Not Long for This World

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  Whether it was the power of the truth or just the power of the man to whom he was surrendering, Gunner declared his interview of Raines officially over and agreed to let his three hosts escort him out.

  At the door, Raines shook his hand again and said, “You didn’t come here prepared to like me very much, did you, Mr. Gunner?”

  His insight took Gunner aback a little. “No. I must confess that I didn’t.”

  “Do you mind if I ask why?”

  “For all the usual reasons I’m sure you’ve heard before. The way you’ve managed to mix success and piety so seamlessly, for one. Your love of overexposure, for another.”

  “The word and will of God can never be overexposed, Mr. Gunner. That is a fallacy. But your mistake is a common one. You’ve confused a need to draw attention to my message with a need to draw attention to myself. I seek a certain amount of fame, certainly. But there’s a reason for that. Who is a sinner most likely to listen to … a poor man shouting from a cardboard pulpit or a rich man speaking into a dozen microphones on the six o’clock news?”

  He grinned broadly at the unavoidability of the answer.

  It was a grin Gunner might have detested only a short hour ago—but now he wasn’t so sure that it didn’t have a certain, down-to-earth appeal. He decided he had better leave while he still had an ounce of skepticism for the man left.

  “I’m sorry we never got around to talking about the upcoming peace summit,” he said. “I’d wanted to ask you how it was going.”

  Raines threw another log onto the fire of his grin and said, “It’s going magnificently. Thank you.”

  “I don’t suppose I have to tell you that there are a lot of people out there in need of a miracle who will be expecting nothing less.”

  “I know,” Raines said, nodding. “I know. They won’t be disappointed.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  It was a stupid question to ask a Baptist minister, and they both realized it. Raines just smiled and said, “The secret is faith, Mr. Gunner. Faith in the Lord’s almighty power to heal the hearts of men. These ’bangers attending the summit will all be young men who have accepted Christ Jesus as their Lord and Savior, kids who are committed to making peace with one another, and through prayer and open discussion of their grievances, that’s exactly what they’re going to do. For Proverbs Sixteen, seven says, ‘When a man’s ways are pleasing to the Lord, he makes even his enemies live at peace with him.’ Amen!”

  “Amen,” Gunner heard himself say.

  Choosing not to chime in, Sam and Dave just stood there.

  chapter thirteen

  The voice on the phone said, “Somebody seen Rookie.”

  It was Smalltime Seivers.

  Gunner had just sat down with a cold one an hour after seeing Willie Raines when the phone rang. “Where?”

  “I gotta show you. You busy?”

  Gunner said, “I’ll pick you up in ten minutes,” and put his beer back in the refrigerator.

  “You sure you gotta go in? Donnell and I could prob’ly go in an’ get ’im, if you want.”

  It was the third time in fifteen minutes that Smalltime Seivers had made the same offer, and the third time Gunner had just shaken his head no. Once again, the big Blue was playing navigator from the passenger seat of Gunner’s Hyundai, this time directing the detective to the Blues’s former place of hiding for weapons and other assorted items of vice gangbangers always preferred held from prying eyes. Donnell Henderson, the latest Blue to make Gunner’s acquaintance, was in the backseat, keeping quiet.

  Henderson looked as if keeping quiet was something he did a lot of. He was a short sixteen-year-old with a headful of hair and an expressionless, cherubic face. Kelly DeCharme’s dossier described him as the Blue with the least impressive police record, a highly intelligent kid who did surprisingly well in school and who liked to talk about being an automotive designer someday.

  He was a classic example of the ultimate inner-city tragedy: a gangbanger with both potential and ambition.

  Though this trip had been Smalltime’s idea in the first place, he was nevertheless squirming around in his seat like somebody sitting on a live eel, clearly regretting ever having agreed to come along for the ride. Invading the Blues’s private domain—abandoned or otherwise—was supposed to be Gunner’s last resort, Smalltime had reminded him. Absolutely the final request he could make of the Blues after all his other options had run out.

