by Kirk Russell
“Yeah, we’d like to take a look inside,” Marquez said, “but we’ll want to get a look at him before he sees us.”
Marquez stepped aside with Shauf and talked it over. Smith had survivalist literature, so she’d go in first and make sure he wasn’t one of the two Marquez had dealt with on the buys. A deputy led her in, and Marquez was left standing with Kendall.
“What kinds of guns were stolen?” he asked.
“A .30-06 and a .30-30. I’m wondering if there’s a bear angle I don’t know about? The dogs, for instance.”
“Could be. Bear hunters sell pups from the good strike hounds.
Those pups can bring five thousand each, and the market supports only so many breeders, so there’s competition and squabbles about bloodlines. Everybody is selling the best strike hound ever born. Ask him about his enemies in the hound world.”
Shauf came out and said Smith wasn’t either of the pair they’d been buying from, so now they worked out a crude cover story with Kendall. A vehicle leaving here had sideswiped their truck last night and broken the mirror, but they hadn’t reported it until this morning. They’d say they were dropping off a friend after coming back from a party, and they’d confide to Smith they hadn’t called the police earlier because they were drunk.
When they walked into the kitchen what caught Marquez’s eye was an old Westinghouse freezer alongside the refrigerator. A black power cord supplying it ran under a door and out to the garage. He nodded at Eli Smith.
“This kitchen looks just like mine. I mostly quail hunt nowadays, but I used to bear hunt with my dad when I was a kid.” He paused. “I’m sorry about your dogs. We’re trying to help out the deputies, but I don’t know what we saw, just taillights really.” He leaned closer to Smith, out of Kendall’s earshot. “We were pretty lit up or we would have called last night.”
Marquez took in the rest of the kitchen, the old sink, metal stripping lining counters built from what might have been the first piece of Formica ever sold. They stepped into a tiny living room. Smelling dogs, he saw the folded blankets on the floor. Smith pointed at the paneled gun case where the two rifles had been.
He described them, then added that at least they were insured.
Marquez caught Kendall’s skeptical look. You couldn’t stand here without wondering how the guy paid his mortgage every month, and here he was saying his hunting rifles were insured.
“They’re collector’s pieces,” Smith said, talking about the scope on the stolen .30-06. “9X scope, inlay silver on the gun,” keeping an eye on Kendall as he talked. “I had them appraised. They come out to do that before they insure you.”
“What’s that cost a year?” Marquez asked.
“It just adds onto the policy.”
Right, just adds onto the policy, and Marquez nodded he understood, then took the conversation to bear hunting, naming places in Virginia and Canada he said he’d been with his dad. He got a little interest from Smith, but not much.
“Ever hunt off bait piles?” Marquez asked.
“They’re not legal out here.”
“Not legal a lot of places.” Marquez nodded toward Kendall. “If he wasn’t around, I’d tell you a story.”
Smith pulled back at that, wariness showing, and Marquez knew he’d pushed a little too far. Smith moved to his dining table now, rested a hand on it, then lifted the hand after a few seconds and rubbed his cheek. A small nervous man with bad teeth and worse breath. He wasn’t their seller. Marquez took a last look around. He put a hand on Smith’s shoulder, said he was sorry again and maybe he’d see him in town.
“I’d almost rather they killed me.”
“Maybe next time,” Kendall said and wiped his nose again.
Outside, Kendall said, “Not telling the truth, is he?”
“Not all of it.”
“And you don’t recognize him?”
“No, but Bill Petroni might.”
Kendall cleared his throat. “Petroni is coming in tomorrow morning, says he’ll clear things up.”
“Coming into the sheriff’s office?”
“That’s right.”
It surprised Marquez how much relief he felt hearing that.
They got back in Shauf’s van, and Marquez lowered his window as Kendall came around and thanked them for coming. Shauf let the van start rolling while he was still talking.
When they hit the main road she said, “Kendall doesn’t like women in law enforcement.”
“You get that from him?”
She turned and stared hard at him. “He’s an asshole.”
8
Shauf’s phone rang just after they reached the main road. She eased off the accelerator, and the van slowed, though he didn’t think she was aware of it. The car behind veered around them, driver honking as Marquez listened to a different Shauf, quieting, comforting, gentle as she tried to calm her younger sister.
When they neared the eastbound on-ramp that would take them back to Placerville he reached and touched her hand, then pointed toward the opposite on-ramp and said, “We have time.”
They’d be at her sister’s house in twenty minutes and still have hours to check out where the buy would go down. He heard Shauf tell her sister she’d be there soon. After she hung up, she backhanded tears off her cheeks as though angry at herself for crying.
“What’s happened?” Marquez asked.
“It may have metastasized after all. There’s something in her lungs. They were hoping-” She shook her head, her voice choked off. “Now she’s talking about something crazy, some surgeon in Houston-tries to cut them out.” She glanced over as if bewildered.
“This is my little sister. She’s thirty-six.”
Marquez talked with the team, briefing them during the hour Shauf was with Debbie. Then they drove the winding roads to where the buy was supposed to go down.
