The Identity Man (26 page)

Ramsey. He was the one who had murdered this Peter Patterson. He was the one who had sent Gutterson to his apartment, the one who was looking for him now and who would go to his worksite and would find out about the Applebees, and who would go to the house on H Street and look for him there.

Shannon lay down, his bag under his head. He stared up at the ceiling. He didn't think Ramsey would hurt the Applebees—why would he? He didn't think so, and yet his sense of their danger was even more urgent to him than his own.

He lay there a long time, thinking about it. The sunlight shifted to slanted afternoon beams in which motes of dust were dancing. He stared up through the yellow beams, through the dancing dust, his mind drifting, his stomach in knots.

What could he do anyway? What could he do about Ramsey? How could he protect them—Teresa, Michael, the old man? It wasn't as if he was really Henry Conor, an honest guy free to play the hero without fear. All that—his new life—had just been a lie, not even a lie, an illusion, a federal setup, a lawdog scam, gone not even like mist in the morning, more like a dream of mist in the morning, because it had never been real to begin with. So? What? Was he just trying to keep that fantasy alive? Was he just looking for an excuse to see her again? Wouldn't Ramsey be waiting for that? Wouldn't he be waiting for him to turn up at the house on H Street? Maybe he'd kill Shannon there, and then the Applebees would be witnesses and he'd have to kill them, too. Wouldn't he just be bringing more trouble to Teresa's door if he stayed, if he tried to protect her?

He lay there with the sun above him slanting and the light of the sunbeams growing mellow. He thought and thought about it. He had to go. If he didn't get out, they'd kill him. There was nothing he could do if he stayed. But to just run like that, to just leave her behind with this Ramsey bastard coming after her...

His mind drifted. He saw himself in the future. Maybe on the run, maybe in prison. It was bound to be one or the other. He thought he would be able to bear the fact that he would never see Teresa again. Hell, he knew he could bear it. He would be sad, but so what? He would not have the life he wanted, the good life he thought he had been meant to have, but so what? A broken heart wouldn't kill you. The sadness would get better over time. He would forget that other life. He was a hard guy—he had always been a hard guy. He could deal with all that if he had to, all that and a side of fries if he had to.

What he couldn't bear, what he couldn't bear even to consider—even just now, even just lying there on the floor—was the idea that some harm might come to Teresa because of him, the idea he might be in his cell one day or hiding in some backwoods town one day, and news would reach him. A murder in the city...

Teresa's face came to him. The boy's face. The angel's face. Their eyes.

He lay there. He thought about it. He thought about ... well, he thought about a lot of things. He thought about sticking his Beretta in his mouth and blowing his brains out—anything just to end this tension and indecision and helplessness. He thought about walking out in the open and letting some trigger-crazy cop do the job for him. And he daydreamed about going to see Teresa one last time, not to try anything with her, he told himself, not to convince her to come with him or even to touch her, so help him, he wouldn't even touch her—but just to warn her, to explain himself, justify himself to her, face to face, and see the forgiveness in her eyes and warn her to get out, to run, to save herself and her family...

All through the day, tortured in his heart, he lay there in the dust on the floor of the ruined house, his head on his bag, his hands behind his head, staring up through the motes in the slanting afternoon sunlight, watching scenarios and disasters play out in his mind, trying to figure out what to do, and waiting for nightfall.

LIEUTENANT BRICK RAMSEY
waited, too, suffered tortures that long day, too, tortures of indecision and of what he disdained to name as fear. But he
was
afraid—there was no other word for it. It had been building in him since that morning.

It had started when he'd seen Gutterson lying dead on Henry Conor's floor. There had been that wisp of superstitious dread, that suspicion of nemesis working against him. Then there'd been the old man in the white house—Applebee—leaning on the mantelpiece under the wooden carving of the angel, the old man looking at him and the angel looking at him as if they knew what he'd done and who he was inside.

Finally, there'd been the daughter—Teresa—and his sense that something was going on here that he didn't understand. That sense—and the old man's look—and the wisp of dread he'd felt when he saw Gutterson—they'd all combined until he felt like a kind of darkness was closing in on him, strangling him. That's when he began to suspect what he would have to do. That's when he began to become afraid.

