The Identity Man (3 page)

A THOUSAND MILES
away, a week or so later, as evening came, Shannon was working with wood. We'll call him Shannon anyway. He'd had a couple of other names in his life and he'll have one more before this story is finished, but he was Shannon now and it'll do. He was running a draw knife over a block of white ash. White ash was a hard wood to shape and it rotted fast, but he liked the color of it. This block in particular had caught his eye in the art supply store. He could see a woman in it, a woman's face. She was not young but not old either. She was very gentle and sweet, feminine and yearning. It was only the face but he could picture all of her. He could see her standing in the doorway of a house at the edge of a field of grain. She was looking into the distance, watching for her man, hoping he would come back to her.

When Shannon had finished shaving the block down to the right size, he would go at it with his gouges and draw out the woman's features. He could do that. He could see the shapes in wood and carve them. It was a knack he had. No one had taught it to him. He'd just found out about it in the shop in the Hall, the first time he was sent away, when he was still a juvenile. He'd gotten six months for misdemeanor breaking and entering, pled down from a felony. He'd gone to the Hall shop to kill time, and he'd somehow discovered this talent of his. When his 8320 counselor found out about it, he arranged for Shannon to get training as a carpenter. That was supposed to give him an honest profession and keep him out of trouble. It hadn't kept him out of trouble. He still was what he was. But in his spare time, he carved wood. He liked doing it. It had a good effect on him. It made him calm inside and still. It was the only thing that did. His mind got into the rhythm of his hands and he got wrapped up in what he was doing. He began to think and wonder about things, things that were different and interesting, questions that had no answers. Now, for instance, as his two hands worked the draw knife back over the tough off-white surface of the block, he was wondering: Where had this woman come from, this woman whose face he saw? Was she really in the wood to begin with or had his imagination just put her there? If she wasn't in the wood, how did he see her? How had she gotten into his imagination? She wasn't like anyone he knew or remembered. Maybe he had met her somewhere or passed her on the street and forgotten. Or maybe they had never met but she existed anyway and had somehow come into his imagination by ESP or something so that he saw her face in the wood as you might see someone in a dream who later turned out to be real. That might also explain how he could have real feelings about her. Because he did. When he thought of her standing there, waiting for her man in the doorway of the house, when he pictured her face brightening with a smile as she first spotted him coming up the road through the field, his heart lifted. He felt glad, genuinely glad, as if he were the man coming home to her. He even smiled—smiled back at her—as he worked the draw knife over the wood. It seemed too bizarre to him that he could feel this way about someone who didn't exist at all.

This was the sort of thing he wondered about when his mind fell into the rhythm of his hands carving wood. It was stupid probably, but it made him calm and still inside and nothing else did.

Shannon wasn't sure how old he was, but he was about thirty-one or -two. His driver's license said thirty-two and he knew it was around there somewhere. He was just over six feet tall, lean, broad-chested, and muscular. He had a long, rugged face with lines down the sides and around the eyes that made him look thoughtful and sad. He was wearing jeans now and no shirt. Sawdust clung to the sweat on his chest and arms.

The warmth of day lingered in the Southern California evening. The air smelled of eucalyptus and the sea. Shannon was standing in the little square of yard behind the three-story apartments, where he lived on the top floor. He was using the workbench he'd set out there among the lawn chairs.

He was about to lay the draw knife aside and open his roll of gouges, but he noticed the long light was finally failing. Another ten minutes and it would be too dark to go on. It wasn't worth beginning the next stage of the sculpture.

Shannon sighed and straightened, taking one hand off the knife and pressing the heel of his palm into his back as he stretched. As quick as that—as soon as he stopped carving—he remembered what he had to do tonight.

On the instant, his good feeling and his calm were gone.

