Not Long for This World (26 page)

Bowling alleys always had lockers, lockers you could rent for an entire winter or summer season, if you wanted to, and this dump was no exception. They were designed to hold bags and balls, shoes and purses, anything a league bowler might want to stash away between games down on the lanes—but there was no law that said they couldn’t be used for other purposes. They were locked by combination and nearly as sturdy as a safe, and they were the last place anybody inclined to steal would be likely to look for something worth stealing. A twelve-ounce lime green bowling ball and a pair of Brunswick shoes wouldn’t bring a thief five dollars on the street, if that. And in a place like this—a veritable graveyard for the living, a parking lot waiting to happen—a man could load one of the things up with a wheelbarrow full of gold bullion and never be noticed.

It was genius.

Most was spinning the dial on a locker now, before a wall lined with them near the door. He had sized the place up upon entering, missing the flash of Gunner in the poolroom he might have caught sight of out of the corner of his eye had he not been so intent on getting in and getting out, and ruled it business as usual, the same old piece of shit, safe and sound and empty as a church on Thursday. He got the door open and started sorting through the locker’s contents with the only free hand he had to use, his left. He was focused on what he was doing, incapable of being distracted.

He never saw Gunner coming.

“Bet I can guess what you’ve got in there, Whitey,” Gunner said.

Most spun, his feet rising up off the ground, at the sound of the voice. The vast expanses of pink flesh taking over his face were flushed with red and his eyes were like two puddles of white acrylic paint, each marred only by a nucleus of black ink.

“Bring your hand out of the locker and put it down at your side,” Gunner told him, holding the Ruger P-85 waist-high, its muzzle pointed downward for the sake of discretion, but not so low as to give Most any foolish ideas. “And make sure it’s
just
your hand. Leave the baubles—or the hardware—inside.”

Most didn’t want to comply, but the Ruger
was
compelling, so he did as he was told, suddenly in no hurry at all.

“Where the fuck you come from?” he asked.

“I have a part-time job here. I paint the stripes on the pins. Do me a favor and step back some, will you? Give me some room.”

Gunner used the Ruger to say “please.”

Most backed up. “So I was right about your ass. You just after the buck. You just in this for the motherfuckin’ dollar!”

“And you’re not, right?” Gunner peered into the locker, keeping Most in his peripheral vision. What he saw didn’t make him drop the gun, but it did make him forget for a moment why he was holding it. It made him forget about a lot of things.

He had never seen so much cash in his life.

It wasn’t the kind you saw in banks, or in those all-star-cast, million-dollar-heist movies that were always turning up on TV. It wasn’t crisp and flat, freshly inked and bound in precise, uniform packets. This was
street
money. Stacks of it. Off-colored tens, twenties, and fifties; folded, spindled, and mutilated.
Real
money. The kind of which
real dreams
were made.

The note nestled among it—the lined sheet of paper somebody had ripped from a yellow legal pad that Gunner had fully expected to see—was just a blip on the radar screen of his mind, a once-critical piece of evidence reduced to relative insignificance.

“Jesus Christ,” Gunner said.

“How much you want?” Most was ever the practical negotiator. “There’s almost fifty G’s in there. You tell me what you want, it’s yours. All you gotta do is gimme the rest and let me be on my way.”

Gunner took a minute to make sure they had no new, inquisitive friends anywhere, finding the old man working the cash register still absorbed in “Wide World of Sports” and the three men out on the lanes still throwing gutter balls, then took the note from the locker and pushed the door to just enough to put its remaining contents out of sight and out of mind.

“And what about this?” the investigator asked, directing Most’s attention to the yellow sheet of paper in his hand.

“That comes with me,” the dealer said, not outlining a condition of the deal but stating a fact, irrefutable and non-negotiable. Then he caught himself, realizing he had made too much of something he wanted Gunner to think was unimportant, and tried to play it off by grinning and shrugging, saying, “Ain’t nothin’ any good to you, right?”

“I don’t know,” Gunner said. “Let’s see.”

He looked at the note for the first time. Exactly as Rookie Davidson had promised, it was a handwritten list of names and gang affiliations, nine in all:

“Top Cat” Collingsworth, Seven-and-Sevens.

“Li’l Ajax” Brown, Stormtroopers.

“Def-Mike” Page, Wall Streeters.

Russell Meadows, Rockin’ 90s.

“Late-Train” Anderson, Doom Patrollers.

“Casper-Gee” Brown, Little Tees.

