The Identity Man

  Shannon made his way to one house that stood slanted like a man with a shortened leg. He saw it in starlight against the sky. Its broken windows stared. Its door hung open. The door flapped and banged and gasped—the latch catching and letting go—as the damp wind smelling of sewage blew stronger.

  Shannon went to it. He stood in the doorway and held the door open. It smelled no worse than the outdoors and he could feel the emptiness of it. Nothing moving anywhere. As his eyes adjusted, he could see the emptiness, too. No furniture. Nothing. The place was stripped bare.

  He stepped in and pulled the door shut behind him, pulled it hard until it held. He sat down and made a place for himself on the dark floor. He lay his head on the bag. He pulled his windbreaker tight around him. He wasn't thinking clearly. He was worn out and had to sleep. Then it would be better.

  He curled up on his side, shivering and clutching his coat. For a moment, his face crumpled as if he would cry, because he had witnessed his own heart in the night city and everything was ashes.

  Identity like stain.

  PART V

  THE BALD GUY

  AT HIS FIRST sight of the dead Gutterson, Lieutenant Ramsey had an uncomfortable premonition of nemesis: a sense some evil fate was working against him. He pushed the idea aside as self-defeating superstition. He looked down at Gutterson and thought: Just good old-fashioned, all-too-human incompetence, that's all.

  Gutterson lay on his back, staring at the ceiling with his mouth hanging open. His head was dented in and there was a small pool of blood under one ear. There was the smell of shit. Ramsey shook his head and sighed. What an idiot.

  "Neighbor heard the fight last night. Didn't think to call it in." This was from the wiry caffeine-waif Strawberry, the detective who'd caught the case. He gestured at a short, saggy man looking mournful and self-important in the corner: the building superintendent. "Neighbor mentioned it to the super this morning. Super came up to check it out, dialed nine one one."

  Ramsey nodded down at Gutterson. Jesus. Acid ate at his stomach lining as his mind went through the various unraveling possibilities, all the ways this could get back to him, bite him on the ass. Henry Conor on the run now, Peter Patterson dead, Reverend Skyles in prison ... He was reckoning each logarithm of disaster like click, click, click. Inwardly grimacing at the acid.

  On the outside, all the while, he wore a look of grim seriousness, a show of controlled moral outrage. It was the same look Strawberry wore on a face that usually fluttered and darted with hummingbird energy. It was the same look the two uniforms had on their faces and the same one that was on the face of Strawberry's gym-rat partner, James. Even the CSU babe taking pictures of the closet wore the girl version of that look. Even the ME's guy, when he showed up, wore it. It was the official look you wore when one of the animals killed a police. It was a look that said: I am grieved like you, angry like you, but I am all business, too, a sword of justice, and we will have our revenge together. It was all show with Ramsey, of course. Personally, he didn't give a shit, because he knew the truth here and, anyway, he had other problems. But he still had to wear the official look. It was more or less a departmental requirement. It was what you wore to a cop-killing.

  "Any idea what he was working on?" he asked, as if he didn't know.

  Strawberry shook his head. "Found a folder in his car with some casework, a picture, some names and places. Apartment apparently belongs to Henry Conor. A carpenter. Been working for Handsome Harry Hand over at the development. Hit him with that hammer."

  It took all of Ramsey's self-discipline to keep from laughing here. Puns about Gutterson getting nailed, getting hammered, getting shellacked flashing through his mind. But really, seriously: How do you show up to deal death with a nine in your pants and get taken down by a carpenter with a hammer? For the sake of his dignity, Gutterson was just lucky he hadn't been stapled to death.

  "Conor must've run for it when he saw what he did," Strawberry went on. "Left his car. It's parked outside. Took Gutterson's gun, though."

  "I'm personally in charge," the lieutenant announced portentously. He knew that would make an impression and it did. Strawberry answered him with one grim nod, impressed and gratified, because an animal had killed a police and now the lieutenant himself was personally taking charge. Yeah, boo-ra, whoop-de-doo. Whatever. Ramsey needed to get out of here before he showed them all what he really thought of this mess.

