Night Game jm-2

by Kirk Russell

  “Get dressed. Take your bag with you,” the pale man said, then talking big, “You would have taken a walk with us if you’d been wearing anything.” He pointed behind him. “Up the road.”

  Marquez put his shirt on, picked his coat up, and found the money was gone.

  “Where’s my money? I’m not interested in doing business tonight.”

  “You already did it. Take the bag and haul ass.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “You leave it here, that’s your problem.”

  “You tell him I want my money back.”

  Marquez put his coat on and walked away. His legs felt stiff, awkward, and he knew it was possible he’d get shot. But each step took him farther into darkness, and when he looked back they were gone.

  9

  After they’d returned to the safehouse and debriefed, Marquez felt too edgy to call it a night.

  “I’m going to take a ride into town,” he said. “Anybody want to come along?”

  “I’ll go with you,” Shauf said. “I could use a drink.”

  They drove past the Creekview Saloon and spotted Petroni’s orange Honda parked not far away. After a moment’s hesitation Marquez pulled over and parked.

  “You sure you want to do this tonight?” Shauf asked.

  “Yeah, he owes us some answers.”

  The bar at the Creekview had been built to look like a big horseshoe, and they took a position along one side. Marquez leaned in to get the bartender’s attention. Three bartenders stood talking to each other, wearing black shirts carrying a gold emblem in the shape of a prospector on the pocket. Gold rush branding was a change he’d seen start in Placerville a few years ago. The original town name, Hangtown, appeared more and more on store windows.

  He ordered drinks and then spotted Petroni sitting with a young black-haired woman at a table in front of a bandstand where a country singer was tuning up her guitar and bantering with the crowd. A waitress wearing cowboy boots, red tights, a short black skirt, and a red bandana around her neck leaned over Petroni’s table.

  Marquez chatted with Shauf while waiting for their drinks. It was too noisy to unwind here, and after they had their drinks he wished they’d gone somewhere else. This wasn’t going to be the place to sit with Petroni. He clicked his glass against hers, and she asked, “Who are these guys across the bar?”

  “The one with the thin blond mustache is Bobby Broussard, one of the cousins. He lives out there with Troy. I don’t know the other guy.”

  The other man was also young but much tougher looking, powerfully built. On this cold night he wore a tight T-shirt under a loose leather jacket open wide enough to show off his pecs. His hair was short, gelled, bleached, his face flat, cheekbone planes too sharp, as if someone had screwed up a wood carving but kept going at it anyway. He became aware of them now. He leaned and said something that brought a leering smile to Bobby’s face.

  Marquez took a sip of rum and said, “That’s Troy Broussard’s daughter, Sophie, sitting with Bill.” He turned, got the bartender’s attention, and asked, “Is Sophie working tonight?”

  “She’s over by the bandstand with her boyfriend.”

  “Oh, yeah, I see her now, thanks.”

  Marquez lifted the rum again, and the bartender lingered, did he want another? Marquez did, but rum wouldn’t work for him tonight. He’d thought coming into town and cooling down would help, but the buy had been too disturbing. He glanced over, caught an arrogant expression on Bobby’s companion’s face.

  Shauf turned her back to them and spoke softly. “They’re focused on Petroni’s table, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why is that?”

  Maybe it was the novelty of a Broussard going out with a game warden, or maybe these two at the bar didn’t have anything else to occupy themselves with, Bobby like a schoolboy giving his girl cousin shit. Petroni’s head shifted just slightly, perhaps sensing the conversation out of his view at the bar, then he finished his drink and stood heavily. He gave Sophie a grim smile before heading for the bathroom.

  “Arguing with her,” Shauf said. “Doesn’t anybody in this town get along?”

  Petroni moved awkwardly around a young couple, the new jeans he wore too tight for his middle-aged gut, the wide leather belt more fitting in a western bar than here.

  As soon as Petroni disappeared into the bathroom, Bobby Broussard started weaving his way to Sophie, his thin frame sliding between tables, a geeky, sleazy smile offered to women he brushed into, his thigh and crotch rubbing against them as he squeezed his way through.

