THE BACK DOOR OFF THE ALLEY at Mickey Moore’s Trueblood Barbershop led directly into Gunner’s office, but Gunner almost never used it as an entrance. Mickey was his unofficial secretary, and coming in through the front door enabled him to check for messages on his way to his desk. Today, however, whatever messages might be waiting for him could wait until hell froze over.
Today, the amusement he usually derived from walking the gauntlet of Mickey and whatever cast of fools, liars, and/or comedians was in the shop at the moment did not interest him in the least. He knew that word of Del’s death—and the crimes he was suspected of committing—would have reached this place by now, hotbed of community gossip that it was, and he was in no mood to deflect all the questions those in attendance would no doubt rain upon him. He had no way to answer those questions, and his ignorance was becoming a greater annoyance to him by the minute.
Still, he had no illusions that sneaking into his office through the back door was going to save him from Mickey himself. His landlord had a sixth sense where the shop was concerned and could detect the slightest disturbance within it, whether the shop was filled to capacity or as empty as a tomb. Mickey didn’t disappoint him. Gunner hadn’t completely closed the back door behind him before the barber split the beaded curtain that divided the two halves of the shop and started toward him, moving like a white-smocked spirit in the dark.
“Not now, Mickey,” Gunner said.
“I’m just checkin’ to see if you’re okay.”
“I’m okay.” Gunner fell into the chair behind his desk. “I just need a little time alone.”
“They say—” Gunner’s glare struck him silent. Mickey stood there for a moment, trying to decide how close to the edge of Gunner’s patience he should let his curiosity take him. Finally, he said, “Just so you know, reporters been calling askin’ for you all mornin’, and a couple have actually come in here lookin’ for you. I think one of ’em’s still parked out front.”
Gunner nodded. “Thanks.”
Mickey went to the doorway, turned before passing through the curtain to return to the head of hair he was supposed to be cutting. “He was a good man. No matter what might’a happened today, he was a good man.”
He walked out. Gunner watched the strands of walnut beads sway back and forth in his wake, and heard a host of anxious voices on the other side of the barrier welcome the barber’s return. Gunner counted three voices in all, including those of Joe Worthy and Chester Hayes, two of Mickey’s most regular customers—but it might have been four. He couldn’t trust his instincts enough to be sure of anything today.
He sat alone in the dark and closed his eyes, summoning the strength to do what he had to do next. He had put it off long enough. He picked up the phone on his desk, only to put it right back down again, having forgotten the instrument was nothing but a useless prop now. As he had his cable TV service, he’d canceled the phone’s landline a week ago, seeking one less bill to pay, and had been reduced ever since to being one of those people who lived and breathed at the mercy of a viable cell phone signal. It was a heartfelt loss. Maintaining a landline might have been ridiculously old school, even for him, but the comfort he found these days in things that were more reliable than fashionable could not be overstated.
Using his cell phone now, he called Del’s parents in Atlanta to give them the terrible news.
Daniel Curry answered the phone on the fourth ring, just as Gunner was about to lose his nerve and hang up. He hadn’t spoken to his uncle in over two years, and it made him sick to think that this was how he was going to break that silence, by dropping a bomb on the old man he couldn’t possibly see coming. Making every effort to be kind, he identified himself and got right to the point, not wanting small talk to give Daniel Curry any false hope that what he was about to hear was going to be anything less than devastating.
When Gunner was done and it was his uncle’s turn to speak, Del’s father reacted exactly the way Gunner thought he would. After letting the space of a few seconds go by, he said, “I don’t understand.”
And of course, Gunner couldn’t make him understand, as unable to understand it as he was himself. All Gunner could do was redeliver the bad news, over and over again, and promise to do whatever he could to help Daniel and Corinne Curry survive the dark days to come. Naturally, his uncle expected much more of him—he was the one out in Los Angeles, seeing Del on a regular basis—how could he not know more about what had happened than he was professing to know? How could Gunner not have more answers to Daniel Curry’s questions than he was offering? Wasn’t he some kind of policeman by trade? How could a policeman be as ignorant of his own cousin’s business as Gunner was making himself out to be?
And, most incredible of all, how could Gunner so willingly accept the authorities’ explanation for what had happened to Del and his family as fact when such a thing was so obviously impossible?
