Dead Game

by Kirk Russell

  “Bottom line is Raburn Orchards had money problems in the summer and fall of 2001,” she said.

  “Call some of those firms,” he said, “and ask if they ever got paid. You’ll have to make up some sort of cover story. Maybe you’re thinking of doing business with Raburn Orchards and the standard credit checks turned up the record of liens.”

  “I’m going to need a business and a name for it.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll leave that to you. Ask if they got paid in full or whether it was pennies on the dollar, and would they do business again with Isaac Raburn.”

  An hour later he still hadn’t had a call back from Crey. Fairly soon, he’d need a way to refrigerate it. He punched in Abe Raburn’s number, talked briefly to him, then drove to meet him at the pear packing shed.

  Raburn had built a wooden platform with slots that slid over the forklift blades the same as a pallet. He drove the narrow forklift around to the back of Marquez’s truck, leveled the platform with the open tailgate, and they wrestled, slid the sturgeon out and onto the platform. In the room in back they slid the sturgeon onto his gutting station.

  Raburn pressed the belly of the sturgeon. “You’ve got yourself a cow here.”

  They cut in, exposing eggs. For the millions of eggs a female produced, perhaps ten million in a lifetime, few offspring would come of them. Raburn lifted out a brown ovarian sack and carried it over to his screen. He mixed the salt solution, worked the eggs loose, and was gentle in the way he did it. The eggs were left in the 4 percent salt solution. Salt would penetrate and preserve them. They’d be stored at twenty-nine degrees.

  There was little conversation between them, but there was a tension in the room. Marquez knew that with a motion he wouldn’t have time to stop, Raburn could turn and drive the blade into his chest. Raburn’s body language made it clear he wanted nothing more to do with him.

  Marquez washed his hands after they’d cleaned off the table. Outside, it was still raining and the morning was dark. He walked back over to the bowl where the eggs were. From here you either ate the caviar or you needed a way to preserve it, a means of production, an understanding of preservatives, vacuum packing, pasteurizing. August wouldn’t go for pasteurizing. There was a stigma about what that did to taste for the market he dealt with.

  Marquez rested a hand on the bowl. He smelled the salted roe and dipped his fingers in, slid a few eggs out and tasted with Raburn watching him. The eggs burst with intense flavor.

  “Is your brother here this morning?” Marquez asked.

  “He took Cindy to the dentist. She has a bad tooth.”

  “Are the kids with them?”

  “I’m supposed to drop them at school.”

  “Let’s go look in a couple of buildings before you take the kids.” When Raburn frowned, Marquez said, “I’ve got active search warrants in the truck, but I’m not asking to search.”

  Raburn had a hard time with that, especially after helping out with the big sturgeon. His wide face openly showed his bitterness.

  “Never stops,” he said, and they drove down to the equipment storage shed that Marquez had walked through once before. Roberts called as they came inside, and he moved away from Raburn to talk to her. He saw the same look of disgust on Raburn’s face as he’d seen the night Raburn had booted the ovaries off the embankment.

  “One of the fertilizer companies talked to me. They settled for sixty cents on the dollar on a nineteen thousand dollar debt. The woman I talked to gave me the name of their lawyer, and I called him. He told me the Raburns settled all their debts at once and told everyone they’d taken on another investor, but only the Feds and the State got paid in full. And you were right, there was a state tax lien as well. I’m trying to call the Secretary of State’s office, but it’s probably going to be easier to drive over there and see if anybody got added to the corporate documents.”

  “My guess is no.”

  “Mine too. I’ll call you from there.”

  The equipment storage building had once been a barn and held more than equipment used to tend the orchards. Marquez walked around with Raburn, asked about the fertilizer stored here and the small repair shop and the tools. There was a greenhouse. They walked inside it, and the air was musty and damp.

  “My brother is experimenting with growing mushrooms.” There were flowers and other seedlings in the greenhouse, and Marquez slowed and looked at those before they moved to the door. “I’ve got to take the kids to school.”

