smashed flat against his face. Blood dripped from various areas of his face and fell onto the rubber mat below him in slow, steady drops. His eyes, though, were remarkably clear. Clear, and angry. More than once while we were growing up—and even a few times in the last week—I’d had the passing thought that Draper was a man who could take a hell of a lot of punishment before he stayed down. Now I had proof of that hanging in front of me.
Draper coughed, and a fine spray of blood flew from his lips and landed on the back of my hand, covering it with tiny crimson droplets. Ramone stepped away and Cancerno stood over me and kicked me again in the side. He hit me directly in the ribs, but he wasn’t a powerful man, and the blow didn’t do the damage he’d hoped to inflict.
“Glad you made it, Perry,” he said. “You’re the other one I wanted to see tonight.”
“You’re done, Cancerno,” I said, not bothering to twist my head so I could see him. “Padgett got shot, and the half of the police department that you
“No shit?” he said. “Well, then, I guess that makes this encounter all the more important. Because I’d hate to go to jail with unsettled scores.”
Cancerno paced to the end of the bar where Ramone stood, then whirled back to Draper and me.
“You guys like fires, right?”
He reached up with the hand that wasn’t holding the gun and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the shelf above Draper. I started to get to my hands and knees when he did it, but Ramone stepped forward and pointed his gun at me.
“I know Draper likes fires,” Cancerno said, smashing the top of the vodka bottle against the bar and shattering the glass. He turned it upside down and poured the alcohol out on top of us. It splattered the floor and my legs and Draper’s bloody face. Draper rose up higher on his toes, the handcuffs still binding him to the heavy oak shelves. It was a massive, one-piece unit filled with shelves for liquor, with mirrors set behind the shelves, and stood at least eight feet tall. Draper’s cuffs were looped around one of the solid crosspieces that separated the two sides of shelves. The wood was not going to break, no matter how hard he pulled.
“Draper likes fires more than he likes his life,” Cancerno said, breaking another bottle and emptying it around us. “That seem like a good trade to you, Perry?” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “What about you, Ramone?”
“Doesn’t sound like a good trade,” Ramone said.
“I didn’t think so, either. But it appears this prick”—Cancerno threw a bottle that just missed Draper’s head before breaking on the shelves—“thought it was a good one.”
Cancerno stopped picking up bottles and stared at me. “I own this neighborhood. But I was done with it. Bigger things in mind. So you bastards had real, real bad timing. Gradduk could have been the only one to die. I didn’t need to send his friends to join him.”
“It’s done, Cancerno,” I said again.
“Exactly.” He nodded. “It is done. But I’m going to be the one to finish it. Understand that, Perry? And Draper here just designed your own graves. Because with all the fires in this neighborhood last night, one more isn’t going to stand out.” He poured a bottle of Crown Royal in a circle on the floor at my feet.
Ramone stood behind the bar, keeping the revolver pointed at us. Cancerno was still working his way down the length of the bar, grabbing bottle after bottle, breaking them, and then pouring the liquor on the floor.
I’d kept moving, still trying to turn my body and prepare to get on my feet when the time came, and apparently I’d gotten too close to that for Ramone’s liking. He fired a round into the shelves just above my head, the bottles exploding, glass and liquor landing on the floor around me.
I stopped moving, and Ramone smiled, showing his teeth.
Ramone’s round was one more in addition to those Cancerno and I had fired earlier, but I wasn’t too hopeful that they would have attracted the attention of the neighbors. The Hideaway’s ancient, thick walls absorbed noise better than the most expensive soundproofing panels. Draper’s dad used to brag about how loud he could turn the jukebox up before you’d hear a bit of it on the sidewalk.
Beside me, Draper shifted position again, sliding his heels across the floor until they actually rested against the bottom of the shelf unit. The chain on his handcuffs jingled softly as he pulled it tight on his wrists. I looked away from him, feeling pity. When Cancerno lit this place, Draper had nowhere to go. Not that I’d make it far— Ramone stood just ten feet away, and his gun was trained on me. At this distance, he’d kill me before I even came out of my crouch.