Benny Torrance was coming. They were going to do a job. Shannon knew he shouldn't be doing jobs anymore, but somehow he kept doing them anyway. People called and asked him to come in on something, and he knew he should say no, but he never did. He needed the money, for one thing. The carpentry work had been sporadic lately. But it wasn't just that. Even when he was working full-time, he still did break-ins. He needed the buzz, the thrill of them. It was like he was addicted to it. Day-to-day life got on his nerves after a while. When he was carving wood, he was calm, it was all right, but when he wasn't, he needed something else. Day-to-day life made his skin crawl.

All the same, he had a bad feeling about this job. He'd had a bad feeling about it for days. He couldn't afford any more mistakes, couldn't afford any more convictions. He had two previous knocks for burglaries in inhabited dwellings. Those were serious felonies. One more and the three-strike law kicked in. That meant he'd die behind bars or get out only as a shuffling old man, doughy from prison starch and barely able to tolerate the free light of day. Sometimes the thought of that made him lie awake at night sweating. It made him sick inside with dread. He had to force himself not to think about it.

So there was that. And then there was the Benny Torrance of it all. Benny was bad news any way you looked at it. He was crazy. There were all kinds of stories about him. Ham Underwood, a guy Shannon knew, said he'd once shared a hooker with Benny and Benny went nuts and nearly killed her for no reason. And there were other stories like that, too. But they weren't the worst of it. Just a couple of nights ago, after he'd agreed to do the job, Shannon had been drinking in the Clover and some guys were talking about that home invasion in Carpinteria. The Hernandez killings. Some of the guys said it was a gang thing, but one of them said it was Benny and he sounded like he knew. That's when Shannon started to get his bad feeling, when he heard that. The Hernandez business was some very sick shit. The whole family had been murdered: father, mother, and two kids, a boy and a girl. If Benny was the doer, Shannon didn't want to be anywhere near him. He was a break-in man, not a rapist or a killer. But he had already agreed to go in on the job and now he felt like he couldn't pull out.

Shannon went inside and showered the wood chips off him. He dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt for the job. He went into the kitchen and cooked himself some eggs and ham. He slid them from the pan to a plate and ate them standing at the sink with a glass of red wine set on the counter. He hoped the wine would take the edge off his bad feeling.

Karen was in the living room. She was watching some TV show about movie stars, which one was screwing which, and so on. Shannon could hear the lady announcer sounding all excited about it, and there were flashes of music like flashes of bright light. When he was done with his eggs, he put the plate in the sink and carried his wine glass to the living room doorway. He leaned against the door frame and looked down at Karen. She was lying on the sofa, drinking a beer and smoking a joint, relaxing after her work day. She had changed out of the clothes she wore at the hotel and was wearing shorts and a pink T-shirt. She had a good body, big breasts, ripe thighs. She had a pretty face, too, when she was made-up nicely. Her dark hair shone in the light from the lamp next to the sofa.

Shannon still liked Karen well enough. He was just tired of her, that's all. He figured they were tired of each other. It was just like anything else: if it went on too long, it made your skin crawl. You needed a buzz. You needed to find something new.

"I gotta go out tonight," he told her.

"Okay," she said. She didn't look up from the television. She knew he did jobs. She knew he did something anyway. She never asked exactly what. Sometimes he wanted to tell her about it, about how he wanted to stop but couldn't, about how he lay awake at night, dreading that he would be sent away for life. But he never did. What could she answer? It wasn't her problem. If he wanted to stop, he ought to stop.

"You mind getting the dishes?" he asked her.

"No, I'll get 'em before I go. I may go out later, too, with Jeanette."

"Okay."

A car horn honked on the street outside, then honked again a long time loudly.

"Why don't you just announce it to the neighborhood?" Shannon muttered. "You dumb fuck."

"Who is that?"

"Benny."

"I hate that guy. He gives me the creeps." Karen took a draw of reefer. She never took her eyes off the television. Shannon couldn't figure what she saw in this stuff. Who cared if one of these movie clowns was doing another one or not?

For some reason, though, watching her watch the show, Shannon felt a surge of affection for her. He walked over to the sofa. He bent down to her, and she lifted her face to him and blew smoke out of the side of her mouth so he could kiss her goodbye.

