Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (28 page)

“He was alive when they put him in the ambulance, and he was
alive when they got him to the hospital,” I said. “All I’ve heard
since then is that he’s in surgery. They’re not telling me more. But
it’s been a hell of a long time, and nobody’s come out to say he’ll be
okay. He can thank me for that. I put him into it.”
She shook her head. “Don’t do that to yourself, Lincoln,” she
said, her voice soft. “Don’t.”
“It’s true, Amy. This one had nothing to do with him, and he’s
on an operating table while I’m out here. It’s not right.”
She leaned down, looked into my eyes. “Why did you start investigating
this to begin with?”
I waved her off and turned away. I didn’t want to have the conversation
where someone told me it wasn’t my fault.
“Well?” she insisted.
I sighed. “Because Ed had been my friend once, Amy. Because
he’d been a good friend.”
“Same thing Joe would say about you. You wanted to help your
friend; he wanted to help his. So it’s okay for you to use that as motivation,
but not okay for him?”
I braced my elbows on my knees and ran both hands over my
face, took a deep breath, but didn’t speak.
“Don’t blame yourself for what happened to Joe. It’s not going
to help anything. And it’s stupid.”
Blunt. That was Amy.
“I heard it was Padgett?” she said after a moment’s silence.
I nodded. “Another guy with him, as yet unidentified.”
I told her about Cancerno then, and about Gajovich, and Alberta
Gradduk. It felt good to talk, better than I’d thought it could
after so many rehashings with police already. Maybe that was
because talking gave me a break from thinking. Made the minute
hand on the clock on the wall slide by a little quicker, a little easier.
“So you believe what Cancerno told you?” she said.
I shrugged. “It made sense. Some of it has to be true, I think. It
fit well.”
“Joe agreed?”
“He thought the truth was probably somewhere in the middle.
That’s where it usually tends to be.”
“Cancerno will kill Corbett if he can find him?”
I nodded again. “I got that feeling, yes. But he was hoping I’d
find him. Save him the trouble.”
“Mr. Perry?”
The voice came from behind me, and I sat up and turned around
to see a doctor standing there. He was wearing surgical scrubs and
glasses, and he put his hand out when I turned to him. When I
shook it, I saw his hands were long and thin, and strong. He was
maybe sixty, with gray hair and perfect posture.
“James Crandall. I’ve been attending to your partner for the last
eight hours.” He nodded at Amy.
I got to my feet, searching his face for an indication of what
news he’d come to share. It displayed no emotion.
“He is not,” said Dr. James Crandall, “in good shape. That said,
he is in rather remarkable shape for what he has endured. There
were two gunshot wounds, and both were serious. They alone
might have killed him, even had medical attention been immediate.
Instead, he was plunged into a polluted river.”
It seemed there was nothing anchoring me to the ground. I
could feel my feet on the floor, but the rest of me seemed disconnected,
like a balloon pulled free from its tether. I forced myself to
keep my eyes on Crandall’s.
“The chest wound caused some serious blood loss,” he said.
“There was arterial damage, massive trauma. We’ve stabilized it,
but there’s no guarantee his body will be able to respond. Sometimes,
they simply cannot recover from trauma like that.”
I tried to nod.

“The second wound,” he continued, “was in the shoulder, and
also quite serious. The bullet lodged between the upper and middle
branch of the nerve trunks—they’re called the brachial plexus— that give movement and sensations to the muscles of the chest,
shoulders, and arms. It also damaged an artery in his shoulder. I
was able to remove the injured portion of the artery and perform
an artificial graft. That was a five-hour process, in itself. If it
works, it may save his arm.”
“May,” I said.
He nodded. “The arm could be lost. That is a possibility I have
to acknowledge at this point. I hope it won’t be the case.”
“But he’ll live.”

Crandall’s eyes never left mine. “He might. As I said, the chest
trauma was massive. The blood loss was severe. His heart is strong
for a man of his age, but it has still been around for sixty years.
Sometimes, they simply cannot take the trauma.”
I didn’t come close to managing the nod this time.
“I’m going back to him now,” Crandall said. “They told me he has
no family, but that you were here. I wanted to talk to you directly.”
“Thank you,” I said, but my voice was not my own.
He gave a curt nod, turned on his heel, and moved back down
the corridor. He walked confidently and with purpose. He was a
man of gifts, a man who could save lives. But he had lost lives before,
too. Even the best surgeons did.

