Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

"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."

"Yeah," said Harry. "Moonlighting. I got him that. Guy wanted someone who could carve things. You know, work with wood. Conor could do that. Applebee, the guy's name was. I remember 'cause he sent me a letter. Like a thank-you note on a little frilly card."

"You save it?"

"No, but I remember. Cause he had this handwriting."

"Handwriting like…"

"Like a girl. And he sent this little frilly card, like I bought him a birthday present or something. Frederick Applebee."

Once again, Joe Whaley made a face, wagged his head. Ramsey caught it out of the corner of his eye.

"What?"

"I don't know. Nothing. I just think there was something else."

"Something like…"

"You know, like a girl. It wasn't just a job, that's what I'm saying. It wasn't just moonlighting. I think there was a girl."

"Which you know because…?"

"I don't know, I think. It's just, when you watch a guy, you can tell, that's all. When there's a girl. You can tell."

Ramsey considered. Joe Whaley looked to him like the sort of person who would watch a guy and who could tell.

"Thanks," he said. Then he said it again to Harry Hand.

He stepped out of the trailer and squinted into the morning sun. The frames of houses rose against the blue sky. The figures of men up on the beams, dark against the brightness. Hammers rising and falling. Big power tools juddering against their bodies. Whapping and buzzing everywhere. All that federal money pouring into the city, you could count on graft master Handsome Harry to get his share. Even the air smelled fresher here. Ramsey wondered who Harry had paid off to get that.

He held the edge of his hand against his forehead, shielding his eyes from the glare. Watching the work with casual interest, his stomach burning.

A girl, he was thinking. Yeah, that would be a loose end all right. IN THE DAYLIGHT, Shannon sat cross-legged on the empty floor and tried to think the situation through. It wasn't easy. His mind was clearer now, but the situation-that was a mess. Here he was in a new town with a new face, all his records wiped out, even his DNA records changed. But from the very start, some bald guy had been following him everywhere. Then, on the night he finally chased the bald guy away, up showed some cop and tried to cut his ear off. What the hell? How did that make sense? Shannon had known a cop or two who would cut your ear off if it served their purposes. He'd even known a couple of cops who would cut your ear off for a laugh. But it was not the usual coplike thing. He did not imagine your average, honest carpenter citizen would get house calls from cops who wanted to cut his ear off. So someone, in other words, knew who he really was or thought he was someone else they knew. Or something.

That was as far as he could get with unraveling that tangle, but there was another area in question, too: what should he do now? Everything inside him-every instinct-was telling him to run. Run fast, keep running. Well, no shit, Sherlock. There was no happy ending to any scenario that involved him staying here. If the bald guy and the cop already knew who he was, then he had a target on his back. And if they had mistaken him for someone else, he couldn't clear himself without revealing who he really was-which could mean death row. In either case, he'd killed a cop, which, in a town like this, came with a mandatory sentence of death-while-resisting-arrest, hold the judge and jury. So it came down to this: running away meant a lifetime of soulless rooms and guttery darkness, but at least it was a lifetime. Running away was the only option if he didn't want to end up dead. It was a no-brainer.

And yet…

All night, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in tortured dreamlike thoughts, the words had come back to him: Identity like stain. The dreams and thoughts were all about Teresa. Teresa seeing on the television news that he'd killed a cop and disappeared or been gunned down by the angry police. They would call him a murderer, a key suspect in the Hernandez home invasion massacre, an accomplice in the slaughter of an entire family. He dreamed Teresa's face when she heard that. And the little boy's face when he heard it. And Applebee's. And the face of the angel on the mantelpiece. Identity like stain.

He tossed and turned on the floor of the abandoned house in a city full of gunshots and sirens and silent suffering, and he knew he couldn't live with that. If he ran away now, he would run forever, a murderer in Teresa's eyes, a monster to the boy. And okay, he was a lowlife thief, a scumbag nothing, but he wasn't a murderer. He wasn't a monster. He'd lived a crappy life, okay, but there was this other life inside him, this good life, this life he was supposed to have lived. It was like another road running next to the road he was on. When he met Teresa, it was as if the roads crossed for a minute, a day, a couple of weeks, and he saw for a while how things could've been. If he ran now, he would be running down the same old road and leaving the road of that other life behind. He would be right back where he was before the foreigner changed his face. A hunted murderer in the eyes of the world, in Teresa's eyes, in the boy's eyes. Running forever. Identity like stain.

Oh, it was too much for him to figure out. He should just get out, hit the wind, that was the smart thing. But, man, he hated it, hated thinking about it, hated the idea of going back to that life. He couldn't have Teresa. He knew that. He couldn't have that other good life. It was too late for that now. He knew. But at least let him be himself in front of her. Let her see that he wasn't a murderer, that he hadn't done Hernandez, that the dead cop was self-defense. Let him clear his name of the killings at least and put some honest picture of his sad self before her. If she saw him on the TV news as he was, as the low thief he really was, well, she could understand that, couldn't she? She could forgive that. She could explain it to the boy and they would both forgive him. Henry just went down the wrong road, she would say. He would've gone down the good road if he could've found it. He just didn't know the way, that's all. And they would forgive him. That's all he wanted now. Let her see him as he was, only as bad as he was. Let him stay and show all of them who he was, so he wouldn't be evil in their eyes.

Are you fucking crazy? he asked himself, sitting there. Are you willing to die to do that? And the answer came boiling up out of him: Yes! Let me die in the life I was meant for. Keep your identity. Keep your stain. Let her see me as I am. Let me die in the life I was supposed to live.

It was strange. These thoughts of his-they were all kinds of disjointed and messed up and emotional. But when he was finished, it was as if he'd gone through the whole thing step by step. It was as if he'd figured it out logically. Because now, he knew exactly what he was going to do.

He untangled his legs and stood up off the floor. He took the gun, the cop's gun, the nine-a, out of his tool bag. He chambered a round and checked the safety. He worked the weapon into the back of his belt and pulled his windbreaker down so that it was covered.

Then he walked out of the empty house into the morning.

In all the gray ruins of the city-with all its houses washed to muddy rubble by the flood and its buildings burned to skeletal cinders-the Government Center in the east end of town was shockingly vivid, colorful, and whole. One structure here had a golden dome that glinted in the sunlight. Another was made of white marble with fluted Roman pilasters, graceful and precise in every detail. Yet another had an impressively long wall of tinted windows reflecting the grassy green park with its red and orange and yellow tulips. In the park, men and women dressed in light spring pastels walked along the asphalt paths to glass doors that flashed back the morning as they opened and closed. The Government Center was a weirdly living thing pulsing on the dead city, like some kind of exotic spider feeding on the gray, colorless shape of the butterfly wrapped in its web.