Ten miles from Placerville, in a creek canyon thick with brush and trees, they found what was left of an old fire service road. They crossed a wooden bridge over the creek, and below, visible off one side of the bridge, was the dirt track running up the right side of the canyon. Shaded and dark with bay, oak, and pine, the road followed the dark green ribbon of creek as it wound back into the hills. You had to be from around here to know about this place, he thought.
He studied the ridgeline, noted places where the team could take positions, and sketched a plan with Shauf. Two could go in early, Cairo and Alvarez, and find a location near the rock he’d been told to walk to. He locked in GPS coordinates, and they drove on, talking routes out, contingencies, whether to ask for any help from the Placerville or county police. They went on another couple of miles before turning around, coming back across the bridge slowly, talking again about who else they could rely on tonight.
That brought up Petroni’s name.
“What’s the deal between you and Petroni?” she asked. Another time he might have said less, but understood she was grasping for something to take her mind off her sister, and she couldn’t quite do it yet with the buy.
“When I came over from the DEA I didn’t know anyone, and Petroni was a pretty good friend to me. A lot of wardens wanted onto the two SOU teams, and it was hard for them to accept someone walking in from outside without wildlife experience.”
“I’d have trouble with you walking in and stealing a glamour job.”
“You here for the glamour?”
She smiled and then said something that surprised him, “I did it to get out of a relationship.”
He thought at first she was teasing but realized she wasn’t, and in some way it made sense. She could brace a suspect and make an arrest without any hesitation, or back someone off, but he’d just watched her kneel and force her hand through the link fence of the dog kennel to stroke the ear of a dead hound. There was a gentleness about her mixed in with the rest, and he could see her having trouble letting go of a failing relationship.
“This team is the best thing that ever happened to me,” she sai
d, “but we’re talking about you and Petroni.”
“Petroni taught me how the department works, and we hit it off. We were working the coast, mostly abalone. I taught Petroni some things about undercover work, and he taught me about poachers, boats, the coastal towns.”
“What happened if you were such good friends?”
“All I know is when things changed. My team made a bust up the north coast in Albion. In the last few days before the takedown we were on the suspects every minute. Petroni was down south, and I was out of communication with him before and then during the bust. He found out we’d made it by talking to our chief, and after that he was a lot less friendly.”
“Why would it matter to him like that?”
“I got the feeling he thought he was running both teams, and he should have been told. Not long after that we both got called to Sacramento, and Petroni’s team got shut down.”
“Bam, shut down just like that?”
“Yeah. The chief wanted both of us there at 9:00 that morning. At 9:10 Petroni’s team was over with.”
“Who gave you the word?”
“Chief Keeler, so you can picture it. Petroni thought I’d kept this other operation secret from him as a way of making my team look better, and that somehow I knew it was all going to go down.
He threw that theory at me in a parking lot in Placerville a year later.”
“He was hurt.”
“Yeah, and it didn’t make any sense to him. He was the one with the wildlife experience.”
He told her a little more but not the whole story as they drove back to Placerville. When they reached the safehouse Marquez called Bell and told him the team was kicking in the money and would wait to get reimbursed. They were going forward with the buy. Alvarez and Cairo were getting their gear ready, everything spread on the dining table. Roberts and Shauf stood in the kitchen talking.
“I don’t like how you’ve done this,” Bell said. “I feel like you went around me.”
The conversation ended badly, and he felt lousy after hanging up. The team had all grouped into the kitchen, Roberts and Cairo laughing at some joke they’d shared.
“We’re on,” Marquez said, as he walked in.
“We were going either way, Lieutenant,” Alvarez said, his face lit up, the energy building now.
Marquez stood among them, taking up the last space, larger than the rest. They were all from different walks of life, coming from different places, more than twenty years between him and Melinda Roberts. Roberts’s hands flew over a keyboard while he still pecked out his reports. She was also a rated sharpshooter. Alvarez came out of East Palo Alto, had worked at his dad’s auto shop, and had planned to be a mechanic. He was the guy who could adapt to any problem, the type you read about surviving an avalanche, somehow reacting quickly enough. Cairo had gone to a year of law school before going through the Fish and Game academy. He was an easy-going surfer type. Even the people he busted didn’t get pissed off at him, and some apologized.
“Okay,” Marquez said, “let’s go over it again before everyone takes off.”
They moved out to the dining room table, and Marquez spread the map. Alvarez and Cairo would leave first, get dropped off near the creek bridge by Roberts, and would hike in until they found the rock.
“The rock has white spray paint on it,” Marquez said. “That’s what he told me to look for. I’m supposed to start up the road at 8:00.” He glanced at Alvarez, then looked at Cairo. “You need to find positions up the slope where you can see the rock. Time yourself going in this afternoon, and that’ll tell you roughly how long it should take for me to get there.”
“How about whistling as you come up the road?” Cairo said.
“Yeah, or I’ll sing.”
The team’s laughter was a nervous kind, and Marquez could feel the change since the CD. The address in Roberts’s file was her parent’s peach orchard outside Colfax. She’d talked to him about the orchard’s isolation, the vulnerability. They were all a little worried.
