“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 least. 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.”