And yet…
All night, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in tortured dreamlike thoughts, the words had come back to him: Identity like stain. The dreams and thoughts were all about Teresa. Teresa seeing on the television news that he'd killed a cop and disappeared or been gunned down by the angry police. They would call him a murderer, a key suspect in the Hernandez home invasion massacre, an accomplice in the slaughter of an entire family. He dreamed Teresa's face when she heard that. And the little boy's face when he heard it. And Applebee's. And the face of the angel on the mantelpiece. Identity like stain.
He tossed and turned on the floor of the abandoned house in a city full of gunshots and sirens and silent suffering, and he knew he couldn't live with that. If he ran away now, he would run forever, a murderer in Teresa's eyes, a monster to the boy. And okay, he was a lowlife thief, a scumbag nothing, but he wasn't a murderer. He wasn't a monster. He'd lived a crappy life, okay, but there was this other life inside him, this good life, this life he was supposed to have lived. It was like another road running next to the road he was on. When he met Teresa, it was as if the roads crossed for a minute, a day, a couple of weeks, and he saw for a while how things could've been. If he ran now, he would be running down the same old road and leaving the road of that other life behind. He would be right back where he was before the foreigner changed his face. A hunted murderer in the eyes of the world, in Teresa's eyes, in the boy's eyes. Running forever. Identity like stain.
Oh, it was too much for him to figure out. He should just get out, hit the wind, that was the smart thing. But, man, he hated it, hated thinking about it, hated the idea of going back to that life. He couldn't have Teresa. He knew that. He couldn't have that other good life. It was too late for that now. He knew. But at least let him be himself in front of her. Let her see that he wasn't a murderer, that he hadn't done Hernandez, that the dead cop was self-defense. Let him clear his name of the killings at least and put some honest picture of his sad self before her. If she saw him on the TV news as he was, as the low thief he really was, well, she could understand that, couldn't she? She could forgive that. She could explain it to the boy and they would both forgive him. Henry just went down the wrong road, she would say. He would've gone down the good road if he could've found it. He just didn't know the way, that's all. And they would forgive him. That's all he wanted now. Let her see him as he was, only as bad as he was. Let him stay and show all of them who he was, so he wouldn't be evil in their eyes.
Are you fucking crazy? he asked himself, sitting there. Are you willing to die to do that? And the answer came boiling up out of him: Yes! Let me die in the life I was meant for. Keep your identity. Keep your stain. Let her see me as I am. Let me die in the life I was supposed to live.
It was strange. These thoughts of his-they were all kinds of disjointed and messed up and emotional. But when he was finished, it was as if he'd gone through the whole thing step by step. It was as if he'd figured it out logically. Because now, he knew exactly what he was going to do.
He untangled his legs and stood up off the floor. He took the gun, the cop's gun, the nine-a, out of his tool bag. He chambered a round and checked the safety. He worked the weapon into the back of his belt and pulled his windbreaker down so that it was covered.
Then he walked out of the empty house into the morning.
In all the gray ruins of the city-with all its houses washed to muddy rubble by the flood and its buildings burned to skeletal cinders-the Government Center in the east end of town was shockingly vivid, colorful, and whole. One structure here had a golden dome that glinted in the sunlight. Another was made of white marble with fluted Roman pilasters, graceful and precise in every detail. Yet another had an impressively long wall of tinted windows reflecting the grassy green park with its red and orange and yellow tulips. In the park, men and women dressed in light spring pastels walked along the asphalt paths to glass doors that flashed back the morning as they opened and closed. The Government Center was a weirdly living thing pulsing on the dead city, like some kind of exotic spider feeding on the gray, colorless shape of the butterfly wrapped in its web.
Shannon sat on a bench at a bus stop across the street. His eyes moved over the crowd in the park. It was a bad setup for him. Lots of cops patrolling the park paths, keeping their wary eyes on the building entranceways and the wrought-iron gate in the spiked fence at the park's perimeter. The cops made Shannon nervous, but he acted casual, his arm draped over the bench back, his legs crossed at the knee. These cops weren't searching for him, he told himself. This was the last place they'd look for him, the last wide-open place they'd think he'd come. These guys were after terrorists and whatnot, he thought. They were watching out for the random nutjob who couldn't feed his family and came after the government with a gun, because there was no one else left who had a job or a dime.
So he stayed on the bench while long minutes passed. Other people gathered at the bus stop and buses came, obscuring his view. When the buses hissed and rumbled away, the other people were gone and there he still was. Trying to look casual. Glancing nervously at whatever cop was passing near. But mostly-the whole time-he kept watch on the one tower of gleaming steel across from the park's near corner; he kept watch on the restaurant on the tower's bottom floor: the World Cafe.
That had been the name on the receipt in the bald guy's car. Shannon had seen it when he'd peeked through the scarred Crown Victoria's window. It was the only clue he had to where the bald guy was-and the bald guy was his only clue to why the cop had come after him to cut off his ear, to why he was in the same old fUgitive cock-up again when he was supposed to be new mang.
At first, he had thought the clue was kind of tenuous. The World Cafe might be a chain. There might be a dozen of them in the city. He was all prepared to go tromping from one cafe to another, describing the bald guy to the waiters, hoping for a hit. But it turned out better than that. There was only one World Cafe, and when he saw where it was, he had hopes the bald guy would show up here sooner or later. This was not the kind of place you traveled to. It was a place for regulars, for people who worked in the Government Center, probably mostly for people who worked in the steel tower, which had letters above the door: Federal Building.
Shannon staked the place out for an hour and a half, so he had a lot of time to think about those letters. Was the bald guy a fed? What were the feds after him for? Why would the feds send a city cop to cut his ear off and kill him? Who the hell did they think he was? Or if they knew who he was, what the hell did they want from him?
No answers. He couldn't come up with a one. So he waited and worried about it and kept an eye on the cops and kept an eye on the Federal Building and the World Cafe until finally-sure enough-up showed the bald guy.
He came out of the federal building, walking quickly. Same guy, definitely. Same junkie-thin slime-dog in yet another cheap suit, and with his chromey dome glinting in the noonday sun. He didn't go into the World Cafe. He headed off along the sidewalk instead, parallel to the park. Within moments, he had nearly lost himself in the flow of pedestrians, his bald head appearing and disappearing in the gathering lunchtime crowd.