Not Long for This World

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “You needed the gun for that?”

  “I brought the gun ’cause he didn’t know I was comin’, an’ I know how he likes surprises. Boy’s scared shitless, cops out everywhere lookin’ for ’im; and I figure he’s carryin’ somethin’ of his own. You don’t get the drop on ’im first, show ’im what’s what ’fore he can go off, don’t matter who you are. The Rook gonna start shootin’. That’s just how he is.”

  “How’d you know he was here?”

  “Man, what’s the difference? A friend of a friend told me. Somebody seen ’im out here and the word got around. You know how it is. Why you askin’ all these questions? We got a deal, or not?”

  “Fuck no,” Davidson said.

  Gunner didn’t have to look at the Blue to know that something ageless had changed him, in the way it had of always changing a man, cowards most especially. He looked, anyway, unable to do anything else.

  This time, courage had been found in a .38-caliber Taurus revolver, probably a Model 85, snub-nosed and gripless. It had been hidden under Davidson’s shirt on the floor, inaccessible until this moment. Gunner felt like an idiot for not having checked the kid for weapons earlier.

  The Blue had the revolver pointed at Gunner’s waist, one finger dancing on its trigger nervously, holding it out with both hands like something foul he detested handling.

  “Put the gun down, man. Right now.”

  He got to his feet and Most turned around, catching the drift of what was happening. Gunner was doubtful that the Blue could actually bring himself to shoot a man deliberately, but he seemed fully capable of shooting one by accident, and that made him only five times more dangerous. Gunner let the Ruger go limp in his hand and set the automatic gently down on the floor at his feet.

  “Over here, man!” Davidson told him. “Push it over here!”

  Gunner used his right foot to pass the gun across the hardwood floor toward him.

  As Davidson bent down to retrieve it, Most, laughing, said, “Way to go, little home! Put this smartass, interferin’ motherfucker in his place!”

  Most started to move forward, as if to join Davidson on the other side of the room, but the teenager shifted the unblinking eye of the .38 to gaze in his direction and said, “Stay where you are, motherfucker! I’ll pop you, man, I’ll pop you!”

  Most froze, frowning. “What kind of shit is this, Rook? I come all this way to give you what you need, and this is how you gonna act?”

  Sliding sideways over to the window, reaching out with one hand to open it, Davidson shook his head, so hard that Gunner feared it might come off. “Don’t bullshit me, Whitey, man,” he said. “I ain’t that stupid. You didn’t come here ’cept to do one motherfuckin’ thing!”

  He tossed Gunner’s Ruger out the window, then picked up Most’s revolver and did the same with it, never taking his eyes from the pair of men in front of him for very long. He used the .38 to move them where he wanted them, keeping his distance, eventually positioning himself by the door and a ready escape.

  “Why did he come, Rookie?” Gunner asked the Blue straightforwardly.

  It was an inquiry Most tried to punish Gunner for asking with a big-league glower, one he had to soften before turning back to Davidson to see what his response would be. For the first time, the kid named Rookie grinned, just a little boy’s smirk with a twist of adult sadism at the corners.

  “Go on ahead, Whitey. Tell me again to shut the fuck up,” he said.

  Wisely, Most declined the invitation.

  “Gimme the keys to the ride, man,” Davidson told him, motioning with the open palm of his left hand. “Right here. Real slow.”

  “Shit. You must be crazy,” Most said defiantly.

  The kid turned his revolver’s nose downward and fired a single round into the floor at Most’s feet, blowing a hole in the hardwood and missing the inside of the dealer’s left shoe by only fractions of an inch.

  “Gimme the goddamn keys, man! Don’t fuck with me!”

  Both amazed and infuriated, Most turned over the keys as directed, putting more on his toss than he had to. Davidson slipped them into a pants pocket and said to Gunner, “Okay. You. Get down on the floor. ’Less you want some of this, too.”

  “I asked you a question,” Gunner said, staying put.

  “Man, I ain’t got time for no questions! Who the fuck are you, anyway, all you wanna do is ask questions?”

  “I’m a private investigator. My name is Aaron Gunner.”

