Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (21 page)

I had to dodge people as I moved down the sidewalk. Word of the
fires was clearly spreading quickly through the neighborhood,
drawing people out into the streets. I heard one man insisting the
fires were the work of street gangs; another woman was screaming

about a gas leak.
I went down the sidewalk and across the street, toward the park,
my gun still holstered on my spine. I was counting the house numbers,
and I saw I was getting close. There it was, two houses down.
I approached the porch, slipping my hand along my spine, close to
the gun. My eyes were locked on the dark windows at the front of
the house, looking for movement.
Those windows blew out with a roar just as my foot touched

down in front of the door.

A shower of glass rushed past me, hard pebbles that didn’t feel
sharp even as they opened up my flesh. I dropped to my knees as
the first wave of heat followed the glass. Flames surged out of the
broken windows and up the front of the house. I covered my head
with my hands and began to roll backward, away from the heat.
I made two complete rolls and half of a third before I fell off
the porch and onto the lawn. As soon as I hit the grass, I began to
clamber away from the house, moving on my hands and knees but
trying to keep my face as low as possible, close to the cool earth
and unexposed to the terrific heat behind me. Across the street
more people were shouting; the crowd that had turned out to see
what all the commotion to the east had been about was now drawn
to the west by the new house in flames.
I went about twenty feet on the ground before finally rising and
running across the street. The neighbors parted as I arrived, keeping
their distance as if I had sprinted out of a quarantined plague
camp. They watched me warily as I dropped onto my ass on the
sidewalk and sat facing the fire, breathing heavily. My forearms
were covered with long scratches from the glass, and blood was beginning
to soak portions of my shirt.
“You all right, fella?” one woman asked, concern in her face. I
just nodded.
“What were you doing over there?” said another voice, this one
heavy with suspicion. “That house is vacant. What’s going on?
There are fires going all over the neighborhood.”
I twisted my neck and looked behind me at the speaker, an overweight
man with red hair and a face covered with freckles. I could
see the other bystanders react to his words; expressions changed
from surprise and concern to suspicion and anger.
“What were you doing over there?” someone else echoed. “That
house has been empty for a year. How’d a fire start in it?”
I braced the heels of my hands against the sidewalk and pushed
off it, getting back to my feet. As I did, my shirt slid up my back a
bit, and the woman who’d asked me if I was all right screamed.
“He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!”
Chaos. Half of the bystanders ran immediately, not bothering
to look for the gun or linger long enough to see if there was true
cause for alarm. Two or three others simply joined the first woman
in shouting, and the man with the red hair and freckles made a
clumsy lunge at me, arms outstretched like a child running to hug
his mother. I spun away easily and dipped under him, came up
with my shoulder in his solar plexus, a football lineman’s move. All
the breath left his lungs in one choked gasp and he staggered back
as I stepped free.
“Somebody get a cop!” another man yelled, and then I heard a
woman misinterpret this and shout that someone had just shot a
cop. By the time the police did get there, they’d have a hell of a time
extracting the truth of the situation from that group. But if one
of those cops was Padgett, I had no desire to wait around. I began
to run.

