It's Not a Pretty Sight Read online

  “And you just all of a sudden came running to help. Is that it?”

  “I don’t—”

  “None of this is any of your business, Aaron. It’s not your problem. Ten, eleven years ago, it might have been, but not now. Not anymore.”

  “Momma, that’s not true.”

  “It is true! You didn’t care about that girl! You haven’t given her a single thought since the day you let her go! But now you want to be outraged because somebody killed her. Now that she’s not here to see it, you want to come runnin’ to her rescue, like she was your wife, and not his!”

  She stood up, before Gunner could offer any kind of rebuttal, and said, “Go home. Go home and mind your own business, like you’ve been doing for the last ten years. There’s nothing you can do for Nina, or me, now. Except maybe make things worse.”

  Her insistent stare would not relent until he had risen to his feet, yet he made no immediate move for the door. “Maybe I deserve that, I don’t know. I’d have come around once or twice, like you say, just to make sure she was doing okay … maybe none of this would have happened. It’s for sure if I’d known Michael was abusing her …” He had to bite down on the thought, his eyes narrowing with anger. Thinking as much of Grace Mokes as he was of Nina.

  “Anyway, none of that does anything to change the fact I’m hurting right now, same as you,” he went on. “Whether you think I’m entitled or not. And I’m going to keep right on hurting until the man who killed your daughter is off the street. Either in a cell, or in a box, one or the other.”

  “That’s not what Nina would want,” Mimi said.

  It was so true he almost nodded his head. “Nina wanted a lot of things she didn’t get,” he said instead.

  Before his voice could crack again, he kissed his Momma Hillman on the cheek and went home.

  “Well? Anything to report?”

  Nine o’clock in the morning, and Goody was on the phone looking for results.

  Gunner had no time for him today. “You’ll be the first to know when I do, Mr. Goody.”

  “You’re not just getting started, I hope.”

  “No. I’ve been up since three. Surely I’d be cheating you otherwise.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ll give you a call later this afternoon, Mr. Goody. Say around four.” He hung up, not caring if the big man was offended or not.

  Then he rolled out of bed.

  In the end, he did Goody’s bidding anyway. He didn’t have any choice. Finding Michael Pearson was foremost in his mind, but there was the little problem of Poole to deal with. All the promises the cop had made to Gunner the day before, he had sincerely meant to keep, so he was almost certainly out there somewhere, in one form or another, watching and waiting. Looking for Gunner to drop Pearson’s name, just drop his name, so he would have an excuse to take him downtown and get him started in a new line of work.

  It wasn’t worth the risk.

  Besides, it wasn’t going to take long to get Goody’s business out of the way. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, Gunner felt confident that the address he’d found in the phone directory yesterday would indeed lead him to Russell Dartmouth. It had been a while since he’d had this kind of break, and he was due.

  The “R. Dartmouth” he had found in the phone directory lived in Venice, down in the Oakwood section where blacks and Latinos had been waging war with each other for years. Three minutes from the beach, less than two miles north of Marina del Rey’s billowing white sails and luxury oceanfront condominiums, Oakwood was a pocket of blight equal to anything Watts or Compton had to offer. Here, poverty had wielded its broad brush like a scythe, littering the sidewalks with black men and women, teenagers and little children, all dressed down and properly sedated for the business of being poor. They lived in tiny little houses with boarded-up windows and apartments filled with smoke. They trod upon grass that had never known a lawn mower, and kicked around empty beer cans just to hear the clatter.

  And they eyed the passing of a stranger’s car like it was a messenger from Death, coming to claim them all.

  It was nothing Gunner had never seen before, but the scene shook him up all the same. Because there was nothing a man or woman could do to deserve so cruel an existence. Nothing. Simply being born into a legacy of such squalor was not crime enough. And yet, here they were. The complacently condemned, crowding onto the trapdoor of the gallows for the hangman yet to come.

