You Can Die Trying (22 page)

Afterward, Hilton had bought himself a hot dog and pushed his way up to the rail to watch the third race, making notes in his racing form as he eyed every movement on the track like a hawk. A three-year-old filly named Simplicity Itself rode the inside to victory less than a half-length ahead of a mare named Same Way Twice, paying off handsomely at $14.60, but if Hilton had expected this result, he had an odd way of showing it: He shredded one of his paramutuel tickets into confetti and called it a day, leading Gunner out to the parking lot and their respective cars.

From there he drove back to work, having never given Gunner any reason to believe he didn’t do this sort of thing every day.

Hilton and Gunner then spent the final four hours of the former’s work day much like they had the first three, with the exception that Gunner slipped away from his post on the mall’s second floor for a few minutes to call an old friend down in Vegas from a pay phone. By the time Hilton left work a few minutes later to have dinner in Hollywood with a fat Samoan Gunner knew to be a bookie named Papa Ho, Gunner felt as if he had Hilton pretty much figured out.

Hilton was getting in the Corvette, out in the dark parking lot of the restaurant in Hollywood, when Gunner finally made his presence felt.

“Hello, Pervis,” he said.

Hilton turned, the color draining from his face even before he could complete the motion. Gunner was just standing there, waiting.

“What the hell do
you
want?” the clothes salesman managed to ask, almost with genuine backbone. The relief in his eyes seemed to imply he had expected to be ambushed by someone else.

Someone he had reason to fear.

“You remember me, then,” Gunner said.

“Yeah. I remember you. You’re that rent-a-cop my idiot sister invited into the house the other day. The one the cops hired to try and fuck up her case against them.”

“Actually, you’re only half right. Despite the common assumption, I’m not working for the cops. I’m working for a neighbor of yours. Somebody who saw something last September I think you might be interested in.”

Hilton’s sneer lost just a fraction of its arrogance. “Last September? Like what?”

“Like the two shots you fired at the cop who killed your nephew Lendell. The ones that drew the cop’s fire to Lendell in the first place.”

This time, Hilton’s face took the whole fall, like an old theater curtain dropped from the rafters. With his last ounce of false courage, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I think you do. Lendell didn’t get shot that night because Jack McGovern was a racist pig looking for a little target practice. He got shot because you tried to kill McGovern first, when you saw it was a cop Lendell had brought back with him into that alley instead of Noah Ford. What you did was, you panicked. And then you ran away.”

“That’s a lie! You’re crazy!” Hilton said.

“I’m not crazy. Just tired. And maybe a little hungry. I’ve been following you around all day today, and it seems like all I’ve seen you do is eat. First at the track, during your lunch hour. And then just now, breaking bread with Papa Ho. What was that you had in there, by the way? Veal? It looked pretty good.”

“Look, fuck you. I don’t have to listen to any more of this shit.” Hilton sat down in the car and started to close the door behind him.

“I have your gun, Pervis,” Gunner said.

Hilton froze, the car door still hanging open in his hand.

“The one you tossed in the garbage can at the end of the alley, before you ran away.”

Hilton came alive and tried to slam the door shut, but Gunner stepped forward to stop him. He looked down into the low-slung car at him and said, “I could have taken it straight to the police, and watched them yank you out of your sister’s house without calling first to say they were coming. But I thought maybe Harriet had seen enough policemen around for a while, and deserved to hear the news from you, in whatever way you’d care to present it. But if that’s not important to you …” He backed away from the car. “I’ll just see you downtown. Sooner or later.”

Gunner put his hands in his pockets and waited for Hilton to make up his mind.

Hilton killed some time scanning the parking lot beyond the Corvette’s windshield, just to give him something to do with his eyes, then slowly pulled the keys out of the car’s ignition and stood up. He slammed the door closed, locked it, and turned around, looking not unlike a second-grader about to be marched down to the principal’s office.

“Smart man,” Gunner said.

