Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (3 page)

“And yet you drive down here as soon as you hear about this
shit? Feel the need to involve yourself?”
I understood his disbelief, because I was feeling it, too. But all I
could do was nod.
“Well, I guess that’s a hell of a nice thing for you to do,” he said.
“But I don’t know what to tell you, Lincoln. I don’t know where he
is. If he shows, I’ll tell him the same thing you’d tell him—to go
turn himself in.”
“If anybody can get in touch with him, Scott, it’s you. I’d like to
talk to him.”
He kept his eyes on the television but I could see the muscles in
his chest and shoulders tighten.
“Listen,” he said, “you already know how I feel about the way
you dicked Ed over to help your career. But you’ve stayed out of the
neighborhood and out my bar since then, and, shit, we were friends
once. Because of that I thought I’d do my damnedest to be cordial
when you showed up here. But you’re making that awfully hard,
Lincoln.”
“I appreciate the attempt at cordiality,” I said, “however poorly
executed.”
“Please don’t make me . . . ,” he began, but before he could get
any further, Ed Gradduk came down the stairs that led up to the
storeroom and shouldered his way past the crowd at the pool table.

CHAPTER
3

I watched Ed walk toward us, and when Draper saw my face, he
turned and swore under his breath.
Ed was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. There was blood on
the shirt and a nasty gash over his right eye. His hair was tousled
and long, and beneath it his face was tan and smooth. Not yet
thirty, and facing life in prison, if the jury went easy.
“A friend in need,” he shouted as he approached, and it took
only those four slurred words to let me know he was hammered.
“Where does that put me, Lincoln? I’m in need, my man, that’s for
damn sure. But you a friend? Shit.”
Draper put his hand out and caught Ed’s shoulder, trying to turn
him and send him back up the steps, but Ed shrugged it off. His
movements and his speech showed he was drunk, but his blue eyes
were sharp and piercing. When we were kids, people used to take
us for brothers, with the same dark blond hair and bright blue eyes.
What are you doing here?” he said.
“I heard you were in some trouble.”
'Some trouble? You jerking me off, man? Some trouble}” He
looked at Draper and laughed wildly, but Scott didn’t crack a smile.
He was glancing at the door, probably thinking that a cop could
step inside at any moment, that there might be one watching the
bar from the street.
'He’s taking a few hours to get himself together,” Draper said to me, eyes still on the door. “Had to get his mind in order, sober up,
cool off. Maybe call an attorney, maybe get his hands on a car and
bail.” Draper snapped his eyes back to me and now they were hard
and unfriendly. “I’m not going to make the call, Lincoln. Wasn’t
when he showed up, and I won’t now.”
“Nobody’s making any calls just yet,” I said. Ed was watching me
with a leering grin, swaying like a sailor on board a pitching ship.
“The hell you doing here?” he said, and his voice was filled with
wonder and not anger. “I mean, damn, Lincoln. You just gotta be
there when I go down, huh? Gotta soak it up, savor it?”
I met his eyes, and I waited for my own response, waited for the
words to form themselves into something that would get through
to him, tell him how it had been for me, tell him why I’d had to do
it. The words didn’t come, though. After eight years of waiting for
them, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Good luck, Ed,” I told him, and then I turned and walked for
the door.
He started after me, and when Draper tried to pull him back,
Ed told him to stay the hell inside. I pushed the door open and
stepped out into the cooling air, stood on the sidewalk with my
hands at my sides and my eyes on the ground while Ed joined me.
He took out a cigarette and lit it, and we stood there together in silence.
The smell of the alcohol was heavy on him, but somehow I
had the sense his mind was sober right now.
“They execute a guy for murder in Ohio, don’t they?” he said.
“Sometimes.”
He nodded and smoked some more.
“Sometimes they don’t,” I said. “Depends on the circumstances.
What are yours?”
He laughed, and it was a menacing sound, so empty it chilled
me to the core.
“What are my circumstances?” He laughed again. “Oh, man.
You don’t even want to hear about it, Lincoln. They are not clean. I
can tell you that. They are not clean.”
He began to walk down the sidewalk then, swaying and weaving
but moving fast enough, and he motioned for me to follow with a
jerk of his hand. I shot a glance down the street, looking, as Draper
had, for a police presence. When I saw none, I followed.
“My circumstances,” he said around the cigarette, “are a little
difficult to explain. I hear there’s a videotape of it, though, and
that’s all the jury needs to see. If a picture is worth a thousand
words, then what’s a video against words from an ex-con? Probably
worth a million of those. A guy like me could run the world dry of
words, still not have enough.”
The breeze picked up, rustling the trash and gravel on the sidewalk
and sending dust and bits of fine dirt into our eyes. I blinked
against it, ducked my shoulders, and put my head down.
