“Goddamnit!”
He expected to hear laughter, but none came. Instead, the silence he had awakened to returned, as complete and unnerving as ever.
“All right. What the fuck is this?” Gunner finally asked, containing his anger in deference to his utter inability to defend himself.
“Judgment day, my brother,” the other man said, his voice circling Gunner buzzardlike from several feet away. If he and Gunner weren’t alone in the room, he was the only one willing—or authorized—to speak.
“Scales? That you?”
“No. It isn’t Scales. You and I have never had the pleasure, Gunner.”
“Bullshit. You tried to kill me out at Jack Frerotte’s house two nights ago.”
“Is that right?”
“Damn straight.”
“And why would I have wanted to do that?”
“Because you’re a Defender of the Bloodline. You and Scales, and those boys who helped him jump me at his apartment.”
There was a long pause before the other man said, “Yes.”
“And Frerotte too, I imagine.”
“No. Jack Frerotte was never a true believer. We understand that now.”
Behind his back, Gunner was rubbing his wrists raw trying to stretch the cable ties binding them together, caring little that his chances for success were minimal at best. Sooner or later, his friend the Defender was going to tire of talking and move on to more demonstrative, perhaps even sadistic, ways of expressing himself, and Gunner had good reason to believe his life might depend on having his hands free when he did.
“So he was just a hired gun, then,” the investigator said, just to keep the conversation going.
“A hired gun?”
“When he murdered Thomas Selmon for you. You paid Jack to do that, he didn’t do it voluntarily.”
After a moment, grudgingly: “Yes.”
“You didn’t expect to pay him?”
“I told you. We thought he was one of us. We would never have assigned him Selmon’s execution otherwise.”
The voice was on Gunner’s right now, at approximately 2 o’clock.
“So maybe Selmon’s not really dead. If Jack was only in it for the money—”
“We saw the body, Mr. Gunner. Jack took us to the grave site. That wasn’t part of the original plan, of course, but our growing doubts about his sincerity made such guarantees necessary.”
Then the photograph Gunner had found in Frerotte’s basement had been for real. Not a fake the fat man had put together just to run a game on his friends.
“By ‘we,’ ” Gunner said, “I take it you mean—”
“Our numbers are not important, Gunner. Except to say that there are far more of us than just the four brothers you already know about. That much I can assure you.”
Now the voice was directly behind Gunner, precipitating at least a momentary halt to the investigator’s struggles with the cable ties.
“Any of the others in here with us now, by any chance?” Gunner asked.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But you’re not going anywhere either way, are you, brother?”
The truth in that, more than the sarcasm in it, stung like a cold razor at Gunner’s throat. “Why don’t you tell me what you want,” he said.
“What we want? We want you to tell us whose side you’re on, of course. With whom, exactly, do you stand, Gunner? The Judases—or God?”
Choosing his words carefully, knowing dangerous ground when he was about to tread on it, Gunner said, “That all depends. Which god are we talking about?”
“There is only one god, my brother. Allah, the Almighty. The father and protector of our people.”
“The African-American people.”
“The living seed of Mother Africa, yes. The very same seed being destroyed from within by the agents of the White Devil who live among us.”
“You mean like Thomas Selmon.”
“Yes.”
“And that radio talk show host out in New Hampshire.”
“Delbert Olney. Yes. You know about him?”
Gunner didn’t answer.
“ ‘The Genius of the Ghetto’ Brother Olney used to call himself. He hadn’t lived in the ghetto since he was six years old and didn’t give a damn about anyone who did. But he was an ‘expert’ on the problems of our people.”
“So you killed him.”
“Yes. He was only the first of many.”
“You intend to kill all the Delbert Olneys in the world?”
“That is Allah’s will, Mr. Gunner.”
“And you know that because?”
“Because I’ve been inspired to know it.”
“Let me let you in on a little secret, brother. You’re gonna run out of bullets long before you run out of victims. Or haven’t you and Allah figured that out yet?”
