by Sean Lynch
“They can be a bit of an anchor,” Quintana acknowledged.
“You mind if I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead,” Quintana said.
“The name Drop-Dead Bullock mean anything to you?”
“This part of your investigation?”
“That’s right.” I figured at this point I had nothing to gain by holding back, especially since I knew Quintana could learn about my investigation by speaking with Matt. Besides, being a vice cop meant he might have useful information.
“I’m looking into the murder of a teenaged girl here on the Track. Occurred about three weeks ago,” I said. “Name was Marisol Hernandez.”
“Rings a bell,” Quintana said. “What about it?”
“The name ‘Drop-Dead Bullock’ came up.”
Quintana and Bo exchanged glances and shrugged. “Don’t know him, but I’ve heard the name,” he said. “Mostly street scuttlebutt. He’s supposed to be one of the bigger players on the Track, but if he is, he keeps a low profile. Has a reputation as a dude not to fuck with.”
“So you’ve never had any personal dealings with Bullock?”
“No. Like I said; I know him by reputation only. You think he’s connected to the Hernandez killing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard the name, that’s all.”
“I’ll keep my ear to the ground,” Quintana said. “I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”
“I appreciate it.” We shook hands again.
“I’m glad I didn’t have to arrest you for soliciting,” Quintana called out on the way back to his car.
“So am I,” I said. “Have a safe shift.”
“I should have known you weren’t out on the Track trolling for pussy,” Bo said, falling in behind the sergeant. “Chauncey’s a fag name.”
“Bo,” Quintana barked. “Be nice!”
“Well it is,” he insisted.
Chapter 16
Within a few blocks of driving away from Sergeant Quintana and his cordial partner Bo, I suspected a car was following me. By the time I reached Seminary Avenue I was sure of it.
I was driving east on International Boulevard. My destination was the MacArthur Freeway onramp from 98th Avenue, and home. Now that I had company I’d have to re-route.
I turned north on Havenscourt Boulevard and then east again on Bancroft Avenue. My shadow stayed with me. From the headlight configuration reflected in my rear-view mirror I guessed the car was a four-door sedan of American manufacture, maybe ten years old. The car had no front license plate.
I changed lanes a couple of times, and found the car mirroring my course. I could see the outline of two occupants through the car’s windshield when I drove under the street and traffic lights.
I was contemplating my next move, and patting myself on the back for my cleverness in spotting the tail, when a second car passed the one tailing me at high speed. Maybe I wasn’t so clever after all.
This car was also a large American sedan. I didn’t get more than a glimpse of it before it entered the opposing lanes, cut me off, and rammed the front of my truck broadside at better than forty miles an hour.
I careened towards the curb, the impact spinning me around one-hundred and eighty degrees. My truck slammed into a parked Chevrolet sport utility vehicle and came to rest. I was now facing the direction I’d come, and the car which had been tailing me.
This saved my life.
Since my vehicle had been struck broadside the airbag didn’t deploy, which was a good thing. Because instead of sitting stunned in the driver’s seat with a plastic pillow over my eyes and a snoot-full of toxic gases, I had a birds-eye view of the two men clambering out of the tail car, which had skidded to a stop a couple of car-lengths from the crash. Both men were wearing dark clothing and had their hoods pulled up, shadowing their faces. The driver, a large man, was holding a handgun. His passenger, much smaller in stature, was shouldering an AK-47.
I usually drive in urban environments with my window rolled down; a habit honed from my uniformed patrol days. As a result, I was able unlatch my seatbelt, plant my feet in the center console, and launch myself out through the open driver’s door window as the first volley of 7.62×39 bullets cascaded through what was left of my shattered windshield. An added benefit of carrying my pistol on my strong side is the ability to quickly draw in the same motion required to unlock a seatbelt; another skill acquired during my tenure as a beat cop. Consequently, by the time I landed on the pavement outside my crunched truck, I had my pistol in hand.
