Weiss was still at his desk when I came in the next morning. Still staring at his computer. But he was reading an e-mail now. Bishop had sent it to him from a terminal at the California Highway Patrol’s Driscoll air barracks.
Weiss. Glad to hear word reached you about the helo in time. I had to stay in woods to stop whack on Kathleen. Have to answer cop questions for a while due to bodies. See you in a day or two. JB.
As Weiss read, his mouth curled up in an exceptionally goofy smile. Bishop had risked blowing his assignment to go back and get the girl. Weiss wasn’t exactly sure why, but he found this piece of news incredibly gratifying.
And in fact, Bishop had not only retrieved Kathleen from the swamp, he’d also flown her out of the woods to safety. Hirschorn’s gunmen had stood guard over the runway for a while after Bishop’s escape as they’d been ordered. But as the night dragged on, they got bored and returned to camp to join Alex Wellman, who was anxiously watching for his employer’s return. Bishop and Kathleen, hiding in the nearby trees, saw their chance and made their way to the plane. Bishop got it started and took off. They reached Driscoll in one of the dark hours of morning.
By that time, the first reports of the attack on North Wilderness were going out over TV and radio news. So when Bishop showed up at the California Highway Patrol’s chopper station near the airpark, the police were very interested to hear what he had to say. Bishop found the Dynamite Road on the sectional chart of the area and used it to lead the cops directly to the forest runway. Wellman and the remaining gunmen were in custody before the sun rose.
Bishop had killed three people out there in the woods and Kathleen had killed another. This troubled the police—a little. They kept the two of them around town for questioning for a couple of days. Most of that time, Bishop and Kathleen spent together upstairs in the house he’d lived in. As events unfolded and the full story was revealed, it became pretty clear that the killings they’d committed had been done in self-defense. They were told they were free to go and that no charges would be filed.
Bishop bid Kathleen a tearless farewell at the airpark. Then he mounted his Harley and rode off into the sunset.
News continued to come out of North Wilderness for several weeks afterwards. By the final count, five corrections officers and one prisoner died in the attack on the SHU. The man called Ben Fry was suspected of killing three of them. The other three, including the prisoner in his cell, were killed by the Hellfires.
Two other people also lost their lives that night: the pilot of the attacking Apache and the man in the helo’s gunner seat. It was another day or so before they were identified as Chris Wannamaker and Bernard Hirschorn.
With his death, over time, the full extent of Hirschorn’s criminal organization began to become public. His stranglehold on the town of Driscoll was only a small part of it, it turned out. He was also responsible for a good deal of the trafficking in drugs, weapons and human beings throughout the Pacific Northwest. It was an organization built on murder—twenty-five murders at least, some of fairly high-level bad guys who had tried to stand in Hirschorn’s way. It remained Weiss’s belief that the Shadowman had been hired to commit many of these killings and that in doing so he had become the one man who could easily destroy Hirschorn’s business and Hirschorn himself. He knew where the bodies were buried so to speak, and Weiss thought he had used this leverage to convince Hirschorn to act on his behalf.
Anyway, on the basis of testimony from Alex Wellman, local and federal authorities were able to close down much of Hirschorn’s network from Driscoll clear up to the Canadian border. Which—as a comical sidelight—made a hero out of Ray Grambling: the honest FBO owner who’d hired detectives to investigate what Hirschorn was doing with his planes. The detectives themselves refused to be interviewed at any length and so the press quickly lost interest in them.
Whip Pomeroy killed himself. Weiss, being Weiss, had known that he would. He’d tried to get the prison to put the man on suicide watch. He’d tried to get in to talk to him again. But officials at North Wilderness were furious with the detective for going over their heads to alert the governor about the incoming Apache. The fact that he’d turned out to be right only made the matter worse. So they didn’t listen and, about ten days after the attack, Pomeroy chewed through his wrists and bled to death in his cell. He just couldn’t stand the suspense anymore, Weiss thought. He knew—he believed with all his heart—that if he stayed alive, the killer was sure to come back.
As for him—the killer, the man called Ben Fry—he vanished without a trace. Search parties, choppers and dogs crisscrossed the wilderness surrounding the prison for two weeks but couldn’t come up with a single sign of him. His mug shot appeared in newspapers, on TV, but no one had seen him anywhere. After a while, the authorities began telling the media that the escapee was almost surely dead, lost in the forest or maybe drowned trying to make his way along the coast. What they neglected to mention was the fact that, the more they studied the records, the more they began to understand that there had never been a man called Ben Fry at all. His identity, his fingerprints, even his face on closer study, seemed to have been a construct, a fake. But no matter. Their story—that he was dead—became the official version of things. Most reporters seemed satisfied with it.
With one exception. Jeff Bloom, the guy from the Chronicle, the guy who’d done the original stories about the Shadowman after the South Bay Massacre. Jeff claimed to have a secret source who said Ben Fry was the Shadowman himself, or at least was believed to be by the people who knew him. He wrote an article describing the entire incident at the prison as one chapter in a kind of twisted love story, a killer’s attempt to reclaim the woman who had captured his unspeakable heart.
The Chronicle editors didn’t believe that one for a second. The article never ran.
And so that appeared to be the end of it. But there was one other incident that seems to me worth describing. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether it’s part of this narrative or not.
