Shell Games

by Kirk Russell

  “Sure.”

  “And what were you thinking, or do you remember? Did you realize those wounds weren’t fatal?”

  “He made one more attempt, tried for my eyes.”

  “So you made sure.”

  Marquez stood silent with emotion sweeping through him, all the inner promises he’d made to the dead, all the years wondering and knowing Kline was out there still. Yeah, he’d driven the blade through Kline’s heart and he’d known what he was doing, which was the question Douglas was asking. He’d pushed down until he felt the tip of the blade slide off a rib and snap on the metal floor. He’d crossed Davies’s abyss.

  “You’re asking if I had a choice,” Marquez said. The Feds had anticipated capturing Kline. Douglas had counted on questioning him.

  “Maybe I am, but I don’t want an answer. Or maybe you don’t remember. Basically, you were defending yourself, trying to save your life.” Douglas paused. “You’re going to get asked a lot of questions this afternoon, but I can understand the actual moment being a little hazy. They say the knife went in and then was pushed through with great force and the tip snapped on the floor decking after it exited his body. The ribcage was compressed enough by force to allow the knife to go all the way through him. You sliced a rib almost in half and buried the knife hilt in his chest, but then you’re a big man. Still, you’re going to get questioned about it.” Marquez felt Douglas’s hand on his back. “Let’s go back up top.”

  “You go up; I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Marquez stepped out of the walk-in and shut its door. He laid a palm on the cold metal door and knew he’d had a choice. He’d held the knife over Kline and brought it down into his chest with all his strength. Douglas was letting him know not to say or remember much about the fight, but that didn’t feel right either. Marquez lifted his hand away, walked out the passageway and climbed the stairs into the sunlight. He stood at the rail looking out across at the City again, at the mare’s tails of cirrus fanning from the west, thinking about Kline, just the things he knew Kline had done, the people he’d killed. He didn’t hear Douglas walk over, but then felt a hand on his back.

  “You answer some questions this afternoon and then it’s over, Marquez.”

  “It all happened fast, but I had a choice.”

  “No, you didn’t, and fuck him.” Douglas pointed at the Marlin, Hansen clearly visible at the wheel on the top deck. “There’s your ride. When they ask, you say you were rolling around fighting on the floor. Kline had the knife, then you had it and you don’t even know what happened. You were fighting for your life. Or say noth-ing.” Marquez didn’t answer that, wasn’t sure what he’d do yet, and Douglas moved the conversation on. “Where do you go now?”

  “A bear poaching deal.” The answer sounded hollow and out of place.

  “Never ends, does it?”

  “Not really.”

  Douglas offered his hand and Marquez shook it. “We owe you, Marquez. You take care of yourself.”

  “You, too.”

  He rode across the bay without looking back. He knew he wouldn’t be able to lie about killing Kline and decided he’d say nothing. If they wanted to take it further, that was their call. The boat dropped him and he spent the afternoon with the FBI and their many questions about Kline, about whether Marquez had a personal score to settle. They read his silence as an admission and they brought Douglas into the room and walked through the sequence of questions again, let him know they’d put a lot of resources into finding Kline and had expectations about unraveling his network, following the tentacles back to the cartel and the murders of three American judges. Cases that had gone back years in addition to the new killing here in San Francisco.

  He watched the nostrils of the man across from him flare as he insinuated that Marquez had murdered a suspect. They walked him through the sequence again, coming up to the point of holding the knife, to the point where if he’d seconded the empathetic voices in the room who suggested he was fighting to defend himself, he could have walked out easily. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that and when they let him leave at dusk, he knew he’d left them to an internal debate.

  That night he chopped oak kindling, split a log, and built a fire. He poured a scotch and sat on the stone bench near the fireplace and used a knife to cut the pages from his Kline file. One by one he fed them to the fire and watched the cardboard backing curl and burn and the photos color and smoke, then darken at the center and burst into flame. And he wept for his dead friends, tears no one would see that dried with the fire heat, tears he’d held back for more than a decade. He broke the ashes apart with an iron poker, poured another scotch, and then walked out onto the deck under the stars and knew that for him, it was over.

  41

  A few weeks later on a cloudless morning in October when the sky was a dark blue and the sunlight gold with the fall, Marquez drove up the coast to an abalone festival with Katherine and Maria. They turned off the coast highway onto an open grassy field above the ocean about a mile before Mendocino. A volunteer wearing a fluorescent vest waved them toward a parking spot at the end of a long row of cars. It was a cook-off, an annual deal put on by the Mendocino Area Park Association.

