Bury the Past

by James L'Etoile

  “You drop that thing, and Karen won’t talk to us again,” John said.

  “Sherman and the driver are still inside the cab. A biker, no, make that two bikers in the garage. One’s about six three, two seventy-five, with prison ink on both arms.”

  She snapped off a dozen photos in quick succession and magnified a shot on each man: the two bikers, Sherman, and his friend.

  “Sherman’s opening his door. Here we go. The big dude and his buddy are coming toward them.”

  John rolled his window down, but the voices were caught in the wind going in the other direction. “I can’t hear a thing.”

  Sherman stepped out and faced off with the thick-necked biker.

  “I don’t see a weapon on either of them,” Paula said.

  “Keep watching.”

  With an abrupt movement, the biker threw his arms around Sherman and lifted him off his feet.

  “What the—he’s hugging him. They’re laughing,” John said.

  The driver got out of the truck cab, walked around the front, and shook hands with the other biker who came out to the driveway. The bigger biker’s embrace ended, and Sherman put his arm around the big man.

  “What this hell is this, a family reunion?” Paula said, snapping off more photos.

  “I don’t get it,” John said.

  The biker pointed to the front of the house. He trotted to the chipped stucco above the garage and pointed. He smacked the driver on the shoulder, and the man shrugged.

  “What’s he looking at?”

  It took a few seconds to hit. “The bullet holes from the drive-by. He’s pointing out the bullet holes from when McDaniel went down.”

  The biker motioned them into the garage, and they disappeared inside the house.

  Paula lowered the camera. “It looks like Sherman knew about the hit. And the smile on his driver’s face looked—I don’t know, prideful?”

  “He could’ve been the shooter. He wore a mask, so I can’t be sure. But how does Sherman figure in with a bunch of white-power meth heads?”

  A pair of bikers rode up to the house, and the loud engine noise rattled the windows of the car when they passed. They parked their rides, backing them into the curb behind the truck. One man unstrapped a black nylon satchel the size of a grocery bag from his bike. Both men glanced around as if they expected trouble and headed for the house.

  “The one without the bag has a gun. He’s got his hand on it. This could get exciting now,” Paula said.

  The expected gunshots didn’t occur. Instead, the two bikers who arrived minutes ago came out without the black bag.

  Paula snapped a series of photos of the men as they approached their bikes. “They’re relaxed now. No hands on weapons.”

  “Delivery boys,” John said.

  Their motorcycles rumbled to life, and the pair charged down the street, setting off a car alarm a block away.

  John’s cell phone chirped. He rolled up the window so his voice wouldn’t carry and alert the bikers. “Penley.”

  “I have the plate info on the Ford truck for you. Ready?” the watch commander said.

  John snagged a notepad from the center console and tucked the phone against his chin. “Go.”

  “The vehicle is registered to Mark Andrew Wallace. The DMV flagged the record as a restricted plate.”

  John knew what that restriction meant. He had one of his own. “He’s a cop?”

  “Sac County Sheriff, according to the DMV records,” the watch commander said.

  “Is he undercover?” John asked.

  “Don’t know. That truck is a personal vehicle, for what it’s worth.”

  John took down the residence information for a place in midtown near East Portal Park. “Got it. Thanks.” He put the cell on the seat.

  “The driver’s a cop, eh?” Paula asked.

  “Looks like it. Sac County. The name Wallace doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “I know most of the detectives over there, and this guy doesn’t look familiar at all. Wait—Wallace works for the sheriff’s department. Does he look like the guy in the video with Burger?”

  Paula pulled the camera up when she noticed movement in the garage. Sherman, Wallace, and the big biker came out onto the driveway, and Sherman carried the black bag. She captured a good image of Wallace when he took off his sunglasses and wiped his forehead with a forearm. “He looks like the deputy in the video.”

  “He’s about the same size. Man, it’s got to be him. Same build, shaved head—even the way he stands,” John said.

