Good Man Gone Bad. Gar Anthony Haywood

      They kept him down at the Southeast station for another forty minutes, Luckman finally content to answer more questions than he asked. In the end, both he and Gunner left the little interrogation room as confused as they had been going in.

      Gunner drove out to Harbor UCLA hospital on automatic pilot, no more aware of what he was doing than a rock was of rolling downhill. A host of news reporters had tried to get a statement out of him at the station while he was sleepwalking to his car, but they would have had better luck drawing a quote from one of the wax figures at Madame Tussauds. He vacillated over which inalienable fact was more difficult to believe: that Del was dead, or that he’d killed himself after turning a gun on both his wife and daughter.

      Either way, Gunner knew his world had just narrowed dramatically. Del hadn’t been his only family, but he had been Gunner’s closest. Gunner had lost contact with his younger brother, John, almost a year ago now—the last he’d heard, the retired Navy man had been living somewhere just outside of Portsmouth, Virginia—and his baby sister, Jo, was up in Seattle. He had a nephew here in Los Angeles—his late sister Ruth’s son Alred—“Ready,” as he was known on the street, was a bona fide gangster Gunner treated like a rabid dog on too short a chain. Del, by contrast, was someone he saw or spoke to over the phone at least two or three times a week. The only child of his mother Juliette’s brother Daniel, Del was the nearest thing Gunner had to a confidant.

      And yet, as Gunner thought about it now, he realized that their frequency of contact had dropped off precipitously over the last two months or so. He’d last seen his cousin only three days earlier, at the Acey Deuce bar where they often hooked up, but prior to that, the two men hadn’t spoken in almost two weeks. As it was, that last night at the Deuce, they’d had almost nothing to say to each other; even the banter Gunner and Del liked to exchange with the bar’s loud-mouthed owner Lilly Tennell had been decidedly muted and uninspired. Looking back, Gunner could see that a space had opened up between them, a wedge of silence and secrecy that had crept up on them like a ghost, and it shamed him that it had taken him this long to become aware of it.

      He’d been too caught up in his own troubles to care if Del had developed any of his own. Maybe if he’d tried to talk to Del about the things that had been weighing on his own mind lately, his cousin would have felt obliged to reciprocate, giving Gunner a chance to defuse whatever it was that had driven him to murder-suicide. But men didn’t open themselves up to each other that way, especially when times were hard and complaining just made you feel like an old woman. Pride shut you down instead and made you pretend all was well, feeding the false hope that, no matter the odds against it, you could fix whatever was broken all by yourself.

      Still operating under a cocktail fog of guilt and reflection, Gunner parked the Cobra in the hospital lot and made his way up to the ICU where Zina Curry—assuming the girl was still alive—waited. He knew it would be some time before she’d be able to answer the questions he and the police had for her, if she ever recovered from her injuries enough to do so at all, but the girl was unmarried and childless and, as far as he knew, Gunner was her last living relative in Los Angeles. Somebody had to be there when she either opened her eyes again or passed on. It didn’t matter that he and Zina were, for all practical purposes, strangers—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her, and what little Del used to say about her hadn’t left him with anything more than a vague idea of what kind of foolishness she liked to watch on television or how much weight she’d lost or gained; she was family, and a man didn’t let family go unrepresented in hospital waiting rooms. Ever.

      When he found the nurses’ desk on the third floor, they told him Zina had just come out of surgery and was still on her way to the ICU recovery room. They couldn’t comment on her condition. He asked to speak with the doctor who’d performed her surgery and then followed the nurses’ directions to the waiting room, which was every bit as claustrophobic and depressing as he’d feared it would be. The walls were bare, the magazines were all unreadable, and the muted television was tuned to a cooking show he would have traded for a cartoon had he access to the remote. The room’s only other occupant, a fat white woman in a yellow blouse and gray sweatpants, sat in one corner crying the blues into a cell phone, making a mockery of a sign mounted directly over her head forbidding the use of such devices.

      Gunner figured he could live with her ignorance for a good five minutes; after that, the lady was going to need a new cell phone.

      He had calls of his own to make. Del’s parents, Daniel and Corinne, had to be informed of his death and Noelle’s, and the condition of their granddaughter. He would wait until he spoke to Zina’s surgeon before contacting them in Atlanta. With any luck, they would absolve him of any further responsibility and volunteer to pass the word on to anyone else in the family who needed to be notified. It was a selfish wish, but that was what he wanted.

      The big woman in the gray sweatpants and knockoff running shoes closed up her phone and waddled out of the room, leaving Gunner free to replumb the depths of his grief and confusion in relative peace. He tried the thought on for size one more time: Del was dead, and he’d murdered Noelle and tried to kill Zina.

      It still made no sense.

      It made no sense at all.