"You make friend, like message said. Rich friend, powerful friend. He sends me to help you."
"Who? I don't have any friends like that. Who?"
The heavyset man shrugged. He shrugged like a foreigner, too. "You are smart man. You can know."
Whittaker, Shannon thought. It had to be. Who else? It might be a foreign name. Hard to tell.
"What does this friend want to do?"
"He send me to help you. To save you." He held up the phone again. "I call for car."
This was nuts, Shannon thought. Nuts. It had to be a setup. He was a stone idiot for coming. He had to go. Right now. He had to.
But he didn't go. He just didn't. The next second and the next, he was still there, still standing there with the rows of eyeglasses in the window watching him and the bespectacled eyes above the roof staring down. He was thinking about Mexico or South America or wherever he would have to run to. It felt to him almost as if that alien country, whatever it was, surrounded the mall, as if it lay just beyond the mall's perimeter. It felt to him almost as if he would suddenly be there if he left the mall. He would be there hunted, alone, lost forever to his motherland, a stranger and an outlaw and prey to anyone.
"How can you help me?" he said, stalling for time so he could make his mind up.
But the foreigner with the bushy eyebrows only flipped his phone open. "Send car," he said into it.
Instantly, Shannon saw the headlights turn in off Main. They bounced toward him across the lot, going in and out of the gray dark and the pink light. It was a blue Cadillac, Shannon could see as it drew near. He could see the shape of the driver behind the wheel, but he couldn't make out his face. The Caddy pulled up close beside the foreigner. The foreigner pulled the rear door open.
"We should not stay," he said. Then he got into the car's back seat, leaving the door open for Shannon.
Well, he was right about that anyway. They shouldn't stay, not with the light of the car drawing attention, and all those eyeglasses staring.
Shannon took a deep breath. Almost before he decided to do it, he was walking to the car. He tossed his gym bag to the floor and lowered himself onto the back seat. As he was pulling the door shut, the car started moving.
He sat back, dazed. What the hell had he just done? He stared blankly at the pane of dark Plexiglas that shielded the front seat. He couldn't see the driver on the other side. He only saw his own reflection.
After a moment, he collected himself enough to turn to the foreigner. There were lights burning low on the doors and he could see him clearly. "Where are we going?"
The foreigner didn't answer. He seemed to be studying Shannon, peering at his face as if it were a statue in a museum. He was twisted around toward him on the seat with his arm up resting on the seatback. He was tilting his head this way and that as if considering his options.
"What're you looking at?" Shannon asked him.
The man reached out with his thick, liver-spotted hand. He tried to take hold of Shannon's chin. Shannon slapped the hand away.
"Get off me. What're you doing?" The foreigner just went on studying him. It gave him the creeps. "Who are you anyway?"
"I am identity man," the foreigner murmured as he studied him. Only he said mang instead of man. "I am identity mang." Now, finally, he turned away. He reached for something on the other side of him. Shannon craned his neck and peered hard to make out what it was in the dark. It was a medical bag. The foreigner opened it, rooted through it with his thick fingers, glancing at Shannon over his shoulder. "Yes? You know this? Identity?"
Shannon shook his head. "What-you mean, like, you get people fake ID?"
"Oh! Please! Not fake ID." The foreigner went on looking at Shannon but went on rooting in his medical bag at the same time. " Real ID. New. I give you new everything. I give you new face. I give you new name, new papers, new work, new place to live. Yes? Is good, huh? I save you. I give you new life entirely."
Then, with unbelievable swiftness, animal swiftness that outraced the mind, he whipped his hand around and plunged a syringe into Shannon's neck.
Shannon began to lift his hand in self-defense, but his hand fell back as he sank into unconsciousness.
PART II
THE GANGSTER WAS fifteen years old. He called himself Super-Pred-he actually called himself that. He had his own following among the scattered crews warring over the city's Northern District, or what was left of the Northern District after the looting and the fire and the flood. He had a rep for the unimaginably sudden and grotesque: frothing fits of rage that left his enemies de-boweled or otherwise damaged irrevocably. There was, for instance, one thirteen-year-old in his posse nicknamed Eyeball because Super-Pred had torn one of his eyeballs out in a property dispute over some twelve-year-old cooch-who, by the way, had been missing ever since.
Thus Lieutenant Brick Ramsey watched dispassionately as Detective Gutterson beat the little cancer down.
They were in a steel shed, what had been a storage shed out back of an auto parts shop years back. The shop itself was long gone but the shed stood even after the flooding. Corrugated steel walls and a dirt floor. That's where the boy was-on the floor, hands over his head to protect it. The blood from his nose had made a round stain about the size of a silver dollar in the packed earth.
Well, these things had to be. The Northern District was lawless now. Murders every hellish day. Gunfire all the time-so much gunfire that citizens had stopped calling it in-it was just rattling background noise to them like cicadas in the trees. Super-Pred's squad-and other squads like them-prowled the ruined streets in dark and daylight. Slink-backed coyotes, drooling for Vics. With rap-star T-shirts and golden dollar signs on golden chains and baggy pants like their convict heroes wore. One night, a pack of them broke into a woman's emergency trailer-one of those trailers the feds gave to people who'd lost their homes in the storm. They broke in and raped her to death right there in her own bed, her four-year-old daughter crouching in the corner.
That was bad enough. But last night, someone really crossed the line. Someone popped a cruiser. A cop car establishing a presence on Northern Boulevard. A couple of patrolmen doing a slow pass, giving the evil eye to the whores and dealers there. Some joker hunkered like Baghdad behind a Dumpster in an alley opened up with a Kalishnikov and peppered the car's passenger door, could've hurt the rookie riding shotgun. Shooter was gone before they could chase him down. That crossed the line. That couldn't be allowed to stand. When the police passed by, you faded, motherfucker, you vanished like the Cheshire Cat till there was nothing left of you but your shit-eating grin. That was the law of the streets.
"I'm going to leave here with your scrotum in my pocket or the name of the fool with the AK," Lieutenant Ramsey said quietly.
Detective Gutterson kicked the boy in the stomach by way of punctuation, making the punk let go of his head and clutch his belly now, all curled up and writhing on the shed's dirt floor.
Gutterson smiled down at his work. And what a likely thug he was, Ramsey thought. Two hundred and fifty pounds of pure contempt disguised as a human being. A six-foot-four frame of deteriorating muscle. A smirking, resentful expression plastered on that crewcut potato of a head, an age-old mask of hatred that spoke trouble to a brother's very DNA. Back in his dreamed-of yesteryears, Ramsey figured, Gutterson probably would have been an overseer on a southern slave plantation, all whip and hard-on. Now he was a bullying cop in whatever was left of this bled-dry city, and it was one of Ramsey's few remaining sources of job satisfaction that he could tell a dog like this to fetch and it would go fetch, despising his colored master only a little more than he despised himself for having to obey.
Gutterson was loving this, just loving it. It was probably the highlight of his week. And the junior g, Mr. Super-Pred down there-he knew it, too. He knew that his only pathway out of this mini-perdition was through the sympathies of Lieutenant Ramsey.