Not Long for This World Read online

  Gunner looked at DeCharme.

  “LAPD says Lovejoy was killed somewhere in the neighborhood of ten-thirty, give or take fifteen minutes,” she said.

  Which meant that Mills had a fine alibi, providing his presence in Baldwin Hills—no stone’s throw from the site of Lovejoy’s murder—could be verified.

  “How did you get to the theater? You drive, or did she?”

  “I did.”

  “What were you driving?”

  “My mom’s car. Seventy-nine Olds Cutlass, gold with a white top. What difference do it make what we was drivin’?”

  “If no one saw you or Sharice in Baldwin Hills that night,” DeCharme said, before Gunner could reward Mills’s curiosity with an insult, “maybe they saw your mother’s car, and will remember it. Although Oldsmobiles—”

  “Don’t usually leave lasting impressions on people,” Gunner said, completing DeCharme’s thought. “If you parked it in a crowded lot, it was probably only one Olds out of a hundred there.”

  Mills nodded his head silently, understanding.

  “You see Rookie Davidson at all that evening?” Gunner asked him, shifting gears abruptly.

  The teenager shook his head. “Uh-uh. Didn’t see the Rook all that day.”

  “He wasn’t at the movies with you and Sharice?”

  “Hell, no,” Mills said, disdaining the chance to hitch Davidson up to his comfortable alibi. “He was back in the ’hood drivin’ for the man what popped Dr. Love, how he gonna be with us?”

  Gunner paused, genuinely surprised by the admission. “You know that for a fact?”

  “What?”

  “That Rookie was the driver in the Lovejoy killing.”

  “Oh yeah,” Mills said. “Had to be him.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “The car, man. S’posed to’ve been a blue Mav’rick, right? That’s Rookie’s ride, a blue Mav’rick. ’Sides, that’s what homeboy does, ain’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  Mills looked at Gunner as if he were some low-intelligence life form too dense to be believed. “Drive, man,” he said simply. “Rookie don’t do nothin’ for the set but drive.”

  He said it as if Davidson were capable of nothing else; as if he had found his niche in life and could not possibly deviate from it. In the organizational matrix of the contemporary street gang, Gunner thought, one’s very role in life was probably just as easily defined as that.

  “Why would Rookie have been driving that night? He have something against Lovejoy personally that you’re aware of?”

  “Shit yeah, he did. We all had somethin’ ’gainst Dr. Love personally,” Mills said matter-of-factly. “The Blues, the Troopers, the motherfuckin’ Tees—everybody. Didn’t no set want Dr. Love in they ’hood, ’cause all he ever caused ’bangers was trouble. Always buggin’ homeboys to give up they set, to stop gangbangin’ and shit. Look at this bogus peace conference thing he was tryin’ to get everybody to come to. You know about that?”

  Gunner nodded.

  “Shit. Peace conference my ass. That ain’t gonna ’complish nothin’, ’cept get a few more homeboys’ heads fucked up”

  “I take it you weren’t invited to attend.”

  “Invited? Yeah, we was invited. Matter of fact, now you mention it, it was Dr. Love what invited us. In person. Came around the ’hood one day, tryin’ to make his goddamn conference sound like somethin’ fresh, like some special event was gonna change our whole lives, or somethin’. I told ’im, ‘Sorry, Doc, but my homies an’ me, we got other plans that day. Count us the fuck out.’”

  He laughed.

  “It doesn’t sound like you two hit it off too well,” Gunner said.

  “No. We didn’t,” Mills admitted.

  “But you didn’t kill him.”

  “No. Not me.”

  “But the police have your shotgun, with your prints all over it.”

  “So? They didn’t find it on me. Last time I seen that piece was four days ’fore I got hemmed up, ’fore some motherfucker busted into our crib in the ’hood and took everything. All the homeboys’ gats got picked, there wasn’t nothin’ left behind. I keep tellin’ the cops, whoever it was done it, musta been them what killed Dr. Love, not me.”

  “What about the witness who says you did?”

  “You talkin’ ’bout the bitch on TV? Shamika Jones, or whatever her fuckin’ name is?”