  Gunner had assured him that such was indeed the case, thinking to himself that the big Blue didn’t know the half of it. Henderson’s tip regarding Rookie’s whereabouts hadn’t come a moment too soon.

  This was desperation time.

  For what DeCharme had predicted eight days ago, Gunner had only managed to prove in the time since: Rookie was the key to everything. Everyone else the investigator had seen fit to talk to in reference to Darrel Lovejoy’s murder was capable of providing only mere fragments of the truth, or so it seemed. The total picture of Lovejoy’s death—the names, faces, and myriad motives involved—was apparently Rookie’s alone to know, and Gunner was finally ready to concede that he had to turn the fugitive Blue up again, alive and conversant, if he ever hoped to share the boy’s invaluable insight.

  He had let Rookie slip through his fingers once; he wasn’t going to let it happen again.

  The site Smalltime had in mind turned out to be the skeletal husk of a small abandoned house sitting along what used to be the 1700 block of 117th Street, just south of Imperial, before construction of the new 105 Freeway had advanced this far east to flatten everything in its path. The house was the only one of nine on the block still standing, a final tribute to the impoverished men and women who had held on to the only real estate they were ever likely to own right up to the last, but it was easy to see that it wouldn’t be standing much longer. A chain-link fence surrounding the block kept Gunner and the Hyundai a full seventy yards away, but even from that distance, with the late afternoon sky going dark overhead, the house looked like something held together with spit and a handful of nails.

  “We used to use the garage,” Smalltime said. “The house is all fucked up; it wouldn’ta been safe to put nothin’ in there, but the garage is cool. Cube put a lock on it and everything. We’d probably still be usin’ it, ’cept whoever it was broke in and took our shit, they fucked up the door bustin’ the lock off. Ain’t no way to lock nothin’ up in there now.”

  They were still sitting in the car, pulled over at the curb on Holmes Avenue. Gunner killed the engine and looked back at Donnell Henderson, who still hadn’t said a word to anyone since they’d stopped to pick him up.

  “This where you saw Rookie?” Gunner asked him.

  Henderson nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Was he alone?”

  Another nod. The kid had a definite gift for gab.

  Gunner turned around again, thinking he was finished, but Henderson surprised him by elaborating.

  “He called me up. Said he had to talk to somebody.”

  Gunner looked at him again.

  “One of the homeboys, I mean. He called me this mornin’, ’fore I went to school, an’ said if he didn’t talk to one of his homies, man, he was gonna go crazy.” He shrugged. “So I asked him where he was at, an’ he told me he was chillin’ out here, an’ asked me to come see ’im, an’ shit. You know. To bring ’im a taste.” Apparently, rock was a word he was not going to use in front of Gunner. “So I did.”

  “When?”

  “When what?”

  “When did you see him?”

  “I don’t know. ’Bout three o’clock, I guess. Soon as I got outta school.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  He gave Gunner another nod, identical to the first two. “Yeah. I talked to ’im.”

  “What did he say, Donnell?”

  The Blue held on to his answer for a long time, as if the fate of the entire world depe
nded upon his silence. “He said somebody’s tryin’ to kill him. And, like, he don’t know who to trust no more.”

  “Man, who’d be tryin’ to kill Rookie?” Smalltime asked skeptically.

  “Whitey Most,” Gunner said flatly, watching Henderson’s face for confirmation.

  And confirmation came in another Henderson nod, slow and deliberate.

  Gunner turned to Smalltime. “How do we get in there?” he asked, gesturing toward the house on 117th Street. He could grill Henderson later if he had to, but better to get the details from Rookie Davidson himself now, while the opportunity still appeared to present itself.

  “There’s a hole in the fence, ’round the other side,” Smalltime said, referring to the south end of the block.

  Gunner pulled a flashlight out of the glove compartment and opened his door to get out of the car.

  “Show me,” he said.

  Somebody had done a surprisingly neat and clever job cutting the hole in the chain-link fence. Rather than tear a jagged segment out of the mesh as Gunner might have expected, the unnamed Blue with the wire cutters had sliced a large, almost perfectly symmetrical flap into it instead, creating an inconspicuous opening that was not likely to be easily detected by anyone looking for such things.