I landed on my shoulder and rolled, grateful for Judo training, and came up in a crouch. I ducked-walked around behind the demolished Chevy SUV, which kept me below line-of-sight.
A continuous burst of semi-automatic rifle fire peppered my truck. I surmised the gunmen didn’t see me bail out, since they didn’t shift their fire, and continued to pour bullets into the driver’s compartment of what had once been my vehicle. When I peered up from behind the parked Chevy I noticed the pistol-wielding driver was also firing into my truck along with his partner. He was using a Glock with an extended thirty-round magazine; all the rage in Oakland this season.
I thumbed back the hammer of my Sig Sauer .45 for single-action precision and ensured my spare magazines were handy. Then I waited. I was anticipating one, or both, of the two barking guns to run dry; they were certainly being emptied of their lethal cargo quickly enough. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the driver of the sedan which had rammed me, a skinny African-American man in his twenties, stagger from his smashed car and scamper across Bancroft Avenue. I let him go; he apparently wanted nothing to do with the ambush raging in the street, and I didn’t want a threat coming after me from another direction.
After what seemed like an eternity, but which was probably no more than ten or fifteen seconds, both gunmen’s weapons went silent. Even in the dim light of the streetlamps I could see the Glock’s slide locked back. The dude with the AK-47 began to fumble with the removal of the banana-shaped magazine from his rifle. The fellow with the pistol dug into a pocket and emerged with another extended magazine for his Glock. I didn’t plan on giving them time to reload.
I inhaled, exhaled evenly through my nose, and stood up from where I’d been hunkered behind the smashed Chevrolet. Assuming a solid, two-handed, Weaver stance, I focused the tritium front sight of my pistol into crystal clarity as I brought it to bear on my first target. I rested the front sight on the upper chest of the closest threat; the bigger man reloading the Glock. I squeezed the trigger three times in rapid, controlled succession.
The distance was approximately thirty feet; relatively far for a handgun encounter, especially against dual threats. The triple-tap struck the man’s large frame high in his chest, the last round striking under his chin. He dropped to the ground like poured water.
Before the first man hit the ground, I transitioned my pistol’s front sight to the second man; the one blundering the reload of his rifle. He was trying, and failing, to stuff the replacement magazine straight up into the magazine well. It’s a common mistake with untrained personnel when reloading an AK-47 series weapon; you have to rock the magazine forward and back a little when inserting it. Maybe the shooter didn’t know that. Maybe he never had to reload before. Maybe seeing his partner get shot to hell next to him made him nervous.
When his partner fell, the man apparently gave up on the reload. He dropped both the AK-47 and the fresh magazine he was unsuccessfully scrabbling into place and flung open his coat. He came out with a pistol, also a Glock, from his waistband.
I fired a double-tap, which struck him in the torso but didn’t down him. I fired another two shots with the same effect; he flinched, signaling hits, but didn’t fall. He brought his pistol up and began to fire at me one-handed.
I ducked behind the Chevy again; if you have cover, use it. Bullets ‘tinked’ against the body of the car as I conducted a speed reload. I’ve heard there are people who can count the number of rounds th
ey expend during a firefight, and I know some trainers who teach their students this method. I’ve never known anyone, however, who could tally their round count with any accuracy in the heat of an actual shooting fracas, and I’ve been in a few. It’s better to focus on your front sight, trigger control, and assessing threats than it is to audit the number of bangs your gun puts out. If you think you’re getting low on ammunition, you probably are; reload. If you can do it behind cover, better still.
Once my gun was fully charged, I moved in a crouch to the opposite side of the car from where I’d originally ducked. The gunman began walking towards where I’d been, still firing. He was closing the distance for what he expected to be a point-blank kill.
When I popped up again, from a different spot behind the crunched Chevrolet, it caught him flat-footed. He didn’t see me move behind the car. This time, instead of firing a triple-tap, I squeezed off another two rounds into his center-of-mass. After a minute pause to re-orient the front sight upward to his nose, I fired two more times. He crumbled to the ground faster than his partner, his pistol clattering to the pavement.
