Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

"Police!" he started to say. But with a soft, damp sound, the flood-rotten wood of the doorframe splintered. The door swung in and the word died half spoken.

Another glance at Ramsey. Another nod. Gutterson drew his gun and charged the place. Ramsey more or less strolled in after him.

"Oh…!" Gutterson strangled on a curse. The stench inside was hellish. He clapped a hand over his nose and mouth. "Fucking animals," he said through his fingers. "It's like living nose-deep in shit."

He went off to search the place, moving tensely behind his gun.

Ramsey, meanwhile, put his hands in his pants pockets and ambled into the living room. The smell was even worse in here. He tried breathing through his mouth but the air tasted bad, too. It was an awful brew: sewage, garbage, rotten food, maybe some dead things, drowned rats in the walls or a cat somewhere, and just the all-around putrescence of water damage. The whole place must've been under the flood at some point. The sofa had been soaked to a hulking mush. It looked as if it had melted and then resolidified. Chairs and tables were all overturned, broken and only half recognizable, what was left of them flung randomly about like body parts in a minefield. The walls were crumbling, broken through in places to the beams and insulation. The ceiling was mildewed and sagging as if it were about to come crashing down.

"Clear!" Gutterson announced, coming in behind him.

Ramsey had already found what he was looking for, was already standing in front of one moldy wall. Gutterson moved up beside him and the two cops stood shoulder to shoulder, looking at it.

The wall was spray-painted and chalked from top to bottom, covered in tags, scrawled all over with ornate and sweeping gang handles and gang signs. Black skulls, green waves, gray thorns, red fire. Nicknames formed by tortuous swirls of color. Ramsey's eyes went over them. He knew the merciless thugs who made these marks and he despised them. He had always known them, always despised them. They were what his mother had hammered at him not to be. What the marines had sweated out of him. He had thought he'd lost his last sentimental traces of pity for them during his patrolmen years, seeing the creatures they were, cleaning their victims' entrails off the macadam. But it was strange. Looking at these marks today, he felt some distant stirring of… compassion… something. The flamelike rise of their embroidery seemed to him like supplicating hands raised to the sky, the masculine energy of their creation sounded in his mind like the soul-cries of fatherless young men, a great inarticulate bubble of boy-prayer desperately bursting under an empty heaven and then desperately gone.

"Like pissing on a tree," said Gutterson. "Animals."

Ramsey, with his air of quiet moral dignity and the writhing sourness inside him, didn't answer. Reluctantly, already knowing what he'd find, he shifted his gaze to the wall's low corner on his right hand, to the words stroked there in dripping blood-red letters.

"What the fuck?" Gutterson muttered.

The dripping blood-red letters said,

Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson! SHANNON KNEW TIME was passing but he didn't know how much. Days? Weeks? He had no way of telling. He would float upward toward the surface of consciousness but never quite break through. He would see the world above as if through water, a liquid blur of life just beyond him.

The foreigner was up there sometimes. The crazy old bastard who'd injected him. Shannon remembered. The mall parking lot. The watching eyeglasses. The back seat of the car…

The foreigner would give him drinks through a straw. He would talk sometimes, though the words also came to Shannon as if through water and he could never recall from time to time what the foreigner said. He would try to answer. He would struggle to break through the surface, to come awake fully. But the drugs-it must've been drugs-would suck him back under. Light narrowing to a pinpoint, depths closing over him. He would hear the foreigner's voice like a fading echo: "Sleep."

And he would sleep.

Now he awoke. It was different this time. He felt it right away. His mind was clearer. He was aware of the room around him, of the bed underneath him. He had a new sense of his own material presence.

He was in pain-he was aware of that now, too. His face was stiff, aching, throbbing. The pain pulsed from the center of his head to radiate through his entire body. His left arm stung like hornets had been at it.

He began to lift a hand to his face.

"Don't touch yet," the foreigner said.

Shannon stared at the hand groggily. He let it sink down again to the sheets. Slowly, he turned toward the voice.

The foreigner was standing beside his bed. He was wearing a doctor's get-up, a white coat, a stethoscope around his neck. He was adjusting a blinking machine that stood on the top shelf of a green cart. Shannon noticed now that his bed had a rail like a hospital bed and that the mattress was partly raised like a hospital mattress so he could sit up. The machines the foreigner was tinkering with looked like hospital-style machines, too. There was an IV bag with its tube stuck in Shannon's arm. Another tube ran out from under the blankets-a catheter. It was all hospital stuff.

But Shannon sensed that this was no hospital. A dim fire of panic sprang up in him, a dim fire of fear he understood was there but could hardly feel. He looked around the room. No windows. No pictures. Nothing. Just blank, white walls. No furniture but the bed and one chair. Where the hell was he?

At that point, Shannon's eyes started to sink shut. He started to slump on the upraised mattress.

"Sit. Sit up, stay up," the foreigner said briskly, coming to the bedside, pushing at his shoulder. "You have to keep elevated for swelling."

Shannon shook his head, stretched his eyes, trying to stay awake. "Where am I? What'd you do to me?"

"I cut off your legs and replace them with grinning doll heads."

"What?"

"Ta, ta, ta. Don't be fool. I joke with you. I give you new face, like I tell you. So the police, they won't know you. Is good, yes?"

"My face? You changed my face?" Shannon started to lift his hand to it again.

"Don't touch. Here. Drink."

The foreigner held up a water bottle made of blue plastic, a sports bottle with a built-in straw.

"No more drugs," said Shannon thickly.

"Drink. Is apple juice. I drug you here," said the foreigner, pointing to the IV tube.

Shannon realized he was very thirsty. He let the foreigner hold the bottle under his lips. He sucked at the straw. The apple juice tasted good-cold and sweet. Shannon took another sip, then sat back against his pillow.

His mind was getting clearer. He rolled his head so he could focus on the foreigner. He could see the man better in here than he could before, out in the parking lot, in the night. There really was something seedy about the guy. The doctor outfit couldn't change that. The whole look of him was shady and suspicious. The red-and-silver hair slicked back in its own oil and the eyebrows sprouting all over the place. The liver spots on his unsteady hands. The fluffy white hair that looked like dead dandelions growing out of his ears. And something else: that sinister laughter in his eyes, that unwholesome sparkle of chaotic wit. You got that with foreign guys sometimes. Shannon had seen it before. They acted like they'd been around forever and knew everything, like they knew the whole world was just one big joke and you were a naive American fool if you took it seriously.

"You just went and changed my face?" Shannon made himself sound pissed off about it but really he wasn't sure how he felt. It was his face, on the one hand, and no one had asked him. On the other hand, the whole business was coming back to him-the Whittaker job and Benny Torrance and the Hernandez killings. He could see where the foreigner might have done him a favor.