  “What?” Most said, incredulous.

  “I’m working for Toby Mills. I was hired by his lawyer to find you.”

  “Toby?” Davidson asked.

  “That’s right. Mills is sitting on the hot seat for the Darrel Lovejoy murder, but he insists the cops have the wrong man. He says you were driving for somebody else the night Lovejoy was killed, that he was at the movies at the time.”

  “You ain’t got to tell ’im nothin’!” Most barked. “He’s just tryin’ to get you to admit it was you what did the drivin’!”

  “Nobody needs you to admit anything,” Gunner said to Davidson. “The cops have your car, they know you were driving. All they need from you—all I need from you—is the name of the man who put you up to it. The trigger man in the backseat. You come up with that, and you just might be able to do yourself and Mills a big favor.”

  “He’s just tryin’ to burn you, boy! Listen to me!” Most insisted. He was having a hard time keeping still.

  “Shut up! I know what he’s doin’!”

  Davidson had the gun fixed between both hands again, trained almost exclusively on Most. He had been holding it for a long time now, and every minute it spent in his sweaty, excitable possession brought the two men before him that much closer to a bullet.

  “Just like I know what you’re doin’,” the Blue told Most, shaking his head sadly, riding the fine line between rage and utter despair. “You shouldn’t oughta’ve dissed me like that, Whitey. That was fucked up.”

  He steadied his hands to shoot, just as Most kicked out with his right foot and pitched the room into total darkness. What Gunner had taken for a doomed man’s fidgeting had actually been inspired maneuvering; Most had edged his way over to the cord of the table lamp sitting on the floor and had yanked it free from the wall. Davidson fired the .38 three times into the blackness before making good his escape, pausing to verify neither hits nor misses. Gunner, at least, went unscathed; he saw the last two muzzle flashes from a facedown position on the floor, having done some inspired maneuvering of his own to get there.

  If the same thought had struck Most at all, it had not come quickly enough. He had hit the floor with a different sound than Gunner, and now was making all the muffled noises of a man in considerable pain. When Gunner’s groping hands found him, working in the dark, he offered no resistance, and there was plenty of something wet and sticky on his clothes. How badly he had been hit, Gunner couldn’t tell, and didn’t really care. The fact that he was incapacitated, as far as the investigator was concerned, was a stroke of incredible luck.

  Gunner jumped up off the floor and went after Davidson, confident that Most would be waiting for him upon his return.

  The Blue was trying to turn the Maxima’s engine over when Gunner arrived on the street, the latter cursing Most for having parked the car four houses farther down the block. Gunner reached the white Nissan only seconds after its big V-6 came to life, but all he had time to do was try the handle on the passenger-side door before Davidson stood on the gas and pulled off, painting the asphalt by the curb with burnt rubber. He watched Davidson bounce the flying Maxima off several parked cars en route to running the signal on Brand, and then the detective actually sprinted halfway to his cousin Del’s Hyundai before realizing how futile it would be to press the gutless little car into pursuit.

  He turned and went back to the house.

  Including the time it took to retrieve the two handguns Davidson had tossed out the bedroom window, Gunner had been away less th
an ten minutes, but that proved to be long enough. Most was nowhere to be found when the investigator returned to the bedroom to look for him. All the dealer had left behind was a messy pool of blood on the floor that Gunner had no intention of cleaning up.

  Like the two in the bush, clipped wings and all, the bird in the hand had flown the coop.

  chapter twelve

  Friday morning was for losers. In the wake of Thursday night, both Gunner and the LAPD had to start their weekends off lamenting about the ones that had gotten away.

  For his part, Gunner had cruised about the San Fernando neighborhood where both Whitey Most and Rookie Davidson had slipped through his fingers as long as he dared, searching primarily for the former, but the cry of advancing police sirens had finally forced him into a hasty, empty-handed retreat. Not long afterward, the police contingent that reached the 900 block of Brand Boulevard, where Gunner’s little adventure had begun, achieved similar results in their attempts to find Davidson and the white sedan that had allegedly torn up half the parked cars in the entire east valley.

