Fear of the Dark

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  They had all left spirits behind, and their spirits needed no company. His self-respect was simply not worth another ghost. And so his rage, what there was of it, would be stillborn; the human sacrifice it would take to resurrect his dignity would not take place.

  He would survive, and leave it at that.

  Survival was, after all, the most he felt he truly deserved.

  Del’s patience finally ran out on Monday, the fifth straight day of Gunner’s self-imposed exile. He came to the door around four in the afternoon and wouldn’t stop ringing the bell until Gunner answered it.

  “You’ve got mail all over the porch,” he said, handing over a stack of miscellaneous bills as he stepped inside.

  The house was dark, the soft white face of Gunner’s still-running TV set notwithstanding. A dirty sheet was falling from the couch to the floor, converting it from a broken-down piece of living-room furniture to an unkempt bed. The remains of several days-old meals stood drying on plates and dishes at various locations, the scent of bad luck bourbon hovering in the air like a black cloud with no silver lining.

  Del took a moment to examine the wreckage, then turned his eyes of stone to Gunner and said, “Enough’s enough. What the fuck’s goin’ on?”

  It was a rhetorical question; he didn’t wait for an answer. “I spoke with Ziggy this morning. To see if he could tell me why your phone’s been out of order for the last two days. You know what he said? He said you’ve pulled the plug. On your life.”

  “Ziggy’s been working too hard,” Gunner said.

  Del moved a plate of petrified lasagna and sat down in the room’s one good chair. “You don’t bullshit your attorney, Aaron. You tell him the truth, whatever the truth may be, and help him make a case out of it. That too much for Ziggy to ask?”

  “I’ve told Ziggy what happened. A thousand times. If he chooses not to believe it, that’s his problem.”

  “He’s not stupid, man. He’s been working for you for four years, you don’t think he can tell when you’re being straight with him and when you’re not?”

  “He’s my lawyer, not my mother! I tell him what I want to tell him, goddammit!”

  He was beginning to feel sick. The bile he had managed to suppress for four days was coming to the surface, and he was oddly relieved to sense it.

  “And what about me?” Del asked. “That go for me, too?”

  “It goes for everybody. Ziggy knows what he needs to know; you know what you need to know. I killed a man before he could kill me, and I’m through as a private investigator. The page has turned. I’m ready to go to work for you now, full time. What more do you want?”

  “I want to believe you’re making the break clean. That you’re choosing this moment to get out and go in with me because that’s what you want, not because you’re afraid. Afraid of what you’ve done, or what you might do again, if you don’t.”

  “Look. It’s time, that’s all. You don’t think it’s time?”

  “What I think doesn’t matter. If you think it’s time, then it must be. But don’t kid yourself, and don’t kid me—you can’t turn your back on ten years’ work out of fear and expect to make it stick.”

  Gunner laughed. Del could usually be relied upon to see through a man with disarming precision, but this time he had it all wrong. Gunner was afraid, that much was true—but not of himself.

  For himself.

  “I say something funny?”

  Gunner kept laughing, unable or unwilling to stop. He had a bottle of Lord Calvert in his hand and was pouring himself a drink, a large one in a dirty glass.

  “You overestimate me, cousin,” he said, grinning, before tossing the bourbon down in a rush.

  Del took a good hard look at him, already fast at work on a second drink, and said, “Maybe I do.”

  He went to the door and opened it. Terry Allison was standing on the other side, out on the mail-strewn porch, getting ready to ring the bell. They both did a double-take, surprised.

  “I’m looking for Aaron Gunner,” the blond said stiffly, breaking their shared paralysis first. She was wearing a light cotton summer dress in pastel blue, sleeveless and scoop-necked to expose all the perfectly bronzed flesh she could legally afford to display. The garment itself was innocent; the firm, lithe body beneath it was not.

  Del turned to Gunner for help, at a loss for words. Gunner walked his fresh drink over to the door and greeted Allison with a crooked smile, going out of his way to make her feel cheap and out of place.