The other man didn’t answer for a long time. “We want you to step off, Mr. Gunner,” he finally said, issuing a direct order. “Find something else to do with your time that has nothing to do with us and nothing to do with Thomas Selmon.”
And there it was: the end of conversation Gunner had been dreading. Instantly rendering his struggles against the bands around his wrists pointless.
“What about my client?”
“Your client? Tell her what you wish. But you’d be smart to discourage her from pursuing the matter of her brother’s disappearance, as well. That is, if you’re at all fond of her.”
“Meaning you’ll kill her if she doesn’t.”
“That is precisely my meaning, yes.” He came up unexpectedly on Gunner’s left side, whispered right into his ear. “Just as we’ll kill you. However reluctantly. If it was Allah’s wish that we kill everyone who gets in our way, Mr. Gunner, you and Sister McCreary would already be dead. Surely you can see that. But that is not our way. We are Defenders of the Bloodline. We are assassins for the people, not common murderers.”
He was telling what he thought was the truth. The distinction he was describing was as real for him as the earth beneath his feet.
“Give me Frerotte,” Gunner said, playing the long odds that so presumptuous a demand wouldn’t get him killed on the spot.
“What?”
“I need Frerotte. You let me nail him for Selmon’s murder, and I’ll do what you want. I’ll walk away, and McCreary will, too. I give you my word.”
“Your word?”
“You want me to forget you clowns tried to burn me alive Wednesday night, that’s my price. I want Frerotte. The rest of you can go to hell.”
Gunner’s boldness struck his host silent again, filling the room with an eerie, almost palpable air of doom.
And then the Defender laughed.
Before Gunner knew what was happening, a hand took hold of his left arm, put it in a vise grip as a needle was punched into his flesh, feeding yet another injection into his veins.
“You’re a lunatic, Gunner. And you’re in no position to negotiate, as you have somehow failed to notice. We are in control here, not you.”
“Wait! You don’t …”
Already, Gunner could feel himself drifting into unconsciousness. Damning himself as a fool for overplaying his all but nonexistent hand.
“If someone tried to kill you at Jack’s crib Wednesday night, it wasn’t us. So the debt you seem to think we owe you is a false one.” He paused. “The debt we owe Jack Frerotte, however, is not.”
Gunner tried to speak, made only a small, pitiful murmur of discomfort.
“He deceived us. He presented himself as a fellow believer, when all he really was was a mercenary. Had we allowed him completely into our confidence, allowing you to deal with him now might pose some threat to us. But we were smart enough, at least, to keep him at a distance. He no more knows our names and identities than you do.”
To Gunner, the Defender’s voice was distant now, an ever-fading wisp of sound echoing in the dark.
“So it seems we have a choice to make, my brothers and I. Trust you to do as
you say and let you live? Or kill you now and worry about Jack later?”
Again, silence descended upon the room. Gunner tried to wait it out, but couldn’t.
Sleep had finally overtaken him.
thirteen
THERE WAS NO WHITE LIGHT. NO HANDS REACHING OUT TO him from a shadowy void, no familiar voices calling his name, no friendly faces beckoning him toward heaven. But it was a near-death experience just the same. A murky, shades-of-gray spiral funneling down to perfect blackness. Silent, cold, terrifying.
And Gunner didn’t know how it would end.
He was vaguely aware of a nagging regret. Had he brought this on himself? Was this the ignoble way he was going to die—pricked by a poison needle and put to sleep, like a tired old dog that hadn’t the strength to bark anymore—because he hadn’t had the brains to lie in exchange for his life? To just tell the man he’d fallen prey to what he wanted to hear, and nothing more? The words would have been so simple to say: “Okay. You win. You want me gone, I’m gone.”
