Dead Game (22 page)

Douglas had once made
a cryptic remark to Marquez about religion. As they leaned against the metal railing of a boat and looked out at the clean sky above the water, Douglas had said he believed in God too much to ever sit in a church.

But a memorial service is for the living, not the dead. Douglas’s was held in a chapel adjacent to the East Bay mortuary and graveyard where he was to be buried alongside his mother. A pastor who’d never met Douglas conducted the service. He quoted often from the Bible and gave no sign that he had any feeling at all for Douglas’s life or death.

After the chapel service Marquez followed a line of cars up the long hill to the gravesite, where two men were at work adjusting a dark wooden coffin so it would lower properly into the grave in the steep manicured lawn. A second service began, and those in the audience were asked if they wanted to say anything. An old friend of Douglas’s, a man who said he’d known Charles forever,
said, “It was simple with Charles. You could always count on him to do the right thing. It didn’t matter what it was, he would do it.”

Marquez took a long look at Douglas’s sons, square-shouldered and brave as Douglas would want them to be, though tears ran steadily down their cheeks. His wife, Amelia, sobbed as the moment overwhelmed her, and Douglas’s brother pulled her close and held her. When the coffin lowered Amelia broke free and sank to the grass. She grabbed at the chains, tried to stop it from lowering, and a deep sadness came over Marquez. He felt the tears on his own face, couldn’t take this one stoically. He wished he’d found the words to speak earlier and looked away now down the long falling slope and at the dark green of the big oaks and out across San Francisco Bay, at the whitecaps, gray-black clouds at the horizon.

He and Douglas used to talk about what they’d do someday when they had more time. Douglas wanted a house where he could have a big vegetable garden and barbecue on a back deck that looked out on nothing but hills. He’d move north until he could afford a good house, or inland if he had to. He was tired of the fog. He wanted to be where it froze at night in the winter, someplace north where you could toss a football around on New Year’s Day and you were warm in the sun in a T-shirt, but where you knew there was winter.

“Do you think about what comes next?” Douglas had asked, and he’d been serious. “I mean after you get tired of chasing perps and the geeks stealing from our children’s future.”

When the crowd began to break up and move toward the cars, Marquez went to Amelia to tell her how sorry he was. He felt her desperation as she gripped his hands.

“My dreams are gone,” she said. “I had so many dreams of the things we were going to do.”

Marquez walked to his truck. Only as he unlocked it and was getting in did he become aware of someone behind him. A young FBI agent had come up behind him, and he turned to face him, wondering what it was. Another special agent, a woman, backed him up. She stood within earshot but out of the line of confrontation.

“What are you doing here?” the agent asked.

“Charles was a friend of mine.”

“I don’t think you belong here, and I’m not alone thinking that.”

“What’s that about?”

“Don’t show up at the wake.”

The agent waited for a response as though the statement warranted it, but Marquez turned back to his car and got in. He drove away without looking in the rearview mirror, but it had affected him. He did not attend the wake. He’d been unsure whether he would or not, and maybe he deferred to the agent’s words.

An hour later he was on the sidewalk outside the Presto on Union where Maria was working this afternoon. As he came inside her elbows were on the yellow marble of the counter, two customers, two friends of hers he guessed, standing at the bar across from her, cappuccinos in front of them, as she leaned toward them, chatting. A young man with a goatee cleaned an espresso machine to the side of her. He had a feeling that was Shane. He read Maria’s quizzical smile at his black suit and then saw her put it together and the smile vanish.

“Why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and walk with me?”

They walked up Union Street, then climbed up toward Pacific Heights and walked along Broadway where the wind was stronger.

“Your mom told me she came to visit you last night.”

“Only so she could tell me to come home. It wasn’t like she wasn’t waiting the whole time just so she could say that.”

“She told me she didn’t ask for anything.”

“Lies like that,” Maria said almost under her breath, the comment almost lost in the wind, her anger at her mother surfacing again. Marquez stopped walking when he heard it.

“Lies like what?” he asked.

“That’s why she came by,” Maria said. “She hates me.”

“Or you’re so angry you think you hate her. She’s worried because she cares so much, and like any parent she doesn’t want you to take a wrong turn.”

“Like I’m the first person to ever take a break before going to college.”

“She’s afraid you’ll end up without a college degree and working for minimum wage.”

“My friends don’t have college degrees.”

“It’s like a business card here, Maria. A degree is a bare minimum in a lot of places you might go to work.”

“Well, I don’t want to become a suit. I don’t want to live that kind of life.”

“It’s not about what you don’t want to be; it’s about what you do want to be.”

“Mom thinks I’m ungrateful, lazy, and selfish. She was disgusted when I said I want to go shopping instead of look at a college I could never get into anyway.”

“Things get said, and you’d better learn how to forget, if you can’t forgive.”

“How about when your own mother says them?”

“My mother dumped my sister, your aunt, and me at my grandparents when I was nine and my sister twelve. She was going to come back when she ‘got her head clear.’ But we never saw her again. She got killed in a train wreck in India. She was on a spiritual
quest going somewhere to find out about herself, and my father was always going to take us back from his parents and raise us, but somehow he was always in the process of getting his life together. The year before they dumped us we lived in a tent up the coast. I was almost two years behind in school when I started, and all I really knew how to do well was fight. Two years behind and big for my age.”