  “Well. Will wonders never cease.” He turned to his cousin and said, “Del, this sweet young thing is Ms. Terry Allison, right-hand lady of would-be Congressman Lew Henshaw’s right-hand man, Larry Stewart. Say hello to my cousin Del, Ms. Allison.”

  Allison nodded and took Del’s hand, making a feeble attempt to shake it.

  “Ms. Allison thinks Lew Henshaw is just what her district needs, Del. Maybe, somewhere down the road, just what we all need. If you know what I mean.”

  “That’s not why I’m here, Mr. Gunner,” Allison said, blushing, tainting her tan with a faint crimson glow.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. You must’ve heard about your pal Ferris, then. You want to ask me not to waste any more of your delivery boys, I guess.”

  “No! If you’d just listen to me for a second—”

  “Waitaminute, waitaminute. I’ve got it. If it’s not Henshaw, and it’s not Ferris, then it must be something kinky that brings you all the way out here, into the ghet-to. You want to know if what they say about us is true, right? You want to find out first-hand whether or not we’re just as good in the sack as we are on the dance floor.”

  “Aaron, Jesus, man,” Del said.

  Gunner wouldn’t take his eyes off the girl. “Hey, no problem. I can spare a few minutes. Del was just leaving. Weren’t you, Del?”

  Allison ran off. She fumbled her way into a late-model white-on-white Toyota Supra parked at the curb out front and peeled some tread off its tires pulling away. Gunner stepped out onto the porch to watch her go and laughed, his voice ringing more with melancholy than amusement.

  Del came up beside him and said, “Up until a few minutes ago, I was only guessing. But now I’m sure.” He paused. “Whatever it is you’re trying to forget, it’s not going to go away. It’s going to fuck with you until you die, or until you deal with it. One or the other.” He shook his head. “You’re not ever going to be able to outrun it.”

  Gunner grinned and finished off his drink. “Watch me,” he said.

  He went back inside the house and closed the door behind him.

  he last Thursday in October, ten days after his arrest in connection with the death of Stanley Ferris, Gunner started his second term of employment under his cousin Del, making his retirement from private investigation official. With two hundred-plus hours of uninterrupted self-pity under his belt, he stepped back into the light of day like a man emerging from an extended coma and endeavored to learn all over again the ways of the living.

  The heat wave that had tortured Los Angeles for five consecutive weeks was at last abating, freeing the mercury in a million thermometers to dip below ninety and settle there, but some people were slow to notice the change. They still had to squint against a white-hot sky and drive their cars with the windows rolled down; their throats remained dry and it still hurt to breathe and their clothes continued to cling to their bodies like a wetsuit. The meteorological crisis that had driven them to the edge of anarchy was over, but its effects lingered on. The human time bomb Black America had become was still ticking, and would for a few days more, at least.

  Meanwhile, Gunner went about his business as a reborn electrician’s apprentice with relative peace of mind. The Buddy Dorris affair was behind him. His phone had been plugged back in since early Tuesday and had yet to ring. Brother Jamaal had given up the ghost and Verna Gail had apparently never really given a damn in the first place, so that was that. He was making his break for
a better life, and there were no more voices of dissent to be heard. He was home free.

  His first day on the job went well. He spent a short four hours helping Del install a new AC outlet in a Century City office computer room, took a long lunch, and was summarily dismissed until Friday.

  And then Al Dobey turned up.

  Gunner was walking a forty-dollar bag of groceries home from the Alpha Beta market on Florence and Central when he spotted the portly pimp coming out of a barber shop across the street. A fresh shave and haircut made him look less the sleazeball than usual, but there was no mistaking the three diamonds in Dobey’s left earlobe or the prescription sunglasses under his panama hat. He looked up from a wad of money in his right hand as he hit the sidewalk and caught sight of Gunner across the way. He shoved the money into his right-hand trouser pocket, then started to run.

