Not Long for This World (24 page)

The Blue held on to his answer for a long time, as if the fate of the entire world depended 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,
any
thing 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, Kelly 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.

Gunner turned his attention to Davidson and said, “Rookie, this is Kelly DeCharme … Toby’s lawyer, the one I told you about last night.”

Davidson glanced at her, but didn’t say anything.

“We’re going to ask you some questions and we want you to answer them as truthfully as you can. All right?”

Out of a long stretch of nothing, a nod emerged.

“Toby Mills didn’t kill Darrel Lovejoy, did he?”

Another long stretch of nothing. Then a shrug. “No.”

“Who did?”

“You know who it was, man. You know the motherfucker.”

“Tell me, anyway.”

“Whitey. It was Whitey.”

“Whitey Most?”

“Yeah. Whitey Most. How many cats name’ Whitey you know?”

Gunner and DeCharme glanced at each other, exchanging a common, unspoken sense of relief.

“You drove, and Whitey did the shooting, is that it?” Gunner asked Davidson, turning around to face him again.

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“With Toby’s gun.”

“Right. That’s it.” He was starting to cry again. “I didn’t wanna roll on Dr. Love, man. Me an’ Dr. Love, we topped it off, we was cool. Cube an’ some of the other homeboys, they was always talkin’ ’bout jackin’ ’im an’ shit, but I never had no problem with Love. Never.”

“But Whitey did.”

Davidson nodded his head again. “One day, he just say he gotta roll on somebody, an’ me, I gotta drive.
Me
. He say if I don’t do it, he gonna say it was me what told him ’bout Toby doin’ bus’ness on the side, talkin’ ’bout how he gonna open a car wash with Whitey’s money, an’ shit. He say I know if Toby hears that, I’m as good as got. The homies’d jump me out, like a fuckin’ perpetrator, or somethin’.”

“Toby Mills was doing business on the side?”

“Yeah, you know.” He shrugged again. “Holdin’ back. Keepin’ a little somethin’ to sell to ’is friends, shit like that.”

Gunner shared another knowing glance with DeCharme.

There was Whitey Most’s motive for framing his best runner for murder.

“So then you stole Toby’s gun for him.”

Davidson sipped his drink, trying to delay his answer as long as possible. “I stole
all
the homeboys’ guns. ’Cause Whitey, he didn’t say, ‘Go get Toby’s gun.’ He just say he needed one—a
Blue’s
gun—an’ told me to go get one. Snatch everything outta the crib so’s it’ll look like somebody just ripped us off. You know, another set, like the Tees or the Deuce-Nines, somebody like that.”