Bishop snagged a half-empty beer bottle by the neck. He took a swig. It settled his stomach. He worked his way to his feet. Found his jeans on the threshold. Pulled them on.
He wandered down a dark hall. Found a bathroom. Pissed. He wandered down a dark stair. Found the living room: an epic wreckage. Bottles, bags, pizza boxes, CDs strewn all over the furniture. And Shorty, fully dressed, splayed out in a big old leather recliner, fast asleep. There was a dead soldier of tequila under his boot heels, an Xbox controller held loosely in his hand. He must’ve ditched his old lady at some point and joined them.
Tipping up his beer bottle, Bishop wandered on.
He came to the doorway of a room stacked with boxes. Computers, radios, TVs. Stolen shit. Jacked off some truck or out of some warehouse somewhere. Who the hell knew what these asswipes were into?
You’re one of us.
Yeah, right. Bishop peeled off the jamb, slouched on into the kitchen. He sure wished he hadn’t killed Mad Dog, though. It was a weight on his gut. He shouldn’t have gotten so carried away in the moment. He shouldn’t have crossed the line.
He came into an old-fashioned country kitchen. Big black gas stove. Black-and-white tiling on the floor and the walls. Kind of weird the way everything was in its place in here. As if it were the one room in the whole house no one had entered.
But there was what he was looking for: a door, a screen door to the outside. A chance to get some fresh air, yeah. He was going to puke or pass out if he didn’t.
Thick-headed, weak-bellied, he rolled on through. Came out atop a short flight of concrete steps overlooking the backyard.
The air felt good, all right. Cool and damp and refreshing. He breathed it in gratefully. Sipping his beer, surveying the yard. It was a misty, shifting landscape. Twisted oaks stood ghostly in the fog. Yellow leaves stirred on the grass at his feet like autumn stirring. And pale, sturdy fingers of sunlight stretched down from the unseen sky, fading to nothing before they ever reached the earth.
He looked to the far side of the half acre. The mist was thickest there. It churned and drifted as if it were a living mass. Dark shapes rose out of it and sank away in a sort of dance of coming and going. He watched it a while in a morose and dreamy daze.
And soon, and slow by slow, he became aware there was a figure—a figure at the center of it. A human form, sharply present and then spectral and dim and then sharply present again, hunkered in the morass like a garden gargoyle. It took a moment before Bishop realized it was a living man.
Cobra.
Bishop came down the steps, ambled across the lawn toward him. Another memory began to nag at him. Something had happened. Something important. About Cobra. About Cobra and Honey…
That’s right: They had had a fight. A bad one. A loud one, anyway. It happened when the other girls turned up. Everyone was stoned and the girls started grinding to some classic White Trash and Honey had seen how things were going and she started screaming over the blasting music, saying she wasn’t one of Cobra’s whores, she wasn’t going to be treated like one of Cobra’s whores. Cobra cursed her. He was drunk as hell by then. He said he’d fuck whoever he wanted, when he wanted. He was a free man. Honey had stormed out, her blonde hair flying behind her. Bishop remembered that: her blonde hair flying. A minute later, in the lull between “Let’s Get It On” and “I’ve Got News,” they’d heard her pickup’s engine kick over. They’d heard the truck bounding down the long dirt driveway to the road below.
Well, Bishop thought. That was good. That was something anyway. A memory to lift his spirits, a little counterbalance to the sorry-ass business of killing Mad Dog. Honey and Cobra had had a flame-out. That was excellent. Bishop’s offer to take her away from all this might be looking a lot better to her now.
After Honey was gone, Bishop remembered, Cobra had started to party hard. He drank hard and prowled around the middle of the floor and made a speech about some bullshit or other. We’re, like, the edge, we’re, like, the new thing, we’re, like, the old, the oldest thing again. Like brothers, man, like all brothers bonded together against everything, against all the so-called rules and codes. It’s just us instead now. From now on. Everything is us, just who we are. We’re men. We’re men. Then he roared like an animal, shaking his two fists at the ceiling. Finally he staggered off to his bedroom with one of the girls in tow, a narrow-hipped teenager with a glance full of thrilling mischief.
And now here he was out here, squatting on his heels in the grass. Wearing only his underwear, his white briefs. His body was all ropy muscle, but it seemed gaunt and fragile somehow.
Bishop stood over him. Cobra didn’t turn or look his way. He just went on peering out into the mist.
They were at the border of a ridge, Bishop saw. The ground dropped down steeply just beyond. Through the shifting gray curtain, Bishop caught glimpses of the city stretched out below them, the broad plain of white buildings colored orange and rose with the morning light. The bay lay beyond them. He got only a hint of it. And only a hint also of the blue sky that lay out there beyond the bay. But as far as he could make out, it was clear as could be on the flatlands and the water. It seemed the fog was all up here, all gathered on the high ground.
