Not Long for This World (29 page)

It wasn’t until he hit the street that Gunner remembered what he was driving. The Hyundai had completely slipped his mind. He had intended to return the car to his cousin Del this morning, after having retrieved his own—a fire-engine-red Ford Shelby Cobra perfectly suited to such urgent missions as this—from the downtown parking garage it had been stored in for nearly two months. But now … now he had less than twenty minutes to get from Lovejoy’s Palm Avenue Lynwood home to Willie Raines’s First Children of God Church in Inglewood—a distance of roughly eight miles—before the gangbanger peace summit was scheduled to begin, and he was going to have to do it in a Korean-made windup toy too slow to be accurately described as “lethargic.”

Were it possible to move the clock forward a good ten years, he could have taken what by then would be the newly completed 105 Freeway directly to his destination, as the freeway’s proposed route practically drew a straight line between Lovejoy’s home in the east and Raines’s church in the west, but as there was little more to the 105 today than an oft-broken swath of destruction and a handful of overpasses that led to nothing in all directions, he had to blaze another trail along existing surface streets. Naturally, the route he was forced to settle for only pointed out one of the primary reasons the new freeway was being built in the first place: There was no easy way to reach Inglewood from Lynwood, and vice versa. An eight-mile stretch on the map was going to be an eleven-mile trip in practice, all shortcuts considered.

Also, it was nearing the city’s lunch hour.

South on Burris Road to Rosecrans Boulevard, then west on Rosecrans toward Van Ness Avenue, Gunner pushed the little Hyundai along as hard as he dared, the whine of its overtaxed four-banger and anemic automatic transmission pleading with him to stop every inch of the way. The car, which hadn’t turned a single head in five weeks, was now making quite a spectacle of itself: Pedestrians and motorists alike were stopping dead in their tracks to watch it speed by, their faces alight with either amazement, amusement, or a combination of the two.

Gunner just let them look. This was no life-and-death matter he was rushing like a madman to resolve, he knew, at least not on the surface—being late for Raines’s peace conference was not likely to prove a “fatal” misfortune, by any means—and yet lives
did
hang in the balance, as far as he was concerned. For the
course
of six lives alone—
Cuz
and
Hood
lives—would almost certainly take a destructive turn for the worse if the gangbangers about to pass the peace pipe among themselves and Willie Raines were to discover—
after
the fact, and not
before
it—that they had played a crucial role in the holy man’s second, and perhaps even more hypocritical, great deception of their brethren. Their humiliation was the disaster Gunner was racing to avert, and he could only hope that by doing so he could diffuse—or at the very least
limit
—the violent repercussions that were likely to follow their inevitable awakening to Raines’s true colors.

If the Hyundai threw a rod through the windshield, it would die for a good cause.

The Hyundai didn’t die, however. It just lost the race. It sang all the songs of death, engine pealing on the straightaways, suspension groaning on the curves, until its tortuous journey through the occluded arteries of Rosecrans and Van Ness was over, and Gunner’s precious deadline had come and gone. The noontime peace summit had been underway a full four minutes when Gunner pulled the car into the large outdoor parking lot of the First Children of God Church. Any thoughts he might yet have entertained about crashing Raines’s party in mid-swing without causing too much of a stir were now lost forever, as he had to vie for a parking space with an incalculable fleet of television- and radio-news vehicles. Though the news conference scheduled to follow the closed-door main event was a good three hours away, the media had apparently descended upon the site early, smelling blood. If any part of Willie Raines’s well-intended little get-together was going to go awry, it was not going to go unreported.

Strangely, the LAPD did not appear to share the press’s unabashed interest in the affair. Making his way through the church’s grounds in search of the administration building, where the peace talks were reportedly taking place, Gunner failed to encounter the police in any of their myriad forms: no plainclothes detectives, no street cops in uniform, no black-and-white Chevys or Plymouths. Knowing Rod Toon as well as he did, Gunner assumed his CRASH unit’s conspicuous absence here had to be the result of some demand that Raines’s guests had made upon the Reverend, some condition they had placed upon their agreement to attend with which Raines had felt compelled to comply.

