You Can Die Trying (14 page)

Gunner was only three blocks from home when they put the lights on him.

He had just spent the greater part of Friday night at the Acey Deuce, the neighborhood bar and night club in which he did the vast majority of his drinking, and he still had a light buzz on. Having Deanna Lugo come on to him this afternoon had put him in a somewhat celebratory mood, and he’d wanted to put the day to rest in the company of some friends, rather than with a bottle of Wild Turkey and a few fond remembrances of Claudia Lovejoy back at home. Up until now, it had seemed like the right thing to do.

On his way home, he had stopped for a brief moment back at the alley behind Forty-second Place, just east of Van Ness, to see for himself what the scene looked like at night. Lugo had been the second person to mention, after Harry Kupchak, how impossible Jack McGovern had found it to see inside the alley on the night of Lendell Washington’s shooting, and Gunner had decided he didn’t like not knowing how much truth there was to the claim. A lot of time had passed since the night in question, and how things were today did not necessarily have any bearing on how they had been then, but tonight, the alley had been dark.

Very dark.

And Gunner found that problematic.

It was almost midnight. Traveling east along 108th Street, enjoying the cold night air that the topless Cobra afforded him, he couldn’t remember doing anything special or reckless, had made no sudden lane changes nor abruptly increased his speed—and yet there it was: a blazing red light bar blinking in his rearview mirror.

The neon calling card of the Man.

Gunner pulled the Cobra over to the curb just on the other side of San Pedro and waited for instructions. Depending upon who he was dealing with, he could be ordered to show his hands, or to step out of the car—or be greeted by silence, which in its own way was more disconcerting than anything else.

The Cobra’s engine hadn’t completely died when a wave of white light washed over its and Gunner’s back, as the driver of the black-and-white behind them hit the search light mounted above the sideview mirror on the driver’s side of the car. Gunner could hear the patrol car’s doors open and close, but the light in his eyes when he glanced in his mirrors gave him nothing to see of the two men approaching but silhouettes, one on his right, one on his left.

Gunner knew better than to turn around for a better look.

The uniform on his right came as far as the Cobra’s rear quarter panel and stopped right there, his right hand resting on his weapon. Gunner could actually hear the pop as he undipped the safety strap securing the revolver to its holster.

The uniform’s partner, meanwhile, came all the way forward to Gunner’s side and said, “Good evening. May I see your driver’s license and registration, please?”

A narrow-framed white man with a pockmarked face, he’d made the word
please
sound like a vulgarity he found personally offensive.

“What seems to be the problem?” Gunner asked.

There was a slight delay before the question received an answer. “There’s no problem. Your driver’s license and registration, please.” Before Gunner could argue, the officer said, “Use your right hand only, and keep your left hand up near the top of the wheel, in plain sight.”

Okay
, Gunner thought.
It’s going to be like that.

He produced the requested documents in the manner prescribed and watched as the stone-faced officer held a flashlight to them, looking each over carefully. He was in no hurry. Even his partner was starting to show signs of impatience when he finally looked up and said, “Step out of the car for me, please, Mr. Gunner.”

Gunner looked at him, tempted to protest, but kept his mouth shut and did as he was told.

“Step around to the other side of the car and wait. I’ll just be a moment,” the officer said.

He didn’t move until Gunner had joined his partner on the sidewalk. Then he moved back to the patrol car and got on the radio to run a check on the Cobra and the black man he’d found driving it.

The young black patrolman sharing the sidewalk with Gunner studied his face skeptically.

“You look like you’ve been drinking,” he said.

Gunner shrugged, knowing how little good a lie would do him. “Some.”

“What’s that mean, ‘some’?”

“It means I had a pretty good buzz on about two hours ago, but now I hardly feel a thing.”

The officer fell silent, no doubt trying to decide whether or not the subject was worth pursuing. Then he nodded in the direction of the Cobra and said, “That’s a lot of car to be driving around drunk in, don’t you think?”

Gunner didn’t say anything.

“It’s a Cobra, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Yours?”

“Yes.”

“Is that right?” That seemed to throw him for a minute. “You put it together yourself?”

