The Identity Man (7 page)

Then, with unbelievable swiftness, animal swiftness that outraced the mind, he whipped his hand around and plunged a syringe into Shannon's neck.

Shannon began to lift his hand in self-defense, but his hand fell back as he sank into unconsciousness.

THE GANGSTER WAS
fifteen years old. He called himself Super-Pred—he actually called himself that. He had his own following among the scattered crews warring over the city's Northern District, or what was left of the Northern District after the looting and the fire and the flood. He had a rep for the unimaginably sudden and grotesque: frothing fits of rage that left his enemies de-boweled or otherwise damaged irrevocably. There was, for instance, one thirteen-year-old in his posse nicknamed Eyeball because Super-Pred had torn one of his eyeballs out in a property dispute over some twelve-year-old cooch—who, by the way, had been missing ever since.

Thus Lieutenant Brick Ramsey watched dispassionately as Detective Gutterson beat the little cancer down.

They were in a steel shed, what had been a storage shed out back of an auto parts shop years back. The shop itself was long gone but the shed stood even after the flooding. Corrugated steel walls and a dirt floor. That's where the boy was—on the floor, hands over his head to protect it. The blood from his nose had made a round stain about the size of a silver dollar in the packed earth.

Well, these things had to be. The Northern District was lawless now. Murders every hellish day. Gunfire all the time—so much gunfire that citizens had stopped calling it in—it was just rattling background noise to them like cicadas in the trees. Super-Pred's squad—and other squads like them—prowled the ruined streets in dark and daylight. Slink-backed coyotes, drooling for Vics. With rap-star T-shirts and golden dollar signs on golden chains and baggy pants like their convict heroes wore. One night, a pack of them broke into a woman's emergency trailer—one of those trailers the feds gave to people who'd lost their homes in the storm. They broke in and raped her to death right there in her own bed, her four-year-old daughter crouching in the corner.

That was bad enough. But last night, someone
really
crossed the line. Someone popped a cruiser. A cop car establishing a presence on Northern Boulevard. A couple of patrolmen doing a slow pass, giving the evil eye to the whores and dealers there. Some joker hunkered like Baghdad behind a Dumpster in an alley opened up with a Kalishnikov and peppered the car's passenger door, could've hurt the rookie riding shotgun. Shooter was gone before they could chase him down. That crossed the line. That couldn't be allowed to stand. When the police passed by, you faded, motherfucker, you vanished like the Cheshire Cat till there was nothing left of you but your shit-eating grin. That was the law of the streets.

"I'm going to leave here with your scrotum in my pocket or the name of the fool with the AK," Lieutenant Ramsey said quietly.

Detective Gutterson kicked the boy in the stomach by way of punctuation, making the punk let go of his head and clutch his belly now, all curled up and writhing on the shed's dirt floor.

Gutterson smiled down at his work. And what a likely thug
he
was, Ramsey thought. Two hundred and fifty pounds of pure contempt disguised as a human being. A six-foot-four frame of deteriorating muscle. A smirking, resentful expression plastered on that crewcut potato of a head, an age-old mask of hatred that spoke trouble to a brother's very DNA. Back in his dreamed-of yesteryears, Ramsey figured, Gutterson probably would have been an overseer on a southern slave plantation, all whip and hard-on. Now he was a bullying cop in whatever was left of this bled-dry city, and it was one of Ramsey's few remaining sources of job satisfaction that he could tell a dog like this to fetch and it would go fetch, despising his colored master only a little more than he despised himself for having to obey.

Gutterson was loving this, just loving it. It was probably the highlight of his week. And the junior g, Mr. Super-Pred down there—he knew it, too. He knew that his only pathway out of this mini-perdition was through the sympathies of Lieutenant Ramsey.

"You let that peckerwood do a brother like this?" he whined, clutching his gut, squinting up at Ramsey through his swollen mug.

Ramsey squatted on the shed floor so he could peer directly in through the purpling lumps of the gang-banger's cheeks to the dim gleam of the swimming child-eyes buried in them. The lieutenant smiled. A quiet, distant smile to let the boy know that the road of racial solidarity ended at the brick wall of his heart. Then he faked a friendly glance up at Gutterson.