Marquez watched Alvarez and Cairo load gear, then climb into Roberts’s van. Shauf left ten minutes later, and he was alone at the safehouse. He got his gear together and put on the Kevlar vest, but it didn’t feel right. He sat and held the vest in his hand for a while and then picked up the coat with the fiber optic sewn into it, the camcorder, and it just didn’t feel like the right move. He’s not through checking us out, and he gave us too much time to prepare today. Marquez picked up his phone and called Roberts.
“I’m not going to wear anything,” he told her. “Tell Alvarez and Cairo they have to get as close as they can. They’ve got to be able to move fast.”
She chuckled. “You found a new way to cowboy it, Lieutenant.”
“No, I’m running with my gut. He’s giving us too much time to prepare.”
She was quiet then said, “Okay, I’ll let them know.”
He hung up and took a call from Kendall. “How about meeting me in Placerville for a beer?” Kendall asked. “I want to compare notes and talk, and I met with your warden today.”
Marquez got the name of the bar. An hour later when he walked in he found Kendall at a table with a thin red-haired woman he introduced as Sadie. Her freckled face was evenly tanned, hair heavily dyed, her smile shy and friendly. Marquez figured her tan explained Kendall’s using an applied tanning product. Sadie smoothed her thin dress as she stood, and she brushed away Kendall’s hand as he patted her rear.
“I won’t be long,” Kendall told her, then motioned for Marquez sit down.
On the table a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and a half-eaten order of fried zucchini rested on a copy of the Mountain Democrat. Marquez watched Sadie take a seat at the end of the bar. She looked unhappy to be alone, and Kendall nodded toward her.
“Good woman,” he said, as though talking about a reliable old car. “I drove down and picked the bullet up from your friend at DOJ. Thanks for having him call me, but the bullet is not a match. I’ll get it back to you. That said, if you find your Coldwater Canyon hunters, I’d like to interview them.”
“How’d it go with Petroni?”
“He bullshitted us again.” Kendall leaned back, belched softly, covering his mouth. “I’ve got another witness tying him to Vandemere, and we’re going to have to kick it up a notch. I’m notifying your chief tomorrow unless you want to take a final run at convincing Petroni.”
“I don’t.”
“Then it gets rough for him now.”
“You’re running on rumors.”
Kendall looked at Sadie, then back at Marquez. “I don’t have to tell you anything about rumors. You live off tips, don’t you?”
Marquez left Kendall sipping a Jack Daniels. After he was in his truck and rolling toward the buy site, he checked in with Shauf.
“We’re all in position,” she said. “You’re going to drive past Melinda right at four miles out.”
“Have you seen anyone?”
“No, though we heard motorcycles.”
“Dirt bikes?”
“That’s what Brad and Cairo think.”
Their map showed the road alongside the creek ending a couple of miles in, but that didn’t mean there weren’t unmarked trails.
“So maybe there is another way in,” he said.
“That’s what we’re guessing.”
“Okay, well, I just drove past Roberts.”
He felt his gut tighten the way it had years ago when he’d gone out on the first drug buys. He didn’t feel like himself.
“They say it’s going to take you twenty minutes to walk up to the rock. It has the names Chloe and Ed spray-painted in white on it.”
“Got it.”
Twelve minutes later Marquez started up the creek road, smelling the moss and oak leaves, feeling the cold night. The flashlight shone on dark earth. He heard the trickle of water in the creek off to his left, and the night seemed unnaturally dark. On the phone their seller had warned him to keep the flashlight pointe
d down at the road, and he kept it angled just ahead and walked slowly, listening, expecting from what Shauf had told him that it might be a dirt bike that would round the corner and coast down toward him with its engine off. Half a mile in, a light flashed on and off ahead. A deep voice he wasn’t sure he recognized said, “Shine the light at your face and keep it there.”
Marquez shone the light on his neck and stared into the darkness trying to see who was there. Holding the light on himself made him feel like a target. Two men walked down the road toward him, and he knew he’d done the right thing leaving the Kevlar vest and digital camcorder behind. One was big but light on his feet, fading to the side while his pale companion came forward with a garbage bag and a powerful flashlight. He dropped the bag on the ground and shone the light on it.
“Take a look,” he said, and when Marquez didn’t, “what are you waiting for?”
“You open it.”
“What are you afraid of?”
The background man moved in and showed a gun.
“We want you to take off your coat,” the pale man said.
“I don’t really want to.”
“Take it off anyway, but do it slowly.”
Marquez unzipped his coat, hoping Alvarez and Cairo had a clear view. They’d have to come out fast with their guns drawn. He handed over his coat and watched the pale man check the pockets, knead the sleeves and every inch of the coat before dropping it on the ground. The big helper moved around behind.
“Your shirt.”
“Right.”
Marquez took his shirt off and tossed it on the garbage bag, let the guy bend and pick it up. He guessed they’d been hired to come check him out and who knows what else if they found what they were looking for. It changed everything again. He ignored the urgency in the next order that he spread his legs, did it slowly, asking, “If you’re looking for a wire, it means you think I’m a warden. Why is this happening?”
The pale man squatted now, taking little time with the shirt, handing it up to Marquez while his partner carefully checked the rest of Marquez’s body. The garbage bag got opened, exposing dried bear galls.
