Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

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 zwits and boings. 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.

"Mommy!" screamed the boy.

Super-Pred gave an avuncular laugh. "You a fierce little man, ain't you?" he said. He glanced through the archway, charmed for a moment by the cartoon rabbit and the cartoon hunter on the TV screen.

"Leave him alone!" Teresa shouted.

Rage flashed in the gangster's eyes, and he spun and grabbed her as she struggled in the grip of his two thugs. He pincered her cheeks with one hand and leaned his nose almost against hers.

"You don't talk to me, bitch! You just a bitch!"

Teresa tried to twist her head free, tried to talk to him. "Please! You can have anything you want. Just leave him alone!"

The Pred laughed again. Grabbed her face again. Grabbed her breast hard so that she cried out in pain.

"Mommy!" screamed the little boy.

"Bitch, I can have anything I want anyway!" Super-Pred said. He glanced at his companions. "Spread that shit around."

He meant the gasoline in the cans they'd brought with them. The thug who'd whipped the old man leaned the shotgun against the armchair and grabbed a red can. Another thug grabbed another can, and they began splashing the room with gasoline, splashing gasoline over the old man where he lay gasping and coughing in his own blood.