When Last Seen Alive (19 page)

As Gunner gamely struggled against them, they ushered him farther into the room as Scales calmly closed his apartment door, grinning like someone who was about to become filthy rich. He came back around to where Gunner could see him and said, “When I heard you might drop by, something told me you might lead with the gun this time, so I invited a couple of my ‘boys over. I hope you don’t mind.”

Gunner made one more effort to break free of his captors, realized it was a lost cause. He couldn’t have been more at Scales’s mercy if he’d been nailed to the floor with railroad spikes.

Scales finally laughed out loud, then threw a looping right uppercut into Gunner’s stomach that the investigator feared would plow straight through him. He fell slack, wheezing desperately for air, held upright only by the two men at his sides. It was all he could do not to black out.

“That dumbfuck Barber Jack was supposed to whack you,” Scales said. “That’s why I put you on to him in the first place. But here you are, in my shit again.” He shook his head and sighed. “It was up to me, I’d pop a cap in your ass right now and be done with it. But it’s not up to me. Somebody wants to talk to you, hell if I know why.”

Gunner wanted to hear more, but he still couldn’t speak. Learning to breathe again took precedence over everything else.

“Stand him up,” he heard Scales tell his accomplices, his voice filled with annoyance for Gunner’s childlike helplessness.

The two masked black men lifted Gunner up as instructed, forcing him to his feet. Gunner found the strength to raise his head, only to do so just in time to catch the right hand Scales threw at his face without warning. The blow struck him flush on his left cheekbone, but didn’t knock him out; Scales had taken something off it, not wanting him unconscious just yet.

“That was for your own protection,” Scales said. “I don’t want you thrashing around, making this any harder than it has to be.”

Gunner’s eyes rolled up, saw Scales inserting a hypodermic needle into the mouth of a small glass vial.

Oh, Christ
, he thought, begging his limbs to move. But nothing would work. Every ounce of his strength was gone.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Scales said, seeing his distress. “A goddamn needle. Is it clean, or is it dirty? Did I just take it off a junkie with AIDS, or right off the drugstore shelf?” He laughed. “That’s the beauty of using a needle, instead of chloroform or something like that. It messes with your head. I like that.”

He laughed again, heartily, the point of the syringe in his right hand glistening like a gemstone, and stepped forward to give Gunner the injection.

• • •

He didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious, but Gunner had the sense it had been several hours at least.

How he could know that, or anything else for that matter, was hard to say. Still feeling the effects of the drug he’d been doped with, he came to and found himself blindfolded and gagged, tied to a hardwood chair, arms behind him, like a deer to the hood of a hunter’s pickup truck. He was blind, and mute, and half-frozen; his surroundings were as cold as a butcher’s freezer and just as eerily silent. Multiple windings of the duct tape covering his mouth and eyes secured his entire torso to the back of the chair, so tightly he could barely inhale, while his wrists seemed to be fastened together with plastic cable ties. Even without the aid of sight, the futility of trying to free himself anywhere inside of forty-eight hours was obvious to him.

He sat motionless for several minutes, waiting for his drug-induced stupor to wear off completely as he listened for clues to his location, but no such clues were forthcoming. He was either in a soundproofed room, or one that was merely far removed from the usual cacophony of modern civilization. Gunner tried to imagine such a place, but couldn’t, distracted by a growing awareness that his right biceps ached where Scales had put his beloved needle in.

When he finally lost patience with doing nothing, he tried to shift his weight to one side, to see if he could rock the wooden chair over and shatter it on the floor beneath him, but the chair didn’t move an inch. Curious, he tried again, to the other side this time, and again the chair wouldn’t budge.

“It’s bolted to the floor,” someone said.

The voice had been muffled and almost unintelligible, like that of a whispering highwayman wearing a bandanna over the lower half of his face. Gunner immediately thought of the hockey masks Scales’s two friends had been wearing at Scales’s apartment earlier.

Gunner tried to speak, forgot that he was gagged.

“Here. Let me get that for you,” his host said. Muffled voice or no, he didn’t much sound like Byron Scales.

Someone reached for the duct tape plastered over Gunner’s mouth, ripped it from the investigator’s face like they were trying to start an old outboard motor. Gunner screamed in anguish, his skin afire, knowing all too well as he did so he was providing the precise entertainment his kidnapper or kidnappers had been hoping for.

“Goddamnit!”

He expected to hear laughter, but none came. Instead, the silence he had awakened to returned, as complete and unnerving as ever.

“All right. What the fuck
is
this?” Gunner finally asked, containing his anger in deference to his utter inability to defend himself.

“Judgment day, my brother,” the other man said, his voice circling Gunner buzzardlike from several feet away. If he and Gunner weren’t alone in the room, he was the only one willing—or authorized—to speak.

“Scales? That you?”

“No. It isn’t Scales. You and I have never had the pleasure, Gunner.”

“Bullshit. You tried to kill me out at Jack Frerotte’s house two nights ago.”

“Is that right?”

“Damn straight.”

“And why would I have wanted to do that?”

“Because you’re a Defender of the Bloodline. You and Scales, and those boys who helped him jump me at his apartment.”

There was a long pause before the other man said, “Yes.”

“And Frerotte too, I imagine.”

“No. Jack Frerotte was never a true believer. We understand that now.”

Behind his back, Gunner was rubbing his wrists raw trying to stretch the cable ties binding them together, caring little that his chances for success were minimal at best. Sooner or later, his friend the Defender was going to tire of talking and move on to more demonstrative, perhaps even sadistic, ways of expressing himself, and Gunner had good reason to believe his life might depend on having his hands free when he did.

“So he was just a hired gun, then,” the investigator said, just to keep the conversation going.

“A hired gun?”

