Not Long for This World

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “Well? What does it mean to you?”

  The Blue did a clean-and-jerk with his massive shoulders, shrugging, and said, “Don’t mean nothin’ to me. It’s just a book full of ’bangers. Serious ’bangers. Kind like to jack people, just for fun. I used to know some of ’em.”

  “What do you mean, ‘used to’? They don’t ’bang anymore?”

  “I mean they don’t do nothin’ anymore. They dead. Most of the cats in that book are dead. You a serious ’banger, down for anything, that’s how you gen’rally gonna end up. Right?”

  He grinned once more and got out of the car.

  Following Most around for the next day and a half turned out to be just as uninspiring an occupation as Gunner feared it might be. Little separated the dealer’s way of earning his money from any other legitimate salesman’s, and that never spelled excitement; he spent all his time being sociable with good clients and uncompromising with bad ones, negotiating terms but never arguing over them, hopping like a speed freak from one illicit point of sale to the next.

  He drove a brand-new pearl white Nissan Maxima sitting on low-profile wheels and tires that made the car look like a cat forever about to pounce. On foot and on the road, Gunner watched him buy and sell, compare notes with a number of his brethren, and seduce a few homely women, but all it really taught him was that Most and the man with whom he had seen Tamika Downs only hours before she died were about the same general size and shape. Gunner never once saw anything he had never seen before, or had not expected to see, at one point or another, from the very beginning of his surveillance effort.

  Like the invariable destitution of his customer base, Most’s chosen locales of business were uniformly common and predictable. Street corners and alleyways crowded with the lifelong unemployed, parking lots and playgrounds, shopping-mall eateries and abandoned residential buildings. In such places, he made deals with preadolescents and the elderly, males and females and the lost souls in between, kids on their way to school and adults on their way to nowhere. No one was too young or too innocent, too old or too wise to be denied his goods and services. Success in the drug trade refused a dealer the liberty to be discriminating.

  Gunner was not an expert tracker, as a past full of painful failures in the endeavor had pointed out, but he somehow never attracted Most’s attention, even though Most was acting like a man thoroughly convinced he was being followed. He had a way of taking one last look around before departing that went beyond the usual wariness of his kind. Gunner had at first feared that he had tipped his hand in some way—not an unreasonable assumption considering his record—but it soon became obvious that Most was merely fearful of a tail, as opposed to being actually aware of one.

  Still, he appeared to be conducting business as usual, making as many stops as was likely to be his norm. He kept Gunner hopping like the last ball in a pinball machine, and by late Thursday afternoon, Gunner was fed up. Most had offered him nothing. He had seen the spotty-complexioned dealer trade rock cocaine with hookers and mail carriers, mothers and grandmothers, runners and suppliers, cops in uniform and in plainclothes, Cuzzes and Hoods of every denomination, friends and even some competitors.

  There had been no sign of Rookie Davidson, however.

  In fact, there had been nothing worth a second thought in the twenty-nine hours he had invested in shadowing Most save for two mildly peculiar, seemingly unrelated occurrences.

  The first was a pair of trips Most had made to a run-down bowling alley on Western near Imperial, early in the afternoon both Wednesday and Thursday. Gunner knew the establishment as a hotbed of inactivity, an empty-bellied pink elephant where anything actually moving stood out like a sore thumb, and so to avoid detection he had chosen to wait outside for Most each time, parking the Hyundai across the street rather than in the alley’s desolate parking lot. He was left to guess what magic the place held for Most, but it was at least safe to say that the sport of bowling wasn’t it; on each occasion, the dealer had gone in and come out in less than ten minutes.