  He gave another look down at Gutterson. Gutterson staring stupidly with his mouth open. Gutterson stupidly dead. What a moron.

  Ramsey frowned around the room with murderous virtue—one more official display for the troops while the acid ate away the inside of him.

  Finally, when he figured he'd given them enough of the old moral outrage bullshit, he headed for the door.

  So it turned out there was a problem with this business of moving your minions through the force of your invisible will: idiot minions. Send Gutterson to get some information and kill a guy, and he winds up some carpenter's do-it-yourself home improvement project. It was a while before Ramsey could stop shaking his head and smiling to himself with wry misery.

  Still, the more he thought about it, the more he thought there were angles here, unintended positive consequences. The situation was now set up so that Ramsey could get a lot accomplished simply by doing his job. Conor, for instance, had been pretty well neutralized. He had nowhere to go. He couldn't reach out to the feds or the media. Augie Lancaster had the local feds and the media in his pocket. Buses, trains, planes, rental cars—they were all being covered. And there was no chance he would make it out of town on foot either. The first time he stuck his head up, any cop who spotted him would pop him like a duck at a shooting gallery: up, pop, he's gone. So the only real problem now—now that Gutterson had shit the bed like this—was finding out exactly what Conor knew and whether anyone else in town knew it. Not the street creatures. They didn't matter. Who would they talk to? Who would care? But there might be others. There was too much mystery around this carpenter to know for sure.

  Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson.

  Loose ends—that's what it was all about now. Conor was more or less history, but there might still be loose ends.

  "He have friends?" Ramsey asked.

  He was talking to Handsome Harry Hand now. Little basketball of a guy with a monkey face. They were in the development's messy site trailer, standing together beside the bulletin board. Guy named Joe Whaley was over behind his desk, tilted back in his chair, hands laced in back of his head, watching. Whaley looked like a man who did a lot of watching: a big man with I've-got-your-number eyes. The way he was studying Ramsey, Ramsey figured him for the kind of guy who would know things. But Harry was the boss. So he talked to Harry.

  "Any guys he hung out with regularly?"

  "Not really," Harry said. "You know, guys he talked to. But he kept himself to himself. Didn't socialize much or..." Hand appealed to Joe Whaley with a look. Joe Whaley was the head man on the site.

  Joe Whaley pulled a face and Ramsey said, "What? You know something?"

  Whaley shrugged. Reached down behind himself to scratch his back. "I think he had something going. I don't know what for sure. Something that kept him busy on the weekends, though."

  "Yeah," said Harry. "Moonlighting. I got him that. Guy wanted someone who could carve things. You know, work with wood. Conor could do that. Applebee, the guy's name was. I remember 'cause he sent me a letter. Like a thank-you note on a little frilly card."

  "You save it?"

  "No, but I remember. Cause he had this handwriting."

  "Handwriting like..."

  "Like a girl. And he sent this little frilly card, like I bought him a birthday present or something. Frederick Applebee."

  Once again, Joe Whaley made a face, wagged his head. Ramsey caught it out of the corner of his eye.

  "What?"

  "I don't know. Nothing. I just think there was something else."

  "Something like
..."

  "You know, like a girl. It wasn't just a job, that's what I'm saying. It wasn't just moonlighting. I think there was a girl."

  "Which you know because...?"

  "I don't know, I think. It's just, when you watch a guy, you can tell, that's all. When there's a girl. You can tell."

  Ramsey considered. Joe Whaley looked to him like the sort of person who would watch a guy and who could tell.

  "Thanks," he said. Then he said it again to Harry Hand.

  He stepped out of the trailer and squinted into the morning sun. The frames of houses rose against the blue sky. The figures of men up on the beams, dark against the brightness. Hammers rising and falling. Big power tools juddering against their bodies. Whapping and buzzing everywhere. All that federal money pouring into the city, you could count on graft master Handsome Harry to get his share. Even the air smelled fresher here. Ramsey wondered who Harry had paid off to get that.

