Not Long for This World (32 page)

Before Toon had a chance to answer that, the Uzi outside abruptly barked again, sending them rushing for cover. Gunner helped Toon claw his way to the rear of the Nova and they huddled there together, staying low, waiting for a seemingly endless, whining wave of bullets and shrapnel to come to an end.

When it did, and silence had descended upon the garage once more, Toon said, “He’s not gonna do that all night. He’s not that stupid. You know what I’m saying?”

Gunner nodded his head somberly. He had felt something sharp cut his cheek a moment earlier, just below his left eye, and now he could taste his own blood in his mouth.

“He’ll be coming in,” he said.

“Yeah. Any minute now. He’s been around long enough to know, he messes around out there much longer, after the racket he’s just made, he’s gonna have a squad car on his ass before he can finish us off.”

“Okay, so he’s coming in. Any ideas on what we can do about it?”

“Yeah. Just one.” He let his eyes play over the Nova. “You ever hot-wire a car, Gunner?”

Gunner didn’t bother answering the question, just said, “You’re out of your mind, Toon. He makes his entrance before we can get the damn thing started, we’ll be easier to hit than two fish in a barrel.”

“So what? We’re gonna be that anyway, if we just wait around here. I don’t catch him with a lucky shot coming in, he’s gonna cut us to fucking pieces, and you know it.” Using the Nova’s rear bumper for leverage, Toon was already struggling to his feet. “So quit arguin’ and help me into the backseat, will you?”

Gunner wasn’t mollified, but he did as he was told.

When both men were in the car—Toon in the back, Gunner behind the wheel—Gunner asked, “What am I supposed to do once we’re out of here?”

Stretched out on the Nova’s sickly vinyl upholstery, Toon tried to grin through his pain and said, “If you’re lucky, you won’t have to do anything. You’ll put about ten thousand miles’ worth of tire tread on that little fucker’s ass and save somebody the expense of burying him.”

“And if I’m not lucky?”

“If you’re not lucky, you use this,” Toon said, holding his service revolver out for Gunner to take. “You do him before he does us. You put the pedal to the metal and give him all six in passing, as fast as you can count that high. You read me?”

Gunner took the gun. Toon saw the expression on his face and recognized it immediately. “I know what you’re thinking, Gunner,” he said, “and you can forget it. I don’t give a fuck what his birth certificate says; that’s no fifteen-year-old kid I’ve just told you to blow away—that’s a
man
. A man who gave up being a baby three goddamn homicides ago. And if you don’t do what I tell you and treat him like one, he’s gonna put both of our sorry asses in the ground. Make no mistake about it.”

His eyes bore into Gunner until the investigator had no recourse but to nod his head in agreement, unable to refute Toon’s logic.

“I hear you,” Gunner said.

Without any further discussion, he ducked his head under the Nova’s steering wheel and went to work on the car’s ignition, using Toon’s flashlight to guide him. He had to break the wires he needed with his hands and strip the insulation back with his fingernails; he had one wire done and the other broken when the garage door started to rise, groaning like an old man haunting a graveyard.

“Gunner!” Toon warned him.

Gunner lifted his head to peer out of the car’s windshield while he fought to prepare the second wire, no longer able to see what he was doing. The door before him was rising fast now; it would be Cube Clarke’s intention to surprise them, to shove the door out of the way and be on top of them before they could adequately defend themselves.

Though it was a wreck and an eyesore, a mistreated and neglected piece of machinery more than twenty years old, Gunner understood that the Nova would have to start on the first try. There would be no time for a second.

He touched together the two naked wire ends beneath the dash and held his breath as the garage door swung all the way open.

“
Gunner!
” Toon roared again.

The Nova sputtered awake and bucked forward violently, given full throttle by Gunner’s right foot mashing the gas pedal to the floorboard. He caught a glimpse of Cube Clarke standing directly in the car’s path in the pitch-black darkness outside the garage before the Blue opened up with the Uzi and the investigator was forced to duck his head again, below windshield level, driving blind.

Almost immediately, Gunner felt the Nova collide with something. The sound of the impact was dull and sickening, a sound Gunner hoped soon to forget, but the car sped on unfazed, bouncing and careening off an unseen curb. The Uzi fell silent and Gunner looked up just in time to see Clarke’s body roll off of the car’s perforated windshield and disappear, tumbling over its right front fender to the ground below.

Gunner sat up behind the wheel and eased up on the gas, bringing the car to a stop in the middle of the pulverized remains of 117th Street. As the investigator looked back over his shoulder at Clarke, who was trying to command his broken body to its feet less than ten yards away, Toon fought to lift himself from his prone position in the backseat and said, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t stop, you dumb shit! Get us the hell out of here!”

“He’s hurt,” Gunner said flatly, getting out of the car.

“Are you out of your fucking mind? Get back in the car, Gunner! Use your fucking head!”

Toon opened his mouth to go on, but Gunner was already moving away, toward the fallen Blue.

As Toon watched through the Nova’s murky rear window, the investigator reached Clarke just as the latter was completing a painful crawl along the street’s craggy landscape to the Uzi, intent on regaining possession of the weapon from which he had been temporarily separated.

