He was voicing a gross exaggeration of how he really felt, of course, but such was the state he was in today, emotionally depleted and desperate for someone to blame. The white man was always an easy target, too easy and too hackneyed, but the habit white folks in the entertainment industry had of foisting their most racially insensitive daydreams upon the general public under the facade of “speculative” storytelling held a special place on Gunner’s list of pet peeves.
“Preach, G!” Hobie called out.
“I’m not preaching. I’m just talking. You can watch any damn thing you want, Cal. I’m sure the writers will fill that show with some very smart and honorable slaves. But me, I’ve got zero interest in the South rising again, on TV or anywhere else.”
Sufficiently shamed, Cal fell silent, and Mickey and Hobie did the same, suddenly feeling sorry for him. In the awkward hush that followed, Gunner’s phone rang. The number for the incoming call was blocked from his view.
“This is Aaron Gunner.”
“You’ve gotta find Reesie quick. Before that crazy old fool finds her first.”
The female voice was breathless, fear and agitation riding on every word.
“Who is this?”
“This is Laticia Abbott. Reesie’s mother. Please, Mr. Gunner, you gotta find her for me. I think he had a gun.”
“Who?”
“Harp’s father. He just come by here looking for Eric. He thinks Tyrecee’s been hidin’ him somewhere.”
“Has she?”
“Hell, no. At least, not in my house she ain’t. She knows better.”
“Where is Mr. Stowe now?”
“Out lookin’ for Reesie. Ain’t you heard a word I been sayin’?”
He called Roxanne Niles the minute he got in the car. If anyone knew where Tyrecee was, it was her. She wouldn’t want to be a snitch, but Niles had the smarts to understand the danger her girlfriend was in if Harper Stowe Jr. was really out on the street looking for her and Eric Woods, armed with a gun.
“I think I might know where she’s at,” Roxanne said over the phone, without a moment’s hesitation. “But I’ve gotta take you there.”
Gunner didn’t want the company but she wasn’t going to be dissuaded. He picked her up at the mall where he’d met her before and followed her directions as she offered them.
“Where are we going?”
“My father’s house,” she said, issuing an admission that pained her. “He lets me and Ty hang out there when we need a place to chill. I think he loves Ty more than he loves me.”
“And Eric?”
“Daddy wouldn’t care if he was with her or not. He doesn’t care much about anything, to be honest. Especially when he’s been drinking.”
It was a long drive. Roxanne’s father lived at the north end of Long Beach, in a staid, boxy apartment building in the shadow of the Long Beach Memorial Medical Center just south of the 405. Gunner had suggested early on that they call ahead, but no one answered when she tried her father’s number. “They probably shut his phone off again,” Roxanne said. “He forgets to pay the bill all the time.”
The two-story complex they arrived at was the perfect complement to the man she was describing, unkempt and past its prime, living on the razor’s edge of civilized society. Two trash bins that looked like they hadn’t been moved or emptied in ages sat at the curb, as cracked and broken as a pair of stale cookies.
Roxanne turned to get out of the car, but Gunner held her back. “What unit is he in?”
“Fourteen.”
“You need to wait here.”
“No. I told you.”
Gunner drew the Ruger from the shoulder holster under his jacket, gave her a good look at it. “Listen. If Eric’s in there, this could get ugly fast. I don’t want you getting hurt.”
“You don’t have to worry about that. I can take care of myself.” She hustled out of the car before he could stop her and proceeded to enter the building, giving him no recourse but to follow.
Inside, she led the way to unit fourteen, on the second floor, above an empty swimming pool stained unsettling shades of brown. She knocked on the door and waited, Gunner standing to one side with the Ruger pointed earthward behind his back.
“Daddy, come get the door! It’s Rox!”
She knocked again. Music thudding from a downstairs apartment made it difficult to tell if anything was stirring inside number fourteen. Roxanne was fishing a set of keys from her purse to open the door herself when a short, wiry black man with a head of wild, gray hair on the other side of the threshold beat her to it.
