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.
More hours passed. I stayed in my chair, and Amy sat with me. We talked less. The police had not come to find me again, and I had not heard from Richards. Amy was struggling to stay awake. I told her to go home and get some sleep.
“No way, Lincoln.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I hear something. It’s almost two in the morning, Ace. Go get some rest.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll fall asleep eventually.”
She didn’t want to go, but she also didn’t want to argue with me. After a minute, she got to her feet.
“Call me as soon as you hear anything new,” she said.
“I will.”
She leaned down and gave me a hug, kissed me on the forehead, and then left. I was alone again in the empty waiting room, watching the clock.
My thoughts returned to Mitch Corbett. Had he set us up? If Cancerno was to be believed, Corbett and Padgett had worked in tandem before. But trusting a guy who made a life running every hustle in the book was a big if.
I found myself hoping Cancerno knew where Corbett was. Hoping someone else had been able to succeed where I had failed, and that Cancerno had already finished his own task. I’d believed his sincerity about that more than any other part of his story. If he found Corbett, he would kill him.
It wasn’t going to be easy to find him, though. Joe and I were good, and we hadn’t come close. And knowing Corbett’s relationship with Cancerno changed things. Maybe he had more money than anybody had known. Maybe he’d swindled a cool million off Cancerno and bailed, and that was why Cancerno wanted him dead. That could change things dramatically. Explain why even our gifted spook in Idaho hadn’t been able to help us. Money changes everything. The two hardest people to find are those with plenty of money to run with, and those with none at all.
Joe’s idea about checking Joseph A. Marsh had been a good one. Assuming Corbett didn’t have money, it had been perfect. Where else would he go without any cash, with no family to take him in? His options would have been slim, and finding someplace—anyplace—to wait the storm out while he tried to come up with a plan would have been hard. The Neighborhood Alliance properties offered him that, and the school was the best option of the lot. Remove that from the list, and who the hell knew where he’d gone.
The thought of the list stopped me cold. The night of the fires, I’d tried to get ahead of Corbett by moving through the list of Neighborhood Alliance properties. Where had the list come from, though? Amy. And she’d gotten it from the county recorder’s office. The houses had nothing to do with Cancerno’s crew until they were instructed to begin working on them. One house, the big one on West Fortieth, had been purchased just a week before Sentalar died. It was almost certain Cancerno’s team wasn’t ready to work on it yet, and quite possible that they didn’t even know about it. But Corbett had been with Sentalar in that last week, touring the neighborhood. He might have known.
“Shit,” I said aloud. “I saw it. I
Mitch Corbett had a cat. There’d been a litter box in the furnace room at his house. The door to the furnace room had been closed. If he’d left the cat in the house, he would have left that door open. Wouldn’t want the cat pissing all over the rug.
There hadn’t been a cat in Corbett’s house, but I’d seen one in the vacant house on West Fortieth. Hard to forget the little beast, considering I’d damn near shot it. It hadn’t been a stray, either, but healthy and well fed, with a collar that had reflected a glitter of light when I’d leveled my gun at it.
