It's Not a Pretty Sight Page 5

  There was a short service at Mother of Sorrows Catholic Church, followed by the interment of the body at Holy Cross Cemetery. Gunner attended both, his landlord, Mickey, serving as both his driver and his nursemaid, but he passed on the gathering at Mimi’s home that was scheduled to come later. He had a hard time dealing with the anguish grieving black people liked to lavish on their dead under the best of circumstances; today, looking and feeling very much like a corpse himself, he had even less stomach for it than usual.

  “Take me home, Mickey,” he’d said, after offering Mimi his apologies and saying good-bye at the grave site. She had taken one look at him and sent him on his way, making him promise to call her later so that she’d know he was doing okay. Not fifteen minutes removed from burying the last of her three children, and she was worrying about him.

  But that was Momma Hillman for you.

  By nine o’clock that evening, the pain that had been pounding out a steady cadence on the inner walls of Gunner’s skull mercifully began to subside.

  He wasn’t recovered by any means, but he was able to eat, drink, and walk to and from the toilet without getting sick or falling on his face, and that was something. He was still a little unsteady on his feet, and his stomach threatened trouble if he remained upright for too long, but beyond that, he was progressing nicely. Nicely enough that he felt confident he could go back to work the next morning.

  Then Weldon Foley called.

  Foley was a fixture at the barbershop Gunner used for an office, Mickey Moore’s Trueblood Barbershop on Wilmington and Century. The old man never needed a haircut, he just liked hanging around. Gunner couldn’t remember the last time he’d been at the shop that Foley and his landlord weren’t arguing about something, trading insults and insipid theories in some comical excuse for a debate, Mickey trying to concentrate on the head he was butchering at the moment, and Foley just sitting there, watching and instigating. The two men were inseparable.

  But Foley wasn’t just a fly on the wall; he also worked for Mickey. He hardly needed the additional incentive to be there, but Mickey also paid him a few dollars to clean up the place. Foley ran a broom across the floor at regular intervals during the day, then came in every other night after closing time to do the rest. Sometimes at six, sometimes at nine, sometimes as late as midnight; Mickey allowed him to set his own schedule.

  “I found your boy,” he said, the instant Gunner answered the phone.

  It took Gunner a moment to place the voice. Phone calls from Foley were not a common occurrence. “Foley?”

  “I found ‘im, man. The boy you lookin’ for.”

  “Pearson?”

  “Yeah. The one … the one you been askin’ about.”

  Foley sounded odd.

  “Where is he?”

  After a long pause, Foley said, “You gotta meet me here at Mickey’s. I’ll show you.”

  “Mickey’s?”

  “Yeah. I’m here right now, finishin’ up. Come on down an’ I’ll show you where the boy’s at.”

  “Come on down? What do I want to come down there for? Just tell me where he is now and I’ll go find him myself.”

  “No! You … It ain’t gonna work that way, man. I gotta take you to ‘im.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gunner said.

  “Look. It’s like, where the boy’s at, you’d never find it on your own. I gotta take you there. Otherwise …” He let his voice trail off.

  “Yeah?”

  “Otherwise, you ain’t gonna get there in time. ’Cause he ain’t likely to be there long. Fact, he might be gone already, I don’t know.”

  He wasn’t making a great deal of sense, but Gunner had the feeling he could talk to him all night and he still wouldn’t. Foley could be like that, especially with a drink or two in him.

  “I’ll be right down,” Gunner said, only halfway sure he was strong enough to make it as far as his front door.

  The first thing he saw when he came in was the man in the barber chair.

  The third and last chair in the shop, furthest from the door. Mickey’s chair. The lights weren’t working and the room was black as coal, and the chair had been turned around to show its back to him, but Gunner could see the man—if it was a man—sitting there just the same, reflected many times over in the shop’s mirrored walls. A silent and motionless ghoul, wearing one of Mickey’s striped barber aprons over his head like a shroud.

  He was about Foley’s height.