“Little girl,” he said, two eyes red and wet as marbles smiling at the sight of his daughter standing there. “How you doin’?” He seemed to take no notice of Gunner.
“Daddy, we’re looking for Tyrecee. Is she here?”
Her use of the word “we” tipped him off that he’d missed something, and now he glanced to one side to register Gunner’s presence. “Who’s this?”
“He’s a friend. We’ve got to find Tyrecee. Is she here, Daddy?”
The question perplexed him on some level. “I dunno.” He blinked to clear his head, genuinely unsure. Gunner couldn’t smell the alcohol on his breath from where he stood, but he imagined it had to be intense. “I think so.”
Roxanne turned to Gunner for direction, made a small move toward the door. He shook her off.
“Eric! This is Aaron Gunner! Are you in there?”
Nothing. The girl’s father just stood there in the doorway, utterly confused.
“Eric!”
“Go away!” Tyrecee Abbott shouted back. It sounded more like a plea than a demand.
Roxanne barged inside, Gunner moving too slow to stop her for the second time in ten minutes. He pushed past her father into the apartment and gave chase, cursing under his breath, the gray-haired man at the door lagging behind them both. The small apartment was dark and thick with the smells of hard liquor and spoiled food. Roxanne carved her way through it to a back bedroom and stopped abruptly at the open doorway.
Inside, Eric Woods stood wide-legged alongside an unmade single bed, Tyrecee Abbott clutched tight to his chest, the blade of a large carving knife pinned to the girl’s throat. Feet bare and naked from the waist up, Woods looked disheveled and tired, as if he hadn’t slept in days, and aside from her usual petulant air, Tyrecee appeared to be only slightly better off.
“Get the fuck outta here, bitch,” Woods snapped at Roxanne. Then, catching sight of Gunner: “You too, man. I’ll kill her, I mean it!”
Unfazed, Roxanne started to plunge into the room, but this time Gunner moved first, stepping forward to block her path to Woods and assert himself as the person Woods was going to have to address. Roxanne’s father, meanwhile, hung back behind his daughter and Gunner, his sense of puzzlement growing.
“Hey! What’s goin’ on?” he asked, befuddled.
“Put the knife down, Eric,” Gunner said. “It’s over.” The Ruger was still in his right hand, down at his side but out in the open where Woods was meant to see it.
“Ain’t nothin’ over!”
“Yes. It is.” Gunner lifted his arm and fired a single round into the bed, at an angle intended to keep the bullet inside the room if it passed straight through. Woods and Tyrecee jumped as one at the sound. He let the gun fall back down to his side. “I’m in a real bad way. This past week has been one kick in the teeth after another. If you hurt the girl, I’m going to kill you.”
It wasn’t an idle threat. He didn’t want to do this, take the Ruger in hand yet again to gamble with Tyrecee’s life in this way, but there was nothing else to be done. Two weeks ago, he would have had the wherewithal to play this thing out, to give Woods room to surrender on his own terms, in his own time. But not today. Today, Del and Noelle were still fresh in the ground, and over the last six days, Gunner had suffered all the fools he could take. Burdzecki. Gordito. Johnny Rivera. Burdzecki had tested his patience and lost.
Now it was Woods’
s turn.
“Put the knife down, son. Live to see another day.”
“Hey! Hold up a minute!” Roxanne’s father said, alarmed.
His daughter spun on her heels, threw a hand up to silence him. “Daddy, hush!” She looked back at Gunner again, realized with some trepidation that she and everyone else in the apartment aside from Woods might as well have been a thousand miles away, for all Gunner cared about them as witnesses.
“Please, Eric! Do what he says!” Tyrecee pleaded.
But Woods wasn’t ready to believe Gunner was serious. He had to study the man with the gun a full minute longer before the truth, as unvarnished and uncomplicated as Gunner had stated it, became obvious to him: he wasn’t walking out of here in possession of either his hostage or the knife he was holding to her throat. If he tried to do either, he would draw his last breath on the floor of this apartment, in this room.
“Fuck it,” he said, and tossed the knife down at Gunner’s feet.
