You Can Die Trying (26 page)

Gunner was reaching for his client’s brother’s throat when someone behind them said, “Yes, you are, Sonny.”

Mitchell Flowers’s wife was standing at the threshold of the dining room, eyeing her brother-in-law with the cold, unflinching determination of an angry kindergarten teacher. How long she had been there, neither man could say; she had appeared from the rear of the house without making a sound.

“You’re going to do whatever this man tells you to do,” she said firmly. “Or I’ll go to the police myself this instant. Do you understand?”

“Sissy, this ain’t none of your business,” Sonny said.

“This is my business. Anything that involves my husband is my business.”

“Shit. You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

“It’s one thing for the two of you to get yourselves killed trying to blackmail somebody. But when you pay someone else to do your dying for you, under false pretenses …” She glanced at Gunner and shook her head. “Someone has to bring you to your senses.”

“Woman, you the one needs to be brought to her senses!” Sonny argued, struggling to his feet. “You want Mitch to go to jail? Is that what you want?”

“No. But I don’t want to see him dead, either!” Flowers’s wife left the dining room at last to square off with her brother-in-law at close range. “Look at yourself!” She gestured at Gunner. “Look at him! Look what these monsters you’ve been messing with have done to you!” She shook her head. “This isn’t going to happen to Mitch, Sonny. I’m not going to allow it. And neither should you.”

“Sissy …”

“He’s always looked out for you. Always. You know as well as I do, he only did this foolish thing because he thought he was helping you. Well, it’s time for you to do something for him for a change. Before it’s too late.” She turned to Gunner again. “I hope you’ll forgive me for not having said something sooner, Mr. Gunner. But I was so afraid for Mitch …” She let her eyes drift down to the floor for a brief moment, then raised them again. “I don’t know if there’s anything you can do for him. But if there is …”

Gunner shrugged, knowing he was about to say something he might regret later. “I can’t promise you anything, Mrs. Flowers. Partly because I’m in no position, and partly because I’m in no mood.”

“I understand.”

“But whatever I can do to minimize your husband’s involvement in all this, I’ll do. For your sake—not his.”

Sonny’s sister-in-law smiled and reached out to shake Gunner’s hand. “Thank you. You’re very kind.” Facing Sonny again, she said, “I’ll be going back to my room now, Sonny. If you and Mr. Gunner are still here when I come back, I’m going to call Mitch at work and tell him to meet me down at the police station. You can join us there, if you like.”

She was all through talking. Without another word, she turned and walked away, into a hallway past the dining room and out of sight.

“Shit,” Sonny Flowers said.

The screen door slammed as Gunner just left him standing there.

After a moment, Mitchell Flowers’s little brother threw on some clothes and limped out to the investigator’s car.

15

Gunner didn’t waste his time looking for Milton Wiley.

He knew Wiley wasn’t going to be around. The attorney was too smart for that. The man he had ordered killed the night before was still alive and on the loose, and his favorite henchman was cooling his heels in jail, waiting to be brought up on kidnapping and attempted murder charges. Wiley would see Gunner coming a mile away, and make himself scarce. Just as Pervis Hilton would.

Unfortunately for Hilton, only Wiley had the resources to do the job right.

While Wiley might have already put oceans and continents between himself and Gunner, the best Hilton could do toward the same end was take a day off from work and hide in the far reaches of his sister’s home. At least, that was where Gunner and Sonny Flowers found him a few minutes before noon, after one of his Zeidler & Zeidler co-workers at the Fox Hills Mall had told them Hilton had failed to report for work that morning.

Hilton’s Corvette had been nowhere in sight upon their arrival, but Gunner had instructed Sonny to ring Harriet Washington’s doorbell anyway, while he went around to the back of the house to watch the back door. Standing inside Washington’s backyard gate, peering around a rear corner of the house, Gunner had heard Sonny use the doorbell twice, then knock once, before he spotted Hilton easing his way out of a rear bedroom window.

