Good Man Gone Bad Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR GOOD MAN GONE BAD

  “Good Man Gone Bad is Gar Anthony Haywood’s best work yet, keeping a tight focus on Aaron Gunner and his exploration of his city and the meaning of justice. More than a mystery, this book is a mirror held up to society and the world.”

  —Michael Connelly, New York Times—best-selling

  author of the Harry Bosch novels

  “Haywood is in peak form, a classic hard-boiled mystery full of sly humor and street wisdom—but also a surprisingly tender treatise on masculinity and the futility of violence. A page-turner as engaging as it is deep.”

  —Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird,

  Heaven, My Home, and The Cutting Season

  “Good Man Gone Bad is bracing, heart-wrenching fiction from Haywood, and the best in his Aaron Gunner series to date. Gunner is by now part of LA’s contemporary noir canon—cynical, compassionate, and tireless in his pursuit of stubborn truths. Hip and raw. Don’t miss it.”

  —T. Jefferson Parker, New York

  Times–best-selling author of The Last Good Guy

  “Aaron Gunner is back! And Los Angeles needs him now, more than ever. Good Man Gone Bad peels away the lies we tell each other to avoid our painful inner truths—the most powerful kind of detective story.”

  —Naomi Hirahara, the Edgar Award–winning

  author of the Mas Arai mysteries

  PRAISE FOR THE AARON GUNNER MYSTERIES

  “A masterful mystery writer…. Haywood’s the real thing, all right, a formidable artist with something important to say about some of the most troubling issues of our day.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Gunner yanks the sheet off the American nightmare of race, politics, and murder, LA style.”

  —Spike Lee

  “The fresh dialogue, raffish atmosphere, and boldly drawn characters leave little doubt as to why Haywood’s mysteries are fast becoming hard-boiled classics.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  (Page Turner of the Week)

  “Haywood is particularly adept at sliding social commentary into his carefully plotted tales. And his descriptions of Southern California are sometimes worthy of Raymond Chandler.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Haywood deserves comparison with Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Walter Mosley. Each of these writers has given us a different Los Angeles, and Haywood adds another precinct to this protean city of dreams. If your mystery collection doesn’t include the Gunner novels, begin to remedy the situation.”

  —Booklist

  “Gunner is one detective you don’t want to miss.”

  —The Atlanta Constitution

  GOOD MAN GONE BAD

  An Aaron Gunner Mystery

  Gar Anthony Haywood

  Prospect Park Books

  Copyright © 2019 by Gar Anthony Haywood

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Prospect Park Books

  2359 Lincoln Avenue

  Altadena, California 91001

  www.prospectparkbooks.com

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

  www.cbsd.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Haywood, Gar Anthony, author.

  Title: Good man gone bad : an Aaron Gunner mystery / Gar Anthony Haywood.

  Description: Altadena, California : Prospect Park Books, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019003319 (print) | LCCN 2019005639 (ebook) | ISBN 9781945551673 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781945551666 (pbk.)

  Classification: LCC PS3558.A885 (ebook) | LCC PS3558.A885 G66 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003319

  Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan

  Interior design by Amy Inouye, Future Studio

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my children:

  Courtney, Erin, Maya, and Jackson

  The best work I’ve ever done.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE AARON GUNNER NOVELS

  Fear of the Dark

  Not Long for This World

  You Can Die Trying

  It’s Not a Pretty Sight

  When Last Seen Alive

  All the Lucky Ones Are Dead

  Good Man Gone Bad

  GUNNER WAS SITTING IN TRAFFIC on the eastbound 105 when he saw the helicopter. The traffic was nothing new and neither was the police aircraft, the latter cutting and recutting a circle in the gray sky ahead like a boat with a broken rudder. This was Los Angeles, after all, and well east of the great class divide that was La Cienega Boulevard, so inertia and signs of law enforcement in action went hand in hand.

  People in the hood called the LAPD’s helicopters “ghetto birds,” and if feathered birds filled the air over the city in greater number on any given day, it wasn’t by a wide margin. At least, that’s how it sometimes felt to Gunner. Day or night, rotors booming and/or searchlights blazing, the choppers were there, doing their part to tighten the noose that forces on the ground were trying to close around the neck of some poor runaway miscreant. They drowned out the sound of televisions and rattled the panes in windows, and when they shook you from a restful sleep at two in the morning, they didn’t leave you in peace to drift back to base until all hope of finding sleep again was lost.

  Still, like every other nagging inconvenience that came with being poor and of color in the City of Angels, a man eventually learned to live with the black-and-white flying machines. He could see them and yet not see them; hear the churning of their blades as little more than white noise. Gunner himself had long ago learned to marginalize them in exactly that way.