“How come you’ve never told me about living in a tent?”

“It’s not the kind of thing you brag about. The kids at the funeral today just lost their dad. I knew their father well enough to know they just lost the best friend they’ll ever have. You and your mom are going to have to deal with what you’ve said to each other. The only way to do that is to keep talking and put the bad stuff behind you. It’s time you come home.”

She hung tough. “I’ve got to get back to work, Dad.”

He walked down with her, then drove to the Humane Shelter and picked up the cat that Anna had abandoned and August had dumped on the shelter. Marquez wrote a check to the shelter, and the woman there found Bob’s collar.

“Okay, Bob, you’ve got a new home.”

He put the cat carrier on the passenger seat and crossed the Golden Gate in heavy traffic, feeling very emotional about Douglas’s death. Then he took a call from Crey.

“My man,” Crey said. “I was beginning to think someone mistook you for an FBI agent in a parking lot and blew your ass up.”

“I’ve been laying low.”

“Tell you what, dude, I would have bought tickets to watch that shit go down. I hate those fuckers. They put me in a little room and tried to tell me I was connected to some big-time drug traders
and I was going to do twenty years unless I snitched people out. A couple of them were in the bait shop today.”

“What did they want today?”

“They’re everywhere asking questions about the Burdovsky babe. I thought she got smoked, but I guess she’s alive and they’re trying to find her.” He laughed. “More than alive, she’s on the wanted list.”

“I thought it was Russians they were after.”

“Right now, if you’ve got a V in your name they want to talk to you. But look, I’m calling because I’ve got an offer for you. I talked to the boys, and I think maybe your story is just about right. They were going upstairs, which isn’t cool with me. I’ve got a proposition for you.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“You and me partner up in the business.”

“Partners?”

“That’s right, and I’m serious. I’m talking about fifty-fifty. I move it and deal with the customers. You do your end, and we split everything. I got the big boat, you got boats, and we work the delta.”

“I might be interested. Let me think about it. But what about Torp and Perry?”

“There’s some other shit you don’t know about. I think it’s going to catch up to them. They ripped a car off a girl they were staying with, and now I’m getting some calls, people wondering where she is.”

“What’s her name?”

“You don’t even want to know. Think about it and call me.”

A second later he hung up.

That night it rained hard,
and in the morning the clouds were low and the wind blew hard over the mountain. Marquez listened to the rain lash the windows and made calls. He talked to his team about the Crey offer, then picked up a message from Raburn and phoned him back.

“This is one you might be interested in or not,” Raburn said. “There’s an old Mexican albino they call Whitey. He called me yesterday because he’s got one.”

“How long have you known him?”

“A while. He’s into peyote and mushrooms and used to live down in the desert in New Mexico. Came up here about a dozen years ago. He knows how to keep a sturgeon alive. He’s got one with eggs. I usually hear from him once every six months, but he called twice yesterday. He says he’s up Razor Slough.”

Marquez had never heard of sturgeon biting up Razor. There was little flow, it was shallow, narrow, and last time he was there
it didn’t look like either the Army Corps or the state had done any dredging or clearing of deadfall in years. Razor was out along the edge of the delta, deep in the Central Valley, and there was little up there but mosquitoes in summer and the rotted remains of an evangelist’s attempt to set up an encampment. It was also too early, far too early for a sturgeon to migrate that far.

“He’ll meet you there,” Raburn said. “That’s if you’re interested.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Wouldn’t make any difference if I did or not. I got a number you’ve got to call back before noon if you’re interested.”

Marquez looked outside. Raining hard and his boat was at Loch Lomond. Wouldn’t be easy to launch his boat and run it all the way up to Razor on just the possibility of a sturgeon. But something nagged about it. He copied the number he was supposed to call.

“I’m not saying he’s really got one, but he never calls unless he does. Do you know how to get to Razor Slough?”

“I can probably find my way back.”

“ ‘Cause I can’t go with you. I’ve got to meet my brother.”

“How’s the weather where you are?”

“The rain has let up.”

“Razor is where the preacher left that mess?”

“You got it. One end is closed off, but you can’t get in there

unless you want to hike. You got to go by water, but you can’t go the whole way. If I was you I wouldn’t do it, but you wanted me to call you with every offer.”

Marquez felt a vague unease. He hung up with Raburn and called Shauf to talk it over. There was a Zodiac they could borrow and put in well upriver. That would cut the boat time to forty minutes, and they’d still have the hike.

“Is it worth it?” she asked.

“If I partner with Crey it might be, and the storm is supposed to taper off.”

Marquez looked at Bob the cat sitting on the fireplace mantel where he’d been sitting since last night. Katherine had fed him on the mantel. A little can of something called Fancy Food was sitting in front of him. He’d eaten out of the can without knocking it off the mantel. Marquez looked at him and thought about why he’d brought him home. Maybe because the way Bob had been abandoned angered him, or maybe because when he’d first met Katherine she and Maria had a cat they loved that had died of cancer about four years ago.