“Two-Jay” Williams, Gravediggers.

Toby Mills, Imperial Blues.

“Nite-Train” Brooks, Double-K Gangsters.

All the names looked familiar; all had no doubt come from Darrel Lovejoy’s notebook. The list was precisely what Gunner had hoped for, and just as he had envisioned it, with one surprising, notable exception: it hadn’t been written by Teddy Davidson.

The inimitable calligraphic style displayed here, Gunner had seen before, on flyers and in ledgers, memo books and calendar pages, check stubs and business cards, all scattered about a cluttered office on the third floor of a crumbling medical building on Hoover and 112th. It was the very same handwriting that filled the book whence the names in question had been taken: Darrel Lovejoy’s.

“Shit,” Gunner said angrily. Another wrench had been thrown into the machine, and his precious one-upmanship was now just that much further out of reach.

He slammed the locker door shut all the way, sealing the money inside, and spun the dial on its face a few times to secure it. Most didn’t know what this meant, but he knew he didn’t like the looks of it.

“All right, all right, what’s happenin’?” he asked.

“Outside,” Gunner said. “Right now.”

“Where we goin’? What about your money?”

“I’m not worried about the money. It’s not going anywhere.”

“Shit, neither am I ’til I find out where we goin’.”

“We need to talk, Whitey. Just you and me. I know a nice quiet place where the drinks are free and the conversation comes easy. How’s that sound to you?”

“Like a ripoff,” Most said, but he started for the door all the same.

The first thing Mickey Moore said when he saw them was, “Now there’s a man needs a haircut!”

He was talking about Whitey Most, thinking the dealer was just some new business Gunner had drummed up for him but then he saw the Ruger pinned hard against Most’s ribs and the “Cut the shit” look on Gunner’s face, and he knew that wasn’t the case. Naturally, the place was packed with the usual Saturday-afternoon crowd, much to Gunner’s chagrin: They had to weave their way through seven men, not counting Mickey, to get to Gunner’s work space in the back. Everybody noticed the gun, of course, despite the detective’s efforts to hurry Most along, but that couldn’t be helped. Mickey had a back door, too, just like Lilly Tennell’s Acey Deuce, only his was locked and boarded up, in deference to the thieves who had used it to break into the shop five times in the past two years.

Moore put down his scissors and stuck his head through the curtain after them, as Gunner had figured he would, but Gunner just said, “It’s okay, Mickey,” and the barber went away, a snoop who knew how to take a hint. He and his small army of customers created a dull roar debating the possible meanings of what they had just seen, but there were no more interruptions.

A desk, a couch, two chairs, a desktop reading lamp, and a wastepaper basket—that was still the extent of Gunner’s office. It all looked pretty feeble in the dark, and turning on the reading lamp did little to improve it. Still, Most took the chair in front of the desk, Gunner took the chair behind it, and they both made the best of it.

“You said somethin’ ’bout drinks,” Most said, slightly agitated. He was still looking down the unfortunate end of a German-made 9-millimeter automatic, yet his first priority was getting something to drink. He was as bad as Rookie Davidson.

“When we’re finished,” Gunner said. He could have explained that when he had made Most the promise of “free drinks,” he had had the Acey Deuce on his mind, but he felt like Most should have figured that out. He had been right there when Lilly had turned them away, less than ten minutes ago, closing the Deuce’s back door in their faces, saying, “Not two days in a row, no, no, no, no! This ain’t no goddamn speakeasy!”

“Finished what?” Most asked.

“Filling in the blanks. What else?”

“Man, make some sense.”

“I’m talking about the list, Whitey. I want you to tell me about it.”

“The list?”

“The list of gangbangers. Dead gangbangers. The one I just took out of your locker at the bowling alley. That list.”

Most said nothing. Recognition did not register on his mottled face.

Gunner shook his head and said, “You tell me you want to make a deal, and then you don’t talk to me. What kind of shit is that?”

“Look, man, why you gotta know ’bout the list? What the hell do you care ’bout it?”

“Because it’s mine now, Whitey. It doesn’t belong to you anymore, it belongs to
me
. Assess the situation at hand and I think you’ll see what I mean. All the options are mine. I can turn you over to the cops right now and make myself fifty thousand dollars richer, or I can listen to you tell me what I want to know and maybe forget the fifty grand is even there.”

“Forget it?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Forget it.”

“Shit. I’m s’posed to believe you’re gonna forget about fifty motherfuckin’ grand?”