He didn’t realize there was someone moving up behind him until the expression on Hilton’s face abruptly changed, and he heard gravel popping beneath someone’s feet, just at his back.

Gunner only got halfway turned around, and one hand out of his pockets, before his skull slammed into something hard, and the world shut down for the night.

13

When the fog finally rolled out, big-time pain rolled in.

It started at the back of Gunner’s head, just behind his right ear, and then radiated outward, sending signals of discontent throughout his entire body. It felt like somebody had slung a manhole cover like a Frisbee and planted the damn thing in his skull. He thought about opening his eyes, but discovered to his dismay that the thought alone was enough to drive the manhole cover an inch farther into his brain. So he resigned himself to keeping perfectly still. For the rest of his life, if necessary.

So as not to make himself completely useless, he took a little inventory. What he found was that he was laying on his back, unbound, on what felt like the soft leather flesh of a divan. And that whoever his hosts were, they were not happy with each other at the moment.

“Why in God’s name would you bring him here?” he heard Milton Wiley say.

“I told you. Because I thought I was doin’ you a favor.”

This voice was vaguely familiar, but not yet identifiable.

“A favor? What kind of favor?”

“He was talkin’ about takin’ homeboy here to the police. It sounded like he knew the whole deal. So I thought, you know, maybe you’d wanna talk to him.”

“Talk to him? For what? He was only a nuisance to me. He couldn’t prove anything. But by bringing him here like this, you’ve tied my hands. Do you realize that? You’ve put me—you’ve put all of us—in a completely untenable position.”

“What the hell does
untenable
mean?”

This time, Gunner recognized the voice. It was his impatient friend from Wiley’s waiting room. Howie Foster.

“It means we have no choice now but to kill him. Unless he can somehow see his way around to being reasonable.”

“Kill him? What do you mean, kill him?”

This was Pervis Hilton.

“Shit. I’m in enough trouble as it is. I’m not getting involved in any goddamn murder!” Hilton said.

Gunner opened his eyes. The jolt of discomfort he had been expecting followed the act, all right, but it was mercifully shortlived. His vision cleared after a moment and he could see the three men positioned around Wiley’s office distinctly. To his right, Wiley was sitting on the front edge of his desk, facing a standing Foster, while Hilton was sitting in a chair between them, looking as distressed as ever.

It was Foster who saw him first.

“Hey. Looks like he’s wakin’ up,” the big man said. He sounded slightly amused.

Gunner grabbed the back of the leather divan with his right hand and pulled himself up into a sitting position, doing what he could to ignore his body’s violent protestations. Afterward, he had to wait a while before the room and its occupants drifted back into focus.

“How’s the head, homeboy?” Foster asked, grinning.

Gunner looked at him, rubbing the back of his neck with his right hand, and said, “I think you can guess the answer to that. ‘Howie.’”

“You can call me ‘Mr. Foster,’ asshole.”

“And you can call me ‘in your ass,’ you ever come near me again. All right?”

Foster just laughed.

Wiley stood away from his desk to get a closer look at Gunner and said, “For what it’s worth, Mr. Gunner, I had nothing to do with your being brought here this evening. This meeting was entirely Mr. Foster’s idea, I’m afraid.”

“So I heard,” Gunner said.

“You heard? You mean, you were awake when we—”

“Were discussing the probability of having to kill me? I heard that. Yeah. As I recall, the vote was one for, and one against, with your boy Howie here abstaining. Though, I’d imagine if you asked him to vote again—”

“You’d be dead. Damn straight,” Foster said.

He was standing directly in Gunner’s path to the office door. Deliberately.

“Nevertheless. We were talking about something that never has to happen,” Wiley said. “For all your insipid disruptions of my business, Mr. Gunner, you still strike me as an intelligent man. One who can be bargained with, given death as his only other alternative.”

Gunner shrugged, and winced when it cost him. “You’re asking me to forget an awful lot, counselor. Don’t you think?”

