The Identity Man by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online

slightest gesture with her head. He followed it and saw there was a door in the wall behind her.
    It was the second time that night a woman had helped him get away from the cops. He felt a passion of gratitude to her and to her entire sex, fools that they were for a man in trouble, fools that they had been for him all his life, he didn't know why. This, too, he expressed through his eyes when he looked up at her for the last time.
    But now, the four cops were coming fast across the street, their expressions alert, their hands on their holsters. Shannon closed his fingers around the bartender's keychain. He stood off his barstool and, as he did, the bartender lifted the flap in the bar to let him pass through. With a final glance over his shoulder, he saw the four oncoming cops reach the sidewalk just outside the Cocktail Hour. Then he pushed through the door behind the bar.
    He came into a narrow, crowded pantry. A long table filled the center of it. Shelves and boxes lined the walls. Shannon had to squeeze between the table and the boxes to get to the heavy metal door at the far end. The door was locked with a deadbolt. Shannon started flipping through the keys on the bartender's keychain, searching for the right one. He could hear the rock music playing in the bar, but he couldn't hear whether the police had come in yet. He thought they must have. And he thought the fat guys at the bar must've noticed him leaving. There wasn't a lot of time before the cops pushed into the pantry behind him. He fumbled hurriedly through the keys.
    There it was: the key he wanted. Quickly, he had the heavy door unlocked. He left the keys dangling there and pulled the door open.
    He stepped out into a parking lot. It was a dark expanse with only a single car parked in it. All over, in the cool night air, there were sirens—sirens coming from every direction, growing louder from every direction. Shannon's throat closed with desperation. He understood the truth now: they were all—all of them—coming for him.
    The metal door swung closed. Just before it shut with a clank, he heard the rock music grow louder as the pantry door burst open inside. The cops were right behind him.
    A moment later, he was running as fast as he could into the darkness.

FOR THREE DAYS he lived in a graveyard. It was on a cliff top overlooking the sea. There were acres and acres of gently rolling lawn. There were paved walkways winding through the grass. There were stones and steles, crosses, and the occasional statue rising white on the green hills amid shrubs and eucalyptus and palm trees. Shannon knew one of the groundskeepers here, a sad-eyed, egg-shaped dude named Hector Medeiros. They had done a few jobs together. Hector helped him hide out.
    During the daylight hours, Shannon kept out of sight in a mausoleum near the edge of the cliff. It was a small classical temple of white marble. Inside there was a stone bench against one wall. On the opposite wall there were square stone panels with brass plates on them. The plates had the names of the people whose corpses were behind the panels. There was a small window on another wall. It was stained glass, yellow with a dark yellow cross in the middle. You couldn't see much through it, only shapes moving when someone went by.
    Being in the mausoleum made Shannon jumpy and claustrophobic. The place was the size of a prison cell, only a few paces wide and long. He couldn't go out during the day because there were groundskeepers out there and visitors sometimes. He couldn't see through the window so he was constantly paranoid about someone approaching, someone coming in on him, even though Hector told him no one would. He gathered some sticks and whittled them with his pocketknife to calm his nerves. Even so, after the first day, he began to feel he was buried in here, the same as the dead people. Once, when he fell asleep on the stone bench, he had a dream the dead people had come out of the wall and were standing over