  Gunner called Foley’s name once, twice, but the body in the chair didn’t move. He tried the light switch again, and again received the same result: nothing. His head began to swim. He’d come halfway prepared for something like this, but now that he’d found it, he wanted no part of it. He never did.

  He lifted the nine-millimeter Ruger automatic from the waistband of his pants and started forward.

  “Foley! Is that you?”

  The head under the apron shifted, then grew still again. Foley coming around, or Michael Pearson playing possum; it was impossible to tell which.

  He hoped to God it was Foley.

  The chair wasn’t more than fifteen feet away, yet it felt like a distance he would never live to cross. The silence in the room was paralyzing. Just beyond the chair, past a beaded curtain hanging in an open doorway, more darkness loomed: the office in the back. A black pit offering him nothing but one more thing to fear.

  He made it to the chair.

  The clothes and shoes beneath the barber’s apron looked like Foley’s, but he couldn’t be sure. It was still too dark to be sure about anything. He held the Ruger out with his right hand, aimed directly at the hooded man’s skull, and spun the chair around with his left, yanking the apron away as he did so.

  Gagged and unconscious, Foley fell forward toward him just as the beaded curtain nearby exploded, thrown aside by someone entering the room like a projectile fired from a cannon.

  Gunner tried to swing the gun around, but too late: He was knocked off his feet before he could complete the motion, ducking a right hand thrown at his head that only partially missed. The two men hit the floor hard, Gunner leading with his back, his right cheek burning strangely.

  He figured he was good for ten, maybe fifteen seconds of serious horseplay; any more than that and he was dead. And maybe he was dead anyway, because he knew now that his cheek wasn’t burning, it was bleeding; cut open with the pair of Mickey’s scissors he could see in his foe’s right hand. He tried to get up, but couldn’t; the black man above him was kneeling on his chest, hard, pinning him down. Rolling to one side or the other proved equally impossible. He had no strength to fight. There was nothing to do but watch the scissors ascend, high overhead, and then—

  He pulled the Ruger’s trigger.

  The shop flashed white with the weapon’s report and his would-be killer froze, Mickey’s scissors suspended in time above his right ear. The bullet had hit him only inches above and to the left of his groin, leaving behind an entry wound slowly staining his pants red. His face was a mask of utter disbelief. Gunner bucked to throw the man off him and scrambled to his feet. He heard the scissors hit the floor and skitter off to distant parts unknown.

  When he thought he could afford the luxury, he located the nearest wastebasket and threw up in it, feeling only slightly better than he had immediately after his dance with Russell Dartmouth. Two days of lying on his back down the fucking drain.

  The bleeding man on the floor stirred, moaning, but was clearly capable of little else, so Gunner turned his attention to Foley. He found him with his eyes open, staring sideways at Gunner’s shoes. He was struggling to free the hands taped behind his back, and was shouting against the hand towel that had been stuffed into his mouth. Blood was leaking from his nose, and his left eye was nearly swollen shut, but otherwise he appeared to be okay.

  “How you doing, Foley?” Gunner asked him, when he’d removed the gag from his mouth. “You all right?”

  “He made me call you, man,” Foley said,
sounding sad enough to cry. “I swear I didn’t want to, but he made me! Motherfucker said—”

  “Forget it. No harm done. Come on, get up off the floor, I’ll call you a doctor.”

  He lifted the older man onto his feet and guided him back into the barber chair he’d fallen out of. He could hear their friend on the floor grunting and groaning as he worked to unbind Foley’s hands, but he didn’t bother to turn around until he was done, satisfied that the man was no longer a threat to anyone. And he was right. The man he saw when he finally looked for him again was far closer to the dead than the living. He’d forced himself up to a sitting position, back braced against the nearest wall, and grown still, eyes open but unseeing, both hands clasped over his ruptured middle. Only the faint movement of his lips lent any credence to the idea that he was not already dead.

  Gunner had only seen Michael Pearson two or three times in his life, but he felt relatively certain this was he.

  “Is he …” Foley started to ask.

  “No,” Gunner said. “Not yet. But he will be soon, I don’t get an ambulance out here for him fast.” He went to the phone on the counter nearby and called 911.