  The other oddity involved a meeting Most had taken during the last daylight hours of Thursday with what Gunner figured for an Imperial Blue, only not the one he had been hoping all along to see. Most had driven out to Venice Beach and found the kid waiting for him in an all-but-empty public parking lot, freezing his tail off in the cold and wet springtime gale blowing in off the Pacific. Dressed in only a Lakers T-shirt and a denim ensemble of pants and jacket, he wore Cuz colors in all the customary places—the laces and trim on his basketball shoes, for example—and displayed them as well in the fashion the Blues had made their trademark: A blue wristband rolled up high on the right biceps. He didn’t look a day over fourteen, but he moved like an old man, taking his time, daring the world and everyone in it to try and rush him along. He had a small head crowned by a flat-top haircut, with a twist: The top had been sheared off at an angle, descending left to right. It made him look as if he was wearing a hat he could not keep straight on his head.

  There were a number of Blues Gunner had not yet come to know, but he didn’t feel like any introductions were necessary to figure out which of these this one was. Whitey Most’s behavior around the Blue said it all. Up to now, he had shown no apparent deference to any gangbanger, regardless of set; his manner around them, in fact, had struck Gunner as wantonly reckless and haughty.

  This was a different Whitey Most, however.

  As Gunner had watched from the vantage point of an adjacent, more heavily populated parking lot, Most had left his car to go to the Blue, giving himself up to the cold outside without complaint, a concession Gunner had seen him make for no one in the past. Where before he had been all too willing to stand toe to toe with anyone, with the Blue he kept his distance, circling and sliding as they spoke, smoothly frustrating any attempt on the kid’s part to close the distance between them. All of the forceful gesturing and finger pointing that usually accompanied a Most discourse was gone; his was the body language of a man walking a tightrope—deliberate and controlled.

  The Blue, meanwhile, remained motionless, hands in his jacket pockets, eyes fixed straight ahead, keeping his words, when he had something to say, to a minimum. His lips barely moved when he spoke.

  There was no doubt in Gunner’s mind that this was Cube Clarke.

  Exactly what kind of business Most had with Clarke was impossible to ascertain, since their meeting was over quickly and nothing was passed between them. However, there had been something in the way they had said their goodbyes that seemed to suggest Most was buying information, and that Clarke had sold him precisely what he had wanted to hear.

  Above the razor-sharp horizon line to the west, one of Los Angeles’s patented burnt orange sunsets was in full swing when Most left Clarke—if it was Clarke—and Venice for the northbound San Diego Freeway, clearly not headed for home. Gunner played with the idea of letting him go and sticking with Clarke instead, but decided that would only be trading one blind hunch for another. He had gone out on a limb with Kelly DeCharme to come this far with Most, and he knew that to back off now would be as good as admitting that his professional instincts, such as they were, could not be safely trusted again.

  So he followed Most’s low-slung Nissan into the darkening bowels of the San Fernando Valley, with nothing more substantive than curiosity to claim as incentive.

  It turned out to be the best move he had made in a week.

  Exchanging the northbound San Diego Freeway for the westbound 118, Most led Gunner into the valley’s answer for the L.A. barrios, the city of San Fernando, where he made two stops. The first was at a Chevron gas station on the corner of Glenoaks and Van Nuys, where he spoke briefly with the tall, gangly black man sitting inside the attendant’s booth. Most parked his car beside one of the pumps but didn’t buy any gas. Between the interruptions of other customers, the black man slid him a note of some kind and was repaid with an indeterminable amount of cash.

  From there, Most drove directly north to an addr
ess less than three miles away, near the northeast end of the 900 block of Brand Boulevard, on the opposite side of the 118. Single-story tract homes from an era gone by lined the street, brave but disintegrating monuments to a dust-ridden, virtually all-Hispanic neighborhood trying desperately to hold on to the last vestiges of middle-class status. With nightfall a foregone conclusion, all was quiet and dark. Most pulled up in front of a canary yellow house with white window shutters and trim, but it would be five hours before he gave Gunner any indication that the place he really wanted was actually four houses down, though on the same side of the street.

  He spent the entire five hours in the Maxima, waiting, leaving Gunner, parked almost a full block away, no alternative but to do the same. Whatever he did to help pass the time, he did alone; no one ever appeared on the street, to walk by or to join him in the car. Gunner had brought along a pair of infra-red field glasses, but there was only the back of Most’s head to see, and he tired of using them quickly. Finally, sometime after midnight, Most stepped out of the Nissan to give his surroundings a cautionary once-over, displaying the paranoia Gunner had learned to expect from him.

