Not Long for This World (30 page)

The AR-15 clattered to the floor, creating a hollow racket in the empty church. Dazed, Davidson clawed after it with both hands, but Gunner brought a right foot up to kick the wind from his midsection, and Davidson forgot the gun entirely. Gunner watched him double over, hugging his waist and gasping for breath, then snatched the heavy assault rifle from the floor and gave his two benefactors a good hard look at last.

The tall one in the long leather jacket had a dark, disconsolate face framed by a mane of shiny black jheri curls; the small one was short-haired and neckless, with a hard stocky body that made him look about two feet shorter than he actually was.

The small one said, “Who the hell are you, man?” in the same voice he had used before to ask what the fuck this was.

“I’m the law,” Gunner said, trying to make that sound like something with which even a platoon of crazed gangbangers wouldn’t mess. “Who the hell are you?”

“His name is Wheel,” the tall one said, the words coming slowly, ponderously, from out of some dark, incalculably low vocal register. “An’ my name is Dog. An’ that motherfucker’s name right there”—he aimed a finger at Davidson’s general direction—“is Teddy goddamn Davidson.”

His right arm came up out of his heavy coat, bringing the vague shape of a single-barreled pump-action shotgun with it.

Gunner could do nothing but get out of the way. Davidson had made it to his feet, still wobbly, when the three blasts came, one right after the other. The first one caved his chest in and sent him reeling; the second took his chin off; and the third blew his remains off the balcony, scattering a bloody mess over the pews below.

A fourth .22-caliber round put a jagged hole in the back of the choir bench behind which Gunner was hiding, but it was only fired in passing, so as not to make him feel neglected or totally unimportant.

“That was for my homeboy Casper,” the big kid named Dog said matter-of-factly. He dropped the shotgun to his side, made the Cuz sign energetically with his left hand, and then was gone, racing the smaller Wheel down the stairs and out into the street.

Gunner slid the AR-15 across the floor to the other side of the balcony and tried hard to feel lucky to be alive.

chapter
sixteen

I
n a very odd way, Gunner felt sorry for the Reverend Willie Raines. His post-peace summit news conference was a disaster. The spectacular death of Teddy Davidson not only forced the minister’s little afterparty out of the First Children of God Church itself—in deference to the police investigation taking place there—but rendered it a veritable nonevent, as well. From the tiny confines of a hurriedly prepared Sunday school classroom, Raines had tried hard to sell the just-concluded peace conference as a qualified success, taking great pains to point out that technically, bad blood between rival gangs had played no part in Davidson’s death, but his audience was minimal and his witnesses—the six gangbangers with whom he had conferred—were generally unavailable to either confirm or deny his claims. The police were taking them aside a pair at a time for questioning, and those who were with him at any one time were too busy celebrating Davidson’s assassination to talk about anything else.

While their impromptu interrogation foiled Raines’s every attempt to turn the news media’s attention from Davidson’s murder to the story they had come here to cover in the first place, it did manage to prove worthwhile. Rod Toon, whose CRACK unit was directly responsible for the investigation at the scene, actually persuaded one of the gangbangers on the Reverend’s panel to admit that the homeboys who had blown Teddy Davidson off the church balcony were his. It was nice to get an unforced confession for once, Toon thought, but hardly necessary. David “Cold-Bee” Bennett was a nineteen-year-old runt and Little Tee with a passion for red bandannas and dark sunglasses whose runaway paranoia was legendary; there was no way he could have come here, unarmed and naked to the world, to talk peace with several of his worst and most-hated enemies without assigning a pair of fellow Tees like Anthony “Dog” Lewis and Clarence “Wheel” Mitchell to watch his back.

And yet, Bennett had confessed, anyway—glibly, matter-of-factly. Dog and Wheel, his boys, were heroes. They had brought Teddy Davidson to justice, righted the great wrong that had been done to Los Angeles gangbangers everywhere, and in so doing had brought immeasurable honor to their set.

Willie Raines would never have admitted it, but the two assassins had actually done a better job of bringing the gangs together on this day than he had.

Gunner had no choice but to feel sorry for him.

Sorry enough, in any case, to wait until the klieg lights of public scrutiny had gone down on the First Children of God Church to approach its beleaguered founder with the bad news Gunner had come here to deliver. Toon had read Gunner the riot act in eight different languages and removed his men from the scene, and the Reverend had lost the token interest of one last, preoccupied member of the press when Gunner finally requested a meeting.

Raines was tired and badly disheveled, but he led the investigator to his private office on the grounds and issued an official order that they not be disturbed. He made himself comfortable behind yet another imposing desk and Gunner did likewise on a burgundy leather couch backed up against one wall nearby.

“You don’t look relieved,” the investigator said.

Raines sighed heavily and smiled. “I couldn’t be more relieved, I assure you. I’d been prepared to be exhausted at today’s end, of course … but not for these reasons.” Just like that, the smile was gone.

“I didn’t mean that,” Gunner said.

Raines looked at him quizzically.

“I was talking about Davidson. He’s dead, and you don’t look relieved. Why is that?”

Raines had to think about the question a while before answering it, still not certain how Gunner intended it to be taken. “I’m relieved in the sense that the poor devil’s misery is over, Mr. Gunner, if that’s what you mean. And I’m relieved to know that his senseless killing of children has come to an end, of course. But beyond that, I see no reason to feel relief. A man was murdered here today. Brutally. There is very little solace to be found in that.”

“True,” Gunner said, nodding. “Unless this particular dead man happened to take something more than his body with him to the grave. You’re familiar with the expression ‘dead men tell no tales,’ aren’t you, Reverend?”

Raines shrugged, reluctantly playing along. “I believe so.”