  Gunner found the building he was looking for and parked the red Cobra right out in front of it, no longer as concerned with discretion as he was with expediency. He knew the car would attract the attention of all the wrong people sooner or later, but he wasn’t planning on being away from it for more than five or ten minutes. He was going to run up to Dartmouth’s apartment, establish that he’d found the right man, then leave. Throw Goody his bone to make him go away and then get back to the only work that really mattered to him right now: finding Michael Pearson. Poole or no Poole.

  Gunner didn’t know what Russell Dartmouth’s last place of residence looked like, though Goody had supplied him with the address, but he felt safe in assuming the man’s move to Oakwood hadn’t done much to improve his living conditions. The apartment building in which Dartmouth now lived—if Gunner was indeed as lucky as he felt—was a two-story stack of cracked and crumbling stucco on Brooks Court between Sixth and Seventh Avenue that seemed to promise nothing but grief for visitors and inhabitants alike. Fronted by dead landscaping and covered in diverse, overlapping layers of unsettling brown paint, it appeared about as steady on its foundation as a drunk was on his feet; like something that had been destroyed by the Northridge earthquake of ’94 but had forgotten to fall down.

  Gunner went inside, past a set of double glass doors rendered opaque by grime, and followed a mailbox labeled DARTMOUTH up to the second-floor balcony and room 21, the blare of dueling televisions and radios flooding the open courtyard behind him. He knocked on the door and waited. There was a window to his left, but a closed set of dirty blinds blocked his view of the apartment beyond, though it appeared to be completely dark. He knocked again.

  Down below, a little boy was suddenly running rings around a dead palm tree, giggling like he’d never had so much fun in his life. Gunner turned to watch him, amused, and didn’t see the huge blur coming up on his right until it was too late to do anything but flinch.

  A fist the size and approximate weight of a truck battery hit him just above the right ear and put him flat on his back on the balcony floor, blinking into a wash of white light he thought would never fade. The need to drift off into unconsciousness was strong and immediate, but he fought it with all he had, convinced he was a dead man if he didn’t.

  “Why the hell you keep messin’ with me, man? Why you keep messin’ with me?” he heard the voice of a madman demand.

  The guy had surprised him by coming at him from out on the balcony, rather than from the inside of the apartment. He was little more than an outline to Gunner, but an outline was enough to make one thing, at least, perfectly clear: He was big. Not heavy or muscular, particularly, but tall; somewhere in the neighborhood of six seven or six eight. A giant. And Goody had placed Dartmouth’s height at around six one or six two.

  The fool needed glasses.

  “Waitaminute …” Gunner murmured, trying to get to his feet. But none of his limbs would work as intended and the leviathan standing over him wasn’t interested in talk.

  “Wait a minute, my ass! Fuck wait a minute!” the big man howled, using his right foot to kick Gunner twice in the ribs. Gunner rolled over and curled up like a pill bug, fighting to breathe and hold on to his breakfast at the same time.

  Who in the hell does this maniac think I am? Gunner wondered.

  “I’m sick of this shit, man! I’m sick of you people fuckin’ with me! You motherfuckers gonna learn to leave me alone! You gonna learn!”

  He was lifting Gunner up by the shoulders, preparing to throw him over th
e railing.

  While his vision was improving, all of Gunner’s other faculties were shot; he couldn’t breathe, his ribs were killing him, and his head felt like the core of a detonating grenade. A gun would have come in handy, but he wasn’t carrying one today; he’d left his Ruger P85 at home, as he did most days. Smart.

  The big man had him up in the air now, about waist-high.

  There was no time to throw a punch, and not much reason to; with what he had to put behind one at the moment, a punch might not even get his friend’s attention. And he definitely needed more than the man’s attention. With what he figured to be five, maybe ten seconds left to live, he decided to try the one thing—the only thing—he felt relatively sure he could pull off with any real hope of success.

  He grabbed hold of the big man’s balls.

  First with one hand, then with both. Squeezing with all the power he could generate, not caring a bit if he tore something loose. But the giant cared. He abruptly went rigid and lowered Gunner to the floor, his grip on the investigator’s shoulders rapidly relaxing. He didn’t even feel like screaming, anymore.