“When he murdered Thomas Selmon for you. You
paid
Jack to do that, he didn’t do it voluntarily.”

After a moment, grudgingly: “Yes.”

“You didn’t expect to pay him?”

“I told you. We thought he was one of us. We would never have assigned him Selmon’s execution otherwise.”

The voice was on Gunner’s right now, at approximately 2 o’clock.

“So maybe Selmon’s not really dead. If Jack was only in it for the money—”

“We saw the body, Mr. Gunner. Jack took us to the grave site. That wasn’t part of the original plan, of course, but our growing doubts about his sincerity made such guarantees necessary.”

Then the photograph Gunner had found in Frerotte’s basement had been for real. Not a fake the fat man had put together just to run a game on his friends.

“By ‘we,’ ” Gunner said, “I take it you mean—”

“Our numbers are not important, Gunner. Except to say that there are far more of us than just the four brothers you already know about. That much I can assure you.”

Now the voice was directly behind Gunner, precipitating at least a momentary halt to the investigator’s struggles with the cable ties.

“Any of the others in here with us now, by any chance?” Gunner asked.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But you’re not going anywhere either way, are you, brother?”

The truth in that, more than the sarcasm in it, stung like a cold razor at Gunner’s throat. “Why don’t you tell me what you want,” he said.

“What we want? We want you to tell us whose side you’re on, of course. With whom, exactly, do you stand, Gunner? The Judases—or God?”

Choosing his words carefully, knowing dangerous ground when he was about to tread on it, Gunner said, “That all depends. Which god are we talking about?”

“There is only one god, my brother. Allah, the Almighty. The father and protector of our people.”

“The African-American people.”

“The living seed of Mother Africa, yes. The very same seed being destroyed from within by the agents of the White Devil who live among us.”

“You mean like Thomas Selmon.”

“Yes.”

“And that radio talk show host out in New Hampshire.”

“Delbert Olney. Yes. You know about him?”

Gunner didn’t answer.

“ ‘The Genius of the Ghetto’ Brother Olney used to call himself. He hadn’t lived in the ghetto since he was six years old and didn’t give a damn about anyone who did. But he was an ‘expert’ on the problems of our people.”

“So you killed him.”

“Yes. He was only the first of many.”

“You intend to kill all the Delbert Olneys in the world?”

“That is Allah’s will, Mr. Gunner.”

“And you know that because?”

“Because I’ve been
inspired to know it.
”

“Let me let you in on a little secret, brother. You’re gonna run out of bullets long before you run out of victims. Or haven’t you and Allah figured that out yet?”

The other man didn’t answer for a long time. “We want you to step off, Mr. Gunner,” he finally said, issuing a direct order. “Find something else to do with your time that has nothing to do with us and nothing to do with Thomas Selmon.”

And there it was: the end of conversation Gunner had been dreading. Instantly rendering his struggles against the bands around his wrists pointless.

“What about my client?”

“Your client? Tell her what you wish. But you’d be smart to discourage her from pursuing the matter of her brother’s disappearance, as well. That is, if you’re at all fond of her.”

“Meaning you’ll kill her if she doesn’t.”

“That is precisely my meaning, yes.” He came up unexpectedly on Gunner’s left side, whispered right into his ear. “Just as we’ll kill you. However reluctantly. If it was Allah’s wish that we kill everyone who gets in our way, Mr. Gunner, you and Sister McCreary would already be dead. Surely you can see that. But that is not our way. We are Defenders of the Bloodline. We are assassins for the people, not common murderers.”

He was telling what he thought was the truth. The distinction he was describing was as real for him as the earth beneath his feet.

“Give me Frerotte,” Gunner said, playing the long odds that so presumptuous a demand wouldn’t get him killed on the spot.

“What?”

“I need Frerotte. You let me nail him for Selmon’s murder, and I’ll do what you want. I’ll walk away, and McCreary will, too. I give you my word.”

“Your
word
?”

“You want me to forget you clowns tried to burn me alive Wednesday night, that’s my price. I want Frerotte. The rest of you can go to hell.”

Gunner’s boldness struck his host silent again, filling the room with an eerie, almost palpable air of doom.

And then the Defender laughed.

Before Gunner knew what was happening, a hand took hold of his left arm, put it in a vise grip as a needle was punched into his flesh, feeding yet another injection into his veins.

“You’re a lunatic, Gunner. And you’re in no position to negotiate, as you have somehow failed to notice.
We
are in control here, not
you.”

“Wait! You don’t …”

Already, Gunner could feel himself drifting into unconsciousness. Damning himself as a fool for overplaying his all but nonexistent hand.

“If someone tried to kill you at Jack’s crib Wednesday night, it wasn’t us. So the debt you seem to think we owe you is a false one.” He paused. “The debt we owe Jack Frerotte, however, is not.”

Gunner tried to speak, made only a small, pitiful murmur of discomfort.

“He deceived us. He presented himself as a fellow believer, when all he really was was a mercenary. Had we allowed him completely into our confidence, allowing you to deal with him now might pose some threat to us. But we were smart enough, at least, to keep him at a distance. He no more knows our names and identities than you do.”

To Gunner, the Defender’s voice was distant now, an ever-fading wisp of sound echoing in the dark.

“So it seems we have a choice to make, my brothers and I. Trust you to do as you say and let you live? Or kill you now and worry about Jack later?”

Again, silence descended upon the room. Gunner tried to wait it out, but couldn’t.

Sleep had finally overtaken him.

thirteen

T
HERE WAS NO WHITE LIGHT.
N
O HANDS REACHING OUT TO
him from a shadowy void, no familiar voices calling his name, no friendly faces beckoning him toward heaven. But it was a near-death experience just the same. A murky, shades-of-gray spiral funneling down to perfect blackness. Silent, cold, terrifying.