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

it out under
a well-worn Nike. “Sometimes, they hurt.” He looked up at me.
Memories, I mean. I know there are good ones, but bad ones?
Man, that’s the worst. You’d do whatever you could to put them
away, drive them out of your mind, lock them out for good. But
you can’t do that. They’ll keep coming back, and, Lincoln, those suckers can hurt. It’s like your memory’s bleeding, you know? And
you can’t do anything but give it some time, wait for it to clot.
Can’t stitch it up. Just got to wait it out.”
I tried to fill my voice with some of the commanding
tone I’d used on the bartender—“give that talking-in-riddles shit a
rest, all right? Maybe you didn’t want to see me down here, but I
came, anyhow. And if you want my help, I’ll do the best I can. But
you got to tell it to me.”
He started walking again, and while his steps seemed a little
surer now than they had when we’d left the bar, it still wasn’t difficult
to tell he was drunk. His eyes looked sober, though, and his
face had a serious cast that told me his mind was—finally—very
much in the moment.
“You don’t need to be a part of this, Lincoln,” he said. He still
moved with shuffling steps, his feet seeming not to come off the
ground at all. It was the way he’d walked when he was twelve.
“I know that.”
“I went to the prosecutor,” he said. “You know what he told me?”
“I don’t know, Ed.”
“Told me to go home and keep myself out of trouble. Told me
he had enough problems without a con like me coming to him
with wild schemes and rumors. You believe that? The man’s paid
with taxpayer cash, Lincoln, and he sent me out of his office. Told
me to stay out of trouble.”
“Why’d you go to the prosecutor?”
“I’ll tell you something else—I tried to do it the right way. The legitimate way, you know?” His eyes had a milky cast to them
again, wandering, fading back into the recesses of his booze
addled brain. “I tried. And they sent me home and told me to stay
out of trouble. Then I said the hell with it. I’ll get them to take a
look one way or the other, right? Because, Lincoln, the man
needed somebody to bring it back to him. One way or the other.”
A car was drifting up the street behind us. I was looking at Ed’s
face, but he turned to glance at the car, and when he did, his eyes
went fiat.
“Shit.”
I turned and looked myself, and when I did, I echoed him. It
was the Crown Vic that had been parked outside his mother’s
house. The cops realized we’d seen them, and the driver punched
the accelerator, closing the gap with a squeal of rubber. A flashing
bubble light came on at the top of the windshield, and Ed Gradduk
ran.
“Don’t run—let them take you in, and we’ll go from there,” I
yelled, but he ignored me. I ran after him and tried to grab him,
hating the cops for showing up just when Ed was beginning to explain
things. My hand caught a piece of his shirt, and when I
tugged it, he spun off-balance before twisting away from me. The
loss of balance sent his right foot off the sidewalk and into the
street. I saw him glance up at the minivan that was traveling in his
direction, then back at the Crown Vic coming from the opposite
side. He looked at them both, then tried to run across the street as
I lunged after him again. He made it a couple of steps, but there
was too much alcohol in his bloodstream for such rapid movements,
and halfway across Clark Avenue his feet tangled beneath
him and he went down.
The Crown Victoria driver had been pushing it, trying to get in
front of Ed and block his path across the avenue. When Ed fell,
the driver didn’t slow immediately, his reaction time poor. When
he finally did register what had happened, he locked up the brakes,
but far too late. The car rode the skid into and over Ed Gradduk.
I stood on the curb and screamed something that was supposed
to make sense but came out like the howl of a wounded animal,
and then I ran into the street, too. Ed’s