Dead Game

by Kirk Russell

  “Did you drink him under the table?”

  “No, Ludovna can put away the vodka, but I did my part.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “A little buzz, but I’m okay.” Marquez looked around. “Hungry.”

  It smelled like cheese melting in the open wood-fired oven. Alvarez had grown a goatee again. He looked like the resistance leader of a guerrilla unit who’d come out of the jungle for a beer.

  “It’s time to check out the KGB story, and he told me tonight he had a wife here who went into the Sacramento River in her car and drowned. Doesn’t seem very troubled by that.”

  “Where are we at, overall?”

  “Not much closer with August. Not any closer, really. We’ve documented sales to a Richie Crey and Ludovna, though some of the videotape is sketchy. We’ll need several sales to make a case. Burdovsky is an open question.”

  “Cairo told me she burned us.”

  “Looks like it.”

  They ordered a pitcher of beer and a pepperoni pizza. Alvarez filled a glass for Marquez and refilled his own after the pitcher arrived.

  “Long drive here,” he said. “I’m starving. Hey, what’s the deal with the FBI?”

  “They’re getting close to making a bust and they’re nervous. They’re not saying what it’s about, only that it’s Eurasian Organized Crime and there’s a possibility we might go blue on blue, in which case we get backed away.”

  “So is Eurasian the Russian mob?”

  “Yeah, and it sounds like these guys are Ukrainian.”

  “Where’s Ludovna from?”

  “Moscow. They haven’t said what this group is into, but the FBI has wiretaps where Jo Ruax of DBEEP is mentioned. They also claim her house was cased. DBEEP is being pulled back.”

  “You mean, like off the water?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No kidding.”

  “So there’s some sort of overlap. And we have until Christmas.”

  “I would have been in Mexico.”

  Marquez lifted his beer glass to Alvarez. “Good that you’re here instead.”

  They ate the pizza, and the beer was quickly gone, but it was nice to sit in the warmth and firelight from the oven. When the bill came they paid and Marquez said, “See you back at the house.”

  At this late hour he didn’t expect a call from Maria or Katherine, but he got one from Maria. It was after 1:00 on the East Coast.

  “We went to Vassar.”

  “Yeah, how was it?”

  “The library is beautiful, but now we’re in New York City. We went to dinner at some place called Bellavitae tonight that mom thinks is the greatest.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  She paused and admitted, “It was good. It’s new and like a crostini-and-wine-bar type thing.”

  “How was the crostini?”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was really good but you kind of have to drink wine.”

  “If you go to college they hand out fake IDs when you register. So where are you tomorrow?” He tried to remember. He parked outside the safehouse and tried to remember. “Cornell?”

  “We’re skipping the tundra. We would have to fly up there anyway.”

  Marquez listened to the clipped answers, the grudging explanation of why they’d changed their schedule, the sort of bitchiness that drove Kath crazy but never really got under his skin. Maybe it was one advantage of being a stepfather. Perhaps that role made it easier to see her as a separate person. He read through the sarcasm and saw a teenager still sorting out who the enemy was. It definitely wasn’t her mother.

  “Okay, then where? Columbia?”

  “Mom probably should since she wants to go back and finish her college degree some day. It might be a good school for her. For me it’s a ‘reach school,’ and I’m already applying to enough reach schools.”

  “You don’t think you’d get in?”

  “I definitely wouldn’t.”

  “You’ve flown all the way back there. Walk the campus.”

  He could add, the money has been spent to send you back there for this special trip that very few kids get to make and the walk wouldn’t be any more than you’ll make in your average shopping mall. What Maria needed was her world shaken up, and he’d have to find the words to reach her, but he didn’t have them tonight.

  “I have to say good night,” Maria said.

  “Try to connect with your mom.”

  “Right.”

