The Identity Man

PART V

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.

"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.

Shannon sat on a bench at a bus stop across the street. His eyes moved over the crowd in the park. It was a bad setup for him. Lots of cops patrolling the park paths, keeping their wary eyes on the building entranceways and the wrought-iron gate in the spiked fence at the park's perimeter. The cops made Shannon nervous, but he acted casual, his arm draped over the bench back, his legs crossed at the knee. These cops weren't searching for him, he told himself. This was the last place they'd look for him, the last wide-open place they'd think he'd come. These guys were after terrorists and whatnot, he thought. They were watching out for the random nutjob who couldn't feed his family and came after the government with a gun, because there was no one else left who had a job or a dime.

So he stayed on the bench while long minutes passed. Other people gathered at the bus stop and buses came, obscuring his view. When the buses hissed and rumbled away, the other people were gone and there he still was. Trying to look casual. Glancing nervously at whatever cop was passing near. But mostly-the whole time-he kept watch on the one tower of gleaming steel across from the park's near corner; he kept watch on the restaurant on the tower's bottom floor: the World Cafe.

That had been the name on the receipt in the bald guy's car. Shannon had seen it when he'd peeked through the scarred Crown Victoria's window. It was the only clue he had to where the bald guy was-and the bald guy was his only clue to why the cop had come after him to cut off his ear, to why he was in the same old fUgitive cock-up again when he was supposed to be new mang.

At first, he had thought the clue was kind of tenuous. The World Cafe might be a chain. There might be a dozen of them in the city. He was all prepared to go tromping from one cafe to another, describing the bald guy to the waiters, hoping for a hit. But it turned out better than that. There was only one World Cafe, and when he saw where it was, he had hopes the bald guy would show up here sooner or later. This was not the kind of place you traveled to. It was a place for regulars, for people who worked in the Government Center, probably mostly for people who worked in the steel tower, which had letters above the door: Federal Building.

Shannon staked the place out for an hour and a half, so he had a lot of time to think about those letters. Was the bald guy a fed? What were the feds after him for? Why would the feds send a city cop to cut his ear off and kill him? Who the hell did they think he was? Or if they knew who he was, what the hell did they want from him?

No answers. He couldn't come up with a one. So he waited and worried about it and kept an eye on the cops and kept an eye on the Federal Building and the World Cafe until finally-sure enough-up showed the bald guy.

He came out of the federal building, walking quickly. Same guy, definitely. Same junkie-thin slime-dog in yet another cheap suit, and with his chromey dome glinting in the noonday sun. He didn't go into the World Cafe. He headed off along the sidewalk instead, parallel to the park. Within moments, he had nearly lost himself in the flow of pedestrians, his bald head appearing and disappearing in the gathering lunchtime crowd.

Shannon unfolded himself quickly from the bus stop bench. Dodging traffic, he crossed the street and went after the guy. He took an angry satisfaction in it. All this time, the bald guy had been following him, now the tables were turned. And it wasn't like at the fair either. He had a plan now. He was going to get the bald guy alone, catch him off guard, corner him, ask him what the hell-fed or not, get the truth out of him. Just thinking about it, just being on the move, brought his anxiety down from the boil and made him feel better. The bald guy had come to represent the whole situation to him, the way it always came back to the same thing, being hunted, being on the run, identity like stain.

He reached the sidewalk that ran beside the park's iron fence, directly across from where the bald guy was. Both sidewalks were crowded and getting more crowded every minute as people poured out of their offices for lunch. It was easy for Shannon to blend with the crowd, hold back, and watch from a safe distance as the bald guy hurried along across the street and ahead of him. Shannon had every reason to feel sure the bald guy didn't know he was there. He did feel sure.

Only it turned out he was wrong.

The bald guy reached the corner about a half block in the lead, with Shannon across the street and behind him, watching him over the heads of the pedestrians. The bald guy stopped and waited for the light to change, so Shannon pulled up in the middle of the block, pretending to admire the golden dome through the fence. When the light did change, the bald guy crossed the street and then turned the corner. Shannon had to cross in the middle of the block to go after him, running to beat the traffic. The bald guy continued on down the side street, disappearing from view. Shannon fought through the moving crowds. He reached the corner while the light was still good. He crossed and followed.

He found himself now on a narrower street. There were office buildings all of dark glass to his right. Beside him to his left, taking up the whole block, there was a large parking structure, three stories of featureless concrete. Here, suddenly, away from the Government Center, there were a lot fewer people on the sidewalk. Between Shannon and the bald guy now, there were only a bum and a businesswoman walking along. But the bald guy still kept moving with his quick, determined stride, and it still seemed to Shannon that he was unaware of being trailed.

Then, without warning, the bald guy glanced back over his shoulder as if he sensed Shannon behind him. Shannon froze, startled. In that frozen instant, the bald guy darted sideways and vanished into the parking structure.

Shannon cursed. What now? Had he seen him? Had he somehow known he was there? All at once, he went from having the drop on the bald guy to not knowing what was what, who had the upper hand. It gave him a hot, flashing sensation of frustration and anger. This was the way things kept going for him. Well, not this time. The bald guy wasn't getting away.

Shannon didn't hesitate. He started running, shoving the bum out of his way, getting an acrid whiff of him as he went past. He ran full tilt down the sunlit sidewalk. Reached the entrance to the lot, an archway in the white wall. He charged through the door into the shadows under a concrete stairwell.

He peered out across a still, dark cavern of parked cars, his eyes flicking to the movements of pedestrians here and there. No bald guy. Then, with a sort of instinct, he glanced up-just in time to see black shoes hurrying up the switch-backing stairs above him. He started up the stairs. Already the bald guy was out of sight, though Shannon still heard his footsteps. He followed the sound to the second-story landing and there heard a heavy door opening above him. He charged up toward the third story, the last story. As he reached the landing, he saw its big metal door swing closed. It shut with an echoing metallic clack.

