Entering Sunset Ranch, Gunner quickly found the street he was looking for and slowed the red Cobra to a crawl.
These homes had been inhabited for some time, but the black-and-white address markers on the curbs before them were still fairly new and perfectly legible, enabling Gunner to make a reasonable determination as to where the house Dobbs was supposed to be hiding in was situated on the block, without first having to cruise the noisy Cobra past its front door. He could see less than a half-dozen lighted windows on the entire street, making it unlikely his passing would actually attract anyone’s attention, but he didn’t want to take the chance. He waited until he was nine, maybe ten houses away, then pulled the Cobra over and parked, at the heart of a dark void between streetlights where he hoped he’d be difficult to spot from a distance. From there, he used a pair of binoculars to make a positive ID of the house he was interested in, and found it to be just as dark and relatively lifeless as its neighbors. That was good.
Now there was nothing to do but get comfortable in the Cobra’s driver’s seat and wait for Bunche to show.
It was 1:22 A.M.
A little more than an hour later, the Compton police detective appeared out of nowhere beside him, standing in the street, and said, “Just what the fuck are you doin’ here?” Managing to keep his voice low, when what he really wanted to do was scream.
Without batting an eye, Gunner said, “Waiting for you. What else?” He turned to nod at Bunche’s partner, Bertelsen, as the other cop stepped into view, over on the passenger side of the convertible.
Bunche couldn’t figure it, why they hadn’t scared the investigator shitless sneaking up on him like they had, but all the cop said was, “I don’t remember invitin’ you to the party, Gunner.” He had no mints in his mouth tonight, no doubt a concession to the stealth this mission would soon require of him.
“Like my message said, I didn’t think you’d mind, I came out to watch the house until you got here,” Gunner said, “considering it was my tip that brought you out here in the first place.”
“Yeah, well, you thought wrong, buddy,” Bertelsen said, having almost as much trouble keeping his voice down as his partner.
Explaining, Bunche said, “I had that talk with Matt Poole you suggested I have, an’ guess what? I found out what your interest in all this is. Revenge. This Nina Pearson you think Dobbs whacked, she was an ex-old lady of yours.”
“Forget about it, Bunche. I’d wanted Dobbs dead, I’d have gone in there and put a clip in his ass an hour ago,” Gunner said.
Bunche shook his head, said, “Sorry, brother, but you’re goin’ home. Right now.”
“No, I’m not. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Look, asshole—” Bertelsen started to say.
“No, you look. I’ve been playing ball with you guys right down the fucking line so far. Right? So what the hell’s wrong with letting me help you? If Dobbs has any company in there—”
“We don’t need your help, Gunner.”
“I won’t lay a hand on the sonofabitch! All I want is to see you take him, you have my word on it.”
“Not a chance. Say adios, amigo,” Bertelsen said.
Gunner turned to Bunche, knowing he would have the last word.
“You just want to see us take him,” the black cop said. “That’s all.”
“That’s all. Or if you need me to back you up—”
“You’re gonna stay right here, Gunner. Right here in the fuckin’ car. You can’t see what you wanna see from here, you’re outta luck.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Bertelsen cried, regarding his partner with open disbelief.
“You don’t think—” Gunner said, still talking to Bunche alone.
“I think you say another word, I’m gonna rescind the offer I just made you,” Bunche said, ignoring Bertelsen just as completely as Gunner had. “Okay? You either stay right here till we tell you to move, or you take your ass home right now. What’s it gonna be? Me an’ Al, we got work to do here.”
“Richie—” Bertelsen said, trying once more to be heard.
“Shut up, Al. He’s makin’ up his mind,” Bunche said. He was looking straight at Gunner.
With the gaze of both cops bearing down on him, Gunner shrugged and said, “I’ll stay in the car.”
Bunche eyed him warily, well short of being thoroughly convinced. “You must’ve seen us go by, huh? In the car, I mean. That’s how come you weren’t scared, we came up to you like this.”
Gunner had to grin, amused to see Bunche couldn’t let even as little a mystery as this go unsolved. “Those pack mules you boys drive are kind of hard to miss.”