  The next morning Marquez drove into the delta to meet Ruax at Mel’s in Walnut Grove. There were a couple of tables inside and they were empty, but any room would have been too small for her today. She’d gotten the word last night. He bought a coffee to go while she waited outside in the wind. By the time he walked out she’d crossed the road to the river and looked like someone who’d come out of a movie theater and found her new car had been totaled. She wanted to be angry but was still too shocked.

  “I can’t believe they made the decision without talking to me,” she said. “Why were you at that meeting and I wasn’t?”

  “Because I’d already been to the FBI Field Office in SF and met Ehrmann. He heads the Russian mob squad there, but no one told me he was coming to Sacramento and I didn’t know he’d be there when I got there. My chief called me in, and you didn’t miss anything. He brought a blacked-out transcript so we’d have something to hold when he told us they want DBEEP pulled. The idea was to make it seem like Chief Baird’s decision.”

  “Okay, then will this Ehrmann blow me off if I call him?”

  “No, he’ll talk to you. He’s not shy. I’ll give you a cell number, and if you want you can try him.”

  He wrote the cell number down and watched her fold the paper and jam it in her pocket. She exhaled and looked away, looked down at the dark green roll of the river.

  “We’ve got a bunch of things we’re working,” she said. “You’re going to have to take a ride with me. I’ll have to show you where we’re at.” She shook her head, reminded him of Shauf with Raburn. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “We can take my boat,” Marquez said. “It’ll get us where we need to go.”

  “What boat do you have? I didn’t even know you knew how to drive one.”

  Marquez let it go, let her lash out without coming back at her. He’d worked with DBEEP before, had worked well with them and figured he would again.

  “I’ve got a Fountain I bought damaged at a DEA auction years ago. The bow got a hole punched in it when the driver rammed a boat with a couple of DEA agents onboard and tried to sink it. I bought it on the cheap and then it sucked all my savings into the repair. It’s not for sneaking up on people, but we won’t look like surveillance either. It’s docked down in San Rafael at Loch Lomond. We’d have to meet there.”

  They set a time, and he left her and drove across the river. The palm trees in Ryde were framed against a white sky. The river was muddy green and running with whitecaps. The Sacramento/San Joaquin drainage formed the largest delta facing the Pacific on the northern or southern hemisphere. It drained two thirds of the water that left California. The web of sloughs, the agricultural land along the levee islands, wasn’t like any other place he knew of in the state. There were relatively few buildings, and he drove past deep orchards of pear and apple and vineyards that stretched as far as he could see.

  On the drive home he talked again with Selke, who’d been talking to Ehrmann.

  “I ran the photos by Ehrmann that you found in her kayak as well as the photo we found in her wallet. He told me Burdovsky had a short marriage and a son she doesn’t see anymore because he was kidnapped by the father. The photo from her wallet was taken outside Moscow. That’s her ex in the photo, the same guy who kidnapped the boy. His name is Alex Karsov, and according to Ehrmann, he started with computer crime but went on to become a big wheel in arms dealing. For years Burdovsky made trips back to Russia to try to find
her son. The deal was her ex didn’t want his boy to disappear to America, didn’t want him to grow up fat wearing baggy pants falling off his ass and watching TV when he’s not playing videos. Forget that last part about the kids, Marquez; I’ve got some issues with my ex-wife.”

  “Are the Feds looking for Anna?”

  “It’s not clear, but Ehrmann talks like she’s alive and they might know where she is. I told him you were very worried about her. I played it up. You haven’t slept at night since she vanished. You’re consumed with guilt, that kind of thing. I’m trying to get him to tell us more, so this is your heads-up on that.” He chuckled. “You cry every night over Burdovsky.”

  “When did the father run with the boy?”

  “She was in school in Moscow, got pregnant, married, and then things went south. He didn’t want her to take their son, so he grabbed the boy and took off. Russia was a mess so there was no one to go after him, or he was connected enough to keep it from happening.”

  Ehrmann had formed the boundaries of an imaginary tumor with his hands as he’d described the malignancy Eurasian Organized Crime represented. He wasn’t against the word mob but said it didn’t cover it.

