It's Not a Pretty Sight by Gar Anthony Haywood Page B

sorry ass, but somebody else did it for me. Ask Goldy, she’ll tell you.” He coughed spasmodically and spit up some more blood.
    “Who is Goldy?”
    “The bitch …” He fell silent, as if his train of thought had deserted him. He turned his head to one side and kept it there, for no apparent reason. Gunner was beginning to think he’d passed on when he suddenly spoke again, picking up right where he’d left off. “The bitch I was with that night. Who the fuck you think?”
    Incredibly, he actually managed to laugh, making a sound deep down in his throat like a handful of rusty screws being rattled about at the bottom of a tin can. Gunner couldn’t help but wince. “She thought if she lef’ me, I wouldn’t have nobody. Like I was gonna be lonely, or somethin’. Sheeit … Dumb-ass bitch, I was gettin’ busy with a diff’rent ho every goddamn night!”
    The supreme irony he found in this last compelled him to laugh again, and again he paid for the privilege with a bloody cough, long and loud and coarse as sandpaper.
    “I told you to shut up,” Gunner said once more, and this time it was no mere suggestion. He’d heard Nina referred to as a bitch twice now, and he wasn’t going to hear her dishonored like that again. He didn’t have that kind of patience.
    When he stood up and walked back to the telephone, Foley said, “Man wants to talk, let ‘im talk. An’ if he wants to die, let ‘im die. What the hell should we care, he wants to laugh hisself to death?”
    “You want to know why we should care?” Gunner asked, flipping through the pages of a pocket telephone book for Matthew Poole’s number at home. “I’ll tell you why: Because I just shot a man who murdered an ex-girlfriend of mine. With my own gun, at my place of business. After calling all over town for two days, trying to run him down. Are you getting the picture yet, Foley, or do I have to go on?”
    “They gonna think you set this up.”
    “You’d better believe they are.”
    “An’ if the boy dies …”
    “I’m going to be in the deepest of deep shit. Yeah.”
    “Jesus,” Foley said.
    “Go keep an eye on him, will you? I’ve got one more call to make.”
    It was like asking Foley to keep an eye on the back row of teeth in a live alligator’s mouth, but he did as he was told, limping slowly away like an old arthritic turtle.
    When Poole answered the phone, picking up after only three rings, Gunner said, “You want Michael Pearson, come get him.”
    “Who the hell is this?”
    “Get your fat ass out of the bed and think about it. It’ll come to you.”
    “Gunner?”
    “Hurry up, Poole. We’re here at Mickey’s, waiting. How much longer Pearson’ll be around, though, I can’t say.”
    Rather than ask what that was supposed to mean, the cop said, “You were told to leave Pearson to me.” Understanding that what Gunner was leaving unsaid was not good, and already pissed off about it.
    “Do me a favor, Lieutenant. Get down here first, and give me my thirty whacks later. Okay?”
    He hung up the phone.
    Somewhere off in the distance, many worlds away, the baleful song of a siren began to grow from a whisper to a scream.
    Gunner prayed to God it was singing for him.

five
    “Y OU ’ VE JUST MADE A CAREER CHANGE ,” P OOLE SAID . “Your cousin the plumber’s gonna have himself a partner again.”
    “Del’s an electrician,” Gunner said. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”
    “Plumber, electrician. Same difference. Either way, you’re gonna be doin’ somethin’ else with your time besides makin’ my life miserable. Unless you wanna play private dick in some other state of the Union. You could always try that, I suppose.”
    “If any other state’d have you,” Detective John Gruber said. Poole’s partner on the Nina Pearson murder case, Gruber was a short, disagreeable white man with a gap-toothed grin and flat head; a cop who never opened his mouth unless he had something nasty or vulgar to