Fear of the Dark (16 page)

Ferris made a whimpering sound and started to fold in Gunner’s arms, passing out. He hit the floor like a bag of cement when Gunner let him go, too busy watching the Browning stare him down to do anything else.

Carrying a weapon of his own, the little man in the hood came forward to relieve the detective of the Police Special, and Gunner turned it over without resistance, saying nothing. He was trying to decide if he had ever heard the big man’s voice before this moment.

“How the hell’d you get this?” the little man demanded, referring to the .357. Now Gunner had heard both men speak, but their voices were muffled behind the black hoods and it was all he could do to make out what they were saying.

“I found it in a trash can out in Hollywood,” Gunner said, emotionlessly. “You don’t remember putting it there?”

“Damn, Gunner. You are one determined motherfucker,” the larger man said, issuing the compliment with some amusement. “Anybody ever tell you that?”

Gunner wouldn’t answer him.

“You’ve got what some people might call stick-to-it-iveness. Which means you have no idea when to quit. Do you, smart ass?”

Still, Gunner wouldn’t answer. The big man finally drew the Browning away from his face and gestured with it toward the front of the house. “Back to the living room,” he said. “Now.”

His cordiality was gone. He left his associate to take on the task of bringing Ferris around to rejoin them and led Gunner into the living room, using the Browning to coerce him into a seat at one end of the couch. The little man in the hall slapped Ferris with an open hand until the fat man was conscious again, then jostled and wrestled the stumbling giant into position beside Gunner.

“What the hell is happening?” Ferris asked, looking sick again.

“Shut the fuck up!” the little man told him, lackadaisically training the midnight special in his left hand upon him.

Watching Gunner closely, the big man said, “You’re awful quiet, my man. Cat got your tongue?”

Gunner shrugged. “You have the floor, for now. Make the most of it.”

The taller man’s grin nearly shone through his disguise. “All right, then. I’ll be brief. But I’d advise you to listen up, because this will be complicated. And I’m only going to recite it once.” He shook his head. “You’ve been fucking up, Gunner. Left and right. You’ve been taking yourself and the Mickey Mouse job you do a little too seriously, and the party or parties my associate and I represent don’t appreciate it. For them, you’ve become more trouble than you’re worth. So the two of us have been asked to see what we can do about persuading you to back off for a while.

“Now. To achieve that effect we could kill you, of course. As a matter of fact, in retrospect, maybe that’s what we should have done in the first place, considering all the good it did us to fix you up for Mr. Townsend’s murder. But we’ve decided we don’t want to kill you. Seems we’ve come to like you, in a way.

“So what we’re going to do, we’re going to help you instead. We’re going to make up for past transgressions and work something out that will hopefully prove beneficial to all concerned. You with me so far?”

Gunner didn’t say one way or the other.

“I’ll take that to mean you are. So here’s the plan. You’re going to wise up and walk away, Gunner. You’re going to stop annoying my employers and live to tell about it. You’re going to forget about Denny Townsend and Buddy Dorris, and you’re going to forget you ever knew Buddy’s sister Verna. You’re going to go home and hide your face for a long, long time.

“Of course, in order to do that, you’re going to have to get squared away with the authorities. But that’s cool. Because we’re going to fix that for you, too. With ease.”

He took Gunner’s handgun from the smaller man beside him and began to remove shells from the cylinder. “By the way. Has your buddy Ferris here told you what he
really
was to the late Denny Townsend? Or did he just give you that tired old ‘we were the best of friends’ horse manure?”

Ferris started to say something, but thought better of it. He looked to Gunner as if he could use another cigarette.

The big man in the hood glanced up to watch Ferris squirm, his hands still at work unloading Gunner’s hefty .357. “Hell, they were banging buddies,” he said, matter-of-factly. “They were partners in the crime of homo-you-know-what-is.”

“That’s a lie!” Ferris said.

“What they had was the real thing. An intense bonding of the souls, my sources tell me. But you know how those tempestuous romances can be. They run hot and cold. Tempers sometimes flare. Especially when there’s a jealous hot-head like Stanley involved.”

“That’s a fucking lie! We were friends, that’s all! Just good friends!”

The little man with the little gun stepped up to kick Ferris full in the mouth, like a ten-year-old bully imitating something he’d seen in a martial-arts movie. Ferris came out of it cheaply enough: he had a cut lower lip and a good reason to say nothing more.

“What I’m getting at,” the larger man continued, as if blind to the interruption, “is that it just so happens that Ferris and his lover boy had one of their more impressive spats only days before the latter met his untimely death last Thursday. Ferris made some wild accusations and even threatened to do his beloved bodily harm. All in a
very
public place. And that means he had what, Mr. Private Investigator?”

“A motive,” Gunner said, starting to squirm himself.

“That’s right.” The larger man reached out to hand Gunner’s .357 back to the little man standing beside him and slipped its slugs into a trouser pocket. “So how does this story grab you: You went looking for Townsend and caught his spurned lover’s attention in the process. The drop at the Y was his idea; he set it up and made sure you followed him there from Townsend’s apartment so he could knock Townsend off and arrange things so you’d take the rap.”

Ferris was asking for another kick in the mouth; he was shaking his head for all he was worth.

“What about him?” Gunner asked, nodding at the fat man on the opposite end of the couch. “That supposed to be his story, too?”

“Let me finish,” the hooded one said.