  When he was satisfied he still had the street to himself, Most walked the short distance to his eventual destination, a tan-colored wooden bungalow and a detached garage, the former sitting sideways on the lot, showing only a flat, windowed, nondescript end to the street. The house was dark, seemingly empty, but Most approached it with care nevertheless, loitering on the sidewalk before it, either trying to build his nerve or listening for sounds within, Gunner couldn’t say which.

  As a result of its transverse orientation, no direct entrance to the home was available from the street. Gunner couldn’t be sure, but he guessed that the “front” door was positioned somewhere along its northeast wall, beyond a wooden fence and gate that joined the house to its forward-facing garage on the southwest half of the property. Most finally went to the gate, and his long, seemingly forlorn inspection of what lay on the other side lent credence to Gunner’s theory. Most was only discouraged, however, not deterred. As Gunner took up his field glasses again and watched, the dealer reached over the gate with his right hand and unlatched it, the effort he put into silence impossible to miss, with or without field glasses. He babied the gate open and stepped into the backyard, out of Gunner’s view.

  Without hesitation, Gunner left the Hyundai and started toward the house, sensing that Most was actually on the verge of doing something worth witnessing for the first time in two days. He closed on the house slowly, trying to listen over the barking of a distant dog for some clue to the dealer’s whereabouts, but he could hear nothing. He edged up to the garage to steal a quick glance over the fence Most had disappeared beyond and caught a glimpse of a barren, grassless backyard and Most, hunched over near the main door to the house, fingers working frantically to jimmy the lock.

  It was an art he apparently had some skill in, because he was inside when Gunner next looked for him, mere seconds later. Again, Gunner didn’t hesitate to follow, careful to handle the gate leading into the backyard as gingerly and silently as had Most. He had the Ruger out of its holster as he reached the door Most had forced open and left ajar; the small living room beyond was pitch-black, and empty. There was no sign of Most among its shadows.

  The dealer did not turn up again until Gunner entered the house after him and spied him at the end of a short hallway off to the right of the living room, near what appeared to be an open bedroom door. Gunner’s eyes were taking their time warming to the darkness, but he had no trouble discerning the fact that there was a revolver of some kind in Most’s right hand as the dealer reached out with his left to bring the lights up in the bedroom and step inside.

  “Well, well, well,” Gunner heard Most say wryly.

  The splotchy-faced black man had caught Rookie Davidson sleeping, half-naked and unarmed. The Blue had jumped up from the mattress on the floor he had been sleeping on with nothing but a handful of sheet with which to defend himself, and there he sat at Most’s mercy, his back to the wall, looking like a wounded gazelle shivering beneath a salivating lion’s gaze.

  It was hard to imagine him as an accessory to murder.

  It would have been Gunner’s preference to keep his distance and just let Most make his play, to watch and hear how things were going to go down, but his better judgment ruled that option out. Most was behaving as if he had come here to do more than scare the pants off of Gunner’s quarry, and there was no way to know how much time, if any, he would devote to conversation before actually getting around to what he really had in mind.

  Gunner let the dealer get halfway into the room, advancing upon Rookie in small, catlike steps, before the investigator showed himself at the bedroom doorway and said, “That’s far enough, Whitey.”

  Most turned, startled, and now both he and Davidson had the same comical mask of dread contorting their faces. He started to swing his body around, but his eyes caught sight of the Ruger and he terminated the movement immediately, though he made no effort to lower the gun in his own hand.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  “It’s not important that we get to know each other,” Gunner said. “We don’t attend the same dinner parties. Drop the gun on the floor and step back, hands behind your head. Slowly.”

  Most looked at Rookie, disdaining Gunner’s order. “You know this motherfucker?”