  Like a sprinter reacting to the starter’s gun, Gunner took off after him, giving no thought to what he was doing. Forty dollars’ worth of food just hit the ground and he was gone, legs pumping at full tilt, arms swinging back and forth in alternate rhythm.

  Dobey’s fat was a definite impediment to his progress, but his fear was great enough to counteract it. Without his hat, lost in the first ten feet of his flight, he was moving like a man thirty pounds lighter and ten years younger. No sooner had Gunner joined him on the north side of Florence than the pimp crossed back to the south side, running west toward Wadsworth, rebounding off a Japanese pick-up that never hit its brakes, and weaving his way around several other vehicles that did. Gunner followed suit, but with greater care, allowing Dobey to claim a sizable lead.

  Dobey restricted the chase to Florence, refusing to veer off in one direction or another and abandon the myriad distractions and obstructions the heavily populated boulevard had to offer. It was difficult terrain for both men to traverse, and that was to Dobey’s advantage. The street was full of people, young and old, male and female, moving grudgingly or not at all. Maybe someone the pimp shoved out of his way would disapprove of Gunner trying the same trick moments later, and would lodge a vehement protest with a loaded gun or a sharp knife. Maybe Gunner would nudge the wrong woman’s child, or step on the wrong man’s foot. It wouldn’t take much to get killed today; it never did.

  None of this was of much concern to Gunner, however. His mind was on other things. Like breathing and keeping his balance, and ignoring the pain in his still-aching ribs, all the while trying to decide what it was he was doing, and why, or for whom, he was doing it. Dobey was a valid foe only in Gunner’s old world, his surrendered world; he held no meaning in the present one. Taking the pimp in his hands and changing the shape of his face forever would accomplish nothing. It would not bring back Audra Dobey. It would not make Gunner’s past any less a disaster.

  So what the hell was he doing?

  Dobey had put thirty yards between himself and his pursuer when he reached the intersection of Avalon and Florence and came to a halt. He had gone as far as his fear could take him, and he was tired. His lungs were burning and his powder-blue suit was dark with sweat. He reached behind his back to pull a nine-millimeter Beretta from the waistband of his pants and waited patiently for Gunner to break from the crowd before him.

  In his excitement, Dobey had failed to notice the black-and-white Dodge sitting to his left on the opposite side of Florence on Avalon, where two uniformed policemen were giving a kid on a moped a hard time for parking in a red zone. Gunner, however, had been more attentive; he was now ensconced in a snug little break between two buildings, out of harm’s way. Dobey was waiting for him in vain.

  The mass of people in line with the pimp’s Beretta broke off in all directions as those who had seen it dove for cover and those who had not instinctively did likewise, anyway. By the time Dobey saw the two men in blue racing across Florence toward him, he was alone on the corner with nowhere to run and no cover to take. A sitting duck.

  “Halt! Police!”

  They only let him hear it once. They let him turn in their direction and gave him a full second to drop the Beretta before cutting him down, making the choice for him. They fired six rounds each, emptying their weapons; then and only then did they leave the street to approach his body, what little remained to bloody the ground.

  Like most uniformed cops assigned to this part of the city, both men were Caucasian, razor sharp and humorless. The younger of the two went to call for back-up while his partner stayed behind to look Dobey over. He was down in a crouch, rifling the dead pimp’s pockets, when it dawned on him that a crowd was gathering around him, and the gun in his holster was empty. He stood up slowly and glanced about, his left hand searching for the nightstick at his waist.

  “All right, people, let’s break it up.”

  “Say what?” someone asked.

  “Break what up?” someone else demanded.

  “You shot that man in cold blood,” a woman said.

  “Sure as hell did,” a young boy agreed. “I seen it.”

  The cop held his ground. “Let’s go. Move it, I said!” He had his baton out now. He craned his neck to see how the kid at the car was coming along, but the crowd was blocking his view. Traffic was starting to back up on the street as drivers paused in the middle of the intersection to watch the growing mob on the sidewalk.

