Free Fear of the Dark by Gar Anthony Haywood Page A

locker room and came to a halt on wavering legs in front of Townsend’s locker. The lock on the door was open; the pillowcase full of clothes was still inside. A half-dozen lockers down, his shoulder holster lay empty atop his shirt and coat.
    Gunner fell twice trying to run to his car outside. He felt sick all the way there, and worse when he finally made it. A man with filthy blond hair sat slumped over in the Cobra’s passenger seat, his head resting awkwardly against the dashboard. He could have been asleep, but he wasn’t; there was a hole in him somewhere, Gunner knew, and a .357 Police Special had most likely made it.
    Mean Sheila had nothing more to fear from the white boy with the funny left eye.
    And neither would anyone else, ever again.

etective Lieutenant Matthew Poole of the Los Angeles Police Department, Homicide Division, blew the steam from a cup of hot coffee and said, “You’re never gonna guess who we found dead yesterday.”
    He tried the coffee and watched Gunner’s face project indifference. It wasn’t the best blank mug he had ever seen, but it deserved an honorable mention.
    “Yeah?”
    “White guy by the name of Denny Townsend. The Denny Townsend.”
    “The Denny Townsend.”
    “Yeah. The one you’ve been lookin’ for for the last few days. That Denny Townsend.”
    “Oh, right, right. That Denny Townsend.” Gunner nodded his head, seeming to remember something long forgotten. “He’s dead, huh?”
    Poole nodded, dropping another cube of sugar into his cup. “Somebody shot him in the midsection with a high-caliber handgun and left his body in a dumpster behind the Newberry’s on Western and Venice. He got it somewhere between the hours of one and four P.M. Thursday, the coroner figures.”
    “Damn.”
    “Yeah. That’s what I said.”
    “Any witnesses?”
    Poole shook his head. “Uh-uh.”
    He drank some more coffee and dropped a good spot of it on the solid green tie he was wearing. The stain it created wasn’t going to be lonely there: it was but the latest addition to an already expansive collection, mementos of culinary exploits past.
    But then, stains went well with Poole. He was a slow man in his late forties whose body looked like a suit he had slept in; it was a loose jumble of flesh and bone, of formidable dimension but completely unintimidating. He had a basset hound’s swaying jowls and more straight black hair than he knew how to comb.
    Perhaps to compensate, he kept a fairly clean, upbeat cubicle in the otherwise decadent 77th Street Station building near Broadway. The city had actually coughed up a few dollars for partitions to block off one detective’s floor space from another’s, and Poole was cornered at the far end of the squad room where the window blinds were open to the sun’s advances and the walls were patched and freshly painted. There was even a potted Boston fern hanging from the ceiling, in good health and thriving.
    “Why aren’t you surprised?” Poole asked Gunner, mopping his tie with a coat sleeve. “Don’t tell me you already knew?”
    “Day-old news is old news, Lieutenant. You want to surprise people, do card tricks.”
    “Bet your client’s all messed up about it, huh?”
    “Actually, I haven’t seen her since I heard, so I can’t say. But I imagine she’s taking it pretty well.”
    “I don’t suppose you’d know who did the dirty deed?”
    Gunner didn’t like the chair he was sitting in; it was hard and uncomfortable, designed to make interrogations a miserable experience. “Like any good citizen, I would have come forward if I did.”
    “You could make an educated guess,” Poole said.
    “You dragged me in here to make an educated guess? Okay. How’s this: it was somebody black. Sympathetic to the Brothers of Volition and pissed about what happened to Buddy Dorris. Does that narrow the field down any for you?”
    “You think Townsend killed Buddy Dorris?”
    “I didn’t say that. I don’t know if he did or not; I