Hours passed. I stayed in my chair, and Amy sat with me.
We talked less. The police had not come to find me again, and I
had not heard from Richards. Amy was struggling to stay awake. I
told her to go home and get some sleep.
“No way, Lincoln.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I hear something. It’s almost two in the
morning, Ace. Go get some rest.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll fall asleep eventually.”
She didn’t want to go, but she also didn’t want to argue with me.
After a minute, she got to her feet.
“Call me as soon as you hear anything new,” she said.
“I will.”
She leaned down and gave me a hug, kissed me on the forehead,
and then left. I was alone again in the empty waiting room, watching
the clock.
My thoughts returned to Mitch Corbett. Had he set us up? If
Cancerno was to be believed, Corbett and Padgett had worked in
tandem before. But trusting a guy who made a life running every
hustle in the book was a big if.
I found myself hoping Cancerno knew where Corbett was.
Hoping someone else had been able to succeed where I had failed,
and that Cancerno had already finished his own task. I’d believed
his sincerity about that more than any other part of his story. If he
found Corbett, he would kill him.
It wasn’t going to be easy to find him, though. Joe and I were
good, and we hadn’t come close. And knowing Corbett’s relationship
with Cancerno changed things. Maybe he had more money
than anybody had known. Maybe he’d swindled a cool million off
Cancerno and bailed, and that was why Cancerno wanted him
dead. That could change things dramatically. Explain why even our
gifted spook in Idaho hadn’t been able to help us. Money changes
everything. The two hardest people to find are those with plenty
of money to run with, and those with none at all.
Joe’s idea about checking Joseph A. Marsh had been a good one.
Assuming Corbett didn’t have money, it had been perfect. Where
else would he go without any cash, with no family to take him in?
His options would have been slim, and finding someplace— anyplace—to wait the storm out while he tried to come up with a
plan would have been hard. The Neighborhood Alliance properties
offered him that, and the school was the best option of the lot.
Remove that from the list, and who the hell knew where he’d gone.
The thought of the list stopped me cold. The night of the fires,
I’d tried to get ahead of Corbett by moving through the list of
Neighborhood Alliance properties. Where had the list come from,
though? Amy. And she’d gotten it from the county recorder’s office.
The houses had nothing to do with Cancerno’s crew until they
were instructed to begin working on them. One house, the big one
on West Fortieth, had been purchased just a week before Sentalar
died. It was almost certain Cancerno’s team wasn’t ready to work
on it yet, and quite possible that they didn’t even know about it.
But Corbett had been with Sentalar in that last week, touring the
neighborhood. He might have known.
“Shit,” I said aloud. “I saw it. I saw the damn thing.”
Mitch Corbett had a cat. There’d been a litter box in the furnace
room at his house. The door to the furnace room had been closed.
If he’d left the cat in the house, he would have left that door open.
Wouldn’t want the cat pissing all over the rug.
There hadn’t been a cat in Corbett’s house, but I’d seen one in
the vacant house on West Fortieth. Hard to forget the little beast,
considering I’d damn near shot it. It hadn’t been a stray, either, but
healthy and well fed, with a collar that had reflected a glitter of
light when I’d leveled my gun at it.

It was five past two when I left the hospital to find Mitch Corbett.

CHAPTER
28

I didn’t have my truck at the hospital, so I had to walk it. The
house was about two miles from MetroHealth. I walked down the
empty sidewalks, keeping my hands in my pockets and my shoulders
hunched against the light chill the storms had left in the night
air. A car cruised past me slowly, a couple kids sticking their heads
out of the windows and yelling at me. I didn’t look up. One of
them tossed a bottle that hit ten feet away and shattered. They
laughed and drove on.
Although I was feeling confident that Corbett had been in the
house, I wasn’t sure he’d still be there. The day after the fires, the
cops would have had to put some scrutiny on the Neighborhood
Alliance. They would have checked the other houses, probably accompanied
by an arson team. If they’d flushed Corbett out, would
he have returned? All I could do was hope that he had.
The house on West Fortieth looked just as it had the last time
I’d visited it in the night—dark, lonely, and forgotten. A neighborhood
lived on around it, but this house was no longer part of that.
I approached the back door.
I didn’t have a gun. My Glock had been lost in Rocky River, and
I hadn’t gone back to the office or to my apartment before making
this trip. I wasn’t in a mood to let that worry me, though.
The door wasn’t locked. The knob turned freely in my hand. I
pushed the door open about six inches, then stepped to the side,
and listened. There was no sound of movement. I gave it a few seconds
longer, then pushed the door all the way open and stepped
inside. I remembered the layout and moved fairly quickly through
the kitchen and into the living room. As I entered, I heard a soft
thump and moved to the side again. A car passed outside, and light
slid over the room momentarily. It was enough to show me a familiar
gray-and-white cat on the floor, looking up with wide eyes that
shone in the darkness, and a large man stretched out on the floor
under a thin blanket, a handgun beside him.
I shuffled close to him, and the cat meowed loudly. The man
didn’t stir. I felt along the dirty floorboards with my left hand,
searching for the gun. I touched something else and discovered it
was a metal-handled flashlight. I took it in my right hand, then
kept searching till I found the gun and put it in my left hand.
When I picked the gun up, the cat yowled again, louder this time.
The man on the floor grunted softly and sat up. I hit the flashlight
button and shot the beam into his eyes.
“Rise and shine, Mr. Corbett.”
He covered his eyes with one arm and swept the other across the
floor, searching for the gun.
“I’ve already got it,” I said, and he stopped moving. His eyes
were shielded and he squinted, and still he couldn’t see me, because
I was standing behind the light.
“I’m Lincoln Perry,” I said. “And we’re going to do some talking.
Talk well enough—and that means honest enough—and you
might not die tonight, Corbett.”

