Free The Identity Man by Andrew Klavan

at her toddler's arm. And here and there, again and again, the slouching, shift-eyed, yellow-eyed young coyote-men prowling the afternoon, casing locations, casing prey, meeting on corners to clasp each other's hands in an expert and near-invisible exchange of cash and contraband.
    Fighting to Save His City.
    Had it ever been true? Ramsey wondered bitterly. Even at the beginning when Ramsey had first followed him, even loved him, even then had Augie Lancaster ever fought to save this city? Had he ever even meant to? Well ... in daydreams maybe. Daydreams like we all have of ceaseless cheering, of an endless parade, of himself, Augie, slowly passing in his top-down limousine, the hands of the poor upraised in gratitude at the spangly gold showering from his beneficent fingertips. Maybe he really hadn't known—maybe he really hadn't understood that even the dream of doing good can be the hunger for power in disguise. Maybe he hadn't recognized the strangely red-visaged angel who had whispered to him he could be king of saints only to slowly tutor him to be king of kings—king of the city kings with his vacation homes and his cars and his boat, and the vacation homes and cars and boats of his cronies...
    Fighting to Save His City.
    All those times he had called these people his brothers. All those times he had told them that the white man was their enemy, that only he could save them as he saved them—look!—in his dreams. All those beautiful speeches—
City of Hope, City of Justice
—spurring them on to this protest or that, to boycott a Jew store owner who had shot a neighborhood thief, or to picket a radio station where some DJ had made some racial crack, or to protest a white jury's verdict that had sent some black mad-dog to prison. All those times he had inspired them to bare their chests and display the scars of injustice, mobilizing them as an army of victims to blackmail another dollar out of the citadels of white guilt and fear. It was all good—all good for the king of the city kings, but for the brothers? Useless, meaningless diversions while their fatherless children prowled the streets in drooling coyote crews and their fatherless mothers smoked bone for crack cocaine which their fatherless fathers sold to them in the broken buildings that all the spangly gold from his fingertips somehow never did rebuild.
    Fighting to Save His City.
    Sure. Because the journalists had their daydreams, too, the guilty white journalists made gullible by their desperate yearning for virtue. The same strangely red-visaged angel whispered in their ears, too:
Well done, thou good and faithful servants, here are your Pulitzer Prizes and your I-Love-a-Nigger Decoder Rings for, lo, you have lifted a dusky-colored saint into the slowly passing top-down limousine of his parade where the spangly gold may fall upon the brown-skinned masses, transforming their infirmities and all your sins into an ever-to-be-remembered goodness.
    Herded into a pit and shot like infected cattle,
Ramsey thought.
The stupidest pack of fools on earth.
    Except maybe for him. Except maybe for Lieutenant Brick Ramsey himself, who had also followed Augie, who had even loved him and also believed.
    Gutterson swung the wheel and turned the Charger off the boulevard.
    They came onto a short lane. The houses here stood ghostly, lopsided and broken. You could see through the staring windows that they were empty, their interiors ravaged. You could see over-turned furniture in there and piles of debris and brown stains rising to the high waterlines on the wall.
    The lane dead-ended at an empty lot, a dirt-brown expanse where plastic bags and papers tumbled over concrete shards and discarded mattresses and discarded refrigerators and ovens and scrap. It made a mournful backdrop.
    "This is the one," Gutterson said.
    It was the fourth house down on the left, about halfway to the dead end. It was made of large wooden shingles painted pale green. Ramsey could already feel its