But he had tried to negotiate instead. To salvage some fragment of his self-esteem by insisting the Defenders give up Jack Frerotte. As if he had been in any position to bargain. Trying to dictate terms to someone who had nothing to lose by killing him had been the height of reckless machismo. Had it cost him all the days he’d had left to walk God’s green earth?
The answer lay at the black, bottomless core of the gray spiral continuing to draw him down, closer and closer to what he knew was death. And in his ears, a slow, inexorable beat prevailed:
Thump … thump … thump …
The sound of a poor man’s heart shutting down for good.
“I still say he ought’a see a doctor,” Winnie Phifer said.
Gunner shook his head. “No.”
“Winnie’s right, Gunner. You don’t know what them fools might’a given you,” Mickey said.
“I’m fine. Get the hell out of here, both of you.”
The trio was in Gunner’s office, Gunner stretched out on his back on his couch, the others looming over him, watching him labor to keep their faces and the room around them all in focus. It was Saturday morning. Winnie had found the investigator unconscious in front of the barber shop’s back door, rolled up in a ball on the ground like an oversize infant someone was trying to give away. She’d brought him inside all by herself, waited for Mickey to show up a few minutes later to decide what to do with him. Mickey shook him by the shoulders and slapped his cheeks a few times to bring him around, then asked him what had happened. Gunner didn’t remember all of it, but he remembered enough to bring his two nurses to the brink of calling an ambulance for him.
Winnie snorted, her motherly concern gone unappreciated, and left. Mickey stayed behind, thicker skinned and harder headed than she. Dillett the Ridgeback was nowhere in sight.
“You gonna call the cops?” Mickey asked.
“No. Not yet, anyway.” Gunner tried to sit up, changed his mind when his stomach started doing somersaults. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my car anywhere?”
“Didn’t see it out front when I came in. Maybe it’s around the corner, or somethin’. You want me to go look?”
Gunner nodded. He didn’t have to tell his landlord why the car was a priority; a ’65 Ford Cobra convertible in mint condition wasn’t going to last five minutes left unattended anywhere, security system or no security system, and Mickey knew that as well as anybody.
“That cop Poole called you twice yesterday,” Mickey said. “He said—”
“I know what he said. Forget about it,” Gunner told him irritably, waving him out the door. He had meant to call Poole to ask for an extension on his forty-eight-hour deadline relative to the Everson case, but forgot. Now Poole would doubtless be on his ass all weekend.
When he was finally left to recuperate alone, Gunner did something that would have made his landlord proud. He said a silent prayer of thanks. He was alive. His head felt like an urn filled with sand, and his body ached everywhere, but he was alive. Some would have called him lucky, others blessed. Gunner was convinced he’d been a little of both.
After his fleeting moment of gratitude had passed, he made a second attempt to get to his feet, managed to pull the stunt off this time. He wobbled over to his desk and sat down before the thought occurred to him that he should check his pockets, make sure the Defenders hadn’t added insult to injury by robbing him blind. They hadn’t; his money and wallet were in their usual places, seemingly untouched. His keys, however, were gone, replaced by something else: a small hand-drawn map.
It was childishly rudimentary, just a series of labeled parallel and perpendicular lines directing him to a remote location in the Angeles National Forest, between forty and fifty miles north of Los Angeles proper. Beneath a small red cross near a crooked line identified as San Francisquito Canyon Road, someone had scrawled a brief message:
We’re gonna be watching you, brother.
Thanks for the use of the ride.
A sure sign that Mickey wasn’t going to find Gunner’s car outside after all.
• • •
As expected, Gunner’s cousin Del Curry bitched the whole drive out to the site depicted on the Defenders’ map, pausing only to check his Hyundai’s mirrors during lane changes.
Gunner had known the purpose of this expedition would shake the self-employed electrician up like this, but he was trying to suffer his cousin’s whining in silence all the same, still feeling the last diminishing effects of his drugging the night before. It wasn’t easy.
“I’m not a grave digger, man,” Del kept saying. “Why the hell’d you have to call me for this?”
