He picked up another ball from the table.
“Yeah,” the King said, nodding his head enthusiastically. “I can handle it.”
“Good. We’ll make the first question simple. Where’s Rookie?”
The King hesitated before answering, knowing it was the last thing Gunner wanted to see him do. “I don’t know,” he said sheepishly. “I ain’t seen the boy in three weeks, so help me God.”
“That supposed to be your idea of a straight answer, King?”
“I’m tellin’ you the truth, man! I swear it!”
“Then how’d you get hold of Rookie’s car?”
Another pause. “His car? Who the hell said—”
The next ball struck the wall an inch from the King’s right eye, exploding against the soft plaster like a cannon shot. It had stirred the air near his head as it sped by, and he could still feel its breath on his brow as he cringed, belatedly, to defend himself.
“Somebody saw you sell the Maverick for scrap, King,” Gunner said, collecting a cue ball with his left hand while keeping the Ruger out where no one could possibly miss it with his right. “Don’t try to tell me you didn’t have it.”
“He’s fuckin’ my place all up, King!” one of the men on the floor cried. He was a short, dark-skinned man with off-centered eyes and a bulbous nose, the last of the King’s friends to speak. “Tell the motherfucker what he wants to know!”
“All right, all right,” the King said, offering Gunner the palms of his hands as a solicitation of peace. “I had the goddamn car, yeah. So what?”
“The question was, How’d you get hold of it?”
“I bought it, man. That’s how.”
“You bought it?”
“Yeah, I bought it. Rookie sold it to me. Showed up at the house one day and said he needed money bad, that the cops were out lookin’ for him and he had to get lost somewhere. He’s my kid, he was in trouble, so I gave him a few dollars for his car. What’s wrong with that?”
“When was this, exactly?”
“Like I told you, ’bout three weeks ago.” He straightened up again, gaining confidence. “It was on a Monday, I know that.”
“How’s that?”
“’Cause my ol’ lady’s off on Mondays, an’ she was home when I borrowed the seventy-five bucks.”
Gunner marveled at the man’s paternal generosity. Seventy-five dollars for a ’78 Ford Maverick in running condition was a fire-sale price of laughable proportion; even sold as a junker, it had probably returned the King’s investment three times over.
“Rookie tell you he and Toby Mills had murdered Darrel Lovejoy?” Gunner asked him.
The King shook his head. “Hell no. He didn’t tell me nothin’ like that. All he said was, he was in trouble and he needed money. I didn’t know who they’d shot up ’til I heard it on the news.”
“Who’s’they’?”
The King shrugged. “Rookie and whoever it was in the car with him. This Mills kid, I guess.”
“You guess? You mean you don’t know who it was?”
“No. Rookie never told me that. He never told me nothin’, ’cept he was in trouble, like I said.”
“Maybe he didn’t have to tell you. Maybe you were there to see for yourself.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. You sure as hell sound too sure of Rookie’s involvement to have just heard about it on the evening news. Or is there some reason for that you haven’t mentioned yet?”
Again, against his better wishes, the King delayed his answer, unsure of what to say. “I found some shells in the car,” he said in time, with some regret. “Twenty-eight gauge, in the back, on the floor.”
“Damn,” somebody prone near his feet said.
Mill’s gun was a 28-gauge shotgun, but that wasn’t something the King could have picked up from the press.
“Where are the shells now?” Gunner asked.
“I tossed ’em,” the King said. “What else could I do? They was evidence could’ve put the boy up for life. I wasn’t gonna leave ’em lyin’ ’round for the cops to get hold of.”
Gunner grimaced. “What’s the name of the yard you sold the car to?”
“Solid Gold. Place is called Solid Gold Junk, on San Pedro, downtown.”
“You seen Rookie since you bought the car?”
“No.”
“Or talk to him over the phone?”
“No. I ain’t heard from him at all since then.”
Gunner pitched the cue ball at the King’s left leg, throwing it sidearm to take some speed off, and scored a direct hit on the pudgy man’s kneecap, a blow that restored his dwindling fear of Gunner immediately.