Gunner had been expecting the question; he heard it all the time. “It’s not a kit car,” he said.

“What?” The cop stepped closer to the car for a better look. “You’re kidding. This is the real thing?”

Gunner nodded.

“You mind if I ask how you got it?”

“A buddy in Nam left it to me,” Gunner said tersely.

“A buddy? What kind of buddy?”

“A dead one.”

The cop looked at him, finally at a loss for words.

Here and there along both sides of the street, people had stopped to gather and gawk, and Gunner was beginning to grow weary of all the attention. He watched as the officer at the car started back toward him, his clipboarded ticket book in hand.

Showing his partner a little nod Gunner was meant to miss, the cop offered Gunner his clipboard and a pen and said, “Sign there at the bottom, please, Mr. Gunner.”

“What’s it for?” Gunner asked, irritated.

“Your left taillight is out. Just like it says.”

He stood there grim-faced, waiting for Gunner to either sign the ticket or give him an argument.

Gunner signed the ticket.

The cop pulled Gunner’s copy of the citation out of his book and handed it to him. “Have a good night, sir,” he said.

Even though he knew there was no chance now that Gunner would.

“Mr. Gunner. It’s good to hear from you,” Mitchell Flowers said. It was barely nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, yet he sounded like someone who had been awake for hours.

Gunner could picture him standing at his living room phone, dressed like an urban farmboy, a muddy garden spade in his free hand.

Mr. Black Middle America.

“I’d like to see you this morning, Mr. Flowers, if that would be possible,” Gunner said.

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m not sure. Will you be home for the next fifteen minutes?”

Flowers had to think about that for a minute. “This can’t be done over the phone, Mr. Gunner?”

“It could, sure. But I’d rather do it in person. How about it?”

Silence.

“I’ll come incognito,” Gunner promised.

“If you think it’s that important,” Flowers said finally. “Come on over.”

A heartfelt invitation it wasn’t.

Gunner was going to try to weasel out of the case.

He realized now that he had been crazy to accept it in the first place. Four days on the job, and all he’d really managed to prove was what he’d known from the beginning: Clearing Jack McGovern of Lendell Washington’s murder couldn’t be done.

There seemed to be evidence galore that McGovern had been facing a hopelessly stacked deck from the beginning—from the opportunistic Milton Wiley to the overzealous IAD team of Danny Kubo and Dick jenner, everyone who could have possibly made things worse for him apparently did—but that wasn’t the point Gunner had been hired to make. What Mitchell Flowers had paid him to establish was that all the effort McGovern’s friends and enemies had spent trying to bury him had been directed at an innocent man—and so far, Gunner had come much closer to proving McGovern’s guilt than his innocence.

Gunner didn’t really need a more compelling reason for quitting the case than that, but he had one all the same. Getting pulled over by Frick and Frack the night before had reminded him of it, after he had somehow neglected to mention it last Monday night, when he’d fooled both himself and Mitchell Flowers into thinking he could do what Flowers was asking of him.

Cops made Gunner nervous.

He had never gone in for the popular dictum that said no cop was to be trusted and every cop was to be feared, but he had seen enough uniformed madmen in his time to know that his next confrontation with a policeman could always be his last. A run-in with the wrong cop, at the wrong time, was all that it would take. Because many of the men and women who patrolled these streets didn’t always see things the way they really were. They didn’t think they could afford to. In the interests of staying alive, they had taught themselves to expect the worst of every situation, and to treat strangers like the enemy. It was experience-driven paranoia, coupled with a vast array of preconceived notions about whole groups of people. Notions that could get a man belonging to such a group killed or crippled for life under the right set of circumstances.

Gunner had no reason to believe that either of the officers he had met Friday night fell into this particular category, but he had no reason to believe they didn’t, either. And that was the real problem: never knowing. Not knowing how much one could say to whom, or in what tone of voice; how fast you could move your hands, or where you should keep them; what expressions to keep off your face, or what to do with your eyes. Any step could be a false step, in the wrong cop’s eyes, and the right false step on any given night could buy you a ticket to the boneyard. All you had to do was be unlucky enough to draw a meeting with a crazy like Jack McGovern.

