“Were you aware that Teddy Davidson was being blackmailed?” Gunner asked.
“Yes.” Raines nodded his head again. “But not right away. Teddy didn’t tell me he’d been paying a witness to one of the murders—Whitey Most—until after he’d tried to kill Most and failed. He called me up one day and it all came out at once. I think he called it making a confession.”
Gunner remembered the shattered driver’s side window on Most’s car and what the dealer had asked him upon their first meeting that night in San Fernando: “You the motherfucker tried to kill me the other day?”
“Most never tried to put the squeeze on you?”
“No. He never knew about me. Teddy would never have told him about me. That was the one thing I never had to worry about, Teddy telling anyone that it had been me who’d put him up to killing those boys, not Darrel.”
“Until Sunday.”
“Yes.” Raines nodded. “Until Sunday. I had his complete faith, his complete loyalty right up until then. But when he came to me after shooting those police officers, and I tried to convince him to turn himself in … he ran. He saw it as a betrayal. I promised him both the church and I would help him with his defense in any way possible, and I thought I had him resigned to surrender, but when I actually made the call to the police, he turned on me and fled. I knew from that moment on I had lost him. If the police were to find him, he would tell them everything. Everything.”
“But he never got the chance.”
“No. He never did.”
The two men fell silent for a moment. They knew there was only one place for this discussion to go from here.
“What do you intend to do now?” Gunner asked, finally.
Raines gazed at him strangely, somewhat confused. “I should be asking you that question, shouldn’t I?”
Gunner shrugged. “Not really. We both know the same story, but only one of us has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting anyone to believe it, and it’s not me.”
“But you assured me you’d tell it, anyway.”
“That’s true. And I will. My professional ethics would give me a hard time, otherwise. The question is, am I going to have to make my statement alone, or are you going to make one of your own first?”
Raines didn’t say anything.
“It’d be better for everyone all around if you took the initiative here, Reverend,” Gunner went on. “Because when you get right down to it, I’m not the one with any real stake in where we go, or what we do from here. You are. Whether I go to the police with what I know today, or sit on it for a week, the consequences for me are likely to be about the same. The number of times a night, for the next few nights, I’ll have to roll over in bed before nodding off—that’s about the only difference it may ever make to me. But I don’t think the same can be said for you. Can it?”
Raines watched him stand up with the haunted eyes of an abandoned child. “No. No, it can’t.”
“It should help that you’ve had a few months’ practice in deceit, but then again, it may not. Your conscience has had quite a workout; it’ll be interesting to see how much it has left.”
They went to the door together and shook hands.
“I’ll be praying for you, Reverend,” Gunner said.
Then he left the good pastor of the First Children of God Church to the business of praying for himself.
chapter seventeen
It was a 1967 Chevrolet Nova with a horrid guacamole green paint job over a lime green base. The right-rear fender was crushed like the vanes of an accordion and its left-hand headlight was just an empty socket spewing wires from its core. Rod Toon circled the car three times, but he knew even before his first pass was over that this was the vehicle for which his department had been looking for well over a week now.
“What do you think, Toon? Am I still a total fuckup, or have I finally done something right?”
Gunner was standing off to the side, giving the LAPD detective all the room he could possibly want to conduct his study of the car. They were working by flashlight inside the fetid and decaying garage of the Imperial Blues’s old weapons cache, the condemned home Gunner had visited five nights ago on 117th Street south of Imperial, in the as-yet-uncast shadow of the new 105 Freeway.
“Bigger accidents have been known to happen,” Toon said, pouring the flashlight’s beam into the Nova’s interior. “How the hell’d you find out it was here, anyway?”
“I took a guided tour of this place last Friday night. This is the former Blues safehouse Rookie Davidson ripped off to get hold of the gun Whitey Most used in the Darrel Lovejoy killing. Toby Mills’s gun. I never got inside, but I could see the garage was in pretty good shape. I called CALTRANS this afternoon, and they told me they’d had to replace a padlock on the main gate sometime in the middle of last week, it just kind of fit.”
