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.
CHAPTER 21
Consciousness returned like an abrupt end to a long journey, as if I’d been deep in water swimming upward slowly and easily, then broken the surface without warning. I opened my eyes, but my vision was fading in and out, and the room I found myself in seemed to be on its own axis, spinning fast. Above me the ceiling went on forever into blackness. Two hard blinks later I realized the ceiling was the sky, and I wasn’t in a room at all. I was on my back on pavement.
I started to move upright, but a quick surge of nausea and dizziness stopped me. I dropped back down and rolled on my side, feeling as if I was about to get sick. It was then I noticed the men with the guns.
There were two of them—both in suits, both with automatics in shoulder holsters, no attempt made to cover the weapons with their jackets.
“Probably shouldn’t have sat up so fast,” the taller one said conversationally. The shorter one just stood and glared at me. I didn’t know what to make of them yet, but they didn’t seem inclined to shoot me, so I just put my head back down on the pavement and closed my eyes, waiting for the sickness to pass.
It was a few minutes before I was able to stand. The suits had carried me away from the fire, probably as far as a few blocks, then dropped me in an alley. We were beside a Dumpster, and the smell of garbage wasn’t helping my nausea. On either side of the alley were tall stone buildings, dark and quiet. None of the light from the fire that had to be still burning was visible, and it was strangely quiet here in the alley.
“Hell of a thing you did,” the suit on my right said. He was the taller one, with short dark hair and close-set eyes. “Running right into a wall like that. Never seen anything like it. You came out running like you had a gold medal in mind, head down, and then—boom—right into the wall. Hell of a thing.”
It’s always nice to have your athletic achievements appreciated.
“Can you walk now?” the other suit said. He was looking around, shifting his weight, edgy. The taller guy was relaxed.
“Yeah,” I said, my tongue thick against my teeth.
“Great. We’re going to walk down the alley and get into a car. Then we’re all going to go get you some water and some painkillers and have a nice little talk.”
My legs were unsteady beneath me, but they moved well enough, and everything above my waist seemed fine except for the pounding in my head. The lump on the top of my skull went warm and then cool, warm and then cool, like a coal fanned by a breeze. I winced against the pain and then, slowly, started to walk. The nameless men in the suits stayed on each side of me, standing close.
“FBI?” I said as we moved down the alley.
“Just me,” the taller one said, his voice as lighthearted as his springy, fast step. He was walking down the alley with bouncing enthusiasm, as if he were coming out of Jacobs Field after watching the Indians win on a walk-off homer. “I apologize for forgetting the formal introduction, Mr. Perry. My name’s Robert Dean.”
The FBI agent who had requested Rabold’s files. A member of the RICO task force, according to Amos Lorenzon.
“And you?” I asked the other.
“Brent Mason, internal affairs, Cleveland police.” He clipped the words off individually, as if he were counting. If I’d had to guess, I would have put them the other way around. Seemed like the guy with the rod up his ass would have been federal. Then again, the internal affairs guys can’t help the rod—nobody likes them, and after a while that begins to affect your personality a bit.
We came out of the alley and I saw we were back on Fulton Road. They’d hauled me quite a ways.
“Didn’t want to let me be rescued by the fire department or some other cops,” I said.
“Oh, no,” Dean said. “Couldn’t have that. You might not believe it, Mr. Perry, but there are some cops in this neighborhood that wouldn’t have had all that much interest in rescuing you.”
They put me in the back of an unmarked Taurus that looked identical to the one Joe drove. Mason drove and Dean sat in the front beside him, so at least they trusted me not to leap from the car and flee. No handcuffs, no indication that I was a suspect in the fires. That was a plus.
“So I look all beat to shit,” I said as we stopped at a red light on Fulton, “and you guys seem pretty fresh. No cuts, no burns—suits aren’t even wrinkled.”
“Uh-oh,” Dean said. “I get the feeling he’s deducing something.”
Mason didn’t say a word.
“I’m guessing you didn’t pull me out of that fire,” I said. “But it’s just the three of us in here. So who did?”
Mason didn’t answer, but I could tell from the way his shoulders tightened that he didn’t appreciate the question.
Dean twisted around to face me and grinned broadly. “Can’t tell you. Because we missed the son of a bitch.”
“Missed him?”
“Sure did,” Dean said cheerfully. Mason’s shoulders tightened even more, as if someone were ratcheting up the tension in him with a wrench. “You came running out, and we both went after you. You stopped yourself with that header into the building next door, and, like a couple of jackasses, we were both there when you went down. The other guy bailed out right then, cleared the yard, and was long gone. It was, Mr. Perry, a serious drop of the ball on our part. And, oh, man, you do not want to imagine the response we’re going to get when we offer this one up to the powers that be.”
Dean concluded with a chuckle, and Mason looked at him as if he’d like to take his hands off the steering wheel and wrap them around the FBI agent’s throat. He kept his mouth shut, though. He was good at that.
