Not Long for This World (14 page)

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 said, “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, “Bull
shit
. 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.

“Nobody gets this much rock on a layaway plan, lady,” he said. “Your credit’s not that good. Somebody’s supplying you for free, and I’d like to know why.”

“You’re crazy! I paid fifty dollars for that shit!”

Gunner twisted her wrist once, pinching the fragile bones beneath her flesh in a merciless vise that buckled her knees. “I’m not going to stand in the rain and listen to lies. You want me to catch my death of cold or something?”

Downs let out a little cry of anguish and crumpled some more, tears streaming down her face.

“Please! He’ll kill me if I talk to you!”

“Then we’d better make this fast, before he catches us out here shooting the breeze—don’t you think?”

Gunner clamped down on her wrist again and Downs began to nod her head frantically, acquiescing. The rain was still falling like an anvil dropped from a high rise and she was soaked to the gills, the wig on her head filled with water and weighing her down. Gunner was in only slightly better shape.

“Toby Mills wasn’t in Rookie Davidson’s car the night Darrel Lovejoy was killed, was he?” Gunner asked.

Downs shook her head, eyes cast downward. “No. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know if he was or not.”

“How’s that again?”

“I couldn’t see who was in the car! I couldn’t really see that good; it was dark.”

She was chewing her lip again, head still down but eyes turned upward to steal a peek at him, checking his reaction. Gunner released her wrist, afraid of what he might do to it if he didn’t. “Then somebody paid you to lie.”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“I can’t tell you that. I told you.”

“You’re getting on my nerves, Tamika.”

“Look, ask me anything else. Anything. Just don’t ask me to give you the nigger’s name!”

“All right. Forget his name, for now. Unless I miss my guess, I already know it, anyway. So tell me about the deal, instead. What was it? Free rock for a month to be at the bus stop when it happened, to say it was Mills and Davidson in the car? Something like that?”

“Something like that, yeah,” Downs said, nodding.

“That was Whitey Most I saw you with earlier, wasn’t it?” Gunner asked straightforwardly.

Downs didn’t answer, but her eyes betrayed her surprise.

“Yes or no, Tamika. All I need’s a simple yes or no.”

She made her choice faster than he anticipated, and it wasn’t among those he had listed for her. He had found it too easy to be physical with her, and had relaxed, confident that her will to fight had been sufficiently broken. It was a false assumption she brought to his attention by ripping the two packets of crack cocaine from his right hand while shoving him backward and off-balance against a row of trash cans directly behind him. He had no time to do anything but fly ass-backward over the cans and land in a soggy heap on his back, garnished liberally with garbage and fully relieved of his pride. By the time he recovered and reached her backyard gate, she was already clambering into the house.

She was trying to lock the door behind herself when he got there, but she panicked before completing the job and never threw the dead bolt, choosing to retreat farther into the house instead. With only the lower lock on the door to stop him, Gunner lowered a shoulder and broke into the house easily, catching a glimpse of the fleeing Downs up ahead as he dodged splinters from the doorjamb flying about his head.

Downs disappeared into the dark living room at the front of the house and Gunner ran like a madman through a small and untidy kitchen in pursuit, driven by fear to reduce her lead before she could pull a gun from a nearby dresser drawer and aim it at his face as he rounded the next corner. She was diving into the bathroom off a short hallway leading to the bedrooms in the back, perhaps with just such a scenario in mind, when the detective finally reached her, and this time she couldn’t close the door fast enough to lock it behind her.

With only Downs’s paltry weight behind the door to stop him, Gunner forced his way into the bathroom with little difficulty and dragged her back out into the hallway. She was kicking and screaming for all she was worth, doing little damage but making one hell of a racket, and yet no one appeared to come to her aid. Gunner guessed the children she had professed such concern for earlier were either very sound sleepers or absent from the premises.

Issuing no further ultimatums for her to ignore, the detective marched Downs into the living room and straight out the front door into the street, setting a course for the unmarked police car parked across the way. The two LAPD plainclothesmen formerly inside the car were already starting across the street toward him, one white man and one black, hands gravitating toward their holstered weapons. Downs was begging for a reprieve, but Gunner wasn’t listening.

