Fear of the Dark (6 page)

Gunner braved a few seconds to catch his breath before fumbling around for, and finding, a light switch. In the well-diffused glow of two ceramic table lamps at opposite ends of Sheila’s front room, their bulbs unguarded by shades, the wiry man on the floor beside the couch was everything Gaines had said he would be: of medium height, slim, and no fighter. Ray Hollins, Sheila’s friend from the Motor City, was out cold.

Sheila herself was nowhere in sight. Gunner frisked Hollins quickly for weapons and scanned the floor for one the purported pugilist might have lost in the heat of their modest scuffle. Finding nothing, he cast but a casual glance over the mundane decor of the place and set out to find the lady of the house.

There was a bedroom to his left and a kitchen to his right, with a small bathroom in between. He rolled his eyes around in the bathroom for a while, then advanced to the kitchen. It was full of smells he didn’t like, smells that had little or nothing to do with cooking. He was reaching for the light switch when someone made a clumsy attempt to sneak up behind him, running without stealth and knocking things over along the way. He needed no clairvoyance to guess who it was, but played it safe and spun around to throw a right hand with something on it, anyway.

Sheila dropped like a stone, a knife the size of a small machete leaving her hand as she fell.

Two women, two right hands. He understood the occasional necessity of the practice, but slapping women around was still nothing he wanted to become proficient at.

Annoyed, he tossed Sheila’s knife into the safety of the kitchen and dragged the hooker’s limp form across the carpet to the couch, where he parked her parallel to Hollins, who was just now starting to come around. Gunner took a seat on the arm of an overstuffed easy chair and watched him blink a few times, recall where he was and who he was with, and then make a shaky move to get up.

“You don’t want to do that,” Gunner said, smiling the smile of a new friend.

Hollins took his advice and relaxed, until catching sight of Sheila for the first time. She had turned to one side, away from him, and her resemblance to a corpse was a strong one.

Hollins started to cry.

“Shit, man,” he said, his lips barely moving. “You
killed
her!”

Sheila belched in her sleep. She rolled over toward him and opened her eyes, showing him all the white around her irises.

“How’re you doing, Sheila?” Gunner said.

The sound of his voice drove her, backpedaling, up against Hollins and the base of the couch. She stared at the detective blankly, failing to recognize him right away.

“Aaron?”

“Yeah. Long time no see, huh?”

She kept her guard up, refusing to relax, and rubbed her left cheek, saying nothing.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” Gunner said, smiling again.

“You the one that hit me?”

“Yeah. You were the one with the knife, right?”

She tried to remember, did, and nodded. “I didn’t know it was you. I thought it was somebody else.”

“I figured as much.”

She sat up, struck with a sudden thought. “What
are
you doing here?” she asked, reaching for Hollins’s hand.

Gunner said, “I thought maybe you could use a few dollars. In exchange for a small favor.”

“Who the hell are you?” Hollins demanded. He had been taking in their exchange with exemplary patience up to now.

Gunner tossed him a glance of unmistakable disrespect. “An old friend.”

“He’s okay, honey,” Sheila said, squeezing the young man’s hand, watching the tears dry to salty streaks on his face. “This is Aaron. Aaron Gunner. He’s an old drinkin’ buddy of mine. We got what you call a ‘plutonic relationship.’”

“Strictly,” Gunner agreed, nodding.

Hollins didn’t say anything. Sheila turned to Gunner and said, “What kind of favor you want? Not the usual kind, I know.”

Gunner smiled weakly and shook his head, hoping she wasn’t warming up to another big come-on, Hollins or no Hollins. “I need to ask you a few questions, Sheila. About the man who killed J.T. and Buddy Dorris at the Deuce.”

A long pause. “Why?”

“Because I’m working again. For Buddy’s sister, Verna. You know Verna?”

“Never heard of her.”

“That’s all right. It’s not important.”

“I thought you gave that shit up, private detectin’. You were supposed to be workin’ in construction with your cousin, I thought.”

She was on guard again. A private investigator was, after all, a man other people paid to do their dirty work.

“I was. I am. But this came up a few days ago, and I thought I’d give it one more try. For old times’ sake.”

“You lookin’ for the white boy?”

“Yeah.” He came right out with it. “And Howard Gaines says you might be able to tell me where to find him.”

Sheila released her grip on Hollins’s hand.

“Howard needs to shut the fuck up,” Hollins said.

Gunner glowered at him, but made no move from his chair. He didn’t want to see the Motown Wonder cry again. He turned to Sheila and asked, “Can you help me, Sheila?”

“Why would I know where you can find him?”

Gunner shrugged. “Maybe because you’re a popular girl. One who’s been known to go through the phone book looking for tricks, when times are rough. A girl meets a lot of interesting people that way. Black people, white people—you know.”

“I don’t do much white business,” she said.

“So maybe you know him from somewhere else.”

Sheila was silent.

Gunner sighed. Whatever Del was doing right now at a fifteen-dollar-an-hour-clip, it couldn’t be as difficult as this. “You think
he
sent me, is that it?”

Sheila remained silent.

“You think he called me out of retirement so I could come over here to hold a rap session in your living room. Lay you out, prop you up against the sofa, and wait for you and your boyfriend to come around before knocking you off. That what you think?”

Sheila stared at him, saying nothing. She was holding Hollins’s hand again.

“I don’t
know
what to think,” she said finally. “I’m too damn
scared
to think!”

