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.