Foster and his agents had found an office directly across from the restaurant Anatomy. The office was abandoned, all the furniture removed, the walls torn up, the insulation underneath exposed. The paneling was gone from the ceiling, too. Wires hung down and light fixtures dangled. The floors were covered with dust.
Shannon and Foster stood together at a filthy window, looking out. They were on the second floor. They could see the front of the restaurant below, but they couldn't see inside through the tinted window. The slickster and the weasel were there behind them, each sitting on a metal chair. A laptop computer was set up on a third chair.
Shannon kept his hands in the pockets of his jeans. They were unsteady and he didn't want Foster to see them shake. It was annoying. In his mind he was pretty calm now that the waiting was over. In his mind he was thinking: What the hell, right? Everybody dies. But his body was afraid and unsteady.
"Need another look?" Foster said. He held his cell phone out in front of Shannon. There was a photograph on the phone's screen: Lieutenant Brick Ramsey. He was a solidly built man with a serious, oval-shaped face and a thin moustache. He seemed to have a sort of stillness and dignity about him. He looked like an upright guy, the kind of upright guy every tough neighborhood needs. The priest, the cop, the coach-the kind of father fi gure they need in these neighborhoods where there are no fathers, where it's all women without virtue and men without honor, like Applebee had said. If this had been one of those old black-and-white movies he had watched back in the white room, a guy who looked like Ramsey would've been the hero of the picture, except for his being black and all. But the real world was different from the black-and-white movies, Shannon thought. The real world was always right on the brink of falling completely the fuck apart.
"I've got it," Shannon said. "I'll recognize him."
Foster put the phone back in his pocket.
"And you'll be able to hear me, right?" said Shannon. He just said it to say something because he was nervous. He didn't really want to know how the whole thing was going to work.
"Maybe," said Foster. "We may be able to hear you. We sent a text message to Ramsey's cell phone. When he picked it up, it downloaded a Trojan horse-malware-software-that turned his phone into a listening device."
"Really? You can do that?"
"Maybe. I guess we'll find out."
"Hell, if you can do that, why didn't you just do it before? Why do you need me?"
"Because every warrant we've ever gotten in this city, the target's been alerted within forty-eight hours."
"Great. So what's different now?"
"We got the warrant twenty minutes ago. We may have some time before he finds out."
"But what if…?" Shannon started to say.
"If the Trojan horse doesn't work? Or he turns off his phone or he somehow spots the download or the warrant's already been blown or any of another million ways we can be fucked? Then we'll be fucked. That's just the kind of fly-by-night operation it is, dog."
Shannon's hands clenched in his pockets. "My tax dollars at work," he muttered.
"If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't be working for the government, believe me. We'd make our own damn money."
Shannon glanced at a clock that stood above the boarded storefront of a bank. It was nearly noon.
Foster said, "All right. Let's go."
It was during the next few moments that Ramsey had his revelation. Until then, there had just been his burgeoning, amorphous dread and superstition, an increasing sense of persecution by unseen forces too powerful to resist and an increasingly desperate idea that none of it mattered anymore anyway. Ever since his meeting with Super-Pred, he had felt like that. He had felt vague and distant, indifferent, dead. When the phone call from the gangster reached him, when he heard that Teresa and her family had escaped, that this plan, too, even this one, had been foiled by the forces arrayed against him, he accepted the news with a sort of spit of laughter, as if to say, What else could you expect in this unfair world? He no longer seemed to care whether or not he saved himself. He didn't even feel as if he was himself any longer. He was just the sullen vessel of his own resistance to the inevitable end. But the end was inevitable all the same.
So he sat in the booth, waiting. Anatomy was an upscale Italian restaurant. It had soft lighting and yellow walls. There were square tables under white tablecloths throughout the open room. There were booths with brown leather seats against one wall. Hanging on that wall between the sconces here and there were large plaster sculptures of body parts. That's what gave the restaurant its name. There were enormous arms and hands hanging up there, huge legs and feet and an oversized torso. And there was one table under a gigantic woman's breast and another under a gigantic pair of buttocks. That's where Ramsey was sitting-in the booth under the giant ass.
There were people at almost every other table, and the empty tables had signs on them marking them reserved. The crowd was mostly men in suits, but there were some women, too. Everyone was talking and the room was filled with voices and laughter.
Where Ramsey sat-under the plaster buttocks-he had a clear look at the front of the place. The bottom half of the long window was blacked out and there were venetian blinds on the top half. The blinds were partially open, so he could see the people passing on the street. The door was clear glass. He would be able to see anyone approaching.
He sipped from a glass of water, set the glass down, and checked his watch. It was nearly twelve. When he lifted his eyes, he looked out through the front door. He spotted Henry Conor crossing the street.
Ramsey hadn't realized until then that he despised Conor and was afraid of him. Maybe he'd denied it to himself because he didn't like to think he was afraid of any man. But now he felt the full force of it. This nemesis that he sensed was dogging him-this evil fate he'd got himself all worked up about in his mind-what was it, in the end, but Conor really? Conor inspired by the Reverend Skyles as Patterson had been inspired by Skyles. Conor coming after him to avenge Patterson like he was Skyles's vengeance or the vengeance of God. Conor killing Gutterson. Getting the drop on Super-Pred and his g's. Conor and Patterson and Skyles and God and his mother-it had all gotten wrapped up together in Ramsey's mind until it felt like the work of some persecuting power. But now that he saw the man in the flesh he realized: it was just this man, this one man. All he had to do was get rid of this one man and his problems would be over and he'd be free.
Yet, even as he thought that, once again, he felt that instinctive doubt, that awareness of shadow and uncertainty beyond the edges of his understanding. Something still didn't quite add up. Something was wrong.
And then, as so often happens in the moment of crisis, circumstances brought the revelation he needed.
Because, just as Conor reached this side of the street, just as he was approaching the door, his hand lifting to push it open, a waiter came up beside Ramsey. The waiter was a husky crewcut blockhead who looked a lot like a police detective in a white waiter's outfit. He handed Ramsey a pink square of paper from a message pad. Ramsey glanced at the paper. The words on it were scribbled in penciclass="underline"
They got a warrant to Trojan horse your phone.
Ramsey looked up sharply. Silently, he mouthed the word: Who?
The blockheaded waiter-who-was-really-a-cop mouthed a word back at him: Feds.
Shannon pushed through the restaurant door. The voices and the laughter rose around him as the door swung shut. He saw Ramsey sitting in the booth along the wall. The lieutenant was wearing a fine gray suit and a fine burgundy tie. He was holding a pink message slip in his hand, talking to the waiter standing next to him. Then the waiter moved away and Ramsey looked over and saw Shannon coming toward him and Shannon saw the look in his eyes and it was a look like murder. For a second, fear rose uncoiling like a cobra in his stomach, and he actually thought the scenario might play out the way Foster described it: Ramsey just pulling his gun, just shooting him down right there with everyone watching. But no, that didn't make sense. He took a breath and managed to force himself to keep walking forward.