Sorrow's Anthem

CHAPTER 29

The name rocked me, but it shouldn’t have. After all, until that day I’d never seen Cancerno without Draper at his side. It explained the phone call I’d gotten from Scott the morning after Ed died, too, the sudden change of heart he’d shown. Cancerno had probably ordered him to bring me down so they could see how much Ed had shared before Padgett had crushed him under the Crown Victoria.

“You’re sure?” I asked Corbett, even as all of the facts supporting it slid through my mind.

He nodded once. “Trust me, I got a good look at the man. No doubt in my mind at all. Jimmy sent him out because Jimmy wants to use me to explain his way out of everything surrounding the Neighborhood Alliance. Burn down the houses, blame it on me, and he’s done. Well, he’s got to find me and kill me, first. But then he’s done.”

I stood up. A muscle in my back clenched hard at the movement, stopping me before I got upright. I winced and pushed past it, taking a deep breath that made the muscle ache worse. I’d been in a car accident, dragged a lifeless man through a river, and had no sleep. No wonder my body was protesting.

“You’ve got to talk to the police, Corbett. I’ve already got them looking at Gajovich, and Padgett’s dead. You can’t just hide here, waiting for other people to figure it out.”

He didn’t say anything.

“People have been murdered,” I said. “No one is going to care about what you did with the Neighborhood Alliance. They’re going to care about taking Cancerno down, and Gajovich. Not about you.”

He was scared, though. A guy like Corbett, who’d spent years working cons and scams, seeing corrupt cops and prosecutors, did not like the idea of solving things through official channels. But he was going to have to do it.

“I’m calling a detective named Cal Richards,” I said. “And you’re going to talk to him. You can trust this one.”

He nodded, slowly. “All right.”

“One more question—how the hell did you know so much about what happened between Cancerno and Padgett and Alberta Gradduk, anyhow?”

For moment, he didn’t respond. Then he lifted his head and looked at me.

“Remember how I told you they put a gun to Norm’s head while Padgett and Cancerno had their fun?”

“Yes.”

“I held the gun.” He did not drop his head. Did not look away. “By then, I owed Jimmy a hell of a lot more than Norm Gradduk ever did. And I’d been working for him for a while. And before Norm killed himself, I burned Solich out of business, like Norm was supposed to.”

“And told the cops it was him,” I said.

“Yes.”

I exhaled loudly and shook my head. “Did Ed know?”

“Yes. It’s how I started the story when I told it to him.”

I stood and stared at him.

“I changed a lot over the years,” Corbett said softly. “Never forgot that night, Perry. And then when Ed started working with us . . . and, man, we got along. He was a good guy. One of the best I’ve ever known. And loyal. If you were his friend, he’d break his back to help you. No questions asked.”

“Yes,” I said. “He would.”

“A time came when I knew I had to tell him. Had to. Man was my friend, and he didn’t know. And he was working for Jimmy, and didn’t know. And that wasn’t right.”

It had been a hard story for Corbett to tell, all right. Ed hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d told me that.

“He listened to it all, and he didn’t turn on me, not right then, and not after,” Corbett said. “Can you imagine? The things that happened to his family, you know? The things that I was a part of. And all he did was thank me for telling him.”

I watched the shadows on the opposite wall. “Could be he’d learned something about holding grudges.”

“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Corbett said. “But now? Shit. I’d do anything to take it back. Because look what it started. Look what it did.”

I shook my head. “No. You needed to tell him, Corbett. It needed to be settled. Ed started to settle it, and now we’re going to finish it. You and me. You’re talking to Cal Richards. Telling him everything you told me. You’re going to do that because you’re too much of a man not to. You can’t hide from it anymore.”

“Okay,” he said, his voice low and sad. He snapped his fingers, and out of nowhere the cat emerged again, purring. It sat beside him, and he scratched its head.

“You know,” I said, “you should have left the cat at home. It certainly wasn’t helping you hide.”

“He’s fifteen years old,” Corbett said, as if that explained everything. “Couldn’t leave him.”

“I’ll have someone come to get you.”

He shook his head. “No. I’m not going to do it that way. You say I can trust this guy, Richards, then I’ll trust Richards. But you’re not going to send them out to get me, put me in handcuffs. You set up a meet with him, and I’ll be there.”

I thought about it, then nodded.

“Tomorrow morning, Richards and I will come here. Just the two of us. You’ll be here?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I believed him. He was not a man who had any energy left to hide, or to run.

“I’m leaving now,” I said. “And I’m taking your gun.”

“Where you going?”

