by David Putnam
I walked back down to the sidewalk and south. I came back walking the route the suspect took, looking at the open door of the garage. I stopped. The LAPD officer got out of her patrol car, walked to the center of the quiet street, and watched. I said loud enough for her to hear, “Can you please close the garage door and open it when I tell you to?”
She nodded, came closer to the driveway, and pushed the garage door opener. The door came down; the racket again pierced the quiet night the same as it would’ve Friday morning. I walked down two houses and then headed back. “Okay, now.”
The garage door started up. I got to where Wicks stood just as it finished opening. “Well, boy wonder, what’d that do for you?”
I scowled at him and went back to the garage entrance. I took in a deep breath and entered. In between the cars, blood splattered and pooled the smooth concrete floor, red, turning brown. Lots of it. One of the pumpkin balls had gone through one of my friends and spattered the windshield. Body tissue and blood also littered the dashboard. I swallowed hard to keep the bile down. I’d seen plenty of crime scenes, but it came at you differently when you knew the people, were friends with them.
I walked down to where Wicks now stood with Officer Wu and said, “I’m guessing nothing came back on the shotgun or the shells, no hits on the serial number?”
“You guessed right. Got any ideas?”
I shook my head. “Not a one. From this range, the guy didn’t have to be that great of a shot. He was wearing gloves?”
“Don’t know, but that’s the working theory. We got nothing off the shells or the gauge.”
I closed my eyes. “Go through it again. Walk me through it. Talk slow and don’t leave out a thing this time.”
“Are you serious?”
I didn’t reply but just kept my eyes closed. He started from the beginning, telling it just like he did before. I watched it play out in my mind, taking it from the suspect’s point of view, then again from Connors’ and Jean Anne’s. The LAPD officer stood close by. I sensed her breathing.
Wicks said, “… then he tossed the shotgun on the lawn right here just like this. The shells were green Remingtons and were recovered right over here. The shotgun was an Ithaca Deerslayer, 12 gauge, and—”
I opened my eyes. “Say that again?”
“The blower was an Ithaca Deerslayer, 12 gauge. What? You got something?”
“Yeah, I think I do. I think I know who’s involved.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“SON OF A bitch, you’re kiddin’ me, right, Bruno? You really think you know?” He trailed along as I headed for his Dodge. Full dark no stars slammed down around us, making us vulnerable from all sides. I was glad to be away from that crime scene and I allowed myself to breathe freely again.
“Son of a bitch, I knew you could do it.”
Wu followed. “Hey, wait. Don’t you leave. My boss will want to know what you found out. Wait.” She keyed the mic on her shoulder lapel and turned her chin close to it. “15 L 20, can you have a supervisor 10-87 this location, ASAP.”
We both ignored her and got in. Wicks started up and chirped the tires when he pulled away from the curb. “You really came up with something, just like that? I knew you could do it. Give, who is it? Let’s get after his ass.”
I turned my head slowly and looked at him. “I don’t know who did the shooting, but I think I know where to look.”
“All right. That’s not as good, but it’s something no one else has. We can use it. We can work with it. Tell me.”
“Just give me a couple of minutes to work it out in my head to see if all the pieces fit.”
He pulled over to the curb and waited. “I’m not going to drive around in circles like some kind of circus monkey with his ass on fire while you get your thoughts together. Spit ’em out. Let me hear it. Maybe I can help talk you through it.”
