Sorrow's Anthem lp-2

by Michael Koryta

  Closer still he came, and now I could see that he held a gun in his right hand, down against his leg. He’d heard the shots, all right. And he was no fool, either, just brave. He hadn’t waited for backup, because he’d known someone might be in the river. Maybe close to dying.

  I waited until he came to our end of the bridge before I stood up and shouted.

  “Hey! We need help down here!”

  I waved my hands, but even so it took him a few seconds to locate the source of the shouting. All my back muscles were tight, braced for a shot that might come from the opposite bank. When the ranger saw us, he moved forward at a jog, around the edge of the bridge and down to the stone wall that shored up the bank. I left Joe and struggled around the wall and up the muddy slope, trying to get high enough to talk to the ranger. That was when I saw the gunman who hadn’t fled through the trees.

  He’d taken off his ski mask and climbed back onto the bridge. He was running up it now, closing fast. His footsteps slapped loudly off the wet concrete. The ranger turned at the sound of his approach and raised his gun.

  “Stop! Put your hands in the air and get on the ground!”

  The man kept coming, but he lifted one arm. Something glistened in his hand, and then I saw that it was a badge.

  “Cleveland Police Department!” he shouted in response. “Relax, I’m a cop. Now stand down.”

  It was Jack Padgett, and in the hand that didn’t have the badge was a gun.

  The ranger lowered his weapon slightly, his shoulders relaxing.

  “Don’t listen to him!” I shouted. The ranger turned his head a fraction to the left, looked at my face. “He shot my partner,” I said. “He’s going to kill us.”

  The ranger’s eyes snapped back to Padgett, who was still running toward him.

  “Get on the ground!” the ranger yelled. “Now!”

  “Cleveland Police!” Padgett said again, still running.

  “I don’t give a shit. Get . . . on . . . the . . . ground!”

  Padgett kept running. The ranger’s eyes slipped back to us, took in Joe’s ashen face, my desperation. I dropped back down from the bank, knelt over Joe, and reached around for my gun. My fingers found the holster, empty. I’d lost the Glock in the river.

  Padgett was ten yards away. The gun was still in his hand.

  “Shoot him!” I screamed at the ranger.

  “Cleveland Police!” Padgett yelled for the third time. The hand with the gun was coming up, the barrel moving toward the ranger.

  I reached inside Joe’s jacket, hoping his gun was still in the shoulder holster, but even as I did it, I knew it was too late. We were dead. The ranger wouldn’t shoot a cop, and Padgett was going to kill us all.

  The ranger shot Padgett.

  He fired once and caught him in the thigh. Padgett’s right leg spun away from his body, and he hit the pavement in a whirling tumble, banging against one of the iron bridge supports. For a moment he stayed down. Then he rolled over onto his shoulder and lifted his gun, aiming at the ranger. The ranger fired again. Padgett dropped and stayed down.

  The ranger keyed his radio microphone and shouted into it, “Shots fired on the bridge at Rocky River. Repeat, shots fired, need backup immediately, and paramedics.” Then he turned to us. He dropped to his knees and stretched out his arms. Rain cascaded off the brim of his wide hat.

  “Let’s get him up here,” he said.

  It wasn’t easy. A sheer wall of at least ten feet was in front of me, and I couldn’t shove Joe up to the ranger against that. Instead we had to move upstream, into the thickets and small trees that lined the riverbank. The ranger fought down through the brush until he reached me, then hooked his hands under Joe’s arms and lifted him clear, dragged him back up the hill and set him on the grass. I clambered up the bank after them, using small trees for handholds, thorns tearing at my skin. My entire body was shaking. Sirens were wailing somewhere up above the valley, playing sorrow’s anthem, this time for my partner.

  The ranger left us there, walked back to the bridge, and crossed to Padgett. He knelt beside him and stayed there for a while. Then he returned to stand in front of me. His wet face was drawn and grave.

  “Mister,” he said, “I hope you’re an honest man. Because I believe I just killed a police officer.”

  CHAPTER 27

  The hospital room was cool and dark. I sat on the tile floor with my back against the door. I’d been here for a while now. At least ten minutes had passed since I’d told the cops I needed to go to the bathroom, when all I’d really needed was to get away from them, from the lights, from the world. I’d needed to close my eyes. It was a small thing, closing your eyes. But I needed it badly.

  I’d made a few random turns through corridors that smelled of pungent cleansers until I found an empty room. Joe was in the building, somewhere. I couldn’t see him, though. He was still in surgery. Eight hours of it now.

  I wondered how long they could keep him in surgery. At what point did they just give up? Eight hours seemed like a lot of it. I wondered who the surgeon was, how steady his hands were, how much experience he had with gunshot wounds. I wondered if Joe was already dead.

  If I’d gotten him killed.

  I slid my heels back so my knees were raised, crossed my arms over my knees, and rested my forehead on my arms. Kept my eyes closed. He hadn’t wanted to get involved. Not even at the beginning. I’d gone out to his house in the middle of the night, sat in his living room, and pressured him into helping me. He’d hesitated, and not because he was worried about his own safety, or about lost money on the paying cases, or about the media attention surrounding Ed’s death. He’d hesitated because he knew that I was on a fool’s mission. Because in the end, what could I accomplish? I could alter a dead friend’s legacy. But was that enough? The answer wasn’t as resounding in my mind tonight as it had been all week.

  Eight hours Joe had been on the table. They would have parts of him opened up, blood running down his skin, tubes inserted into his nose, wires fastened to his flesh, computers monitoring his life, if indeed he still had life.

  Ed Gradduk was my demon, not Joe’s. If anyone was going to be hurt trying to help a dead man, it needed to be me.