“To see an old friend.”

The neighborhood was silent when I stepped out of the back door of the house on West Fortieth Street with Corbett’s revolver tucked in my waistband. There was a pay phone up the street. I could use it to call Cal Richards. I could send him down to the Hideaway, let him pick up Draper.

I walked past the phone, though, moving north toward Clark Avenue at that time when the night seemed to have forgotten to which day it belonged. The police would get their chance at Draper soon enough. Right now, I wanted my own. I wanted to hear him explain it. To understand how he’d let it happen.

It was past three when I got to the Hideaway, and even Clark, usually an active street, was still. The bar would have been closed for nearly an hour now, but I was hoping to find Draper there, anyhow. People in the bar business typically go to bed about the time most of us wake up.

I walked up the sidewalk to the front door, over cracked stone steps where I’d once sat with Ed and Draper and watched the regulars drift in and out of the bar. Now I stood on them alone and tugged on the heavy door, found it locked. I pulled my hand back and knocked several times, the enormous piece of wood soaking the sound up even when I pounded hard with a closed fist.

Nobody came to the door. It was hard to make a good, loud knock on that front door, though, and if Draper was in the back, it was no surprise that he hadn’t heard it. I walked around the building and down the alley that ran beside it. The back door was familiar to me; when Ed and Draper and I used to snag a couple bottles of booze from Draper’s old man’s supply, that was how we made our exit.

The back door was open. I stepped through it and into a narrow, musty corridor with rubber mats on the floor. A couple empty kegs were stacked along the wall to my right, and it was dark. I started to yell out for Draper, but stopped. Something felt wrong about the place.

I moved slowly down the hall, sidestepping the kegs, and trying to keep quiet. I didn’t hear anything from the bar, and that bothered me. If Draper was still here, it seemed he’d be cleaning up from one day and getting ready for the next, moving chairs and adjusting kegs and filling the coolers with bottles of beer. Instead it was completely still.

There was a door to my left that would take me out of the hall and into the back portion of the dining room. I passed it up and continued until the hall took a sharp, ninety-degree turn and opened out behind the bar. I had Corbett’s revolver in my hand now, held against my thigh. I stepped around the corner of the hall and raised the gun as Scott Draper came into view.

He was sagging forward in front of the tall shelves that stood behind the bar, his hands over his head, cuffed to the heavy wooden shelves that were lined with bottles of liquor. He’d been cuffed just high enough that when he fell forward, his knees hung a few inches off the floor, increasing the pressure and pain in his wrists. He hung there now, his body limp, head down, and I could see blood dripping off his face and onto the floor. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat and blood, and even from ten feet away I could see swollen knots rising on his face. While I watched, Jimmy Cancerno stepped forward with a gun in his hand and swung the butt of the gun into Draper’s face. It connected without the hard crack of metal hitting bone that I’d expected; instead, it was more like the sound of someone stepping on a wet sponge. That gave me an immediate idea of just how swollen Draper’s face already was.

The scene in front of me was wildly different from anything I could have expected when I stepped around the corner, but I didn’t pause to consider it. Instinct took over. Draper had been a friend once, and moving to help him wasn’t a decision so much as a reflex action.

“Not surprised you had to put him in handcuffs before you had the balls to hit him, Cancerno,” I said, taking another step forward and pointing the revolver at his head.

It wouldn’t be like Cancerno to travel alone to take on somebody like Draper, but I couldn’t see anyone else yet, so pointing the gun at him was my best bet. I stepped forward some more, clearing the edge of the wall so I could see into the rest of the room. That was when Ramone came around the corner and lifted a shotgun at me.

I switched the revolver’s muzzle quickly from Cancerno to Ramone, bringing it to bear on his chest before he could get his gun high enough to fire, and he froze for a moment, just a few feet away with the shotgun at his waist. Even while I stopped his advance, I knew I was screwed. He and Cancerno were positioned at opposite angles from me, and they were close. Keeping both of them at bay was going to be difficult.

“Get out of here, Lincoln,” Scott Draper said, the words sounding as if they’d been spoken through a mouthful of newspaper as he spit them out through busted, bloodied lips.

“I’d prefer it if he stays,” Cancerno said, and there was a flash of motion as he turned to face me, reversing the gun in his hand so it was no longer held by the barrel.

“Keep the gun down, Cancerno,” I said, taking a step back, close to the wall, and shifting the gun quickly from Ramone to Cancerno and then back to Ramone as he started to raise his gun again. I had to get at least one of them disarmed, fast, or this was going to be over all too quickly. My choice was Ramone—he would be the better shooter, the better fighter, and he was closer.