“Goddammit, man, that ain’t necessary! I’m tellin’ you the truth!”
“I need to find him, King,” Gunner said, retrieving yet another ball from the table at his side. “Rookie’s the only one who knows if the cops have the right man in Mills or not.”
“So what the hell you come to me for? Boy’s an almighty Imperial Blue; go ask the fuckin’ Blues where he’s at!”
“I did that. They sent me to you.”
“Shit,” the King said, rubbing his knee vigorously, “they know the boy won’t have nothin’ to do with me! Boy’s father’s s’posed to be his friend, somebody he can talk to ’bout things, but Rookie ain’t never taken me into his confidence ’bout nothin’. Like he don’t trust my judgment, or somethin’. He needs advice, he don’t come to me, he goes to them little sorry ‘homeboys’ of his, or that fuckin’ rock dealer he’s so goddamn tight with.”
He stopped, struck by a sudden thought. “Yeah, that’s right! That’s who you need to be talkin’ to, ’steada me! You wanna find Rookie, go talk to that fuckin’ dealer he’s always suckin’ up to, one’s got him so damn fucked up all the time!”
“What dealer is that?” Gunner asked.
“Whitey. Whitey Most. Kids live over there ’round the house get most of their shit from him, ’cludin’ the Blues. He’s Rookie’s connection; man even uses the boy to make runs for ’im from time to time. Why don’t you go ask him where Rookie’s at?”
Because crack dealers can be inhospitable, Gunner wanted to reply, but didn’t.
“Rookie’s strung out pretty bad, is he?”
The King grunted. “You ever seen somebody wasted twenty-four hours a day? Or hurtin’ so bad to get high they can’t sit still for a goddamn minute? Gotta be movin’ their hands or their feet, steadily, like they’re in a big hurry to get someplace, or somefhin’?
“Boy’s brother always be gettin’ on my case, talkin’ ’bout how livin’ with me must be so hard on the Rook, and shit. Hey, I tell you what. It’s hard livin’ with Rookie, too.”
Gunner didn’t openly commiserate. He was thinking about the King’s last question, realizing to his surprise that he did indeed know someone who exhibited similar symptoms of resdessness. And now he knew to what malady those symptoms could possibly be attributed.
“Where would I find this Whitey Most?” he asked the King. “If I should decide to look for him?”
“Ask any kid from ’round there, they’ll tell you where you can find ’im. Motherfucker’s always on the street somewhere; you won’t have to look too damn hard.”
Gunner nodded his head and said, “Thanks.” He tossed the solid six ball in his hand back on the table and started to back out of the room, keeping the Ruger out and at the ready, strictly as a precautionary measure. Several of the men on the floor dared to raise their heads to watch him leave, but no one made any effort to rise.
“Don’t you hurt my son, man,” the King said with commendable backbone.
Gunner let him have the last word and disappeared into the driving rain outside.
chapter eight
Tamika Downs slipped out of her house at a few minutes past ten Monday evening, not long after the city was granted its first respite from the rain’s watery onslaught in five hours, but the relief team for the pair of plainclothes police officers in t
he green Buick Le Sabre Gunner had pointed out to her earlier in the day never saw her leave. They were wide awake and alert, still parked on the opposite side of Croesus with a good view of the house, but Downs went out the back way and through the alley dissecting her block, and there was no way for them to know she was gone.
Unbeknownst to Downs, however, her exit did not go entirely unnoticed, because Gunner was there to see it. He had parked Del’s Hyundai near the mouth of the alley where it opened up onto 105th Street, and had been waiting only four hours and eleven minutes when Downs made her devious escape. True to Gunner’s faith in the car, she took no note of the Hyundai sitting there; its generic profile was the ultimate urban camouflage. Wearing a huge brown wig, a pair of skintight fake leather pants, and a matted fur coat, she skittered by on the rain-slick pavement and rushed off, heading west on 105th toward Wilmington.