My truck was only a block or two away, still parked in the alley,
but I was running away from the crowd, which took me in the
opposite direction. I decided it would be best to stay on foot and
try to move as fast as possible. Five houses were burning in the
neighborhood now, and if the son of a bitch responsible stuck to
the houses on my list, there were just two more to go. I wondered
if Padgett would be turning up somewhere else along the
list.
I ran back across the street and past the park, ducked in behind
a house, and got the Neighborhood Alliance list from my pocket.
My fingers left streaks of blood on the paper as I unfolded it.
I had a good idea of where to go next. The first fire had been the
farthest east of any of the homes, and the two on Erin Avenue had
also gone up in east-to-west fashion. Whoever was doing this was
working for speed and efficiency, moving through the houses systematically,
working his way west.
The closest house left on my list was to the southwest, on West
Fortieth, between St. Mary’s Cemetery and Trent Park. If I ran
hard down Fulton to Clark, I might be able to make it.
If the second house on Erin Avenue was the smallest I’d seen on
the list, the house on West Fortieth was probably the largest. According
to the recorder’s-office list Amy had faxed me, this was
the last house Anita Sentalar had acquired. It was an old home,
set back from the road a little deeper than the neighbors, composed
of three stories of faded paint and broken windows. A
front door looked out over a short porch, but after my last experience
I decided to avoid the front steps and take a look around
the back.
The house faced west, and the south side was bordered by a sagging
chain-link fence. A narrow driveway led past the house on the
north side, ending in a detached one-car garage.
I walked down the driveway, my legs trembling beneath me
from the long, fast run I’d made. A streetlight was at the front of
the house, but at the rear it was quite dark. I had a flashlight in the
truck, but the truck was too far away to do me any good now. I approached
the back of the house.
Everything about the property was still and quiet, and those
qualities were accentuated by the commotion raging to the north
and east. By comparison, this stretch of the neighborhood now
seemed like a ghost town. I looked around the yard carefully and
saw nothing. The back door looked solid, and there was no sign
anyone had broken in. Maybe I’d been wrong in my assumption of
where the next fire would be set, or maybe whoever was responsible
for them had stopped at five. With the gathering police and
fire attention, not to mention the crowds on the streets, it wasn’t an
unreasonable idea.
I had nearly convinced myself of that when I stepped closer to
the back door and saw a single pane of glass was missing from the
window that made up the top half of the door. I slipped my arm
through it and found the lock easily. I twisted it and then tried
the knob. It didn’t turn, which meant the door had already been

unlocked.
I took three steps back from the house and gazed up at the dark
windows, looking and listening for any sign of movement, of
someone inside. Nothing. I reached behind me and took the Clock
out of its holster, then switched it from my right hand to my left
and reached back inside to unlock the door.
Inside, the house smelled musty. I took a few tentative steps,
shuffling my feet instead of lifting them and lowering them, because
I couldn’t see what lay ahead. Using this technique, I moved
forward, out of the small entryway and into what appeared to be a
kitchen. Here I paused for a few seconds and allowed my eyes to
adjust to the lack of light. When I could see well enough to make
out large obstructions, I began to move forward again. At the
doorway I stopped and slid my palm up and down the wall, searching
for a light switch. I found it, but when I flicked it up, nothing
happened. The electricity was out in the house, probably killed by a
long-inactive account.
I moved through an empty living room and came to the steps,
started up them. The first flight of steps ended on a narrow landing,
and above it a hall led away to what I assumed were bedrooms. I was
on the landing when I heard a shuffling noise, a slight rush of movement,
then a gentle thud. I knelt and listened for another sound. Just
when I was convinced there would be no more, I heard another
thud, this one even softer than the first, followed by a jingling noise.
I was halfway up the steps, staying low and leading with my left
hand, when something rushed at me. I shouted and brought the
Glock up, my finger tense on the trigger, as a large cat bounded
down the steps. It leaped over my shoulder and landed gracefully
on the steps behind me, turned and meowed loudly. A metal tag on
its collar glinted in the thin beam of light from the street, no doubt
the source of the jingling I’d heard. The cat gave me one more
yowl, then cut left and disappeared.
“Holy shit,” I said, taking a long, shaky breath and sagging
against the wall, every muscle in my body trembling with tension.
No wonder the thuds had been so soft—the cat probably weighed
about ten pounds. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand,
the sweat stinging in cuts and scratches left from the glass shards,
and then stood up, ready to move on now that I’d courageously
driven the cat away.
I found the rest of the house empty, left, and went back out to
stand in the yard. Now what? Should I wait to see if someone arrived
or continue moving through the list? After a moment’s debate,
I chose movement over patience. Joe wouldn’t have been
surprised.