  Blue cooking smoke rose in the clearing and pickups, cars, and campers were backed up to barbecues and grills. Beyond it all was the dark blue line of the ocean. They walked in and Marquez handed all but one of the tickets he’d bought months ago to Maria, then bought a couple cups of chowder and stood with Katherine in the sunlight as Maria wandered off. You handed a ticket over and got to taste somebody’s abalone recipe and he watched to see what line Maria would get in. But she went first to the tables of beaded jewelry, T-shirts, and other fairground paraphernalia. She leaned over a table, a long-legged young woman wearing a tube top and jeans.

  “Gaining weight,” Katherine said.

  “She’s going to be okay, Kath.”

  And so were they, he thought, finding their way to some dif-ferent space. It would take time but he was more patient with that now and knew they’d get there. He checked his watch, glanced back toward the entry gate. He’d had another conversation with the FBI yesterday and though the man he’d talked to didn’t seem happy about it, they were going to treat his killing Kline as self-defense. They wanted him to sign something tomorrow and he’d agreed to.

  Katherine slipped her hand into his and he moved closer to her. He scanned the crowd out of habit, took in the faces and saw the DFG table and the uniformed officer talking to a couple of women, probably explaining the habitat of abalone and the effort at sustainability.

  “Here she comes,” Katherine said, and they watched Maria walk back across with a plate of fried abalone. One of the pieces had a little American flag stuck in it.

  “Try this,” Maria said. “It’s got this great sauce,” and Marquez picked up a piece and bit into it. He reached for another and she pulled the plate back, her eyes lit with a wry humor he hadn’t seen in a while. “Get your own,” she said. “You’ve still got a ticket.”

  An hour later, Maria and Katherine were ready to leave and went on ahead to the truck while Marquez waited through the last of a line to use the remaining ticket. The cook was pounding abalone on his tailgate, then grilling it in strips on a barbecue. Marquez watched it cook, got served a plate and walked toward the exit. He looked back once, figuring she’d made other plans and had decided not to stop by. Then he spotted her. She was with Stuart and stand-ing with another couple, people who looked like they were friends. Petersen wore a cap and stood a little back from the group and to the side. He could see Stuart laughing and judging from their faces it looked like the other man was telling a funny story. Marquez took a bite of abalone and lingered near the exit, debating whether to cross the clearing. But he was unsure whether to interrupt.

  He’d talked with her plenty on the phone and had been to see her in Redding about a week and a half after Petersen had gotten home. They’d sat in her living room drinking te
a while she told him how she’d find herself crying unexpectedly and how her mind would go blank at times. She was getting help with it, seeing a psychotherapist. He saw her face turn in sunlight, the cap that had shadowed her eyes coming off as the man with the funny story started talking to her. When she smiled that light quick smile of hers he felt a rush of warmth.

  There were some things you never really got over, but you could get past them. Petersen put her arm around Stuart and looked out across the clearing and saw him now. Marquez saw her nod and held up his index finger, an old joke between them, signaling her that she was the number one warden. But it wasn’t a joke today and he wanted her to know that. He held her gaze and smiled back at her, then waved and slowly turned away. It was time to go home.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people: California Department of Fish and Game Assistant Chief of the South Coast Region Mervin Hee, Captain Nancy Foley, Lieutenant Kathy Ponting, Lieutenant Adrian Foss, Lieutenant Keith Long, Warden Richard Vincent; without their help and guidance this book wouldn’t have hap-pened. My agent, Philip Spitzer, whose sensibility and undaunted enthusiasm I’ve relied on throughout. My editor, Jay Schaefer, for seeing the true possibilities in Marquez and then guiding me to write a better novel. Branch Russell, Lydia McIntosh, my brother and sister. Greg Estes, Paul Hansen, Tim Stokes, John Buffington, Tony Broadbent, David Hayden, good friends who waded through rough drafts and offered ideas that were often better than my own. I am deeply indebted to a crime fiction writer—who shall remain nameless here—for his extraordinary generosity, thoughtful advice, and the encouragement he gave when it mattered most. My daugh-ters, Kate and Olivia, for their humor and patience, for enduring the “just give me another few minutes to finish this paragraph” that so often stretched into an hour. And especially to Judy, my wife, who never once challenged my idea that I could and would write novels, and whose support has never wavered.

  Copyright ©2003 by Kirk Russell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Russell, Kirk, 1954–

  Shell games : a John Marquez crime novel / Kirk Russell.

  ISBN 978-0-8118-4186-3

  1 California. Dept. of Fish and Game—Fiction.

  2 Government investigators—Fiction. 3. Abalone fisheries—Fiction.

  4. California—Fiction. 5. Smuggling—Fiction. I. Title.

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