Gunner hoped to hell the Reverend knew what he was doing.

The mob of news people he had been hoping to avoid were assembled in the church’s meeting hall when Gunner came upon them. The
Times
story had said Raines’s news conference would convene in the church itself, but everyone appeared to be waiting here, instead. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Unlike the church, the small, white, windowless geodesic dome that was the hall was on the same side of the complex’s grounds as the administration building, for one thing. And from here, no one—including Gunner—was going to get in or out of the critical conference room within the administration building without being seen. Secondly, also unlike the church, the hall was where the
food
was. As Gunner watched from a safe distance, the media types were swarming around a large buffet table with vigor and vitality, exhibiting all the class and courtesy of a drunken rugby team negotiating for a loose ball.

Some might have wondered why Raines had ordered the buffet set up here, as opposed to the church, where the news conference was going to be held, but the Reverend’s reasoning was an open book to Gunner. Raines’s beloved new church would be the perfect place for this mad horde of reporters to roll tape and snap pictures in the summit’s aftermath: The cross in the background of every recorded image might serve to remind people who his “partner” in the endeavor had been. But he obviously wouldn’t want anybody breaking bread in there.

God’s house was no place for such vulgarity.

Gunner took in the debacle of the media’s assault upon the buffet table and imagined himself in the center instead, a madman who had just brought Willie Raines’s greatest hour to a premature end with a string of incredible allegations against the Reverend—allegations that, at this point, could neither be proven nor corroborated …

He made up his mind all over again: He would wait for the summit’s end to make his move.

“I take it you’re not hungry,” somebody said.

The voice behind the investigator had been smart and sweet, and he turned around to find that the woman it belonged to fitted both descriptions as well. Early twenties, tall, with a medium-sized Afro and a smile that could melt ice faster than a microwave. The prim and proper mode of dress said she was an aide—but not a bad one to have around, to be sure.

“Actually,” Gunner said, “I’m starving. But I’m not sure I’m up to fighting that mob for a plate.”

“Would you like me to go in and get something for you?”

“No, no. Thanks, anyway.”

“How about something to drink, then?”

Gunner shook his head. “I think maybe I’ll just go back to the car, wait there for the news conference to start.”

“Why wait in the car? You can wait in the church, if you like.” She pointed to the pronounced steeple that was visible above and beyond the roofline of the school building just across the way. “Bobby’s inside, he’ll show you where to sit and everything.”

She smiled again, making it an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“Okay. Thanks.”

He started off, until she said, “But it’s not going to happen, you know.”

He looked back at her. The wonderful smile was still there, but different, somehow.

“What’s that?”

“What you came here to see. Most of you, anyway. The summit’s failure. Reverend Raines’s humiliation. Some bloody fight between the gangbangers in his office that could ruin everything he’s worked so hard for. Nothing like that’s going to happen.” She shook her head softly, placidly. “The Good Lord won’t let it.”

Gunner just nodded his head, admiring the openness with which the young woman shared her faith.

“I hope you’re right,” he said, showing her a smile of his own.

He reached the church proper a few minutes later and entered through an open side door, expecting to find “Bobby” waiting for him within, as promised. Bobby, however, was nowhere to be found. In fact, the church was empty; Gunner had the building to himself.

And what a building it was.

Like its exterior, the interior of Willie Raines’s church was a definite departure from the classic Christian house of worship, in that it preferred asymmetry to balance, smoked glass to stained glass, and light pine pews to dark oaken ones. Still, it was no less eerie in the dark; its silence seemed just as deafening, and its massive chromium cross just as mournful. Gunner had to agree with Raines: This was no place to eat, drink, and be merry.

A series of tables had been set up end to end at the front of the church, before the altar, but that was the only sign of the impending news conference.

