Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

He came into a narrow, crowded pantry. A long table filled the center of it. Shelves and boxes lined the walls. Shannon had to squeeze between the table and the boxes to get to the heavy metal door at the far end. The door was locked with a deadbolt. Shannon started flipping through the keys on the bartender's keychain, searching for the right one. He could hear the rock music playing in the bar, but he couldn't hear whether the police had come in yet. He thought they must have. And he thought the fat guys at the bar must've noticed him leaving. There wasn't a lot of time before the cops pushed into the pantry behind him. He fumbled hurriedly through the keys.

There it was: the key he wanted. Quickly, he had the heavy door unlocked. He left the keys dangling there and pulled the door open.

He stepped out into a parking lot. It was a dark expanse with only a single car parked in it. All over, in the cool night air, there were sirens-sirens coming from every direction, growing louder from every direction. Shannon's throat closed with desperation. He understood the truth now: they were all-all of them-coming for him.

The metal door swung closed. Just before it shut with a clank, he heard the rock music grow louder as the pantry door burst open inside. The cops were right behind him.

A moment later, he was running as fast as he could into the darkness. FOR THREE DAYS he lived in a graveyard. It was on a cliff top overlooking the sea. There were acres and acres of gently rolling lawn. There were paved walkways winding through the grass. There were stones and steles, crosses, and the occasional statue rising white on the green hills amid shrubs and eucalyptus and palm trees. Shannon knew one of the groundskeepers here, a sad-eyed, egg-shaped dude named Hector Medeiros. They had done a few jobs together. Hector helped him hide out.

During the daylight hours, Shannon kept out of sight in a mausoleum near the edge of the cliff. It was a small classical temple of white marble. Inside there was a stone bench against one wall. On the opposite wall there were square stone panels with brass plates on them. The plates had the names of the people whose corpses were behind the panels. There was a small window on another wall. It was stained glass, yellow with a dark yellow cross in the middle. You couldn't see much through it, only shapes moving when someone went by.

Being in the mausoleum made Shannon jumpy and claustrophobic. The place was the size of a prison cell, only a few paces wide and long. He couldn't go out during the day because there were groundskeepers out there and visitors sometimes. He couldn't see through the window so he was constantly paranoid about someone approaching, someone coming in on him, even though Hector told him no one would. He gathered some sticks and whittled them with his pocketknife to calm his nerves. Even so, after the first day, he began to feel he was buried in here, the same as the dead people. Once, when he fell asleep on the stone bench, he had a dream the dead people had come out of the wall and were standing over him-just standing there, looking down at him. He woke up with a start, sweating.

It was better in the evenings. When the groundskeepers went home, he would carefully emerge from the mausoleum. Hector would let him into the groundskeepers' building, a one-story house with offices and storerooms and a kitchen. Shannon gave Hector money and Hector brought him food and a newspaper. Then, once dark fell, he could go outside and get some air among the graves-as long as he kept an eye out for the security guards who came through on patrol all night long.

Staying at the cemetery, he had time to take stock of his situation. The more he thought about it, the worse it seemed. Benny had screwed him but good. Setting him up for the Hernandez killings-well, it paid Shannon back in full for the kneecap, that's for sure. It was an excellent vengeance. It really got to him, got on his nerves, got into his imagination, especially in that first rush of panic and anxiety after he heard about it in the bar. He had no alibi for the killings. They had gone down two months ago in the small hours. He'd probably been in bed at the time. He couldn't even remember. He could imagine himself getting convicted for the crime. He could picture himself on death row. The strap-down. The needle. The images ate at him.

Later, when he'd had a chance to calm down a little, Shannon told himself the rap would never stick. The police weren't stupid. They had fingerprints and DNA and all that stuff. They weren't going to pump him full of poison on the say-so of a little psycho like Benny. Were they?

But that was the thing: it didn't matter. That was the beauty of it, speaking from Benny's point of view, that was the excellence of his revenge. It didn't matter if the rap stuck or not. By setting him up for the Hernandez killings, what Benny had done was make sure that the cops would hunt him down. They'd put it all on him: feds, choppers, dogs, the TV news. There was already a quarter-of-a-million-dollar reward on his head. So they'd bust him for sure eventually, and even if they cleared him for the Hernandez job-he'd skip the needle; great-but he was a three-time loser. He'd still go down for life.

So nice work, Benny.

But then, on the third night he was at the cemetery, something happened, something flat-out bizarre. This is really where the whole story about Shannon gets started.

It was evening but still light. The grounds crew had gone home and Hector had let Shannon into the building. He had brought him some food. A chicken wrap and a Coke and some potato chips and another sandwich for later.

Shannon was famished after sleeping and pacing in the mausoleum all day. He plunked down at the table in the kitchen and tore into the wrap. While he ate, he read the newspaper Hector had brought him. That was when he saw the news about the price on his head, the quarter of a million reward. Just as he saw it, he felt Hector's eyes on him. He looked up. Sure enough, Hector was standing just behind him, gazing at him. His expression was full of sorrow and greed, like a poor but honest man gazing at the loaf of bread he was about to steal.

"What're you looking at, you squirrelly wetback?" Shannon asked him.

Hector looked away quickly. "Nothing, man, nothing."

"You saw about this reward, didn't you? Gonna sell me out, Hector? Gonna get you your quarter of a mil in blood money? Huh?"

"No, no, my friend, of course not, never."

Yeah, he was. Shannon could tell. Maybe tonight. Or maybe he'd wrestle with his conscience tonight, but then he'd do it tomorrow for sure. He'd go home and talk to Carmen and she'd point to their forty-seven kids or however many it was and say, "A quarter of a million dollars, Hector," and then you could butter Shannon's ass because it was basically toast.

So Shannon knew his time was running out. When the sun was going down, he went outside. He went to the edge of the cliff and sat on the grass under a palm tree. His hands whittled a stick, but his eyes were on the ocean, watching the orange light of the sinking sun moving on the waves. He watched the water go slate gray as the sun went down.

He had to get out of here. There was no point waiting for things to cool off. They would never cool off. There was no point heading for another city either, Vegas or anyplace else in the U.S. With the Hernandez killings hanging over him, they'd be after him everywhere. He'd have to try for Mexico, maybe even South America. He hated the idea. It was no picnic down there for a foreigner on the run. Hard to get work, dangerous to steal. Anyone with a sharp eye could turn you in or own you. And with the hellhole jails down there and the dirty cops and the gangs and the feds up here still after him, he could just imagine what he would turn into over time, scurvy and low four seasons of the year, lower with every season, a perennial bottom-feeder creeping feverishly from job to job.