  He held the edge of his hand against his forehead, shielding his eyes from the glare. Watching the work with casual interest, his stomach burning.

  A girl, he was thinking. Yeah, that would be a loose end all right.

  IN THE DAYLIGHT, Shannon sat cross-legged on the empty floor and tried to think the situation through. It wasn't easy. His mind was clearer now, but the situation—that was a mess. Here he was in a new town with a new face, all his records wiped out, even his DNA records changed. But from the very start, some bald guy had been following him everywhere. Then, on the night he finally chased the bald guy away, up showed some cop and tried to cut his ear off. What the hell? How did that make sense? Shannon had known a cop or two who would cut your ear off if it served their purposes. He'd even known a couple of cops who would cut your ear off for a laugh. But it was not the usual coplike thing. He did not imagine your average, honest carpenter citizen would get house calls from cops who wanted to cut his ear off. So someone, in other words, knew who he really was or thought he was someone else they knew. Or something.

  That was as far as he could get with unraveling that tangle, but there was another area in question, too: what should he do now? Everything inside him—every instinct—was telling him to run. Run fast, keep running. Well, no shit, Sherlock. There was no happy ending to any scenario that involved him staying here. If the bald guy and the cop already knew who he was, then he had a target on his back. And if they had mistaken him for someone else, he couldn't clear himself without revealing who he really was—which could mean death row. In either case, he'd killed a cop, which, in a town like this, came with a mandatory sentence of death-while-resisting-arrest, hold the judge and jury. So it came down to this: running away meant a lifetime of soulless rooms and guttery darkness, but at least it was a lifetime. Running away was the only option if he didn't want to end up dead. It was a no-brainer.

  And yet...

  All night, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in tortured dreamlike thoughts, the words had come back to him: Identity like stain. The dreams and thoughts were all about Teresa. Teresa seeing on the television news that he'd killed a cop and disappeared or been gunned down by the angry police. They would call him a murderer, a key suspect in the Hernandez home invasion massacre, an accomplice in the slaughter of an entire family. He dreamed Teresa's face when she heard that. And the little boy's face when he heard it. And Applebee's. And the face of the angel on the mantelpiece. Identity like stain.

  He tossed and turned on the floor of the abandoned house in a city full of gunshots and sirens and silent suffering, and he knew he couldn't live with that. If he ran away now, he would run forever, a murderer in Teresa's eyes, a monster to the boy. And okay, he was a lowlife thief, a scumbag nothing, but he wasn't a murderer. He wasn't a monster. He'd lived a crappy life, okay, but there was this other life inside him, this good life, this life he was supposed to have lived. It was like another road running next to the road he was on. When he met Teresa, it was as if the roads crossed for a minute, a day, a couple of weeks, and he saw for a while how things could've been. If he ran now, he would be running down the same old road and leaving the road of that other life behind. He would be right back where he was before the foreigner changed his face. A hunted murderer in the eyes of the world, in Teresa's eyes, in the boy's eyes. Running forever. Identity like stain.

  Oh, it was too much for him to figure out. He should just get out, hit the wind, that was the smart thing. But, man, he hated it, hated thinking about it, hated the idea of going back to that life. He couldn't have Teresa. He knew that. He couldn't have that other good life. It was too late for that now. He knew. But at least let him be himself in front of her. Let her see that he wasn't a murderer, that he hadn't done Hernandez, that the dead cop was self-defense. Let him clear his name of the killings at least and put some honest picture of his sad self before her. If she saw him on the TV news as he was, as the low thief he really was, well, she could understand that, couldn't she? She could forgive that. She could explain it to the boy and they would both forgive him. Henry just went down the wrong road, she would say. He would've gone down the good road if he could've found it. He just didn't know the way, that's all. And they would forgive him. That's all he wanted now. Let her see him as he was, only as bad as he was. Let him stay and show all of them who he was, so he wouldn't be evil in their eyes.

  Are you fucking crazy? he asked himself, sitting there. Are you willing to die to do that? And the answer came boiling up out of him: Yes! Let me die in the life I was meant for. Keep your identity. Keep your stain. Let her see me as I am. Let me die in the life I was supposed to live.

