Free It's Not a Pretty Sight by Gar Anthony Haywood

about correcting him in front of his friends.
    “He thinks it’s our fault,” Foley said to Gunner, still looking as hurt and tired as he had the last time the investigator had seen him, stepping into the backseat of the taxi Gunner had called for him outside the LAPD’s Southwest station more than thirty-two hours earlier. “Like it was us tried to jack the boy up in here, ’stead of the other way around. Ain’t that a bitch?”
    “You didn’t have to let ‘im in,” Mickey said. “What the hell you let ‘im in for?”
    “’Cause he looked like he needed help ! I told you that! Man come knockin’ on the door, holdin’ his arm all funny an’ shit, an’ said he just been jacked up, could he please use the phone. What was I s’posed to do, say no?”
    “Yes. Yes! Just say, ‘I’m sorry, brother, but the boss ain’t here, I can’t let you in. You’re gonna have to use the pay phone down the street.’”
    “Man, that’s cold,” Morris Bingham said.
    “Sure is,” Winnie agreed.
    “Cold? I’ll tell you two what’s cold,” Mickey said, stopping his work on Bingham’s almond-shaped head to more directly confront his detractors. “Cold is comin’ in here this mornin’ and findin’ blood all on the floor, that’s what’s cold. On the floor, on the walls, in my chairs—”
    “All right, Mickey, we get the point,” Gunner said, finally entering the conversation outright. “We fucked up the place. We’re sorry.” He was sitting in a chair against the wall, four chairs removed from Foley and everyone else, acting like the magazine he had open in front of his face was actually holding his interest. No one was fooled. Both his silence and the distance he had placed between himself and the others had been a clear indication to everyone that his mind was elsewhere, and he wanted it to stay that way.
    But Mickey wouldn’t allow it.
    “‘Sorry’? You can be sorry if you want to,” Foley said, “but not me. I almost got killed Saturday night, I’m just happy to be alive.”
    “Amen to that, brother,” Alonzo said.
    “Besides—who the hell you think cleaned the place up this mornin’, ’fore all the rest of you got here? Him ?” Foley pointed at Mickey. “Hell, no! It was me , that’s who. He didn’t even have to say a word, I just come in here an’ did it. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?”
    He was talking to Mickey, but Mickey wasn’t listening. He was studying Gunner instead. He turned his clippers off, dropped them to his side, and said, “Hey, Gunner, man, don’t be like that. I’m just messin’ with you guys, that’s all. You know that.”
    “Forget it,” Gunner said. He still had the magazine open in his hands.
    “It’s just, I walk in here this mornin’ and see blood all over the place, man, I didn’t know what to think. ’Cause you guys didn’t call me to tell me what happened, so I thought—”
    “Anybody know a girl named Goldy?” Gunner asked, tossing the magazine back onto its pile on the table beside him.
    Everybody stopped what they were doing to look at him, surprised by the question.
    “Goldy?” Bingham asked.
    “Like Goldie Hawn, the actress?” Winnie asked.
    “I guess so. I’m not sure,” Gunner said.
    “Who the hell is Goldy?” Mickey asked.
    Gunner shook his head. “Probably nobody. Pearson said he’d been with a girl named Goldy at the time of Nina’s murder. I’m sure it was just bullshit, but …” He shrugged. “You never know.”
    “Yes you do. That nigger’s full of shit,” Winnie said. “He killed that girl, an’ he knows it. Only girl named Goldy he knows is the one in that fairy tale, ‘Goldilocks an’ the Three Damn Bears.’”
    “I heard that,” Alonzo said.
    Gunner nodded his head, agreeing. “That’s what I think too. It just bothers me a little, I guess. Him picking a name like that out of the hat, I mean. ‘Goldy.’”
    “What’s wrong with ‘Goldy’?” Bingham asked.
    “Nothing. Except that a man usually