  “I’d like to see the house.”

  “Do you have a warrant for the house?”

  “I’ve got a warrant for all the buildings.”

  “Why are you such a hardass today? There’s nothing in their house, so why do you want to look in it? If you thought there was anything there, you would have looked before now. Why invade their privacy? Besides, I’ve got to take the kids to school. I’ve got to get going.”

  In many ways Raburn was right: Marquez didn’t know what he was looking for, and it was more about pushing Raburn to see what would happen. He’d thought over Raburn shooting up his boat and had decided there could easily be more behind it than just trying to get out of the deal he’d made with time. Or get away because he was afraid of Ludovna. So he’d gotten new search warrants. He was getting in Raburn’s face. He pointed at the canning building. It was small, had cinder-block walls and a metal roof and door, no windows.

  “All they do in there is apple and pear butter.”

  “Open it for me and go ahead and take the kids to school. I’m fine here alone.”

  Raburn unlocked the door, then strode in ahead of him and opened all the cabinet doors. The metal cabinets lined the walls, and their doors banged against each other as Raburn threw them open.

  “What’s the problem, Abe?”

  “Oh, there’s no problem. Look at whatever you want.”

  There were six- and eight-ounce glass jars with the Raburn Orchards label and boxes of jars for both apple and pear butter. Marquez picked up one of the jars, looked at the red-orange label, the color of the top similar to the burned color of the remaining pear leaves on the trees. He moved along looking in the cabinets. On the opposite wall there were four cabinets with locks.

  “What’s in those?”

  “Same stuff, but they hire seasonal help and were getting things stolen so they bought locks for half the cabinets. Do you want me to go find a key?”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Hey, why would I mind, and why would the kids mind being late to school?”

  “Where are you going to get the key?”

  “I don’t even know where one is, and come on, man, this is the canning room. If you’re looking for some apple butter I’ll get you a case. Do you want me to comp you a case of apple butter? Do you want apple butter for everyone on your team? I’ll get as many cases as you want.”

  “Take it easy.”

  “What do you mean take it easy? I just cut up your fish for you, and now you’re jacking me around.”

  “Where are the keys?”

  Raburn shrugged, acting now like he didn’t have any idea.

  “Isaac can open it for you when he gets back. The key is probably in the house, and it’s stupid for you and me to look for it.”

  “Let’s open them now.”

  “Why can’t it wait? I’ve got to drop the kids off.”

  “I’ll walk down to the house with you.”

  When they got there Raburn remembered a key high on a shelf in the kitchen. Marquez walked back up the gravel road and opened the cabinets. Inside, he found more six-ounce and eightounce jars. Then he found the two-ounce glass jars he was looking for. The labels would go on later. August would put those on.

  “Those are for pimentos,” Raburn said, as he put his head back in. “He’s got a friend growing pimentos and Cindy jars them for him. It’s just another way to make a little money at farmers markets. I’m leaving.”

  Raburn walked away, and not long after, Marquez heard
his truck idling outside. The oldest Raburn boy sat in the passenger seat and Raburn’s niece in the jumpseat in back. Both kids stared at him, wondering who he was, and he waved at them.

  “Better take them to school,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll be here when you get back.”

  Marquez picked up one of the jars and out of the corner of his eye saw Raburn back in the doorway, agitated, not wanting to leave him here alone. But he didn’t find anything else in the cabinets. He went through each shelf carefully.

  “How long will it take you to drop them and get back?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Better do it.”

  “There’s nothing more to see, and this is my brother’s space. You don’t need to come in here anymore. He’s got his business, and he’s not involved.”

  He drove off with the kids. When he did Marquez walked back to the cabinet that held the two-ounce jars. The jars were the right size. He looked around at the room again. Raburn hadn’t wanted him in here and maybe that was his growing resentment, or he was emboldened, or maybe it was as simple as violating his brother’s space. But his gut told him it was more than that. He’d watched the way Raburn threw open the cabinet doors. Making a show of it, but he couldn’t hide his nervousness. He turned one of the glass jars in his hand and looked around the room again.