  Voices in the hall. Someone inquiring about me. A nurse saying she hadn’t seen me. I kept the door shut until I heard the man thanking the nurse, and then his voice registered. It was Cal Richards. I’d seen nothing but cops for hours now, but not Richards. I’d been wondering when he’d show up.

  I slid sideways far enough to clear myself from the door, then reached up for the handle and pulled the door open.

  “Richards.”

  He was halfway down the hall when I spoke, and at the sound of his name he turned and looked one way, then the other, seeing nothing. I stuck my hand into the hall and waved it at him. He saw me and walked down to my room. When he stepped inside, he turned on the lights. I winced against the harsh brightness, and he flicked them back off. He closed the door softly. A chair was at the foot of the empty bed. He slid it across the floor and sat down.

  “You okay?” he said.

  I looked at him, but in the dark room I saw nothing of his face, just an outline.

  “He’s still in surgery,” I said.

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t see his mouth move when he talked, and his voice seemed to float out of the blackness, soft and strong. “I’ve asked about him. First thing I did when I got here, in fact, was talk to the doctors.”

  “And?”

  “It’s a bad one. Two gunshot wounds.”

  “I know that, Richards. I was there. What else, though? Nobody around here will give me details.”

  “I’m not a doctor, Perry. I can’t tell you what’s happening in there.”

  I leaned my head back against the wall and shut my eyes again. “What can you tell me, Richards?”

  “I can tell you that Jack Padgett’s not dead yet, but he’s also in no condition to talk. I can tell you that the car he drove was stol
en, and I can tell you that we don’t know who the second shooter was.”

  “Have you found Corbett?”

  “No.”

  I shook my head. “That son of a bitch matters. Corbett’s the guy who makes everything go, Richards.”

  “You seem a lot more convinced of that than you were two days ago.”

  “He matters to everybody,” I said. “Living and dead. Mattered to Sentalar, Ed, Rabold. To Padgett and Cancerno. You’ve got to find him, Richards.”

  “We’re going to.” He shifted in his seat and I saw his silhouette lean forward. “But first you’ve got to tell me what you did that made it all escalate so damn fast, Perry. What you did that made a cop decide it was worth the risk to try and take you out. You have to have an idea about that.”

  “I’ve got one.”

  “I need to hear it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It starts with Mike Gajovich.”

  Richards let his breath out in a long, low exhalation. “Yeah.”

  “You’re already there, huh?”

  “Started that way this morning,” he said.

  “In Berea?”

  “Uh-huh. While I was looking into Sentalar, I learned she wasn’t the first choice for director of the Neighborhood Alliance. A Berea city councilman was. He took the job, then backed out. Seems Mike Gajovich was pretty heavily involved in the whole project. Seems this guy from Berea was guaranteed a job on Mike’s staff when he became mayor. Guaranteed the job if he’d look the other way on some funding issues with Cancerno’s contracting company and the Neighborhood Alliance. Guy had long ties to Gajovich, and I’m sure he’s a crooked bastard, but he was wise enough not to like that setup and he backed out. The way things are shaping up, it looks like Cancerno’s kicking back a lot of the cash from that organization to Gajovich, funding his campaign, most likely.”

  I wanted to care. I wanted to ask for the details, try to tie it all back to the puzzle pieces I’d spent a week assembling, make it fit, make it neat. I couldn’t, though. I couldn’t find it in me to give a damn about any of it anymore. Not with Joe stretched out on some cold steel table, scalpels and forceps being used on his body.

  “You gonna tell me how you got to Gajovich?” Richards said.

  “His brother’s going to be involved, too,” I said instead of answering his question. “Dean and Mason are probably already on it. His brother’s the commander of District Two. Rabold and Padgett’s boss.”

  “That did come up,” Richards said.

  “Have you brought Cancerno in yet?”

  “Looking for him. Missing in action, for now.”

  “Him and Corbett,” I said. “Wonderful.”

  “I’m going to need you to tell me what you know in some detail. But not now.”

  I was already shaking my head. “You’re right, not now. I’m done talking to cops for the night, Richards. I’m done until someone lets me see Joe.”

  He was quiet for a minute. “I wanted to come earlier. Soon as I heard. But with all this shit going down, the prosecutor involved now, I spent the whole afternoon meeting with the brass.”

  “It’s fine.”

  He looked up. “I’m just trying to tell you,” he said, “that it matters to me, too.”

  I nodded. “All right, Cal. I understand.”

  Twenty minutes later, Richards was gone, off to consult with his superiors yet again. I didn’t envy his job. The department would already be sweating the damage control of Padgett’s shooting by the MetroParks ranger. Adding it to a day in which they’d learned one of their own commanders and the county prosecutor were likely tied to major corruption had probably sent them into cardiac arrest.

  Let them see it through, I thought. Let them deal with Cancerno, and find Corbett, and fire Gajovich or impeach him or whatever the hell it was you did with a prosecutor. It didn’t matter anymore. Ed Gradduk was dead, and my partner was headed that way.

  With Cal Richards gone, I sat alone on a vinyl chair in a waiting room for something like the urology department at MetroHealth. The doctors and nurses in this ward were long gone, and it was basically empty. They’d wanted to keep me out of sight, though. The media was swarming, and they all wanted me. The cops had wanted me to go to the police station; the MetroHealth administrators had simply wanted me to get out of their building. I’d refused.

  “Lincoln!”

  I turned my head to see Amy rounding the corner of the hallway, walking fast, her face pale. She crossed the room and knelt in front of me, rested her hands on my knees, and looked hard at my face.

  “Is he okay?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened? I didn’t find out till about two hours ago, when my editor called to see if I could get in touch with you for a quote. I didn’t even know what he was talking about. It took me forever to figure out where you were.”

  She slid into the chair beside me, and I told her what I could tell her. What she most wanted to know—Joe’s status—I could not provide.

  “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.