Bunche made a little face and started backing away from the car, toward the house he and Bertelsen were about to drop in on. “Don’t move,” he told Gunner simply. “You move, I’m gonna shoot you. I swear to God.”
“You and me both,” Bertelsen said, drawing the slide back on his service automatic for Gunner’s benefit before moving to follow his partner.
Gunner watched them close quickly upon the house, squirming around in his seat like a house pet that needed to be let outside.
Bunche took the front door, while Bertelsen eased around to the back, disappearing from the investigator’s view down the driveway. Gunner grabbed his binoculars again. He saw Bunche step up on the dark porch and press himself to the wall beside the doorjamb, gathering the nerve to knock on the door and let the show begin.
But he never got the chance.
Gunfire erupted from the back of the house, first the lone report of a handgun, then two loud, extended shotgun blasts after that. Bunche stiffened, energized by fear, and came down off the porch to follow the sound to the back, taking the same route Bertelsen had along the left side of the house, albeit slower and with greater care. He never even looked Gunner’s way.
The investigator threw his binoculars down and jumped out of the car, hitting the ground running. The Ruger was in his hand before he covered three feet.
Bunche reached the back of the house, slipping from Gunner’s sight just as Bertelsen had earlier, and two more shots rang out: a handgun and a shotgun again, this time firing almost simultaneously. Gunner was four doors away now, going on three. A black man sprinted into view, emerging from the same yard Bunche had just entered, and saw Gunner coming. He looked like the wild man in the circus, eyes glowing like drops of molten metal, hair all over his ebony face and head. He was holding a pump-action shotgun in both of his hands.
“Dobbs!” Gunner called after him, stopping in the middle of someone’s damp lawn to aim the Ruger at the wild man’s chest.
Dobbs took off running.
Gunner fired at him twice, but the man was both fast and lucky; even weighed down with the shotgun, he was able to get away unharmed. Gunner started to go after him, then remembered Bunche and Bertelsen. Both men were probably down and in need of his help, if they were still alive. If he left them to pursue Dobbs now, he could be leaving them to die.
Deciding what to do was a no-brainer.
He found Bunche first, laid out on the driveway where Dobbs had left him, bleeding all over the concrete. His right shoulder looked like something a lion had been chewing on, but he was alive and conscious. Bertelsen was neither. He was joined in death by a young black man who was stretched out on the brick patio beside him, several feet away from a sliding glass door that stood wide open, flooding a lighted kitchen with cold night air. Several giant glass bottles of Magnum malt liquor stood on a patio table nearby, all but one of them empty.
It was an odd scene, but Gunner thought he understood it.
“I thought I told you to keep your ass in the car,” Bunche said as the investigator tended to him—in obvious pain but seemingly intent on surviving.
“Save it,” Gunner said.
“Is Al …”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
Bunche tried to nod. “Motherfucker must’ve been waitin’ for us, or somethin’. He was tipped off.”
<
br /> Gunner shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’s another dead man back there besides Al.”
“So? What’s that supposed to prove?”
“It doesn’t prove anything. But the way it looks to me, this guy was out on the patio when Al showed up, and Dobbs was in the house, getting another brew out of the ’box, or something, I don’t know. Al popped the other guy, I assume because he made a move, and then Dobbs came out of the house and popped him.”
“And me,” Bunche said, grimacing like he was about to pass out.
“Yeah.”
“Did you get ’im? Tell me you got the sonofabitch.”
“No. But he won’t get far. How many friends can he have in Fontana?”
“Go get the fucker! He’s hurt!”
“You hit him?”
“I think so, yeah.” Bunche grimaced again and said, “Hurry up, goddamnit! Before the asshole gets away!”
Hearing voices behind him, Gunner looked over his shoulder to see that neighbors were starting to gather around out on the sidewalk nearby, watching him and Bunche converse.
“You going to be all right?” he asked the detective.
Bunche nodded and tried to elaborate, but he couldn’t get the words out through his pain.
