Free The Identity Man by Andrew Klavan Page A

haunted emptiness as the Charger pulled to the curb in front of it.
    "This is where they hang?" said Gutterson. "Look at it. Bunch of animals."
    Ramsey choked down his hatred for the man and with it any answer he might've made.
    The two of them got out of the car. They started across the front yard—the ruin of the front yard. The lawn was dead and littered with rubbish: cans and bags and pieces of lumber and rebar. They stepped through it gingerly, the debris crunching and clanging and crackling under their shoes. Gutterson's hand hovered over his nine, in case anyone was in the house and up to mischief. Ramsey's hands were at his sides. He was certain there was no one in there.
    They reached the front door and stood one on either side of it. A breeze off the river brought a fresh stink to them. Ramsey's nostrils stung with it and with the first hint of the smell within. Gutterson glanced at Ramsey. Ramsey nodded. Gutterson reached out and banged on the door with his fist.
    "Police!" he started to say. But with a soft, damp sound, the flood-rotten wood of the doorframe splintered. The door swung in and the word died half spoken.
    Another glance at Ramsey. Another nod. Gutterson drew his gun and charged the place. Ramsey more or less strolled in after him.
    "Oh...!" Gutterson strangled on a curse. The stench inside was hellish. He clapped a hand over his nose and mouth. "Fucking animals," he said through his fingers. "It's like living nose-deep in shit."
    He went off to search the place, moving tensely behind his gun.
    Ramsey, meanwhile, put his hands in his pants pockets and ambled into the living room. The smell was even worse in here. He tried breathing through his mouth but the air tasted bad, too. It was an awful brew: sewage, garbage, rotten food, maybe some dead things, drowned rats in the walls or a cat somewhere, and just the all-around putrescence of water damage. The whole place must've been under the flood at some point. The sofa had been soaked to a hulking mush. It looked as if it had melted and then resolidified. Chairs and tables were all overturned, broken and only half recognizable, what was left of them flung randomly about like body parts in a minefield. The walls were crumbling, broken through in places to the beams and insulation. The ceiling was mildewed and sagging as if it were about to come crashing down.
    "Clear!" Gutterson announced, coming in behind him.
    Ramsey had already found what he was looking for, was already standing in front of one moldy wall. Gutterson moved up beside him and the two cops stood shoulder to shoulder, looking at it.
    The wall was spray-painted and chalked from top to bottom, covered in tags, scrawled all over with ornate and sweeping gang handles and gang signs. Black skulls, green waves, gray thorns, red fire. Nicknames formed by tortuous swirls of color. Ramsey's eyes went over them. He knew the merciless thugs who made these marks and he despised them. He had always known them, always despised them. They were what his mother had hammered at him not to be. What the marines had sweated out of him. He had thought he'd lost his last sentimental traces of pity for them during his patrolmen years, seeing the creatures they were, cleaning their victims' entrails off the macadam. But it was strange. Looking at these marks today, he felt some distant stirring of ... compassion ... something. The flamelike rise of their embroidery seemed to him like supplicating hands raised to the sky, the masculine energy of their creation sounded in his mind like the soul-cries of fatherless young men, a great inarticulate bubble of boy-prayer desperately bursting under an empty heaven and then desperately gone.
    "Like pissing on a tree," said Gutterson. "Animals."
    Ramsey, with his air of quiet moral dignity and the writhing sourness inside him, didn't answer. Reluctantly, already knowing what he'd find, he shifted his gaze to the wall's low corner on his right hand, to the words stroked