Shannon was about to charge through-he was charging through, one hand turning the doorknob, the other pushing at the solid gray metal of the door. But as the door opened, some inner sense, some unspoken logic, told him he was being lured into a trap. He kept pushing the door with his left hand, but his right went behind him, to the gun in his belt under his windbreaker. He was drawing it out even as he pushed into the garage.

And it was a trap, sure enough. The bald guy was hiding in a little alcove off the garage roof. As Shannon came clear of the door, the bald guy came out from behind it and jammed a gun against Shannon's temple.

"Fuck with me," he said.

Gritting his teeth in frustration and rage, Shannon figured, All right, I will. He whipped up his own Beretta and aimed it at the bald guy's face.

The stairwell door swung shut.

The two men locked eyes over the guns. Then Shannon snorted. Then the bald guy snorted. If they were going to shoot, they'd have shot by now. It was a stupid situation. But neither wanted to be the first to put his gun down, so they stayed like that, the barrels trained on one another. A standoff.

The bald guy smiled. "You're a hard case, Shannon. Most scumbags would've run. You should've run. You're a dumb son of a bitch." He had a hard, dark, smooth voice, a voice like asphalt.

"You know me," Shannon said to him.

"I know you, yeah. I even figured you'd turn up. I watched from the window all morning. Saw you sitting out there on the bus-stop bench. So yeah, I know you."

Shannon steadied his gun. He had a strange feeling, a strange jumble of feelings. There was the anger at this fool and the angry anticipation that he was about to get some answers and the fear about where all this was going. And then, beneath all that, there was something else, an understanding he had suppressed from the very beginning, from the very moment he got the text message from the identity man telling him to meet him in the parking lot outside of Eyes. From that very moment, somewhere down deep inside him, he had known that this whole deal made no sense. The foreigner and the white room and the idea that the Whittaker Foundation or some other mysterious "friend" had arranged for him to get a new face and new records and new life like princess in fairy tale… Fairy tale was right. It made no sense. When did stuff like that happen? When did new lives get bestowed on people in mall parking lots? All along, he had known the whole setup was a lie somehow. He had known it and had suppressed the knowledge, because he wanted so desperately for the lie to be true, wanted so much to be free of who he was.

Now, as he pointed the gun in the bald guy's face and the bald guy pointed his gun at him, he felt a bright, trembling sense coming up inside him like evil sunrise, a sense that he was about to get some answers to questions he had not wanted to ask.

"Who are you?" he said. "Why are you after me?"

"After you?" said the bald guy with a laugh. "You are a dumb son of a bitch. I'm not after you, dog. I'm your guardian fucking angel. If you hadn't chased me away at the fair, you wouldn't be in this mess."

Shannon blinked, trying to understand, feeling he was about to understand but couldn't yet, not yet. "What are you talking about? You sent that cop. He was gonna kill me."

"He was gonna kill you. But I didn't send him. I sent you."

Shannon tried to understand this, too, tried to figure it, couldn't, shook his head. "I don't… What…? What do you mean? Who are you? Why do you know me?"

The bald guy snorted again. He shook his head, smiling a wry half smile. Then he lowered his gun and slid it into a shoulder holster under his cheap suit jacket.

"Know you," he said. "I made you, fool. I'm the real identity man." LIEUTENANT RAMSEY WENT to see the old man first. The meeting did not go well. The very sight of the white shingled house standing whole and alone amid the rubble all around it renewed that oppressive superstitious sense of destiny or karma or something at work-that sense that had been haunting the periphery of his awareness ever since he saw Gutterson dead on the floor, the great, staring, stupid lump of him with his brainless head caved in. That whiff of nemesis then-the whiff of dead Gutterson's shit and also of nemesis-of evil fate working against him-an invisible will opposing his invisible will-had been just that, just a whiff, a faint sensation, but it grew now when he saw the white house standing there as if magically unharmed. And when the old man opened the door to his knock, it grew even stronger.

"Mr. Applebee?"

"Yes?"

Ramsey held up his badge. The old man looked at it and then looked back at him, looked in his eyes and then looked him up and down in slow, silent appraisal. He said nothing, only stepped aside to let him enter. A cop gets used to that sort of thing-being hated on sight and all-still, Ramsey had the sickening sense that it was more than that, that he had been judged on his Inner Man and found wanting. That's what made the superstitious sensation worse.

Worse, and then worse as he stepped inside. The musty Negro respectability here was smothering and accusatory, the sense of nemesis clearer and more present, almost an oppressive stringency in the atmosphere. The old man led the way past moldering upholstered furniture and piles of books about jazz and African culture. There was even an antimacassar on the back of one of the chairs, for Christ's sake. Ramsey's mother had used those. What the hell was this place? 1950?

The old man himself seemed as anachronistic as his surroundings. Ramsey had had schoolteachers like him as a child. Putting on intellectual airs and white professorial dignity. Looking down at him with disapproval, no matter how he tried to please.

Applebee led him into the dining room and positioned himself at the mantelpiece. He was wearing a sweater with patches on the elbows, and he leaned one of the patches on the mantel. Ramsey's eyes flicked up and saw the wooden carving above him, three angels, two in profile with trumpets, the third gazing down at him, his hand upraised, his face unpleasantly alive with a look that seemed to echo and amplify the old man's condemnation. The angel of his nemesis, Ramsey thought, before he could sweep the thought under.

"How can I help you, Lieutenant?" Applebee said quietly, and the way he said it made Ramsey feel as if he'd been called into the principal's office.

"I understand a carpenter named Henry Conor was doing some work for you."

"That's right, he was."

"He's not here now, though."

"No. He finished the job. He's done."

"So you don't know where he is?"

"He was only moonlighting here on weekends. I assume he's at his usual work or at home." Despite the neutral tone of his words, there was a sort of irony and intelligence in the old man's eyes that made Ramsey wonder what he had done to offend him. He tried to chalk it up to the usual neighborhood suspicion of the police, rife even among the law-abiding citizens sometimes. But it seemed more than that. Had Conor said something to him?

Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson.

Ramsey glanced up at the angel on the mantelpiece. There was a sort of irony and intelligence in his eyes, too. Annoyed, Ramsey spoke more bluntly.

"He's not in his apartment," he said. "There's a dead police detective there, but not Conor. That's why we're looking for him."

Applebee took a deep breath and shifted his position. A dead detective-that was more than he had bargained for. Still, as the breath came out of him, that undertone of disapproval was there again.

"I don't know anything about that," he said. "I'm sure Henry wasn't involved in killing your detective."

"Oh, really? What makes you sure of that?"

The old man hesitated and then answered, "You get a sense of people." He said it pointedly, Ramsey thought, accusatorily-the old fart-the angel of his nemesis-or was all this just in his own imagination? "In any case," the old man went on, "he did some work for me and now he's gone. You're welcome to search the place, if you think he's hiding somewhere."

Ramsey paused, irritated, giving the old man the eye. "That shouldn't be necessary," he said. "You're here alone, I take it."

"Yes."

"You live alone?"

"I live with my daughter and grandson. She's at work and he's at school."

There was something then-something on the word daughter- a shifting of the eyes away and back, a slight hesitation. Ramsey caught it, understood it in a flash. Handsome Harry's site boss, Joe Whaley, had been right. There was a girl. Applebee's daughter. Was that the source of the hostility here? Was she the one the old man was trying to protect? That made some sense of this, at least.

"Is there anything else, Lieutenant?" Applebee said-trying to fill the silence, Ramsey thought, fearing he might have given himself away.

Ramsey considered getting tough with him but thought better of it. He wasn't ready to go so far as to put his hands on the geezer and, without that, he didn't think the old man would crack. More likely, he'd just get on the phone when Ramsey was gone and warn his daughter that the big bad policeman was on his way.

So Ramsey gave him a brief smile instead. "No," he said. "Nothing else. I'm sorry to bother you, but I did have to check." He went into his wallet, offered the old man his card. "If Conor contacts you or you hear anything, please get in touch."

Applebee took the card without a word. Without a glance at it, he stuck it in his sweater pocket.

The irony and disapproval in the old man's eyes and the irony in the eyes of the angel of judgment and his own self-aggravating superstition continued to annoy Ramsey, but he exercised his famous self-control-merely smiled again and nodded. None of it mattered, none of it was to the point. It was best in this situation just to be polite and move on.

The daughter was the one he was really after.

He knew her. The moment he set eyes on her, he understood exactly who Teresa was. The good girl, he thought, the church girl. It figured, her being Applebee's daughter and all. And it gave him fresh insight into Conor's trajectory.

He was sitting in his Charger now, parked in a no-stopping zone in back of the school where she taught. It was a Westside private school, a big old cathedral-like building of red brick with rounded mission gables. There was a fenced-off asphalt courtyard out in back with some playground equipment and some painted white lines for field games. Ramsey was parked in front of that.

The lunch hour was just passing. At the sound of a bell, the boys poured out into the yard in their neckties and the girls in their plaid skirts, all of them shouting and laughing together, a surflike roar. Ramsey was just about to get out of his car and go inside to find Teresa when he saw her step into one of the rear doorways. She stood there, watching the children at their play.

He knew her face from her license photo in the computer, but he hadn't had a real sense of her until he saw her now. Now he felt a sort of helpless admiration for her and a dark resentment toward her and a dark attraction. The good girl, the church girl. His wife had been one of the same. She was the girl who didn't drink or do drugs or smoke or party. The girl who sang in the choir and decorated her notebooks with marker drawings of hearts and flowers. The girl who said "Aw" when she saw pictures of small animals and "Oh no! What're you going to do?" when her friends got themselves knocked up. She was the girl who walked swishing past when the brothers talked jazz at her passing ass, because she wasn't going to come over here, baby, not even if she was so fine, aw really, he'd be so careful, swear. She had her life all laid out in her mind, her plans confided to her diary, and they didn't include no baby-baby-baby, because she wasn't going to have no baby before the clock struck married. She was that girl.

And here was the thing about it. Girls like that-for some reason, they were love magnets for weak and damaged men. It was some kind of save-me-mommy deal. His wife had told him all about it. They wanted her sympathy, her kindness, her "Oh, you poor thing." They wanted her to make them better than they were, but, fucked-uppedly enough, they wanted to drag her down to their level, too. "I used to tell them if they wanted salvation, they could get themselves a Bible," Ramsey's wife had said. "If you want me, you gotta walk like a man."

That's what they held out for, these girls. Men. Military men. Cops. Long-haul collegiates going for the big degrees, business, engineering, even medicine or law. That's what his wife had done-she'd held out for him. This one, too-Teresa. Got herself a hero soldier, the records said. Only she got handed the short stick of God, didn't she? Husband killed in Sandland. So she was stuck with the kid-and-no-husband scenario, like it was nigger fate.

The thought drew Ramsey's mind back in bitterness and melancholy to his wife. Who had gotten the short stick, too, in the long run, you might say. But that was a whole 'nother story, and he didn't have time to torture himself with it now.

He got out of the Charger. There was a gate in the schoolyard fence. It was padlocked and an older man, a janitor in dirty greens, was sitting in a chair beside it in lieu of a guard. Ramsey showed the man his shield through the diamond links. The janitor rose creakily and opened the padlock.

As Ramsey walked across the yard toward Teresa, the children chased each other all around him. Their surflike roar broke into individual voices, cascades of laughter and wordless cries. These seemed to feed the melancholy in him somehow, seemed to increase his brooding awareness of the evil fate arrayed against him. So, too, did the sight of Teresa as he came closer and closer to her, as she reminded him more and more of his wife.

She had moved from the doorway to settle a dispute between two boys over a kickball. She was turned half away from him and didn't see him approaching. She was bending forward to talk to the children. His eyes went over the curves of her body, and over her profile. Why isn't she teaching in the Northern District public schools where they really need her? he thought-because he wanted to resent her for something other than the fact that she reminded him of his wife, as the laughing children reminded him of his son and daughter.