  Gunner didn’t have to be told that the smart thing to do with his Friday would have been to voluntarily offer Rod Toon and the authorities his own account of the previous evening’s events, preferably before they came around to demand one, but Kelly DeCharme told him as much, anyway. She did it to ease her conscience more than anything else. She had come to understand that the smart thing to do and Gunner’s eventual course of action only rarely coincided—as they failed miserably to coincide here.

  Having spent his first waking hours looking in vain for Most in all the obvious places with which he had become familiar in the last few days, Gunner decided to follow his own contrary navigational inclinations and let Toon and the police fend for themselves, hoping for the best. Had he thought his story would compel Toon and James Booker to pursue Whitey Most in earnest, he would have made DeCharme happy and gone in to let them hear it, but he knew his story wasn’t that persuasive. It seemed to further imply that Most had been involved in Darrel Lovejoy’s murder, to be sure, but it was nothing about which a hardened cop or D.A. was likely to get excited; all he’d really be doing by coming clean now would be adding more holes to a puzzle already full of them, and he didn’t feel up to taking Toon and Booker’s abuse when they demanded he do better than that.

  If he was lucky, they would never know the difference. But he would have to be very lucky. Holding his tongue was a calculated risk that merely required him first to dismiss the possibility that the officers on the scene in San Fernando had traced Thursday night’s disturbance to the bloody bedroom where Most had been shot, and then assume that in their ignorance they had written the whole thing off as some kind of bizarre drunken-driver scenario, to which the investigator was not likely ever to be connected.

  All in all, this made for a perilously thin web of conjecture upon which to base an argument, but it was one in which he had to profess some faith in order to convince himself—not to mention DeCharme—that his most logical next step was to drop in not on Toon and Booker but on the Reverend Willie Raines, instead.

  DeCharme, of course, disagreed, but there was little she could say, as it had been she, at Gunner’s request, who had spent the early part of her Friday morning determining that the title holder to the house where Most and Gunner had found Rookie Davidson in hiding was none other than the Children of God Ministries, Raines’s ever-diversifying religious and political enterprise. DeCharme tried lamely to sell Gunner on the idea that simple coincidence explained this revelation, but Gunner wouldn’t buy it. Compared to all the disjointed scraps of intelligence the investigator had managed to accumulate so far—ranging from a drug dealer’s fascination with bowling alleys to a notebook full of dead gangbangers—Raines’s connection to Rookie Davidson’s hiding place was the closest thing to hard evidence he had come across yet, and he wasn’t about to dismiss it as anything but.

  As he had the day before, Gunner tried all morning to reach Claudia Lovejoy by phone. Today, at least, he had an excuse for making the call—he was going to take her up on her offer to set the table for a conference with Raines—but an excuse was all it was, and he knew it. What he really was doing was what he had attempted to do Thursday—start his workday off by meeting a need he could not explain—but again, the gesture was fruitless. Not one to buck a technological trend, Lovejoy had turned the drudgery of answering her phone calls over to a machine, and all Gunner could do was leave her a second message identical to his first, a succinct “please call me” ditty that was as vague as his reasons for leaving it.

  Unlike Lovejoy, Willie Raines personally answered Gunner’s phone calls from his offices at the First Children of God Church in Inglewood, though he arranged for their two o’clock meeting to take place at the Reverend’s Baldwin Hills home. He had sounded cordial and gracious, more than willing to help, and yet not terribly surprised to be called upon in relation to Rookie Davidson.

  Gunner wondered what that meant.

  Inching his cousin’s Hyundai up the steep, winding incline of Punta Alta Drive toward its scenic culmination among the crests of Baldwin Hills, it struck Gunner that the West Los Angeles hillside community wasn’t what it used to be, as few communities that had undergone the transition from an all-white neighborhood to an all-black one, seemingly overnight, ever were. Peeling paint and shedding tile roofs were an intermittent sight along both sides of the street, as were unkempt shrubs and lawns, turned brown and brittle by benign neglect. Here and there, a pedestrian Chevrolet or Plymouth sat in a driveway, instead of a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz. Still, from its unequaled vantage point high above the city, where a clear day often rewarded its residents with a panoramic relief that stretched from the beaches of Santa Monica to the high rises of downtown Los Angeles, this remained the kind of real estate that demanded a sizable entry fee, and Raines’s home turned out to be one few self-respecting CEOs would be ashamed to call their own.