“But you saw him go in?” I said.
“We did.”
“And?”
“And he was a big son of a bitch in a baseball cap,” Dean said. “We were across the street, and you saw how damn dark it was behind that house. By the time we got across, things were burning. We probably would have been in fine shape if you hadn’t come storming out when you did.”
“Sorry. If I’d known burning to death would have helped you boys, I’d have stayed inside, of course.”
“You say the guy pulled you out of the fire?” Dean said.
“That’s right. I jumped down the stairs and put my foot right through one of the steps. Fell and got hung up, and then he came in and pulled me loose. Got me out of the living room and shoved me through the back door and I just kept going.”
“So you were right next to him,” Mason said, speaking for the first time since we’d gotten in the car. “You got a good look.”
“I got no look.”
He shifted his eyes to the rearview mirror and gave me a hard squint, as if he thought I were lying. I stared back at the mirror and shook my head slowly.
“No lie, Detective. The place was on fire, and the guy was behind me. I had my eyes closed because of the heat for most of it, anyhow.”
Mason grunted with disgust and dropped his eyes from the mirror.
They drove to Clark, then west to the intersection of Clark and Sixty-fifth, where Mason pulled into the narrow, steep parking lot of Mom’s Restaurant. Mom’s had been there forever; as long as I could remember and a few decades beyond that, at lea
st. When I was a kid, my dad would take me to breakfast at Mom’s on Saturdays. We’d make the walk up from the house—always a walk, never a drive, even if it was pouring rain or blowing snow—and then eat and talk. My dad would drink water and coffee, and I’d have orange juice and pancakes. He’d wince every time I ordered it—orange juice and syrup, he’d say, your teeth will rot out.
Mason shut off the engine and we all got out and went inside. The room was nearly empty, and I realized the place had to be close to shutting down for the night. When I’d gotten older and joined the force, I’d still meet my dad here sometimes, generally early in the morning when I got off the night shift. The last time I’d set foot in the place, a guy who’d known the Gradduks well had come over and talked to my dad at length without ever acknowledging me. Neither of us commented on it, but we never went back, either.
A waitress came around the corner, saw us, and raised her eyebrows. Dean said, “Enough time for coffee?”
“Always time for coffee,” she said, and led us back to a booth along the front wall.
Dean had a first-aid kit with him, retrieved from the glove compartment. He found some aspirin in it and gave them to me with a couple of antiseptic cloths in plastic wrappers.
“Wipe those over your arms,” he said. “You got some burns on the arms, and one across the back of your neck. Don’t look too serious, but you might want to get them looked at. You’re talking well enough that a concussion doesn’t seem likely, but I don’t want you suing us for denying you medical treatment, either. You want to get checked out before we talk, we’ll run you down to the hospital.”
I shook my head. “I’m good.”
“Hell of a knock on the head he took,” Mason said, looking unhappy, no doubt envisioning his ass on the line for losing an arson suspect and denying a victim medical treatment in the same hour.
“I gave him an aspirin,” Dean said, and I had a brief recollection of some bad Harrison Ford movie where guys in a submarine are dying from radiation and Ford keeps screaming at the medic to give them some aspirin. It made me want to laugh, but I figured an outburst of laughter would probably convince them to take me to the hospital, after all.
“All right, guys,” I said. “I want to go home, take a shower, and go to sleep with a bag of ice on my head. So let’s get to it.”
“Half of Clark-Fulton’s on fire, and this guy wants to go to bed,” Dean said.
“You think I set the fires, take me to jail.”
“We know you didn’t set the fires,” Dean said. “But you’ve got a real knack for showing up in hot-action places lately, Mr. Perry. Thought we should discuss that.”
“Is that why you were following me tonight?”
“Didn’t start out following you,” he said. “Started out following Jack Padgett. Then you showed your face and we got more than a little intrigued. Split with the two other guys we were with and went with you. Got a hell of a show, too.”
I made a little bow that caused the lump on my head to pulse with heat and pressure, like a balloon filling with hot water. I gritted my teeth and leaned back in the chair. Tonight wasn’t a good occasion for physical comedy.
“A few nights ago, Jack Padgett and Larry Rabold ran over a fugitive in Clark Avenue,” Dean said. “You were there. Last night, Rabold was found murdered. You did the finding. Tonight, houses all over the neighborhood are catching fire, Padgett’s patrolling the crowds, and you’re sprinting through the streets.”
“How’d you get in it, Perry?” Mason said. “And how, exactly, do we convince you to get out of it?”
I looked at Mason and then back at Dean. “I got in it when my friend got run over by Padgett and Rabold. I’ll stay in it until I can explain why that happened.”
“Anybody paying you?” Dean asked.
“Nope.”
“Can we interest you in a government-funded vacation out of state for, say, three weeks?”