"Ms. Grey?" he said. He flashed his badge again as she straightened and turned to look at him. As she came around to face him close up-gave him the whole cornball valentine-shaped face with its high cheekbones and warm brown eyes-the jolt of his attraction to her was startlingly sharp. He was painfully aware that he had once been the sort of man she would have held out for, that now he only seemed to be that man-as his wife had finally understood.

"Mrs. Grey, yes," she corrected him-which he also resented, without quite knowing why.

Then her eyes went to his badge, and they were startled and filled with worry. She hadn't expected him, hadn't known he was coming. The old man hadn't called her-or maybe he'd tried to and she kept her phone off at work. Conor hadn't contacted her either. Which meant she probably didn't know about Gutterson yet. The news wouldn't have made it onto TV-in fact, there was only one television station and maybe a website or two where anyone still thought a murder in this city was news.

He said, "I'm Lieutenant Ramsey," and she turned to him expectantly. He couldn't tell whether she recognized his name or not. Was it possible Conor had never mentioned him to her? Or was she just pretending that he never had? He couldn't tell.

"Mrs. Grey, do you know a man named Henry Conor?"

"Yes, I know Henry. He did some work for my father. Why, is something wrong?"

"What sort of work?" he asked her. "Carpentry?"

"Some… carving work, that's right."

The little hesitation gave him everything he needed. She was not thinking about Conor's carpentry. She was thinking about the man himself. She was the girl in question, all right.

"Is that it? Is that your whole relationship to him? He worked for your father?"

"Well, I'm not sure what you mean," she said reluctantly. And then-in case he already knew-she confessed: "We were friendly. In fact, he took me and my son to the fair yesterday."

"To the fair."

She made the classic female defensive gesture, defiantly brushing her hair back with her hand. "What's this about?"

"We're looking to question Mr. Conor about a police detective who was found dead in his apartment this morning. He was killed with one of Conor's hammers."

He said it brutally and got the effect he wanted. She was staggered, her lips parting, her pupils becoming pinpoints. For a moment, he thought she might actually swoon to the asphalt.

So Ramsey thought he had the whole picture now. A lonely widow with a man in the house, a man who would include the boy when they went to the fair. She had been falling in love with Conor, her feelings flowing powerfully, maybe only checked a little by the memory of her husband and by some mental wrangling a girl like her would do out of obligatory protectiveness toward her son. But hesitation or no, mental wrangling or no, she'd been falling for him. And now here was Ramsey telling her there was a dead detective, that Conor was on the run, being hunted by the police. Telling her, in effect, that Conor was just the sort of damaged criminal-type she had been avoiding all her life, just the sort of bad, needy boy she had fended off while waiting to meet the real man she married-the sort of man Ramsey seemed to be. He sensed all this in a second and sensed he had a moment of psychological power over her here, a moment when all her instincts would tell her to turn away from bad boy Conor, to turn toward the nice policeman who reminded her of her dead husband, and tell him everything.

"That's… Henry wouldn't do anything like that," she said.

"Really. You know him that well?"

"Well, I…"

"You know where he came from? What he was doing here?"

"He was a carpenter, working as a carpenter."

"Did he ever tell you why he came to this city in particular? Doesn't seem like a very nice place to come to. A lot of people are leaving, as I understand it."

"He said he came for the work. He said there's a lot of work here-because of all the rebuilding."

"Did he ever mention a man named Peter Patterson?"

"Peter… Uh… No. I don't think so."

"What about Jesse Skyles? The Reverend Jesse Skyles."

"I don't think so. I've heard of him. The story in the paper-about him and the girl. Henry and I talked about a lot of things. We may have talked about Skyles. I don't remember."

"You may have, though."

"I'm sorry. I just don't remember."

"But you talked about a lot of things."

"He would carve out in the backyard. I would go out there and talk to him sometimes. To keep him company."

"You and your son or just you?"

"No, and my son. And my father, too, sometimes."

Ramsey thought he had the whole picture. "But you can't remember what you talked about?"

"Not everything. It was just conversation. You know."

"Did he ever mention my name? Ramsey? Did he ever mention me?"

"No. Why are you asking me these things?"

"Mrs. Grey, do you have any idea where Conor is now?"

"No. No, I don't. I thought he would be at work."

"He's not at work. He's gone. A police detective has been murdered in his apartment, and Conor has disappeared. If you know where he is, it would be a good idea to tell me."

"I don't know. I already told you. I don't know. Henry wouldn't do anything like that, I'm sure."

Ramsey felt a strange flutter of doubt. Something was wrong here, very wrong, but he couldn't place it. For one thing, he couldn't tell whether the girl was lying or not. His instincts told him she wasn't, but he thought she had to be. Would Conor have kept all his purposes secret from her? As they became close, as they became intimate even, wouldn't he want to share with her the burden of his mission? It didn't make sense that he would ask questions and jabber freely on the street and suddenly become secretive with the girl he was romancing. Something here, anyway, didn't make sense. Ramsey felt he had a bright, clear picture in his mind of what had passed between this girl and Conor, but he couldn't quite put that picture together with the Conor he thought he'd come to know. It was as if, outside the bright clarity of his understanding, there was deep shadow-shadow that hid a hunkering disaster. Nemesis.

"Ms. Grey-Mrs. Grey-I feel you're keeping something from me."

"I'm not. I'm really not. Why would I?"

"Are you certain Conor never said anything to you? About why he came here? Why he came to this city?"

"For the work, that's all. He said he came for the work."

"All that time you talked to him, and your father talked to him, and your son, that's all he told you." He couldn't stop himself. He couldn't let go of it. Something didn't make sense.

"Look… Henry didn't murder anyone," she answered. "He wouldn't do that."

"That isn't what I'm asking you."