He fell into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, spent, as Tyrecee snatched up the knife and joined the others at the door. “You fucking bitch! I hope your ass gets the death penalty!”
“Call 911,” Gunner told her, as much to shut her up as anything else.
For a moment, she looked as if she might argue, questioning why she should be assigned such a task and not her girl Roxanne, but then she gave Gunner’s face a closer look and decided to do as she’d been told. As Tyrecee moved off, Roxanne’s father still standing mute behind them, Roxanne subjected Gunner to an inspection of her own and said, “You weren’t really—”
“Yeah. Yeah, I was.”
She had nothing more to say to him until the police arrived.
24
“SO, HOW YOU HOLDIN’ UP?” Lilly asked.
“I’ll live.”
“I know you’re gonna live. I’m askin’ how you’re doin’.”
The Deuce was packed with people tonight, bodies and voices competing for every inch of real estate, so it irked Gunner that, despite everything else she could be doing, the bartender was here, towering over his little table, sweating him. He took another swallow of Wild Turkey, his throat burning, and said, “I feel like shit. But compared to yesterday, probably a little less so.” He looked up to meet Lilly’s gaze directly. “How’s that?”
“Well, you ain’t gettin’ worse, so I’ll take it as an encouraging sign. I heard they caught that boy. The one they think killed his boss at that auto parts place.”
Nothing escaped the woman. Gunner had never spoken to her directly about his work for Kelly DeCharme, and had only discussed it here with Kelly herself out of the barkeeper’s hearing, yet Lilly somehow understood his connection to the news reports of Eric Woods’s apprehension this afternoon. He knew she came by this knowledge honestly—it was only her alacrity for gossip at play, not magic—but he still found it cause for wonder.
“Yeah.”
“So that other boy—the one your lawyer friend represents—I guess they’ll be letting him go.”
“They should, yeah. Eventually.” According to Kelly, who’d been monitoring the status of his interrogation by the LAPD, Woods had already issued a confession to Darlene Evans’s murder, so Harper Stowe III’s eventual release from jail seemed all but a certainty.
“You want another?” Lilly nodded at Gunner’s near-empty glass.
He did, but he shook his head forlornly. “Del’s father is meeting me here any minute. I think I’d better slow my roll a little.”
“He and the wife goin’ back home to Atlanta?”
Gunner winced. “No. They’ve decided to stay a while, or at least until Zina’s back on her feet. They’re moving out of their hotel into Del’s crib tomorrow.” He emptied his glass. “I’m sure she’d prefer they didn’t bother, but they’ve got their minds made up.”
Were he his aunt or uncle, he would have let the girl rot, happy to let her recover from her injuries alone, as best she could. But Daniel and Corinne Curry were good Catholics, and their threshold for granting forgiveness was far lower than that of their nephew. They did not find Zina beyond redemption for all the hell she had put Del and Noelle through just to be with a man like Glenn Hopp. They wrote her insolence off as the work of the devil, playing on the insecurities and raging hormones of youth. Just as they had hope her body would heal over time, so too did they believe her soul could be similarly rehabilitated.
Gunner held no such belief.
He was still too angry for that, and imagined he would remain so indefinitely. Zina was old enough to have known what Hopp was, and all the trouble she was asking for by sleeping with him. She shouldn’t have needed her parents to tell her. But they had told her, both of them, and in Noelle’s case, even ridden her like a pack mule trying to steer her out of harm’s way. Had she heeded their advice early on and let Hopp go, her mother’s own indiscretion might not have enraged her to the extent that it had, and the argument over it that took place in Zina’s home eight days ago, culminating in the death of two people and the near-death of another, might never have occurred. But Zina had held on to Hopp instead, recklessly and foolishly, and everything she had put at risk in doing so, other than her own life, had been lost in the bargain.
Gunner didn’t much care that she lacked the clairvoyance it would have taken to see just how tragic her selfishness would ultimately prove to be. She should have changed course regardless, if only to spare her parents the indignity of having their place in Zina’s life assumed by a jackass like Glenn Hopp.
“Did you hear what I said?” Lilly asked, miffed.
