Free All the Lucky Ones Are Dead by Gar Anthony Haywood

as you can see.”
    â€œMaybe somethin’ will come up.”
    â€œI don’t think so. At least, I wouldn’t count on it. I’m sorry.”
    Jolly stared at him a moment longer, measuring Gunner’s words for falsehood, then lifted himself to his feet. He lumbered over to the investigator’s desk, stopped just in front of it. “Lemme have a pen and some paper,” he said.
    Gunner found a pen in a desk drawer, handed it to Jolly along with a small notepad.
    â€œI’m gonna leave you my address over at the apartment I got downtown,” the big man said, scrawling out the address. “I ain’t got a phone, but all you gotta do is come over, you decide you need me. I’ll be right there waitin’.”
    â€œJolly…”
    â€œAnytime day or night, don’t matter. I’ll be there.” He handed the pad and pen back, took one more look at the determined expression on Gunner’s face. “Lord says you got work for me to do, Gunner, and the Lord never lies. You’ll see.”
    Jolly turned and stalked away.
    Gunner watched the beaded curtain in his office doorway sway to and fro in Jolly’s wake, didn’t realize his phone was ringing until it was almost too late to answer it.
    It was a man who identified himself as an LAPD homicide cop named Steven La Porte, no one Gunner had ever heard of before.
    â€œWhat can I do for you, Detective?”
    â€œYou’re Aaron Gunner. The private investigator, is that right?”
    â€œThat’s right. How can I help you?”
    â€œI was wondering, Mr. Gunner, if you knew a man by the name of Ray Crumley?”
    â€œRay Crumley?” Gunner felt the stirrings of a queasy stomach fast approaching. “I don’t know him, no. But about forty minutes ago—”
    â€œYou left a message on his answering machine at home. Yeah, we know.”
    â€œWe?”
    â€œMy partner and I, plus a few of our friends from the division. We’re over at Ray’s place right now, tidying up a bit. You wouldn’t mind dropping by to give us a hand, would you?”
    â€œI wouldn’t know the way. I never met Crumley, like I said. What the hell happened, Detective? You gonna clue me in, or what?”
    â€œWhat happened is, ol’ Ray is dead. And he didn’t die of natural causes,” La Porte said. “But don’t take my word for it, Mr. Gunner. Why don’t you come on down and see what’s left of ’im for yourself?”

s i x
    T HE LATE R AY C RUMLEY HAD BEEN RENTING A CLEAN little one-bedroom apartment in the Mid-City area of Los Angeles, on Burnside Avenue just north of Olympic. Situated in the heart of a quiet, ethnically diverse neighborhood where trouble rarely reared its head, his apartment building was a two-story, white-with-yellow-trim number that looked like all the other such rental properties surrounding it, except for the buzzing police activity out front: squad cars and yellow tape, news crews and an ambulance, and a host of uniformed patrolmen with answers to nobody’s questions.
    Gunner was out in the hallway beyond Crumley’s open apartment door when the familiar stench of a runaway bloodletting told him what he’d find inside. Actually seeing the crimson splatter someone had made in the dead man’s ransacked living room in the process of killing him proved almost anticlimactic.
    â€œLooks like somebody had a real thing for red, don’t it?” Steven La Porte asked, grinning.
    He was a tall reed of a blond, with an angular face beneath a mound of curly hair. His brown suit fit him like something he’d inherited from a larger uncle, and his smile was filled with the yellowed, unappealing teeth of a lifetime smoker.
    â€œAaron Gunner, right?”
    Gunner nodded, still surveying the bloody, disheveled room. Oblivious to the two crime scene technicians flitting about it, a body lay under a sheet on the floor beside