"I know, but…"

"He never mentioned Patterson? Or Skyles? Or me?"

"No. I don't think so. No. I'm almost sure."

"I find that difficult to believe," he said, looking hard into her eyes, his doubt mixed with anger now because she reminded him so much of his wife.

A bell rang in the big old cathedral-like building, a long, loud rattling bell. The laughter and shouting of the children came back to Ramsey as if it had been gone, as if the volume of it had dropped to nothing while he talked to Teresa Grey.

"I-I have to go," she said. "Recess is over. I have to go back to work. You're wrong about Henry."

But he could see she was uncertain as she turned away-uncertain enough, he thought, that she would have told him what she knew. Or was it all a performance? Was she hiding Conor? Protecting him? Was she that good a liar? She could have been. No one lies better than a good girl in love. And Conor would've said something to her. He must've. It didn't make sense.

Ramsey stood there another moment, aware of the woman's peculiar valence-the way she touched on his personal sorrows-and yet unable to distinguish it from that lingering suspicion of a shadow zone outside the zone of his understanding, that strange darkness sheltering nemesis and disaster.

He stood there and watched her walk back into the building, her skirt swishing as the children rushed past on either side of her, as they crowded before her through the schoolhouse door.

For the first time, he felt afraid of what he was about to do. "ALL RIGHT," said Shannon. "Tell me."

They were in the green Crown Victoria now. The bald guy was driving. The bald guy's name was Foster, it turned out. Foster glanced over at Shannon and laughed.

"Where'd you think you came from, dog? Your mama's tummy? You think the stork brought you? You think you were born again through water and the spirit? Or maybe someone told you one time that dirt-bag thieves get brand-new lives for free."

Shannon faced forward, expressionless, looking out the windshield at the miserable boulevard. Stores boarded up. Hollow-eyed whores. Predators slouched so deep they were shaped like question marks. All this on a bright spring Monday afternoon.

"I guess I wondered…" he said glumly.

"Yeah, I'll bet you did. I'll just bet you did. But you're all alike, you bottom feeders, every one of you. You think someone's gonna hand you the moon on a platter. You think someone should, like they owe it to you. Oh, I'm so poor. Oh, I'm so put upon. Where's my money? Like you earned it somehow by virtue of being a worthless piece of shit. Every time I wanna round up a fresh batch of dumb-ass bail jumpers, all I gotta do is tell them somebody's giving them something for nothing. Free tickets to the Super Bowl. Free house. A new car. Never did shit for nobody nohow, but out of the woodwork they come like it's only their due."

Shannon could've said it wasn't like that for him. He could've said he had been desperate, on the run, wanted for murders he hadn't committed and a break-in that he had. He could've said a lot of things, but he just said: "So this whole new identity thing was-what? Like, a setup?"

"Of course it was a setup! Why should anybody give you even the smell of his ass?" Foster shook his head and snorted. "I don't know whether to be amazed or amazed that I am still amazed."

The car turned a corner onto a side street of shattered houses, some no more than dust and lumber piled on dead grass. Shannon stared out at them but hardly saw them, immersed in what the man was telling him, still all murk and confusion. His sluggish effort to work out the truth of the matter was getting him nowhere. This was way beyond his powers.

"So what was it then?" he said. "What was it-some kind of scam to steal money?"

Foster let out a big guffaw. "A scam to steal money? Son, I work for the federal government. We don't need a scam to steal money. We are a scam to steal money. Look up 'scam to steal money' in the dictionary, there's a picture of the federal government right there. Scam to steal money! God save me from an uneducated public."

Slowly, Shannon turned to face him. Close up, Foster's aura of seediness was even more apparent, the threadbare shine of his suit and the wasted-junkie thinness of his frame even more painful to look upon. Close up, he had a fidgety, watchful junkie demeanor, too, something frantically alert in the smart, bright eyes.

"That cop," said Shannon. "Gutterson…"

"Gutterson!" Foster spat back the name as if the dead detective had been a bill for back taxes.

"He was never after me, was he?"

"Ah!" Foster took one hand off the steering wheel and tapped a finger against the side of his own head. "Now the clock is beginning to tick."

"He was after Henry Conor."

"The mist is parting. Finally."

The fields of rubble and dead grass fell away as the car turned another corner. Here was a long side street of antique office buildings with elaborate cast-iron facades. Between their tiers of pillars, arched windows, some broken, some just dark, exuded emptiness like a vapor, an atmosphere of abandonment coiling above the entire block. Vaguely, Shannon recognized where they were, realized they were not that far from his own brownstone.

"Who is he then?" said Shannon. "Who's Henry Conor?"

"Henry Conor is you," Foster answered, turning the wheel. The Crown Victoria slid to the curb, into the shadow of a building bleak with ruin. "Least, he's you-or he's no one."

Shannon waited for more. Foster shut the car down with swift, jerky movements, scoping the area all the while, his head turning back and forth, his sharp eyes darting here and there. He pulled the car keys out of the ignition and fiddled with them nervously.

"I made Henry Conor up," he said with a quick, mirthless smile. "I invented him, dog. And then I got you to take his place."

Into the louring building. Up four flights of dark stairs. Graffiti on the gray, abandoned walls and chips and scars in the paint where the plaster showed through like an exposed nerve. Down the gutted hallway to a carved wooden door where Foster knocked out a quick code, then used a key.

Shannon followed him across the threshold. Inside: a loft stripped bare. Chairs and card tables and a cot under the exposed heating pipes and fluorescent bulbs. There were three laptops, two playing various squares of video footage, one showing a series of oscillators. Shannon saw images of his apartment, Gutterson's outline traced in chalk on the floor.

Two men were here, both in shirtsleeves, both wearing guns, one weaselly, playing Patience at a table, one slick and handsome, lying on the cot, reading a magazine about pretty girls in their underwear.

Foster shut the door.

"You were watching me," Shannon said to him. It made him feel sick to see it.

"Listening, too," said Foster flatly.