Keeping an eye on Cancerno, who was walking around the bar toward me, I took a few shuffling steps toward Ramone. All the lights were off in the bar except for one thin fluorescent lamp above the mirrors, and behind Ramone the dining room was dark. I hoped they didn’t have more backups waiting there.

“Put it down, Ramone,” I said, and he stood completely still, looking unconcerned. In Ramone’s eyes, I had already lost this fight because I hadn’t shot him as soon as I’d seen him. He was a killer, and his mind worked in a kill-or-be-killed fashion. I had failed to kill him, and now he was sure that I would die before this was over.

I was about to repeat my command when I saw Cancerno lift his gun quickly to shoulder level. I jerked the barrel of the revolver away from Ramone and fired a quick snap shot at Cancerno almost exactly as he fired at me. Both of us missed. Even as I was pulling the trigger, through, I was diving to my left, into Ramone, knowing that I had to prevent him from getting that shotgun up and firing at close range.

I hit him in the chest with my shoulder, but he’d been prepared for my lunge, and rather than attempt to bring his gun up, he dropped it, wrapped one arm around my head, and went with my momentum. We fell together, Ramone clutching my head and neck, and landed painfully on the floor of the bar. I tried to roll onto my right shoulder immediately and bring my gun around on him, but Cancerno was running toward us, trying to get a clear look at me, so I leaned back and fired two rounds into the glass mirrors behind the bar, making him drop. That was too much time to give Ramone, though, and he was on his knees, swinging his fist at my face.

He caught me high on the side of my head, as I had just enough time to turn my face away. It was a hard punch, and the next one was even harder. I swung the gun at his mouth, but he blocked it with his forearm and the gun flew from my hand. I grabbed at his chest with both hands as he threw another punch, and another, both connecting with my forehead.

Then it was over, Cancerno standing above me with a Beretta 9 mm pointed at my face. Ramone threw one last punch, this one splitting the skin above my right eye, then climbed off me and retrieved his shotgun.

“Thanks for coming by,” Cancerno said, and kicked me in the ribs. I rolled onto my stomach and tried to push myself up, but he kicked me again and pushed the Beretta against my skull.

“Stay down,” he said, and then to Ramone, “Get him over with Draper.”

“No more handcuffs,” Ramone said.

“That’s all right.”

Ramone lifted me off the floor by my hair, pushing the barrel of a gun I assumed was Mitch Corbett’s revolver in my spine. He shoved me past the bar and then kicked me behind the knees, making me fall forward. I caught myself with my palms out, but he ground his boot into my back, shoving me down on my stomach again.

I looked up at Scott Draper, and it took a great deal of effort to keep my eyes on him. His face was a pulpy mess of blood and bruises. I saw his front teeth hanging loose and chipped behind torn lips, and his nose had been smashed flat against his face. Blood dripped from various areas of his face and fell onto the rubber mat below him in slow, steady drops. His eyes, though, were remarkably clear. Clear, and angry. More than once while we were growing up—and even a few times in the last week—I’d had the passing thought that Draper was a man who could take a hell of a lot of punishment before he stayed down. Now I had proof of that hanging in front of me.

Draper coughed, and a fine spray of blood flew from his lips and landed on the back of my hand, covering it with tiny crimson droplets. Ramone stepped away and Cancerno stood over me and kicked me again in the side. He hit me directly in the ribs, but he wasn’t a powerful man, and the blow didn’t do the damage he’d hoped to inflict.

“Glad you made it, Perry,” he said. “You’re the other one I wanted to see tonight.”

“You’re done, Cancerno,” I said, not bothering to twist my head so I could see him. “Padgett got shot, and the half of the police department that you don’t control is going to see Gajovich right now.”

“No shit?” he said. “Well, then, I guess that makes this encounter all the more important. Because I’d hate to go to jail with unsettled scores.”

Cancerno paced to the end of the bar where Ramone stood, then whirled back to Draper and me.

“You guys like fires, right?”

He reached up with the hand that wasn’t holding the gun and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the shelf above Draper. I started to get to my hands and knees when he did it, but Ramone stepped forward and pointed his gun at me.

“I know Draper likes fires,” Cancerno said, smashing the top of the vodka bottle against the bar and shattering the glass. He turned it upside down and poured the alcohol out on top of us. It splattered the floor and my legs and Draper’s bloody face. Draper rose up higher on his toes, the handcuffs still binding him to the heavy oak shelves. It was a massive, one-piece unit filled with shelves for liquor, with mirrors set behind the shelves, and stood at least eight feet tall. Draper’s cuffs were looped around one of the solid crosspieces that separated the two sides of shelves. The wood was not going to break, no matter how hard he pulled.

