You Can Die Trying (25 page)

Ziggy nodded his head.

“I still say you should have let me file a complaint against those assholes who handled Foster’s arrest,” Gunner said, changing the subject.

“No. That would have been a mistake. I can’t think of anything else that could have made Loiacano more reluctant to take your story seriously than he already is than that.”

“They made a goddamn laugh-in out of busting him, Ziggy,” Gunner said angrily.

“I know, kid. I know.”

“And he didn’t lose those three teeth on a fucking CD case, either. He was talking just fine until after they cuffed him.”

“Yeah. It’s a shame. Really.”

Gunner turned to watch him take another bite of his apple. “You think I’m overreacting,” he said.

“I didn’t say that. I just think you’d be better off looking at the bright side of things, that’s all. Why sit here worrying about how Foster lost his teeth, when you should be thanking God he didn’t put a bullet in the back of your head and dump your body in a ravine somewhere?”

“Because a man shouldn’t have to hear every watermelon joke a cop knows every time he gets taken downtown,” Gunner said. “That shit gets old after a while, all right?”

Ziggy turned to look at him, but Gunner quickly glanced away. It wasn’t Ziggy’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.

It was just the way things were.

Early Thursday morning, when Deanna Lugo tried to pull her car out of her Los Feliz apartment building’s underground garage, Gunner was standing there waiting for her in the driveway, barring her path to the street. He had been waiting here for nearly three hours to surprise her, never once picking up the security phone out front to try to talk his way into her apartment, and from the look on her face now, a surprise was exactly what he had given her. She looked like someone who had just caught a glimpse of the Grim Reaper himself.

She rolled her window down as he approached the car and said, “What do you want?”

“I want the gun,” Gunner said, showing remarkable restraint. “What do you think I want?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Look—in case you haven’t noticed, somebody tried to kill me last night, and you’re the only one who can stop them from trying again. So quit fucking around and give me the goddamn gun!” He dented the door on her side with the heel of his left hand.

“Get away from the car,” Lugo said.

Gunner started pulling on her door handle, ignoring her.

“I said get away! Now!”

She had her service weapon out, aimed at Gunner’s chest.

The black man stopped pulling on the door, but did not retreat. “That’s not going to stop me,” he said, shaking his head.

“I don’t
have
the gun anymore, all right? IAD has it.”

“IAD?”

“That’s right. IAD.”

“You mean Dick Jenner?”

She lowered her eyes to avoid his. “He came to see me down at the station house yesterday. He said they were opening up Maggie’s case again, and they knew I had the gun someone had used against him the night he shot that kid. He told me if I turned it over without asking any questions, and promised to keep my mouth shut about it afterward, they’d forget about my having had it run through the labs without going through the proper channels. What could I do? I had to give it to him.”

Gunner didn’t say anything.

Lugo looked back up at him and said, “It was an official request, for God’s sake. I had no choice.”

A car horn honked behind her. They both turned to find a rough-idling blue Isuzu pulled up to her rear bumper, an impatient black woman sitting behind the wheel, waiting to exit the garage.

“I have to go,” Lugo said. “I’m sorry.”

Gunner put his hand on the car to stop her and said, “I don’t get it. I told you two days ago you didn’t want to get too involved in this, and you just shook me off. ‘I can take care of myself,’ you said.”

“That’s right. I can.” She put the car in gear. “What the hell do you think I’m doing now?”

She almost knocked him on his ass pulling away.

“Man. What the fuck happened to you?” Sonny Flowers asked, grinning.

“It’s a long story,” Gunner said. He was standing out on Mitchell Flowers’s front porch, waiting for Flowers’s baby brother to open the screen door and invite him in.

The investigator was in a sour mood, for a variety of reasons, and he didn’t really care if Sonny Flowers knew it or not. He had made one stop before this one after leaving Deanna Lugo’s apartment building a little over two hours ago, and the scene that stop had led to hadn’t played out the way he had thought it would at all. In fact, it had thrown him off stride considerably, and he had a strong sense it was going to put a damper on his whole day.