"Don't worry," muttered the slick guy on the cot, turning a page. "We covered our eyes when you jerked off."

"I didn't cover my eyes," muttered the weasel dealing cards. "I dug it."

"We were watching out for you, boy," Foster said. "You were our guy in place. You were Henry Conor. We knew they'd come for you."

"You invented this guy…"

"A follower of Reverend Jesse Skyles, a friend of Peter Patterson, a man who knew what Patterson knew, a man on a mission."

Shannon looked at the videos of his empty apartment, the hallway outside the door, the street outside the brownstone. The whole place must've been rigged with cameras and microphones.

"Why me?" he asked.

"You showed up for it, darling. You answered the call and came to the mall. Guess you wanted it more than the others we tried. Or maybe you were just the first one stupid enough to check his cell phone. I don't know."

"No," said Shannon. "No, I mean…" He stared at the videos, fascinated, thinking about all that time he was being watched. "No, I mean, why me instead of one of you? If you needed a man in place, why didn't you use an agent, one of your own?"

"We're breached, baby face. Augie Lancaster's got more men in my agency than I have. That's why we're flying a little bit off the radar here. Way off the radar, the truth be told. What you're looking at right now is every agent I have that I can trust, minus a higher-up who's funneling the money."

The two men waved without looking up from what they were doing. Shannon stared at them dully.

"Anyway, I didn't need an agent. I didn't want an agent." Foster moved to one of the big arched windows. He stood to one side and looked out and down, checking the street below. "All I wanted was a body, an identity. A treasure at the end of the treasure hunt. Someone the trail led to, if you see what I mean."

Shannon did not see what he meant. "The trail…"

"The clues. We left clues for them to find. Computer traces. E-mails. Graffiti in empty houses. Remarks made to informants on the street. A photograph of a man sitting in a car. Signs that Peter Patterson hadn't been alone, that he shared his information with someone-and that now that someone had come to town, a man on a mission, looking for justice."

Shannon shook his head. More murk, more confusion.

Foster, glancing over at him from the window, laughed. Gestured at him for the benefit of his colleagues. "Look at this fool. Doesn't even know who Lancaster is." Then, explaining it to Shannon: "Lancaster runs this town. Runs this state. Could run this country if no one stops him. And his network goes so deep, we've never been able to get near him without getting derailed or blown or reassigned. Then-by the grace of God-literally by the grace of God-along came Peter Patterson. Low-level city bookkeeper, nobody even knew he was there. But he was well enough placed to see where the money was going, federal money, state money, programs, going where it always goes, into the pockets of the people who control it, in this case Lancaster and his gang. For years he lived with it-this Patterson, I mean. Sure, he lived in a bottle to kill his conscience, but it seemed to be working for him. Then, one day, he heard the Reverend Skyles preaching in some asshole of a church somewhere and he got the word and came to Mr. Jesus. Climbed out of the bottle. Found his conscience. Began to make overtures to us. Feeling us out. Working up his courage, you know. We were reeling him in slow by slow. We almost had him. But we're so damned breeched. They got to him first."

Finally-and it really did feel like clouds parting in his head-the light began to shine for Shannon. He began to understand. His lips parted as he gazed at Foster. "They killed him. Your informant-Patterson. Lancaster killed him."

"Had him killed. Just as dead as ever he could be. Right in the middle of the storm and the riots, too, so whatever evidence there was was lost in the rain and confusion. There was no way to make the case. Oh, we knew who did it, all right. Only one man Lancaster could trust with a job like that. But we'd never have broken him. In fact, with our agency so corrupted, we could barely move without giving ourselves away. So we had nothing. Again. And in a single leap, Augie was free-free and going national to boot. A hero because his city was so corrupt it collapsed in a rainstorm. That's the government for you: it fails upward. It has three new remedies to fix everything it just destroyed."

Foster had moved away from the window now, moved back toward Shannon, talking. Shannon, a much bigger man, stared down at the frenetic, seedy little figure.

"So you made them think there was someone else, another guy with the same information Patterson had. A guy you just made up."

"Henry Conor. Another Skyles disciple. A private detective from down the road. A man on a mission. We needed someone we could trust, someone no one knew, someone who couldn't give himself away, because even he didn't know he was the guy…"

Everything happened at once then. Shannon understood-and erupted, furious. He grabbed Foster, both hands on the front of his jacket. The weasel jumped up, his chair falling backward, a handful of spades and clubs and hearts and diamonds flying, red and black everywhere, as he drew his gun. Likewise the slickster on the cot: riffling pages of cleavages, bras, and panties went airborne as he leapt up and charged into the melee.

"You knew they'd come to kill me!" Shannon managed to say before the weasel stuck the gun barrel in his eye and the slickster wrapped an arm around his throat and pulled him off, with Foster shoving him away for good measure. "That's all I was there for-i ust to die! You missed the first murder, so you wanted to make sure you witnessed the second!"

Foster had fallen backward, angrily smoothing his threadbare jacket, his chintzy tie. The other agents held Shannon fast, one with his chokehold, the other with his gun. Foster gestured them away.

"All right," he said.

They let Shannon go, sneering as they backed off. The slickster fetched his magazine. The weasel holstered his gun. He righted his chair and began to gather the playing cards.

Shannon and Foster stood glaring at one another.

"We didn't want them to kill you," Foster said.

"You just didn't give a shit if they did."

"Why should we? You're a lowlife. You don't mean anything to us. You don't mean anything to anyone, Shannon. If you died, so what? Who cares? But we figured they wouldn't kill you right away. We figured they'd do exactly what they did do: try to find out what you had, where the info was, who else had it, who else knew. Maybe if you hadn't chased me off at the fair that night, I'd've been nearby when they made their move, could've gotten there to help you. As it was, we had to watch from here-and by the time I reached you, it was over."

Shannon gave a bitter laugh. "Bad break for you, me killing him, huh?"

