Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

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.