“It fit. Right.”
“You still haven’t answered my question, Toon. Does this get me off your shit list or not?”
“I don’t see a weapon. You want off the list, I’ve gotta have a weapon.”
Gunner started to argue but decided against it. “You try the trunk yet?”
“The trunk. Yeah. Good idea.”
There was nothing to keep it closed but a coil of heavy-gauge insulated wire. Toon yanked it off and lifted the lid with the fervor of an archaeologist on a history-making dig, the flashlight’s narrow column of light spraying across the pitch-black garage every which way as he moved.
But the Uzi wasn’t there.
“I’m not sure I like the looks of that,” Gunner said, peering over Toon’s shoulder into the car’s empty trunk.
“Forget it,” Toon said. “It’ll turn up.”
And so it did.
A burst of gunfire exploded through the garage door and both men went down under the barrage, Toon because he had to and Gunner because he instinctively thought it wise. Something had taken a piece out of the policeman’s left leg just below the kneecap and he was lying there trying to pretend that the pain wasn’t killing him and the blood wasn’t scaring him half out of his mind.
“Jesus Christ Almighty!”
Gunner kept his belly pressed low to the ground, and crawled over to him. “I don’t suppose I have to tell you who that is out there,” he said.
“I know who the fuck it is,” Toon said angrily. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me from the start what this little field trip of yours was all about? I’d’ve known we might run into Cube and his pals, I’d’ve brought along some goddamn backup!”
“That didn’t sound like Cube and his pals to me. I only heard one gun.”
“It doesn’t make any goddamn difference! You don’t go up alone against a psycho like Cube Clarke unless you’ve got no other choice!”
He had pulled off his tie and was struggling to make a tourniquet with it. Gunner took it out of his hands and did the dirty work for him, his mind on the Ruger P-85 he was still without and badly missing.
“I was hoping to surprise you,” the investigator said. “And I thought a couple of grown men like ourselves could take one teenager without much trouble.”
Before Toon had a chance to answer that, the Uzi outside abruptly barked again, sending them rushing for cover. Gunner helped Toon claw his way to the rear of the Nova and they huddled there together, staying low, waiting for a seemingly endless, whining wave of bullets and shrapnel to come to an end.
When it did, and silence had descended upon the garage once more, Toon said, “He’s not gonna do that all night. He’s not that stupid. You know what I’m saying?”
Gunner nodded his head somberly. He had felt something sharp cut his cheek a moment earlier, just below his left eye, and now he could taste his own blood in his mouth.
“He’ll be coming in,” he said.
“Yeah. Any minute now. He’s been around long enough to know, he messes around out there much longer, after the racket he’s just made, he’s gonna have a squad car on his ass before he can finish us off.”
&
nbsp; “Okay, so he’s coming in. Any ideas on what we can do about it?”
“Yeah. Just one.” He let his eyes play over the Nova. “You ever hot-wire a car, Gunner?”
Gunner didn’t bother answering the question, just said, “You’re out of your mind, Toon. He makes his entrance before we can get the damn thing started, we’ll be easier to hit than two fish in a barrel.”
“So what? We’re gonna be that anyway, if we just wait around here. I don’t catch him with a lucky shot coming in, he’s gonna cut us to fucking pieces, and you know it.” Using the Nova’s rear bumper for leverage, Toon was already struggling to his feet. “So quit arguin’ and help me into the backseat, will you?”
Gunner wasn’t mollified, but he did as he was told.
When both men were in the car—Toon in the back, Gunner behind the wheel—Gunner asked, “What am I supposed to do once we’re out of here?”
Stretched out on the Nova’s sickly vinyl upholstery, Toon tried to grin through his pain and said, “If you’re lucky, you won’t have to do anything. You’ll put about ten thousand miles’ worth of tire tread on that little fucker’s ass and save somebody the expense of burying him.”
“And if I’m not lucky?”