The officers were only halfway across Croesus, and Gunner and Downs were still on the latter’s front lawn, when a single headlight out of the north washed over the men in the street, announcing the presence of an onrushing doom. A battered and rusted ’67 Chevrolet Nova that once upon a time had been lime green screamed out of the blinding rain in the distance to speed past Downs’s address, the driver inside strafing the front of Downs’s home with a helter-skelter spray of automatic-weapon fire. Gunner threw his hostage facedown onto the lawn and hit the dirt himself, reacting well, but playing tag with an arbitrary hail of bullets was a tricky business and he knew either he or Downs, if not both, would manage to catch one or two slugs even before he kissed the ground.

He was right.

As he lay on the water logged grass, his nose buried in a pool of mud, he heard the sound of dissimilar gunfire join that of the automatic rifle, and then a hard
whump
! preceding the Nova’s tire-squealing song of escape. Tentatively, he raised his head and turned his gaze to the street. A few brave residents had started to spill out of their homes and assemble at each curb, watching as one of the plainclothes officers assigned to Tamika Downs’s surveillance—the black one—tended to his fallen comrade, who was sprawled out on his back on the tarmac with his limbs splayed in awkward, unnatural positions.

Feeling sick, Gunner turned his head again to check on Downs, and the news there was just as bad. She, too, lay in an extraordinary position, left arm up, right arm down, her stomach flat to the ground but her head bent to the side, toward him. She was bleeding profusely from a throat wound and her eyes were open, searching the night for that last instant of crack-induced euphoria of which Gunner had deprived her.

Foolishly, the detective started to get to his feet, but a voice behind him said, “I think you want to stay right where you are, mister,” and that’s exactly what he did.

Because the black cop with the dead partner getting rained on in the street had his gun drawn now, and he looked like he just might want to use it.

chapter
nine

A
ngry cops and pissed off D.A.s were nothing new to Gunner.

Eleven years on the job had taught him that the sight of a private investigator was often all it took to send either form of public servant into a frothing, venomous rage; theirs was an adversarial relationship decades old and still going strong. The names changed and the threats varied from man to man, but for the most part, a cop or a district attorney’s routine was always the same. Depending upon the nature of his offense, either real or imagined, Gunner could almost guess beforehand what would be said, and how.

But Assistant District Attorney James Booker was different.

Booker was the forty-one-year-old prosecuting attorney whose job it was to represent the state in the Darrel Lovejoy murder case, and he was not a man to whom one could immediately warm up, even on his better days. He was an angular-faced black man of medium height who prided himself on a body-fat ratio of less than 8 percent and a rapport with the LAPD to which few members of the District Attorney’s office could lay claim. He was a snow-haired ex-navy man with a wife and three children, and he moved the way he spoke, with economy and precision.

In the first light of Tuesday morning, playing host to Gunner’s reluctant guest in a small interrogation room at the LAPD’s dilapidated Seventy-seventh Street Station, located in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles, Booker was facing an abundance of aggravations: the loss of both his prize witness in the Lovejoy case—Tamika Downs—and a six-year veteran of the LAPD’s crack antigang unit known as CRASH (for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums); the still-at-large status of the pair’s drive-by killer; and Gunner, the unwitting idiot it seemed he had to thank for it all. He had every right to be distraught—even Gunner had to admit that—and yet only Rod Toon, the third man in the room and the head of the CRASH task force, could see that Booker was livid. To Gunner, seated on the opposite side of the barren desk that separated them, Booker appeared to be little more than
miffed
.

“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that that was the weakest damn story I have ever heard,” the Assistant D.A. said to the investigator, using the same tone of voice to issue the critique that he might have used to read a bedtime story to one of his kids.

“Ditto for me,” Toon said, smirking from a standing position behind him. “I think maybe you’d better reconsider and call your lawyer after all, Slick.”

For a change, Gunner had a comfortable chair to sit on during an LAPD grilling, but he squirmed in it just the same. His tooth was bleeding again and someone was playing the inside of his skull like a kettledrum. The thought of having Ziggy, his attorney, around to offer Gunner his own special brand of professional mothering was beginning to look like a better idea all the time, but the detective wasn’t ready to concede that such a measure was necessary. Besides, he was trying to convince his inquisitors of both his innocence and good intentions, and running for the shelter of a good lawyer was in his opinion no way to accomplish the feat.