“When Davidson died, he took the truth about a lot of things with him. Who it was that gave him Darrel Love joy’s list of gangbangers to use as a guide for murder, for instance. Everyone seems to have assumed Lovejoy did it himself, simply because he wrote it, including the man who killed him. But Lovejoy could just as easily have written the list for someone else. Someone who asked him to write it under decidedly false pretenses, of course.”

Raines stared at him blankly, waiting for him to make his point.

“I’m talking about you, Reverend. Teddy Davidson got that list from you, not Darrel Lovejoy.”

Raines started shaking his head emphatically. “No. That’s insane.”

“Yes,” Gunner said. “We do agree on that.”

“You don’t know Willie Raines! You couldn’t possibly make such an accusation if you understood for one
moment
what Willie Raines stands for!”

“I know what you stand for. I think I even know what your intentions are. If I didn’t think a decent man was buried somewhere underneath all the madness, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d be telling this story to the police, not you. But I can’t sit on it forever. Whether I can prove a word of it or not, I’ll have to go to the authorities with it eventually. With or without you.” He paused. “Unless, of course, you’re as good at killing men yourself as you are at having them killed for you.”

Raines looked at him for a long time, the light behind his eyes mirroring his vacillation between rage and guilt, grief and indignation. For Gunner, it was not unlike watching a ball kick around on a roulette wheel, waiting for fate to side with either red or black, the dark or the light within a man’s heart.

Before the wheel could stop spinning, Raines got up and walked over to the lone window in the room, where he peered out into a world of leadership-starved people he had thought only hours ago was his own to command.

“You can’t imagine how much I wish I
could
do my own killing, Mr. Gunner,” he said. “But my conscience—and my faith—refuse me that luxury.” He turned away from the window to face Gunner evenly. “So here I am. With no alternative, to hear you tell it, but to bare my soul and throw myself on the mercy of my fellowman.”

“I’m afraid that’s about the size of it,” Gunner said.

“Considering everything I have to lose—and all the people I’ll disillusion by doing so—do you honestly believe I’ll feel any better about myself afterward?”

Gunner shrugged. “That depends on how heavy a load you’ve found it to carry. A man like yourself, in your line of work … I would think it’s weighed a great deal on you.”

Raines nodded his head slightly, acknowledging a great truth. Tears welled up in his eyes as he stood there, but refused to fall. “Yes. Lord, yes,” he said. He looked out the window again and asked, “Do you remember Sam and Dave, Mr. Gunner?”

“Sure. The twins.”

“The twins. Exactly. Well, there’s only Sam, now. Dave has passed on.” He took a deep breath and let it out arduously. “I had him put to sleep two days ago. I had no other choice. As I told you the day you met them, Dave was inherently antisocial, absolutely impossible to deal with. It was something all the training in the world could never have corrected, every trainer and veterinarian I ever took him to said so. It was in the blood. And yet despite his condition, I never would have given up on him had it not been for one thing: He was beginning to have an adverse effect upon
Sam
.

“That was inevitable, of course. The two dogs were inseparable; they did everything together. And Dave was the strong one, the more dominant personality; eventually, he would have ruined Sam completely, I’m sure of it. So I cut my losses. I destroyed one brother to save the other. Do you follow what I’m getting at, Mr. Gunner?”

Gunner said, “You played the good shepherd. You stripped the weed from the vine so that the vine might grow and prosper.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s what you called yourself doing by killing the gangbangers on Lovejoy’s list.”

“Yes. I did.” He looked Gunner’s way again, smiling sadly. “Perhaps you’d have to be an ordained minister yourself to understand.”

Gunner shook his head. “I doubt that would help.”

“On the contrary. I think it would. I think if you had some insight into the realities of a clergyman’s calling, if you could imagine for just one moment what it’s like to feel compelled to save the world when your power to heal is woefully insufficient to the task, you would understand perfectly. No servant of Christ can save everyone, Mr. Gunner. No matter how hard we may try, no matter what methods we may adopt, it is a simple fact that our every victory is doomed to be tempered by some defeat, somewhere down the line.

“Therefore, it is imperative that we learn to keep our losses to a minimum. That we make the commitment to recognize the forces of evil at work against us in all their forms and deal with them accordingly. Disbelief, for example. Hardened skepticism. We cannot allow these poisons to run wild among the good people of a congregation and still expect that congregation to be saved. Doubting Thomases breed, Mr. Gunner. Dire hopelessness is transmittable.”

He crossed the room to a silver bar cart parked behind his desk and began to make himself a drink, never thinking to ask Gunner to join him. “I had to work with the children in this community a long time before I could admit that, but now it seems as clear to me as the heavens above. I can only reach my hand into the quagmire of this insanity called gangbanging and pull so many kids out. I have to draw the ones up who wish to be drawn up, and let the others go. And I cannot stand idly by and let those who prefer the darkness to the light to impose their will—
Satan’s
will—upon young people who might otherwise choose to come with me.

“Those boys on that list were
demons
, Mr. Gunner!
Demons!
I know that to be true because that’s exactly what I asked Darrel to give me: the names of Lucifer’s most powerful emissaries on the street. I was in the early stages of organizing this morning’s peace summit, and I had made up my mind long before that I was going to do everything in my power to see that it succeeded. The summit was going to prove to the world that the poor black youth of this nation are not yet an expendable commodity, that there is still great worth and pride and potential behind our children’s pain and hatred, fear and resentment, and I was not going to permit the agents of Satan to render it stillborn by infecting the entire gangbanging populace with their impenetrable pessimism and contempt. I’d had it happen to me too many times in the past.”

“So you hired Teddy Davidson to do some killing for you,” Gunner said.