  It was strange. These thoughts of his—they were all kinds of disjointed and messed up and emotional. But when he was finished, it was as if he'd gone through the whole thing step by step. It was as if he'd figured it out logically. Because now, he knew exactly what he was going to do.

  He untangled his legs and stood up off the floor. He took the gun, the cop's gun, the nine-a, out of his tool bag. He chambered a round and checked the safety. He worked the weapon into the back of his belt and pulled his windbreaker down so that it was covered.

  Then he walked out of the empty house into the morning.

  In all the gray ruins of the city—with all its houses washed to muddy rubble by the flood and its buildings burned to skeletal cinders—the Government Center in the east end of town was shockingly vivid, colorful, and whole. One structure here had a golden dome that glinted in the sunlight. Another was made of white marble with fluted Roman pilasters, graceful and precise in every detail. Yet another had an impressively long wall of tinted windows reflecting the grassy green park with its red and orange and yellow tulips. In the park, men and women dressed in light spring pastels walked along the asphalt paths to glass doors that flashed back the morning as they opened and closed. The Government Center was a weirdly living thing pulsing on the dead city, like some kind of exotic spider feeding on the gray, colorless shape of the butterfly wrapped in its web.

  Shannon sat on a bench at a bus stop across the street. His eyes moved over the crowd in the park. It was a bad setup for him. Lots of cops patrolling the park paths, keeping their wary eyes on the building entranceways and the wrought-iron gate in the spiked fence at the park's perimeter. The cops made Shannon nervous, but he acted casual, his arm draped over the bench back, his legs crossed at the knee. These cops weren't searching for him, he told himself. This was the last place they'd look for him, the last wide-open place they'd think he'd come. These guys were after terrorists and whatnot, he thought. They were watching out for the random nutjob who couldn't feed his family and came after the government with a gun, because there was no one else left who had a job or a dime.

  So he stayed on the bench while long minutes passed. Other people gathered at the bus stop and buses came, obscuring his view. When the buses hissed and rumbled away, the other people were gone and there he still was. Trying to look casual. Glancing nervously at whatever cop was passing near. But mostly—the whole time—he kept watc
h on the one tower of gleaming steel across from the park's near corner; he kept watch on the restaurant on the tower's bottom floor: the World Café.

  That had been the name on the receipt in the bald guy's car. Shannon had seen it when he'd peeked through the scarred Crown Victoria's window. It was the only clue he had to where the bald guy was—and the bald guy was his only clue to why the cop had come after him to cut off his ear, to why he was in the same old fUgitive cock-up again when he was supposed to be new mang.

  At first, he had thought the clue was kind of tenuous. The World Café might be a chain. There might be a dozen of them in the city. He was all prepared to go tromping from one café to another, describing the bald guy to the waiters, hoping for a hit. But it turned out better than that. There was only one World Café, and when he saw where it was, he had hopes the bald guy would show up here sooner or later. This was not the kind of place you traveled to. It was a place for regulars, for people who worked in the Government Center, probably mostly for people who worked in the steel tower, which had letters above the door: Federal Building.

  Shannon staked the place out for an hour and a half, so he had a lot of time to think about those letters. Was the bald guy a fed? What were the feds after him for? Why would the feds send a city cop to cut his ear off and kill him? Who the hell did they think he was? Or if they knew who he was, what the hell did they want from him?

  No answers. He couldn't come up with a one. So he waited and worried about it and kept an eye on the cops and kept an eye on the Federal Building and the World Café until finally—sure enough—up showed the bald guy.

  He came out of the federal building, walking quickly. Same guy, definitely. Same junkie-thin slime-dog in yet another cheap suit, and with his chromey dome glinting in the noonday sun. He didn't go into the World Café. He headed off along the sidewalk instead, parallel to the park. Within moments, he had nearly lost himself in the flow of pedestrians, his bald head appearing and disappearing in the gathering lunchtime crowd.