Gunner didn’t know what to say to any of this, especially the last, so he said very little. Apologies and condolences were his only recourse, and he offered up both until his voice was gone and his throat was dry. He let the call peter out with an exchange of sad goodbyes and hung up the phone, certain he had done all the damage his uncle and aunt—both well into their seventies—could endure.
They were going to fly out from Atlanta as soon as they could make arrangements, firmly convinced they were in a race against death to reach their only grandchild. Gunner had told his uncle what Zina’s doctor had told him: though the surgery to remove a bullet from the parietal lobe of the girl’s brain had been successful, and it appeared her injuries would not prove fatal, it would be hours yet before they could say what her long-term prognosis might be. She could suffer extensive memory loss, partial paralysis—or, God willing, she could recover completely. They were going to have to wait until the swelling in her brain receded and she regained consciousness to know.
As reasons to hope went, it wasn’t much, but for Gunner at least, it was better than nothing.
Somewhere in Los Angeles, Noelle had a younger brother, and a father in a convalescent hospital. Gunner had never met either man, but he’d heard enough from Del over the years that he knew the brother spent his time in and out of drug rehab, and the father suffered from dementia. Assuming they were still alive, they needed to be notified of Noelle’s death, as well, and Gunner would have felt obligated to make the calls now had he any idea where the two men could be reached. But he didn’t. He was thankful for small favors.
Sitting motionless behind his desk, listening to the chatter of Mickey and his customers out front, he considered his next move. He had paid work to do and that needed to come first. It was bad form to put off a client in hand just to hustle for your next one or two, regardless of how dire your future prospects appeared to be. He was weeks into a legal defense case for Kelly DeCharme, an attorney who occasionally retained him, and he had both personal and professional reasons for wanting to keep Kelly a satisfied customer.
On the professional side, he needed the work she gave him to keep coming; on the flip side, over the last fifteen days, he and Kelly had taken the first tentative steps into the muddy waters of a romantic relationship.
It was a romance long in the making, a surprising development neither had suspected was even possible this far down the road of their acquaintance. Physical attraction had always been part of the mix between them, ever since their first meeting over twenty years ago when the attorney, then on staff at the Public Defender’s office, had hired Gunner to assist her with a case she didn’t trust the city’s own detectives to reliably handle. She was a striking, dark-eyed brunette, and he was an older, bronze-skinned giant with a shaved head and a wry smile. But he was also a black pretend-cop working from the back of a Watts barbershop, while she was a white defense attorney with Century City aspirations, and the discordance of that combination was clear enough to them both that they’d never let their lightweight flirting take any kind of serious turn.
Until two weeks ago.
They’d met for dinner to talk about a case and allowed the personal to creep into the conversation near the end. She told him that her marriage of four years to a Woodland Hills dentist had ended in divorce six months earlier, and he countered by describing how his last attempt at a long-term relationship had taken its final breath almost a year before that. Neither could explain why afterward, but something in this exchange gave them the idea that the next logical step for them both was to sleep in the same bed, and that’s where they ended up that night.
Now they were gingerly going wherever that fateful evening seemed to be taking them. They’d had no regrets the morning after and were still waiting to see if any would ever develop. But they were taking it slow. Painfully slow. No multiple-night sleepovers, no talk about the future. She’d made no promises to him and he’d made none to her. If it all unraveled tomorrow, it wasn’t going to be because they’d pushed too hard.
Their business relationship, meanwhile, continued unabated. Gunner was being paid by DeCharme—now working for a private law firm in North Hollywood—to do legwork on a complicated murder case, and he was obligated to make this his first priority. But it wasn’t going to be his only priority. Finding out what had happened to Del, and why, was going to be a primary occupation for him, as well. Maybe it had been unfair of Daniel Curry to think his nephew should have seen this thing coming, and to have expected him to have all the answers to the questions Del had left his survivors to ask. But Gunner’s uncle would be well within his rights to hold him accountable if he didn’t seek those answers out now. He owed Del and his parents that much, at least.
Whatever the truth was, it wouldn’t bring anyone back from the dead. And knowing it could prove to be more terrible than not.
But that was a risk Gunner knew he was just going to have to take.