  With what was now total darkness as an ally, Gunner and his small raiding party slipped through the opening and started toward the house in the distance. There was no security to be concerned about; there was nothing here to steal. Piles of rubble and unlevel earth made up the entire block, save for nine hollow rattraps waiting their turn to go beneath the bulldozer, the ghosts of ghettos past.

  The little two-bedroom house they were interested in looked no better up close than it had from a distance, and all was quiet inside. Despite all the effort its new owners had put into boarding up its windows and doors, it was as Smalltime had described it: a clapboard sieve unsuitable for anything. Gunner imagined it had always been so, even in life.

  True to Smalltime’s word, however, the garage was in better shape. Its walls were filthy and discolored, but seemingly whole and intact.

  “See?” Smalltime said, voluntarily playing tour guide. “This is where they busted the lock off.”

  He was moving toward the garage door when a figure stepped out of the shadows beside the building and said, “Get the fuck away from there, ’Time.”

  The night was pitch-black, making the man before them nothing more than a three-dimensional silhouette, but this particular silhouette Gunner knew he had seen before, standing in a cold Venice Beach parking lot with Whitey Most.

  “Cube!” Smalltime Seivers said. It was the first time Gunner had ever heard him sound like anything other than the giant he was.

  Cube Clarke stepped farther out of the shadows toward the big man, and Smalltime’s change in demeanor was suddenly even easier to understand. Clarke had an automatic rifle in his right hand. He was resting it barrel-up on his right shoulder, using it in contrast to the Texas Rangers baseball cap on his head to strike the sadistic, casual pose of a battle-mad soldier of fortune.

  It was hard to be sure in the darkness, but Gunner thought the gun looked like an Uzi.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Clarke demanded, giving Smalltime little notice and ignoring Henderson altogether, his attention fixed solely on the investigator.

  “You know who it is, Cube,” Smalltime said, trying to sound like himself again. “Gunner. The cat I told you about, one’s workin’ for Toby’s lawyer.”

  Clarke moved in for a closer look, still holding the automatic rifle’s barrel up near his ear, finger at the ready on the trigger. Darkness or no, there was no doubt: He was wasted. Fucked up. The eyes were dead behind a glistening layer of crack-induced haze.

  Gunner knew how zombies like this could be, how easily they could kill a man if something, anything brushed them the wrong way. He let Clarke look him over and said nothing, thinking about the Ruger under his coat and how long it would take him to draw it if the Blue decided to cap his evening with an act that could only enhance his reputation as a psychopath.

  “This is him, huh? The pussy said he was gonna jack me if I ever fucked with ’im, right?”

  He slapped Gunner full on the face with his left hand, hard. Stupidly, Gunner had been watching his right almost exclusively, thinking he’d go for the rifle first, and never saw the blow coming.

  “Well, I just fucked with him.”

  Too dazed to speak, Gunner blinked back tears and instinctively reached for the Ruger, but caught himself before he could complete the movement. He didn’t need to see Clarke clearly to know what such a maneuver would buy him now, this late in the game.

  “I’m waitin’, man. What’s the problem?”

  “Hey, Cube, man, chill out,” Gunner heard Smalltime say.

  “Fuck. chillin’ out. Man say he gonna jack me an’ he don’t do shit! He’s a pussy! A motherfuckin’ pussy!”

  His eyes still watering badly, Gunner looked up, to find that the weapon Clarke had so proudly displayed up on his shoulder was now being held only inches from the investigator’s face, barrel-first. Seen from this perspective, and at this range, it could no longer be mistaken for anything but an Uzi.

  “Don’t do it, Cube,” Smalltime said, making the plea sound as much like an order as he dared. “Man didn’t come here to fuck with you, he come here to look for Rookie!”

  “Rookie ain’t here,” Clarke said sharply.

  “He was here before,” Donnell Henderson said, finally contributing to the conversation.

