You Can Die Trying by Gar Anthony Haywood Page A

preposterous prices. Million-dollar homes and offices required million-dollar appointments to make their extravagance complete, and there was no better place in Los Angeles to look for such appointments than here, the Neiman-Marcus of the Architectural Digest set.
    “I suppose you come here often,” Gunner said after he had finished filling Kubo in, offering him a brief and sketchy outline of his work for Mitchell Flowers to date. The two men were wandering from floor to floor, peering through all the display windows from a safe distance, trying not to laugh at the unbelievable decadence of it all.
    “Every chance I get,” Kubo said, examining a two-foot-tall ceramic flamingo that had a four-figure price tag dangling from one of its spindly legs. “But I figure I’m the only cop in town who does, so we shouldn’t have to worry about bumping into anyone I know.”
    It had been twenty-two years since he and Gunner had been wet-nosed recruits of the LAPD, the scourges of the cadet academy up in the Dodger Blue hills of Elysian Park, yet Kubo didn’t wear the time at all noticeably. He was a smooth-skinned Japanese-American with the face of a kid and the energy to match, and his body still looked like something out of a male wish-fulfillment catalog. Habitually dressed like a commodities broker out to impress the boss, his only discernible flaw was a segmented and misaligned right eyebrow, a souvenir from the day back at the academy that a maniac cop and martial arts instructor named Phillip Adler split his forehead open with the heel of his left foot. Deliberately. Adler had let his peculiar dislike for Orientals get the better of him that day, and was well on his way to seriously maiming one … until Gunner stepped out from the crowd of terrified cadets watching the scene to shatter Adler’s jaw with a solid right hand.
    They gave Gunner his walking papers two days later.
    “You think I’m being paranoid, but I’m not,” Kubo said. “Word gets around I’ve been talking to you, I’m never going to hear the end of it. Whether I actually tell you anything or not.”
    “Word’s not going to get around,” Gunner said.
    “Yeah, right. Like it didn’t get around that you had a black linebacker in a go-go dress leave flowers for Harry Kupchak with the desk sergeant at Southwest yesterday.”
    Gunner started to grin, but Kubo wasn’t having any.
    “You think it’s funny, making a cop look like an ass in front of his fellow officers, but I’ve got news for you. You’re playing with his life. Once a cop loses the respect of the men he works with, he’s finished. Dead and buried.”
    “If I could have gotten the man to talk to me any other way, I would have,” Gunner said.
    “Maybe he had more important things to do than talk to you. You ever think of that?”
    “I didn’t ask him to do it for me. I asked him to do it for his friend McGovern.”
    “It doesn’t matter who you asked him to do it for. You were wasting the man’s time—just like you’re wasting mine now. Because you’re never going to prove what you’re trying to prove. What your client says he saw never happened.”
    “Says who?”
    “Says me. We took that alley and the yards on either side of it apart. If the Washington kid had lost a gun that night, we would’ve found it. Either that, or some slugs.”
    “Depending on how long you looked, you mean.”
    “We looked until we were satisfied,” Kubo said.
    “Satisfied of what?”
    “That we weren’t going to find anything.”
    “And that took what? Two hours, three hours …?”
    Kubo frowned, realizing he had already said more than he had planned to. “It’s none of your business how long it took. I’m telling you Washington was clean, and that’s all I intend to say about it. Now, or ever.”
    “Shit. Are you starting that again?”
    “I’m not starting anything. I’m just telling you how it is. You’re chasing your own tail with this McGovern business, and I’m not