  31

  “You knocked out Torp’s front teeth,” Crey said.

  “Yeah, he owes Lisa a chair.”

  “Man, you’re too much. What did I say to you about working with my crew? This really screws everything up.”

  “He started to pull a gun, and Perry came at me with a knife.”

  “He was just trying to get another drink. He couldn’t get inside. The door was locked.”

  “Tell him to drink out of the toilet next time he’s thirsty. You and I know he was going upstairs.”

  “No, he wasn’t, and you read too much into everything. At the most he was going to borrow a bottle of Jack Daniels.”

  “He had a gun.”

  “He’s always got a gun. That doesn’t mean anything. You think he was going up to do her, then what, the cops are there in the morning, and how long do you think it would take them to figure out who did it? He ain’t that stupid, man, and the point is I asked you to work with my crew.”

  “I took a mask and gloves off him. He had a bottle of chloroform.”

  Crey was silent, then quietly said, “Lou didn’t tell me that.”

  “Because Perry planned to follow him upstairs. They were both on the deck. Start meeting me yourself because I can’t deal with them anymore. I’ve got a drop for you later today, and I don’t want to see anybody but you.”

  “What time will you get here?”

  “Before 2:00.”

  He hung up as Raburn came back from dropping the kids off. Marquez had left the canning room and walked the gravel road through the orchards back to the packing shed. He was at his truck when Raburn came up alongside him.

  “I’m leaving,” Marquez said. “The key is on the table in the room.”

  “When is all this going to end?”

  “You know, that’s a question I ask myself. How long is it going to take to shut these guys down?”

  “What am I supposed to tell the kids when you’re rooting through their family’s business?”

  “You could tell them that the man going through cabinets in the canning building is trying to keep Uncle Abe out of prison, and Uncle Abe still doesn’t get it.”

  Marquez loaded the fish and caviar and left to meet Crey in Rio Vista. After the drop with Crey he’d continue on to Grizzly Bay to make another buy. He met Crey at the bait shop, and Crey wanted him to follow. They drove out to the end of the street and moved the sturgeon and caviar from Marquez’s truck to Crey’s. Almost nothing got said, and Crey was very jumpy. When Marquez wasn’t watching he’d dropped an envelope with the cash in it on the driver’s seat of Marquez’s truck. He pointed it out without identifying it.

  “Is that money for me?”

  “I gotta go,” Crey answered.

  “You okay with me counting it before you take off?”

  Marquez lifted the envelope off the seat. He let the bills slide into his hand. But Crey had already turned and was getting in his truck. Without waiting for the money to be counted he drove away, and after he left Marquez had a quiet conversation with the team. Alvarez would go with him to make another sturgeon buy in Grizzly Bay, and the rest of the SOU would stick with Crey.

  Grizzly Bay was the color of lead, then bright silver where the sunlight broke through onto the water. Marquez could remember when troops were trained here in preparation for fighting in the Mekong in Vietnam. He rechecked his directions, then pulled over on the shoulder 2.3 miles from the last stop sign. About twenty minutes later a couple of kids pulled up in a gray minivan, neither looking older than eighteen. The driver got out, walked up to Marquez’s window, and then introduced himself. Julio Rodriguez. He was clean-cut, hair short and gelled, a cheerful guileless face. Marquez could tell the kid hadn’t done this before.

  “You want to look at the fish first?” Julio asked.

  “Sure would.”

  Marquez got out and looked at the sturgeon in the mini-van. It was a decent size, over the slot limit by a foot. The kid was very proud, said it was the biggest he’d ever caught. The other young man stayed in the cab, looking around once but apparently just there to help lift the sturgeon, didn’t have anything to do with catching it.

  “How long have you known Abe?” Marquez asked.

  “My uncle knows him. I don’t know him.”

  Marquez counted out the bills, and Alvarez drove slowly past, videotaping the exchange of money. Julio couldn’t have been more unaware. They moved the sturgeon, and Marquez questioned him.

