Not Long for This World (19 page)

“That’s him there,” Smalltime Seivers said. “The one with the fucked-up face. Looks like one of them ponies. I forget what you call ’em.”

“Palominos,” Gunner said.

“Yeah, that’s it. Palominos.”

Smalltime was pointing to one of three black men standing in a narrow alley behind the 1900 block of 114th Street in Watts, the trio conversing in the furtive but jocular manner inner-city drug sales always seemed to bring out in people. The man in question stood just over six feet tall and looked to be in his early thirties. He had a glistening jheri-curled mane of black hair that petered out at his shoulders, and ten fingers laden with more gold than the average jeweler’s window dared display. His most distinctive feature, however, was the spotty coloring of his flesh; even from a distance, it was obvious that he suffered from the disfigurement of vitiligo, a degenerative epidermal condition that gradually bleached skin of its darker pigmentation, spreading ever-expanding patches of pink flesh across the body. There were signs of the disease on both of his hands and at the open throat of his blue silk shirt, but the greatest casualty of his affliction, as Smalltime had pointed out, was his face; were it not for a large island of dark skin on his left cheek and a smaller one encompassing his right eye, the man easily could have passed for an albino in a dark wig.

No wonder they called Most
Whitey
, Gunner thought.

He and Smalltime were standing about thirty yards farther east down the alley from Most and his customers, hunched over the raised hood of Gunner’s borrowed silver and black Hyundai as if working to solve some debilitating automotive mystery of the Orient. Ordinarily, Smalltime might have been hard for Most to miss, but the alley was a popular place for amateur grease monkeys to labor over their latest wrecks, and the two had plenty of camouflage behind which to work. If Most had taken note of them, he showed no signs of caring.

“He ain’t gonna be here long,” Smalltime observed, pretending to be checking for loose spark-plug wires. “Looks like we caught ’im ’bout to finish up.”

Gunner nodded. Most’s small gathering had been joined by one lone woman in an iridescent bathrobe and matching house slippers, but there was no one to be seen behind her, either waiting boldly in line or hanging back discreetly.

“You have any idea where he might go from here?”

The big man looked at him blankly; Gunner had spoken like somebody trying to talk through a mouthful of undercooked mashed potatoes. Exactly as he had feared, his dentist had made a pincushion out of his lower jaw with his syringe of Novocain, and nearly a full two hours later, the lower half of Gunner’s face was still just a useless, distant memory.

He asked the question again, enunciating deliberately:
You have any idea where he might go from here?

Smalltime shrugged. “I know a few places he might go.”

Gunner straightened up and made a show of wiping his hands on a dirty rag. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

He slammed the hood shut on the little Hyundai and got in behind the wheel. Smalltime took the passenger seat and the car did a fast tilt to his side, groaning, its suspension being crushed and compressed like a watch spring under a dead rhino. Gunner started the engine and began to back slowly out of the alley, away from Most.

“Okay. Now you seen ’im,” Smalltime said.

Gunner tried to play dumb, but the Blue wasn’t buying. Their arrangement, after all, had been explicit: In exchange for pointing Most out, Smalltime would get to hear to what the dealer owed the detective’s interest. Most was no great friend of his, Smalltime had said, but he was a close business associate of Toby Mills’s, and the Blues did make regular use of his services, at least indirectly, so the Blue could not see how making an enemy of him would benefit anyone. Enemies came easily enough in the ’hood; there was no need to go out and make more.

Gunner thought of himself in the Hyundai’s place, squashed under the big Blue’s weight like an empty pie tin, and decided to tell him a fraction of the truth, at least—that his interest in Most stemmed from the suspicion that Rookie Davidson might be paying the dealer a visit sometime soon, either out of need or simply out of habit.

“Yeah. I can buy that,” Smalltime said, nodding, satisfied that the investigator was: playing it straight with him.

As the little Hyundai labored along beneath his weight, he let his eyes linger on Gunner with open curiosity, apparently trying to solve whatever riddle it was the man represented to him. “When you gonna ask me?” he asked at last, grinning.

“Ask you what?”

“Why I ’bang. You know, why I ain’t doin’ somethin’ more ‘constructive’ with my life. Shit like that. You ain’t asked me nothin’ like that, yet.”

Gunner kept his eyes on the road. “Maybe I’m not interested,” he said.

“Shit. You’re interested. Everybody’s interested.”

“Maybe I’m not like everybody. Maybe I’ve heard all the answers to that question before, and couldn’t relate. I’m dense like that.”

“You’re sayin’ ’bangin’ don’t make no sense to you.”

“A lot of things don’t make any sense to me.”

“Man, you ain’t even curious ’bout my reasons?”

Gunner finally glanced at him. “What difference would it make if I were? You don’t want to hear my feeble pleas for reform and I don’t want to hear your lame explanations. If I thought anything I could say would wise you up, I’d make the effort. But I don’t. You’re a big boy, ’Time. I can’t talk you in to or out of anything, and I’m not going to lose any sleep trying. Sorry.”

Smalltime just looked at him. He had either come to understand Gunner better, or was simply more amused by him, because soon he was grinning again, from ear to ear.

The notebook Gunner had taken from Darrel Lovejoy’s office less than eighteen hours ago was sitting between the car’s front seats, and Gunner asked the Blue to take a look at it as they made their way back to the corner of Avalon and Imperial, where the detective had picked Smalltime up that morning. He had glanced through it himself the night before, in bed, but could find nothing in the case histories within that seemed unusual or significant, either obvious or written between the lines.

“What the fuck is this?” Smalltime asked, leafing through the notebook’s pages, amused.

“It belonged to Darrel Lovejoy. It’s a book of gangbanger case histories, but I’m not sure what it means. If you can read it all right, I’d like you to tell me what you make of it.”

Smalltime seemed inclined to object to the insinuation that he might not be able to “read it all right,” but he merely nodded his head again and dug into the book, maintaining a heavy silence until they reached their destination.

The Hyundai was sitting idle by the curb, its engine running, when he handed the notebook back to Gunner, still without comment.

“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.