  “An ambulance? What you wanna call an ambulance for him for? Sonofabitch almost killed us both, he wants a doctor, let him go get one for hisself!”

  “I wish I could, Foley, but—” He had to cut the sentence off and gesture for Foley’s silence when his 911 call abruptly went through. He made it brief, reporting a shooting and requesting an ambulance without preamble. Then he hung up, in the face of a determined dispatcher gamely trying to press him for more details.

  Afterward, he went to check on Pearson.

  “I didn’t kill the bitch,” the wounded man said when Gunner knelt down beside him, blood bubbling up at both corners of his mouth. A thirty-something pretty boy, light-skinned, square-jawed, thinly mustachioed. His voice had been almost too soft to hear, but his tone was unmistakably upbeat. He thought what he’d said was funny.

  “Shut up and save your strength,” Gunner said.

  “I wanted to kill her sorry ass, but somebody else did it for me. Ask Goldy, she’ll tell you.” He coughed spasmodically and spit up some more blood.

  “Who is Goldy?”

  “The bitch …” He fell silent, as if his train of thought had deserted him. He turned his head to one side and kept it there, for no apparent reason. Gunner was beginning to think he’d passed on when he suddenly spoke again, picking up right where he’d left off. “The bitch I was with that night. Who the fuck you think?”

  Incredibly, he actually managed to laugh, making a sound deep down in his throat like a handful of rusty screws being rattled about at the bottom of a tin can. Gunner couldn’t help but wince. “She thought if she lef’ me, I wouldn’t have nobody. Like I was gonna be lonely, or somethin’. Sheeit … Dumb-ass bitch, I was gettin’ busy with a diff’rent ho every goddamn night!”

  The supreme irony he found in this last compelled him to laugh again, and again he paid for the privilege with a bloody cough, long and loud and coarse as sandpaper.

  “I told you to shut up,” Gunner said once more, and this time it was no mere suggestion. He’d heard Nina referred to as a bitch twice now, and he wasn’t going to hear her dishonored like that again. He didn’t have that kind of patience.

  When he stood up and walked back to the telephone, Foley said, “Man wants to talk, let ‘im talk. An’ if he wants to die, let ‘im die. What the hell should we care, he wants to laugh hisself to death?”

  “You want to know why we should care?” Gunner asked, flipping through the pages of a pocket telephone book for Matthew Poole’s number at home. “I’ll tell you why: Because I just shot a man who murdered an ex-girlfriend of mine. With my own gun, at my place of business. After calling all over town for two days, trying to run him down. Are you getting the picture yet, Foley, or do I have to go on?”

  “They gonna think you set this up.”

  “You’d better believe they are.”

  “An’ if the boy dies …”

  “I’m going to be in the deepest of deep shit. Yeah.”

  “Jesus,” Foley said.

  “Go keep an eye on him, will you? I’ve got one more call to make.”

  It was like asking Foley to keep an eye on the back row of teeth in a live alligator’s mouth, but he did as he was told, limping slowly away like an old arthritic turtle.

  When Poole answered the phone, picking up after only three rings, Gunner said, “You want Michael Pearson, come get him.”

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “Get your fat ass out of the bed and think about it. It’ll come to you.”

  “Gunner?”

  “Hurry up, Poole. We’re here at Mickey’s, waiting. How much longer Pearson’ll be around, though, I can’t say.”

  Rather than ask what that was supposed to mean, the cop said, “You were told to leave Pearson to me.” Understanding that what Gunner was leaving unsaid was not good, and already pissed off about it.

  “Do me a favor, Lieutenant. Get down here first, and give me my thirty whacks later. Okay?”

  He hung up the phone.

  Somewhere off in the distance, many worlds away, the baleful song of a siren began to grow from a whisper to a scream.

  Gunner prayed to God it was singing for him.

  five

  “YOU’VE JUST MADE A CAREER CHANGE,” POOLE SAID. “Your cousin the plumber’s gonna have himself a partner again.”

