The Identity Man (21 page)

He covered his face with his hands and blew into them, thinking,
Okay, okay.
Trying to gather himself and figure it out. When he looked again, the dead guy was still there, still staring up at the ceiling, and Shannon thought,
Okay
again and decided he had to search the guy, find some ID, find out who he was.

He got off the bed and went to the body. Knelt down by it—cautiously—not that he thought the guy was alive or anything—there was no chance of that—but he had this horror-movie image in his head of the guy leaping up at him anyway, dead or no. Flinching at the stench of shit, he held the guy's jacket open and went into the pocket. He found what he thought was the guy's wallet—but no such luck.

He drew the thing out and when he saw it, he groaned aloud in misery. It was not a wallet. It was a leather ID holder. There was a police badge pinned to it, a detective's badge. Inside was the guy's police ID card: Detective Glenn Gutterson.

Shannon had killed a cop.

IT WAS A LONG
time before the full extent of the catastrophe occurred to him. Oh, he knew it was a disaster right away, but it was a long time before he could take it all in. With the adrenaline still pumping through him and the cop just lying there dead on the floor, he couldn't think clearly. But he had to think. He had to figure out what to do.

He knew right away he couldn't risk calling the cops—not just because of who he was and who he wasn't, but because he didn't know what this was all about. It might be about anything and he didn't know which way the danger lay, so he just had to keep to himself. Which meant he was stuck with it, stuck with a dead cop and no one to turn to, and a murder rap waiting for him if he zigged when he should zag. That sent some more adrenaline through him. Because maybe someone had heard them fighting and was already dialing 911. Maybe the sirens were about to start up in the distance or maybe right outside or maybe there'd just be a sudden pounding on the door...

And what then? What about Teresa? He wasn't thinking clearly, so it took him a few moments to think about her. He was sitting on the bed again by then. Staring at the body, not even seeing it now. Just staring and rubbing the heel of his hand back and forth over his mouth, never mind that his lips were already raw from it. Thinking: What about Teresa and the boy and Applebee? And what about his job and his new life like fairy tale?

Well, that's over with,
he thought.

That's when he began to see the scope of this thing. It was global, wasn't it, a total Hiroshima of his hopes and dreams. The new life, the girl, the angel on the mantelpiece—they were all just ashes now. It was a cluster-fuck so epic he couldn't even feel bad about it. What was the point in feeling bad?

Well, maybe he'd feel bad later. Maybe, it occurred to him, he was in shock now. He sure wasn't thinking clearly. It only now occurred to him with any urgency that he really had to get out of here. The sirens might start, the knock might come any minute. That was the main thing, he thought, sitting there, staring at the dead guy, rubbing his mouth raw with his hand.

His new life was over. He had to go.

The things he saw that night—the awful life of the night in that ruined city—it all seemed strange and dreamlike to him as he passed. Everything seemed at once faraway and yet part of him, faraway and yet connected to him, as if it were an emanated dream, a dream that had projected itself onto the world, a world outside that had somehow originated in the nightmare factories of his mind. The tilted, blackened buildings. The slumped buildings with blackened windows like eyes. A building he came to suddenly around a corner with thick black smoke pouring out of it, and crackling, hoarsely whispering flames licking red out of the belly of the blackness. There was a man in the upstairs window, staring out, not even calling for help, not even caring, just staring out as if he was already dead. There were no firemen. No sirens coming. Just a few scrawny beasts of boys watching it like a movie, laughing and exclaiming and slapping hands. He saw another gang of boys in the mouth of an alley not far from there. They were crouched over something alive, like vampires feeding. He saw legs kicking weakly out of the slow melee, flashes of skin and blood. A man leaning against the alley wall smoked a cigarette and watched. A girl crouched at his feet, fearful and fascinated, bright-eyed, helpless and aroused. Shannon moved on. He heard machine-gun fire. On an empty street, he saw girls and boys-dressed-as-girls taking gangly thugs in and out of an abandoned brownstone. He heard sirens. On a street with no lights at all, he saw an ambulance loom out of the dusky distance, its flashers whirling red. It rushed past him and in the screaming noise and strobic red glow, he saw the silhouette of a man lying in the gutter, clawing at the pavement. And then the ambulance went past and the man sank back into the darkness.

It all seemed far away and it all seemed to come from inside him, his heart enacted in the shadows, his brooding fantasies brought to life. He walked—he didn't know how long—deep into the night. Carrying his tool bag, only with clothes and toiletries in it instead of tools. And the gun, the big cop's nine. He had almost left the apartment when he remembered it, had the door open and his foot on the threshold, when he had stopped and gone back and fetched it from under the bed.

He didn't take the car. They'd have the car made too fast. He'd drive and drive and then they'd put out one call and have him. He knew he wasn't thinking clearly, but he knew enough to leave the car. His cell phone, too: he'd dumped that in a sewer. So he walked and walked, disconnected from everything, and the city was like his dreams playing out all around him.

In the end, he found himself in a neighborhood of small houses ruined by the flood. He didn't know how late it was. He looked at his watch and he still didn't know, it didn't register. A damp breeze that smelled of sewage reached him. The black of the broad sky seemed as if it was slowly being stained from within with a lighter indigo—so he thought it might be nearly dawn.

In any case, he was exhausted now. He looked around him. There were no lights anywhere. The houses were lopsided wrecks, all empty. Animals moved over fields of debris—not just rats and squirrels, not just the bats jiggering in the indigo sky—but big, loping, red-eyed creatures that might have been dogs or something else nosing through the garbage, and great hunched, brooding birds that might have been vultures, and other bony creeping beasts that might have been children or something else.

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.

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."