“Let it go, Cube. You need help,” Gunner said, standing over him. He had Toon’s service revolver in his right hand, pointed at a spot just between Clarke’s shoulder blades.

Toon’s voice was barely audible in the distance, shouting Gunner’s name all over again.

Both Gunner and Clarke ignored it as the Imperial Blue once more took hold of the automatic rifle and tried to stand, forcing a shattered left leg to carry some part of his weight.

Finally teetering on his one good leg like a drunken sailor, he swung the Uzi up in Gunner’s general direction and, through a mouthful of blood, said, “
Fuck you
.”

To Toon’s amazement, Gunner followed his advice and emptied the police detective’s gun. He fired six rounds in rapid succession and made them all count, leaving nothing to chance. Clarke went down under the fusillade as if hit by a train, firing the Uzi into the night sky as he descended.

He was dead before the gun’s last muzzle flash had melded with the darkness all around him.

Gunner gave the Blue’s pitiable form a short, silent examination, then pitched Toon’s revolver and turned away, walking toward the sound of sirens and a pair of red dome lights that were closing fast upon him.

chapter
eighteen

Y
ou’ve gotta put it out of your mind, Gunner. You wanna go crazy?”

“Thanks for the sterling advice, Toon. Dear Abby couldn’t have said it better.”

“You’re seein’ quite a bit of the Lovejoy woman, I understand.”

“She’s a chiropractor. I’ve got a bad back. It’s a romance made in heaven.”

Toon just grinned. “Look, this is getting off the subject a little, but I got a call from Willie Raines this morning. He says he wants to see me this afternoon. Very important. You wouldn’t have any idea what that might be all about, would you?”

“Me? Why would I know?”

“Just an idea I had.”

“You shouldn’t get so many ideas, Toon. Your line is law enforcement, not advertising.”

They were standing out in the parking lot of the Seventy-seventh Street Station, on an overcast Friday two weeks after the death of Cube Clarke. The LAPD had just completed its investigation of the Darrel Lovejoy homicide and decided Gunner had done nothing while under the employ of Kelly DeCharme to warrant either prosecution or suspension of his license.

So he was getting his Ruger back.

“You asked me a few weeks ago if you were off my shit list,” Toon said. His next words weren’t even out of his mouth yet, and already he hated the sound of them.

“That’s right. I did.”

“For the record, yeah. I guess you are. Until the next time, anyway.”

Gunner started for his car. His
real
car. He’d given Del the Hyundai back and taken the red Cobra out of mothballs. “There isn’t going to be a next time, Toon,” he said, tossing the comment over his shoulder.

“Shit. Guys like you, there’s
always
a next time,” Toon said.

Gunner turned the Cobra’s engine over as Toon stood over him. “Remember what I said, Gunner. Serious business. You’ve gotta put it out of your mind. Cube Clarke was no kid. You hear what I’m sayin’? Repeat after me: Cube Clarke was no kid.”

“Cube Clarke was no kid,” Gunner said, humoring him.

“That’s right. Keep sayin’ it. Over and over. ‘Cube Clarke was no kid.’”

Gunner nodded his head condescendingly and started the car rolling. “Goodbye, Toon,” he said.

On the way home, with the Cobra’s top down and the wind freezing his face, he made a concerted effort to concentrate on the fifty thousand dollars he had “inherited” from Whitey Most, having kept one last little secret from Rod Toon, but his mind would not stay put on anything so auspicious. Instead, it gravitated toward the world of gangbanging, as he had known it would. He had been able to think of nothing else for days.

Up to this point, he had fought the compulsion tooth and nail, but today, as an experiment, he tried a different tack: He went with it, hoping the flood of black images would somehow revive the blissfully blind hatred he had held for gangbanging and all its participants only five short weeks ago. Deliberately, he thought about drive-bys and baby-faced wannabes, killers without conscience making hand signals for TV cameras, and walls and fences obliterated by overlapping layers of prideful, grotesque graffiti. He thought about crack and PCP, shotguns and Uzis and AK-47s, scars across beautiful throats and heavy black bellies—in short, every bleak, soul-crushing, and heartbreaking aspect of the L.A. street-gang culture he could possibly imagine.

And still, the pure, uncomplicated abhorrence he had once known for gangbanging would not come.

So he reverted to Toon’s exercise in his search for peace, the same one he himself had come up with the very night Cube Clarke—too young at fifteen to see an R-rated kung-fu movie without a parent or guardian in tow—had died.

Cube Clarke was no kid.

Cube Clarke was no kid.

Cube Clarke was no kid …

Someday, he knew, the self-hypnosis would take hold—and he would actually begin to believe it.

acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the following people for their invaluable contributions to this book—and for their far more invaluable friendship:

Lin Bolen-Wendkos, the North Star

Bill and Joey Sommers, the innkeepers

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1990 by Gar Anthony Haywood

This edition published in 2012 by
MysteriousPress.com
/Open Road Integrated Media

180 Varick Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com