Kirk Russell - Redback

Marquez had no fear in his eyes in the bull ring and without turning around he’d intuitively understood what to do to try to get Takado away from Miguel Salazar. Diving into San Francisco Bay when the fog was coming in and the water rough said he was capable of focusing everything on a moment. The elephant poachers, that was unusual. He knows we’re hunting him, Stoval thought. He knows and he’s not running. I’ll bring Kline north and we’ll focus on El Paso. I don’t want him moving again. It needs to be now.

Sheryl was in Virginia, four floors up at DEA headquarters. Marquez was in a pay phone in El Paso, Texas. She sounded engaged in the new job and happy, though worried about him.

‘You wigged out, John, that’s all there is to it, but I’m glad you’re back in the States. Where were you all winter?’

‘Guadalajara and farther south, then in Thailand and Indonesia.’

‘How are you paying for all this?’

‘I’m eating through my 401K.’

‘That’s insane.’ She exhaled into the phone. ‘Look. I’ll be in LA next week. Why don’t you meet me there?’

‘I need a favor, Sheryl. I need you to check something for me. I heard something from a judge in Mexico named Carlotta. He’s very well connected. He told me the CIA got the Kiki Camarena tape from someone who was in the room during the torture. Anderson told me Stoval was a source for the CIA. Tell Anderson I’ve learned something more about the black letter and ask him if he knows anything about Carlotta.’

‘What black letter? What are you talking about? You sound like a nutcase babbling about secret UN helicopters. Next thing you’re going to tell me is that Stoval was behind the Kennedy assassination. And what’s Kerry Anderson doing talking to you? You’re not a Fed anymore. He shouldn’t be talking to you. Is he passing you information?’

‘Do that for me. I’ll call you back.’

Marquez left the phone booth. Some of what Sheryl said stung him and he tried to shake it off. He hadn’t known Kiki Camarena personally, but everyone in the DEA knew of him. Camarena was the first DEA agent kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Mexico. His killers were never caught and Marquez hoped Carlotta was a new lead.

Marquez was leaner and in better shape than he’d been in at the DEA, though sick lately with something he picked up in the jungle. At night he’d get a fever. He’d lost weight. His hair was longer, face tanned. He looked civilian and he didn’t carry a gun anymore, though in his car was a Kimber pistol and he had another hidden in the rundown house he rented.

After hanging up with Sheryl he crossed back into Juarez and took up the same position in the same room in the same apartment across the street from the offices he’d watched for the last ten days. But again, no one showed up, and when he crossed back to Texas it was 3:30 in the morning and with a fever the trapped heat in the dusty rental house was stifling. He opened windows and splashed water on his face. He stripped off his clothes and lay down.

When he woke the sheets were drenched in sweat and he heard a vehicle slow on the street. When he didn’t hear it pull away he slid over to the side of the bed and sat up. Seconds later, he heard a door downstairs kicked open. It slapped against the wall and hob-nailed boots clicked like hooves across the floor as above Marquez scrambled for his gun. He heard splashing, a sloshing of liquid, and then the smell came in a wave up the stairwell, stronger than gasoline, sharp as acetone, vapors that stung his eyes as he dragged the dresser over, climbed up and broke the skylight loose. He pulled himself up and on to the roof just ahead of the roar of heat and light.

Later he had little memory of sliding, of the brittle old asphalt shingles slaking away underfoot. The rotted gutter held just long enough to slow him. He remembered a doctor leaning over him, skepticism in his eyes about Marquez’s ability to comprehend his words but saying it anyway, ‘You’re a lucky man.’

His search for Stoval ended there. He knew he couldn’t even risk staying in the hospital. He limped across the lobby and out into the heat. An hour later he was on a bus headed out of Texas. He zigzagged north and got his health back in small mountain towns in the Rockies before returning to California and then lived out of a motel for five months using a false name.

But he also made contact with friends in law enforcement. He had his letter of recommendation from Holsten and he got his resume together. He tried the Department of Justice, hoping his resume would get him an interview at DOJ and maybe a job. It didn’t get him either.

When his tenants blew out of the lease on the Mount Tamalpais house his grandparents left him, he moved in there and applied to the San Francisco Police. SFPD was interested in his experience dealing with gangs, but they sensed what DOJ had, that something was missing, so he went to work for a private eye friend. But he still couldn’t move forward. On a Friday afternoon when a case was resolved and it didn’t look like his private investigator friend needed him in the near term, he got out his backpack.

He called his sister first, and then a woman named Katherine that he’d met recently and found himself thinking about every day. He told both and the next morning turned the water heater off and shut the house up.

Two days later he was along the Mexican border again, only this time he turned north. He took his first steps along the two thousand six hundred fifty miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. He figured this was where he’d get his life sorted out. It was a safe place to think and plan, and he wouldn’t spend any money or at least not much. He’d made mistakes and Sheryl was right, he’d lost his way. He hiked into the highest mountains and it was okay being alone. It was fine to be alone and think about what had happened and where to go from here.

Marquez was north of Whitney at Rae Lakes when they came for him again. His tent was pitched so that an outcrop of rocks sheltered him from the night downwind off the peaks. A warning had been passed along about a black bear in the area and though he had his food in a bear canister, it was the bear snuffling around the tent that woke him and it was the bear that scared one of the two men into talking.

A few words called out, a hushed whisper, and Marquez had time to get out of the tent. They fired twenty or more silenced rounds through his tent before checking inside. When they did he hammered a rock down on to the skull of one and drove the same hard granite through the lenses of the night vision goggles the other wore. He struck the eyes again and again as the man clawed at the goggles straps. Marquez stripped his gun from him and left him kneeling, nearly blinded.

At gunpoint he forced both to walk into the cold lake. He questioned them, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, the one man unable to see and supported by the other.

‘You’ll die here if you don’t tell me who sent you.’

They gave him a name and when the name didn’t mean anything he got angrier. They gave the same name again, where they were contacted, how it worked, how they got paid, the photos they were supposed to take of his body. But their contact name still didn’t mean anything and he used the silenced gun of one and shot into the water near them. He forced them back. He listened to their ragged breathing and kept the flashlight on them as he packed his gear. He took their clothes, shoes, and guns, and then walked away when they were still in the water. The one with the eye wound wouldn’t last another four hours. Hypothermia would get the other.

‘You guys have a nice night.’

But half a mile away from them he did a thing he’d think about for years after. Slipping the pack off, he removed their shoes, clothes, coats, and walked back. He found them stumbling along the trail around the lake, the one he’d blinded crying out and shivering uncontrollably. He dropped their gear with them and left them a flashlight, and in a strange way letting them live freed his heart from an anger he’d carried since Takado’s murder.