“What happened, Ed?”
He worked on the cigarette for a while, and when I glanced at
him the gash above his eye was brighter than it had been, the
wound opening up again and spilling more blood.
“In the beginning,” Ed Gradduk told me, “it was all about
money. The revenue stream, as my old man would have called it. I
found one, buddy. It was already there, but I got my piece of the
action, played my role, and took my cut. All you can ask, right?”
I didn’t answer, and we walked on in silence for maybe a block,
Ed sorting out his thoughts.
“So it was money,” he said. “A lot of money to some people, less
to others.”
“And to you?”
“Enough to me. It was enough. But then . . .” The menacing
laugh came again, and with it the temperature seemed to drop ten
degrees. “Then it stopped being about money. Got personal.”
“Why?”
He stopped walking and looked at me, tilting his head to the side.
“A man told me a story.”

I raised my eyebrows. “What story?”
“The one he didn’t want to tell,” Ed answered. “And I do feel
bad about that. It was hard on him, because he knew it’d be hard
on me. Stuff like that, well, it doesn’t tell easy, Lincoln. But I guess
that’s how it goes. The stories that matter most are the hardest to
tell.”
“Did you kill the woman?”
He blew smoke wearily. “I did not kill the woman. And I don’t
give a damn if they have a video or a picture or a thousand eyewitnesses
to whatever it is they say happened, Lincoln—that’s not
how it went down.”
“I can help you, Ed,” I said, and he raised his eyebrows and
snorted. “I can help you, but you’ve got to tell me the whole score.
Give me the names, give me the facts, lay it out there.”
His eyes had drifted past me, over my shoulder and into the
houses behind me. He pointed at them with his cigarette.
“Andy Butcher used to live in a house up that street. 'Member
him? Crazy little shit. We were standing out in his front lawn that
day the bus from the Catholic school went by.” He laughed and
smiled, seemingly carefree, just another guy out for an evening
stroll. What murder charge? Nope, not me.
“The bus from the Catholic school goes by, and one of those
shirt-and-tie boys tosses a bottle at us? You remember it; I know
you do. Little prick throws a bottle at us, and it hits the grass instead
of the sidewalk, doesn’t bust. And Andy, shit, he picks it up
and takes off running. Bus must be doing twenty miles an hour,
but he catches up to it.”
I remembered it, the scene playing through my head now like a
movie clip: Andy Butcher sprinting after the bus with the bottle in
his hand; the bus slowing because a car had just swung out of a
driveway in front of it. Andy making a jump right at the side of
the bus, Ed and I standing back in the yard with our mouths hanging
open, staring in amazement, as Butcher hooked his left arm
through the half-opened bus window and hung there, clinging to
the side of the moving bus while he brought the bottle in with his
right hand and smashed it against the stunned Catholic school
kid’s face.
“Man, we ran like hell,” Ed said.
I nodded, and somehow I wanted to smile, even though this was
no time to reminisce. “We did,” I said. “The bus driver got out,
started chasing us, screaming about getting the police.”
We’d gone probably twenty blocks that day before any of us had
the sense to cut in one direction or the other, get out of the driver’s
line of sight. Ran through a few yards until we collapsed in a heap,
laughing our asses off and exchanging high fives.
“Butcher, he was one hell of an athlete,” Ed said. “Never played
an organized sport in his life, but he could catch a moving bus and
hang in the window. Amazing.”
“Ed, you’ve got to tell me what happened,” I began, not wanting
to talk about Andy Butcher anymore, but he held up his hand and
interrupted again.
“People talk about memories like they’re the best things in the
world, Lincoln. They love the word, love the feel of it, say it with
this breathlessness, all nostalgic and shit. Memories, they say. Oh,
how I love those memories.”
He tossed his cigarette to the pavement and ground it out under
a well-worn Nike. “Sometimes, they hurt.” He looked up at me.
Memories, I mean. I know there are good ones, but bad ones?
Man, that’s the worst. You’d do whatever you could to put them
away, drive them out of your mind, lock them out for good. But
you can’t do that. They’ll keep coming back, and, Lincoln, those suckers can hurt. It’s like your memory’s bleeding, you know? And
you can’t do anything but give it some time, wait for it to clot.
Can’t stitch it up. Just got to wait it out.”
I tried to fill my voice with some of the commanding
tone I’d used on the bartender—“give that talking-in-riddles shit a
rest, all right? Maybe you didn’t want to see me down here, but I
came, anyhow. And if you want my help, I’ll do the best I can. But
you got to tell it to me.”