“I needed a ride, and you’ve got a car. Any more questions?”
“Mickey’s got a car, doesn’t he?”
“Mickey had to work today. You don’t.”
“But this kind of shit is police work, Aaron.”
“I called the police. Poole was out in the field, and Emilio Martinez has the day off. Jesus, Del, you’re acting just like an old woman!”
And so it went between them, Del crying like a baby, Gunner giving him hell for it, though in truth, Gunner was just as reluctant to do what they were about to do as his cousin. That the map was leading them to the location of Thomas Selmon’s body, Gunner had little doubt, and after nine months in the ground, he knew the corpse was likely to be as appetizing a sight as an autopsy in progress. But he had demanded Jack Frerotte’s head in exchange for his disinterest in the Defenders of the Bloodline, as misguided as that promise had been, and now it seemed he was going to get it, ready or not. Providing, of course, the Defenders hadn’t ditched his car this far out in the middle of nowhere just to add an exclamation point to his kidnapping.
Gunner had suggested this last possibility to Del simply to try and quiet him, putting no credence whatsoever in it himself.
San Francisquito Canyon Road was a twisty, winding two-lane that climbed up into the Angeles National Forest eight miles above Interstate 5, between Castaic Lake to the south and Elizabeth Lake to the north. The terrain it sliced through was all rough and tumble, a rocky, heavily foliated landscape of steep angles and narrow ledges that seemed the very definition of desolate. It was a long way to go to dump a body, Gunner mused, but few places would have been better suited to the purpose, especially at night.
About nine miles into their upward trek toward Elizabeth Lake, Del pointed and said, “There it is.”
The Cobra had been pulled off the northbound side of the road and left to rest on a slight strip of shoulder there, jammed into a small niche in the hillside. It was covered in dust, but otherwise appeared to be unharmed. Del turned his boxy little Hyundai in behind it, leaving the Korean car’s tail protruding about a foot or two out into the road, and both men climbed out to inspect the red convertible more closely. They still hadn’t seen more than two cars go by in either direction since they’d left Castaic Lake.
To Gunner’s utter relief, the Cobra was indeed safe and
sound. None of the indignities that could have easily befallen it under the circumstances—knife-shredded seats, soda-stained carpeting, a dented and key-scarred exterior—were in evidence. Apparently, whatever else the group was or wasn’t, the Defenders of the Bloodline were not common vandals.
“I don’t believe it,” Del said.
“Yeah. Neither do I,” Gunner agreed.
“Maybe something’s missing. There’s gotta be something missing, right?”
Gunner had already made a quick assessment. “The keys,” he said.
Directing Del to watch for opposing traffic, nonexistent as it was, he opened the Cobra’s driver’s side door, felt around the floorboard beneath both seats. “Nothing,” he said when he was finished, shaking his head.
“They had you come all the way out here to get the damn car, and didn’t leave the keys?”
“No. I don’t think so.” He was looking past Del to the other side of the road, where the hillside fell off sharply to continue its descent to level ground.
“What?”
“Come on.”
Gunner started across the silent highway, didn’t bother to look back to see if his cousin was following him as instructed. He reached the edge of the drop and looked down, out over a wall of thick vegetation and jagged rock that would be difficult to traverse on foot, but not impossible.
Del came up behind him, said, “You think they threw ’em down there?”
“Not exactly. Do me a favor and go get those gloves I brought along, huh?”
“The gloves? You mean—”
“Just go get ’em, Del. Hurry the hell up.”
Del reluctantly did as he was told, had to wait for a badly crumpled Toyota pickup truck easing its way downhill to pass before he could cross back to Gunner’s side of the road. Gunner took the gloves out of his hand without a word, slipped them on, and then stepped over the guardrail, cautiously making his way down the treacherous incline, step by tenuous step.
“Are you sure you know what the hell you’re doing?” his cousin called after him, staying put right where he was.
When Last Seen Alive Page 15