"I'll see you later," Shannon said. He tasted her lips and the ganja. For some reason, he felt sad to leave her.

"See you, baby," she said.

But they never saw each other again.

As soon as Shannon got a look at Benny Torrance, he knew this was going to be a disaster of a night. Benny was aggie-eyed—his eyes looked like streaked marbles. God knew what he was on, but he was obviously juiced out of his mind. You could practically see his bonzo thoughts whooshing through his brain about a hundred miles a minute, like a wall covered with graffiti seen from a fast train.

"Shannon, my boy!" he rumbled.

He clapped a hand on Shannon's thigh as Shannon slid into the passenger side of the pickup. Then, with a thick guttural laugh, Benny jammed his foot down on the gas. The tires gave a banshee shriek and the black truck fired off into the night with a roar that must have rattled windows. The guy was a cluster-fuck in human form.

Benny was thickset, rippling with muscle. He had long stringy hair. He had a brutal face with three days' stubble. He was dressed in dark jeans and a black windbreaker, zipped all the way up. Blue tats peeked out where his flesh showed—the head of a rattler on his right wrist, a woman's bare leg on his left, curling tentacles coming up around his collar: it looked like he was smuggling a whole fantastic menagerie of dream creatures under his clothing and they were trying to squirm free.

He drove fast and, man, he drove loud, some kind of supercharger jazzing the truck's combustion and boosting the HP. He had to shout at Shannon over the roar.

"Talked to my friend an hour ago. He says the place is loaded. Caveman security. We're gonna be doing the money dance before the night is over."

Yeah, yeah, yeah,
thought Shannon. He half hoped some cop pulled them over for speeding or excessive noise before they arrived.

No such luck.

They came onto a stretch of road south of the city center, a dark street parallel to lower Main. Every shop here had its gates down. There was no one on the sidewalks. There were no street lamps. A breeze brought the smell of the ocean from a few blocks away. A couple of palm trees, sunk in shadow, whispered over the low buildings. A car or two went by when the traffic lights changed. Other than that, nothing was moving. The place was dead.

Benny parked the truck in the center of the block.

"Let's do this thing," he growled.

He got out and led the way to a narrow drive between a fabric store and a dry cleaner. Shannon followed him, alert, looking for trouble this way and that. He was wearing a black windbreaker now. He had a canvas roll tucked into the inside pocket.

They went down the drive to where it ended at a quaint house hidden among trees. It was a three-story Victorian clapboard with a porch and a gabled roof and a fanciful turret and blue trim painted around the windows. There was a painted sign at the entrance to the porch steps:
THE WHITTAKER CENTER
. There were cheerful swirling vine designs around the words.

It was a foundation of some kind. A charity or something. Benny had a friend who worked security there. The guy had given Benny the patrol times and the alarm codes and told him where there was an old combination safe full of cash. Apparently they kept a lot of cash around. People could just drop in and get a handful of dollars if they needed it badly enough.

Shannon took a look around the place as they went up the porch steps. He was reassured by the location, the way the house was set back from the road. No one driving by on the street was likely to notice them and there were no neighbors who might spot them with a glance out a nearby window either.

But one thing did worry him. The front door had a top pane of beveled glass and he could see a yellow glow through it.

"There's a light on in there," he said in a soft voice.

"Just for security," said Benny. They were shoulder to shoulder and Shannon could smell the vomitous scent of old beer on him. "The guard only comes by on the even hours. I told you. They just walk around outside."

Shannon nodded. Benny
had
told him that, but he was not convinced.

Shannon knelt in front of the door. He had a small penlight that sent out a blue beam. He held the penlight in his teeth so that the beam shone on his work. He brought out his canvas roll, laid it on the porch, and spread it open. It was the same kind of roll he used for his gouges when he carved wood. It was lined with pockets for his tools. He drew out a snapper pick for the front door and was through the lock in five seconds. The alarm warning sounded, a steady shrill, but soft, too soft to be heard outside the building. There was a sixty-second delay before the real alarm went off. Benny had told him that, too.