He started walking again, and while his steps seemed a little
surer now than they had when we’d left the bar, it still wasn’t difficult
to tell he was drunk. His eyes looked sober, though, and his
face had a serious cast that told me his mind was—finally—very
much in the moment.
“You don’t need to be a part of this, Lincoln,” he said. He still
moved with shuffling steps, his feet seeming not to come off the
ground at all. It was the way he’d walked when he was twelve.
“I know that.”
“I went to the prosecutor,” he said. “You know what he told me?”
“I don’t know, Ed.”
“Told me to go home and keep myself out of trouble. Told me
he had enough problems without a con like me coming to him
with wild schemes and rumors. You believe that? The man’s paid
with taxpayer cash, Lincoln, and he sent me out of his office. Told
me to stay out of trouble.”
“Why’d you go to the prosecutor?”
“I’ll tell you something else—I tried to do it the right way. The legitimate way, you know?” His eyes had a milky cast to them
again, wandering, fading back into the recesses of his booze
addled brain. “I tried. And they sent me home and told me to stay
out of trouble. Then I said the hell with it. I’ll get them to take a
look one way or the other, right? Because, Lincoln, the man
needed somebody to bring it back to him. One way or the other.”
A car was drifting up the street behind us. I was looking at Ed’s
face, but he turned to glance at the car, and when he did, his eyes
went fiat.
“Shit.”
I turned and looked myself, and when I did, I echoed him. It
was the Crown Vic that had been parked outside his mother’s
house. The cops realized we’d seen them, and the driver punched
the accelerator, closing the gap with a squeal of rubber. A flashing
bubble light came on at the top of the windshield, and Ed Gradduk
ran.
“Don’t run—let them take you in, and we’ll go from there,” I
yelled, but he ignored me. I ran after him and tried to grab him,
hating the cops for showing up just when Ed was beginning to explain
things. My hand caught a piece of his shirt, and when I
tugged it, he spun off-balance before twisting away from me. The
loss of balance sent his right foot off the sidewalk and into the
street. I saw him glance up at the minivan that was traveling in his
direction, then back at the Crown Vic coming from the opposite
side. He looked at them both, then tried to run across the street as
I lunged after him again. He made it a couple of steps, but there
was too much alcohol in his bloodstream for such rapid movements,
and halfway across Clark Avenue his feet tangled beneath
him and he went down.
The Crown Victoria driver had been pushing it, trying to get in
front of Ed and block his path across the avenue. When Ed fell,
the driver didn’t slow immediately, his reaction time poor. When
he finally did register what had happened, he locked up the brakes,
but far too late. The car rode the skid into and over Ed Gradduk.
I stood on the curb and screamed something that was supposed
to make sense but came out like the howl of a wounded animal,
and then I ran into the street, too. Ed’s body lay under the car, and
the stupid son of a bitch in the driver’s seat put it in reverse and
backed up, rolling the front wheels over Ed once more. I screamed
again, and then the car was in park and the cops were clambering
out it, shouting at me to keep back. I ignored them and ran toward
Ed, reached under the car for him.
I had my hands on Ed’s shoulders when the cop who’d been
driving grabbed me and tried to pull me back, shouting at me to
get out of the way. I spun and put my right fist into his stomach
without thinking about it, then crawled back under the car while
he doubled over. Ed’s body was only partially covered by the front
end of the Crown Vic, and as I tugged him free, I knew he was
dead—blood was flowing from his nose, mouth, and even his ears,
the flesh ripped and scraped, bits of the skull stark and white
against the blood and torn skin. I got only a glance before the second
cop wrapped his arm around my throat and pulled me back,
pushing the barrel of his gun in my ear.
There was more shouting then, but I don’t remember what was
said. Some of it was directed at me, some of it was from me. The
cops were shoving me away, and I was screaming in their faces.
The middle-aged woman who’d been driving the van from the opposite
direction got out of her vehicle, took one look at Ed,
dropped to her knees, and vomited in the street. More cars had
gathered now, and people were standing on the curb, watching the
scene. One of them was moving forward, and I turned away from
the cops in time to see Scott Draper just before he threw a punch
at my head.
“You shoved him!” he screamed. “You shoved him!”
“He ran,” I shouted back, and he swung at me again as the cops
tried to get in our way. “I tried to stop him, you stupid bastard.”
He was still trying to get at me. I grabbed him by the shoulders
and knocked him backward onto the pavement. I would have gotten
a punch in if the cop who’d been driving the Crown Vic hadn’t
caught my wrist. He slammed me onto the ground next to Draper.
That’s where I remained while they put the handcuffs on—
facedown on the street, my right cheek against the road, my left
eye watching a trickle of Ed Gradduk’s blood work its way toward
me, cutting a determined path over the pavement as if its last mission
were to touch my flesh.