The patrol unit took off once John and Paula checked in with them.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Paula said. She was not in the mood to play a rousing game of homeless hide and seek.
Bullet peeked around the side of the metal dumpster.
“Get your ass out here,” Paula snapped.
Bullet looked unsure, like he wanted to bolt back into the brush behind the store.
“Don’t you dare. You got me out of bed, so you owe me an explanation,” John said.
Bullet skulked from behind the waste container and came to the paved part of the lot where John and Paula waited.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do.” Bullet’s voice was raspy and weak.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” John asked.
A mottled purple bruise was visible in the light from the storefront. A dark stain spread under Bullet’s jaw.
“I got hit in the neck. A sucker punch.”
“That why you called us out here? To snitch out one of your homeless pals?” Paula asked.
Bullet shook. “No, it ain’t like that. The guy who done this. I think he was on the road when that guy got himself killed.”
“Burger? The man who was murdered on Garden Highway? You saw the man who did it today?” John said.
“He was there. I knew he looked familiar. I was too slow putting it together.”
“You’re sure? You saw the guy?”
“It was his voice. It was so dark before that it was hard to see him, but I’d never forget that voice.”
Paula pulled her cell phone and thumbed through a collection of photos. “Is this him?”
She held out a prison mug shot of Sherman. Not exactly an unbiased photo identification. A defense attorney could argue she should have assembled a “six-pack” of similar looking photos from the DMV database.
Bullet shook his head. “No, that ain’t him. I’m talking about a big, beefy dude. His name’s Junior.”
Paula put the phone away. “Junior killed Burger for Sherman.”
“Wait, what?” Bullet said.
“How long ago did you last see him?” Paula asked.
“Must be close to an hour, maybe less.”
“We gotta get a perimeter set up. He’s on foot,” John said.
“He didn’t kill nobody,” Bullet said. John and Paula stopped. Bullet looked from one to the other. “He didn’t kill nobody. Did you hear what I said?”
“You just told us that you saw him up on the road when that man was killed,” Paula said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Goddammit, Bullet, I don’t have time for games,” Paula took a step closer to the man, and he cowered, waiting for a blow, like a man used to taking a beating.
“I said I saw him and heard his voice. But he wasn’t the one who done the killing.”
“There were two men?” John said.
Bullet nodded and looked for approval, hoping he’d said the right thing.
“If this man didn’t kill Burger, then who did?” Paula said. She held Sherman’s photo again. “You sure?”
“No.”
“No he didn’t, or no you’re not sure?”
Bullet closed his eyes and shook. “Please, I’m trying to tell you.”
“Okay, okay, take a breath and tell us what you remember,” John said.
Bullet gulped for air like he was surfacing from the deep end of the pool. “I followed a man, not that man, out to the highway. I listened to them talk, and he’s the one who stomped the living shit outta that guy after he mentioned your name, Detective,” he looked at Paula.
“Go ahead. Where does this other guy come in?” John said.
“The dude who done the killing came back to the fire road. Junior was in the blue van, and him and the killer dude talked some, and that’s when one of ’em saw me and they split.”
“Are you certain the guy in that picture isn’t the one you saw kill the man on the highway?” John said.
A quick nod. “I’m certain.”
“That doesn’t mean that Sherman didn’t set the whole thing up,” Paula interjected.
“Would you be able to recognize the killer again if you saw him?” John asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t wanna get involved. I done enough. You guys don’t need me for anything else.”
“You’re involved up to your ass, cupcake,” Paula said. “What did he look like? What was he wearing?”
Bullet’s eyes shut tight, and it hurt to watch him think that hard. John felt sorry for him. All the drug use had turned the man’s mind into a Swiss cheese–like mess.
“He was big. It was dark.”
“Think. What did you see?”
He shook his head so hard that John feared Bullet would give himself a concussion. “I can’t say.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Paula asked.
“I don’t know. There was something familiar about the guy. But I can’t say where I’ve seen him before.”
“It was Sherman,” Paula said. “It has to be.”
FORTY-FOUR
Bullet was afraid to return to the homeless camp because he thought someone would come back and finish him. John found a housing voucher and dropped Bullet at one of the single room–occupancy hotels downtown that catered to the down and almost out. As much as Sacramento tried to eradicate the places that attracted people like Bullet, the number of people needing those lifelines grew. The city couldn’t solve the homelessness epidemic in the capitol, but they could keep them out of sight. It was easier to pretend the lost ghost souls didn’t exist.
The face that John and Paula saw in the hours before daybreak was the side that the tourist guides didn’t publicize. The parks teemed with homeless. They weren’t camping, because that was against the city ordinances, but they were on the grass and sprawled out on benches until they were rousted to move on. The light-rail stations attracted a different element after dark. The late-night trains ran more drugs than people.
“What’s in it for Wallace? Why would he risk so much picking up Sherman on those bullshit court appearances? And why would Junior be there if he wasn’t doing the killing? What am I missing?” Paula said.
