and neo-Nazis—Nazis!—had emerged from America’s shadows to take center stage, and men and women like Gunner were once again being forced to assert their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on a regular basis. This wasn’t America prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by any means, but that was where the country seemed to be headed, following the lead of its commander in chief, a real estate huckster turned politician who made lying into the camera both an art form and a weapon of mass destruction.
Gunner’s cell phone had to ring twice to draw him back from the depths of his growing funk.
The name on the phone’s screen belonged to his cousin the electrician, Del Curry. He didn’t have his Bluetooth headset on, and his first impulse was to just let the phone ring; wind noise made the device all but worthless in the convertible, and he didn’t want to risk a ticket for driving with the phone up to his ear. Still, any man as short on paying work as Gunner was had to look for opportunity at every turn, and Del had sent prospective clients his way before, so he snatched the phone off the seat and answered it before a third ring tone was complete.
“Del, what’s up?”
The man on the other end of the line was already talking over him. “Aaron? Cuz?”
It sounded like Del, but he couldn’t be sure. The voice had been faint and all but drowned out by some kind of stuttering background noise.
“Man, I fucked up,” Del said, and if the words themselves hadn’t been clear, the way in which he had uttered them—through a despondency that had him crying like a baby—would have been. And despondency wasn’t Del Curry’s thing. “I really fucked up.”
“Fucked up how? Man, what are you talking about?”
His cousin didn’t answer; all Gunner could hear instead was that same dissonant thrumming sound in the background, vaguely familiar yet hard to identify.
“Del!”
“They’re gone, cuz. My girls. They’re both gone and it’s my fault,” Del said, trying to pull himself together. “Ain’t nobody’s fault but mine.”
He fell silent again, and somehow Gunner knew he had just heard Del’s voice for the final time. He shouted his cousin’s name into the phone repeatedly, trying now to steer the Cobra off the freeway by force of will alone, but it was hopeless. The cell connection died and Del was gone.
Just in time for Gunner to realize that the incessant droning he’d been hearing over the phone, and the buzzing of three helicopters flying high above his head, had been one and the same.
1
“AND THAT WAS ALL HE SAID?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t—”
“No. He didn’t say anything more than what I’ve just told you, for what? The fourth time now?”
“We apologize, Mr. Gunner,” the detective said. His name was Luckman, Jeff, and his low-key manner was almost soothing enough to compensate for the freezing cold of the little police interrogation room and the rickety, uneven legs on Gunner’s chair. “But we’re just trying to understand what happened here.”
“You’ve already told me what happened. My cousin killed his wife and tried to kill his daughter, then turned the gun on himself.”
Even now, many hours after he’d first heard the news, it sounded more like a joke than a matter of fact. Del and his wife, Noelle, were dead, and their twenty-two-year-old daughter Zina was in critical condition out at Harbor UCLA. All of them shot at Zina’s home with a 9mm handgun registered to Del. The detectives said the young woman’s chances of survival didn’t look good.
“Maybe you’d like to take a break,” Luckman said.
“A break’s not going to change anything. I’ve told you all I know. The man said he’d fucked up but didn’t tell me how. He said his girls were dead and that it was his fault. Then he hung up. That’s it. There is no more.”
“He didn’t say he’d just shot his wife and daughter?”
“No.”
“Or that he was about to take his own life?”
More forcefully this time: “No.”
“And you have no idea why Mr. Curry would have wanted to harm either person.”
“None whatsoever.”
“Were there any problems in the home that you were aware of? Were Mr. Curry and his wife getting along?”
“Yes. I mean, I think they were. Del loved Noelle. And I’m sure she loved him.”
That had always been Gunner’s understanding, anyway. Del didn’t talk much about his family life, even with Gunner. When he did, however, it was usually to recount a story that made everything on that side of his world sound either funny or touching, Noelle in particular. On those rare occasions Gunner saw her, at family barbecues or holiday dinners, Del’s wife—a tall, heavyset woman with flawless dark skin and a dazzling smile—gave him no reason to suspect she was anything but happy.
“What about money? Could Mr. Curry have been in any kind of financial trouble?”
“Money was always an issue, sure. And lately, more so than ever, I suppose. But was he hurting bad enough to do something like this?” Gunner shook his head, unable to fathom the possibility. “I can’t see it.”
And yet, something had driven Del to do what he’d done. Something larger and more pitch black than anything Gunner, prior to today, could have ever dreamt his cousin was coping with. Unless things hadn’t really gone down the way the cops were saying they had. Luckman and his partner didn’t seem to have any doubts whatsoever, but Gunner asked the detective again if there was a chance—any chance at all—that somebody other than Del had done the shooting.
“We can’t answer that conclusively until we’ve completed our investigation, of course,” Luckman said. “But right now? Based upon witness accounts and the evidence at the scene? I’d say there’s little to no chance that anyone other than Mr. Curry was involved.”
The “witness accounts” he was referring to were statements they’d received from two neighbors of Del’s daughter, who’d reported hearing a loud argument taking place in the house, followed shortly thereafter by gunfire. One of these people had called 911, and paramedics and police had arrived on the scene just in time to hear one more shot, the one that had apparently ended Del’s life.
The ghetto bird cutting circles in the air above Zina’s home hadn’t been interested in Gunner’s cousin, at all. Its focus, and that of the news ‘copters accompanying it, was another crime altogether, just blocks away. Which was how shit often went down in Gunner’s world: one disaster after another, packed as tightly together as rounds in a magazine. The cruel coincidence only served to make Del’s death just that much harder for Gunner to swallow.
As he was the last person to speak to Del before he died, Luckman and his partner were looking to Gunner for answers, and they seemed willing to lean on him all day and night to get them. If Gunner couldn’t
