When Last Seen Alive by Gar Anthony Haywood Read Free Book Online Page A

for a moment, searching for some indication that the threat was insincere, only to discover just the opposite was true. He would die if he ever set foot in the Deuce again. He had never been so sure of anything in his life.
    “All right. Have it your way,” Frerotte said, trying to portray a man too big to be affected by so small a defeat as this. He turned to face Gunner one last time, said, “Until next time, my brother.”
    He closed the razor in his right hand lovingly, slipped it into his back pocket, and was gone.
    Nine years later, the “next time” Frerotte had referred to still had not materialized.
    Gunner had done everything in his power to avoid the big man, and Frerotte had never come looking for him, at least to the investigator’s knowledge. Gunner didn’t know why, and he didn’t much care; he was just glad to see Jack had lost interest. Cowens, meanwhile, left Los Angeles for good not long after his mutilation, some said for Atlanta, others Memphis, taking his girlfriend and a badly reattached nose with him. Gunner saw him once before his departure, pumping gas into a Lincoln at a station on Hawthorne Boulevard, and had a hard time not staring at the misaligned mass of flesh and bone Frerotte’s butchery had left him to live with. Neither one of them said a word about Barber Jack.
    After years of not doing so, it would have suited Gunner just fine to never speak the man’s name again, but now that was impossible. A janitor named Blue had seen to that.
    “What the hell you wanna ask me about him for?” Lilly Tennell asked Gunner, spilling Wild Turkey all over the Acey Deuce’s bar as she tried to pour him a shot and scold him at the same time. The big woman with the red smear of a mouth hadn’t been there the night her late husband had banned Frerotte from the premises, but it was a move she had always been strongly in favor of. She despised Frerotte with a passion and had been riding J.T. to close the Deuce’s doors to him from the moment she first laid eyes on him.
    “I need to talk to him, Lilly,” Gunner said. “For a case I’m working on.”
    “Ain’t a case in the world that important. Do yourself a favor and leave that motherfucker alone. You’ll live longer.”
    “I hear what you’re saying, and I feel the same way. But I don’t have a choice, I really have to talk to him.”
    “And you think I know where you can find him?”
    “I was hoping you might’ve heard something about that, yeah.”
    “His name don’t come up around here, Gunner. You know that.”
    “Doesn’t mean he hasn’t dropped in at least once since J.T. passed, just to see if he could get away with it.”
    Lilly laughed at the very thought. “Shit. I wish to God he had. He’d’ve lost more than his goddamn nose, he’d’ve tried comin’ in here.”
    “Then you don’t know where I can find him. That what you’re saying?”
    J.T.’s widow stared at him, two massive, meaty arms crossed in front of her chest, trying to decide if he was man enough to handle the information he was asking her to divulge. Gunner just let her look, knowing from experience how useless it was to press her when she was determined to be deliberate about such things.
    “Man came in here a while ago, said he an’ Jack was in the joint together once,” Lilly said eventually, her tone full of disdain and disapproval. “Talked about the time they did together like it was a vacation on the Riviera, or somethin’.”
    “And?”
    “And he said he just run into Jack a couple days before that, first time since he got out, over at one of them casinos over on Normandie. Jack’s a security man there, he said, you can believe that shit.”
    “Which casino was this?”
    “The Royalty Club, I think it was. I’m not sure.”
    “The one across the street from the Queen of Hearts.”
    “Yeah. But I could be wrong, like I said. Man was talkin’ to Benny Abbott that night, not me, so I’m only tellin’ you what I