The last house on my list was on Newark Avenue, near Trent Park.
Like the previous one, it was empty, dark, and still. The back door
was locked. Until I kicked it in.
I cleared the lower level and walked for the stairs. This was the
darkest house yet, and I didn’t see the steps clearly until I ran into
the banister with my shoulder. Like the rest of the house, the steps
were wooden and old, and when my weight settled on each one,
there was a soft creaking, like farmhouse shutters swinging in a
gentle breeze.
At the top, I moved quickly down a short hall and found two
closed doors. I opened one and stepped in, cursing the darkness.
There wasn’t enough light from the street to help in this house. I
felt around the wall until my hand hit a sink. This would be the
bathroom. I stepped back into the hall and pulled the door shut,
then tried the next one. A bedroom.
Something creaked beneath me, and I tensed up immediately,
then relaxed and laughed softly. Hadn’t I learned anything from
the cat? No need to overreact. The laugh died fast as I heard more
sounds from below and realized that someone had entered the
ground floor of the house, walking confidently, without fear of
making noise.
I stayed in the bedroom for a minute, listening to the clomping
steps beneath me and wondering if the intruder would try to come
up the stairs. Then I eased the door open, gently as possible, and
stepped back into the hall. My night vision had adapted, and I
could see the steps clearly. I moved toward them, my left hand
searching the wall for the railing. Just as I found it, I became aware
of something that scared me far more than the cat had—a heavy
smell of kerosene coming from the ground floor of the house.
Fear is a product of the senses. I’d experienced fear many times,
but before it had always been the result of something seen or felt
physically. This new sensation, of standing alone in the dark and
literally smelling danger, froze me for a moment. I stood on the
stairs with my right hand on my gun, my left tight on the railing,
feeling like an animal in a cave, sniffing the air for signs of hostility.
Then my brain finally kicked my body into gear, and I started
down the stairs much faster than I’d come up them. I was no
longer worried about proceeding quietly; my only priority now was
getting out.
I made it all of four steps before flame touched fuel somewhere
below me. There was one loud puff, like a gust of air forced out of
a plastic bag, followed quickly by a crackling roar. I reached the
landing just as the flames crawled up the walls of the ground floor,
and for the first time I saw the dark old house illuminated. The
front door was partially obstructed by flames, but I knew that my
best chance—my only chance—was to rush through them, hit that
door, and pray I could find the lock and turn it quickly.
In the interest of speed, I tried to leap from the middle landing
all the way to the bottom of the steps, intending to hit the ground
running for the door. I didn’t make it. My leap carried me down
about seven of the ten steps, and it turned out to be a poor idea.
The old, rotten wood that had creaked so ominously under me on
the way up the steps broke with this much greater impact. My left
foot slid across the surface, free, but my right foot plunged into the
step between the shattered boards and sank up to the ankle. It
caught and held as my weight and momentum continued forward,
and I went down hard.
I hit the floor with my hands held out to keep me from landing
directly on my face, and the Glock slid free and skittered across the
floor toward the flames. My kneecap connected with the edge of
the bottom step, and a current of pain rode through my leg, followed
instantly by a numb sensation. The flames from the walls
were spreading across the floor now, toward the stairs, and I was on
my stomach, pinned by my ankle.
Rolling away from the flames and lifting my arms to cover my
face, I jerked my numb leg, trying to wrench my foot free. One of
the broken boards cut a furrow in my flesh, but I didn’t get loose.
For the second time in just a few seconds I felt like an animal: first
smelling danger in the dark, now caught with my foot in a trap.
Something moved to my right. I rolled back onto my left shoulder,
sending another wave of pain through my ankle as it twisted
against the pressure of the boards that held it, and tried to stretch
my hand out for the gun. I couldn’t see anything now because I
couldn’t bear to keep my eyes open this close to the searing heat of
the fire. All around me was the smell of fuel and burning wood,
and an incredible, oppressive heat.
A hand on my leg. Now I shouted and lashed out with my arms,
trying to strike. I caught nothing but air. The hand twisted hard
against my leg, and then my foot was free and I was sliding all the
way to the floor. My hand brushed against my gun, and I’d
wrapped my fingers around it and begun to turn back to the steps
when I was suddenly lifted easily into the air, turned, and set back
on my feet. The flames surged against us, closer now than ever, and
I squeezed my eyes shut and began to move, one hand on my gun
and the other clutching the shirt of the man who’d freed my foot.
I had no idea who he was, but he was moving purposefully
through the heat, pulling me along, and right now that was all I
needed to know.
We went through the living room, stumbling and staggering,
and then the other man pulled up short, leaned into my ear, and
said, “Duck!”
He put both hands in the middle of my back as I dipped my
chin against my chest and then he shoved me forward with such
strength that I felt my feet leave the floor once again as I sailed out
through an open door. Cool air rolled over me a half second before
I fell forward onto the pavement.
The heat was behind me now but still close, and I got upright
quickly and began to stagger away from the house. I opened my
eyes again but saw only shadows and flashes of light, and just as I
was thinking that I’d better slow down before I hit something, I hit
something. My skull clanged against some object of much greater
density—wood, stone, steel?—and then I was falling backward
into blackness.