“Draper likes fires more than he likes his life,” Cancerno said, breaking another bottle and emptying it around us. “That seem like a good trade to you, Perry?” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “What about you, Ramone?”

“Doesn’t sound like a good trade,” Ramone said.

“I didn’t think so, either. But it appears this prick”—Cancerno threw a bottle that just missed Draper’s head before breaking on the shelves—“thought it was a good one.”

Cancerno stopped picking up bottles and stared at me. “I own this neighborhood. But I was done with it. Bigger things in mind. So you bastards had real, real bad timing. Gradduk could have been the only one to die. I didn’t need to send his friends to join him.”

“It’s done, Cancerno,” I said again.

“Exactly.” He nodded. “It is done. But I’m going to be the one to finish it. Understand that, Perry? And Draper here just designed your own graves. Because with all the fires in this neighborhood last night, one more isn’t going to stand out.” He poured a bottle of Crown Royal in a circle on the floor at my feet.

Ramone stood behind the bar, keeping the revolver pointed at us. Cancerno was still working his way down the length of the bar, grabbing bottle after bottle, breaking them, and then pouring the liquor on the floor.

I’d kept moving, still trying to turn my body and prepare to get on my feet when the time came, and apparently I’d gotten too close to that for Ramone’s liking. He fired a round into the shelves just above my head, the bottles exploding, glass and liquor landing on the floor around me.

I stopped moving, and Ramone smiled, showing his teeth.

Ramone’s round was one more in addition to those Cancerno and I had fired earlier, but I wasn’t too hopeful that they would have attracted the attention of the neighbors. The Hideaway’s ancient, thick walls absorbed noise better than the most expensive soundproofing panels. Draper’s dad used to brag about how loud he could turn the jukebox up before you’d hear a bit of it on the sidewalk.

Beside me, Draper shifted position again, sliding his heels across the floor until they actually rested against the bottom of the shelf unit. The chain on his handcuffs jingled softly as he pulled it tight on his wrists. I looked away from him, feeling pity. When Cancerno lit this place, Draper had nowhere to go. Not that I’d make it far—Ramone stood just ten feet away, and his gun was trained on me. At this distance, he’d kill me before I even came out of my crouch.

Cancerno had assumed a position at the far end of the bar, his back to the hallway that led out to the back door. He’d finished spreading alcohol and stood with a bar rag in one hand and his revolver in the other. Watching him, Ramone set the revolver down on top of the bar and lifted his shotgun again, leveling it across the surface of the bar, the ugly muzzle pointed right at me. No need to worry about accuracy now; the shotgun would cut me in two if I tried to move.

“You’re right, Perry,” Cancerno said. “It’s all done.” He shifted the bar rag so he held it in the same hand that was clenched around his revolver. He reached into his pocket with the other hand, and when he withdrew it, a steel Zippo was in his fingers. He flipped the top off the lighter and flicked the wheel with his thumb. A short flame appeared, and he touched it to the edge of the bar rag, which began to burn slowly.

I shifted my weight forward, onto my toes, preparing for a rush that would end with a shotgun blast, and behind me I could hear Draper tensing, the handcuffs scraping against the wood that held him.

“I don’t think so,” Ramone said, following my movement with the barrel of his gun. My fingers brushed against glass, and I squeezed them around the shattered neck of one of the bottles Cancerno had broken. My opportunity would come thanks to Cancerno, although he didn’t realize it yet. The fire wouldn’t kill me as fast as Ramone’s shotgun would, and the initial burst of flame might be more distracting to the shooter than to me. When Cancerno dropped that rag to the floor, I was going to be moving with the flames, right at Ramone’s throat, with that jagged glass in my hand.

“I hope this hurts like hell,” Cancerno said, holding the now-burning rag high in the air, grasping it with just two fingers, and I tensed every muscle, ready to spring forward when that rag hit the floor. That was when I heard Draper let out a grunt that sounded like an explosion as he suddenly lurched forward.

I am a strong man. I own a gym where many stronger men come regularly to hoist obscene amounts of weight. During my time on the narcotics beat, I saw men riding methamphetamine highs kick down doors and punch through walls as if they were not even there. Never, though, had I seen a display of raw strength comparable to the one Scott Draper offered in that moment at the Hideaway. With a single, swift-but-massive effort, he lunged forward and jerked with all his power at the handcuffs that held him to the shelves. Because Draper was so tall, they were fastened fairly high on the cabinet, well above the central point of balance. When Draper leaned into that savage jerk forward, the several hundred pounds of oak shelving and liquor bottles leaned with him, overbalanced, and fell forward.