I ignored him and mentally traveled back three years to a time when I rode in Judge Connors’ Mercedes with Deputy DA Rivers and a skinny meth tweaker named Twyla. We were after a murderer, one of three who had escaped from the jail through an elaborate and highly organized conspiracy. They had used a diversion along with electric drills to pull the bolts from the visiting window. The judge craved excitement and wanted to get involved. He put up a reward for Sammy Eugene Ray, aka Little Genie. The judge wouldn’t give Twyla the money until she pointed out the location where Little Genie was hiding. A simple and benign operation: we’d drive by, she’d point it out, then we’d call in the troops and hit the house with flash bangs and shotguns. But like Dad said on many occasions, if you make a plan, God laughs. When we got close, Sammy Ray bebopped out of the apartment he’d been hiding in. He was wanted for three murders where he’d killed off his dope competition. He was death-row eligible with nothing to lose. He’d more than earned the designation “Armed and extremely dangerous.” He was a major threat to public safety. I had no choice but to brace him then and there. Before I could walk up on him, two of his thugs came out of the same apartment. We went to guns. I emptied both of mine and only hit one of them. I was about to be gunned by the second one, shot point blank, when the judge intervened; he dropped him with a shotgun blast. Some of the pellets had hit me and I still carried those scars on my back.
“Let me off at the Crazy Eight. We can’t do anything about this until tomorrow.”
“Buuullshit, you’re not gettin’ off that easy.”
“Okay, you want to do something tonight?”
“Damn straight I do.”
“You said this goes all the way up to the governor. Well, get him outta bed and tell him to have Sammy Eugene Ray transferred down from Pelican Bay to our jail so we can have a talk with him in the morning.”
“Sammy Eugene Ray?”
“That’s right, from 10th and Crenshaw three years ago.”
“Naw, shit, I thought you had something really good. They already looked at him and stuck a microscope up his ass. They’ve had two days. They didn’t find a thing. They checked all his correspondence, played back all his phone calls, checked his visiting records, and ran down his girlfriends. That’s a big zero.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“Oh, you think you can get over on him when the best guys in homicide have already had a go? I’ll say it again, Bruno, buuullshit. You got anything else?” He pulled away from the curb and headed south, hopefully back to the Crazy Eight. Maybe Johnny Sin hadn’t left yet and I could coax him over to TransWorld and get him to make the big gun deal. Use the concealed video to capture his every word to get that deal in the works.
I sat quiet remembering all the good times with the judge. We talked a lot in his chambers when court wasn’t in session. We often took our lunches together while playing chess. I played an aggressive attack strategy that beat him cold the first three times. He figured me out, and after that, he could win whenever he wanted.
“Well?” Wicks asked.
I looked at him. The passing streetlights made his face flash bright then dark. “Well, what?”
“You didn’t answer the question. Why do you think you can get Ray to talk to you?”
I stared at him, waiting for him to put it together all on his own.
“Just tell me, asshole.”
“I caught up to him in that restaurant, remember?”
Wicks’ face lit up with a smile. He let loose with a smoker’s raspy laugh that degenerated to a cough. He slapped his leg. “That’s right. That’s right, you beat that boy to a pulp, tore up that entire restaurant. I remember. I was your first phone call. It looked like a Mack truck drove through the place. And … oh yeah, he was still getting away and you shot him in both legs point blank. Stuck the gun right to his legs and pulled the trigger. I’ll tell you what, that really raised some eyebrows. That was really something else. The news reports said it looked like an earthquake hit the joint. Yeah, you’re right, maybe he will tell you something when nobody else could get dick out of him.”
Wicks
drove into the night, his laugh turning to a chuckle that eventually died out. He smoked his thin brown cigarette and pondered what I’d just told him. “Okay, wait. Wait. Something out at that scene tonight hit a trip wire in that big beautiful brain of yours and you thought of something else. What was it?”
“The shotgun.”
“Okay, and … ?”
“Judge Connors used a shotgun that day on 10th and Crenshaw.”
“Man, that’s a real stretch even for you. There’s a million shotguns out there and—”
“Not Ithaca Deerslayers. They were popular in the fifties and sixties, even into the seventies, but Remingtons and Winchesters took over. You just don’t see Deerslayers anymore; they’re rare.”
“You mean that was a Deerslayer the judge used?”
“That’s right, and for someone to use one on the judge and to throw it down in front of his house is too big of a coincidence. Someone was making a statement. He used pumpkin balls because he was angry.”
Wicks hit the steering wheel with his palm. “Son of bitch, that’s good. That’s really good. How did all of those homicide assholes miss this?”
