Shell Games jm-1

by Kirk Russell

  “You’re winning medals,” Marquez said.

  “It was handicapped for age. There was a big difference, let me tell you.” He slid his chair over, pride on his face that the paper-weight had been noticed. His face looked like smooth rock this afternoon. “Have you had lunch, Marquez?”

  “You want to do this over lunch?”

  “It’s not going to be any easier up here.”

  “All right, let’s go eat.” Marquez reached down to his side and lifted his laptop. “I brought this. We got a little shaky footage down near Morgan Hill the other night that I want to show you.”

  “Is this where the girlfriend got rolled down the hill?”

  “Yes.”

  “They doped her up.”

  “That’s what we’re hearing. We lost a van we were following, but we got a few murky shots I want to show you after lunch.”

  They walked to a Japanese place that Douglas said was cheap and not far away. The sky was ragged overhead now, but the side-walk was sunlit. They talked about baseball and the 49ers, what they had coming up, tried to reconnect in some way as they walked to the restaurant. But the sports talk didn’t get them anywhere and they sat at a small maple table now in a corner of a room that filled with light every time the sun moved from behind clouds. Marquez ordered a small plate of tuna sashimi, a bowl of rice, miso soup, as though the soup could touch the emptiness inside. He felt like a diplomat on the losing side of a war, waiting to hear what the terms of surrender would be. Ready to protest but knowing his words would fall on deaf ears. It wasn’t his career in jeopardy that had made him call Douglas. It was the threat to the SOU, the way Keeler had laid it out.

  He ate and looked at Douglas, again, his smooth dark face, sturdy build, winning a triathlon, thinking that Douglas must work hard at it. It took a particular discipline, a strength of mind more than body. He wasn’t in bad shape himself, but nothing like that. He knew they weren’t that far apart in age and that when they were kids there couldn’t have been more than a handful of black agents with any hope of a career path like Douglas had going in the FBI. Things had gradually changed and Douglas had had the guts to go after that change.

  “What do you think of Mueller?” Marquez asked, keeping the conversation on the FBI for the moment.

  “Good director. Sorry we lost him out here.”

  “Do you want to go east yourself?”

  “Not as bad as you want to ship me.”

  “I’m having a hard time figuring out what the Bureau wants from us.”

  “Communication.”

  “Like talking to God.”

  “That’s because you keep asking me to tell things I can’t.”

  “You had two agents tailing me and I don’t get an explanation.”

  Douglas smiled suddenly. “Take it as a compliment, Marquez.”

  “Yeah?”

  Marquez picked up his chopsticks, ate the sticky rice, and the food did something good for him. He asked about Douglas’s wife, his two boys, and found that he liked him still and could separate him from the Bureau. But he wouldn’t let Douglas buy lunch, didn’t want to owe him for anything.

  Then they were back in Douglas’s office. Marquez booted up, showed Douglas what they had. Shauf had managed to get photos of the van. She’d picked a spot ahead of them on the road out toward Gilroy and caught faces in a streetlight. He knew already that the photo quality was too poor to enhance. He wasn’t asking Douglas for help with that, just wanted to see his reaction to the passenger’s face, because he had a nagging sense he should know.

  “This is who rolled her down the hill?”

  “Yes, and the van was stolen.”

  “I recognize him,” Douglas said, “and I’m guessing you do too. You’ve got Eduardo Molina there. He’s using the name Carlo. He had plastic surgery just like the boss. That’s why you had trouble recognizing him. He also caught a customs agent bullet in ‘95. It almost killed him. When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “I haven’t seen him in fifteen years. We were right there with him on an Oakland street and I didn’t recognize him.”

  “I’ve seen that footage, and, yeah, they really did a number on his face. He’s been with Kline all those years. He’s your confirma-tion, Marquez. You’ve been looking at him.”

  “I guess I’m slowing down.”

  “That’ll be the day.”

  Douglas was flattering him now, so there must be a reason. Marquez could tell he was calculating. He watched Douglas fold his arms across his chest.

  “We appreciate what you do out there, Marquez.”