I ducked behind the Chevy once again, reloaded my pistol with a second fresh magazine, and stepped around the car. I directed my aim at the two downed men. Neither moved. I scanned all around me, paying particular attention to my six o’clock position, for any additional threats. Nothing emerged.
There were cars stopped in both directions on Bancroft Avenue. People began to mill about on the sidewalks. I saw the furtive eyes of several young men who’d been loitering on the street glance towards the AK-47 rifle and the two pistols my adversaries had dropped. In Oak-Town, guns are like Dorothy’s ruby slippers; everybody wants them, and instinctively know the best time to acquire them is after their owners are dead.
I walked over to where the two men lay. I tried my best to avoid walking on the spent cartridge cases littering the street; an old crime scene preservation habit. It was a like playing a macabre game of hopscotch. Luckily the two men were lying fairly close to each other, and thus their discarded firearms were nearby as well. I kept my eye on them. I still had my gun in my hand.
“Stay back,” I called out to nobody and everybody. “First person to step into the street gets shot.”
No one tested me, for which I was grateful. I’m guessing the fact that I’d just gunned down two heavily armed men may have had something to do with it.
I wasn’t even sure anyone had called the police. It was, after all, Oakland on a Friday night. There were probably several other gunfights in the hopper ahead of mine, and very few cops to respond to them.
I looked down at the men I’d shot. Both were dead on arrival. The smaller man, the one with the AK-47, was Hispanic. He had his coat open from when he’d drawn his pistol. He was clad in a ballistic vest not unlike the one I was wearing under my own jacket. I could see the craters where his vest had absorbed multiple hits from my gun. Unfortunately for him, he’d also taken two of my .45 slugs through the front of his cranium. He was well beyond Bactine and Band-Aids.
The second man was African-American, and much larger than his partner. He was also wearing a ballistic vest. I could feel it when I kicked him with my toe. He’d taken a couple of shots to the ballistic vest as well, but the third round in my triple-tap must have landed high; you get a bit of muzzle flip from rapid-firing a .45. This round took him on the chin, and probably passed all the way through and severed his spine. He was deader than Tupac.
A lot of blood had seeped from the larger man’s mouth and the gunshot entrance wound below it. It pooled around his head, soaking his dreadlocks, and stained his once-pristine white baseball hat.
The two gunmen who ambushed me, and who were now decomposing on Bancroft Avenue’s dirty concrete, were the guys in the Burger King I’d met less than an hour ago. I’d paid the big man in the white hat forty dollars for the services of a whore named Holly. That would presumably make them soldiers of DeShawn ‘Drop-Dead’ Bullock.
Soldiers don’t act without orders.
People were watching. I knelt down over the big man, leaned my ear over his face, and placed the hand not occupied with my gun over his chest. I pretended to check him for a heartbeat and pulse. As if.
What I was actually doing, under the guise of checking his non-existent vital signs, was searching his pockets. Within a moment I found what I was looking for; his cellular phone. I palmed the phone and stood up.
I walked over to the smaller man and did the same. His phone I also found, but left in place. The cops would find two missing phones suspicious. When I stood up this time, I holstered my gun. In doing so, I slipped the phone I’d taken from the larger man inside my pocket. I was pretty sure nobody saw me do it.
Eventually I heard sirens.
I might have been the only person in Oakland that night hoping police sirens were getting closer.
Chapter 17
The door to the interview room inside Oakland Police Department’s Major Crime Section 1 opened and Greg Vole walked in. He had bags under his eyes, disheveled hair, and was wearing a faded Hastings College of Law sweatshirt, jeans, and deck shoes with no socks. I forgave him his rumpled appearance. Not only was mine worse, but it was almost two o’clock in the morning.
When the Oakland police units finally rolled up on Bancroft Avenue, several hours ago, they found me smiling affably amid the carnage with my gun holstered and my driver’s license held up in my otherwise empty hands. It didn’t matter; the cops still pointed their guns at me, ordered me to lie face down on the ground, and handcuffed me per standard high-risk arrest protocols. In their shoes, I would too.