“On the contrary. I think I’m asking you to forget very little. Mr. Hilton’s connection to the gun you say you’ve found, number one. And the details of this meeting—and the kidnapping that preceded it—number two. Is that too much to ask in exchange for one’s life?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“That’s because you’re oversimplifying things a bit. You’re not just asking me to forget the gun was Hilton’s—you’re asking me to forget the part he played in the robbery that got his nephew killed. Or hasn’t he told you yet that the robbery was his idea?”

“Shut the fuck up, man!” Hilton said, actually threatening to rise from his chair. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“The young man has a serious gambling problem,” Gunner said to Wiley, as if Hilton hadn’t even spoken. “He spends his lunch hours betting on the sixth-place horse in every race out at Hollywood Park, and a little birdie I know down in Las Vegas says he’s as regular a loser there as he is at the track. He’s in the red everywhere he goes, and people who stay in the red sometimes do desperate things. Especially if they’ve fallen too far behind the eight ball with a bookie like Papa Ho. Papa Ho isn’t a patient man, from what I understand.”

“The fat bastard was going to kill me,” Hilton said to Gunner, his jaw set so tight the words just barely passed through his teeth. “For thirty-five dollars. Thirty-five dollars!”

“Shut up, Pervis,” Wiley said.

“Why? He already knows, right? He’s so goddamn anxious to hear the details, right? Well, let him hear them, then. Fuck him!”

“We don’t know
what
he knows. But if you blurt out the whole damn episode …” Wiley paused, to make sure Hilton caught his meaning. “You’re going to have to accept some responsibility for the consequences.”

Hilton surveyed the three faces in the room, trying to read them. Foster was clearly pulling for him to speak his mind, but neither Gunner nor Wiley appeared to give a damn what he decided to do.

In the end, he looked at Gunner and said, “I was into Papa Ho for almost a thousand. Nine hundred and seventy-two dollars, man, that’s what I owed him. And I had it, too. Everything but thirty-five dollars of it. Nine-hundred and thirty-seven dollars was all the green I could scrape up. I’d had a bad run and …” He shrugged. “I was busted. Didn’t have anything more to sell, didn’t have anything left to hock. I asked around for a week, trying to borrow the money, but … I’d borrowed money before, and I guess I’d made a mess of it.

“Anyway, come my last day to get the money, I was still lookin’ for it. Papa Ho said, he understood it was only thirty-five dollars, but he’d already cut me some slack once before, the year before that, and this time he wasn’t going to let it ride. It was the principle of the thing, the fat motherfucker said. So …”

He couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out.

“So you put your two nephews up to knocking off a liquor store for you,” Gunner said.

Hilton nodded. “I tried to lift some of my sister’s jewelry at first, just to hock it for a while, and then put it back, but I’d already hit her up like that once, so she put the shit away. Hid it somewhere in the house where I couldn’t find it. I was tearing up the place lookin’ for it when Noah came in lookin’ for Lendell, and saw me. That’s when I got the idea to have him get the money for me.”

He shook his head, thinking about it. “But the little fucker wouldn’t do it alone. He said Lendell had to come with him.”

“And you didn’t have time to argue with him.”

“No. I didn’t.” He fell silent for a moment, melancholy setting in. “When I look back on it, I can see that’s where it all got fucked up. Him insistin’ that Lendell go along.” He shook his head again. “I should’ve never let that little fucker talk me into that.”

“You should’ve never done a lot of things,” Gunner said. “Including go into that alley with a gun that couldn’t have stopped that cop if you’d stuck the barrel in his ear and emptied it.”

Hilton just looked at him, dumbfounded.

He really didn’t know.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Wiley asked, agitated.

Gunner looked up at the attorney and said, “I’m talking about blanks. The kind they use in the movies.” He turned to Hilton again. “The next time you buy a gun on the street, Rambo, read the fine print. That piece you bought to protect yourself was a fake; you couldn’t have punched a hole in a paper bag with the shells it was loaded with.”