  Sherman and the biker shook hands, a transaction complete.

  “God, I wanna know what’s in that bag,” Paula said.

  “Nothing good comes by way of an armed biker delivery.”

  Wallace and Sherman got back into the truck, and the biker went back to the motorcycle frame.

  The Ford pulled away, and John followed at a respectful distance. Wallace made one stop, at a liquor store, before he pulled into the driveway at his Forty-Fifth Street home.

  John parked on the opposite side of the street, one house down from the well-kept home in the city’s Fab Forties neighborhood. Wallace keyed the front door of an art deco–inspired home and went back to the truck to carry in four dark-amber liquor bottles. Sherman followed with the black bag in one hand and a twelve-pack of beer under the other arm.

  “Looks like a welcome home party for Sherman,” John said.

  Through the gauzy linen curtain in the front, they were able to watch Sherman drain a beer in two long pulls. He popped another, and this one took three swallows.

  “Looks like they’re gonna tie one on. Should give us some time to find out what Sherman had in that bag,” John said.

  “Wait until he’s passed out drunk and break in? You can’t be serious.”

  John shook his head. “You went right there, didn’t you? No, I’m not talking about going in there.” John started the car. “We’re gonna see a man about a bag.”

  THIRTY

  John parked the sedan in the first spot he could find at the UC Davis Medical Center. The trauma unit was a small plain concrete-faced building in the shadow of the larger hospital tower. Multiple ambulance bays kept the unit fed with trauma victims from all points of the region.

  George McDaniel’s room was the only one with a Sacramento police officer stationed at the door. After John had flashed his ID for the officer, they entered the patient room. McDaniel was awake, but he could’ve been mistaken for dead because his complexion was more gray than pink.

  McDaniel looked worried at John’s entrance, then relaxed as his morphine allowed his mind to register who it was.

  “Hey there, Detective.” His voice was thin and raspy.

  “I gotta admit, I didn’t think you were gonna make it for a minute there,” John said.

  “Lucky for me, I don’t remember a whole lot about anything after the gunshots started. I woke up in this place.”

  “Nothing good would come out of remembering any of that.”

  “It’s funny. All those years of working as a cop, even the sketchy shit we pulled, and I never got shot. And I get caught in some random tweaker drive-by.”

  Paula plopped in a chair at the foot of McDaniel’s bed.

  “My partner, Detective Newberry.”

  “How long you been hanging out with the low-life types like those bikers?”

  “They’re really not that bad. Besides, not too many people accepted me for what I was—am.”

  “You hook up with them in prison?” Paula asked.

  McDaniel coughed and grabbed his ribs. “Yeah—yeah. They gave me protection from everyone who wanted to make their bones killing a cop.”

  “What’d you have to do for them?” she asked. “Protection like that ain’t free.”

  He looked down the bed at Paula, who now had her boots resting on the bed rail. “I wasn’t a saint. Never claimed to be. I moved weapons, collected rent, and muled shit for them.”

  “So t
hese friends of yours, why would they be behind you getting shot?”

  McDaniel’s eyes shot from Paula to John.

  “Looks like it,” John said.

  “No. You’re lying.”

  “You gotta ask yourself, why would they do that?” John repeated.

  McDaniel’s eye’s unfocused for a moment, and John snagged the remote button for the pain medication before McDaniel could check out and avoid the questions.

  “Who is the big dude at the house? Over six feet and pushing three hundred with thick greasy hair?”

  “That would be Junior. He runs the place and reports directly to the Brand.”

  “Brand as in ‘Aryan Brotherhood’?” John asked.

  “He ain’t a member or nothing; they let him do pretty much whatever he wants as long as they get their end.”

  “Would their end include getting you out of the picture?” John asked.

  McDaniel shrugged.

  “Do Junior and Charles Sherman know one another?” John said.

