Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem Read Online Free PDF Page A

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