Read Online When Last Seen Alive by Gar Anthony Haywood - Free Book Online

I doubt it, he’s in no condition to help you. Or didn’t you just hear me say how fucked up he is?”
    “But if he was the last one to see Covington alive—”
    “Like I said. You ask me, he wasn’t. Jack’s a neighborhood head case with a violent temper, nothing more, and nothing less. He doesn’t make people disappear, he cuts ’em to ribbons and leaves the pieces all over the sidewalk.”
    “Yeah, I know, but—”
    “Forget the buts. You go over to see Jack at the hospital and he picks that moment to croak, our friends with the Gardena PD are gonna show you a real vanishin’ act. The next twenty-five years of your life, poof! , gone in sixty seconds. You don’t believe me, you’re outta your mind.”
    But Gunner did believe him. The chance Poole was describing was very real.
    “All right. So I can’t talk to him. But I can do the next best thing.”
    “Show you what a sport I am, Gunner, I’m gonna act like I’m too stupid to know what that means,” Poole said.
    He took his cup of ice cream and walked out, not wanting to be a party to whatever the investigator intended to do next.
    • • •
    Returning to his office at Mickey’s to make a few phone calls, Gunner walked into a full-blown discussion regarding his need to own a pet. Both Mickey Moore and Winnie Phifer had people in their chairs, and four other customers were waiting their turn, everybody talking and laughing like revelers at a New Year’s Eve party. Among the customers, only Drew Taylor and Joe Worthy had faces Gunner recognized, but that didn’t matter; the good will of the hour could not be undone by unfamiliarity.
    “You could use a companion, seems to me,” Winnie told Gunner. “It ain’t healthy, bein’ all alone all the time.”
    It seemed she had a ten-week-old Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy she was trying to find a home for, and the investigator was the only person left who hadn’t explained to her satisfaction why the dog would be miserable living with them.
    “I’m not alone all the time,” Gunner said.
    “What? So you bring some woman into the bedroom two or three times a month. What’s that do for you?”
    All the men in the house started laughing.
    “Shit, I’ll tell you what it does for ’im,” Mickey said. But before he could go on, Winnie swung her left arm out as if to slap him, missed on purpose.
    “You know what I’m talkin’ “bout!” she said, chuckling despite herself. “I mean, what the hell good is somebody you only gonna see two or three times a month? All the rest of the time they ain’t around, you’re lonely?”
    “I’m not lonely,” Gunner insisted.
    “You alone six days out of every week, you’re lonely,” Winnie said.
    “And you think a dog would solve that problem.”
    “It could. A dog or a cat. Somethin’.”
    “Ain’t you ever had a pet?” Joe Worthy asked. It was his head Winnie was shearing down to the scalp on both sides, her clippers buzzing around his skull like an angry bee.
    “I had a goldfish once,” Gunner admitted.
    “A goldfish?” Mickey said, obviously unimpressed.
    “Yeah. I called it Spike. Little Rocky Bythewood was selling ’em door-to-door for a dollar one day, so I bought one.”
    “Rocky Bythewood? That boy used to live over on Fifty-fourth Street?” Drew Taylor asked.
    Rocky Bythewood had been a pint-sized con man who could sell a Malcolm X T-shirt to the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. If he was alive somewhere today (and it was doubtful), it was only because his family had moved to Chicago before his legion of victims could band together to lynch him in the street.
    “Yeah,” Gunner said. “You remember him?”
    “I remember him. Man, I’ll bet that fish was dead in a week.”
    “Try a day. That was the sickest damn goldfish I ever saw. I could’ve kicked Rocky’s narrow little ass.”
    Taylor just shook his head.
    “And that was the only pet you ever had?” Worthy asked.
    “That was it,” Gunner said.
    “You got your