He was standing there to greet him before Hilton’s feet even hit the ground.

“Yo, Ben. Nice to see you again,” he said.

Hilton spun around and froze, reacting first to the terrible shape Gunner was in, then to the gun that was staring at him from the investigator’s right hand. Gunner had retired his nine-millimeter Ruger automatic to his hall closet ever since agreeing to take the McGovern case, not wanting to risk the volatile mix of concealed firearms and officers of the law, but now he felt an overwhelming need for its company. It seemed unlikely that the gun could land him in any more trouble than he was already in.

“Do me a favor and don’t ask me what I’m doing here,” Gunner said. “You used that line last night. Remember?” He patted Hilton down, finding only a set of keys in one pocket. “Your sister home, by any chance? Or do you expect her home soon?”

Hilton shook his head.

“Mind if we go back inside, then?”

Gunner used the Ruger to indicate the back door.

Maintaining his silence, Hilton took back his keys, opened the door, and led the way inside, taking occasional peeks at Gunner over his shoulder all the while. They passed slowly through the kitchen and ended up in Harriet Washington’s living room, where true to Hilton’s word, they heard nothing to indicate the woman of the house was home.

“Open the front door and tell the man waiting outside to come in,” Gunner said.

Hilton was already as paper white as a black man could become, but the discovery that Gunner wasn’t alone here seemed to edge him even closer to the shade of a bloodless corpse. Gunner had to pull the slide back on the Ruger for emphasis before Hilton found the nerve to do as he had been told.

His nerve was quickly lost again, however, when Sonny Flowers stepped into the house to join them, an expression of sheer boredom on his face. He still wasn’t sure why he was here, doing Gunner’s bidding, but of course, Hilton didn’t know that. To Hilton, the limping, one-eyed black man probably looked like the Angel of Death incarnate—and that was exactly the reaction Gunner had made this trip to elicit from him. He could have waited to see if Hilton would crack under Denny Loiacano’s questioning, it was true, but this seemed to be an approach to loosening Hilton’s tongue that showed infinitely more promise.

“Pervis, I’d like you to meet my client. This is the man who saw you shoot at Jack McGovern the night you inadvertently got your nephew Lendell killed.”

“Look,” Hilton started to say, finding his voice at last, “I didn’t have nothin’ to do—”

“He has your friend Foster to thank for the way he looks,” Gunner said, cutting him off. “Just like I do. But whereas I’ll be relatively whole when I heal up, he never will be. Not quite, anyway.”

Gunner nodded at Sonny, and the one-eyed man lifted his eye patch to give Hilton the same good look at his black, hollow eye socket he’d given Gunner earlier.

“I’m tellin’ you, man! I didn’t have nothin’ to do with that!” Hilton cried as he turned his eyes away, disgusted. “Howie works for Milton, not me!”

“The three of you are in this together, Pervis,” Gunner said. “You’re as much to blame as they are. And since we can’t get our hands on Foster or Wiley …” He shrugged. “I guess you’re going to have to pay for this man’s losses all by yourself.”

“What?”

“You heard me. This is payback time, homeboy. For him, and me.”

“Hey, man. I
told
you—”

“Fuck
what you told me. Your denials don’t mean shit to me, and they mean even less to him.” He turned to Sonny. “Look around the house, see if you can find something we can tie him up with.”

Sonny nodded his head and started to hobble off, toward the back of the house.

“Waitaminute! Waitaminute!” Hilton said, blinking back tears. “Don’t do that, man! Come on!”

“Come on, what?”

“Let’s talk about this a minute! All right? Let’s just talk!”

Gunner studied Hilton’s face in silence for a long moment, as if he might actually turn the younger man’s offer down. Finally, he said, “Okay. You want to talk, we’ll talk. For a minute.” He looked at Sonny again. “Go back out to the car and wait for me there. I’ll call you if I need you.”

The sullen, one-eyed man just stared at him, doing his best to feign disappointment, then turned away wordlessly and left, slamming the front door closed behind him. He was no Danny Glover, Sonny, but he’d put on a pretty good show.