  “I think Ehrmann will tell us more if we both work him,” Selke said. “They’ve got their investigation and there’s more overlap than he’s let on. He’s returning calls too quickly. I just get that feeling. We need to play off each other when we work him.”

  Marquez doubted that either he or Selke would work Ehrmann successfully for information. And he wasn’t even sure he wanted to know what Ehrmann saw when he looked at a county detective and an undercover warden. But neither did he really care. He knew why his team was here. They weren’t shutting down arms traffickers, but they were trying to protect a species that had been on this earth since the dinosaurs. An arms trafficker might come up with an elaborate rationalization for how the arms they sold actually helped the oppressed, the same as market poachers taking bear might claim to feed a market for traditional medicines. Fundamentally, both were about greed, and he had the feeling Ehrmann was sympathetic to what the SOU was trying to do because he understood the commonality.

  But, like Selke, Marquez felt the hand of the Feds brushing closer. He knew if the stakes were high enough with this arms trafficker, then the FBI might even be listening in on the SOU conversations. Unlikely. Still, he turned the idea as he drove home to Mill Valley.

  21

  When Marquez pulled up to Loch Lomond Marina, Ruax was sitting in her truck. He backed the boat trailer down the ramp, and the Fountain slid into the water. He waited until Ruax was on the boat and the engine idling, then eased the boat trailer back up the ramp and parked. Calm water broke smoothly off the bow as they headed out the channel.

  “I brought a thermos of coffee and picked up some cinnamon rolls on the way in,” he said. “They’re from a bakery in San Rafael.”

  “I don’t eat that kind of stuff.”

  “I know you drink coffee; I’ve seen you do that.”

  “I had a cup earlier.”

  He poured her one anyway, and they came slowly through the buoys, keeping to the five-mile-per-hour limit. He opened the bakery bag, showed her the cinnamon buns, fresh, still hot and sticky, and she shook her head, a look of disgust crossing her face.

  “Take the coffee, Jo. It’ll keep your hands warm even if you don’t drink it.”

  He wasn’t much of a pastry eater himself, had only a bite or two, and checked out the bay ahead, looking for other boats. Ruax fixed her gaze on the seismic work underway on the Richmond/ San Rafael Bridge. Sparks flew from welding work. Then they were out of the channel, turning the stern to the bridge and San Francisco Bay behind it. He bumped the speed, and they ran across the gray water toward the red light at the horizon.

  The sky streaked with pink and magenta. Marquez tapped the throttle gently forward, and the bow rose. A deeper roar came from the engine, and Ruax wouldn’t have to talk now. She could look through the windshield at whatever she was thinking about and brood. He pushed the speed past fifty, adjusted the flaps, and the boat began to plane across San Pablo Bay. Along the east shore commuter traffic was already thick. Ahead, the new span of the Vallejo Bridge stood like a gray sentinel, and the sun began to rise through delta fog. They left a white wake under the bridge, swept past Benicia and into the wide shallow upper bays.

  He cut their speed, clicked on the baffling system to dampen the engine noise, slowed more as they left the last sunlight and moved into fog that at first was thin wisps, then wrapped thick around them, cold on their faces. He steered around a log floating off to their left, a branch from it extending like an arm reaching for the sky.

  Now they started passing sloughs, Cache and Steamboat, and he saw a few fishing boats out. No one liked a powerboat at dawn. They drew looks. He got sarcasm from Ruax.

  “Not as quiet as you think,” she said.

  But neither would anyone likely associate the Fountain speedboat with law enforcement. As the river narrowed and fog thickened, Marquez slowed more. He offered Ruax more coffee, poured himself some.

  “What are you going to do with the time off?” he asked.

  “Take a vacation while they figure it out.”

  “Use your vacation time?”

  “No, Baird says they’ll do something about all that.”

  “How’d your crew take it?”