“My brother ain’t here,” Sonny Flowers told him. “He’s at work.”

“I didn’t come here to see your brother. I came here to see you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Do we have to sit out here on the porch swing to talk, or can I come inside?”

Sonny Flowers grinned wide, then unlocked the screen door and just limped away from it, to find a seat for himself in the living room. He had pajamas on again, both the top and the bottoms this time. He watched Gunner step into the house and join him, sipping from a cup of coffee without bothering to offer Gunner one of his own.

“What’s your name again?” he asked curiously, as Gunner sat down in front of him.

“Gunner.”

“That’s right. Gunner.” He drank some more of his coffee, then said, “Man, we look like a matchin’ set. With our eyes an’ all, I mean.” He laughed. “So you was going to tell me what happened to you. That shit sure as hell didn’t happen down at no bowlin’ alley.”

“No. It didn’t.”

“Somebody kicked your ass.”

“As a matter of fact, yeah. Somebody did. And I think you probably know the guy. He’s a big young brother named Foster. Six-four, maybe six-five, and an easy two hundred and forty pounds. Very well spoken, very polite. His friends all call him ‘Howie.’”

For an amateur, Sonny did a good job of keeping the look of recognition off his face.

“I don’t know nobody like that,” he said, trying to smile. “I know some big brothers, but—”

“This one made a one-eyed cripple out of you. Does that help you at all?”

This time, Sonny’s face completely collapsed, then coalesced into an angry, hate-filled mask. He put his coffee cup down and said, “All right. So I know the man. So what?”

“So you and your brother have been playing me for an idiot. That’s what. Your brother wasn’t out by that alley the night Lendell Washington got shot—
you
were.
You
saw McGovern get shot at before he killed that kid, not him.”

“What kid? McGovern who? Man, you’re crazy.”

“I’m not crazy. Just stupid. Milton Wiley had to practically spell it out for me last night before I finally figured it out. He acted like he knew who my client was—yet he didn’t know how to find him. That seemed damned odd to me, considering your brother’s in the book. I know; I checked. He also said something to the effect that my client had tried to blackmail him before, but had gone away empty-handed because he and Wiley couldn’t agree on price. What that suggested to me was that whoever Wiley’s blackmailer was, he’d tried to pinch Wiley for more than he wanted to pay, and blackmailers who do that usually end up one of two ways: either dead—or all broken up. That’s when I remembered you.

“You’re the one Wiley’s looking for, Sonny. Not your brother. You’ve been hiding out in this house, not recuperating in it.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“You put the squeeze on Wiley and Wiley had Foster put the squeeze on you. Full force.”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, ‘blackmail’ an’ ‘squeezin’,’” Sonny said, climbing to his feet. “We didn’t blackmail or squeeze nobody! All we did was offer to help the man win his case. That’s all.” He started hobbling around the room, like a steer in the slaughterhouse waiting for its turn under the hammer. “I called him up an’ told him what Mitch told me to tell him, that it wouldn’t be right for me not to go to the cops, to tell ’em what I saw the night that kid was shot, now that they were gonna get sued for somethin’ they didn’t really do. But if—”

“Wiley wanted to make it worth your while, you might consider keeping quiet about it anyway,” Gunner said.

Sonny nodded his head. “Yeah. That’s it. That’s all I said. I told him I was just thinking ’bout the kid’s mother. I didn’t wanna see her lose a son and a chance for all that money, too. I mean, so what if it wasn’t really murder, the way the cops killed that boy? They’ve murdered plenty others, right? Hundreds of ’em! So I told the man, if he was interested, I wanted to help. That’s all I said to ’im.”

“And you don’t call that blackmail.”

“Hey, did I threaten anybody? No. All I did was make the man a business proposition. Take it or leave it.”

“And obviously, he left it.”

“What?”

“He didn’t pay you.”