“I’ll have somebody put a call in, they haven’t already, then ask a sister or two to come hold your hand till the troops arrive. Okay?” Gunner stood up.
“Watch your ass, man,” Bunche found the strength to tell him.
Gunner nodded at him and said thanks, then was gone.
He hadn’t looked like it when he’d fled the scene, but Dobbs was indeed doing a good job of bleeding, himself.
The spotty crimson trail he left behind wasn’t as easy to follow along the streets and sidewalks of Sunset Ranch as a painted yellow stripe might have been, but it led Gunner to him, all the same, only eleven minutes after the investigator had started tracking him.
He was hiding in the ghost town-like tract of unfinished homes Gunner had seen earlier, over on the opposite side of the street from Sunset Ranch.
He had taken a long, circuitous route to get here, but get here the killer had. Gunner was certain of it. The blood spilling out of him in greater and greater quantities seemed to leave little doubt. Using a strong penlight, Gunner had traced it across the street, before and beyond the chain-link fence surrounding the property, and down a still-unpaved street to a two-story house that was little more than a wood-frame shell. Its exterior walls were all in place, but the interior they surrounded was in its infancy, consisting of nothing but naked wood and fiberboard, exposed copper plumbing and sawdust. Gunner followed Dobbs’s bloody trail right up to the open front door and stopped, considering his options.
As he had only one, he moved forward and slid inside, his pulse racing like a Japanese bullet train.
The house was as silent as a crypt, and every bit as dark. The only sounds he could hear, he was making himself, the floorboards beneath his feet mildly protesting his every step. His penlight was off now, a target beacon he preferred Dobbs didn’t see, so the signs that had brought him this far were much more difficult to read; he could try to read them regardless, but he didn’t want to. He kept his eyes on the floor looking for blood, instead of on his surroundings, Dobbs was likely to blow his head off. The only way to find Bertelsen’s killer now, if he didn’t want to risk getting ambushed, was the old-fashioned way: make a slow, methodical search of the premises until Dobbs turned up.
Shit! Gunner thought to himself.
He did three rooms on the first floor—the living room, the dining room, and what looked like some kind of den. He found nothing. He was still making the only sounds he could hear in the house, and it seemed to him they were getting louder every minute. If Dobbs didn’t know he was here by now, the man was deaf, wherever the hell he and his shotgun were hiding. Around the next corner, maybe?
Gunner started for the nearest open doorway and swallowed hard, his mouth completely dry.
It was a bathroom, with a tub and a separate shower stall. The tall glass door on the stall was still covered by its protective brown paper mask, so that Gunner couldn’t see what lay beyond it in the stall itself, if in fact anything—or anyone—did. He edged closer for a better look, but it didn’t help; he still couldn’t see anything. Moving to the far side of the shower, he held the Ruger in his right hand, reached for the door handle with his left, and started to jerk it open—
—when he finally heard someone else make a floorboard creak, off in another part of the house.
He wasn’t sure, but he thought it had come from somewhere above his head, up on the second floor. He cautiously made his way back out to the front of the house and stood alongside the ascending staircase, listening up. He didn’t hear a thing. The old familiar silence of the place was back again, in full force. He began to wonder if he hadn’t imagined the creaking floorboard, or if what he’d heard had just been the building settling, the way even completed homes liked to do from time to time.
And then he saw the blood.
It was up about ten or eleven steps from the bottom, a blotchy wet pool soaking into the wood. Gunner hadn’t seen it when he’d first come in, his eyes hadn’t made friends with the dark yet, and he’d never been this close to the stairs. But standing where he was now, just to the side and at eye level with the step it was staining, he was in perfect position to see the blood, though it still would have been easy to miss, he’d been unlucky enough to do that.
He craned his neck to see what he could of the landing at the top of the stairs, but saw nothing but an ominous mass of shadows up there. The ideal place for Dobbs to await his imminent arrival.
Again, Gunner paused to consider his options, and for the second time in twenty minutes, realized he had only one. He wanted to bring Dobbs in, he was going to have to go up and get him.
Gunner started up the stairs, slowly.