“Look at it this way: The money’s there for me to take no matter what you do. You decide to cooperate and clear some things up for me, maybe the money’ll be there the next time you go to look for it, and maybe it won’t. On the other hand, you waste another five minutes of my time with this deaf, dumb, and blind routine, and you can kiss your money goodbye. Guaranteed. I’ll go into the Fox Hills Mall tomorrow and make like I just hit the big six in Lotto.”

Most still had to think about it. Watching him sit there, bitterly ruminating, it occurred to Gunner that he looked not unlike a man trying to decide whether he wanted his left arm lopped off at the shoulder, or his right.

Finally, with much reluctance, he said, “What about the list?”

Gunner smiled. Now you’re being smart, the smile said. “Let’s start with why the people on it, with one or two notable exceptions, are all dead.”

Most shrugged, as if the answer to his question was self-evident. “They’re ’bangers. What else do ’bangers do ’cept die?”

“You mean they were murdered.”

“Yeah.”

“By Teddy Davidson, maybe?”

“Who the fuck tol’ you that?”

Gunner shrugged himself. “Nobody keeps a list of dead people unless they’re an undertaker or a murderer. Davidson’s in the retread business.”

“Who says it was his note?”

“Somebody making a lot more friends downtown than you are here. Somebody who knows the value of a good rapport with his local law-enforcement professionals. Somebody who was with you the night you broke into Davidson’s garage and got your hands on the note in the first place.”

“Rookie? You gonna believe
him?
”

“I’m going to believe whoever tells the most complete story. One with a beginning, middle, and end. Just like the cops. You think this is the last time you’re going to have to cope with all these asinine questions? Get real. In the next couple of days, you’re going to be answering them in your sleep. May as well get a little practice in now.”

“Okay, so it was Davidson’s note. So?”

“So how did you know to look for it?”

“Look for it? Shit, I wasn’t ‘lookin” for it. I was just
lookin
. Lookin’ for
somethin
’. Somethin’ like, you know, incriminatin’. Somethin’ to prove what I seen.”

“And just what did you see?”

The dealer shrugged yet again, smiling at his good fortune. “I seen the Rook’s big brother waste a homeboy. That’s what I seen. Little cat name’ Casper-Gee. Casper-Gee, the Tee.” He chuckled. “Over on Colden Avenue, by Avalon. Man made it look like a drive-by, thought there wasn’t nobody ’round to see it, but I seen the whole goddamn thing.”

“When was this?”

He paused to think about it. “Two, three months ago.”

“If it was a drive-by, how did you know it was Teddy Davidson?”

“I seen the motherfucker’s face. I was in the ride ’cross the street, doin’ a little taste, an’ I looked right at ’im. Right at ’im. Him, though, he never seen
me
. He wasn’t thinkin’ ’bout me. It’s like I’m tellin’ you, man had everything scoped, planned real nice. ‘Gee, he was just standing on the corner, alone, like he was waitin’ for a fuckin’ bus or somethin’. Davidson come down the street, stop,
boom! boom! boom!
, then takes off. Gone. Perfect. He’s thinkin’ the coast is clear. ’Cept I seen the fool’s face. The jig was up.”

“You knew Davidson at the time?”

“Yeah, I knew him. ’Fore I got my Maxima—” The thought of his pearl white Nissan Maxima—the low-slung, wide-tracked, powerful beauty that was now, after Rookie Davidson’s bumpercarlike pummeling, probably nothing more than a four-wheeled slab of twisted metal rotting away in some LAPD impound yard in the San Fernando Valley—stopped him cold. He had to squint—biting the bullet—before he could go on. “’Fore I got my Maxima, I use’ to buy all my tires over at his place. Ted’s Tires. He was always in there, servicin’ with a smile. You couldn’t miss his ass.”

“So what happened after the drive-by?”

“Didn’t nothin’ happen. I lay back. I think about it. I ask myself how I can make this fresh information I got pay off. You know. Make it profitable. And I think, if I go to the man and just say, ‘I seen what you did, ante up,’ he’s gonna laugh in my face. He’s gonna say, ‘Your word against mine, blood,’ and there you go. There it is. My word against his, that’s all it’d be, and why the Man gonna wanna believe me? So I think about it, I keep thinkin’ ’bout it, and I re’lize I got to wait. I got to wait ’til I got more than my word ’fore I go to the man and give it up, tell him what I know, tell him what I seen. Wait ’til I got somethin’ he gotta deal with, somethin’ he gotta take
serious
.”