  “Yeah, how’s it helping you?”

  “I know you think we’re protecting poachers and we know Kline is doing a lot of buying, but frankly we don’t know where he is, either. If we did I wouldn’t be sitting here and you know that.”

  Douglas stood and came around his desk. “I’m going to bring another agent in and she’s going to show you something we’ve got for your SOU. Call it a gift from the Bureau to make this go a little easier. Your chief tells me you’ve wanted these for a while. Do you want more coffee or anything?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Douglas went to get the other agent, introducing her as he brought her in. Elaine Hempel. She had a firm dry handshake.

  “Elaine knows tech like you wouldn’t believe.” He felt Douglas studying his face as he prepared to continue. “We’re at a point where it’s going to make more sense to coordinate our efforts. We’ve talked to your chiefs about this.”

  Marquez watched Hempel open a box and lay out telelocators on the desk. She handed him one. He knew the model, made by a Canadian company. He’d looked at them several times with the hope of buying sets for his team. They’d even got a couple as demos to try out, but they hadn’t had the money to buy this year. Telelocators went for two grand each, were an inch by an inch and a half in size. You carried one and you could be tracked real-time anywhere.

  “These are a gift,” Douglas said. “Not a loan. We appreciate what you’re up against. There are ten, so that covers your whole team, right?”

  Marquez nodded. Easier than trying to watch us, he thought. He hid his bitterness and picked up one of the telelocators, turned the black plastic in his hand, liking the small size.

  “You let us know your operational intents on a daily basis and we’ll respond to the viability,” Douglas said. “We’ll handle overall coordination and risk assessment. We’ll determine what contact is made with Kline’s organization. At the end of the day they’ll all go down, Marquez. Kline will go down.”

  “What do you mean let you know our operational intents?”

  “You can shut down the individual divers all day long without a problem, but we’ll handle Kline and Molina. You don’t touch or make contact with anyone in his organization without clearing it with me first.”

  “There’s the Bureau I know and love.”

  “Everything I’m telling you, I’ve talked out with your Chief Baird.”

  “Do you mind if I call him?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Marquez got Baird on the line and Douglas put him on speaker-phone and made a point of saying he and Marquez had been to lunch and gotten things figured out. They were just now handing over the telelocators, and Lieutenant Marquez had a few points of clarification he thought his chief would want to listen in on.

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant,” Baird said.

  “Do I take direction from the FBI, sir?”

  “Only if your operation is overlapping.”

  “And how will we know?”

  “Agent Douglas will coordinate.”

  Douglas held up a telelocator, and said, “the locators,” so Baird understood.

  “You know, sir, how remote the locations can be.”

  “You’ll e-mail your daily report to the FBI, as well.”

  “Is that right, sir?”

  “That’s what we’ve agreed to for the duration of this operation.”

 
Marquez didn’t know what to say. “Any more questions for me?” Baird asked, breaking the silence that followed, and when there weren’t any, said he was late to a meeting.

  Douglas killed the speakerphone with a finger, and said, “We worked well together once before.”

  Agent Hempel handed Marquez the telelocators and briefed him quickly and efficiently on how they worked, how to get them up and running. She gave him her card in case he needed more help. But the word “together” didn’t belong here. The Bureau had figured out how to use his team as another set of eyes. They’d done the army one better and come up with a new-age dog tag. They didn’t care one way or the other about abalone and would share informa-tion only on their terms. Marquez picked up the box of telelocators and thanked Hempel for the demonstration.

  “I guess we’ll be talking,” he said to Douglas and turned toward the door, his gut in his throat, his thinking clouded by surprise and anger.

  26

  When he left the meeting with the FBI he met with the team in a Home Depot parking lot off the frontage road in San Rafael. Their pickups and battered vans blended easily with the carpenter and contractor crowd and no one really paid them any attention as they parked off to one side, away from the rolling carts and foot traffic coming and going through the front doors. The parking lot was windy and vast and the faces of his wardens looked somehow more weathered and tired than yesterday. They wore their sunglasses and kept their distance, their postures quiet, an edge of wariness radiating from them as they waited for him to explain away their confusion and mistrust. He distributed the tele-locators as he talked, watched Roberts quickly drop hers on the driver’s seat of her van as though she didn’t want it touching her flesh. Alvarez turned his in his right hand while his eyes burned with the intensity and indignation of a man who’d just been robbed.