“We need to look at the guy the judge shot. Relatives, friends, fellow gang members, and a good place to start is with Sammy Ray. Set it up for tomorrow morning. Now drop me at the Crazy Eight.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I WATCHED WICKS drive away angry that we couldn’t do more and had to wait till morning. The taillights to his Dodge flashed red as he hit the brakes hard, made the first turn, and slid out of view. He’d dropped me on Central, three blocks north of the Crazy Eight. He said he’d pick me up at my place at 6:00 a.m. I, too, more than anyone else, wanted to get after the man who killed my friends Judge Connors and his wife, Jean Anne, but I also had to check in on the Compton court case concerning Derek Sams, my daughter’s boyfriend. His conviction still had number-one priority. I wanted him—needed him—to get convicted of murdering Bumpy Spanks. But at the same time, the little voice of my bad-self wanted Derek back out on the streets where I’d have access to him one last time. If he walked free and I had my shot at him, I knew my life would be irreparably changed. I had already made the difficult decision that I could live with the guilt and added heartache.
But for now, I needed to sit in the courtroom pews and stare at him, give him night terrors so he couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep, why should he? So I told Wicks to pick me up at ten in the Compton courthouse parking lot. He didn’t like the idea. He wanted to get an early start. He didn’t want someone else to get over on him and solve the killings before he had a fair chance at his opportunity for some blood and bone. In the end he said he’d set up the meeting with Sammy Ray at MCJ—Men’s Central Jail—at 11:00 a.m.
I stepped inside the Crazy Eight to a near-packed house, thirty to thirty-five serious drinkers who left their place of employment at five and now focused on their true goal in life, trying their best to keep their glasses empty and masking the real world behind an alcohol haze.
There was no music playing, not when there was such serious business afoot, drinking. Those who talked kept the noise down to a murmur. I looked around for Johnny Sin and didn’t see him, a missed opportunity I would have to rectify. A train car load of guns put on the street would equate to a serious rise in street murders and mayhem when one murder from those guns was too many.
Ledezma, the bartender, flagged me over, his wavy red hair gleaming in the low light. He set a cheap beer down on the bar at the only open spot, and I still had to nudge out of the way two factory workers who worked at a Vernon slaughterhouse. The reek of death hung on them like an aura.
Ledezma said, “I woulda bet good money you would’ve been spending another night in the can. How’d you dodge that bullet? That dick looked like he had a real hard-on for you.”
I took a drink and shrugged. “What happened to Johnny Sin?”
“He said he’d be back here tomorrow at noon and for you not to be late. I think you’re a fool for messing with the likes of him.”
I nodded. “My dad says the same kind of things. You gonna be my dad now?”
I wasn’t going to make noon if I had an eleven o’clock interview at MCJ with Little Genie.
“You seen Nigel?”
“Yeah, he came in, looked around, and left.”
I drank half the beer, set the mug down, and tossed another crumpled ten on the bar. The Sheriff’s star in my pocket radiated an unnatural heat. I became a bigger fool every minute I carried it. Undercover agents maintained their legend at all costs. I couldn’t hide the badge in the car, and I couldn’t take it home for Dad to find. I got in the Kadett and headed for Lakewood and TransWorld. I needed to brief Black Bart on what had happened and see how he wanted to play it. I guessed that the death of a superior court judge and his wife would trump all else. I didn’t mind getting pulled from the sting. Except for the gun deal. After the sting concluded and all the warrants were served, I’d be spending many weeks in court testifying on all the marks I’d roped into TW, though having them on video would preclude the majority from fighting their cases.
I made my perfunctory cruise of the industrial complex that housed TransWorld. All the day workers from all the other businesses had cleared out and made it easier to spot anything out of the ordinary. I recognized an early-model Chevy truck backed into the yellow loading spot next to TW’s front door, the tailgate down and cluttered with a couple of quilted moving blankets.