“You mean there’s more?”

“Oh, yeah. The happy ending. You look for the man who framed you for murder, and you find him. Here. But when you find him, he has a gun. Your gun. The one he shot Townsend with. Fortunately, being the wise man you are, you have a gun, too. This one.” He had a second weapon in his hand now, an off-brand .38 with a long nose. “Can you guess the rest?”

Gunner could sense a wave of nausea coming on. His mouth was dry and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “I kill him. In self-defense.”

“That would be acceptable to us, yes. Or maybe he kills you in self-defense. Two men, two guns. Two bullets. These things are hard to call.”

Ferris started to scream, but the shorter man in black was on top of him before he could get it going.

“Get him to his feet,” the bigger man said, then turned to face Gunner again. “You too, hero.”

Gunner didn’t move. They were giving him a fifty-fifty chance to survive the night, and a chance like that was nothing to rush into.

“One more time,” the man in the hood said, once more holding the Browning an inch from his face.

Gunner stood up.

The big man walked him over to the mouth of the hallway and turned him to face the living room again, where Ferris stood trembling a good nine yards away, the little pistol of his smaller unwanted guest pressed hard against his temple. He was crying. Gunner’s Police Special was forced into Ferris’s left hand as the off-brand .38 was forced into Gunner’s right. They were made to hold the weapons loosely at their sides before the two men in black backed off, a few feet from each, the Browning pointed at Gunner’s right eye, the midnight special at Ferris’s left ear.

There was no doubt in Gunner’s mind that Ferris would play the game straight. He wasn’t strong enough to play it any other way.

“Go for it,” the big man said abruptly.

The corpulent white man’s arm came up at the word
go
, but Gunner’s .38 spat a quick yellow flash and Ferris froze, his lifeblood suddenly spilling from a hole in his chest no larger than a quarter. He went down with a look of modest surprise growing hard on his face, a look Gunner knew he would see in his mind’s eye for a long time to come.

“Aw, damn,” the tall black man in the silken hood said to no one in particular. “You know what I think I did?”

“It wasn’t loaded,” Gunner said, without looking away from Ferris’s prone body. He couldn’t
make
himself look away.

“Yeah. Must have taken one too many bullets out of poor Stanley’s gun, huh?”

He brought the butt of the Browning down hard upon Gunner’s head and laughed. Gunner collapsed at the waist and started downward, fast.

It was a long fall to a far better world.

he blind nurse, who had sold her illegitimate baby to an ex-con employed by the hospital’s linen delivery service before the speedboat accident that had claimed her sight, was paying a teenage babysitter to steal the infant back from its adopted parents when Ira Zeigler finally said, “Turn that shit off, Aaron, and listen to what I’m telling you.”

Zeigler was Gunner’s fifty-one-year-old lawyer and recalcitrant father figure, a man with no patience for inattentive clients and no taste for bad soap operas. Especially now. Only yesterday he had prostrated himself before a bail bondsman named Zero to get Gunner released from jail, using up a hefty favor he had been saving for a rainy day, and the black man was acting as if it were no big deal; as if $25,000 were a pittance Zeigler could beg off any one of a million friends without half trying.

Gunner turned off the TV.

“They’ve got you by the balls, kid. You know that.”

“By the balls,” Gunner said, nodding. It was almost two in the afternoon, and he was still dressed for bed.

“Manslaughter, maybe. Withholding evidence, for sure. Obstruction of justice. Two counts of breaking and entering, and one count of carrying an illegal firearm. That’s just for starters. What they’ll spring on you later, God only knows.”

Gunner shrugged. “They’ll think of something, I’m sure.”

Zeigler glared at him. He had hard brown eyes set in deep pockets of flesh that could make a dust pile out of Mount Rushmore at a hundred and fifty paces. “All right, that’s it. Cut the crap and tell me what’s going on.”

“Crap?”

“I want the truth, you smart-ass bastard. I want to know what happened, and how. Or am I supposed to be just as goofy as the cops are for buying that goddamned fairy tale you came up with?”

“It’s no fairy tale, Ziggy. I just fucked up again, that’s all. I got in a little over my head and made some poor decisions.”

“Poor
don’t begin to cover it, kid. Try
masochistic.
Or
boneheaded.
Or both.”

“Okay.”

“You’re telling me you let a fat bum like Ferris steal your gun and kill somebody with it. And that you in turn found another gun, broke into his home and killed
him
when he confronted you there.”

“That’s what I said, yeah.”

“That’s a load of shit!”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time. I said I fucked up.”

“You fucked up, so you tell the police
everything?
Without talking to me first? I haven’t taught you how to cover your ass any better than that?” Zeigler shook his head in wonder, red-faced. “You got any fruit in the box? An apple, maybe?”

He left the couch and headed for the kitchen. He was a physical fitness nut who spent as much of his time counting calories as he did bail money, and there was nothing his small, rock-hard frame could not do better or faster than those of many men half his age. Only the luminous bald spot at the back of his head was suggestive of his advanced years, and that was due more to worry for the low-lifes he habitually represented than the ravages of time.

When he returned from the kitchen to sit down again, he had an overly ripe pear in his hand. Gunner’s place was a war zone and Gunner himself looked like a Skid Row reject, but Zeigler didn’t say so. The kind of problems the black man had now, the Good Housekeeping seal would do little to fix.