  “Del’s an electrician,” Gunner said. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  “Plumber, electrician. Same difference. Either way, you’re gonna be doin’ somethin’ else with your time besides makin’ my life miserable. Unless you wanna play private dick in some other state of the Union. You could always try that, I suppose.”

  “If any other state’d have you,” Detective John Gruber said. Poole’s partner on the Nina Pearson murder case, Gruber was a short, disagreeable white man with a gap-toothed grin and flat head; a cop who never opened his mouth unless he had something nasty or vulgar to say. Most of the time, Gunner noticed, it was a little of both.

  “Goddamnit, Gunner, I’m not fuckin’ around this time!” Poole roared, knocking a half-empty coffee cup off the table and across the room, spraying cold coffee everywhere. “I told you to leave Pearson the hell alone, and you went after him anyway! If he doesn’t make it—”

  “Listen to me, Poole. Read my lips this time, will you, please? I didn’t go after anybody! I’ve been in the goddamn bed for the last two days, he came after me!”

  “Bullshit! He had no reason to go after you! He was too busy runnin’ from us to be thinkin’ about you!”

  “Yeah, well, he thought about me anyway, and that’s a fact. He shanghaied Foley, lured me over to Mickey’s, and tried to ambush me. So I shot his ass, hell yes. He didn’t give me any other choice.”

  He’d been telling the same story now for over two hours, as he suspected poor Foley had been doing in another room elsewhere, until even he was tired of the sound of it. Trouble was, it was the truth, and the truth was all he had to offer these two, give or take a few minor details. Like the manhunt he had started for Pearson with a few dozen phone calls, which may have explained to Poole’s and Gruber’s satisfaction the fugitive’s view of Gunner as somebody who needed killing, if Pearson ever hoped to show his face in daylight again.

  “I think you had a choice,” Gruber said, “and you made it. Leave Pearson to the law, or take care of him yourself. You chose to do the latter.”

  “So I could have you two come down on my ass like a ton of bricks, is that it?” He turned to the other cop in the room, said, “Christ, Poole, listen to what you’re saying. I’m not that stupid, and you know it.”

  “Nobody’s accusin’ you of being stupid, Gunner. Just crazy.”

  “Let me tell you what’s crazy. What’s crazy is you bozos leaning on me like this when you know damn well I’m telling you the tr
uth. That’s what’s crazy. Or are you gonna stand there and tell me Foley hasn’t been backing my story up one hundred and ten percent?”

  Poole had nothing to say to that, but Gruber said, “Foley’s been tellin’ us what you told him to say, wiseass. That’s all.”

  “And Pearson? What about him?”

  “You know the answer to that. He’s in no condition to talk. He hasn’t said a word to anyone since they took him to County Hospital.”

  Which was probably just as well, Gunner knew; if Pearson had talked to the police, he would have been unlikely to say anything even remotely similar to Gunner’s account of his shooting.

  “Okay,” Gunner said. “So forget Pearson and Foley. What about the physical evidence at the scene? You guys have heard about physical evidence, haven’t you?”

  “The physical evidence at the scene proves nothin’,” Gruber said, “except maybe how good you are at makin’ attempted murder look like self-defense. At least, that’s all it proves to me.”

  “Aw, hell …” Gunner dropped his chin to his chest and shook his head, genuinely exhausted. He had already been physically sick once since they’d brought him in here, and he was beginning to feel sick again.

  After a short silence, Poole turned to his partner and said, “Johnny, go have another talk with Mr. Foley, will you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’d like a minute or two with this clown alone. You don’t mind, do you?” Poole glared at him, waiting.

  Clearly, Gruber minded a great deal, but there wasn’t much he could do about it; Poole had him outranked.

  “Sure. Why not?” He shrugged, staring daggers at both men alternately, and walked out. Gunner couldn’t help but feel sorry for Foley, if that was indeed where Gruber was headed.

  When the door had closed behind him, Poole said, “Looks like you’ve made another friend at the department.”

  Gunner smiled, not wanting to seem impolite. “Yeah. Man in my line of work can never have too many, can he?”