  Gunner nodded. “You know her?”

  Mills shook his head. “Uh-uh. Ain’t never seen her nowhere before.”

  “Then how do you explain her picking your mug shot out of the book? Why you and not somebody else?”

  “Shit, I don’t know why she done it. Maybe she made a mistake. Maybe she just seen somebody in the car looked like me.”

  “Yeah? Like who?”

  “Hey, I told you, I don’t know who. If it’d been one of my homeboys, I would’ve heard somethin’ ’bout it.”

  “Then Rookie was driving for someone other than a Blue.”

  “I guess so. Yeah.”

  “Would he do that?”

  Mills laughed at the question. “Shit. Why not? The Rook, man, he’s a little pussy. A mark. Ain’t never down for nothin’. He’d drive for anybody, anytime, they scare him bad enough.”

  Gunner paused, said, “That why you’re so eager to sell him out?”

  “This ain’t sellin’ out nobody, man. This is just tellin’ you, straight, ’cause you asked me: It was Rookie what was prob’ly drivin’ the car what rolled on Dr. Love, and it wasn’t no Blue he was ridin’ with. All right?”

  “Then who was it? Give me a for instance, name names.”

  “Shit, I told you, I don’t know who it was. His old man, maybe. The King. The King’s crazy. One mean, drunk motherfucker. The King tells Rookie to jump, Rookie always say, ‘How high?’ He’d’ve told Rookie to drive that night, Rookie would’ve drove, no questions asked.”

  “If this King had a reason to want to kill Lovejoy.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. If.”

  Gunner glanced at DeCharme wearily, then back at Mills. “Anybody else?”

  Mills shook his head. “I can’t think of nobody else. Rookie usually stays with his older brother Teddy, but Teddy ain’t no gangbanger. Hell, no. Teddy, he’s straight. Runs a tire store in the ’hood; man wouldn’t’ve had no part of no drive-by. I’d bet money on that.”

  “He and Rookie get along all right? Are they close?”

  “Teddy be ridin’ the Rook to stop gangbangin’ all the time, but they get along all right, mostly.”

  “You think he might know where Rookie’s been hiding out since the shooting?”

  “Might.”

  “How about the King?”

  “The King? Man, I don’t know ’bout the King. If he was the one what made Rookie drive, he might know somethin’. But if he wasn’t, he prob’ly don’t know shit. ’Cause he don’t wanna know shit usually, right? I mean, the King, he don’t usually give a damn ’bout Rookie.”

  “And you? You have any ideas?”

  “’Bout what?”

  “About where Rookie might be holed up.”

  Mills parted with another dispassionate shrug. “He could be at our old crib, maybe. Place I told you ’bout, where we used to keep all our shit? Go see my homeboys; ask for Smalltime. Tell ’im I said to show you where it’s at. He got any questions, they give you any trouble, you tell ’em to see Jody, my sister: She’ll talk to ’em, tell ’em I say you’re okay.”

  Gunner asked if Smalltime would be able to tell him where to find Rookie’s father, and Mills nodded.

  “Anything you want, you just ask ’im,” the Blue said. “But don’t bother askin’ nobody but Smalltime nothing ’cause he the only one gonna wanna talk to you, prob’ly.” He looked at DeCharme, and the scar on his face began another dance as he grinned broadly. “Tell ’im ’bout Cube, Miss D. So he’ll know what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”

  Gunner turned toward DeCharme
.

  “One of his more misanthropic ‘homeboys,’” the lawyer explained, with apparent distaste for the subject. “‘Cube’ is short for ‘Ice Cube,’ presumably because he has that kind of cheery disposition. I made the mistake of trying to interview him some weeks back, and very nearly got myself killed. You’d be well advised to give him as wide a berth as possible whenever dealing with the Blues.”

  Gunner nodded, filing away for future reference how gravely DeCharme had offered the advice. “I’ll remember that,” he said.

  “All right, people. Time’s up.”

  It was Mills’s guardian angel, the walking frown in the freshly laundered sheriff’s deputy’s uniform. He was suddenly behind the inmate’s chair, arms locked tightly across his chest, genielike, trying to make the point clear that he was not about to be kept waiting. Mills peered up at him and smiled.