  “What gives, Lieutenant?” he asked. “Are they going to tell us where to go and what to do?”

  “They’re not going to direct our days, but whatever Kline has planned they don’t want us to get in the middle of. They’ll let us know if they have a conflict with our location, or who we’re following.”

  “Do we need to get their approval for a bust or surveillance?”

  “Or even who we build a case against,” Shauf threw in, and Marquez glanced at her, hands in the pockets of her jacket, wind ruffling blonde hair at her temples. He turned back to Alvarez.

  “They’re planning to take down Eugene Kline, but they don’t know where he is and they’re concerned we’re going to inadver-tently blow it for them. That’s all I really know and my orders are to distribute these.”

  It was the fourth time he’d said it. He felt the same way as Alvarez, but he’d stepped back into his patrol lieutenant shoes. He’d deal with it a different way.

  “We may as well all go home,” Alvarez said.

  “We’re not going to quit, but we are going to stand down for a day while we get it figured out.”

  He heard the bite in his voice, felt his face tighten. They defi-nitely weren’t going to quit or let up. They’d improvise, adjust, find out what the FBI had going. He looked from Alvarez’s skepticism to Petersen’s quiet watchfulness, to the earnest face of Shauf, to Cairo’s bemused eyes, Roberts’s angry focused intelligence. The team had been larger three months ago. He probably missed Peter Chee most, for his clear reasoning.

  “First they call off the pursuit of the Emily Jane and now we’re reporting to them.” Alvarez shook his head.

  “They’ve got the money and the tech tools, maybe it’ll help us.”

  “Right.”

  “And we’ll adjust to it.”

  “They’re pulling the strings. We’re puppets now.”

  “Carry the telelocators and we’ll see what the Bureau can do for us. We’ll work the lead from Li, we’ll stay on Bailey, and we’ve got tips to follow up on.”

  “Come on, Lieutenant, they just put a leash on us. By the time they get through analyzing each situation it’ll be too late. They don’t care about what we’re doing; it’s just shellfish to them. They’re busy saving the world.”

  He could come down on Alvarez, tell him to get over it and forget the Feds, and he was close to it, but checked himself. Let them think it over tonight and they’d start focusing on the fish broker, Billy Mauro, tomorrow. He understood and felt the same frustration.

  “We’ll start working on Mauro and stay close on Bailey.”

  “Hey, maybe Bailey is working for them,” Cairo said, “and that’s how come he ran. He knew the Feds were there watching him. He could have gotten a ride out of there in a Fed car. Maybe that’s how he disappeared.”

  “Bailey isn’t working for them. They don’t know much about Bailey other than his criminal history. They don’t think he links to Kline. I asked.”

  “But what do you think?” Alvarez asked, and he knew they’d all been wondering. Bailey had been Marquez’s informant. Only Marquez had worked him and Bailey had burned them, and now Alvarez was speaking for all of them. They needed to know what he really thought.

  “I think he’s being used by Kline and he ran because he expected a gunfight. Maybe Kline’s people told him they’d take out Roberts and me and the Sausalito cops complicated the plan.”

  Marquez shrugged. He wasn’t going to speculate beyond what he had already about Bailey’s motives. He let it go at that and ended the meeting. Shauf would go back to the borrowed condo across from Pillar Point with Roberts, Cairo to Fort Bragg, and the others would stand down, take motel rooms, or make the drive home. He watched them go to their vehicles with an air of defeat and decided he’d get everybody together again in the next couple of days. He didn’t think he’d said it very well, hadn’t made clear that they would keep their autonomy no matter what. They’d figure it out, or at least he would. Law enforcement was all push, pull, a mix of failure and success and you did what you had to do to keep it going. They were at that sort of crossroads and his gut said the FBI was worried and that his Fish and Game team had been pulled into the mix not so much because they’d interfered or stood to, but more likely because satellite imagery and agents in suits driving Crown Vic’s into small coastal towns and asking questions wasn’t adequate. They need us more than they’re worried about us interfering, he thought.