  Watching him, Marquez remembered a much younger Bobby working as a spotter on bear hunts, keeping an eye out for the law, a thin kid with bad skin and always running his tongue over his upper lip in a way that made you glad you didn’t know what he was thinking. When Bobby reached Sophie he tapped her on the shoulder and used his beer bottle to point at the bar where his friend stood smiling. Sophie turned, looked at the man at the bar, then raised her hand, and flipped him off as though there were no one else in the room. Shauf chuckled.

  But then something more got said, and Sophie came out of her seat and stuck the same finger in Bobby’s face. Even the singer looked over as Bobby grinned, backing up like this was all good fun, and Sophie’s gaze returned to the other man, who toasted her with his beer and crooked a finger motioning her to come to him. A couple of women yelled at his gesture as if it offended them personally. Marquez heard the word “asshole.”

  “I’m ready to go,” Shauf said. “Who needs this? You don’t, I don’t. Let Petroni have his midlife crisis. I’m fried, you must be too.”

  “Let’s hang for a couple.”

  Petroni came back from the bathroom, and by then Sophie had turned her chair so her back was to the bar. Petroni sat down and looked around at the nearby tables, but what he needed to see was Bobby Broussard’s companion crossing the room behind him. Within a few strides the man was there, and he jerked Petroni’s right shoulder from behind. Petroni just managed to get on his feet as his chair went over, his drink skittering.

  “Watch my drink for me,” Marquez said, and started across just as Petroni and the man came to blows. He saw Petroni take hard jabs to the gut and one to the chin. Petroni went down on one knee, then fell to the floor. The man reached down, wadded Petroni’s shirt, started to lift him, was swearing at him, calling him a cocksucker when Marquez got there and forced him to lower Petroni back to the floor.

  “This is the part where the lowlifes haul ass,” Marquez said. “That’s you.”

  “Let go of my wrist, fucker, before I kick the shit out of you.”

  A moment later he threw his weight sideways, trying to knock Marquez off balance. A table upended but Marquez kept his feet, blocked a hard punch that hurt. He waited for the man to come at him again, but surprisingly, he didn’t.

  “Kick his ass, Nyland, kick his ass!” But Nyland had changed his mind, and the same voice egging Nyland on called to Marquez, “She’s his girlfriend, asshole.”

  Two Placerville officers pushed through the bar doors. Nyland tried to back away, but the police closed on him and looked as though they recognized and didn’t like him. Petroni got to his feet, wiped blood from his nose. Sophie handed him a napkin. Marquez didn’t take his eyes off Nyland. If Nyland was local, he had to know Petroni was the warden out of Georgetown, and not many people come after law enforcement officers, at least not in a crowded bar.

  “Take him in,” Petroni told the officers.

  But they didn’t work for Fish and Game and went about it their own way. They stopped Nyland from walking away and asked Marquez and Petroni to come outside as well. Marquez waited near the bar entrance away from the patrol cars. But Petroni got close enough to Nyland to where one of the cops put a hand on Petroni’s chest and pushed him down the sidewalk. Nyland swore as one officer clicked on cuffs and the other read him his rights. He yelled over at Marquez.

  “I’m watching for yo
u.”

  Marquez ignored him, instead watched Bobby Broussard, who stood in front of one of the cops and kept pointing down the street. Nyland’s keys got handed over to Bobby, and Marquez realized that must have been what the conversation was about. After Nyland was in the back of the patrol car, Marquez moved close to Petroni. One of the cops walked over. He asked Petroni, “Are you going to press charges?”

  Petroni shook his head. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “What do you mean, warden?”

  “I mean, I’ll deal with it.”

  The officer looked to Marquez. “And who are you?”

  “A friend of Bill’s. I was at the bar and saw Nyland or whatever his name is cross the room and start the fight.”

  “And how did he do that?” The cop started writing.

  “He came up from behind and yanked Bill off his chair.”

  Marquez gave terse answers and then his alias as a name. The police cruiser pulled away.