  Carefully maintaining his hold on his victim’s genitals, Gunner rose slowly to his feet and looked the big man over, able to see him clearly for the first time. He was a pale-skinned black man in his early thirties, with an oval bald patch on the top of his head and a long, narrow face; he had a thin man’s potbelly and a rat’s-nest beard, and eyes set so close together they nearly climbed up the sides of his nose.

  Russell Dartmouth. Goody had gotten the height all wrong, but he’d been right about everything else.

  “Say good night, Russell,” Gunner said, feeling revitalized.

  He threw a quick right hand at the underside of Dartmouth’s left jaw and leaned into it, hoping to do with mass alone what he ordinarily accomplished with mass and velocity combined. Maybe it helped that Dartmouth had been caught unawares, and maybe Gunner had merely found his second wind, but either way the big man’s head snapped back nearly ninety degrees and he went down, falling all at once like he’d been lopped off at the knees. It was probably unnecessary, but Gunner went over afterward and kicked him in the side of the head, just to make sure his lights were out for good.

  Not that any of Dartmouth’s neighbors gave a damn. Gunner was still waiting to see or hear so much as one, the kid who’d been playing down in the courtyard earlier notwith-standing. And even he was gone now, making the building’s odd desolation complete. Either the people who lived here were deaf, or they’d raised the act of minding one’s own business to the level of art.

  Crazy.

  Gunner had lost his wallet in the scuffle. He spotted it and some loose change scattered about nearby. He gathered it all up hastily, his ribs giving him hell for the effort, then went through Dartmouth’s pockets, looking for a set of keys. When he found it, he unlocked the door to the big man’s apartment and swung it open gingerly, waiting for another surprise. But he never got one. The apartment was empty, save for all the TVs and stereos, clock radios and assorted VCRs that stood in the middle of the front room, arranged neatly in little warehouselike stacks.

  Goody would have been moved to tears.

  four

  GUNNER SPENT THE BETTER PART OF THE NEXT TWO DAYS in bed. He had a mild concussion, his doctor said, and bed was the only place for him, he didn’t want to be throwing up every three hours, or blacking out at the wheel of a car doing sixty-five in the middle lane of the Harbor Freeway. It was the kind of exaggerated physician-speak he generally liked to ignore, especially when there were things on his “To do” list that wouldn’t wait, but this time he had to believe there might be something to the prognosis. He had already blacked out once, getting in his car right after his final visit to Best Way Electronics had made an ex-client out of Roman Goody, and his head had been pounding like a swordsmith’s anvil ever since Russell Dartmouth’s right hand had tried to lobotomize him. He waited twenty-one hours for the pain and nausea to subside, then sought a physician’s counsel, convinced at last that he was suffering from something significantly more serious than a Goody-induced migraine.

  Not that Goody wasn’t capable of giving someone a major-league headache. The big man had been a pain in the ass from the start of Gunner’s dealings with him, and he’d been one right up to the end. Even as the investigator was handing Dartmouth over to him on a silver platter, Goody was whining and complaining, defending himself against the constant and wholly imaginary threat of being taken advantage of.

  “How do I know this is really him?” he had asked, after he had read and reread the written report Gunner had furnished him with.

  “What do you mean?” Gunner asked. Wondering how much worse his headache would get if he got up from his chair to give Goody the backhand he so richly deserved.

  “I mean, you found him awfully fast. How do I know this address here is for real, and not just somethin’ you made up?”

  Gunner took a deep breath, held it. “That’s what the VCR’s for,” he said. Goody glanced over at the tape machine Gunner had set on his desk along with the report, acting as if he hadn’t noticed the thing until this minute. “You check the model and serial number, I think you’ll see it’s on the list of items Dartmouth purchased from you.”

  Taking the unit out of the unconscious Dartmouth’s apartment hadn’t exactly been ethical, but Gunner had suspected he might need something more than his word to convince Goody that he’d found the right man. And short of dragging Dartmouth himself into Goody’s office …

  “Okay. Fair enough,” Goody said. Suddenly and unexpectedly appeased, he was writing out a check before Gunner could even ask for one.

