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

forever.
    That killed about two hours.
    When his last check had been written, he found a pay phone and called his cousin Del. Poole had suggested he might have to go back to work for the electrician soon, if Pearson didn’t make it and Gunner’s PI license got yanked out from under him, and maybe the cop had something there. Gunner had worked for Del before, and almost learned to like it, so his doing so again was not completely out of the question.
    Of course, there was no guarantee that Del wanted to be bothered with him again. In fact, it was sometimes all his cousin could do just to talk to him over the phone.
    “What do you want?” Del asked him today, the minute he realized who was calling. Not to be rude, but merely time-efficient. Gunner had a reason for calling, he always did, so there wasn’t any point in either of them pretending otherwise.
    “I need to talk to you, Del. Five, ten minutes, that’s all I need.”
    “When? Now?”
    “Right now, yeah. Can you meet me somewhere?”
    “No. I’m busy.”
    “Del—”
    “I’m goin’ over to Mother’s in about a half hour, you want to meet me over there. What’s this all about?”
    “Mother’s? Big Mother’s? When the hell did you start going to Mother’s?”
    Del had tripped on a treadmill the first time he’d visited the popular South-Central gym as Gunner’s guest, nearly two years ago, and the humiliation of the experience had been so severe he’d sworn never to return again.
    “I’ve been a member for almost a year,” Del said. “What’s the big deal?”
    “Nothing. I just thought you said—”
    “Look, you wanna meet me there or not? I’ve got work to do here, I’ve gotta get going.”
    “Sure, sure. I’ll see you in a half hour.”
    “And you’re gonna have my money, right?”
    “Your money?”
    “Don’t bother comin’ without my money, Aaron. Save yourself a trip.”
    He was talking about the seventy-five dollars Gunner had borrowed from him eight weeks before. Somehow, Del never asked for a loan to be repaid until Gunner actually had the money. Which, of course, he did in this case, thanks to Roman Goody. It was as if the man had a direct line to Gunner’s bank account.
    “That was fifty bucks, right?” Gunner asked.
    Talking to no one but a dial tone.
    The answer to the question everyone always asked was yes, there really was a Big Mother.
    His name was Ozzie Bledsoe, and he was as big as a weight lifter could get without bursting out of his skin like an overcooked hot dog. Gunner didn’t know his exact age, but he figured the former Mr. California to be somewhere in his late forties to early fifties, though he looked much younger than that. There were lines beneath his eyes and his hair was turning gray almost as fast as it was falling out, but other than that, the goateed black man seemed completely unaffected by age.
    According to Ozzie himself, he had picked up the Big Mother name in the county joint, back in the mid-seventies when he was still more interested in pulling armed robberies than pumping iron. Some kid in the next cell over had just started in calling him “Big Mother,” yelling it out at the top of his lungs every time he addressed him, and pretty soon, everyone was doing it. Even the guards. What else could you call a black man who was six four, 265 pounds, with a back as wide as a four-lane highway and biceps as big as beer kegs?
    In any case, the name came in handy when, in the fall of ’91, he decided to open a gym of his own. He’d been a retired felony offender for over ten years at that point, and had made a few dollars doing bodyguard work for various people in the entertainment industry. He bought an old gas station with a large service bay to start, stayed there for a couple of years, then found a warehouse building near the Compton airport and converted that. Big Mother’s Gym had been there ever since.
    He saw Gunner walk in the door and immediately started shaking his head. The