He sat on the floor with his back against the wall while I stood in
front of him. He was a big man, over six feet and carrying probably
220 pounds. He wore grimy jeans and a T-shirt, and a new
growth of beard covered his face. The cat had curled up beside
him, and he stroked its fur absently while he talked.
“Whatever Cancerno told you is a lie. The only thing he knows
about the truth is how to avoid it. Ed was my friend. You think I
had anything to do with what happened with him, you’re out of
your mind.”
“You know what did happen, though?”
“Most of it.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here, instead of down at a police
station trying to help before more people die?”
“You just told me,” Corbett said, “that it was a cop who shot
your partner.”
“Yes.”
He laughed softly. “So there you go, man. There you go. First
Anita went down, then Ed, and I knew it was time for my ass to
clear out. Not that I expected to make it long. I got no money, no
place to go. And Jimmy Cancerno is not going to let me stay gone
for long. When the man finds me . . .” He shook his head. “Dying
isn’t going to be easy for me. He’ll make damn sure of that. Take
his time.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I put it all in motion, man. I told the old stories.
And he knows that. Everything that’s happened since? Jimmy’s
holding me personally responsible. I guarantee that.”
“Explain it. If you put it all into motion, I want to know how.
Every last detail, Corbett.”
He ran a hand over his scruffy beard and sighed. My night vision
had adapted to the point that I could see him even without the
flashlight. The empty living room smelled heavily of dust and mold.
“It goes back a ways,” he said. “For you to understand what Eddie
got into, you got to listen a bit.”
“I’ve been through a lot to hear the story. I’m sure as hell not going
to get impatient now.”

His eyes searched for me in the darkness, and he nodded once.
“Okay. Then I’ll get to telling it.”
It started, Mitch Corbett told me, when Norm Gradduk lost his
job. It hadn’t been in April, which was what Norm had offered to
his family. It had been the previous October. For six months, Norm
had left the house every day pretending he was on his way to work.
In reality, he was on his way to the Hideaway or another drinking
establishment of choice. Norm had gone through a handful of jobs
in the two years leading up to that, and at his last firing Alberta
had hit the roof. He didn’t want to deal with that scene again, so
he decided he’d just keep things quiet till he found another job.
“Problem was,” Corbett said, “he didn’t find another job.”
So Norm needed cash, and a steady supply of it. Didn’t want to
go for unemployment, though. There was pride at stake, and of
course it was more likely Alberta would find out the truth if he did
go on the county. Maybe even leave him. One of Norm’s friends,
maybe Scott Draper’s dad, maybe somebody else, introduced him
to a neighborhood guy named Jimmy Cancerno. Told him this was
a man who could give him some cash, a short-term loan, a long
term loan, whatever he needed. Cancerno was more than cooperative
when the two men met; he was downright friendly. Slapped
Norm on the shoulder and told him the money was his. They’d
work out terms of repayment later, he said with a wink. At first,
Norm borrowed as little as possible, just enough to keep the electric
bill paid and food on the table. But the money was given so
freely, without hassle or heartache, that it also became easier to ask
for it. The weekly loans increased. So did the debt. And Norm’s
drinking and gambling.
“You know much about Cancerno?” Corbett asked me, his voice
low and quiet in the dark.
“Big player in the neighborhood, I understand.”
Corbett laughed that unamused laugh of his again. “He runs
this neighborhood, man. Owns it. And the loan-sharking was just
a different sort of investment plan for him. He wasn’t counting on
getting the cash back. What he wanted was favors. He wanted to
have guys who owed him so bad, they’d be willing to do a lot of
things for him. Do things that would make Jimmy a hell of a lot
more in the long run than what the guys owed him on the loans.
He liked to set the hook, Jimmy did. Still does.”