Gunner sat down in a pew at the back and contemplated going home. It was now twenty-five minutes after twelve; Raines and his esteemed panel of gangbangers would be at it hot and heavy by now. Immediately upon his arrival, five minutes late or not, Gunner still might have been able to close Raines’s circus before it had pitched its tent, but now that chance was gone. Now, there was nothing to do but try and catch Raines in between the summit and the news conference, to take him aside and remind him that Teddy Davidson was going to turn up eventually to blow the lid on things for good. Surely, Gunner thought, Raines would have to concede the point, and even be wise enough to use the news conference to make his fall from grace something less than a prime-time death-plunge straight to hell.

It wasn’t much to hope for, Gunner knew, but it was worth a try. So he stayed put in the empty church, waiting for an even emptier event, and pondered the mystery of Bobby—the missing usher—as a way of passing the time.

Then somebody up in the balcony stifled a sneeze.

It had been a man’s sneeze, squelched as well as two hands over his face could manage, but a sneeze just the same. With no other sound but Gunner’s own breathing with, which to compete, it had sounded like a cannon discharge. Gunner stood up and looked skyward.

“Bobby?”

Bobby, or whoever, didn’t answer. Neither did he, or whoever, sneeze again.

Gunner stepped into the church’s center aisle and took a few steps backward, moving toward the front to get a better view of the balcony, but could see little or nothing of what lay beyond its railing. The silence of the place had grown whole again, and it engulfed him. His stomach began to churn wildly; only dimly aware of it, he started down the aisle once more, this time heading toward the rear of the church, making a conscious effort to be quiet about it.

He found the staircase leading up to the balcony and began to ascend it. He gave no thought to reaching for the Ruger because he knew it wasn’t there. Toon had gleefully confiscated it. The staircase was curved, a tight spiral that climbed up and to the left, so that by the time he had any useful view of the landing and beyond, he would be more than visible to anyone up there—as if they needed the extra edge.

He was gathering himself to make a kamikaze charge forward when the man on the balcony grew tired of waiting for him and came down after him, instead. He just hopped down into Gunner’s view, staying to the other side of the staircase where he couldn’t be touched, and said hello.

“Get up here and shut the fuck up,” Teddy Davidson whispered angrily.

He had a short-nosed Colt AR-15 assault rifle in his hands and a look of great impatience on his face. His overall appearance was that of a skid-row bum as badly in need of a shave and a change of clothes as he was of a few hours sleep.

Gunner made him wait a whole tenth of a second before continuing up the stairs.

Up on the dark balcony above, a middle-aged black man with a gray-frosted Afro and a snow-white mustache lay prone upon a choir bench, one foot bare and a thick black dress sock stuffed into his mouth. His hands were tied with a leather belt behind his back. His eyes were open but lidded, dreamy; they seemed to be the only part of his body with any fight left in them.

Poor Bobby.

“You’re supposed to be in New Mexico by now,” Gunner told Davidson.

Davidson just stood there, out of Gunner’s reach, showing no desire to play the investigator’s game of Twenty Questions. “Ever hear of misdirection?” he asked acerbically, keeping his voice down to a dull, dry rasp.

Of course, Gunner had. Pro football was his life. The art of misdirection was a simple one: Fake one way, go the other. Induce the other guy to overcommit to one side, then head off in the opposite direction.

“Nobody west of Phoenix so much as gave me a second look,” Davidson said, grinning.

“They should have known you’d come back. I should have known you’d come back.”

Davidson merely shrugged.
C’est la vie
.

The last thing Davidson wanted to do was actually fire the gun. Gunner knew that. He had gone to a great deal of trouble to spring this one last, unforgettable surprise on Willie Raines and the world, and he would no doubt hesitate to throw it all away just to put a few gaping holes in a meddling private investigator if said investigator was to try something stupid … such as duck his head down and go for the gunman’s knees.…

“
What the fuck is this?
” a strange voice boomed from the direction of the staircase.

Davidson whirled, to find a pair of teenage gangbangers standing at the top of the landing, one tall and one short, both in a foul mood. The tall one wore a full-length black leather jacket and the short one had a toothpick in his mouth, but that was all the extraneous detail Gunner had time to note before he seized the opening their appearance gave him and slammed a fist across the right side of Davidson’s face, knocking him to his knees.