I kept going. Three tilt-up buildings down, I chose a women’s clothing factory and warehouse, called Amy’s Jumpers, where I parked and stayed in the shadows walking back. Now I wished I had Junior along; he could see in the dark and would alert long before I saw a threat coming.
The lights from inside TransWorld lit up the corner lot and made it easy to see Black Bart and RD at the counter dealing with a customer whose back was to the front door. That meant a deal going down. At least one other detective stood behind the one-way glass with a shotgun leveled at the mark, a trigger pull away from blending him into a rack of cheap motor oil. I knocked on the glass door framed in heavy security bars. Inside at the counter, Black Bart’s hand disappeared. The door’s solenoid buzzed. I pulled on the heavy door and entered.
Leo Martinez Jr. from Sparkle Plenty stood on the customer side of the counter. He turned and smiled when he saw me. Guns littered the counter willy-nilly. Black Bart grunted at me and resumed his examination of an Israeli Desert Eagle .44 Magnum.
“Hey, Karl,” Leo said with a greedy gleam in his eyes. “Your boss is going to give me double what you quoted for each gun. What do you think of that?”
Black Bart looked up and scowled. I had not briefed him on the price I quoted Leo. The money didn’t belong to Bart, but he sure acted like it did. The sting was scheduled to go until the money ran out. The more we paid for each deal, the sooner the job ended. And the fewer crooks we could grapple up and take off the street.
I looked at RD and suppressed my anger over his little prank, parking the stolen yellow Corvette in Wicks’ driveway. “We need to talk.”
Leo Martinez Jr. laughed. “You two sound like a couple of old lovers about to break it off.”
RD chuckled. “I think I know the topic. How’d it go? What’d he say? Was he really pissed?”
Black Bart watched us with a supervisor’s eye.
I glared at RD as I came around the corner of the counter to the employee side and started to examine the guns, acting as if I really cared about the gun deal I’d set in motion. “Did Nigel come by looking for me?”
RD nodded. “Yep, said he’d catch you tomorrow, said he was mad that you fronted off Johnny and that he’d set up another deal for noon.”
“All right, thanks.” I’d picked up a Saturday night special, a cheap .38 made from pot metal, real clean and new. I set it back down. Another one, an old .38 Colt Detective, caught my eye. I stiffened without meaning to. My mouth went dry and my heart raced. What the hell was that gun do
ing there?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
RED RUBBER BANDS around the stock looked too familiar. I picked up the gun, opened the cylinders as if checking the functionability of the weapon when in reality I wanted to see the serial number stamped in the frame. My breath caught. I looked up. Black Bart had his eyes on me. I set the gun back down.
Bart looked at Leo. “Since I’m buying the lot, I should get a cut rate. I’ll give you three thousand for all of them.”
“Thirty-eight hundred?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Thirty-five?”
Black Bart reached into his greasy denim pants and pulled out a wad of bills separated with rubber bands. He peeled off four sets, handed Leo three, and broke the fourth one in half and handed that one over as well. Leo’s eyes opened wider than normal. He licked his lips as he counted the money. How many lives had just been saved taking this many guns off the street? Thirty-five hundred was a cheap price to pay.
I feigned interest in the whole transaction and casually slid the old Colt .38 off the counter and stuck it in my back pocket. I took up an armload of rifles and a couple of pistols and carried them back to the gun safes. RD did the same with some handguns.
RD set his down on the empty worktable alongside of mine. He’d have to run the guns to see if they’d been reported stolen, tag them as evidence, and enter each one into the SVS system as stolen/recovered. I headed back to get another load. RD started to follow along. “Come on, Karl, you’re not mad over what I did, are you?”
I stopped. “You put me in a bad position. I told you, that guy is no one to mess with.”
RD chuckled. “Tell me he didn’t laugh after he calmed down? He had to think it was funny, right?”
I gave him a sarcastic smile. “No, he didn’t, and I’m going to be eating crow for it from now until the cows come home. He’ll never let me forget it.”
“Really? No way. I’m sorry, Karl.” His tone didn’t sound like he was sorry.