A few weeks after the attack on the prison, an early heat wave hit San Francisco. Temperatures rose over a hundred for three days running. Men stooped as they walked to work as if they were shriveling into the pavement. Women went disconcertingly bare and their skin glistened.
Then, one midnight when the heat lay on top of us like a dead horse, when it seemed as if there would be no relief from it forever, the blessed fog came in. It rolled down street after street like some kind of heavenly cavalry that stirred up a cooling dust with its silent hooves. As streetlamps and building facades vanished underneath it, the temperature dropped thirty degrees, just like that, on the instant.
“Thank God,” said the whore in Weiss’s apartment. She stood at the open window in her underwear. She let the chill air blow in over her. She held back the hair of her red wig with both hands to expose her features to it. “Thank God.”
Weiss sat in the easy chair in the bay, holding a scotch glass in place on the chair’s arm. He smiled faintly at the girl, only faintly. He was ready for her to go.
But then, when she was gone, Weiss grew despondent, as he often did when these trysts of his were over. He lifted the Macallan’s bottle from the floor beside him. He refilled his glass. Another hooker with another red wig. It made him feel low and dirty somehow.
He sat alone, sipped his scotch. Set it down. The billowing fog lay hard by the windowpanes. The people in the street below were merely shadows. The cars passed in smears of dull yellow light. He started to raise his glass to his lips again.
And he stopped, his hand half-lifted. A violent shudder went through him. All at once, a clammy sweat began to collect on the back of his neck just under his shirt collar. He felt cold, as if he had come down with a fever.
But it was not a fever. It was something else, something strange. Weiss was afraid. Really afraid and for no apparent reason. The cold, damp fear felt as if it were suddenly eating into his bones, spreading through him, weakening him. Something—something on the periphery of his vision—had brought a presence like death into the room. He shifted his gaze—slowly, reluctantly, as if he were terrified of what he might see.
There, on the corner across the street, in the jaundiced beam of a streetlamp lost in fog, he made out the shape of a man. A man wearing a dark raincoat, standing very still. Looking up at his window. Watching him.
Weiss felt his breath catch. He stared down at the figure, unable to turn away. His mouth went dry. He slowly dabbed his lips with his tongue and swallowed—swallowed what tasted like ashes. He made to set his scotch glass back down on the chair arm, but it tipped, slipped from his fingers. It fell on the rug with a ringing thud, spitting the last of the fine whiskey into a flame-shaped stain.
The man in the fog stared up at him, stared and stared. Weiss stared back helplessly, as if hypnotized. He thought of his gun, the old service revolver he kept in his desk drawer. But he couldn’t bring himself to rise, couldn’t find the strength to take the three steps across the room to retrieve it. He was like a man in a nightmare whose will is screaming to escape but whose muscles have turned to mud. He couldn’t explain it even to himself. He simply sat locked in the dim figure’s gaze and felt the chill pressure of terror rising in him and rising until it seemed it would become unbearable and then…
And then the phone rang. The sudden sharp trill of it jolted Weiss where he sat. It broke the spell—only for a second, but he seized that second and stood quickly from his chair.
He strode to the desk. Grabbed the phone with one hand. Stooped and pulled open the lower drawer with another. He was drawing his gun out even as he spoke.
“Weiss,” he said.
“Hello, Mr. Weiss.” The woman’s voice was low and warm. He had never heard it before.
Weiss looked around him, confused, sweeping the gun over the room uncertainly. The sweat was still cold on the back of his neck, but the fear had receded as quickly and mysteriously as it had come. He felt dazed now, as if he really had been in a nightmare, as if he’d been awakened from a deep sleep. He began to wonder if maybe that was it. Maybe he’d dozed off in his easy chair and had a bad dream.
“Who is this?” he said thickly into the phone.
“I just wanted to say thank you, Mr. Weiss,” the woman answered softly. There was something otherworldly, almost unreal in the way she spoke, a lofty, distant quality. “Maybe one day I’ll be able to thank you in person.”
Weiss shook his head, trying to clear it. “Who…Who are you?”
“I can’t come to see you now. Do you understand that? It’s too dangerous now. And you can’t come to me either. Do you understand? Do you?”
“No, I…I don’t…”
“You would only bring him with you. You see? He’ll be watching you now all the time, every second. And if you come to find me, he’ll follow you and he’ll find me first.”
Weiss was breathing quick, breathing hard. Suddenly the things she was saying seemed to make sense to him. “Maybe I could help you,” he blurted out. His voice was soft, almost plaintive. “Maybe I could…”
“Please,” said the woman. “Please listen. You can’t, you can’t come. Don’t look for me. He’ll follow you. He’ll find me.”
“But…”
“And be careful, all right? Please. Be very, very careful, Mr. Weiss.”
The line went dead. It was over. Another moment and the dial tone started. With an unsteady motion, Weiss set the phone back in its cradle. He looked around him. He must’ve fallen asleep, he thought again. That had to be it. He’d fallen asleep and had a dream, that’s all. He half believed he was dreaming still.
He was about to put the pistol back in the desk drawer but he hesitated. His eyes went to the window again. He held on to the gun. Walked back across the room. He looked out through the glass bay, out and down into the yellow glow of the streetlamp.
There was nobody there now. Nothing. Only the shadows. Only the fog.