Now at last, Cobra looked up at him.
Whoa, Bishop thought.
The outlaw was ashen. His face was sunken, ravaged. It looked like a skull but with bloodshot eyes. The flesh of his cheeks hung slack as if it were melting off him. The vee of his mouth hung slack, and there was drool glistening at the corners. His head bobbed slightly on his neck as if he were an old man, too weak to hold it steady.
“Man,” said Bishop with a gesture of his bottle, “you look like I feel.”
“Oh, bullshit, Bullshit to that, compañero.” Cobra sneered irritably. “You don’t fucking feel like this. Believe me. You don’t have the insight to feel this bad. Comprende? Mr. Vroom-Vroom Bang-Bang. This is deep, bleak shit here. This is dark-night-of-the-soul-style shit. You gotta know something to be where I am, dude. You gotta be somebody all the way down to the ground.”
Bishop gestured again, by way of a shrug. “Well, ’scuse my ass,” he said. “I thought you were just out here mooning over some pussy.”
“Oh, fuck her. What, you think this is about Honey? What do you think? You think she’s gone and I’m out here crying? You think I let my old lady tear out over a couple of spare hardbellies?”
“Beats me,” Bishop answered mildly. “She didn’t look too pleased, you gotta admit.”
Cobra gave a single miserable snort. “Fuck her,” he repeated in a mutter. “She can go if she wants. She can go anytime she wants. Long as she comes back when I call her. She comes back or I drag her back. She knows it, too.” He pointed a finger up at Bishop. “And everyone else better know it. You hear me? You all better remember what I told you last night in the Alley. Don’t give me that what-the-fuck stare, man, I’ve seen you eyeball her. And eyeball away. It’s a free country. But don’t you go near her unless you’re tired of living. There aren’t enough miles in the road to put between us, dude, so help me, you go near her.”
“Whatever,” Bishop said.
Cobra lowered his finger. Lowered his shoulders. Turned again, the energy gone out of him. In his gargoyle crouch, his forearms resting on his raised knees, he went back to brooding on the depths of the fog. “Man,” he said heavily. “Man oh man. Everything I fuck turns to shit. Everything I touch gets fucked. What the fuck’s the point? You know? You try to do something with your fucking life, you try to make your life about something…Why don’t women get that? Why do they always wanna make everything small again? She thinks I’m just gonna live and die, just live and breed and die?”
Bishop rubbed his eyes. His head hurt and his brain was running on slow. What the hell was Cobra talking about, anyway? And what was he—Bishop—what was he doing here? He was supposed to be doing something, wasn’t he? Sure he was. It wasn’t as if all this were real. Him and the gang and Cobra. It was bullshit. It was just another assignment for Weiss and the Agency. What with Mad Dog dying and with the booze last night and the crystal and him and Charlie upstairs on the mattresses humping the hardbellies in syncopation, things had gotten all weird and dreamy for a little while there. It had almost started to feel as if he’d actually become part of this whole business. Like Cobra said: One of us.
But no way, not hardly. There was something else. Something he was supposed to be doing here. The job. That’s it: the big job. He was supposed to find out about this big job Cobra was planning to pull off.
“A man wants to be…part of something,” Cobra grumbled on to the shifting mists. “Part of something big, you know. It’s not about…it’s not about what you do. The little shit you do. Y’know? It’s about—what it means. What it all means.”
“I thought you already had this covered,” Bishop said. “All this big-time shit. That’s what you told me. You had some big job all lined up already. Big plan, big money, that’s what you said. Shit, that’s what I’m here for, I know that much.”
For another moment, Cobra crouched there, muttering at the fog, wallowing in his exquisite dejection. Then, as if he’d just gotten the joke, he made a noise, a sort of chuckling noise deep in his throat. He laughed. Suddenly, loudly, hoarsely: “Ha, ha!” He slapped his knee. He pushed off his knee and stood out of his crouch, his ravaged face coming level with Bishop’s. The fog vortexed behind him and haloed his head with a circle of sunlit sky.
“Jigger my zesty carbuncles if you aren’t dead right, my brother,” he said. His face was still an ashen mess, a skull of melting flesh, but now his bloodshot eyes were bright. He grabbed hold of Bishop’s neck the way he had last night on the edge of the canyon. “Wiggle my mossy lingam if you aren’t dead-on, one hundred percent correctamento. You bring me back to myself, dude. Big plan, big money. That’s it. That’s it exactly. Right?” The circle of sky opened, and the sunshine fell on both of them. “We have to get ready for that. Honey, too. She won’t miss that. I know she won’t want to miss that. And you—” His hand cracked smartly as he slapped Bishop’s naked back. “I guess you’ve paid your dues, haven’t you? Huh? With poor old Mad Dog? I guess last night you sure as shit paid your dues.” He slung his arm around Bishop’s shoulder, “It’s time to tell you all.”