“Nope.”
Dean laughed loudly.
“I don’t know who set these fires,” I said. “If you’re expecting otherwise, you’re going to be disappointed.”
“We don’t expect otherwise. Not at all.”
“Do you understand the fires?” I asked. “What the purpose was?”
“We’re not here about the fires,” Dean said. “That’s somebody else’s case. A serious one, yes. But it’s not ours.”
“So why did you need to haul me off the property to assure yourselves of a private conversation?”
All the humor and charm slid off his face as he leaned forward. “To explain to you, Mr. Perry, that you are going to get yourself killed.”
They explained that to me, and a few other things, as well. Although Mason contributed, it was still Dean’s show all the way. There were four of them on the task force, I learned—two internal affairs detectives and two FBI agents from the racketeering and corruption squad. The task force had a simple purpose: explore the depths of police corruption in the department and its ties to Jimmy Cancerno’s criminal empire.
“By and large, this department is clean,” Mason said. “Any department of this size has its bad actors. It’s inevitable. That’s why you need guys like me. To keep it as clean as possible. And in this department, we’ve noticed a disturbing trend—most of the serious allegations keep coming up in the same district.”
The Cleveland police department has eight districts. Clark-Fulton is in District Two, and Padgett and Rabold were District Two officers. Had been for a long time, it seemed.
“We’ve been hearing it for years,” Mason said. “Complaints come and go all the time. But there have been too many in District Two. We noticed something else—there are a handful of officers who routinely turn down promotions that would place them in other districts, and fight transfers passionately. Why? We didn’t know. And then these guys”—he nodded at Dean—“got involved.”
The FBI’s organized crime and RICO squad had gone through a turnover in Cleveland over the years. The Italian mob was once prevalent in the city, trailing only New York and Chicago in activity. That was decades ago, though. Then the Russians moved in, and the organized crime folks had—and still have—their hands full with them. The Russian mobs aren’t like the Italians, though; they aren’t interested in dominating a neighborhood. They’ve got their eyes on bigger projects, and they don’t care about the street-corner shit.
“But we kept getting a sense of this network,” Dean said, “on the near west side. Drugs, prostitution, swag, real estate scams, everything on down to low-level neighborhood hustles and bookkeeping. I’ll be the first to admit we didn’t dedicate a lot of attention to this. Didn’t get really intrigued until we got more and more tips—every one anonymous—about corrupt cops, all in the same damn neighborhood. People feeding us tips about cops who’d been paid off, about detectives who drank with suspects, patrol officers who turned away when certain drunk drivers would roll up on the sidewalk right in front of them.
“So we ask ourselves,” Dean continued, “who the hell is running this show? Like I said before, most of the serious forces left in organized crime are on to bigger and better things. We can’t connect any of this shit around Clark-Fulton to a larger network. But then we began to get it. What if the show down there isn’t about a larger network? What if it’s a lot simpler—a crime throwback, you might say. What if it’s just one cunning son of a bitch who wants to own a neighborhood?”
“Cancerno,” I said.
Dean nodded. “Took us a while to get to him. The man is distanced, I’ll say that. He runs his games with an exceptional blend of control and distance. You don’t see a guy put it together so well very often. But it’s him. No doubt about it. At the end of the day, almost everyone working any sort of hustle in that neighborhood is tied to Cancerno in some way.”
“As are,” Mason threw in, “a concerning number of cops.”
“Right,” Dean said. “And that’s what we’re doing here. We have to know how deep it goes. How fa
r does it spread? He owns street cops, sure. A few detectives, maybe. And every indication says there’s someone higher. But Cancerno’s good—the left hand never knows what the right is doing. One bought cop may not know the next. The information chain is broken by design. But it was for damn sure that an insider could learn more than an outsider. We needed help.”
“Larry Rabold,” I said.
“Yes. We picked Mr. Rabold for two simples reasons: we had good evidence of his wrongdoing, and he had a family.”
“Leverage,” I said, thinking of Rabold’s daughter, her blanched face and bloody shoes, and feeling sick. “Nice, Dean. Real nice.”
“What happened from that scenario is a shame,” Dean said. “A true and profound shame. But we were giving Mr. Rabold the opportunity to avoid jail. We believed it would have worked out better all the way around.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t,” I said. “You should have checked with me first. I could have explained that to you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Dean said.
“What did he give you before he died?”
“Not nearly enough.”
“Where does Ed Gradduk fit? That’s all I care about, Dean.”
“Listen,” he said, “we’re not here to answer your questions. It’s not advantageous to us, and, frankly, we don’t have any desire for you to get more involved than you already are. You’re not law enforcement anymore. You don’t even have a client. You are nothing more than a concerned friend in this case, Mr. Perry, albeit a concerned friend with some unusual abilities. But while our sympathies may lie deep for concerned friends, our loyalties do not.”
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