“If you’re not lucky, you use this,” Toon said, holding his service revolver out for Gunner to take. “You do him before he does us. You put the pedal to the metal and give him all six in passing, as fast as you can count that high. You read me?”
Gunner took the gun. Toon saw the expression on his face and recognized it immediately. “I know what you’re thinking, Gunner,” he said, “and you can forget it. I don’t give a fuck what his birth certificate says; that’s no fifteen-year-old kid I’ve just told you to blow away—that’s a man. A man who gave up being a baby three goddamn homicides ago. And if you don’t do what I tell you and treat him like one, he’s gonna put both of our sorry asses in the ground. Make no mistake about it.”
His eyes bore into Gunner until the investigator had no recourse but to nod his head in agreement, unable to refute Toon’s logic.
“I hear you,” Gunner said.
Without any further discussion, he ducked his head under the Nova’s steering wheel and went to work on the car’s ignition, using Toon’s flashlight to guide him. He had to break the wires he needed with his hands and strip the insulation back with his fingernails; he had one wire done and the other broken when the garage door started to rise, groaning like an old man haunting a graveyard.
“Gunner!” Toon warned him.
Gunner lifted his head to peer out of the car’s windshield while he fought to prepare the second wire, no longer able to see what he was doing. The door before him was rising fast now; it would be Cube Clarke’s intention to surprise them, to shove the door out of the way and be on top of them before they could adequately defend themselves.
Though it was a wreck and an eyesore, a mistreated and neglected piece of machinery more than twenty years old, Gunner understood that the Nova would have to start on the first try. There would be no time for a second.
He touched together the two naked wire ends beneath the dash and held his breath as the garage door swung all the way open.
“Gunner!” Toon roared again.
The Nova sputtered awake and bucked forward violently, given full throttle by Gunner’s right foot mashing the gas pedal to the floorboard. He caught a glimpse of Cube Clarke standing directly in the car’s path in the pitch-black darkness outside the garage before the Blue opened up with the Uzi and the investigator was forced to duck his head again, below windshield level, driving blind.
Almost immediately, Gunner felt the Nova collide with something. The sound of the impact was dull and sickening, a sound Gunner hoped soon to forget, but the car sped on unfazed, bouncing and careening off an unseen curb. The Uzi fell silent and Gunner looked up just in time to see Clarke’s body roll off of the car’s perforated windshield and disappear, tumbling over its right front fender to the ground below.
Gunner sat up behind the wheel and eased up on the gas, bringing the car to a stop in the middle of the pulverized remains of 117th Street. As the investigator looked back over his shoulder at Clarke, who was trying to command his broken body to its feet less than ten yards away, Toon fought to lift himself from his prone position in the backseat and said, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t stop, you dumb shit! Get us the hell out of here!”
“He’s hurt,” Gunner said flatly, getting out of the car.
“Are you out of your fucking mind? Get back in the car, Gunner! Use your fucking head!”
Toon opened his mouth to go on, but Gunner was already moving away, toward the fallen Blue.
As Toon watched through the Nova’s murky rear window, the investigator reached Clarke just as the latter was completing a painful crawl along the street’s craggy landscape to the Uzi, intent on regaining possession of the weapon from which he had been temporarily separated.
“Let it go, Cube. You need help,” Gunner said, standing over him. He had Toon’s service revolver in his right hand, pointed at a spot just between Clarke’s shoulder blades.
Toon’s voice was barely audible in the distance, shouting Gunner’s name all over again.
Both Gunner and Clarke ignored it as the Imperial Blue once more took hold of the automatic rifle and tried to stand, forcing a shattered left leg to carry some part of his weight.
Finally teetering on his one good leg like a drunken sailor, he swung the Uzi up in Gunner’s general direction and, through a mouthful of blood, said, “Fuck you.”
To Toon’s amazement, Gunner followed his advice and emptied the police detective’s gun. He fired six rounds in rapid succession and made them all count, leaving nothing to chance. Clarke went down under the fusillade as if hit by a train, firing the Uzi into the night sky as he descended.