They stripped me of my guns, knife, ballistic vest, flashlight, and just about everything else I had on me, before stuffing me into the back of a police car which smelled of Lysol and puke. They didn’t find the SIM card.
After I palmed the big gunman’s phone, I went to my wrecked truck and retrieved a handcuff key from the ashtray. Using the pointed tip, I removed the subscriber identity module, or SIM card, from the phone and put it into my mouth. It was about the size of a dime. Then I wiped the phone with my handkerchief. It only took a moment, and I blocked the view with my body.
As I walked back to the street to await the arrival of the police and continue my vigil over the abandoned weapons, I inconspicuously tossed the phone into the smashed Chevy through one of its shattered windows.
Not long after I’d been put into the patrol car a sergeant showed up and asked me, “What happened?” I didn’t fall for that one, and merely demanded to speak with my attorney. Any declaratory statements are admissible in court, even if a suspect, which would be me, had not yet been read his Miranda rights.
I sat in the rear of the police car with my hands cuffed behind my back for over an hour while crime scene units, the coroner’s deputies, some reporters, and a host of other people converged on the scene. I watched the technicians perform tasks I had witnessed hundreds of times before with methodical precision masked by bored disinterest.
Eventually Matt Nguyen arrived in a powder blue Crown Victoria. He was wearing a suit under a raincoat. He looked pissed. On his heels was Sergeant Alvero Quintana, who’d driven up in his own black Crown Vic. His partner Bo wasn’t with him.
“What the fuck, Chance?” Matt said, opening the patrol car door I was seated in and gesturing at the scene. “When you called earlier to tell me you were going to be out on the Track tonight, I didn’t expect you to start the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”
“Howdy, Matt,” I said. “Nice to see you, too. Hello Sergeant Quintana.”
“I told you to call me Al,” Quintana grinned. “Now I know why they call you Chance. You sure as hell take some. Stand up; I’ll get those cuffs off.” I complied. My wrists were killing me.
“You two know each other?” Nguyen said.
“Yeah,” Quintana smirked. “We made acquaintance tonight down the street on International Boulevard.”
“Small world,” said Matt.<
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“Looks like you ruffled somebody’s feathers,” Quintana remarked, looking over the scene.
“Chance is good at that,” Matt scowled. “This little escapade of yours is going to cause me a shitload of work I don’t need right now. Why couldn’t you have kept on driving down Bancroft Avenue into San Leandro before starting world war three? That way this clusterfuck of yours would be San Leandro P.D.’s problem and not mine.”
“You think I had a choice?”
“Absolutely,” Matt snapped at me. “You could have stayed home and watched television like a normal citizen instead of sniffing around on the Track like Dick Fucking Tracy.”
I was in no mood for a dressing-down from Matt. Not after what I’d been through. I did my best to ignore his ire and addressed Sergeant Quintana.
“You might want to locate that hooker I was talking with,” I told him. “She said her name was Holly.”
“I remember what she looks like,” Quintana said.
“If somebody tried to whack me after speaking with her-” I began,
“-then she might be in righteous danger,” Quintana finished. “I’m on it.” He pulled out his cell phone and started to dial. Matt grabbed his arm.
“Don’t listen to this asshole, Al,” Matt said. “He’s in no position to be giving orders.”
“Fuck you,” I told him.
“What did you say?” Matt asked, taking a step towards me.
“You heard me; fuck you. I’m out here on the Track doing what you should have been doing three weeks ago; trying to find out who punched Marisol Hernandez’s ticket.”
“I don’t give a damn about your dead whore,” Matt said. “She’s just another suspended case.”
“She wasn’t a whore,” I said.
“How the fuck do you know?” he retorted.
“If you spent less time chasing pussy and playing cards, and more time doing your job, you might know that yourself.”
“Watch your lip, you son-of-a-bitch,” Matt snarled, moving another step closer.