Sonny shrugged, treating the subject like something he had hoped wouldn’t come up. “Yeah, he paid me. Five fuckin’ grand. Mitch said, have him put the money in a kid’s lunchbox and leave it on a bench at the park, late at night. And that’s what he did.”

“Only what? He had Foster waiting for you when you tried to make the pick up?”

Sonny shook his head. “Not the first time. He played it straight, the first time.”

“The
‘first’
time? What do you mean, the first time?”

Sonny wouldn’t answer him.

“You mean, you tried to hit Wiley up
twice
?”

“Man, what do you think? Five thousand dollars wasn’t no kind of money for what I was sellin’! He an’ that kid’s mother were gonna make
millions
suin’ the police, and all he wanted to give me outta the deal was five grand! Mitch, he said we was lucky to get that, but I knew that was bullshit.”

“So you called Wiley again. Is that it?”

Sonny nodded again. “All I asked him for was another ten. Fifteen thousand, that was all I was ever gonna ask him for. And the motherfucker sets his boy on me. In the park, just like you said.” He shook his head, fighting back tears even as he choked down his anger. “He didn’t have to do that, man.” He flipped the patch over his right eye out of the way and pointed to the black, fleshy socket beneath. “He didn’t have to take my goddamn eye over no motherfuckin’ ten thousand dollars!”

Gunner watched him fall back into his chair, his single eye rimmed with red, his chest heaving. It was hard to tell if he even knew Gunner was still in the room.

“Whose idea was it to hire me?” Gunner asked him after a while.

Again, Sonny wouldn’t answer him.

“I’ll take that to mean it was Mitchell’s,” Gunner said.

“He’s my brother, man. He loves me. You think he was gonna just sit by and do nothin’ after those motherfuckers nearly killed me? Shit.” He laughed. “Don’t let my man’s looks fool you. Mitch don’t fuck around. He said, you wanna get even with assholes like that, you don’t go to the cops. You just fuck with their money. Mess their action up so bad, it don’t work no more.”

“And that’s where I came in? To mess their action up?”

“That was the idea. Yeah.” He grinned, looking Gunner over. “ ’Cept it looks like you got your action messed up instead.”

Though he wasn’t entitled to it, Gunner let him have his little joke. He had too many questions left to ask, and he didn’t want to bring their meeting to a premature end by adding a mouth full of broken teeth to Sonny’s already formidable list of physical injuries.

“The money your brother used to hire me—that was his share of the five thousand you got from Wiley?”

Sonny nodded, still smiling. “Yeah. He said that would make it all the sweeter. Usin’ their own money to fuck their shit up with.”

“Did you know Lendell Washington didn’t fire the shots you saw the night Washington was killed? That someone else in the alley did?”

“Someone else? Like who?”

“Then you didn’t know.”

“Man, what the hell are you talkin’ about?”

“Never mind. It isn’t important. What is important is that we stop Wiley’s little game while there’s still time. Before one of us—or all three of us—ends up dead.”

“Dead?”

“You heard me. Dead. I gave Wiley and Foster up to the cops last night, Sonny. Because I thought I had enough to put them away. Unfortunately, I was wrong; at least about Wiley. My one piece of evidence against him took a walk on me, and I think it was a cop who made that happen. Are you smart enough to understand what that means?”

Sonny didn’t say anything.

“It means our asses are swinging in the wind, brother, that’s what it means. It means Wiley and someone with the LAPD are only going to let us run our mouths off about their business so long before they decide to shut us all up permanently. Evidence or no evidence.” He stood up and walked over to where the one-eyed man was sitting. “We have to stop them before they stop us. It’s that simple.”

“Stop ’em how? And what is this ‘we’ shit?”

“We have to go see a man. You and me. Right now.”

“What man?”

“I’ll explain that to you on the way. Let’s go.”

It wasn’t an invitation; looking up into Gunner’s face, Sonny understood that immediately. Still, he said, “Hey. Fuck you. I’m not goin’ anywhere, all right?”