Not Long for This World by Gar Anthony Haywood Read Free Book Online Page A

of that. I’ve lived in this part of the city all of my thirty-one years; I had the same obstacles of peer pressure and environmental deficiencies to overcome as Rookie, and you see how I’ve turned out, what I’ve managed to accomplish. Rookie should be encouraged by my success; he should see it as proof of his own potential, but instead he merely finds it laughable. He’s a quitter and a fool, and I pity him for that.
    “However, while the boy may be guilty by association of murder, he himself has never actually killed anyone before. And this is not just me talking; this is a matter of record. He’s never even been accused of murder before. So I wonder, why is everyone so eager to believe he’s committed one now? Because another Blue says he did?”
    “There’s the matter of his car. The blue Maverick,” Gunner said. “And the witness who’s placed both Mills and Rookie inside it.”
    “Yeah, the witness. I’d forgotten about her. She’s something else to think about, isn’t she?”
    “How do you mean?”
    “I mean that she’s a real bolt out of the blue. A rare find. Most people I know see a man killed in a drive-by, they don’t rush out to make it a matter of public record. They go home and try to forget about it, pretend it never happened.”
    “You trying to say she’s lying?”
    “I’m trying to say that maybe she’s confused,” Davidson said. “With a man like Lovejoy getting killed and all, maybe she saw an opportunity to be a star and jumped on it. All the police would’ve had to do was coax her a little bit. Convince her it was a Maverick she saw, and not a Pinto or a Comet. You know how things like that can happen.”
    Gunner did but chose not to say so.
    “Or maybe she’s just saying what she was told to say,” Davidson continued. “Maybe the Blues are being fingered for Lovejoy’s murder because it’s so easy to see them doing it.”
    “You’re talking about a frame.”
    “That’s right. And why not? Where is it written that all of Lovejoy’s enemies had to be gangbangers, that no one else could have wanted to see the man dead?”
    Davidson was asking better questions than Gunner was, and the role reversal made the detective uncomfortable.
    “I were you, I’d look at all the possibilities,” Davidson suggested.
    “Thanks. I intend to.”
    Gunner took a business card from his wallet and passed it across the desk.
    “I’m getting paid to clear Mills of Lovejoy’s murder, if I can manage it,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t do the same for Rookie if the opportunity presents itself. All I’m after is the truth; I don’t care who it condemns or vindicates. If you hear from Rookie, tell him that for me. Give him my number; tell him I just want to talk.”
    “Sure,” Davidson said, pocketing the card without even looking at it, like a street flyer he intended to trash at his earliest convenience.
    “You love the kid like you say, you’ll let me help him,” Gunner said, standing up. “Because I don’t think there’s anyone else out there who even cares enough to try.”
    He waited for Davidson to nod before showing himself to the door.

chapter four

    H arold ain’t home,” the little boy at the door said.
    “How about your mother? Can I talk to her?”
    The boy shook his dusty head from side to side. “Momma’s at work.”
    There were five kids in all that Gunner could see from where he was standing outside the decrepit two-bedroom apartment in Willowbrook in which Harold “Smalltime” Seivers lived: the boy at the door, who looked about five; two younger boys and a slightly older girl watching television on the floor; and a toddler of indeterminate sex dressed in blue, pulling on the curtains of a window on the far side of the room. The girl and one of the boys on the floor were playing tug-of-war with a pair of pliers, fighting for the right to change the channel on their knobless and archaic rotary-tuned television set.
    “Isn’t someone