  So this particular ghetto bird meant nothing to him at first. It was just a mild distraction from the gridlock that held him fast, only two exits away from the Wilmington Avenue off-ramp that would take him to his backroom office at Mickey Moore’s Trueblood Barbershop on Wilmington and 109th. He was in a foul mood and this delay would do nothing to improve it. Another potential client had offered him a job this morning he couldn’t do for twice what the person wanted to pay, and it had cost him $30 in gas just to hear the pitch and turn it down. The red Shelby Cobra he was driving today guzzled fuel like a wino drank Boones Farm, and Gunner was beginning to think it was an extravagance he could no longer afford. Garaging the car again was a thought that saddened him deeply, so few and far between lately were such small pleasures as getting behind the Cobra’s wheel.

  He sat in the convertible’s open-air cockpit, inching forward on his side of the freeway like a child on an amusement park ride, and tried to clear his mind. He’d been a practicing private investigator for over twenty years now, operating out of the one corner of Los Angeles—what few wanted to call South Central anymore�
��that seemed to have no use for such services. He’d tried to quit a dozen times, a standing offer from his cousin Del to join his electrical maintenance business always on the table, but quitting never stuck. He couldn’t explain why. Something about the profession—if you could call doing the invasive dirty work few people wanted to do for themselves a “profession”—met a deep-seated need in him that nothing else could.

  He watched the police helicopter carve another ring in the sky above, now not more than a mile off to his right, and wondered, as he always did, how much the target of the bird’s attention was worthy of such frenzy. Were the uniformed men on the ground pitted against a killer this time or just another fool? When he read the story in the paper tomorrow, or caught some TV news coverage of it tonight, would he find out all this drama had been caused by a convenience-store robber who’d murdered three people, or a drunken mother of four threatening her neighbors with a garden hoe?

  Whatever the case, the media had finally deemed it newsworthy, because now there were two more choppers in the air, each bearing the colors of their respective news agencies. They respectfully hovered just outside the wide orbit of the circling ghetto bird, reminding Gunner of nothing more than vultures waiting for death to deliver their next meal.

  Prior to this moment, he had given no thought to what location on the ground might correspond to the police chopper’s flight pattern, but as he drew ever closer to his exit off the freeway, he found himself considering the question. By his calculation, it had to be somewhere in the vicinity of Compton Avenue and 118th Street, give or take a block or two. If he knew anyone who lived in that immediate area, their identity escaped him.

  His thoughts turned back to more pressing matters.

  He did a mental accounting of his finances, one of several he was doing on a daily basis as of late, and concluded that his situation was uncomfortable but not yet alarming. He had enough money socked away to survive the light trickle his workload had become for five or six months at least, and his bills were all paid up. He’d canceled his cable service a month ago and taken to eating all but a few meals per week at home, two legs of an austerity program that put a few extra dollars in his pocket if nothing else.

  Things could have been much worse. He knew people for whom things already were much worse: ordinary people just like himself who’d lost everything—career, home, family—to the fallout of a federally mandated tax cut for the rich that could only be paid for in blood. Not blue blood but red, drained from the veins of the poor and the vanishing all-but-extinct middle class. That Gunner had work at all in the present climate put him well ahead of the game, and he knew it. If the end came for him tomorrow, if he never made another dime, that would still be more time than God or the fates had given many people better than he.

  As for what the future might hold, it was hard to be hopeful under the thumb of the fools and madmen currently at the helm in the nation’s capital. Empowered and emboldened by the last elected president, racists and misogynists and neo-Nazis—Nazis!—had emerged from America’s shadows to take center stage, and men and women like Gunner were once again being forced to assert their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on a regular basis. This wasn’t America prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by any means, but that was where the country seemed to be headed, following the lead of its commander in chief, a real estate huckster turned politician who made lying into the camera both an art form and a weapon of mass destruction.

  Gunner’s cell phone had to ring twice to draw him back from the depths of his growing funk.

  The name on the phone’s screen belonged to his cousin the electrician, Del Curry. He didn’t have his Bluetooth headset on, and his first impulse was to just let the phone ring; wind noise made the device all but worthless in the convertible, and he didn’t want to risk a ticket for driving with the phone up to his ear. Still, any man as short on paying work as Gunner was had to look for opportunity at every turn, and Del had sent prospective clients his way before, so he snatched the phone off the seat and answered it before a third ring tone was complete.

  “Del, what’s up?”

  The man on the other end of the line was already talking over him. “Aaron? Cuz?”

  It sounded like Del, but he couldn’t be sure. The voice had been faint and all but drowned out by some kind of stuttering background noise.

  “Man, I fucked up,” Del said, and if the words themselves hadn’t been clear, the way in which he had uttered them—through a despondency that had him crying like a baby—would have been. And despondency wasn’t Del Curry’s thing. “I really fucked up.”