  Waiting at the end of Punta Alta’s seemingly endless climb skyward, only yards from the tremendous earthen crater that had once been the Baldwin Hills Reservoir before the calamitous rupture of its southern wall had precipitated the community’s infamous flood of 1963, a cobblestone driveway described a brief arc before a two-story brick Colonial replete with white-on-white four-column portico and trim. The landscaping was immaculate, as was the car complementing it, parked at the apex of the driveway: an emerald green Jaguar XJ6 that someone had waxed and polished to its light-refracting limit.

  Neither the car nor the home surprised Gunner in the least. Anyone who had ever tuned into one of the Reverend’s weekly televised Sunday services would have realized, as Gunner did, that such fixings of opulence were in no way contradictory to the man or his teachings. The Gospel of Jesus Christ as Raines had always disseminated it was one of many rewards, and he liked to use himself as an example of what a self-made man or woman could accomplish, both financially and spiritually, once they saw fit to place their fate squarely in the Good Lord’s hands. While most evangelists of the electronic age chose to shy away from the subject of their own personal wealth, Raines freely advertised his, using it as the perfect validation, as opposed to a repudiation, of his doctrine.

  Gunner parked the Hyundai in the driveway behind the Jaguar and rang the front doorbell, feeling not unlike a vacuum-cleaner salesman well out of his territory. When the door swung open, it was Raines himself Gunner found standing behind it, though the Reverend was not entirely alone. Dressed casually and comfortably in a powder blue polo shirt and a pair of navy cotton twill pants, he had as his escort a matching set of male rottweilers, one at his left hand, the other at his right, both watching Gunner like something better tasted than trusted. Massive, rock-solid, and brooding, they were the kind of animals a man kept around the house to do anything but turn the other cheek.

  “Let me guess,” Gunner said. “Cain and Abel.”

  Raines shook his head and laughed. “I’m afraid I didn’t go quite that far b
ack for inspiration,” he said. “Though their names do hold some historical significance of one sort, I suppose. Perhaps if you tried thinking Stax records. ‘Soul Man’ and Isaac Hayes.”

  Gunner understood immediately. “Sam and Dave?”

  Raines nodded, grinning. “Sam here is the friendly one,” he said, reaching out to scratch the dog on his right behind one ear. “Dave, on the other hand, is a mite antisocial, I’m afraid. Not dangerous, of course; just antisocial.” His grin widened. “But he’s in my prayers daily. He’ll come around.”

  Gunner didn’t appear to be encouraged.

  “Forgive me if I’ve put you ill at ease, Mr. Gunner,” the Reverend said, reaching forward to shake Gunner’s hand, “but they’re both perfectly safe, I assure you. Come in, please.”

  Gunner braved a mauling to step inside, and Raines closed the door behind him. The twin rottweilers just stood there, biding their time, in no hurry to feed. His eyes on the dogs, Gunner could catch only glimpses of the foyer, but they were sufficient to impress him: pinewood flooring oiled and gleaming, eighteenth-century furnishings of pecan and oak, and seamless, textured wall coverings in cool and lazy colors.

  Raines was supposed to be a married man, but it appeared that the missus was out; the house was silent and Raines made no reference to her. Left alone to play gracious host, he allowed Gunner to appraise the foyer for only a moment before leading him past a similarly well-decorated, high-ceilinged living room into a large wood-paneled study that took its name quite literally: Dominated by an immeasurable collection of books that lined every inch of the four walls an empty, dormant fireplace failed to claim, the softly lit room looked like a small university library. Reading tables were conspicuously missing, but the mahogany desk standing in the middle of the bare floor was large enough to pass for one. Arranged around its considerable breadth were a mere three chairs, all upholstered in sumptuous black leather: a high-backed executive on casters to the rear, and two smaller chairs on fixed legs in front.