His right arm came up out of his heavy coat, bringing the vague shape of a single-barreled pump-action shotgun with it.
Gunner could do nothing but get out of the way. Davidson had made it to his feet, still wobbly, when the three blasts came, one right after the other. The first one caved his chest in and sent him reeling; the second took his chin off; and the third blew his remains off the balcony, scattering a bloody mess over the pews below.
A fourth .22-caliber round put a jagged hole in the back of the choir bench behind which Gunner was hiding, but it was only fired in passing, so as not to make him feel neglected or totally unimportant.
“That was for my homeboy Casper,” the big kid named Dog said matter-of-factly. He dropped the shotgun to his side, made the Cuz sign energetically with his left hand, and then was gone, racing the smaller Wheel down the stairs and out into the street.
Gunner slid the AR-15 across the floor to the other side of the balcony and tried hard to feel lucky to be alive.
chapter sixteen
In a very odd way, Gunner felt sorry for the Reverend Willie Raines. His post-peace summit news conference was a disaster. The spectacular death of Teddy Davidson not only forced the minister’s little afterparty out of the First Children of God Church itself—in deference to the police investigation taking place there—but rendered it a veritable nonevent, as well. From the tiny confines of a hurriedly prepared Sunday school classroom, Raines had tried hard to sell the just-concluded peace conference as a qualified success, taking great pains to point out that technically, bad blood between rival gangs had played no part in Davidson’s death, but his audience was minimal and his witnesses—the six gangbangers with whom he had conferred—were generally unavailable to either confirm or deny his claims. The police were taking them aside a pair at a time for questioning, and those who were with him at any one time were too busy celebrating Davidson’s assassination to talk about anything else.
While their impromptu interrogation foiled Raines’s every attempt to turn the news media’s attention from Davidson’s murder to the story they had come here to cover in the first place, it did manage to prove worthwhile. Rod Toon, whose CRACK unit was directly responsible for the investigation at the scene, actually persuaded one of the gangbangers on the Reverend’s panel to admit that the homeboys who had blown Teddy Davidson off the church balcony were his. It was nice to get an unforced confession for once, Toon thought, but hardly necessary. David “Cold-Bee” Bennett was a nineteen-year-old runt and Little Tee with a passion for red bandannas and dark sunglasses whose runaway paranoia was legendary; there was no way he could have come here, unarmed and naked to the world, to talk peace with several of his worst and most-hated enemies without assigning a pair of fellow Tees like Anthony “Dog” Lewis and Clarence “Wheel” Mitchell to watch his back.
And yet, Bennett had confessed, anyway—glibly, matter-of-factly. Dog and Wheel, his boys, were heroes. They had brought Teddy Davidson to justice, righted the great wrong that had been done to Los Angeles gangbangers everywhere, and in so doing had brought immeasurable honor to their set.
Willie Raines would never have admitted it, but the two assassins had actually done a better job of bringing the gangs together on this day than he had.
Gunner had no choice but to feel sorry for him.
Sorry enough, in any case, to wait until the klieg lights of public scrutiny had gone down on the First Children of God Church to approach its beleaguered founder with the bad news Gunner had come here to deliver. Toon had read Gunner the riot act in eight different languages and removed his men from the scene, and the Reverend had lost the token interest of one last, preoccupied member of the press when Gunner finally requested a meeting.
Raines was tired and badly disheveled, but he led the investigator to his private office on the grounds and issued an official order that they not be disturbed. He made himself comfortable behind yet another imposing desk and Gunner did likewise on a burgundy leather couch backed up against one wall nearby.
“You don’t look relieved,” the investigator said.
Raines sighed heavily and smiled. “I couldn’t be more relieved, I assure you. I’d been prepared to be exhausted at today’s end, of course … but not for these reasons.” Just like that, the smile was gone.
“I didn’t mean that,” Gunner said.
Raines looked at him quizzically.
“I was talking about Davidson. He’s dead, and you don’t look relieved. Why is that?”
Raines had to think about the question a while before answering it, still not certain how Gunner intended it to be taken. “I’m relieved in the sense that the poor devil’s misery is over, Mr. Gunner, if that’s what you mean. And I’m relieved to know that his senseless killing of children has come to an end, of course. But beyond that, I see no reason to feel relief. A man was murdered here today. Brutally. There is very little solace to be found in that.”
“True,” Gunner said, nodding. “Unless this particular dead man happened to take something more than his body with him to the grave. You’re familiar with the expression ‘dead men tell no tales,’ aren’t you, Reverend?”
Raines shrugged, reluctantly playing along. “I believe so.”
“When Davidson died, he took the truth about a lot of things with him. Who it was that gave him Darrel Love joy’s list of gangbangers to use as a guide for murder, for instance. Everyone seems to have assumed Lovejoy did it himself, simply because he wrote it, including the man who killed him. But Lovejoy could just as easily have written the list for someone else. Someone who asked him to write it under decidedly false pretenses, of course.”
Raines stared at him blankly, waiting for him to make his point.
“I’m talking about you, Reverend. Teddy Davidson got that list from you, not Darrel Lovejoy.”
Raines started shaking his head emphatically. “No. That’s insane.”