"Used to be a preacher in my neighborhood when I was a boy. Reverend Mack. He could do a Sunday morning, all right. Full of the spirit. One day, I got up to some mischief or other. My mama hauled me into his office so he could put the fear of God in me. Her holding me half up in the air by my elbow and him standing behind his desk, looming over me like Mount Sinai, sending up smoke and fire and the word of God. And all I could think about was this picture hung up on the wall behind his desk. He must've found it in a book somewhere. Tore it out and framed it. It was a picture of Jesus stomping out sin. Couldn't take my eyes off it. Sin was this—this kind of a twisting, hissing, black serpent all writhing under Jesus' foot, with this half-man, half-dragon face, something out of a horror movie. Just writhing there, helpless, spitting hatred up at the Lord." Above him, Gutterson chuckled heavily. Ramsey choked back his hatred of the man. Looked away from him, looked down at the boy. "That's what you remind me of, son. Twisting there, writhing there on the ground. You remind me of that picture."

Super-P panted through his pain. "I'm just a brother trying to get by on the mean streets, daddy."

"That right?"

"Just a brother trying to get by, same as you."

Lieutenant Ramsey smiled down at the boy patiently but the smile was a fake, and it felt to him even at that moment like the fake it was. His whole demeanor of self-restrained dignity—his lifelong demeanor—felt to him at this point like a hollow construction, a shell he lived in like a hermit crab. The man he seemed was the shell of the man he had once set out to be, his mother's son. But inside, he was not that man. He knew he was not that man.

And because he knew, Super-P's you-and-me-brother strategy was getting to him more than he let on. In fact, his own mental image of that bygone picture on the preacher's wall was getting to him, too. Crouching over the banger in the shed, he could almost feel that snake of sin writhing and twisting and spitting sourly in his belly. And because it really did remind him of Super-P, it was almost as if it was Super-P himself writhing inside him. Not that Ramsey's sin was this gangster's beatdown. That was nothing. That was street business. That just had to be. No. His sin was Peter Patterson, killing Peter Patterson. Even now, weeks after the storm, the memory of the bookkeeper's pitying eyes stared up at him from the memory of the flame-streaked black water, the dead man's face liquid and wavering.

"You loose this cracker on me?" Super-Pred whined. "You think he your beast, but he own you same as slavery. You and me both."

Lieutenant Ramsey gave a single silent laugh but the laugh was a fake, too. This punk didn't know how close he was, how close to getting Ramsey's goat, setting him off. The lieutenant went on smiling but he wanted to shut this punk up with a bullet. Shut him up with a bullet and then do Gutterson, too—do him slow—kneecap, then belly, and finally no-longer-smirking-but-pleading-sweating-cowardly face. Kill them both as if they were the snake inside him.

"You're gonna tell me the shooter's name, little man," he said. "That's a fact." He spoke with his lifelong tone of quiet self-control and moral dignity, his fake tone now that he had Peter Patterson's pitying stare and his own writhing shame inside him. "Detective Gutterson has all day to deal with this. But me, I've got better things to do."

He stood up, making as if to leave.

That did the trick. Panic went flaring through the beaten boy. A day alone with Detective Gutterson would be a day without sunshine for damn sure.

"No, wait! Now hold on! Hold on, daddy."

Ramsey waited. Looked down with his demeanor of lofty dignity at the punk on the floor.

Super-P's body sagged there, the twisting, snakelike tension dying in him. He was finished. He just needed a moment to swallow his shame now, swallow his self-disgust at breaking down, at showing his ass and giving over. There was always that moment at the end before they gave over.

He gave over. "Fatboy," he said.

Ramsey sighed. Fatboy. Figured. Sixteen-year-old lardbutt bully-bait trying to make his bones by unloading on the police. He could be tried as an adult for this, do twenty years, two decades grabbing his ankles, asshole spiked on jail yard meat. It was a world without justice.

"Don't feel so bad," he told Super-P. "You're ashamed 'cause we see your ass? You're ashamed 'cause it turns out you're no tough guy like the rapper on your shirt or your big brother in prison? Turns out you're just another scared, fatherless punk doesn't know how to be a man and you're ashamed? Well, guess what. Rapper on your shirt? Your big brother in prison? They're scared, fatherless punks, too. Show their ass for a dollar and a kick in the shin. It's just who you all are, boy. You just gotta swallow it. Swallow it like a whore swallows cum." He spat in the bloodstained dirt. He sighed again. Fatboy. Then, to the ape Gutterson he said, "Come on."

He gestured the big thug toward the shed door and began to head that way himself. Gutterson paused to snort his disdain over the broken child in the dirt. Then he followed.

But Super-Pred wasn't done. Or that is, he was done, but he needed to pretend there was still some man in him.

