Fear of the Dark by Gar Anthony Haywood

backed away, out of his range. “Believe what you want to believe. I’ve told you what I know, and that’s the best I can do for you. If the cops want to think you killed the white boy, that’s your problem, not mine.”
    “Is that right.”
    “Yeah. That’s right. That was you out there beatin’ the bushes for him, not me.”
    “You’re confused, sister. And your memory’s failing you. I beat the bushes for the man, all right, but I didn’t have any motive to kill him. I didn’t give a shit about Buddy or the Brothers of Volition, I’m as apolitical as a guy can get. But I’ve come upon some lean times lately, that’s a matter of record, and when some broad with a great body and a fistful of money showed up in my kitchen a few days ago to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse …”
    “What offer? I didn’t hire you to kill anybody!”
    “Didn’t you?”
    It was Gunner’s turn to laugh. He threw his head back as she came at him with her nails extended, and he caught her wrists, one in each hand, before she could get to his eyes. She thrust a knee up at his groin, but he blocked it with his thigh and shoved her aside, releasing her arms. She backpedaled a few steps and her right hand found the canvas back of a broken director’s chair sitting nearby. The chair was up over her head before he could stop her and the best he could do was shield his face with his left forearm as she brought it down on him, putting all her weight behind the blow.
    He had been driving himself toward her when the chair disintegrated around his head, and he groped blindly for her throat as his momentum carried him forward, finding her face instead. His left hand held her head in a vise, its fingers splayed wide across her features, as his right looped up to hover, trembling, beside his ear, torqued into a fist coiled to strike.
    Verna’s eyes shut tight as Gunner let it go.
    A framed Time magazine cover of the Reverend Jesse Jackson exploded on the wall behind her, just over her left shoulder. She felt a spray of glass shards at the back of her neck and moved away, squinting, no longer bound by his left hand. The frame dropped to the floor like the blade of a guillotine and was still. Gunner’s right hand was covered in blood.
    He was shaking. She watched him stand there, bleeding profusely, and grimaced. He let her look and said nothing.
    “I’m sorry,” she said finally, shrugging.
    He took a step toward her and brushed the knuckles of his right hand across the yellow front of her blouse, smearing it with blood.
    “So am I,” he said.
    She leaned forward and kissed him, hard. His response was immediate, surprising them both. He was erect when her hand found him, and his breathing was labored, short. He moved his mouth down the nape of her neck and peeled her ruined blouse open, slipping his right hand into the left cup of her bra to ease the full, heavy mound of her breast into the open. The dark flesh of the nipple was hard with arousal even before he brought his lips down around it.
    The hand she was using to explore him paused in its vigorous work abruptly, as she lost herself in the playful teasing of his tongue and teeth, and she reached up to free her right breast for him, stroking the nipple to attention with her own hand until he was ready for it. Her breathing, too, had changed its rhythm, dramatically.
    “The bedroom,” she said, forcefully, and she only had to say it once.
    He took her up in his arms and followed her directions to Buddy’s bed.
    Several hours later, they turned the couch up off its back onto the two legs it had left, retrieved its ravaged cushions from various parts of the room, and sat down to talk. Verna found some beer in the kitchen and brought them both an open bottle. There was no mention of a truce, but that, in effect, was what they were trying. It seemed like the thing to do.
    “What happened here?” Gunner asked, surveying the wreckage of Buddy’s apartment. The fresh bandage on