When he was gone, Gunner said, “That man wants to dig you a grave, Pervis, and I’m going to let him. Do you understand? Because that’s the deal I made with him: If I can’t get the goods on you and the others, I let him have you, to do with what he pleases. Today or tomorrow—whenever he feels like coming to get you.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Hilton said.

Gunner laughed. “Shit. You better take another look at my face, brother. After what you and your pals have done to me, I could eat popcorn in the stands while you got what’s coming to you.”

“But Milton—”

“Milton’s not here. You are. And let’s face it: Wiley might’ve masterminded this whole thing, but it really all started with you. Didn’t it?”

Hilton knew better than to answer that.

“You’re getting deeper into the shit every minute. This could be your last chance to put some distance between yourself and Wiley before it’s too late.”

Hilton knew it was true immediately, but he didn’t nod his head to admit it until several seconds had passed. Lowering his eyes to the floor, he sighed and asked, “What do I have to do?”

“You have to come clean. About everything. Both for me, and for the police.”

“The police?”

“Of course. They’ve got to hear your story from you, not me.”

Hilton fell silent.

“What’s it going to be, Pervis?”

It was a long time coming, but a shrug finally made it up to Hilton’s shoulders.

Gunner grinned. “Good man,” he said. “You’re doing the right thing, believe me.” He glanced around the house until he found the phone, then waved the Ruger at Harriet Washington’s plastic-covered couch and said, “Take a seat and relax for a minute while I make a call, all right?”

He watched as the listless Hilton sat down, then went to the wall phone in the kitchen and did what most people in big trouble always did first: He called a cop.

He had to make two separate phone calls before someone finally showed up. The first was to Denny Loiacano in Hollywood, the second to Danny Kubo downtown.

In both cases, the officers he was trying to reach were unavailable, so he’d left an identical message for each, consisting of little more than his name, Harriet Washington’s address and phone number, and an urgent plea for help. It was Loiacano he really wanted to see, but Kubo was the one who responded to his call roughly an hour later, acting as put upon and disgruntled as when they had last met.

Predictably, Kubo wouldn’t listen to anything until Gunner had explained the patch over his eye and the cast on his right hand with a brief overview of his run-in with Wiley and friends the night before. Kubo thought he was getting the straight scoop, but Gunner flat out lied and told him he had made up a story for Loiacano during questioning, rather than try to sell the Hollywood detective on the truth. Gunner knew Kubo wouldn’t appreciate his drawing another cop into a case Kubo had implored him to drop almost a week ago, and he couldn’t spare the time right now to listen to the IAD man complain about it.

Only Gunner and Pervis Hilton were there when Kubo arrived, as Gunner had sent Sonny Flowers home, hoping to avoid involving either of the Flowers brothers in the McGovern affair unless Hilton’s confession made it absolutely necessary. He had feared an hour would be more than enough time for Hilton to change his mind about turning himself in, but he needn’t have worried. Hilton started talking the minute Kubo sat down and made himself comfortable, clearly anxious to explain to someone, anyone, how little a role he had played in Wiley’s scheme to turn Lendell Washington’s death into the goose that laid the golden eggs.

As Gunner and Kubo took turns asking him an occasional question or two, Hilton took them through the whole sordid affair step by step, from his ill-fated purchase of the gun he had fired at Jack McGovern the previous fall, right up to his reacquaintance with Gunner in his sister’s backyard only hours earlier. He had confessed all to his sister’s attorney within days of his nephew’s killing, Hilton said, because he expected that either Wiley or the authorities would learn of his part in it eventually, and he was looking ahead to the possibility of having Wiley represent him when the time came. In retrospect, Hilton admitted, he should have been able to foresee that Wiley would choose to just sit on the information, considering everything that was at stake, but he hadn’t, and once that mistake had been made, there had seemed to be nothing for Hilton to do but stand back and watch Wiley go to work. Which was just what he did.