“The second man at the scene has to be Sherman. We have his DNA at each of the crime scenes—he was there. Wasn’t he?”
“My DNA was at the scene too. Bullet made noise about someone else as the killer and not Sherman. He seemed sure about that—as much as a meth head can be. Shit, I need more time.”
“We’re closing in, partner,” John said.
“That’s not good enough. According to the lieutenant, I’m on my last twenty-four hours. The Green Mile, and I didn’t even get a last meal.”
“There’s one other guy who matches Bullet’s description.” John reached over the back seat and passed Wallace’s personnel file to his partner.
“What are you doing with this?”
“A friend dropped it off last night. Take a look through there and see if anything pops for you. I took a peek last night, but I didn’t know what we know now. It might change things.”
Paula opened the stiff-backed file in her lap. “He’s got a few disciplinary actions here.”
“Supposedly use-of-force issues,” John prompted.
“At least two of them took place in the jail. He was assigned there after his transfer from Solano County. An inmate filed a complaint that Wallace and others beat him down after he grabbed a food tray from a female deputy.”
“Don’t mess with room service.”
“Another complaint about excessive force. Apparently, he broke a prisoner’s arm when he resisted getting fingerprinted,” Paula read.
“Yeah, booking isn’t a fun place to work.”
“Here’s another where the inmate claimed that he got rat packed after he refused to come out of his cell.”
“Sounds like a cell extraction. What else?”
“Here’s one, more recent. While on transportation duty, Wallace took a
prisoner down and stomped on his ribs. The man went to the hospital and was treated for injuries. Wallace reported the prisoner tried to grab his weapon.”
“Guy has a way of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, doesn’t he?”
“The complaints weren’t sustained, with the exception of the one where he broke the guy’s arm in booking. The report said Wallace escalated the situation and failed to use proper procedure to defuse the prisoner’s behavior. He was reassigned to transportation soon after.”
“Maybe he was the guy they all called on when shit went bad. But there’s a pattern here, like the guy liked to mix it up. I get the feeling there’s more to it than that,” John said.
“Wallace’s training records are spotty for all the required stuff, but he was a trainer for weaponless defense, a marksman for Solano County’s tactical team, and assigned to the SSPNET task force.”
“A marksman wouldn’t have missed McDaniel,” John said.
“Unless he wanted to. You think he was the driver who put down the rifle fire at Junior’s place?”
“It fits,” John said.
“You know how Wallace said he barely knew Sherman but admitted he worked with him on the task force?”
“Yeah?” John said.
“He and Wallace were partnered up back in Solano County. They’ve been working together for years.”
Paula shut the file when her phone chirped. The phone screen displayed an alert. “Wallace’s van is on the move.”
She put down the file on the floor and slid the tablet computer from the console.
“Heading west on J Street.”
John whipped the car into an abrupt U-turn, a move that daytime traffic would have made unthinkable. There were few vehicles on the road at this time of night. The old, faded van was easy to spot, and their tail would be easily spotted too.
John hung a quick right turn and went two blocks south to the next one-way that paralleled J Street. “Let me know when he turns, so I can keep out of sight.”
“We can’t be sure who’s driving. Remember, Wallace can track the van too,” Paula said.
The red dot held its course for ten minutes until it turned on Sixty-Fifth Street to the south. John turned south on another less crowded street a few blocks away.
“He’s stopping,” Paula advised.
John turned toward the mark on the map, and when they pulled within a quarter mile, John switched off the headlights and crept through the dark commercial district streets.
Paula pointed to a storage facility. “The GPS puts him there.”
They got out of the car and approached the yard on foot. The streets were dead quiet, and they heard the clatter of a roll-up door inside the facility. They followed the fence line to a back corner where a space between units gave a line of sight into an aisle of the storage facility. Rows of orange metal doors kept silent vigil. The blue van wasn’t there.
“Give me a boost,” Paula said.
John laced his fingers together, and Paula stepped in his hands with one foot and jammed a toe in a fence link. She scrambled up and dropped down on the other side.
“You be careful. Got your radio on?”
She nodded and slipped out of his sight.
A light crackle of radio static and Paula’s voice whispered through John’s radio, “The van’s moving. I didn’t see which unit he stopped at. Hold on—moving for a better look.”
John pressed his microphone button once to signal he understood.
A few silent seconds passed, and John thought about scaling the fence after her. It was a bad idea to let her go in alone. As if Paula could’ve been stopped.
“It’s Sherman. I saw him as he passed me.”
The rumble of an engine drew John’s attention from the fence. The blue van tripped the motion sensor on the gate-opening device. Sherman pulled through the gate and turned on the main road, heading back into the city.
“Paula, we gotta get moving,” John said through the radio.
“I can’t tell which unit he was in. There must be a hundred back here. I’m on my way to you.”
Paula jogged through the front gate before it closed, just as the van’s taillights disappeared.
A nagging thought flashed in John’s mind. Had Paula let Sherman escape?