“Yes,” Gunner said. “We do agree on that.”
“You don’t know Willie Raines! You couldn’t possibly make such an accusation if you understood for one moment what Willie Raines stands for!”
“I know what you stand for. I think I even know what your intentions are. If I didn’t think a decent man was buried somewhere underneath all the madness, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d be telling this story to the police, not you. But I can’t sit on it forever. Whether I can prove a word of it or not, I’ll have to go to the authorities with it eventually. With or without you.” He paused. “Unless, of course, you’re as good at killing men yourself as you are at having them killed for you.”
Raines looked at him for a long time, the light behind his eyes mirroring his vacillation between rage and guilt, grief and indignation. For Gunner, it was not unlike watching a ball kick around on a roulette wheel, waiting for fate to side with either red or black, the dark or the light within a man’s heart.
Before the wheel could stop spinning, Raines got up and walked over to the lone window in the room, where he peered out into a world of leadership-starved people he had thought only hours ago was his own to command.
“You can’t imagine how much I wish I could do my own killing, Mr. Gunner,” he said. “But my conscience—and my faith—refuse me that luxury.” He turned away from the window to face Gunner evenly. “So here I am. With no alternative, to hear you tell it, but to bare my soul and throw myself on the mercy of my fellowman.”
“I’m afraid that’s about the size of it,” Gunner said.
“Considering everything I have to lose—and all the people I’ll disillusion by doing so—do you honestly believe I’ll feel any better about myself afterward?”
Gunner shrugged. “That depends on how heavy a load you’ve found it to carry. A man like yourself, in your line of work … I would think it’s weighed a great deal on you.”
Raines nodded his head slightly, acknowledging a great truth. Tears welled up in his eyes as he stood there, but refused to fall. “Yes. Lord, yes,” he said. He lo
oked out the window again and asked, “Do you remember Sam and Dave, Mr. Gunner?”
“Sure. The twins.”
“The twins. Exactly. Well, there’s only Sam, now. Dave has passed on.” He took a deep breath and let it out arduously. “I had him put to sleep two days ago. I had no other choice. As I told you the day you met them, Dave was inherently antisocial, absolutely impossible to deal with. It was something all the training in the world could never have corrected, every trainer and veterinarian I ever took him to said so. It was in the blood. And yet despite his condition, I never would have given up on him had it not been for one thing: He was beginning to have an adverse effect upon Sam.
“That was inevitable, of course. The two dogs were inseparable; they did everything together. And Dave was the strong one, the more dominant personality; eventually, he would have ruined Sam completely, I’m sure of it. So I cut my losses. I destroyed one brother to save the other. Do you follow what I’m getting at, Mr. Gunner?”
Gunner said, “You played the good shepherd. You stripped the weed from the vine so that the vine might grow and prosper.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s what you called yourself doing by killing the gangbangers on Lovejoy’s list.”
“Yes. I did.” He looked Gunner’s way again, smiling sadly. “Perhaps you’d have to be an ordained minister yourself to understand.”
Gunner shook his head. “I doubt that would help.”
“On the contrary. I think it would. I think if you had some insight into the realities of a clergyman’s calling, if you could imagine for just one moment what it’s like to feel compelled to save the world when your power to heal is woefully insufficient to the task, you would understand perfectly. No servant of Christ can save everyone, Mr. Gunner. No matter how hard we may try, no matter what methods we may adopt, it is a simple fact that our every victory is doomed to be tempered by some defeat, somewhere down the line.
“Therefore, it is imperative that we learn to keep our losses to a minimum. That we make the commitment to recognize the forces of evil at work against us in all their forms and deal with them accordingly. Disbelief, for example. Hardened skepticism. We cannot allow these poisons to run wild among the good people of a congregation and still expect that congregation to be saved. Doubting Thomases breed, Mr. Gunner. Dire hopelessness is transmittable.”
He crossed the room to a silver bar cart parked behind his desk and began to make himself a drink, never thinking to ask Gunner to join him. “I had to work with the children in this community a long time before I could admit that, but now it seems as clear to me as the heavens above. I can only reach my hand into the quagmire of this insanity called gangbanging and pull so many kids out. I have to draw the ones up who wish to be drawn up, and let the others go. And I cannot stand idly by and let those who prefer the darkness to the light to impose their will—Satan’s will—upon young people who might otherwise choose to come with me.
“Those boys on that list were demons, Mr. Gunner! Demons! I know that to be true because that’s exactly what I asked Darrel to give me: the names of Lucifer’s most powerful emissaries on the street. I was in the early stages of organizing this morning’s peace summit, and I had made up my mind long before that I was going to do everything in my power to see that it succeeded. The summit was going to prove to the world that the poor black youth of this nation are not yet an expendable commodity, that there is still great worth and pride and potential behind our children’s pain and hatred, fear and resentment, and I was not going to permit the agents of Satan to render it stillborn by infecting the entire gangbanging populace with their impenetrable pessimism and contempt. I’d had it happen to me too many times in the past.”
“So you hired Teddy Davidson to do some killing for you,” Gunner said.