He was dead before the gun’s last muzzle flash had melded with the darkness all around him.
Gunner gave the Blue’s pitiable form a short, silent examination, then pitched Toon’s revolver and turned away, walking toward the sound of sirens and a pair of red dome lights that were closing fast upon him.
chapter eighteen
You’ve gotta put it out of your mind, Gunner. You wanna go crazy?”
“Thanks for the sterling advice, Toon. Dear Abby couldn’t have said it better.”
“You’re seein’ quite a bit of the Lovejoy woman, I understand.”
“She’s a chiropractor. I’ve got a bad back. It’s a romance made in heaven.”
Toon just grinned. “Look, this is getting off the subject a little, but I got a call from Willie Raines this morning. He says he wants to see me this afternoon. Very important. You wouldn’t have any idea what that might be all about, would you?”
“Me? Why would I know?”
“Just an idea I had.”
“You shouldn’t get so many ideas, Toon. Your line is law enforcement, not advertising.”
They were standing out in the parking lot of the Seventy-seventh Street Station, on an overcast Friday two weeks after the death of Cube Clarke. The LAPD had just completed its investigation of the Darrel Lovejoy homicide and decided Gunner had done nothing while under the employ of Kelly DeCharme to warrant either prosecution or suspension of his license.
So he was getting his Ruger back.
“You asked me a few weeks ago if you were off my shit list,” Toon said. His next words weren’t even out of his mouth yet, and already he hated the sound of them.
“That’s right. I did.”
“For the record, yeah. I guess you are. Until the next time, anyway.”
Gunner started for his car. His real car. He’d given Del the Hyundai back and taken the red Cobra out of mothballs. “There isn’t going to be a next time, Toon,” he said, tossing the comment over his shoulder.
“Shit. Guys like you, there’s always a next time,” Toon said.
Gunner turned the Cobra’s engine over as Toon stood over him.
“Remember what I said, Gunner. Serious business. You’ve gotta put it out of your mind. Cube Clarke was no kid. You hear what I’m sayin’? Repeat after me: Cube Clarke was no kid.”
“Cube Clarke was no kid,” Gunner said, humoring him.
“That’s right. Keep sayin’ it. Over and over. ‘Cube Clarke was no kid.’”
Gunner nodded his head condescendingly and started the car rolling. “Goodbye, Toon,” he said.
On the way home, with the Cobra’s top down and the wind freezing his face, he made a concerted effort to concentrate on the fifty thousand dollars he had “inherited” from Whitey Most, having kept one last little secret from Rod Toon, but his mind would not stay put on anything so auspicious. Instead, it gravitated toward the world of gangbanging, as he had known it would. He had been able to think of nothing else for days.
Up to this point, he had fought the compulsion tooth and nail, but today, as an experiment, he tried a different tack: He went with it, hoping the flood of black images would somehow revive the blissfully blind hatred he had held for gangbanging and all its participants only five short weeks ago. Deliberately, he thought about drive-bys and baby-faced wannabes, killers without conscience making hand signals for TV cameras, and walls and fences obliterated by overlapping layers of prideful, grotesque graffiti. He thought about crack and PCP, shotguns and Uzis and AK-47s, scars across beautiful throats and heavy black bellies—in short, every bleak, soul-crushing, and heartbreaking aspect of the L.A. street-gang culture he could possibly imagine.
And still, the pure, uncomplicated abhorrence he had once known for gangbanging would not come.
So he reverted to Toon’s exercise in his search for peace, the same one he himself had come up with the very night Cube Clarke—too young at fifteen to see an R-rated kung-fu movie without a parent or guardian in tow—had died.
Cube Clarke was no kid.
Cube Clarke was no kid.
Cube Clarke was no kid …
Someday, he knew, the self-hypnosis would take hold—and he would actually begin to believe it.
Not Long for This World Page 24