  “Fucked up how? Man, what are you talking about?”

  His cousin didn’t answer; all Gunner could hear instead was that same dissonant thrumming sound in the background, vaguely familiar yet hard to identify.

  “Del!”

  “They’re gone, cuz. My girls. They’re both gone and it’s my fault,” Del said, trying to pull himself together. “Ain’t nobody’s fault but mine.”

  He fell silent again, and somehow Gunner knew he had just heard Del’s voice for the final time. He shouted his cousin’s name into the phone repeatedly, trying now to steer the Cobra off the freeway by force of will alone, but it was hopeless. The cell connection died and Del was gone.

  Just in time for Gunner to realize that the incessant droning he’d been hearing over the phone, and the buzzing of three helicopters flying high above his head, had been one and the same.

  1

  “AND THAT WAS ALL HE SAID?”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t—”

  “No. He didn’t say anything more than what I’ve just told you, for what? The fourth time now?”

  “We apologize, Mr. Gunner,” the detective said. His name was Luckman, Jeff, and his low-key manner was almost soothing enough to compensate for the freezing cold of the little police interrogation room and the rickety, uneven legs on Gunner’s chair. “But we’re just trying to understand what happened here.”

  “You’ve already told me what happened. My cousin killed his wife and tried to kill his daughter, then turned the gun on himself.”

  Even now, many hours after he’d first heard the news, it sounded more like a joke than a matter of fact. Del and his wife, Noelle, were dead, and their twenty-two-year-old daughter Zina was in critical condition out at Harbor UCLA. All of them shot at Zina’s home with a 9mm handgun registered to Del. The detectives said the young woman’s chances of survival didn’t look good.

  “Maybe you’d like to take a break,” Luckman said.

  “A break’s not going to change anything. I’ve told you all I know. The man said he’d fucked up but didn’t tell me how. He said his girls were dead and that it was his fault. Then he hung up. That’s it. There is no more.”

  “He didn’t say he’d just shot his wife and daughter?”

  “No.”

  “Or that he was about to take his own life?”

  More forcefully this time: “No.”

  “And you have no idea why Mr. Curry would have wanted to harm either person.”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Were there any problems in the home that you were aware of? Were Mr. Curry and his wife getting along?”

  “Yes. I mean, I think they were. Del loved Noelle. And I’m sure she loved him.”

  That had always been Gunner’s understanding, anyway. Del didn’t talk much about his family life, even with Gunner. When he did, however, it was usually to recount a story that made everything on that side of his world sound either funny or touching, Noelle in particular. On those rare occasions Gunner saw her, at family barbecues or holiday dinners, Del’s wife—a tall, heavyset woman with flawless dark skin and a dazzling smile—gave him no reason to suspect she was anything but happy.

  “What about money? Could Mr. Curry have been in any kind of financial trouble?”

  “Money was always an issue, sure. And lately, more so than ever, I suppose. B
ut was he hurting bad enough to do something like this?” Gunner shook his head, unable to fathom the possibility. “I can’t see it.”

  And yet, something had driven Del to do what he’d done. Something larger and more pitch black than anything Gunner, prior to today, could have ever dreamt his cousin was coping with. Unless things hadn’t really gone down the way the cops were saying they had. Luckman and his partner didn’t seem to have any doubts whatsoever, but Gunner asked the detective again if there was a chance—any chance at all—that somebody other than Del had done the shooting.

  “We can’t answer that conclusively until we’ve completed our investigation, of course,” Luckman said. “But right now? Based upon witness accounts and the evidence at the scene? I’d say there’s little to no chance that anyone other than Mr. Curry was involved.”

  The “witness accounts” he was referring to were statements they’d received from two neighbors of Del’s daughter, who’d reported hearing a loud argument taking place in the house, followed shortly thereafter by gunfire. One of these people had called 911, and paramedics and police had arrived on the scene just in time to hear one more shot, the one that had apparently ended Del’s life.

  The ghetto bird cutting circles in the air above Zina’s home hadn’t been interested in Gunner’s cousin, at all. Its focus, and that of the news ‘copters accompanying it, was another crime altogether, just blocks away. Which was how shit often went down in Gunner’s world: one disaster after another, packed as tightly together as rounds in a magazine. The cruel coincidence only served to make Del’s death just that much harder for Gunner to swallow.

  As he was the last person to speak to Del before he died, Luckman and his partner were looking to Gunner for answers, and they seemed willing to lean on him all day and night to get them. If Gunner couldn’t explain what had caused the bloodbath in Zina’s home, and she died before she could make a statement, maybe there never would be an explanation.

  They kept him down at the Southeast station for another forty minutes, Luckman finally content to answer more questions than he asked. In the end, both he and Gunner left the little interrogation room as confused as they had been going in.