Damnation Street by Andrew Klavan

Author:Andrew Klavan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery, Thriller
ISBN: 9780151012176
Publisher: Harcourt
Published: 2006-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

24.

Later it came to him, in the desert, in the dark. He knew what he had to do.

He'd been driving for hours and hours by then. Pushing on, relentless, through relentless emptiness. Rain came be- fore night fell, a slashing downpour. Then night fell under stuttering thunder. Awesome threefold barbs of lightning jagged from the core of the vast sky to the horizon. The desolate land lit up—endless desolation at every window, in all directions—and then vanished into desolate darkness ... the sheeting rain on the windshield ... the wipers working back and forth.

Weiss drove on, tired, tired. It was hard going. Hard to see anything, hard to make any time. Hour after hour, slogging through the rain. He gripped the wheel, peered into the night.

He thought about Julie.

The Graves family had been poor. That's what Chalk's old newspaper stories said. The father, mother, and two daughters lived in a cramped, dilapidated house on the edge of the east city. The father had worked in a tire warehouse before the company shut down. Afterward, he mostly did odd jobs, off the books, hauling and lifting for whatever outfit would use him. The mother, Suzanne, was a drunk and a meth addict—a whore, too, when she needed money for the drugs. Otherwise, she worked in the local Hoffman's department store from time to time.

The kids, Mary and Olivia, were thirteen and ten.

The neighbors said Mary took care of her little sister. She played mother to her, made sure she ate, made sure she got to school most days. She took Olivia to their room and hid there with her when the parents fought. The parents fought a lot, the neighbors said. Suzanne brought men to the house when her husband was out—long-haired, tattooed toughs in the drug trade. Charles suspected what was going on, and that's what started the fighting. The police had been called in once or twice to break it up.

No one was very surprised when Suzanne woke up dead one morning. She was supposed to go to work that day, and her girlfriend found her body when she came to pick her up. "It was like a broken watermelon, her head; stuff all over the pillow," the girlfriend told the papers. Everyone said it was shocking, but no one was very surprised.

The husband and daughters were thought missing at first. There was some talk about a drug deal gone sour, a kidnapping, and so on. But it turned out the girls were standing outside Olivia's elementary school, unharmed, waiting patiently for the doors to open. Their father had dropped them off there just before dawn. Then he'd driven away. The police found his pickup later that evening. He himself was never seen again. The children didn't seem to know what had happened.

Weiss gripped the wheel, peered into the night. The Taurus pushed through the spattering rain. Weiss thought about the Graves family, Charles and Suzanne, Mary and Olivia. After a while this thing happened to him, this thing that was always happening.

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