  “I talked to Nick Hansen today,” Petersen said-she’d lingered behind, was in her truck now with the window down. She smiled at a memory of the conversation, probably Hansen’s dry humor, coming back to her. “He asked me if there was anything I want to know about the Golden Gate Bridge pilings. He says he can’t even count the trips he’s made out there and says he spends half his days on Fed patrols.”

  “We aren’t going to work for them. I promise you that.”

  “Even if they sing their common cause, all for the greater good song? We’re after the same guy and all.”

  “No way, no chance.”

  “What about the chief?”

  “He won’t cave.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear. Well, I might make a run all the way home tonight.”

  “You can drive with an easy heart now.”

  She laughed. “I’ll come back down to Fort Bragg in the morn-ing and check out that other tip.” She put on her seatbelt and then looked puzzled, glancing back at his eyes as she started the engine. “I’ve got a question.”

  “Ask it.”

  “Does Douglas know this Kline said he’d kill you someday?”

  “No.” And there’s no reason to tell him, he thought.

  Marquez watched her drive off, made a couple of phone calls from the parking lot, then drove down to Tim’s Treads, a tire store Alvarez said he was headed to. He found him in the small waiting room and they walked outside, looking at the traffic on the frontage road, Highway 101 across the fence beyond.

  “They want control of us,” Alvarez said.

  “It’s a telelocator, not an implant in your brain.”

  “You know they’re using us.”
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  “What I think is they need us. They have information that makes them believe Kline is here for more than dope smuggling and abalone. He’s an enterprise, Brad.”

  “Like we’re not up against it already.”

  “Get over it tonight and I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

  He thought about Petersen’s last question as he drove away. He’d been injured and sick the night Kline came for him, but how had Kline known he was vulnerable? He’d never have that answer and never stop wondering. He got ready to call Katherine as he drove away. It was a spur-of-the-moment idea, but early enough in the afternoon that maybe she and Maria didn’t have a dinner plan yet.

  He waited for her cell to ring and remembered crossing the border back into Texas and the old two-story wood frame he had rented for next to nothing and barely used. There’d been a single working bathroom, a bed, a place to cook. He’d had trouble getting out of the car and the house had been hot, dusty, the tap water run-ning with rust that he’d thought was blood in his fevered state. He’d barely made it upstairs to the bed, forced a window open, left the lights off, was lying on his back on sheets that were drenched with his sweat when he’d heard noise in the yard, a car engine, someone down there, idling with their headlights off. He’d managed to get his gun, get into the attic space where he had access to the roof before the front door opened. Then he’d waited, shaking with fever in the dry attic heat, his breath rasping hoarsely, the gun slick in his hand, watching through the crack, watching and listening as he tried to quiet his breathing, tried to focus outside the fever.

  A figure had entered the darkened room. He’d heard boots clicking like hoofs on the ancient wood floor and looked down on the figure whose shoulders were hunched and indistinct and whose eyes by some trick of reflected light were faintly red as the face turned upward.

  “I will find you,” said a voice that seemed to come from inside his head. “I’ll hold your heart in my hand.”

  He’d heard liquid sloshing as the steps retreated, smelled gaso-line as he’d tumbled from the attic, heard the whoosh as it ignited and a ball of bright light illuminated the room. He’d climbed out on the roof, slid on the asphalt, grabbed at old wooden gutters and fallen two stories as the gutter gave way and fire enveloped the house. He remembered hearing ammunition popping as the heat caught it, as the volunteer fire brigade strapped him on a board before sliding him into an old hearse converted to an ambulance. He’d had nothing left, not even his passport, and the hospital had called the DEA and verified he was who he said he was. He’d been ten days in the hospital and had come home to California.