Cancerno had assumed a position at the far end of the bar, his back to the hallway that led out to the back door. He’d finished spreading alcohol and stood with a bar rag in one hand and his revolver in the other. Watching him, Ramone set the revolver down on top of the bar and lifted his shotgun again, leveling it across the surface of the bar, the ugly muzzle pointed right at me. No need to worry about accuracy now; the shotgun would cut me in two if I tried to move.
“You’re right, Perry,” Cancerno said. “It’s all done.” He shifted the bar rag so he held it in the same hand that was clenched around his revolver. He reached into his pocket with the other hand, and when he withdrew it, a steel Zippo was in his fingers. He flipped the top off the lighter and flicked the wheel with his thumb. A short flame appeared, and he touched it to the edge of the bar rag, which began to burn slowly.
I shifted my weight forward, onto my toes, preparing for a rush that would end with a shotgun blast, and behind me I could hear Draper tensing, the handcuffs scraping against the wood that held him.
“I don’t think so,” Ramone said, following my movement with the barrel of his gun. My fingers brushed against glass, and I squeezed them around the shattered neck of one of the bottles Cancerno had broken. My opportunity would come thanks to Cancerno, although he didn’t realize it yet. The fire wouldn’t kill me as fast as Ramone’s shotgun would, and the initial burst of flame might be more distracting to the shooter than to me. When Cancerno dropped that rag to the floor, I was going to be moving with the flames, right at Ramone’s throat, with that jagged glass in my hand.
“I hope this hurts like hell,” Cancerno said, holding the now-burning rag high in the air, grasping it with just two fingers, and I tensed every muscle, ready to spring forward when that rag hit the floor. That was when I heard Draper let out a grunt that sounded like an explosion as he suddenly lurched forward.
I am a strong man. I own a gym where many stronger men come regularly to hoist obscene amounts of weight. During my time on the narcotics beat, I saw men riding methamphetamine highs kick down doors and punch through walls as if they were not even there. Never, though, had I seen a display of raw strength comparable to the one Scott Draper offered in that moment at the Hideaway. With a single, swift-but-massive effort, he lunged forward and jerked with all his power at the handcuffs that held him to the shelves. Because Draper was so tall, they were fastened fairly high on the cabinet, well above the central point of balance. When Draper leaned into that savage jerk forward, the several hundred pounds of oak shelving and liquor bottles leaned with him, overbalanced, and fell forward.
Ramone had time to shoot. He had time, but the shelving unit was at least eight feet tall, and it was coming down right at his skull. He’d been focused on me because I’d been the only one with freedom to move, and when Draper lunged forward Ramone had to pivot to his left to bring the gun around to this new threat. By that time the massive wooden cabinet was falling, and when Ramone pulled the trigger, he took a full step back, trying to avoid taking all that weight on the top of his head. The combined pivot and step backward were enough, and the slug he fired missed us both, splintering through the cabinet about a foot to the right of Draper’s head as it came crashing down.
The bar saved us. The weight of the enormous cabinet would probably have killed us both, crushed us, if it had fallen directly onto our bodies. But because it was so tall, it landed against the bar, shedding glass and booze all over us, and held there, wedged at about a forty-five-degree angle.
Ramone was hidden from my sight now, but Cancerno had screamed something and jumped backward as the cabinet fell, throwing the rag at the same time. It caught the edge of the new obstruction provided by the fallen shelves and dropped to the floor. There was some alcohol there, but it missed the large pool Cancerno had spread earlier, and the eruption of flame was smaller than it might have been.
Staying on my hands and knees to avoid braining myself on the shelves that lay angled over my head, I scrambled for the end of the bar and Cancerno, bits of broken glass slicing into my flesh. I cleared the shelves as Cancerno brought his Beretta up, and I sprang forward, hitting him around the waist as he fired over me. The tackle drove us both down, and he landed on his back, his head snapping against the floor with a crack like a dropped