“If Raburn was going to set us up, Razor Slough would be the place to do it,” Shauf said. “After what happened at Weisson’s, if anything happened to us that sure would be the end of any undercover sturgeon operation. How close to Crey’s call was Raburn’s?”

“Close. What are you wondering?”

“Whether anybody is working together.”

“Let’s go take a look. I’ll call and leave the message with this Whitey character that we’re coming up early in the afternoon.”

Razor Slough was worse than he remembered. Brambles and blackberries tugged at their clothes and scratched their faces. They left the Zodiac tied off on a tree and climbed up the bank. The mud was sticky, and on the hike in it rained on and off and was cold, though there were patches of blue sky now. Marquez pointed out where someone had used a machete to create a channel in the slough. Cuts on the tree branches overhanging the water looked fresh.

It was an hour before they saw the faded plywood structures of the encampment. Smoke rising from a hole in the roof of one of the buildings bent in the wind, and Marquez looked for Whitey. He saw his blue skiff but not him.

The preacher had his brethren carve a swath of earth maybe ten feet above the slough and then level back seventy yards to low hills. Marquez had heard it was a rancher, a follower of the evangelist, who’d allowed this gash cut into land he leased from the government. In the winter runoff silted into the slough, and he remembered something about a lawsuit getting filed. No one had lived here since, except drifters like this Whitey and people hiding out.

They headed for the blue smoke, but it was Anna they found in the shack, not Whitey. She’d set it all up; she’d asked Whitey to call and gambled Raburn would call him. She looked scared.

“You picked a good spot,” Marquez said.

“I was hoping you would come. I was hoping Abe would get a hold of somebody at Fish and Game who would get a hold of you.”

“Do you have any idea how many people are looking for you?”

“I want to turn myself in, but after what’s happened I don’t want to do it alone. I’m afraid of them.”

“They won’t kill you.”

He thought about how they were going to do this as he looked at her. He saw the kayak covered with a tarp in a corner of the building.

“I hid it along the slough. I rode a mountain bike to it. I’m sure they found my bike.”

She pulled a small radio from her pocket, showed it to him, and put it back in her pocket. She probably had some idea of how the FBI would view this meeting, as well.

She kept her eyes on him, the planes of her cheeks sharp, acne scars in the hollows of her cheeks, eyes bloodshot, nose too narrow for her face. She didn’t seem to realize how deep she was in now. He looked around. The Feds couldn’t land one of their helicopters here and wouldn’t know how to get up the slough.

“We’ll bring you out,” he said. “Then we’ll turn you over and you’re going to need to get yourself a lawyer.”

“I don’t know anything about what happened. What I told you last time was the truth.”

Shauf used the kayak, and Anna rode in the skiff with him. He figured it was the last opportunity to ask her what she knew about the sturgeon poaching, but he didn’t ask anything. She didn’t have much credibility with him anymore. As they reached the Zodiac it started to shower again, and he covered the phone as he punched in Ehrmann’s cell. When he got voice mail he hung up and redialed. Same thing happened and he did it again. On the fourth try Ehrmann answered. “I’m in Washington, Marquez. I can’t talk to you.”

“Then tell me who to call. I have Anna Burdovsky with me.”

“Where are you?”

“Coming out of a slough in the delta. I’ll give you coordinates.”

He read them off and gave Ehrmann the boat landing they were headed to.

“You’ll get a call in a few minutes.”

Marquez turned and asked her as he waited for the call, “When did you get into Razor Slough?”

“I had to paddle out into the river to get away and waited for dark, and even then they almost found me. Then I paddled all night. I had food stowed in the kayak, enough for a week.”

“How did Karsov know the raid was coming?”

“They’re always on guard. They got raided in LA a couple of times. They look for buildings they can defend. I told the FBI to watch out because they’re always talking about what they’ll do to anyone that comes after them.”

“Did they ever talk about car bombs?”

“Never with me.”

They turned from the slough into the river, and Marquez kept the speed slow so he could hear her answers. She’d stowed a kayak and mountain bike, and she had used scuba gear to swim out of the slough. She told him how she got away and that she’d stashed the equipment in case the FBI showed up.

“Seems like you knew the bust was going to go down,” Marquez said.

“How would I possibly have known? That’s ridiculous.”

“You’re up a slough hiding when the bombs go off.”

“I was hiding because I knew they were using me like bait. I was afraid I was going to get killed, so I figured out a way to hide, and I didn’t lie to you. I was going to tell you everything, but now after what’s happened I don’t want to say anything until I talk to a lawyer.”

Another shower raked the water, and the heavy rain ended all conversation. Marquez pulled a hood over his head, and the Zodiac plowed through the waves. When the rain lightened they were in view of the boat landing and there was no more time to talk.

“Look at them all,” Anna said, and one agent looked like he was ready to wade into the river.

“Anna Burdovsky, you are under arrest.”

Marquez listened as she was read her rights and handcuffed. She looked small and scared as they took her away. She looked back at him once as though he might help her, and then she was gone, and once more the Feds were asking him what she’d told him and why she’d contacted him. They had a lot of questions, and they wanted him to come in.