  DeCharme checked her watch and looked at Gunner helplessly. “Were you through?”

  Gunner nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “Good,” the guard said, lifting Mills to his feet.

  “Though there is one more thing I’d like to ask him,” Gunner said, before DeCharme’s client could be led away. He was staring directly at the man in uniform, issuing a wordless order to back off.

  The guard hesitated, torn between duty and charity.

  “Just one,” he said to Gunner gruffly, careful to make it sound more like a directive than a question.

  Gunner nodded.

  The guard backed away, just far enough to be harmless, beyond the range of their voices. Mills watched him leave, sneering, delighting in his small retreat.

  “This Cube,” Gunner said to Mills, trying not to let the slithering scar on the young man’s cheek enrage him, “he have any kind of hard-on for Lovejoy you’re aware of? Did they know each other?”

  “Cube? Naw.” Mills shook his head emphatically. “He and Dr. Love, they knew each other, yeah, but they didn’t never mix it up. Love knew better than to fuck with the Cube. Cube ’banged with some Patrollers once, Doc seen what he can do.”

  “Peace Patrollers?”

  “Yeah.”

  Gunner asked what had happened.

  “’Bout a year ago, Cube say he caught a couple Tees in the ’hood and was fixin’ to pop ’em when some Patrollers got in the way. So he had to kill one.” He sounded like somebody describing a memorable play in a football game. “Why you ask?”

  Gunner shook his head. “Just wondered,” he said.

  He looked up to find the bald-headed guard starting back toward them, and made no move to stop him.

  He was finally tired of asking questions he couldn’t stomach the answers to.

  “Well?” DeCharme asked.

  They were standing in the County Jail parking lot, turning like weather vanes against an assertive but dry Santa Ana wind passing through April on its way into May. DeCharme’s late-model Volkswagen Jetta and Gunner’s borrowed Hyundai Excel both sat nearby, but they declined to take refuge in either car, preferring instead the freedom of movement they had outside on their feet.

  “He’s insane,” Gunner said. “You know that.”

  DeCharme nodded, acquiescing. “Yes. I do.” She produced a pack of cigarettes from her purse and lit one up, fighting the wind all the way. “But that doesn’t mean he killed Darrel Lovejoy.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “You think it’s a setup, like he says?”

  “Maybe. Some things seem to fit too well, some things not at all.”

  “Yes. His being the trigger man, for example.”

  “Yeah. Like that. At twenty-two, he’s too old for that kind of duty: A gang decides to take somebody out, they don’t generally assign the actual killing to anybody over seventeen. They let a minor do it, somebody the state can’t try as an adult.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Still, his Baldwin Hills alibi could have easily been trumped up. The girl will say it happened just the way he describes it, of course, but without an objective third party who can place them in the area of the theater at the time of the murder, his movie reviews aren’t worth a damn.”

  “Tell me about it,” DeCharme said.

  “And it’s hard to buy Davidson driving for just anybody,” Gunner went on, speculatively. “If he’s half the wimp Mills says he is, he should have been too scared to go on a drive-by with anyone but a Blue.”

  DeCharme nodded and blew a lungful of smoke over her right shoulder.

  “Which only serves to prove your point: You need to find him.”

  “Yes. We do.”

  She left it at that, and waited. The gaze she turned upon him was steady yet undemanding.

  Gunner shook his head and sighed. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than this,” he said. “Because to do the job right, I’m going to have to get knee-deep in this gangbanging bullshit … and I can’t stand the view of it I already have. But I made that abundantly clear yesterday, didn’t I?”

  “Abundantly clear. Yes.”

  “And yet I’m here, anyway.”

  DeCharme nodded wordlessly. She tossed her cigarette down and crushed it underfoot, then studied its flattened carcass absently.

  “You’re going to start with them, I assume,” she said after a while, looking up. There had been a slight but detectable trace of dread in her voice.

  Gunner shrugged noncommittally. “Maybe not right away. But soon, yes.”

  “In that case,” DeCharme said, “I think I should show you something.”

