"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 wilclass="underline" 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.