  “Nobody asked you, Donnell. Did they?”

  Nobody had, but Henderson didn’t say so; he just shut up all over again.

  “You ain’t got no business bringin’ ’im here, ’Time,” Clarke said, holding the Uzi up defiantly, swaying slightly in his drugged-up stupor, never letting his eyes stray very far from Gunner’s. “Wasn’t nobody but the Blues s’posed to ever know ’bout this place.”

  “I told you, man. We was lookin’ for Rookie,” Smalltime said.

  “I don’t give a fuck what you was lookin’ for. This is the Blues’s crib, home. You s’posed to have some kinda respect for that.”

  He was questioning the big Blue’s loyalty to his set, and Smalltime let him, falling silent. For a gangbanger of his rank—Smalltime was what was commonly referred to as an O.G., or Original Gangster—it was as good as an admission of guilt, if not an outright apology.

  “Get the fuck outta here, pussy,” Clarke said to Gunner, still aiming the Uzi at the investigator’s left eye.

  Gunner hesitated, looking for Smalltime to speak, as if Clarke wasn’t standing here holding a gun to his head and giving all the orders.

  “I said get the fuck outta here!”

  “Do what homeboy say, man,” Smalltime said, serving final notice.

  Gunner glanced at Henderson, then at Clarke again. He knew there was nothing short of dying he could do that would make his loss of face any less real for Smalltime and Henderson, as he had just committed the cardinal sin of reneging on a prideful, unrealistic oath of war in their presence, but he wasn’t so sure about himself.

  “If you don’t already sleep with that thing,” he told Clarke before retreating into the darkness, back the way he came, “I think you’d better start.”

  It was just another empty threat, of course, but it took some guts to say it.

  At least, he liked to think so.

  Gunner found the Hyundai where he had left it and got in behind the wheel. His eyes were still watering profusely and the whole right side of his face was on fire. Half-blind, he put the key in the ignition and noticed with some annoyance that Smalltime had left the window on his side down. Gunner reached across the passenger seat to roll the window up and finally realized he wasn’t alone in the car.

  Rookie Davidson was sprawled out on the backseat, staying low.

  “I can’t run no more, man,” he said, crying.

  A few minutes past nine that evening, Kell
y DeCharme entered the dim confines of the Acey Deuce—a marginally popular nightclub/bar on the corner of 109th and Vermont in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles—and headed straight for the bar. Following Gunner’s instructions, seemingly oblivious to the reaction some among the light, early-hour crowd were having to her pale-skinned presence here, she introduced herself to Lilly Tennell—the giant black woman working the bar and the owner of the establishment—and was promptly shown to the storeroom in back, where Gunner and Rookie Davidson were waiting for her.

  She was a nervous wreck. All she’d had time to do was throw some rumpled clothes on and flip a comb through her hair half a dozen times, and she felt like the “before” picture in a Glamour magazine makeover article.

  The Deuce’s storeroom was short on amenities, but it was warm and well lit, and Gunner could think of no better place to hold this delicate meeting. He had no reason to believe that his home on Stanford Avenue would not have been equally safe and secure, but he was intent on taking no chances that someone might see him with Davidson before he was ready to release him to the police. Rookie had a lot of explaining to do, and Gunner was determined to hear what he had to say first, under his own conditions.

  He was fresh out of favors owed him by Lilly, but she agreed to let him use the room, anyway. He had brought the boy in through the back door, used Lilly’s office phone to call DeCharme at home, then sat among the Deuce’s countless crates of Jim Beam and Michelob Light to await the public defender’s arrival.

  Now she was here.

  Davidson looked terrified but otherwise all right. He was wearing the same outfit Gunner had seen him in the night before. Lilly had given him a tall glass of Coke on ice, and he sat on an aluminum folding chair nursing it like a wine taster sampling a fine Cabernet.

  “Have you talked to him yet?”

  Gunner shook his head.

  DeCharme sat down. “Do you want to start, or should I?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Gunner said, “I think I’d better.”

  DeCharme agreed, nodding.