  Petroni’s voice was thicker, his nose clogged with mucus and blood as he explained. “Nyland used to be her boyfriend. They lived together for years.”

  “Is that his truck Bobby’s driving?”

  A Toyota pickup went past on Main Street, and Petroni nodded, touched his lip, and looked at the blood on his fingers.

  “He’s got dogs in the truck. That’s why they let him take it,” Petroni said. “Nyland’s close with the Broussards, and he used to go out with Sophie. That’s what that was about.”

  “How long have you been going out with her?”

  “She’s not one of them if that’s what you’re thinking. She left home when she was sixteen.”

  Petroni turned to face him, his nose still bleeding, teeth streaked with blood, the tissue paper in his hand saturated. He forced a strange pained smile, and Marquez didn’t think it was the pain of the blows.

  “This isn’t over,” Petroni said.

  Marquez left it alone. Petroni was angry, humiliated, and he needed to cool down. He ought to go down to the station and press charges, let Nyland sit in a cell for a month.

  “Want me to run you by the clinic and get your nose looked at?”

  “No.”

  “Where does Nyland live?”

  “I’ll deal with him.”

  “I’ve got a different problem with him.”

  Marquez got directions to Nyland’s place before Petroni went back inside to Sophie. Shauf was waiting for Marquez near his truck. As they got in he told her.

  “Nyland was at the wheel the other night. That’s the truck that followed me.”

  10

  The next morning Marquez took an early run with Shauf, then sat at the kitchen table in the safehouse, cooling down, talking with Roberts and Cairo while Shauf showered. Shauf came back out, and her wet hair dripped onto the Crystal Basin Wilderness map as they talked about the day ahead. Marquez would make his first trip home in over a week, combining that with a reinterview of Kim Ungar at Ungar’s apartment in San Francisco today. While he was gone, Shauf would start the team on a systematic sweep of the fire and logging roads in the Crystal Basin. Get the keys to all the gates and look for any signs of bait piles. He didn’t yet know how he wanted to deal with last night’s buy, but after finding the poached sow and cubs it made sense to look for other bait piles.

  An hour later he grabbed his gear and left for the Bay Area. Traffic bled slowly across the Central Valley, and every year it seemed there were more strip malls and stucco houses alongside the freeway. The orchards were all but gone. He drove past Vacaville and Fairfield, climbed the dry rounded hills before Vallejo, making phone calls, still juggling thirty cases or leads, one in particular that sounded promising, a sturgeon poaching tip coming from a bait shop owner in the delta. Then Kendall called.

  “I heard you ran into Eric Nyland last night,” Kendall said. “We’ve got a file on Nyland you might want to take a look at, and I’ve got a story for you, if you want to hear it.”

  “I’d like to see the file, and, yeah, anything you know about Nyland I’d like to hear.”

  “Petroni could tell you all about his girlfriend.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “This happened about five years ago, just after I started here. A Tuolumne County sheriff’s deputy showed up looking for help locating Nyland-this was in the fall, September the year I was hired. This Tuolumne deputy had traced Nyland through a partial license plate after a road rage incident in Yosemite where a camper went off the road and an older fellow was killed. The old boy’s wife survived. She got a partial license plate and gave a description of the truck and driver. She and her husband had been on their way home to Lee Vining after staying in Yosemite Valley, so they were climbing toward Tioga Pass. I’m sure you know Yosemite.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A pickup came up behind them and got aggressive about passing, and the old boy got angry, started swinging wide when the truck tried to go around him. Eventually, Nyland, and I’m sure it was Nyland, got around him or rather, came alongside, lowered his passenger window, and shot a hole through the camper’s windshield.

  The old boy swerved, lost control, hit a tree, and was DOA. So this Tuolumne deputy comes into the sheriff’s office, tells us this story, and we all drove out to where Nyland still lives at the end of Six Mile Road. There’s a meadow where a subdivision project went bust. Do you know where that is?”

  “I know the road.”

  “Then you know where it ends. Do you know the story with the Miwoks?”

  “No, but let’s stay on Nyland.”