Keeping the Hyundai at a safe distance, Gunner followed.
Downs reached Wilmington and kept going, crossing over to the 1800 block of 105th, picking up speed. Gunner deliberately missed the signal at Wilmington to give her room to roam, confident of his ability to catch up before she could deviate from her course. He was in no hurry; he had his window rolled down and the cold night air, purged of its usual impurities by the recent rain, was a welcome passenger in the car.
In most other Los Angeles neighborhoods, Downs would have been alone on the street at this hour, but here she was only one nightcrawler among many. This was an acreage of the City of Angels where need ran round the clock and vice never closed its doors. Here and there, men and women uninterested in sleep, perhaps because many of them routinely got as much of it during the day as they did at night, stood in small numbers on dimly lit porches and around parked cars, laughing, shouting, spilling malt liquor on their clothing. Some made lewd remarks as Downs hurried by, too busy even to rebuke them.
She turned right on Willowbrook Avenue and then made an immediate left on 104th Place, staying on the south side of the street until she came to the fenced perimeter of the junior high school on the next corner. Unlike 105th Street, 104th Place was deathly still, dark and unattended. Killing his lights, Gunner dropped back and parked his cousin’s car in the middle of the block, where he watched Downs take a seat on the steps of the school’s main building, settling in to wait for someone.
She had to kill a few minutes glancing nervously about her, freezing in the cold, but she wasn’t made to wait long. The man she had come to see made his appearance shortly before 10:30, having arrived on foot just as she had, coming from the opposite direction. Because he was dressed for the weather, fortified from the chilly night by a fur-lined leather jacket with the collar turned up and a black wool ski cap, his sex and height—the latter somewhere in the neighborhood of six two, six three—were the only two things about him Gunner could read clearly, and with any confidence, from his vantage point.
Downs got to her feet as her ambiguous friend climbed the stairs of the school building to join her, and the two engaged in a succinct, dispassionate conversation that ended with Downs receiving something too small and too briefly visible for Gunner to identify. Moving with the telltale speed of desperation, Downs accepted the man’s offering with her right hand, shoved both hands into the pockets of her coat, and, without another word, turned to leave 104th Place Junior High School behind, apparently headed for home again. The man in the wool cap stayed put and watched her go, waiting to be convinced that all was well before abandoning the comfort of the shadows for the street.
It was a transaction not uncommon to these environs, save for one glaring omission: the payoff. Downs’s friend had received nothing in exchange for his gift.
Gunner quickly reclined the Hyundai’s driver’s seat and lay still, eyeing the little car’s cloth headliner as Downs passed by, splashing through sidewalk puddles on the other side of the street as she went. It was a posture that made him feel uneasy and somewhat vulnerable, because Downs’s friend was now out of view and it was not safe to assume that he, like Downs, would leave in the same direction from which he had come. If he chose to follow Downs’s route instead, walking eastbound on the Hyundai’s side of the street, Gunner would need a miracle to avoid being discovered and labeled as a spy. And perhaps, consequently shot.
Still, having no choice but to trust blind luck with his safety, the detective lay in the Hyundai’s reclined bucket seat and, with nothing left to distract him but the lackluster roof of the car, tried not to think about the tooth that had been killing him since his scuffle with King Davidson’s band of merry men that afternoon. The profuse bleeding had stopped but there was no ignoring the pain. By the time the sound of Downs’s passage had diminished to his satisfaction, he was ready to call his long-standing moratorium on visits to his dentist off, at least for a day.
Gunner brought the Hyundai’s seat up slowly and rose with it, his eyes on the school building ahead, and found it as it had been before Downs’s arrival, fully deserted. All that he could see of 104th Place was equally lifeless.
He started the car as discreetly as possible and retraced his route only as far back as the intersection of Willowbrook and 105th. Staying southbound on Willowbrook, he paused at the curb and merely peered down 105th, picking up sight of Downs in the middle of the block. When he was reasonably assured of her destination, he continued on Willowbrook to Santa Ana Boulevard, turned east, and raced back to Downs’s home on Croesus, taking the same parking space he had originally occupied on the northbound side of 105th, near the alley she had used for her escape.
