Not Long for This World (31 page)

“No. That’s not true.” Raines shook his head again, his mood descending as his thoughts turned to Davidson and his violent death earlier in the day. “Teddy never took a dollar from me to do anything. What he did for me, he thought of as doing for God. He was a very …
disturbed
young man. He’d lost his fiancée and the child she was carrying several years ago in a gang-related shooting, and of course, there was always Rookie to contend with.…”

“How did you come to find him?” Gunner asked, already familiar with Davidson’s unenviable history.

Absently, Raines said, “Oddly enough, through Darrel. Darrel brought him to my attention. It was Darrel with whom he had had words at the Christian Youth Fellowship meeting I told you about before, the one that had preceded Teddy’s decision to leave the church. Darrel had told me afterward that Teddy had said some things about the Patrol and its value to the community, generally expressing the opinion that anything done for the benefit of a gangbanger was a waste of time and money, and had literally turned violent. Darrel threatened him with expulsion from the church, and he decided to leave voluntarily, instead. We thought that was the end of it, but a few weeks later—”

“He started making crank calls to Darrel’s home.”

“Yes. Scared Darrel’s poor wife Claudia to death, Darrel said. How did you know?”

Gunner started to cite the appropriate verses from the book of Deuteronomy, but instead just said, “Lucky guess,” and let it go at that.

“Darrel asked me to talk to him, to see if I could reason with him before the police had to be asked to try,” Raines went on. “So I did. I asked Teddy to meet me here one afternoon, and we talked about his problems in depth.” He took a long swig of his drink and said, “I’m no clinical psychologist, Mr. Gunner, but it was immediately clear to me that this was a man who could become homicidal at any moment. I knew if he didn’t get help, he would almost certainly kill some gangbanger somewhere, sooner or later.”

“So you gave him Lovejoy’s list and turned him loose.”

Raines nodded, eyes cast downward. “That’s a very harsh way of putting it, but I suppose that’s exactly what I did. Yes.” He shook his head at the insanity of it, trying to dislodge its hold on reality through the force of denial alone. “I looked upon it as utilizing his madness
constructively
. I told myself that Teddy was a sick man who would kill senselessly, indiscriminately otherwise. So I gave him direction, a purpose. I convinced myself that the work we were doing together was a necessary evil, a mere sacrifice of the few for the overall good of the many.”

Raines laughed, taking no pleasure in it. “But I was nearly as great a failure at living with the guilt of commissioning murder as I would have been with the guilt of actually committing it,” he said. “I read about the first killing in the paper and saw it on the news and suddenly I understood—I
understood
!.—what it was I had done and was about to be a part of. In your very words, Mr. Gunner, I had turned a madman loose upon children.
Children!
Sick children, demented children, children possessed by the devil himself, yes, but
children
just the same! All my good intentions aside, what I had done in just one week’s time had made a lie out of every oath I have ever made to God the Almighty. It reduced me to the worst and most despicable thing a man of the cloth can ever become: a charlatan and a hypocrite; a
fraud
.

“So I tried to call it off. After the very
first one
! But it was too late by then, of course. Teddy wouldn’t listen. He had a mission now. A
holy
mission, assigned to him by a messenger from God. And there was nothing that messenger—
this
messenger—could say or do to rescind what Teddy liked to look upon as his ‘divine orders.’”

This time the laugh turned into something else, and his tears did fall. The proud man Gunner had always thought Raines to be would have ignored them, but this one didn’t. This man, humbled by a fall from the greatest height known to mortal man—self-anointed sainthood—used the palms of both hands to wipe them away, oblivious to Gunner’s presence and indifferent to his judgment.

Gunner found himself looking away.

“And so the killing went on,” Raines said, struggling to compose himself. “And all I could do was watch, and pray. For his soul, and for mine.”

“And go through with your plans for the peace summit.”

“Yes. I had to do that above all else! After what I’d set into motion to ensure its success, I
had
to make it work. The summit had to be everything I promised it would be, and more. And the sad thing is—the
criminal
thing—is that it was. It
was
! Those boys in that meeting hall with me today … they were truly beautiful. Truly beautiful. When you consider all the garbage—the pain and the misery, the filth and the poverty, the anger and the rage—they had to put aside to come, to leave their homeboys and colors and sets behind for one day just to join hands and discuss the prospects for peace in their neighborhoods—you have to love them. You have to
love
them!

“The story here today should have been those boys, and the message their presence here was meant to send to every man, woman, and child in this country: Gangbangers want a
chance
. They want hope. They want a reason to believe in
something
, anything, besides the basic rules of survival. There is no greed in that, Mr. Gunner. No greed, at all.”

Gunner just nodded his head. The irony of the cruel turn Raines’s fortunes had taken was not lost on him. The minister had gone to great lengths to see to it that his beloved peace summit became nothing less than a front-page, film-at-eleven media event that could demonstrate, far better than anything he had ever tried previously, the true plight of the inner-city Los Angeles gangbanger—and it had all been for nothing. The very man to whom he had given the task of removing the summit’s most likely obstacles—a heartsick psychopath with a king-sized grudge to bear against all things gang-related, named Teddy Davidson—had with his death almost certainly guaranteed the summit a negligible role in tomorrow’s headlines, despite its relative “success.”

“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

I
t 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.”