"That it was. That it surely was. If he'd killed you, we'd've had him. Busted him, turned him, traded our way up the ladder right to Augie himself. We'd have had them all. As things stand, with Gutterson dead instead, the whole operation's blown, a great big waste of time and taxpayer money. When they murder you now-and they will-it'll just be SOP for a cop-killer-shot trying to escape-we get nothing out of it. So congratulations, Shannon. We fucked you? You fucked us right back."

For another moment, Shannon glowered at the little man. Then, disgusted with him, disgusted with himself and with all of it, he turned away, shaking his head at the dusty floor. He had one more burst of anger in him: "Didn't occur to you bastards that if you gave me a new life, I might live it, huh? I mean, when you contacted me, I had nothing, I had nothing to lose, but now…"

Foster shrugged. "Poor baby. Like I said, Shannon, you don't mean a thing to us, not a thing. Just a scumbag thief living off other people's money. Sort of like the government, come to think of it, only they're not looking at three strikes and hard time. But then, what can I tell you? Life's unfair."

Still studying the dust, Shannon hooked his thumbs in his belt. He nodded. He couldn't argue with the man there. Life was unfair all right, and hard time was what he was looking at for sure.

The other agents had now settled back into their places. The slickster was on his cot again, paging from one cleavage to another. The weasel had finished gathering his playing cards, had settled back into his chair, had racked up the deck with a few quick bangs of it against the tabletop, and was dealing himself a new hand.

"What now?" Shannon said. "You gonna turn me in? Send me to prison?"

Foster waved him off. "Nah. I don't want to have to explain this mess to anyone. Better for all of us you just disappear. Do your thing, man. Into the wind with you, there's a good lad. Unlikely you'll get out of town alive anyway. And if you do, well, after today, Henry Conor's gone. Your license, your papers-they'll all vanish from the computers. They'll all be about as useful to you as a teenager's drinking ID. We'll be setting your fingerprint and DNA records straight, too, so the first time you're busted, you'll go down for good. The arc of the moral universe is long, boy, but it bends toward you getting screwed."

Something occurred to Shannon now. He turned his face from the floor, raised an eyebrow at Foster. "You keep calling me a thief."

"You are a thief."

"But not a killer. You don't pin the Hernandez killings on me?"

"Ha! Listen, you add together the IQ of everyone who works for the United States government, you'd get enough intelligence to make one retard with his hat on sideways-but we're not that stupid. Benny Torrance looking for payback ain't even my idea of a good lead. We never would've used you if we thought you were a mad dog."

"But on the TV they keep saying it, telling people I'm a suspect. I've heard them."

"They'll keep saying it, too. We're not the police. You're a suspect till they bring you in and beat the truth out of you."

"So meanwhile, that's it. I just walk out of here."

"Like I said. Unless…"

"Yeah? What?"

"Well, this is gonna unravel fast. Our target is smart-a cop-Ramsey, his name is-he's smart and he'll unravel this jig-time once he starts looking for you, digging into your life. He'll go everywhere you've gone, talk to everyone you've met, and sooner or later, he'll figure out there's nothing there and it'll dawn on him he's been played. On the other hand, if we act fast, if we let him find you-let him find you-maybe he'll come after you. He's out of allies, so he might well do it himself. Then we'd have him."

"You mean come after me like Gutterson did?"

"Right. Find out what you know, work you over, maybe give himself away."

"Or he might just pop a cap in me."

"Or that. Probably that."

"And if he doesn't-and if you get him-what's in it for me?"

"Uh… shit."

"Nothing?"

"Not a thing."

"You still gonna make Conor disappear, put my records back, and all that?"

"Got to. Like I said, we're flying way off the radar here. After today, you're Shannon again, whatever happens."

"You won't even offer me-you know…"

"Immunity? Son, I'm gonna be lucky if I don't end up in jail my own damn self. There's some small chance, if everything goes just right, we might be able to work something out for you higher up the line. But no guarantees, and as things stand, I wouldn't pin your hopes on it. A bullet to the head's a lot more likely."

"So if I help you, either I get killed or I get busted for life."

"Pretty much."

"I guess I'm missing something. I want to do that because… why?"

Foster's whole hairless head seemed to quirk upward as he broke into a self-mocking grin. "Civic duty? Stop the bad guys? Save your mother country from political disaster?"

Thumbs hooked in his belt, head hung, Shannon stood looking at the man a moment.

"Have a nice day," he said then-and walked out.

He made his way back to the abandoned house, his hideaway. He tossed his gun in his tool bag and zipped the bag up and grabbed the handles and lifted it, ready to go, ready to leave town, hit the wind. But he didn't go. He set the bag down again and stood there, staring at it.

He didn't know what it was, what stopped him, but he couldn't move from the spot, even though the tension and urgency of his danger twisted his gut inside him. Then, after a few moments of standing there, staring, he did know. It was Teresa. He couldn't leave because of her.

Slowly, he sat down on the floor. His gut went on twisting, the tension terrible. He knew he had to go, had to run, had to get out of this city any way he could or the police would kill him. So he loved Teresa-so what? It wasn't as if she was going to run away with him. Hell, if she did, it would only ruin her life. And he didn't have to worry anymore that she would think he was a killer after he was gone either. Now that he knew the truth, he could write her a letter and explain it all. Why should he stay because of her?

But the answer was already in his mind, beneath the tension, beneath his conscious thoughts. Foster's words were there:

Our target is smart-a cop-Ramsey, his name is-he's smart and he'll unravel this jig-time once he starts looking for you, digging into your life. He'll go everywhere you've gone, talk to everyone you've met, and sooner or later, he'll figure out there's nothing there and it'll dawn on him he's been played.

Ramsey. He was the one who had murdered this Peter Patterson. He was the one who had sent Gutterson to his apartment, the one who was looking for him now and who would go to his worksite and would find out about the Applebees, and who would go to the house on H Street and look for him there.

Shannon lay down, his bag under his head. He stared up at the ceiling. He didn't think Ramsey would hurt the Applebees-why would he? He didn't think so, and yet his sense of their danger was even more urgent to him than his own.