He went back to the Castle—that was what they called Police Headquarters. He went up to his office on the tenth floor and sat alone. Swiveling back and forth in his high-backed chair. Gazing out the long window without really seeing the expanse of the fire-and flood-blasted city laid out below him.

He tried to think things through, but there's no point in following his logic. There wasn't much logic, in fact. It was all just that strangling sense of things closing in. The superstitious dread. The look in Applebee's eyes, the angel's eyes. Teresa.

They knew. That, at last, was the only sense he could make of it all. That explained the old man's hostility, and the girl's ignorance, which had to have been feigned. They knew what Conor knew. They knew who Ramsey was and what he'd done. They were part of this—this
thing
he was feeling, this evil fate that he felt in the air around him, this will opposed to his will. That's what he was battling here. That's what was lurking in the shadows beyond his understanding, that spirit of nemesis like a stern, relentless phantom, her hand upraised as she waved the Book of Judgment at him, hammering it against the darkness as she hunted him down.

Sitting there, swiveling back and forth, staring blindly out the window, Ramsey realized there was no way out of this for him anymore. He was going to have to see it all the way to the end.

Across town at that hour, the fifteen-year-old gangster who called himself Super-Pred was committing an act of violence so grotesque that even the thugs who attended him found themselves nauseated and quailing. The gnarly-assed junky called Speedball had been scamming on the Pred, no question, and had shorted a detective on his payoff, pocketing the skimmed cash to feed his own habit. Which was not only dishonest but unforgivably stupid, because the cop was a cop and sure to complain. Everyone knew S-P was going to deal out some shit to the junky, and everyone also knew that when the Pred got going, he sometimes lost himself in the work. There was always, therefore, a 50 percent chance that Speedball might not survive the discipline—which was probably why the poor zombie pissed himself when he saw Super-Pred had come to deal with him personally. Still, no one was prepared for the elaborate bloodfest that followed. It was something you'd expect to get more from some Afghan warlord than a city g. When Super-Pred finally hitched up his pants and strutted out the warehouse door, the boyos he left behind could only whistle and curse and steal frightened glances at each other as they mopped up what was left of Speedball's body and the pools of their own vomit besides.

As for the fifteen-year-old lad himself, he was still impossibly wired with triumph and self-horror when he returned to the garage he used for an HQ. Much, indeed, like a warlord of old, he summoned women to him, two of the child-whores he ran, and worked off his excess energy in unspeakably cruel sexual acts that left one of the children bleeding and sniveling and the other mocking her and lording it over her because she felt that was her safest bet.

So there, finally, Super-Pred sat, enthroned in an old leather chair, bloated with satisfaction, his mind a sort of red silence, with even the voice of his self-horror barely a dim cry, no more than what you might hear from a starving baby in an abandoned building as you were driving away. He was drinking a beer, watching a movie on the laptop set on a mechanic's workbench, laughing while two of his minions slouched on the sofa, drinking beers and laughing with him as the gangster on the monitor buzz-sawed a rival in two.

The garage's side door opened then and a shaft of afternoon light fell through it. The gangsters were still laughing as they turned to see who dared disturb them.

Ramsey's silhouette cut its shape out of the light.

Aware of all the ramifications, Ramsey felt slightly nauseated as he stood over the boy reclining in his chair. Super-Pred—making a show of being unafraid of a fresh beatdown from the lieutenant—gave him a lazy salute with his beer bottle and said, "What's up, daddy."

Ramsey gestured with his head and the two other thugs were dismissed.

Then, when he and the Pred were alone, Ramsey said, "There's a white shingled house on H Street..."