FORTY-FIVE
Sherman loved the game, but it was never going to be everlasting. The plan was to destroy Newberry, then cash in the stolen drugs and disappear. He could live like a king in some nonextradition country. The problem was that Junior and his cadre of knuckle-dragging mighty whiteys couldn’t move the product fast enough. He needed someone with a thicker wallet.
He’d gotten into this situation with Junior and his Aryan Brotherhood backers out of necessity. The social opportunities available to a disgraced cop in prison were somewhat limited. In prison, everyone had wanted a piece of him, and only the Aryan Brotherhood had stood between him and a shank in the kidney. The gang’s interest wasn’t from love or even the fact that Sherman was a white boy. Predators acted based on the what’s-in-it-for-me factor, and their protection came with a price.
Sherman had proven himself fending off a handful of halfhearted attempts to put him in the infirmary. The gang saw something they could exploit, and Sherman became an enforcer, collecting rent and sending physical messages to those who disrespected the Brotherhood. The work put Sherman in good standing with the shot-callers, and he enjoyed the reputation. But he’d never bought into all their racial-superiority bullshit.
The gang demanded a test of loyalty. Gang members who worked in the yard office manipulated cell moves and housing arrangements to serve their needs. One of those needs was the discipline of an informant who gave up information about an Aryan Brotherhood operation on the street. It was a minor drug lab in Stockton, and the police acted on the tip. The snitch was marked, and the green light was given for a hit.
The man was moved into Sherman’s cell, and the rat didn’t last the night. He was stabbed in his sleep, and when officers came by for count, they found the informant dead on his mattress and Sherman covered in his blood, sitting by the cell door drawing designs on the cell floor. Within a day, he was in administrative segregation at CSP-SAC and headed for the cage in the PSU.
Sherman knew it was time to call in the favor for his loyalty. If Junior couldn’t move the volume he had, the AB could. Sherman would go around the middleman and deal directly with the gang.
Sherman pulled the blue van into a garage of a low, squat bungalow that looked like it last saw fresh paint in the 1950s. The place had the markings of a house teetering on foreclosure: dry lawn, a handful of windows boarded up, and neighborhood trash strewn on the sidewalk. The house didn’t stand out from the rest of the block. Sherman owned the place and had for the better part of four years.
He parked the van and tucked the keys under the sun visor. He walked to the garage door and surveyed the houses nearby. No curious faces appeared in the windows. Everyone here knew better than to take an interest in someone else’s goings-on. Sherman closed the garage door and placed a new combination lock on the hasp. He gave the dial a spin and walked away.
The pocket of his blue hoodie sagged from the prepaid cell phone he’d gotten at the 7-Eleven when he put five dollars of cheap gas in the van’s tank. Enough to get the Aryan bastards the goods, but Sherman didn’t feel like funding their entire road trip.
He kept to the shadows along the commercial roadway, skirting the yellow pools of light that spilled from the few unbroken lamps. He found the dark doorway of an auto-dismantling business identified by the greasepaint-lettered signs on the front. A thick layer of dust and nicotine glazed the window, but the outline of a greasy counter and a pair of plastic patio chairs marked this as the office of the dismantling operation.
Sherman knew this particular yard from the task force operation. Stolen cars used by high-end traffickers would end up here after a one-time drug drop. The cars disappeared or, more often than not, got what th
e shop owner called “an extreme makeover,” where all parts with a vehicle identification number were removed and swapped out with another scrapped car. Combine that with a cheap layer of paint, and you had the automotive equivalent of an untraceable gun.
The benefit of “shopping” at this time of night was the complete absence of salesmen, or in the case of this yard, crackheads moonlighting as chop shop welders. The four cars parked out in front of the shop’s office were lower-end Hondas and budget imports. Business had slacked off since the state began issuing driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, who could now buy a car on the legitimate market rather than relying on predatory lending in places like this. There weren’t for sale signs on the cars, but those who needed a ghost car knew where to find one.
A gray Honda Civic caught Sherman’s eye. There were hundreds like it that flowed in and out of the city during the twice-daily commute crush. An empty hole where the door lock should be meant he didn’t have to smash the window to get in. He pulled the door open on uneven hinges and sat on a cushion that held the impression of a butt much larger than his.
A bright new chrome ring around the ignition meant it had been recently replaced. He glanced through the filthy storefront window and saw the cabinet on the wall behind the counter where the keys were stored. The owners hadn’t bothered to change it since the last time Sherman was there. Granted, that last time, he’d carried a badge.
The front door had been forced open so many times that Sherman almost fell through when he put a shoulder into the metal frame. With keys in hand, he returned to the Honda and started the engine. He pulled out of the parking lot with his untraceable car. The best part was that the salvage owner couldn’t even report it stolen.
Sherman grabbed the cell phone in his sweat shirt pocket and dialed a number from memory. Someone picked up after the fourth ring, harsh music screaming in the background.
“Yeah?” a voice said beneath the wail of death metal.
“Lemme talk to Simmons.”
“Who’s askin’?”
“Sherman.”
Bury the Past Page 19
