, she slipped away and came to him again. Walked in without a word and pulled herself close against Bishop’s body. Her breath was hot in his mouth. The smell of her was all around him. One of his hands slipped down the back of her jeans and one ran across her shoulder and up into her soft hair. His feeling for her was fierce. He carried her into the bedroom without speaking.
It was one of his moments. One of those times that took him out of himself. They happened usually on his motorcycle, moving fast. Or dodging thunderheads in a small plane or dropping it on instruments through a storm at three hundred feet onto a sudden runway. They happened in the final seconds before a fistfight or during the minutes when he was inside a woman, in motion through a medium of indifferent sweetness. They happened, and the knot in his chest would loosen and the red atmosphere of fury through which he saw the world would turn clear for a little while.
But this was something else with her, a whole other level of mindlessness. If it had only been the elegance of her features or the photographs in her father’s house or the silken softness of her naked skin or the way she thrashed and cried almost as if she were dying into the action between them, it might’ve seemed to him just the usual business, the usual bridge of dumb pleasure between tedium and anxiety, or anxiety and pain. But it was more than that. He went inside her and inside her with such ferocious awareness that there was almost a kind of music to it, a kind of music even to his interior silence.
Just before the end, Bishop placed his palm against her cheek and looked down at her with what for him was rare seriousness. And when she closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against his palm, he felt it come up from the core of him into his chest, He felt a fullness in his chest, and the finish was bright and blinding.
He lay on his back and she lay curled against him. The sheets and covers were bunched at their feet. He looked down the white length of her. He kissed her hair.
“Is it on?” she asked after a little while.
“Yes,” he told her.
He had gotten the e-mail from Weiss that afternoon: Ketchum is in. The girl is up to you.
“What will I have to do?” asked Honey.
“Just get away, just come here. Your father will pick you up.”
She moved a slender hand across his skin. She toyed with the small hairs around his nipple. “And will you kill him, Cowboy?” she whispered. “Cobra, I mean. Will you?”
He smiled a little, shook his head. “I told you. He’ll be in prison forever. You’ll be fine.”
“But it’s not that. It’s not just that.”
He waited for her to go on, breathing the scent of her in deep, not just the scent of her perfume but the scent of her and of the sex with her.
“In my house, my father’s house, we go to church every Sunday,” she said quietly. “My sister Tara’s in the high school choir, my sister Zoe’s on the soccer team; she won first prize at the science fair last year. My mother works at a children’s hospital. She raises funds for them. She loves my father and he loves her. They tell each other all the time. They tell us, too, me and my sisters, and my sisters tell each other.”
Bishop laughed. “Jesus.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s a fucking nightmare. My father wants us all to be perfect all the time. His perfect little girls.”
“I’d say you’ve pretty well scotched that plan, don’t worry about it,” said Bishop.
He felt her smile, her lips against his flesh. “I feel like I’m in a coffin when I’m there. In a coffin buried alive. Or like…I read somewhere that in the old days, pregnant women sometimes used to give birth in their coffins after they were dead. They’d start rotting, you know, and the gases would build up and the baby would get pushed out into the coffin, even though the mother was dead. That’s what I feel like when I’m home. Like I’m a dead pregnant woman in a coffin. It’s like I’m dead only there’s something alive inside me. And the gases build up and build up until this thing that’s alive has gotta explode out of me. And I feel like when the living thing explodes, it’s gonna be, like, this…this crazy, angry monster. And it’s gonna rip its way out of the coffin and just tear everything apart, just kill everyone and rip them all to pieces with their fucking Sundays and their science fairs and I-love-yous all the time.”
Her head was on his chest, so Bishop couldn’t see her face. He was surprised when he felt a tear work its way through his chest hair to touch his skin.
“You’re like that, too,” she told him after a minute.
“Like a dead pregnant woman in a coffin?” he said.
She sniffled and laughed. “Oh, fuck you, Cowboy.”
“I’m just trying to follow you here. It’s a complicated thought.”
“No. Well, yes. You’re like, you wanna explode like I do. You’re like, somebody told you you’re supposed to be the good guy, so you’re trying to be the good guy, but you just want to explode out of it and…and tear off and…tear things up and go wild. And you think you shouldn’t. Everybody tells you you shouldn’t, so you think it’s wrong, but you want to anyway.”
Bishop rested his cheek against her hair. He listened to her voice and breathed the scent of her. There was something to what she said, he guessed. He thought about Weiss. About the things Weiss wanted from him.
You wanna be a piece of shit your whole life? A man like you.
He thought about Weiss writing him that e-mail before he killed Mad Dog: Don’t cross the line.
