It's Not a Pretty Sight (6 page)

four

G
UNNER 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 anything 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.

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.