She scrambled to her feet and followed her nose to a decanter of what Gunner figured to be cheap Scotch sitting along with several short glasses on a table nearby. She poured herself a drink and slammed it down her throat like a dose of castor oil she was afraid to get a good taste of.

“I’ve been goin’ crazy in here,” she said, to anyone listening.

“Where do you know the white boy from, Sheila?”

“I’ve been in this house since the night it happened, waitin’ for that crazy sonofabitch to come get me! Ain’t been out to work, to party, to play—
nothin
’. He saw my face, he knows who I am!”

“You don’t know that,” Hollins said, making a valiant stab at manly reassurance. “Just ’cause you recognized him, that don’t mean he recognized you.”

“Where do you know him from?” Gunner asked again, exasperated.

The hooker poured herself another drink and tugged at the fabric of the cheap kimono she was wearing, making an effort to pull herself together. “He works at a gas station me and Ruth used to stop in at back when Ruth was drivin’ her old man’s Benz,” she said, nursing the Scotch this time. “You remember Ruth—the big girl with the scars where a john cut her up for buyin’ a dog? It’s an ARCO station, I think. On Figueroa, out by the Coliseum.”

“Next to a hamburger stand.”

“Yeah. That’s the one. We used to go in there after workin’ the crowd at Raider games on Sundays, and it used to kill that boy to see us in that Mercedes. He didn’t talk much, but you could tell he was a nigger-hater just by the way he pumped your gas. We used to make him wash the windows just to piss him off.”

“You get his name?”

“It was on his shirt, but I never paid it any attention. He got mine, though. First name, last name, and middle initial.”

“How’s that?”

“Last time I seen him there—last December, I think it was—we had an argument. Ruth had him fill the tank, then couldn’t pay him. She didn’t have any cash. I had a credit card, but he wouldn’t take it. He said we’d have to come up with the cash or he was gonna go get a hose and siphon Ruth’s tank. I said bullshit, he was gonna take my card or kiss his gas good-bye. A perfectly good Visa card, took me two years to get one, and he wouldn’t honor it! Took it out of my hand and threw it across the lot, laughin’ like it was funny or somethin’.

“Well, you know me. I started to go off on the fool, but Ruth wouldn’t let me out the car. She says, ‘Sheila, baby, this white boy’s crazy,’ and when I looked at him again, good, I could see she was right. He
wanted
me to try somethin’. So we just split. Left the card and everything. Got the gas, though.”

She smiled, thankful for small victories.

“The night he came into the Deuce, I didn’t recognize him right away, ’til all the shootin’ was over and he looked straight at me.” She drew imaginary circles around her left eye with an index finger. “Ain’t but so many people with an eye like he’s got,” she said. “That, and his voice, gave him away. When he said, ‘The Brothers of Volition can go fuck themselves,’ man, that was it. I knew it was him.”

“Was that all he said?”

“Just before he ran out, yeah. Right, baby?”

She looked at Hollins. Totally uninterested, he nodded his head.

“Did he come specifically to kill Buddy, do you think? Or was he just trying to rob the place, and got jumpy?”

“He never asked for no money,” Sheila said, shaking her head. “He just came in, told Buddy he was lookin’ for him, and blew him away. He could’ve sat anywhere that night, but he sat next to Buddy. He didn’t
want
no money, you ask me.”

“It was cold-blooded,” Hollins said, his eyes suddenly filled with the memory.

“Lilly seems to think he was after J.T.,” Gunner said, just for the hell of it.

Sheila laughed. The two women found each other pretty funny, apparently.

“She would,” Sheila said, filling her glass again. “She probably don’t wanna believe it was an accident, her losin’ the only man brave enough to climb up on her ass two nights a week.”

Gunner stood up and laughed along with her. Hollins joined them not long after.

Mean Sheila could be as mean as the next lady, when she wanted to be.

riginally, a middle-aged white man in a three-piece suit, eating an Egg McMuffin while reading the back page of the
Wall Street Journal,
had been sitting at the McDonald’s booth to Gunner’s right, minding his own business. But then the giant black kid wearing corduroy pants and a football jersey with the sleeves torn off asked him to move. In so many words.

“Get your white motherfuckin’ ass out the way,” he said, looking down over his tray at the poor fellow in pinstripes.

The white man looked to Gunner for help. Gunner pretended not to notice, and the white man retreated without further delay. Gunner wondered if the morning’s edition of the
Journal
had run a few lines on the four Caucasian gentlemen who had been beaten close to death on a crowded bus in Pittsburgh, late Wednesday.

“You like that, brother?” the kid asked Gunner, grinning as he eased into his new seat.

“Not much,” Gunner said, impassive, finishing off his coffee.

“I’m ready for the war, see. That’s what I am. You ready for the war, Home?”

The kid lifted the front of his jersey up to expose the taped and retaped hilt of an old handgun, jammed down into the waistband of his pants. His grin was electric, if not altogether whole.

“I’ve already had my war,” Gunner said, standing up.

“Yeah,” the kid said, covering the gun up again. “But this one gonna be ours, Home. This one gonna be
ours
…”

He laughed and watched Gunner race a brace of giggling high schoolers to the nearest door.

The ARCO gas station on the corner of Figueroa and 41st Place was owned by a middle-aged Armenian refugee named Boulos Kasparian. He was a short little man with dark hair and skinny arms, bushy eyebrows, and a beard that seemed stunted in its growth. He had dirt under his fingernails and grease stains on his clothes, sure signs of a man with a solid work ethic, but the frailty of his body made him look as if his muscles had never been tested by labor of any kind.