  “What are you going to do with the money?”

  “I’m saving for college.”

  “You’ll have to catch a lot of sturgeon to get through college.”

  “I’ve got two jobs.”

  “Yeah, where do you work?”

  “In Suisun.”

  He kept talking. He played baseball and hoped to play in college. He lived in Suisun, so did the uncle who knew Raburn and taught him how to fish for sturgeon. He was the oldest kid in his family and had four brothers and sisters. He shook Marquez’s hand before leaving, and Alvarez trailed him as he drove away with the money, said the kid never looked in the rearview mirror except slowing at stoplights.

  “Looked to me like he went shopping for the family,” Alvarez said later. “He went straight to a grocery store and then home. Must have been his brothers and sisters who helped unload groceries.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “A little asbestos-shingled house facing the water.”

  Marquez called Ludovna with this one and got told to bring it over to the Sacramento store. A couple of guys working for Ludovna helped him unload. The team was already jokingly calling today the “sturgeon derby.”

  At 2:00, Crey’s boat left the dock with six sport fishermen and worked sturgeon holes around the Mothball Fleet and later went farther upriver and docked at the Delta Queen. After the sport fishermen filed off the boat and went into the bar, Perry and Torp drove up in their van. They boarded Crey’s boat, then left again a few minutes later with a blue plastic cooler and drove to Weisson’s Auto. Shauf and Roberts stopped a third of a mile back. Shauf radioed Marquez.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Stay with them when they leave there.”

  “Can we call the Feds?”

  “I’ll call Ehrmann and let him know we took it this far and we think caviar was delivered here. That’s the cooler I delivered to Crey’s Rio Vista house so we’ve already got it on tape.”

  Cairo sat on Ludovna’s house, and late in the afternoon Cindy Raburn backed into Ludovna’s driveway and stayed only as long as it took to load a cooler into her Volvo backseat.
Hard to tell for sure, but it looked like the same blue cooler, and now Marquez came up alongside the Volvo at a stoplight. He looked down through the back windows and saw the Save Lake Tahoe sticker they’d put on the cooler.

  “It’s the same one,” he said.

  They followed Cindy Raburn back into the delta and home. But rather than drive her car to the house, she stopped at the canning building and lugged the cooler inside. They watched the lights come on.

  “No wonder Raburn was so nervous this morning,” Marquez said. “Let’s let it unfold now. She must be in there to jar the caviar. They went to a lot of trouble to get it here. Let’s see what happens and let’s follow it from here.”

  He broke the team into shifts and drove into Walnut Grove with Shauf. There he bought bread, peanut butter, apples, a couple of candy bars, and filled a thermos with coffee before Shauf dropped him off along the southwestern side of the Raburn property. With Alvarez he came down the steep levee bank in the darkness and then out along the property line, following the edge of the trees. Shauf would stay with her van and watch the roads, and, with Alvarez, Marquez started through the orchards. The rest of the team would go to the safehouse, and they’d rotate in the morning.

  Leaves stuck to his boots as they walked the mud between the pear trees. They worked their way closer. The Raburns didn’t have any dogs, and it was unlikely anyone was behind a darkened window in the main house with night-vision equipment. The single light outside the canning shed door glowed yellow and hazy at this distance, but with light-enhanced cameras they could read the terrain, and the lines of the canning shed took form. Her car was still out front, Isaac’s pickup near the house. Up on the levee road Shauf drove slowly past and on down toward Raburn’s houseboat. She said the lights were off there, his pickup gone.

  “Take a drive through Walnut Grove and Isleton and check the bars. Maybe you’ll find him in town,” Marquez said.

  The cold deepened, and a few more lights came on in the main house. Marquez read Alvarez’s face in the dim light from his cell screen, saw his breath cloud in the cold. The wind picked up. Cindy Raburn was still in the canning building at 10:00 when lights started clicking off in the main house. Not long after, Isaac stepped out onto the porch, and they watched him walk up the gravel road to the canning building.