“No. That’s not true.” Raines shook his head again, his mood descending as his thoughts turned to Davidson and his violent death earlier in the day. “Teddy never took a dollar from me to do anything. What he did for me, he thought of as doing for God. He was a very … disturbed young man. He’d lost his fiancée and the child she was carrying several years ago in a gang-related shooting, and of course, there was always Rookie to contend with.…”
“How did you come to find him?” Gunner asked, already familiar with Davidson’s unenviable history.
Absently, Raines said, “Oddly enough, through Darrel. Darrel brought him to my attention. It was Darrel with whom he had had words at the Christian Youth Fellowship meeting I told you about before, the one that had preceded Teddy’s decision to leave the church. Darrel had told me afterward that Teddy had said some things about the Patrol and its value to the community, generally expressing the opinion that anything done for the benefit of a gangbanger was a waste of time and money, and had literally turned violent. Darrel threatened him with expulsion from the church, and he decided to leave voluntarily, instead. We thought that was the end of it, but a few weeks later—”
“He started making crank calls to Darrel’s home.”
“Yes. Scared Darrel’s poor wife Claudia to death, Darrel said. How did you know?”
Gunner started to cite the appropriate verses from the book of Deuteronomy, but instead just said, “Lucky guess,” and let it go at that.
“Darrel asked me to talk to him, to see if I could reason with him before the police had to be asked to try,” Raines went on. “So I did. I asked Teddy to meet me here one afternoon, and we talked about his problems in depth.” He took a long swig of his drink and said, “I’m no clinical psychologist, Mr. Gunner, but it was immediately clear to me that this was a man who could become homicidal at any moment. I knew if he didn’t get help, he would almost certainly kill some gangbanger somewhere, sooner or later.”
“So you gave him Lovejoy’s list and turned him loose.”
Raines nodded, eyes cast downward. “That’s a very harsh way of putting it, but I suppose that’s exactly what I did. Yes.” He shook his head at the insanity of it, trying to dislodge its hold on reality through the force of denial alone. “I looked upon it as utilizing his madness constructively. I told myself that Teddy was a sick man who would kill senselessly, indiscriminately otherwise. So I gave him direction, a purpose. I convinced myself that the work we were doing together was a necessary evil, a mere sacrifice of the few for the overall good of the many.”
Raines laughed, taking no pleasure in it. “But I was nearly as great a failure at living with the guilt of commissioning murder as I would have been with the guilt of actually committing it,” he said. “I read about the first killing in the paper and saw it on the news and suddenly I understood—I understood!.—what it was I had done and was about to be a part of. In your very words, Mr. Gunner, I had turned a madman loose upon children. Children! Sick children, demented children, children possessed by the devil himself, yes, but children just the same! All my good intentions aside, what I had done in just one week’s time had made a lie out of every oath I have ever made to God the Almighty. It reduced me to the worst and most despicable thing a man of the cloth can ever become: a charlatan and a hypocrite; a fraud.
“So I tried to call it off. After the very first one! But it was too late by then, of course. Teddy wouldn’t listen. He had a mission now. A holy mission, assigned to him by a messenger from God. And there was nothing that messenger—this messenger—could say or do to rescind what Teddy liked to look upon as his ‘divine orders.’”
This time the laugh turned into something else, and his tears did fall. The proud man Gunner had always thought Raines to be would have ignored them, but this one didn’t. This man, humbled by a fall from the greatest height known to mortal man—self-anointed sainthood—used the palms of both hands to wipe them away, oblivious to Gunner’s presence and indifferent to his judgment.
Gunner found himself looking away.
“And so the killing went on,” Raines said, struggling to compose himself. “And all I could do was watch, and pray. For his s
oul, and for mine.”
“And go through with your plans for the peace summit.”
“Yes. I had to do that above all else! After what I’d set into motion to ensure its success, I had to make it work. The summit had to be everything I promised it would be, and more. And the sad thing is—the criminal thing—is that it was. It was! Those boys in that meeting hall with me today … they were truly beautiful. Truly beautiful. When you consider all the garbage—the pain and the misery, the filth and the poverty, the anger and the rage—they had to put aside to come, to leave their homeboys and colors and sets behind for one day just to join hands and discuss the prospects for peace in their neighborhoods—you have to love them. You have to love them!
“The story here today should have been those boys, and the message their presence here was meant to send to every man, woman, and child in this country: Gangbangers want a chance. They want hope. They want a reason to believe in something, anything, besides the basic rules of survival. There is no greed in that, Mr. Gunner. No greed, at all.”
Gunner just nodded his head. The irony of the cruel turn Raines’s fortunes had taken was not lost on him. The minister had gone to great lengths to see to it that his beloved peace summit became nothing less than a front-page, film-at-eleven media event that could demonstrate, far better than anything he had ever tried previously, the true plight of the inner-city Los Angeles gangbanger—and it had all been for nothing. The very man to whom he had given the task of removing the summit’s most likely obstacles—a heartsick psychopath with a king-sized grudge to bear against all things gang-related, named Teddy Davidson—had with his death almost certainly guaranteed the summit a negligible role in tomorrow’s headlines, despite its relative “success.”
Not Long for This World Page 23