He stayed upright in the driver’s seat this time and waited for Downs’s return, no longer caring whether she made him or not. Within minutes, he could see her off in the distance, approaching fast, eyes straight ahead like a colt wearing blinders, single-mindedly giving nothing to her left or right so much as a glance.
She was in a bad way.
By the time she reached the mouth of the alley, she was running more than walking, risking a broken neck on the slippery pavement. When she heard Gunner step out of his car and turned to see him standing there, her left foot came out from under her and she fell to one knee in the street.
“Shit! You scared the hell outta me!”
She was making a mess of getting up on her own, so Gunner did the gentlemanly thing and gave her a hand.
“You really should be more careful, on a night like this,” he said.
“What the hell is it to you? What you doin’ out here, anyway?”
Standing, she pushed his hand away and brushed herself off, eyeing him warily. Great drops of water were starting to fall from the sky, signaling the rain’s return.
“I think maybe we’d better discuss that inside,” Gunner said, reaching out to take her arm.
She pulled away. “We can’t discuss nothin’ right now. I gotta go look after my kids.”
Gunner grabbed her right wrist, hard, and said, “Only person you’re interested in looking out for right now is Number One. That shit in your pocket’s for you, not your kids.”
“What shit? What’re you talkin’ about?” She was trying to break her arm free, twisting and turning, but she was only a hundred pounds or so, too frail for the task.
“I don’t want to make this any harder for you than I have to, Tamika,” the detective said, “but if you don’t shut the fuck up and talk to me like you’ve got some sense I’ll walk your ass around the corner and empty your pockets in front of those nice police officers watching your house. That what you want?”
“No! Let go!”
She was fighting as hard as ever. Gunner, smiling, allowed her to struggle for a moment, then started toward Croesus, dragging her behind him.
“You called it, sister,” he said as the rain began to come down in earnest.
“Wait! Don’t!”
He stopped and looked at her, waiting to hear what she had to say. She chewed on her lower lip pensively, the wig on her head leaning to one side like a crooked wall painting, and sa
id, “What do you wanna talk about?”
“Whatever comes to mind,” Gunner told her, reminding her of his grip on her wrist with a slight squeeze.
It was an attempt to point out that she was in no position to negotiate, a fact Downs soon acknowledged with a tiny nod of her head.
“In the alley,” she suggested.
Gunner didn’t let her go until they were standing at the backyard gate to her home, sharing space in the alley with misshapen garbage cans and illegally parked cars. Thunder was making noises of discontent above their heads and the rain was beating down on the earth as if it had a score to settle with mankind.
“Let’s see what’s in the pocket,” Gunner said.
“Why I got to show you? You already know what it is.”
“Let’s see it anyway. I’m not always as smart as I think I am.”
Downs gave him a sour look but did as she was told. Inside her right-hand coat pocket were a pair of small glassine envelopes, each containing several tiny crystalline chips of white, the end result of a process that had started with the cooking of a mixture of baking soda, water, and cocaine. It was a drug of many names but was most commonly referred to as crack.
Or as Downs and Gunner had learned to call it, rock.
“That’s not a bad score,” Gunner said, making only a feeble effort to suppress his contempt. “Looks like a full day’s supply, assuming you’re as fucked up as I think you are. Must’ve hit you for what? Fifty, sixty bucks?”
Downs started not to answer but thought better of it and nodded her head.
Gunner snatched the plastic envelopes from her grasp before she could withdraw them, and said, “Bullshit. I saw you make the buy, Tamika; you didn’t pay the man a dime for this.”
Instinctively, Downs threw herself at him, reaching to retrieve her stolen instrument of vice, but Gunner caught her right wrist in his left hand again and closed down on it, using the grip to subdue her.
Not Long for This World Page 10