  “They’re angry. Everyone wants more explanation, and we had a lot of things we were working on.”

  “Our operation isn’t just in the delta. You could still work with us.”

  “I’m supposed to stay away from anything associated with sturgeon poaching. That was the advice of the FBI for all of my crew.”

  “Advice is the word they use when they can’t step in and control. Strongly advise is one of their favorites. They’re also the largest single buyer of black marker pens.”

  That last bit went by her, but then, she hadn’t seen the transcripts. Passing Riera’s Marina not all the buildings were visible, still wrapped in fog. Marquez avoided a ship coming downriver and watched Ruax pour herself more coffee, her face changing even as she didn’t want it to, and he could tell she loved the river, loved being out here this morning. She turned to him.

  “We were on the water when those concrete bridge pieces came downriver from Stockton. They were huge.”

  “Pieces for the new Bay Bridge?”

  “Yes.” She described the barge and the pieces for the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge going past her DBEEP boat. “You turn in up ahead not too far,” she said. “These guys were taking sturgeon before you showed up. That’s why you haven’t heard about them before now.”

  “You didn’t owe us anything. You were working your own things before we arrived, and you’ll have new ones when we leave.”

  “We knew they were dealing with Raburn, and we knew he’d sold sturgeon in Rio Vista. His brother’s wife rode with him a couple of times, but we never tied him to the new owner at Beaudry’s like you did. I should have told you those things.”

  Marquez nodded. He understood completely. The SOU had cases they worked and didn’t talk to anybody about until they needed to. Ruax had taken a wait-and-see attitude on the SOU operation and hadn’t risked cases that DBEEP was building. Anna’s disappearing would have only reinforced that, and Ruax didn’t have to apologize for any of it.

  “How much do you know about Isaac’s wife?” she asked.

  “Not a lot. Raburn told us she does some gutting and cleaning but doesn’t know anything about the illegal business. He says she doesn’t even know the laws. How did you get onto her?”

  “Followed her.”

  The boat punched slowly up the river. Up off to the left Marquez made out the water tower behind the Ryde Hotel, then the red lights of the TV tower marking the location of Walnut Grove. Without the light you’d see only gray fog.

  “Okay, you followed her, and then what?”

  “On three instances we saw he
r drop the kids at school and drive to Ludovna’s house. Never checked her rearview and she wasn’t delivering anything, but each time she was inside about an hour.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “What’s yours?”

  The answer was supposed to be sex, but if that was the answer he wasn’t there yet. He’d had a hard time seeing Isaac’s wife in that role. Didn’t think she’d interest the Ludovna he’d met, and she and her husband looked pretty tight. As near as he could tell she worked all the time with either the pear farm or taking care of the two kids.

  “Maybe she cleans fish or processes roe at his house,” Marquez said.

  “I should have told you weeks ago about her.” Bitterness showed again. “But I didn’t want to give up what we’d been working on, and besides, you’re the legend. I wanted to see what you’d come up with on your own.”

  “You don’t really mean that last, do you?”

  “No, I’m sorry, John. It’s not you. I guess I’m just generally pissed off.”

  “That I can understand.”

  She turned quiet again, and they entered the slough. When she next spoke it was to explain what was ahead.

  “There’ll be someone glassing you as soon as you come around the bend up ahead.”

  “How many of them?”

  “Four, and they look like dorks but they’re smart. Usually, they like to sit off the Mothball Fleet, particularly when there’s a moon like this week, but they’ll move around also and camp up a slough like this. Two will fish and two will watch for us or the other wardens. Those two always have binos and usually one of them is on land.”

  “Not like the good old days when the poachers would smoke dope, drink, and hang ten rods on the stern.”

  “I don’t know much about the good old days. I’m only thirty-two.”

  “Is that one of them up there along the bank on the right?”

  “I don’t see anybody.”

  “Third tree in. You see a little bit of a head poking around the trunk.”