Ramone had time to shoot. He had time, but the shelving unit was at least eight feet tall, and it was coming down right at his skull. He’d been focused on me because I’d been the only one with freedom to move, and when Draper lunged forward Ramone had to pivot to his left to bring the gun around to this new threat. By that time the massive wooden cabinet was falling, and when Ramone pulled the trigger, he took a full step back, trying to avoid taking all that weight on the top of his head. The combined pivot and step backward were enough, and the slug he fired missed us both, splintering through the cabinet about a foot to the right of Draper’s head as it came crashing down.

The bar saved us. The weight of the enormous cabinet would probably have killed us both, crushed us, if it had fallen directly onto our bodies. But because it was so tall, it landed against the bar, shedding glass and booze all over us, and held there, wedged at about a forty-five-degree angle.

Ramone was hidden from my sight now, but Cancerno had screamed something and jumped backward as the cabinet fell, throwing the rag at the same time. It caught the edge of the new obstruction provided by the fallen shelves and dropped to the floor. There was some alcohol there, but it missed the large pool Cancerno had spread earlier, and the eruption of flame was smaller than it might have been.

Staying on my hands and knees to avoid braining myself on the shelves that lay angled over my head, I scrambled for the end of the bar and Cancerno, bits of broken glass slicing into my flesh. I cleared the shelves as Cancerno brought his Beretta up, and I sprang forward, hitting him around the waist as he fired over me. The tackle drove us both down, and he landed on his back, his head snapping against the floor with a crack like a dropped cinder block. By the time I lifted myself off him he was already unconscious.

Behind me the fire was spreading. I had turned back to the flames, searching for Draper, when there was motion in the hallway behind me and a shot was fired through the air over my head.

I ducked and grabbed Cancerno’s Beretta as another shot was fired, this one blasting off part of the wall above me. Ramone must have found the revolver, because these shots were clearly rounds from a handgun and not slugs from his shotgun. I rolled onto my left shoulder and brought the Beretta up, looking for him. A shadow moved along the dark wall that separated the bar from the dining room, and I fired several shots in that direction. Then the shadow was gone, and I didn’t pursue. Draper was still pinned behind the bar, with the fire surging closer.

Crawling back to him from the way I’d come out was impossible now; the flames had devoured that end of the bar, the heat so intense I could only look with a sidelong glance, holding my arm up to shield my face. I ran around the front of the bar, switching the gun from my right hand to my left, then put my right palm on the surface of the bar and leaped, swinging myself over it, and onto the floor.

Draper was pulling furiously at his handcuffs, straining away from the fire that was now almost upon him. I ducked my head under the angled shelves and crawled to him. It was almost impossible to see anything now because I couldn’t keep my eyes open against the heat.

Relying on touch instead of sight, I felt for the handcuffs. The metal was hot when my fingers finally found it. I slid my free hand away, pressed the barrel of Cancerno’s Beretta against the thin central portion of the chain, and squeezed the trigger. Shards of metal and wood flew away, and I tugged at Draper’s hands, expecting them to come free. The cuffs held.

I put the muzzle of the gun back against the chain and fired again, and again. I was screaming until I choked on the acrid air. Unable to stand the heat anymore, I fell away, my hand still wrapped around Draper’s wrist. It took me a second to realize his wrist had come free with me.

Then we were on our feet and running out of the bar as flames surged behind us. Draper’s knees buckled and he started to go down, but I caught him and lifted him and then he seemed to find his balance. Clutching on to one another, we staggered out of the bar and into the dining room, which was also beginning to fill with smoke. The heavy front door loomed in front of us, and I hit it with my shoulder, but couldn’t get it to open. Draper found the bolt with one of his bloody hands, turned it, and then we fell forward, out of the bar, and onto the cool concrete of the front steps.

By now smoke was pouring out of the building, and windows ruptured with a soft popping noise that sounded harmless compared to the crackle of the flames. Draper and I scrambled out to the sidewalk on our hands and knees, gratefully gasping in breaths of fresh air. I tried to speak to him, but instead I fell onto my stomach, my chin bouncing off the concrete. I twisted onto my side on the cold, rough pavement of the sidewalk, watched the Hideaway burn, and waited for the sirens to begin.