Then he stopped, only two steps off the first-floor landing. He had an idea.
There was a small bucket of spackle sitting on the floor nearby, and he retrieved it. It was about the size and weight of a gallon of ice cream. Standing off to the side of the staircase again, keeping his eyes open for any movement above him, he gingerly placed the bucket on its side about eight or nine steps up, then gently nudged it forward and stepped back. The bucket rolled noisily down the stairs, striking first one step, then a second, then a third …
Dobbs made his play when it hit the fourth.
He leapt into view up at the top of the stairs and his shotgun spit fire, twice spraying buckshot down the empty staircase. As Dobbs’s face filled with surprise, Gunner reached around the staircase railing and squeezed the Ruger’s trigger three times, bringing Dobbs down toward him like a boulder in an avalanche. Dobbs tumbled down the staircase and stopped halfway, his body folded up in the shape of a dead man. Gunner put a hand to his throat, checking for a pulse, and held his breath, hoping the sonofabitch was somehow still alive.
Then he went to tell Bunche the good news.
nineteen
WHATEVER IT TOOK TO PUT AN ANIMAL LIKE ANGELO Dobbs in his grave, both Bunche and Gunner had failed to do it that Friday morning.
Bunche had hit him once in the right thigh, and two of Gunner’s three rounds had put holes in his left arm and upper chest, respectively. But Dobbs would not die. He defied their collective efforts to end his life, and he did so with robust glee, treating his wounds in the days that followed like bee stings he barely felt the need to scratch. Some people were just like that, Gunner knew. So full of evil; so reinforced by it, you couldn’t dent them; they were all but immortal.
And they loved to boast about it.
Killers like Russell Dartmouth took no pride in what they did; they saw their acts of violence not as works of art, but as unfortunate measures the world had forced them to take. From the moment he had been picked up off the street in front of Mickey’s, early Friday morning after the barber had called 911 to say he wa
s out there handcuffed to a lamppost, Dartmouth had done nothing but rage. He couldn’t articulate his motives for murdering Roman Goody, and he had no desire to try. Receiving credit for homicide was of no interest to him whatsoever.
Monsters like Dobbs were different.
The men and women cut from his mold were ashamed of nothing; they treated their every accomplishment like a badge of honor, something to show the world with pride and self-satisfaction. No crime was too vile or too senseless to confess to; no theft, no rape, no disfigurement of the innocent. And certainly no murder. Murder was the greatest trophy of all.
Murder was the private domain of the chosen few, and Dobbs would never commit one he didn’t want to accept responsibility for.
“Yeah, I killed the bitch,” he said when they asked him about Nina Pearson. Straight out, no hesitation, no worry over how he would say it. He told them he didn’t need a lawyer, whatever they wanted to ask him, they could ask him. He was going back to the joint for the rest of his life with or without a lawyer, who the hell were they trying to kid?
Yeah, he’d been looking for Jimmy Gatewood that night.
Yeah, he’d gone to the wrong house.
Yeah, he’d been high when he got there.
And man, they should have seen what it had looked like, that bitch’s head flying apart all over her perfectly spotless kitchen, ha-ha.
Gunner heard it all secondhand, of course. Poole gave him a full report. The investigator listened to the disturbing details in silence, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. He hadn’t thought it would make much difference to him, Dobbs surviving the holes he’d put in his ass rather than dying as a result of them, but now he knew he’d been mistaken. It would always make a difference. Not killing Dobbs when he’d had the chance would stand as one of his life’s greatest regrets, whether the act would have brought Nina back to him or not.
Naturally, the story broke fast and made the news everywhere, but as early Friday as he could manage it, Gunner delivered it to Mimi Hillman and Wendy Singer personally. Singer took it hard, but Gunner’s Momma Hillman took it much worse than that. Having to live with the idea that her daughter had died at the hands of an abusive husband had been difficult enough for her, but to hear now that Nina’s death had been the result of mere chance, of something so tragic and meaningless as a loaded crackhead’s stupid mistake … It was almost too much for her to bear.
It's Not a Pretty Sight Page 24