  With a side-eyed glance, McDaniel responded with another question. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Because they seemed to hit it off really well earlier today,” Paula said.

  “Sherman’s out?”

  “Yep, so where does that leave you in the big picture?” Paula said.

  John shifted and moved to the foot of McDaniel’s bed. “Let me take a shot at it, and you tell me how close I get. Sherman and your ex-roommates are in business together, and now that Sherman and his task force connections are in play, the Brand doesn’t really need you. How’d I do?”

  “Closer than you’d think. Sherman has what the Brand wants. He has something that I couldn’t give them. I set them up with connections, dealers, and street-level distribution. Sherman has all that juice too, but he has the product too.”

  “What product?” John asked.

  “I want immunity.”

  “From what? Your ass was already in prison for this shit,” Paula said.

  “Not for this, I wasn’t.”

  “What’s Sherman got? You need to give us something if you expect us to go groveling to the DA with an immunity deal,” John said.

  “You’ll back my play for immunity?”

  “It isn’t up to me. But I gotta hear what you have that will make my boss and the DA want to give you a deal.”

  “Sherman. Like I said, he’s a major player. He has enough product to flood the city.”

  “My bullshit meter is ringing loud,” Paula said. “Sherman’s been in prison. In-car-cer-ated. He’s not a player in anything.”

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  Paula got up and gave the bed an inadvertent kick with her boot, causing a wince of pain from McDaniel. “Come on, he’s got nothing. Let’s pull his protective detail and let Sherman and his Brand buddies clean up their own mess.”

  “Okay—okay. Try this on. How many years was Sherman working on the SSPNET task force? Like five, six years, right? How many busts and seizures went down in that time? Hundreds.”

  “Get to it,” Paula said.

  “Every one of those takedowns was light.”

  “What are you saying?” John said.

  “If we took down ten keys of coke, five got papered and booked.”

  “Skimming? Sherman was siphoning off evidence?”

  “Yeah, and not just him. I did, Ronland, Wing, Burger—all of us,” McDaniel said. The man looked scared, and the waves on his monitors confirmed it. His blood pressure went up hard.

  “Sherman got busted holding pounds of cocaine, heroin, and meth. That’s old news,” John said.

  “Not this. It’s stashed.”

  “Where?” John said.

  “Nuh-uh. Not until I get my deal.”

  “Is he in business with Junior?” John asked.

  “Junior is a middleman. That’s all I’m saying until you come through with a deal.”

  A young black nurse entered the room and checked McDaniel’s monitor. She readjusted the blood pressure cuff and manually pumped it for a new reading.

  “You might want to call it off for the day; your pressure is higher than we’d like it to be.”

  McDaniel was flushed and pulled the sheet down, exposing an assortment of racist and white-power tattoos. The uneven color and rough lines gave away where these came from—prison.

  The nurse didn’t bat an eye and made sure McDaniel was as comfortable as possible. She even handed him the pain medication button.

  “Could you send in the white nurse next time?” McDaniel said.

  The nurse tilted her head and stared at her patient for a moment before she said, “I’m going to write that off to the morphine talking.”

  When the nurse left the room, Paula gave the bed frame a hard kick.

  “Ow.”

  “You’re an asshole, you know that?” Paula said.

  “What?”

  “I thought some of your buddies in the Brand must’ve rubbed off on you. But now I know you’ve been an asshole your entire life,” Paula said.

  McDaniel pushed the morphine button. “Fuck you.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  “What do you think about Sherman having a stash of stolen drugs?” John asked as he backed the car from the hospital lot.

  “McDaniel knows how bad we want Sherman. The kind of action he was talking about—someone would have noticed that. You can’t take half of a drug seizure without someone asking questions. The dealers they arrested would start to squawk about the missing product so they didn’t take the fall from their distributors. It doesn’t hang together for me.”

  “It could explain what was in the bag Sherman got from Junior.”

  “Burger would have known where it came from,” Paula said.