He lay there a long time, thinking about it. The sunlight shifted to slanted afternoon beams in which motes of dust were dancing. He stared up through the yellow beams, through the dancing dust, his mind drifting, his stomach in knots.

What could he do anyway? What could he do about Ramsey? How could he protect them-Teresa, Michael, the old man? It wasn't as if he was really Henry Conor, an honest guy free to play the hero without fear. All that-his new life-had just been a lie, not even a lie, an illusion, a federal setup, a lawdog scam, gone not even like mist in the morning, more like a dream of mist in the morning, because it had never been real to begin with. So? What? Was he just trying to keep that fantasy alive? Was he just looking for an excuse to see her again? Wouldn't Ramsey be waiting for that? Wouldn't he be waiting for him to turn up at the house on H Street? Maybe he'd kill Shannon there, and then the Applebees would be witnesses and he'd have to kill them, too. Wouldn't he just be bringing more trouble to Teresa's door if he stayed, if he tried to protect her?

He lay there with the sun above him slanting and the light of the sunbeams growing mellow. He thought and thought about it. He had to go. If he didn't get out, they'd kill him. There was nothing he could do if he stayed. But to just run like that, to just leave her behind with this Ramsey bastard coming after her…

His mind drifted. He saw himself in the future. Maybe on the run, maybe in prison. It was bound to be one or the other. He thought he would be able to bear the fact that he would never see Teresa again. Hell, he knew he could bear it. He would be sad, but so what? He would not have the life he wanted, the good life he thought he had been meant to have, but so what? A broken heart wouldn't kill you. The sadness would get better over time. He would forget that other life. He was a hard guy-he had always been a hard guy. He could deal with all that if he had to, all that and a side of fries if he had to.

What he couldn't bear, what he couldn't bear even to consider-even just now, even just lying there on the floor-was the idea that some harm might come to Teresa because of him, the idea he might be in his cell one day or hiding in some backwoods town one day, and news would reach him. A murder in the city…

Teresa's face came to him. The boy's face. The angel's face. Their eyes.

He lay there. He thought about it. He thought about… well, he thought about a lot of things. He thought about sticking his Beretta in his mouth and blowing his brains out-anything just to end this tension and indecision and helplessness. He thought about walking out in the open and letting some trigger-crazy cop do the job for him. And he daydreamed about going to see Teresa one last time, not to try anything with her, he told himself, not to convince her to come with him or even to touch her, so help him, he wouldn't even touch her-but just to warn her, to explain himself, justify himself to her, face to face, and see the forgiveness in her eyes and warn her to get out, to run, to save herself and her family…

All through the day, tortured in his heart, he lay there in the dust on the floor of the ruined house, his head on his bag, his hands behind his head, staring up through the motes in the slanting afternoon sunlight, watching scenarios and disasters play out in his mind, trying to figure out what to do, and waiting for nightfall. LIEUTENANT BRICK RAMSEY waited, too, suffered tortures that long day, too, tortures of indecision and of what he disdained to name as fear. But he was afraid-there was no other word for it. It had been building in him since that morning.

It had started when he'd seen Gutterson lying dead on Henry Conor's floor. There had been that wisp of superstitious dread, that suspicion of nemesis working against him. Then there'd been the old man in the white house-Applebee-leaning on the mantelpiece under the wooden carving of the angel, the old man looking at him and the angel looking at him as if they knew what he'd done and who he was inside.

Finally, there'd been the daughter-Teresa-and his sense that something was going on here that he didn't understand. That sense-and the old man's look-and the wisp of dread he'd felt when he saw Gutterson-they'd all combined until he felt like a kind of darkness was closing in on him, strangling him. That's when he began to suspect what he would have to do. That's when he began to become afraid.

He went back to the Castle-that was what they called Police Headquarters. He went up to his office on the tenth floor and sat alone. Swiveling back and forth in his high-backed chair. Gazing out the long window without really seeing the expanse of the fire-and flood-blasted city laid out below him.

He tried to think things through, but there's no point in following his logic. There wasn't much logic, in fact. It was all just that strangling sense of things closing in. The superstitious dread. The look in Applebee's eyes, the angel's eyes. Teresa.

They knew. That, at last, was the only sense he could make of it all. That explained the old man's hostility, and the girl's ignorance, which had to have been feigned. They knew what Conor knew. They knew who Ramsey was and what he'd done. They were part of this-this thing he was feeling, this evil fate that he felt in the air around him, this will opposed to his will. That's what he was battling here. That's what was lurking in the shadows beyond his understanding, that spirit of nemesis like a stern, relentless phantom, her hand upraised as she waved the Book of Judgment at him, hammering it against the darkness as she hunted him down.

Sitting there, swiveling back and forth, staring blindly out the window, Ramsey realized there was no way out of this for him anymore. He was going to have to see it all the way to the end.

Across town at that hour, the fifteen-year-old gangster who called himself Super-Pred was committing an act of violence so grotesque that even the thugs who attended him found themselves nauseated and quailing. The gnarly-assed junky called Speedball had been scamming on the Pred, no question, and had shorted a detective on his payoff, pocketing the skimmed cash to feed his own habit. Which was not only dishonest but unforgivably stupid, because the cop was a cop and sure to complain. Everyone knew S-P was going to deal out some shit to the junky, and everyone also knew that when the Pred got going, he sometimes lost himself in the work. There was always, therefore, a 50 percent chance that Speedball might not survive the discipline-which was probably why the poor zombie pissed himself when he saw Super-Pred had come to deal with him personally. Still, no one was prepared for the elaborate bloodfest that followed. It was something you'd expect to get more from some Afghan warlord than a city g. When Super-Pred finally hitched up his pants and strutted out the warehouse door, the boyos he left behind could only whistle and curse and steal frightened glances at each other as they mopped up what was left of Speedball's body and the pools of their own vomit besides.

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…"