Ostensibly, Dennis Bowden was out to change all this, but change was going to be a long time coming. In fact, the pressures Bowden was exerting on the troops to clean up their act were only adding fuel to the fire at this point, giving the already angry cop on the street just one more thing about his job to resent. In this, the still smoldering aftermath of the Dexter Hardy riots, the lawmen of South-Central Los Angeles were being measured for perfection as they had never been before, and the stress of such scrutinization was going to break more than a few of them as time went by.

Up to now, Gunner hadn’t had anybody snap on him, and maybe he never would. But Russian roulette was still Russian roulette, no matter how many times the cylinder in the chamber turned up empty.

And Gunner had never cared much for suicide.

“I don’t understand,” Mitchell Flowers said.

They were in his living room, drinking coffee. He had a nice little home on Forty-first Street, between Western and Van Ness, less than six blocks from the alley where Lendell Washington had died. There was a swing out on the front porch, and a chain-link fence surrounding the front yard. A German shepherd yapped playfully out in the back.

Inside, Gunner had never seen so many doilies in his life.

“You’re giving up. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m saying I’ve been on the case for four days now, and I think you’re throwing your money away,” Gunner said. “That’s what I’m saying. Everyone seems to agree that there may have indeed been some extracurricular activity behind McGovern’s dismissal, but since he was guilty anyway, it doesn’t really matter.”

“But he wasn’t guilty. That’s my whole point,” Flowers said.

Gunner took a deep breath. “You still insist Washington had a gun?”

“Yes. I saw him fire it.”

“You mean you saw McGovern fire it. After he’d shot Washington.”

“No. I saw the boy fire a gun at McGovern. Before McGovern started shooting.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Of course.”

Gunner shook his head. “I hate to differ with you, Mr. Flowers, but I don’t think you did. I’ve been told by a number of people so far that that alley was as dark as the bottom of a well that night, and I’m inclined to believe them. I checked the alley for myself last night, and it was like they say: pitch black. Now, I’m not ready to say you’ve been lying to me, exactly, but—”

“But what?”

“But I wonder why you haven’t exactly been telling me the truth, either. Not all of it, anyway.”

Flowers fell silent, a sure sign that Gunner was on to something. He had an angry, yet uncertain look on his face, like that of a man who was both insulted and apprehensive at the same time.

“I saw him fire two shots,” Flowers insisted.

“You mean you saw the muzzle flashes.”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t actually see
him.”

Flowers paused, fishing for an answer. It almost looked to Gunner as if he were making one up on the spot. “No. I guess I didn’t. But—”

Gunner lowered his eyes to the floor and shook his head, biting down on a choice vulgarity. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” he asked, looking up again.

“What?”

“That you never actually saw Washington fire a gun. That’s what.”

Flowers shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it. So I didn’t actually see him fire the gun. So what?”

“So maybe he wasn’t the one who fired it,” Gunner said. “You ever think of that?”

If Flowers had ever considered the possibility before, it didn’t show on his face. He appeared to be genuinely taken aback. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m suggesting that perhaps there was someone else in the alley with him, Mr. Flowers. Someone with a gun. Someone you didn’t see.”

“Someone like who?”

Gunner had come prepared to answer just such a question. All he’d had to do was spend half the previous night mulling it over. “I don’t know,” he said. “A crack dealer, maybe.”

“A crack dealer?”

“That’s right. McGovern’s partner told me yesterday that that alley’s a regular drug lover’s bazaar around that time of night. Maybe a buyer or a seller was hanging around in there when Washington showed up, saw McGovern coming, and just panicked, not knowing what the hell was going on. He or she could have fired two shots at McGovern just to discourage him, and then taken off.”

Just at that moment, Flowers’s wife entered the room with fresh coffee. She was a narrow-hipped woman with an insincere smile, and she hadn’t said more than “hello” to Gunner since he’d arrived. Her husband had introduced Gunner to her as an old bowling league buddy, an implausibility she had somehow never questioned.