The Identity Man (5 page)

The woman in the ticket booth was old and bent and shapeless. She moved to him slowly and stiffly, as if her bones hurt her. He asked her for a ticket to Vegas. He'd checked the schedules and it was the next bus out of state. It left in an hour. He figured Vegas was a city he could get lost in, find work in. He'd make some contacts there, score himself a new name and driver's license. Maybe eventually head farther east.

The woman pushed his ticket to him under the slot in the window. It was the first time she'd looked up at him. He thought she hesitated when her eyes reached his face, as if she recognized him and knew he was a fugitive. But that really
was
paranoid. It was only a break-in. Why would she know?

Just the same, he took the ticket and left the station quickly, feeling her eyes on his back all the way to the door. There was a bar across the street, the Cocktail Hour. He figured he'd wait for the bus in there. That way, if the police patrols came by the station, he'd be able to see them through the bar's big window.

The Cocktail Hour was small and dark. There was room for a bar and two tables and a video game and that was pretty much it. There was a fat guy playing the video game and two other fat guys sitting together at the bar, talking. There was rock music playing.

Shannon sat on the side of the bar where he could look out the window and keep an eye on the bus station. The bartender came over to him there. She was a woman in her forties. She was pleasantly slender in her black skirt and white blouse. Her face was showing some wear on it, but it was a friendly face. Shannon asked her for a Miller draft.

There was a TV behind the bar. It was hung up high, a rectangle of colored light and motion against the wall's dark wood paneling. The TV's sound was off because of the rock music, but the captions were turned on so you could read what people were saying.

That's how Shannon found out what had happened.

The bartender set his beer in front of him and turned away. Wiping her hands on a towel, she looked up at the TV, her profile to him. Shannon drank. He watched the TV, too. The local news was just coming on. Shannon had his glass at his lips when his own face appeared on the screen.

He nearly choked on his beer. The picture was a mug shot from five years ago, but it was a good enough likeness. Shannon's eyes shifted quickly. He saw the bartender draw a deep breath. He saw her body stiffen. She was careful not to look at him, but he could tell she had recognized him from the picture.

But that wasn't the worst of it, not by half. The words spelling themselves out under his mug shot told what the newswoman was saying:
Local and state police have launched a massive manhunt for John Shannon, a suspect in the Hernandez killings.

Shannon stared, his lips parted.
The Hernandez killings? What the fuck?

A detective was speaking on the screen now. His words spelled themselves out beneath him.
Benjamin Torrance was arrested earlier this evening during a robbery of the Whittaker Charitable Foundation,
he said.
Under questioning, Torrance confessed to the home invasion two months ago in which a family of four were brutally slaughtered. Torrance implicated Shannon as his accomplice in that crime.

Shannon felt the room telescope to nothing around him. He felt suddenly spotlit, white bright, as if everyone must notice him, must see that he was a wanted man. The Hernandez killings. The cops had Benny on the Hernandez killings and in a fury, for revenge, Benny had told them Shannon was in on them. He'd given Shannon up for slaughtering an entire family.

Shannon's wide, suffering eyes returned to the bartender. She was still trying not to look at him, but he knew she would. How could she help herself? He waited for it and when, in fact, she stole a glance his way, he shook his head at her back and forth:
I didn't do it.
Terrified, the bartender quickly looked away at the TV again.

At that moment—as if his luck was collapsing stone after quickening stone, gathering into an avalanche of bad news coming down on top of him—at that moment, a red light caught his eye, and he turned to see two police cruisers pulling up at the curb in front of the Greyhound station.

The rock music in the bar went on playing. The fat guy went on playing the video game, the screen flashing with make-believe explosions. The two other fat guys went on talking, eating peanuts from a bowl and ignoring the TV.

Two cops got out of one of the cruisers across the street. They went into the bus station. Two other cops got out of the other cruiser and just stood there, scanning the area, their eyes passing right over the place where Shannon was sitting.

Shannon turned back to the bartender. She was still staring up at the TV, trying to pretend she hadn't recognized him. Shannon, nauseous, dying inside, followed her gaze.

There on the screen now was the girl, the girl from the job, the one that Benny had molested. Shannon read what she was saying as the words spelled themselves out under her.

It doesn't make sense to me. He could have let this man rape me. He could have taken the money, but he helped me instead. I don't think he could be a killer. It just doesn't make sense. The police must've made a mistake.

When she read that, the bartender couldn't help but glance at him again.

Shannon poured his thoughts into his suffering eyes:
Please, sister, believe her. I didn't do it. I'm not that guy.

This time, the bartender did not pretend to look away. She looked over her shoulder at the window. Shannon looked, too. The two cops in the Greyhound station were talking to the ticket lady. She was lifting an unsteady hand to point at the bar across the street—at him. She must've seen him come in here.

Shannon and the bartender looked at one another. He poured his thoughts into his eyes, begging her to help him. He didn't dare speak out loud. He knew if one of the men in the bar realized what was happening, he would be done for. The men would turn him in. They would figure he was probably guilty anyway and if he wasn't, then let the law work it out. But a woman—a woman might go with her instincts. A woman might feel some sisterhood with the girl on TV. She might feel the romance of reaching out to him in his most desperate hour. A man would do the smart thing, the right thing, but a woman might help him. He begged her to help him with his eyes.

Outside, the two cops were pushing back into the night through the door of the bus station. One of them was talking into his shoulder mike, calling for backup. They joined the other two cops standing by the cruiser. Then all four cops began to cross the street toward the bar—although they had to wait a moment as a truck rumbled past.

Shannon turned to the bartender once again and now she was standing right in front of him. She put her small fist on the bar between them and when she withdrew it, there was a keychain lying there with about twenty keys on it. Shannon put his own hand over the keys, then lifted his eyes to her. She made the slightest gesture with her head. He followed it and saw there was a door in the wall behind her.

It was the second time that night a woman had helped him get away from the cops. He felt a passion of gratitude to her and to her entire sex, fools that they were for a man in trouble, fools that they had been for him all his life, he didn't know why. This, too, he expressed through his eyes when he looked up at her for the last time.

But now, the four cops were coming fast across the street, their expressions alert, their hands on their holsters. Shannon closed his fingers around the bartender's keychain. He stood off his barstool and, as he did, the bartender lifted the flap in the bar to let him pass through. With a final glance over his shoulder, he saw the four oncoming cops reach the sidewalk just outside the Cocktail Hour. Then he pushed through the door behind the bar.

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?"