NIGHT FELL.
Far away, beneath a chandelier flashing rainbows over a fine ballroom in the nation's capital, Augie Lancaster was bestowing the high, ringing ideals of his oratory on the upturned faces of worshipful celebrities. But here, in the alleys of the city he'd created and left behind, there were a thousand little crucifixions. Girls who still had secret dreams of romantic dances were on their knees in the dust taking a mouthful of dick for a handful of dollars. Boys in the animal rage of manhood-without-nobility were strutting the little distance between their hard-ons and the grave. Gunfire was everywhere. A teenager was gurneyed into an ER with a slug in his chest. He'd leave in a wheelchair: dead-eyed, drooling. Wailing drifted through every half-opened window. A little girl slapped her baby because it wouldn't stop crying long enough for her to hit her methamphetamine pipe in peace.
Tsk, tsk, tsk,
said the old men shaking their heads. Old, dried-up, moralizing men locked behind the barred doors of their houses to keep them from souring the juicy life of the street; chewed-up old men spat into the gutter of the juicy street life. And the women? So mean. Thirty-year-old grandmothers: nasty, bullying.

Why you so mean, woman?

'Cause you so weak!

In the churches, meanwhile, they preached other men's sins, so who could fail to say
amen?

***

Then there was the white shingled house on H Street. Strange it should still stand there, surrounded by all that ruin and debris. All those empty lots. Those piles of rubbish rising gothic against the starless sky. Unfair, it almost seemed, to the gangsters staring at it balefully from the dark. Why should it go untouched by the disaster when whole other neighborhoods—their neighborhoods—were gone? The yellow glow of the lights in the windows touched some inborn notion of home they didn't even know how to imagine, and so instead of yearning for it they felt a sort of gibbering justification in their intentions, an instinct to destroy what obscurely moved them and threatened to reveal them to themselves in the light of their best desires. What they had come to do was only right, they felt somehow: the rape and the murder and the fl ames. It was only as it should be, their privilege and their calling.

They glanced fitfully at their leader, wondering why he hesitated to give the word.

Inside the house, there was squealing and comical chatter, a comical music of
zwit
s and
boing
s. The boy, Michael, was lying on his stomach in the living room, looking up from his crayon drawing at an old cartoon on the TV. Teresa checked on him from the archway and then returned to her father in the front room. He was sitting in his reading chair, fiddling with an unlit pipe. She sat across from him on the sofa, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees.

"He'll turn up," the old man told her without much conviction.

She shook her head. "I don't think so. I think he's gone for good."

"He'll come to say goodbye. If he can, he will. You'll see."

She frowned. "I'd just like to hear Henry's side of it, that's all." She didn't like to admit her feelings for Conor, even to herself, but she knew them now and she knew her father knew them and it made her feel exposed and embarrassed. "It's just—that policeman, that detective..."

"Oh, he was..." The old man waved the stem of the pipe in the air before him. "I wouldn't believe a word he said. In this city? The police are worst of all, worse than the criminals. I took one look at him—I knew he was after Henry for his own reasons. Believe me."

"I don't know. He seemed ... like he might've been a good person."

"I think that's what he's good at: seeming like that. Probably was one once. Which makes him even worse. I'm telling you, I took one look in his eyes and..."

Applebee stopped short. He cocked his head, listening. There were only the
boings
of the cartoon music and a comical chattering.

"What? What's the matter?" said Teresa.

"Did you hear something? In the kitchen? In back?"

"I don't think so..."

With his eyebrows lowering, the old man pushed himself out of his chair. Teresa instinctively stood up, too. They hesitated a moment, looking toward the back of the house, listening for a noise.

Then, with violent suddenness, the gangsters burst in through the front door.

There were three shotgun blasts, thunderously loud as they blew off the door's security cage. Even as Teresa recoiled in shock—that quickly—they kicked the door in and charged through.

The old man had a second to lean toward the stairs, toward the gun he kept in his bedroom. Then one of the bangers whipped the butt of the shotgun into his face. The old man staggered back, his knees buckling as he hit the wall and tumbled down to the floor.

Teresa screamed for her son: "Michael!" She turned toward the archway. Two bangers grabbed her by the waist and legs and lifted her into the air as she twisted and struggled. Another thug stalked past her into the living room. He came out laughing with the writhing child helpless in his arms.