  Even in the muted light of the parking lot, Gunner could see that some of the color had left her face. She moved up close and pulled the hair away from the right side of her throat with one hand, tilting her head back to give Gunner a good look at the underside of her jawline. There was a fresh scar there about an inch and a half long, running parallel to the jawline, healing well enough to fade but not well enough to disappear. Ever.

  “Mills meant what he said about Cube,” she said, quickly covering the scar up again. “And so did I.”

  Gunner didn’t say anything.

  Self-consciously, DeCharme shrugged and smiled, hoping she had done the right thing in warning the black man so graphically. “Just for the record,” she said.

  “Sure,” Gunner agreed, nodding his head mechanically. “Just for the record.”

  It was highly pessimistic of him, but he was already detesting the week to come.

  chapter three

  I’m looking for something in a nine-millimeter auto,” Gunner said. “Something lightweight but with plenty of stopping power.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Accurate and easy to conceal.”

  “Right.”

  “Moderately priced but built to last.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Know what I mean?”

  Dee Holiday nodded her head. “You want something cheap,” she said.

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  Holiday smiled in appreciation of her own clairvoyance, happy to see that Gunner’s priorities were as easy to call as ever.

  “Got just the thing for you,” she said, winking, before ducking down to open the long, waist-high display case she was standing behind.

  Dee Holiday was a handsome, ebony-skinned black woman in her mid-forties who could do more with a smile than most women could manage with their entire bodies, and she used the power sparingly, selectively. It was the smile that generally brought Gunner into her place of business—Holiday’s Gun Shop on Rosecrans, just west of Long Beach Boulevard in Compton—rather than any genuine need on his part to actually shop there.

  Today, however, the smile was a secondary attraction. On this Saturday-morning visit, like everyone else in the shop fingering Holiday’s merchandise, he was here to equip himself with some new and improved tool of death, to regenerate his capacity to do one living creature or another serious bodily harm.

  “This is the Ruger P-Eighty-five,” Holiday said, resurfacing from the depths of the di
splay case to hand Gunner a compact, smooth-skinned automatic pistol in a menacing matte-black finish. “Nine-millimeter double-action, fifteen rounds. Built like a tank and hits just as hard, with hardly no recoil to speak of.”

  “Loads?”

  “Practically anything. Hollow point, round nose … you name it.”

  Gunner tossed the Ruger about in his right hand, testing it for weight and feel, liking what he found. “What about accuracy?”

  “Inside of twenty-five yards, very good,” Holiday said. “Inside of ten, better than that. Excellent, even.” She laughed. “Even you could probably hit the broad side of a barn with it, providing the barn didn’t move.”

  Gunner ignored the joke, said, “Sold,” and passed the Ruger back over the counter to her.

  They haggled over price for a while, Gunner trying to make a steal, Holiday trying to make a profit, until a friendly impasse brought them to a fair figure Gunner could almost live with.

  At that point, convinced Holiday had reached her discounting limit, the detective laid a small bundle on the counter before her, a handgun swathed in a ragged-edged, makeshift blue pistol rug, and carefully peeled it open. His black, antediluvian Police Special was inside, a Smith & Wesson .357 with a stumpy barrel and a wicked, battle-scarred finish.

  “What’ll you give me for it, Dee?” Gunner asked.

  Holiday looked at the gun and shook her head. “I don’t want this,” she said apologetically. “This is your Special. The one they gave you at the academy.”

  “So?”

  “So it must have some kind of sentimental value to you, Aaron. You should hold on to it.”

  Gunner shook his own head. “I’m not that sentimental,” he said. He wasn’t going to tell her that the weapon had forever lost its special place in his heart because someone had only months ago used it to kill two people, one directly, one indirectly, and neither with his consent. It was a story of stupidity and professional ineptitude that hurt just to think about, let alone relate to friends.

  Holiday studied his face earnestly, trying to see past the flesh clear through to the secrets of the soul. “You going to war with somebody?” she asked him eventually.

  “Not if I can help it,” Gunner lied, cursing his unfailing transparency. “But one never knows, does one?”