  Davidson shook his head. He had the same pitiable expression on his face the police photographer had captured in his mug shot, only worse.

  The dealer looked at Gunner again. “Who the fuck are you? You ain’t no cop. You woulda said so by now, if you was.”

  Gunner took a single step into the room and said, “I’m the man who’s going to drop your polka-dot ass like a ton of bricks if you don’t do what I say and lose the gun. What else do you want to know?”

  Most’s eyes darted from Gunner to the Ruger and back again, weighing the power and potential of both the weapon and the man wielding it. Reaching an unspoken conclusion, he finally dropped his revolver at his feet and retreated from it, following Gunner’s instructions to the letter.

  “You the motherfucker tried to kill me the other day?” he asked.

  The question took Gunner completely by surprise.

  Most grinned and said, “You ain’t too good with that thing, are you? Man’s payin’ you to do me, and all you end up doin’ is fuckin’ up the windows on my ride.”

  Gunner said nothing, adding an attempt on the dealer’s life to everything else he already knew about him, and realized how well it all fit. Most’s inclination toward driving the white Maxima around in all types of inclement weather with the driver’s side window down could suddenly be seen as more than a mere peculiarity, as could his symptoms of borderline paranoia.

  “I know who you workin’ for, man. Don’t think I don’t fuckin’ know,” he said.

  “Turn around and shut up,” Gunner said, hoping Most would take the initiative to elaborate further on his own. “And put your hands behind your head, like I said.”

  Lackadaisically, the dealer complied, his back now to the gun he had left on the floor.

  Gunner used the lull in their interchange to look the room over, concluding quickly that there wasn’t much to see. Outside of the room’s source of light—a rotund, shaded ceramic table lamp sitting on the floor—the mattress Davidson was sitting on had nothing to keep it company but an empty carton of milk and the clothes the Blue had liberally scattered about it. From the investigator’s position near the door, there was a large window to the left, near Davidson, and a closet with sliding doors to the right, in front of Most.

  While he was anxious to hear more of what the dealer had to say about his near assassination, his professional curiosity piqued, it occurred to Gunner abruptly that his only real objective had already been met, and that this victory could hardly be improved upon, no matter what wondrous tales Most had to tell. Davidson was in hand, and Most was the r
eason; if he never said another word about anything, he had served his purpose, after all.

  Keeping his eyes on the dealer, Gunner said, “Get some clothes on, Rookie. You’re coming with me.”

  “Where we goin’?”

  “I’ll tell you when we get there. Move it.”

  Reluctantly, Davidson started putting on his pants.

  “Now wait just a goddamn minute,” Most said, fighting the urge to turn around. “What you want with him? I thought your business was with me!”

  “You’ve got the right to think whatever you want to think, Whitey. They don’t call this a free country for nothing.”

  “Somebody put up a reward, right? You after the reward.”

  “What I’m after’s none of your business.”

  “Look. You just tryin’ to make a dollar, I understand that. You thinkin’ you can get paid for doin’ me an’ make a little somefhin’ on the side with Rookie here. But let me tell you somethin’. If it’s money you want, I’m the man you wanna see. Whatever you gettin’ to do me, plus whatever they offerin’ for the boy, I’ll double it. How’s that sound to you?”

  “No! Don’t listen to ’im, man!” Davidson said.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Most demanded, his voice splitting the night like a crash of thunder. “You shut the fuck up!”

  The power of the order struck Davidson like a closed fist. He stopped in the middle of what he was doing—pulling a filthy white sock onto his left foot—and froze, rigid with fear. It was as if Most had somehow pulled the plug on a remote-control doll.

  “The kid wants to talk, he can talk,” Gunner said, feeling his blood begin to boil.

  “He ain’t got nothin’ to say can help either one of us,” Most said. “He’s a rock head, an’ he’s all messed up. Probably ain’t had no shit to do for ’bout a week now.”

  “So what’s your interest in him?”

  Most shrugged, composed again, and said, “He runs for me. I’m a friend. I came here to fix ’im up.”