“You don’t know me,” he told her.
“I know you,” said Honey, in his arms. “Because you’re like me. It’s like you’ve always got to choose between doing what’s right and being who you really are. But it’s not what’s right, Cowboy. It’s just what they say is right. It’s all about what they want, really, what they’re after in their lives. You know? I mean, my family goes to church and plays soccer and raises money for charity so everyone will say how wonderful they are and my father can make a lot of money at his business and win his fucking election. Well, I’m not gonna change who I am just so my father can win some fucking election.”
Bishop drew in that scent, that scent of her and of her sex, and considered what she said. And there really was something to it. People told you what was right and wrong, but everybody was running his own game somehow. Hell, Honey’s father could go to church all he wanted. When he needed to get his daughter back without the press finding out, he’d hired Bishop to seduce her. What would the minister have to say about that?
And Weiss. He was no different. It was all well and good for Weiss to say Don’t cross the line. But the truth was he could’ve pulled Bishop off this case before Bishop had had to kill Mad Dog. He could pull him off now before this warehouse job went down and Honey dodged the law and whatever happened to Cobra happened. But Weiss didn’t pull him off; he wouldn’t. Because he wanted Honey’s father to be a happy customer and to tell all his rich friends about Weiss Investigations. Weiss was looking out for his business, for himself. Everyone was. Honey was definitely right about that.
“What’s this got to do with killing Cobra?” he asked her.
She moved, drew away from him, lifted up so she could look at him, so he could see her face. The room was dark, but the glow from the streetlamps on Telegraph came through the window, and he could make out her features, smooth and sweet-looking. It was easy to imagine her in church or in the high school choir.
“If Cobra was dead, I wouldn’t have to go home,” she said. “I mean I would, you know. I’d go home so you could say you’d done your job, so you could get paid and everything. But I wouldn’t have to stay. Because I wouldn’t need my father to protect me.”
“How the hell do you figure that?” Bishop said. “There’s still the rest of the gang. I mean, they won’t come after you like Cobra would. But someone’s sure to cut a deal with the cops, spill his guts, tell them all about you. You were there at the Bayshore, Honey. It’s felony murder, like I said. You’ll need your father to buy your way out of this, one way or another.”
“Not if I had my own money. I mean, I couldn’t run away from Cobra. Even if he was in prison. He’d find me wherever I went, whatever I did. I’d need my father then. He’d hide me out of the country somewhere, hire bodyguards and all that. But if it was just the law, just the law looking for me, just the cops or whatever, that wouldn’t be so hard. I could run, I could get away somewhere myself—if I had money of my own.”
“But you don’t,” said Bishop. “Your father told me. He cut you off after you ran off with Santé.”
Honey’s eyes glinted in the dark. “Cobra does,” she said. “Cobra has money. A lot.”
Bishop propped himself up on his elbows. “He does? Where?”
“Hidden. I know where. It’s all the cash he’s saved from all his stuff he’s got going. Not just the robberies, you know, and the hijacks and stuff. Also meth labs, coke connections, all kinds of shit the other guys don’t know about.”
“How much is it?” said Bishop.
“I’m not sure. But close to a million, I think. That’s what he told me, anyway. He said after he did the warehouse job, we were gonna leave the country. Go down to South America. Just blow out and fucking…just…you know.”
Bishop nodded.
She touched his cheek. “It could be us instead, Cowboy. Shit, I’d like it even better if it was us. I mean, with you, I wouldn’t have to listen to all Cobra’s speeches all day and pretend to give a shit what he thinks about anything. And you wouldn’t have to waste your time with all the boy-girl crap, pretending you want me for my little pink soul or whatever. There wouldn’t be any of that. There wouldn’t be anything, just the money and fucking. And you gotta admit, the fucking rocks.”
He nodded again in the dark. “The fucking rocks,” he said.
“So we do it till we’re sick of each other, then walk away, no hard feelings. A million bucks would take us places, Cowboy. And when we’re done, we walk away.”
Bishop stayed where he was, propped up on his elbows, looking at her. Her eyes still glinted with the tears gathered in them. And that scent, that mingling of perfume and sex and her, was like a cloud all around him. He looked at her lips and felt her breath against him when she spoke.
“It would be so cool,” she said. “Everything would just be us, just us the way we are. Wouldn’t that be so cool, Cowboy?”
After a while, Bishop laughed again. He laughed and lay back on the bed. She swarmed over him. She stroked his face.
“Wouldn’t it?”
“Sure,” he said up at her. “Sure, it would be cool.”
She laughed once, too, gazing down at him.
“If Cobra died,” he said.