  “So what happens now?” Gunner asked him.

  “Now? Now I serve him with papers. What do you think?” Goody looked up from his checkbook, said, “In fact …”

  “Forget about it. That’s not why I asked.”

  Goody waited for an explanation.

  “I was going to suggest you make the next man or woman you send after him a little more aware of Dartmouth’s size and temperament than you did me. Otherwise, you’re going to get somebody killed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think you do. You see what he did to me, don’t you? The man is certifiable. And he’s big enough to cast a shadow over half a city block. Or didn’t you notice that about him?”

  “I believe I mentioned that he was tall.”

  “‘Tall’? He’s a fucking giant. And he’s crazy. I’d been a little less lucky today, he would have killed me, without even bothering to ask who I was or what I wanted with him.”

  “So he’s crazy. So what?”

  “So you’re playing with fire with this guy, that’s what. As would anybody else you hired to approach him again. Surely you understand that.”

  “I understand that he’s a thief who owes me money. That’s what I understand. Him bein’ big and crazy don’t change that.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But it does make him somebody you don’t want to fuck with and then turn your back on.”

  “Nonsense,” Goody said.

  And that was how Gunner left him, comfortably cocooned in a blanket of tightly woven ignorance. It was how Gunner imagined he spent most of his time, in denial of one reality or another that failed to suit his purposes. Goody didn’t know it, but he was getting off lucky; another day as Gunner’s employer and he would have found himself lying flat on his back in a dark alley somewhere, getting his attitude adjusted. Now, no such unpleasantness would be necessary. Gunner’s business with Goody was over, and he was free once more to concentrate on the task his work for the owner of Best Way Electronics had so rudely interrupted—locating Michael Pearson.

  Unfortunately, being free to find Pearson and being in shape to find him were two different things. Having to waste all day Thursday on Goody’s boondoggle had left Gunner feeling more anxious to get his hands on Nina’s ex-husband than ever, but it had also left him in no condition to do an
ything about it. Bedridden with a concussion, all he could do to track Pearson down was count on others to do the job for him. All day Friday, he used the phone like a gregarious bookie, spreading the word to every friend and family member he had on the street that he needed Pearson found. He called in favors and offered up rewards; he coerced and cajoled, charmed and terrorized. He took every tack he could think of to reel Pearson in remotely.

  And then he waited for his own phone to ring.

  It was a long wait. He tried to watch television, but that was impossible; the talk shows were brainless and the soaps hedonistic, the latter to the point of vulgarity. Five minutes into any one of them, and you felt like a total failure, the only human being in the world who wasn’t rich, beautiful, and sexually ecstatic.

  Gunner turned to books and jazz instead.

  Grover Washington, Jr., and John Coltrane; Miles Davis and Dexter Gordon; Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. He reread Harlan Ellison’s Paingod and wore the grooves off Killer Joe, the classic Quincy Jones LP.

  And he dreamed of Nina.

  Sleep was what he needed most, but sleep was where her memory found him most vulnerable. She came to him in dreams of every variety, from the fantastically illogical to the painfully realistic. He heard her laugh a thousand times, and felt her body rocking beneath him over and over again. All he had to do was close his eyes, and she was there.

  But she wasn’t real.

  She was dead, and there was nothing he could do about it. That was the fact he was left to consider, and reconsider, every time a dream did a slow dissolve to startle him awake: Nina was gone. Forever.

  Maybe he was crazy, thinking he was to blame, and maybe he wasn’t. The only thing he knew for sure was that the guilt building up inside him was real, and it had to be dealt with. Soon.

  Before it made him feel more like the world’s greatest fool than he already did.

  Nina’s funeral was held at two o’clock Saturday afternoon. It should have been a gray day, an ugly day, but it wasn’t; the skies were clear and blue, and temperatures were in the low seventies. Great conditions for a picnic, lousy conditions for mourning. Nina had deserved something far less picturesque.