Free You Can Die Trying by Gar Anthony Haywood

hand and shook the hand Gunner was offering him with his right.
    “You’ve been a big help, Sergeant. Thanks,” Gunner said.
    “Forget it. I didn’t do this for you or your client, Gunner. I did it for Maggie. Because I don’t give a fuck what anybody else thought about him, I considered him a friend. That straight up enough for you?”
    He wouldn’t let go of Gunner’s hand. He was trying one last time to pick a fight, to goad the black man into exposing himself as a liar and a cop-hater, but Gunner would have none of it. He had played this game before, with other men who thought it proved something about both the winner and the loser, and so he knew the vacuousness of it all too well.
    He stared Kupchak down and waited.
    It took a few minutes, but eventually the older man grew tired of his own childishness and surrendered Gunner’s hand, laughing a laugh as thin as paper to cover his embarrassment. Then he walked quickly away, without so much as a backward glance in Gunner’s direction.
    It was all the good-bye his pride would let him say.

5

    Gunner called Danny Kubo from the office immediately after his lunch with Harry Kupchak, but not before stopping in at home to stare at the lifeless message light on his answering machine like an old friend that had let him down. Claudia had given him no reason to think she would call, now or ever, but that hadn’t stopped him from hoping she would, anyway. Rejection was relatively foreign to Gunner, and he didn’t know how to take it seriously. That her commitment to their separation could be strong enough to enable her to cut him adrift as promised, however temporarily, truly amazed him.
    It only made matters worse that he was starting to believe she was doing the right thing. The distraction of his work over the last twenty-four hours had forced him to think about the trial separation she was insisting upon economically, without emotion, and in that light he could see the obvious wisdom in it. She wanted to know that her feelings for him were real, and until she was satisfied that they were, she wasn’t really doing him any favors by letting him hang around. It wasn’t her fault that he had already answered for himself the same question regarding his feelings for her; that was just the way these things often worked out.
    “That don’t look right, Mickey. That don’t look right.”
    “Shut up and hold the goddamn picture still!”
    “Lookit them legs, man! They all crooked an’ shit. Damn!”
    Weldon Foley cracked up laughing. He was holding the pages of a copy of Sports Illustrated open for Mickey Moore’s perusal, watching the barber shape the back of a black teenager’s head, as Gunner walked into the shop, sending the little brass bell above the door into a frenzy. Foley himself had had no use for barbers for some time now, as the last gray hair had fallen out of his head more than a decade ago, but he was a regular visitor to Mickey’s establishment nevertheless. He was a retiree with nothing but idle time on his hands and he couldn’t seem to find a hangout in the world more consistently amusing.
    “Hey, Gunner. Come over here, man. I wanna show you somethin’,” Foley said between convulsions.
    “Nobody asked for his opinion. He’s just as blind as you are,” Mickey snapped, scowling at Gunner as the younger man moved toward them.
    The tall, dark-skinned kid in the chair looked worried, but all he did was watch as Gunner walked around him to see what it was that had Foley so broken up. Mickey had crowned the kid’s head with an eight-inch cylinder of hair, sheared the top of it flatter than the green on a miniature golf course, and shaven him bald from the top of the ears down—but there was nothing particularly unusual about any of these things. The barber had done the same to hundreds of customers over the last few years; such a cut was actually the popular debauchery of the moment. But the clump of dark hair Mickey had left uncut at the base