"You think you're better than me?" he called up from the floor, called at their backs. "You no better than me, daddy. You just the same."

Ramsey felt Gutterson glance at him as they walked away together. Ramsey only just bothered to roll his eyes to show how little he cared. But he did care, the snake writhing in him.

"What are you but a g with a badge?" ragged Super-Pred from the floor, trying to salvage some self-respect. "Why shouldn't Fat-boy fight his turf? You just another crew out here, my man. You think we don't know? What about Peter Patterson? Whole street knows about him."

Ramsey stopped in his tracks. Gutterson didn't catch it. The big thug kept going, reached the shed door, had his hand on it. Only then did he look behind to see Ramsey frozen.

Ramsey turned slowly back toward Super-P. "What do you think you know?" he said quietly. Demeanor of lofty moral dignity. His mother's son.

The boy gangster knew he'd gone too far, tried to backtrack. "I don't know nothing." Ramsey took a single step toward him. That was all it needed. Mr. Super-Pred started babbling, "I'm just rapping. Just a tag, man. Give a brother some slack. Trying to get your goat, that's all. Just a tag I saw."

"A tag? Where?" said Ramsey in the same quiet tone. "You saw it where?"

"A house. Old house we hang in sometimes."

Ramsey nodded slowly. With that lifelong demeanor. With the snake writhing in his belly. Peter Patterson's pitying stare through the wavering water.

"Tell me the address," he said.

There was a magazine between the two front seats of the unmarked Charger. Standing in the hollow armrest between where Gutterson sat behind the wheel and where Ramsey sat on the passenger side. It was a national newsweekly. A leading national newsweekly with a picture of Augie Lancaster on the cover. Lancaster was striking a heroic pose. Fists on his hips, eyes on the horizon. They'd photographed him from below so he looked like a moral giant.

Fighting to Save His City.

That was the headline. That was actually the headline.

If stupidity were a communicable disease, Ramsey thought, journalists would have to be herded into a pit and shot like infected cattle.

He looked out his window. It was late afternoon on a dull gray day. No beam of sun—no shock of blue or any color—appeared to mitigate the bleakness of the scene. There was devastation on every side and an inhuman stillness, a heavy hollowness in the atmosphere—or maybe that was Ramsey himself, an emanation of his own interior state. In any case, brownstones stood gutted, their black windows like skull-eyes gazing back at him. Houses lay crippled and broken, sunk in mud that used to be lawns. Shops—he could see through the shattered storefronts—had been scoured of all their goods and were empty and abandoned, the walls stained brown up to the waterlines near their ceilings. There were words scrawled and painted on doorways and walls, words that had been scrawled and painted there to alert rescuers at the height of the flood. They came to Ramsey like disembodied voices, whispering out of the wreckage:
Help us. Four trapped inside. One dead here. Save us. Help us.

The whole area stank. Stagnant water and sewage. It made you flinch at first, but then it made you sad. It was such a mortal sort of odor, the stench of an abandoned corpse. It made you sad and then, after a while, you got used to it and just couldn't smell it at all anymore.

Fighting to Save His City.

Ramsey's eyes went over the scene, flicking instinctively to whatever was alive. A woman wearing a gym suit and carrying a shopping bag, young but bent over as if the earth itself were on her back. Two old men sitting in chairs against a wall, staring at the wrecked world like a movie. An angry mother yanking at her toddler's arm. And here and there, again and again, the slouching, shift-eyed, yellow-eyed young coyote-men prowling the afternoon, casing locations, casing prey, meeting on corners to clasp each other's hands in an expert and near-invisible exchange of cash and contraband.

Fighting to Save His City.

Had it ever been true? Ramsey wondered bitterly. Even at the beginning when Ramsey had first followed him, even loved him, even then had Augie Lancaster ever fought to save this city? Had he ever even meant to? Well ... in daydreams maybe. Daydreams like we all have of ceaseless cheering, of an endless parade, of himself, Augie, slowly passing in his top-down limousine, the hands of the poor upraised in gratitude at the spangly gold showering from his beneficent fingertips. Maybe he really hadn't known—maybe he really hadn't understood that even the dream of doing good can be the hunger for power in disguise. Maybe he hadn't recognized the strangely red-visaged angel who had whispered to him he could be king of saints only to slowly tutor him to be king of kings—king of the city kings with his vacation homes and his cars and his boat, and the vacation homes and cars and boats of his cronies...