“I heard you.”
“Bullshit. I said you owe me a half tank of gas.”
It wasn’t a half tank, it was only a quarter. His aunt and uncle having declared their independence by renting a car of their own, Gunner had returned the big woman’s ponderous Chevy Tahoe to her earlier in the day, cleaned and washed but with less than the full tank of gas he had promised her.
“Put it on my tab.”
“Nigga, you ain’t—”
“Here he comes now, Lilly,” Gunner said, eyeing the bar’s front door. “We’ll have to settle this later.”
Lilly’s head swiveled around on her massive neck to give her a view of Daniel Curry, working slowly through the crowded house toward them, dodging outthrust derrieres and sloshing drink glasses on every side as he came. He looked as out of place as he obviously felt, too stern and sober for a dive like the Deuce by a mile; but he was meeting his nephew here of all places at his own request, so Gunner had no reason to feel for him.
Gunner stood from his chair to greet the older man. “Uncle, this is Lilly Tennell. She owns the Deuce. You should remember her from the funeral and the repast yesterday.”
“Yes, of course.” Daniel Curry held out his hand for Lilly to shake. “It’s good to see you again, Ms. Tennell.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Mr. Curry. But if you don’t call me Lilly, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”
Del’s father smiled, then laughed uneasily. “Lilly it is.”
“Please, sit down.” Both Gunner and Daniel Curry did. “Can I get you anything to drink? On the house, of course.”
After much hemming and hawing, Gunner’s uncle ordered a whiskey neat, and off Lilly went, willfully neglecting to ask if Gunner had reconsidered his decision to remain dry. In her absence, Gunner watched Daniel Curry survey the place with two parts awe and one part horror, the sights and sounds of all these poor, loud, unruly black people overwhelming his senses.
“You sure about this?” Gunner asked. “We can go somewhere else a little more quiet if you like.”
“No. You said this was a place where my son spent a lot of his time. I wanted to see it for myself, find out who his friends were.”
Gunner nodded. He hadn’t yet grown a soft spot in his heart for Daniel Curry, but he was beginning to understand him. “You want me to introduce you to a few?”
“Not right now. Maybe lat
er.”
“How’s Miss Corinne?”
“Corinne is fine. Better than her husband, anyway. She’s stronger than I am. Always has been.”
“And Zina?”
“She’s coming along. Still in a lot of pain, and she sleeps five, six hours at a time. But she’ll be okay. Doctor Low says they plan to move her out of the ICU tomorrow.”
“That’s great news.” It rang laughably false, even to him.
“She’s our granddaughter, Aaron.”
Gunner just nodded.
Lilly appeared with Daniel Curry’s drink and moved off again as soon as she set it down before him, summoned back to the bar by a short, heavyset man with blue-black skin and an almond-shaped head who’d been haranguing her most of the evening as only this Acey Deuce regular could.
“Who’s that?” Gunner’s uncle asked.
“The one doing all the shouting? That’s Beetle Edmunds.”
“‘Beetle’ like the bug?”
“Yeah. You don’t see the resemblance?”
“And those two?” Del’s father pointed at the pair of men sitting at the far end of the bar to Beetle’s right, dominoes splayed all across the countertop between them. They were fussing over the basketball game on TV like two hens arguing over the choicest spot in the yard for pecking.
“The older man in the blue work shirt and Dickies, making all that noise about the Lakers, is Howard Gaines. He knew Del well, and was also at the funeral yesterday. The other brother, the youngster with the beard, I don’t really know. I’ve seen him in here a few times, but I haven’t caught his name yet.”
“You mean Rip?” somebody walking by asked. It was Evelyn Claremont, a short and lean, thirtysomething veteran of the US Navy who popped in and out of the Deuce for weeks at a time as her family here and in Longview, Texas, permitted. She was cute and smart as a whip, and could put a man in his place both figuratively and literally without breaking a sweat, but Gunner was occasionally put off by her interest in bad hair extensions and other people’s business.
“The boy sitting next to Howard. Yeah,” Gunner said.
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