  Gunner had come out of hiding and was moving toward the shrinking circle where the cop was making his stand beside Dobey’s body. The black man could see what was coming and felt obligated to stop it, having no desire to be the imbecile credited with striking the first match in the Second Torching of Los Angeles.

  “He ain’t got no bullets in his gun,” someone said in a shrill, animated voice. “It was clickin’, remember?”

  “That’s right. I heard it,” a tall man wearing a red headband said, standing in the front row. “He fired six times, then nothin’.” He started to smile.

  “Bullshit,” Gunner said, on a hunch. He, too, was in the front row now, directly opposite the man in the headband. “It was the other one shot six times. This man here, he only shot four times.”

  “Four times? You’re crazy!”

  “His motherfuckin’ gun was clickin’” the shrill voice said again, behind the big man.

  Gunner shook his head. “That wasn’t his gun. That was his partner’s. I was standing right here. I saw the whole thing. This guy only shot four times. You don’t believe me, go ahead and fuck with him, see if he doesn’t put two bullets in your ass. You think you’ve got a high voice now …”

  The crowd broke up. Gunner grinned. The younger policeman reappeared, riot gun in hand, as sirens began to assert themselves in the distance.

  “You okay?” the kid asked his partner, confused by the laughter of the gathering. The older man nodded and stole a glance in Gunner’s direction, saying thanks the only way he could.

  Two more black-and-whites lurched to a halt at the curb, having crossed the double yellow line bisecting Florence against traffic, and the party was over. While the mass of black people surrounding the two uniformed officers began to dissipate, a small, middle-aged, pock-marked man in a knitted cap stepped forward to get one last look at Gunner before moving on. He didn’t seem impressed.

  “Funny man,” he said, frowning.

  The shrill voice Gunner had ridiculed was his.

  The demon, it seemed, had been exorcised, the dragon slain.

  The key figure in Gunner’s darkest recurrent nightmare had resurfaced after eight months in hiding, slammed into a wall of pistol fire, and changed Gunner’s life in the process. The man Gunner had been and the man he was now, now that the book on Al Dobey could be closed forever, were two distinctly different people. That much he could sense; that much was clear.

  Initially, Gunner thought himself merely drunk with self-satisfaction, high on a long-standing bloodlust finally satiated, but he quickly realized there was more to his catharsis than that. He was not above finding some justice in Dobey’s death—the debt he owed the pimp’s
daughter had to be from this moment on considered paid in full—but Dobey’s death itself, it seemed to Gunner, was not what had done the trick. The pimp’s fate was immaterial. What he had awakened just by showing his face again was not.

  It had taken Gunner over a week of seclusion to convince himself that his manhood was not worth fighting for, that his pride was a luxury he could easily do without, but Dobey had lain such assumptions to waste in a matter of seconds. Had Gunner let him go when he first started to run, granted him escape uncontested, it would have been impossible to ever again second-guess his decision to trade private investigation for Del’s offered partnership. But he had taken off after the pimp instead. The self-respect he had given up for dead had some life in it after all.

  Which meant there were new decisions to be made, and little time to make them.

  Gunner came to understand all this in the dark, displaced ruins of his living room early Thursday evening, after the smoke had cleared on his busy day. With all the windows open and the curtains drawn shut, the front of the house was almost bearable. He was propped up on the couch with slippers on his feet and nothing but Calvins under his robe, letting an old Bob James album on the stereo massage the kinks out of his mood.

  While his mind sought to assimilate fifteen thoughts at once, he absently sorted through the pile of unopened mail he had collected over his several days of social withdrawal and came upon one parcel in particular that stood out from the rest. It was a brown-papered rectangle only slightly larger than a paperback book, with sharp-edged corners and flat, unremarkable surfaces. Gunner took it in his hands and looked it over, guessing its weight to be somewhere around a pound. Someone with a steady hand and a good calligrapher’s pen had addressed it, but had left no clue to its origin other than a Los Angeles postmark of the previous Friday.