Read Online The Identity Man by Andrew Klavan - Free Book Online

convict heroes wore. One night, a pack of them broke into a woman's emergency trailer—one of those trailers the feds gave to people who'd lost their homes in the storm. They broke in and raped her to death right there in her own bed, her four-year-old daughter crouching in the corner.
    That was bad enough. But last night, someone
really
crossed the line. Someone popped a cruiser. A cop car establishing a presence on Northern Boulevard. A couple of patrolmen doing a slow pass, giving the evil eye to the whores and dealers there. Some joker hunkered like Baghdad behind a Dumpster in an alley opened up with a Kalishnikov and peppered the car's passenger door, could've hurt the rookie riding shotgun. Shooter was gone before they could chase him down. That crossed the line. That couldn't be allowed to stand. When the police passed by, you faded, motherfucker, you vanished like the Cheshire Cat till there was nothing left of you but your shit-eating grin. That was the law of the streets.
    "I'm going to leave here with your scrotum in my pocket or the name of the fool with the AK," Lieutenant Ramsey said quietly.
    Detective Gutterson kicked the boy in the stomach by way of punctuation, making the punk let go of his head and clutch his belly now, all curled up and writhing on the shed's dirt floor.
    Gutterson smiled down at his work. And what a likely thug
he
was, Ramsey thought. Two hundred and fifty pounds of pure contempt disguised as a human being. A six-foot-four frame of deteriorating muscle. A smirking, resentful expression plastered on that crewcut potato of a head, an age-old mask of hatred that spoke trouble to a brother's very DNA. Back in his dreamed-of yesteryears, Ramsey figured, Gutterson probably would have been an overseer on a southern slave plantation, all whip and hard-on. Now he was a bullying cop in whatever was left of this bled-dry city, and it was one of Ramsey's few remaining sources of job satisfaction that he could tell a dog like this to fetch and it would go fetch, despising his colored master only a little more than he despised himself for having to obey.
    Gutterson was loving this, just loving it. It was probably the highlight of his week. And the junior g, Mr. Super-Pred down there—he knew it, too. He knew that his only pathway out of this mini-perdition was through the sympathies of Lieutenant Ramsey.
    "You let that peckerwood do a brother like this?" he whined, clutching his gut, squinting up at Ramsey through his swollen mug.
    Ramsey squatted on the shed floor so he could peer directly in through the purpling lumps of the gang-banger's cheeks to the dim gleam of the swimming child-eyes buried in them. The lieutenant smiled. A quiet, distant smile to let the boy know that the road of racial solidarity ended at the brick wall of his heart. Then he faked a friendly glance up at Gutterson.
    "Used to be a preacher in my neighborhood when I was a boy. Reverend Mack. He could do a Sunday morning, all right. Full of the spirit. One day, I got up to some mischief or other. My mama hauled me into his office so he could put the fear of God in me. Her holding me half up in the air by my elbow and him standing behind his desk, looming over me like Mount Sinai, sending up smoke and fire and the word of God. And all I could think about was this picture hung up on the wall behind his desk. He must've found it in a book somewhere. Tore it out and framed it. It was a picture of Jesus stomping out sin. Couldn't take my eyes off it. Sin was this—this kind of a twisting, hissing, black serpent all writhing under Jesus' foot, with this half-man, half-dragon face, something out of a horror movie. Just writhing there, helpless, spitting hatred up at the Lord." Above him, Gutterson chuckled heavily. Ramsey choked back his hatred of the man. Looked away from him, looked down at the boy. "That's what you remind me of, son. Twisting there, writhing there on the ground. You remind me of that picture."
    Super-P panted