  “Remind me to tell you the local legend sometime about the Miwoks who got slaughtered out there. People claim their ghosts still haunt the area. There are three house foundations in that meadow that never got built on, and out past that are trailers the construction crews lived in. Nyland worked on the subdivision briefly as a carpenter, and the bank let him stay on because the bank officer was a friend of his dad’s. Deal was he’d trade rent to watch the property, and believe it or not, his dad was respected around here, a lawyer that even the cops liked.”

  “Where’s his dad now?”

  “Heart attack when Nyland was nineteen. Probably having a kid like Nyland killed him. Okay, so we go out there in a couple of patrol cars and drive up to the first trailer, the one he lives in, and she answers the door, not Nyland.”

  “Sophie?”

  “See, you know where this story is going. You know her better than you let on. Anyway, Nyland is standing behind her, and she’s wearing a thin T-shirt, and I mean thin and tight, a pair of ragged jeans and is barefoot. Looked like she’d just pulled the clothes on as we drove up. She got right in my face, said she’d been in the sack with Nyland all night and they’d had sex, and we could swab her right there in the doorway if we wanted. I’m not kidding. She started unzipping her jeans, and there weren’t any panties underneath.

  Then she told me I could be the one to do it.”

  Kendall paused, waiting for his reaction, the image of her opening her jeans, the place to make a comment. But what caught Marquez was not her body exposed, and she had a nice one, but rather, the aggressiveness, same thing he’d seen at the Creekview.

  “Nyland came in for questioning and we worked on her separately, but she never wavered on the alibi. I believe Nyland was the pickup driver in Yosemite, and I can promise you she’s damaged goods. That’s who your warden is head over heels about. We’ve also suspected Nyland’s involvement in meth manufacture and a burglary ring, but never been able to pin anything on him. He may look like a pinup for the steroid crowd, but he’s a schemer and smart. Knows what he can get away with. Did Petroni tell you Nyland works for a hunting guide business?”

  “No.”

  “Sierra Guides out of Placerville-they’ve got an office off Main Street.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “That’s where Nyland’s truck came from. The owner there loaned him the money to buy it.”

  “Have you e
ver met the owner?”

  “Never seen his face, don’t even know his name.”

  Marquez didn’t say his team had already checked out the owner, a Joe Durham, who lived in Sacramento and worked as a lobbyist and consultant. As near as they could tell the guide business didn’t do much trade. They’d looked at all the local guide businesses, but they would backtrack now on Sierra.

  When he hung up with Kendall he drove across lower Marin and into Mill Valley, up Mount Tamalpais and home. His house had been built by his grandfather in 1915 on a flank of Mount Tam when land was still cheap. It had a stone fireplace, redwood casement windows that had lasted seventy years, floors of quartersawn white plank oak pegged with mahogany dowels cut from wood his grandfather found on Muir Beach after a cargo ship had foundered. The house looked down along a forested ridge to the ocean. It was where his paternal grandparents had raised him and his sister, Dara.

  When he unlocked the door and walked in he smelled the lime tang of the shampoo Katherine used and saw some of Maria’s schoolbooks stacked on the dining table. Both were comforting, though the house felt empty without their presence. He pulled the clothes he needed from the bedroom, switched his gear into the old two-tone Explorer, and left.

  He crossed the Golden Gate and went out Nineteenth Avenue through the park. Kim Ungar lived down this direction. Ungar drove a late model Lexus and lived in a drab white stucco apartment out in the avenues near the ocean in San Francisco. The apartment units had small decks with Spanish-style iron railings painted black, and Marquez drove past, checking for the Lexus or an open door on the apartment deck before parking around the corner. He didn’t see the car, and when Ungar didn’t answer a knock on his door he figured Ungar had blown him off, which wasn’t surprising. Ungar’s game was agreeing to meet, then not showing.

  For a couple of weeks in the early summer they’d put Ungar under surveillance, despite his being the referring party and their informant. From watching him they’d learned his routine, so after Ungar didn’t answer his door, Marquez decided to run some of the route they’d followed him on when they’d had him under surveillance.