  John turned on Twenty-First and headed downtown. He glanced at his partner as she bit her lower lip.

  “You remember Burger’s dead, right?”

  “Don’t be an ass. I haven’t lost my mind, yet,” Paula said.

  “Just checking. Why bring up Burger at all? How’s that gonna help us now?”

  “Burger put in dozens of hours prepping for testimony. Drilling for the questions the DA was gonna ask him. The whens, wheres, and whodunits. Clarke and her team handled that. I wasn’t there. My part of the case was over. I wanna go over my notes in the files and compare what Burger told me against what came out in his testimony. He might have hinted at how the missing drugs were handled.”

  “Wouldn’t the evidence room records flag missing drugs?”

  “If the drugs never hit the evidence room, the records wouldn’t show anything. The books would balance out.”

  “Sherman’s off-the-books stash.”

  Paula shrugged. “Maybe. But the kind of stash McDaniel was going on about wasn’t gonna fit in that gym bag Sherman picked up.”

  The Sacramento Sheriff’s Department headquarters building looked like it was designed as a fortress. The long slit windows reminded John of those on the prison cells in the PSU. Nothing remotely welcoming for public access; even press conferences were held outside the building.

  “You know Connie Newhouse?” John asked.

  “She’s the administrative captain, right? I met her once. What does she have to do with Sherman? He was Solano County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “It’s his new BFF, Wallace, I’m curious about.”

  “Really? Is BFF part of your vocabulary now?” Paula said.

  John nosed the car into a tight parking space in the garage across the street from the sheriff’s building. “Yeah, so? Kari says it all the time. I’m hip.”

  Paula undid her seat belt. “You’re closer to breaking a hip. She’s a teenager, and old folks do not say ‘BFF.’”

  John got out of the car. “You just call me old?”

  “You need a hearing aid too? Come on, Gramps; let’s see what Captain Newhouse can tell us about Wallace. Or are you gonna file an elder-abuse complaint?”

  He shook his h
ead and pretended to be hurt by her comments, but he was actually glad to see Paula loosen up a bit considering the pressure the case and the DA had put on her. Paula was at her best when she was quick, when she kept two steps ahead.

  The administrative captain’s offices were buried deep in the complex. From there, she managed the department’s communications, records, and human resources. Captain Newhouse came out of her office to greet them.

  “John, what brings you to the dark side?”

  “Just a little interdepartmental cooperation. Some simple background info, that’s all.”

  The captain put her hands on her hips and gave him a stern look. “It’s never ‘simple’ with you.”

  John shrugged.

  “Come on. This way.” Then to Paula, “Detective Newberry, isn’t it?”

  Paula shook Newhouse’s hand.

  “I’m sorry for your burden,” Newhouse said.

  “Sorry?”

  In the captain’s office Newhouse continued, “John didn’t tell you? He and I used to be partners back in the day, before I transferred to the county.”

  Paula glanced at her partner. “No, he didn’t tell me that.”

  “I’m painfully aware of what it’s like to have a partner who is moody, keeps things to himself, and likes coloring outside the lines.” Newhouse grinned when she was done.

  “But you made it out alive!” Paula said.

  “Come on, Connie, it wasn’t that bad,” John said.

  “He must have mellowed a bit since then,” Newhouse added.

  “If you say so,” Paula said.

  Newhouse sat behind her desk, which was piled with paper work. “What can I do for you?”

  “One of your deputies is involved with a suspect,” John said.

  “Okay. Isn’t that more of a matter for our detectives or internal affairs division?”

  “That’s not what I’m after. That kind of inquiry would trigger a formal request from our chief to your sheriff, and everyone would get their boxers in a twist. I’d like to keep this low key. I’m only interested in this guy and his connection to our suspect.”

  Newhouse put on a pair of reading glasses and pulled her computer keyboard in front of her. “Let me have it.”

  “Wallace. Mark Andrew Wallace,” John said.