Kirk Russell - Redback

He hiked out. He called. He made sure Darcey and Katherine were fine, and then returned to the trail. Three weeks later, on a ridge along a canyon on the west shore of Tahoe, he stopped to eat, and sitting on a granite shelf looking down at that graceful improbable lake moved him in a way he couldn’t put in words. The moment marked him and months later in the fall, as he ate a lunch of hard flat biscuits, tuna fish, and half a chocolate bar and black coffee with a game warden in Oregon, it began to gel. The warden was working a bear poaching case. Marquez stayed at a campsite three nights to help him. He taught the warden some undercover tricks and was there when the warden took two poachers down.

On the first of November after completing the Pacific Crest Trail he shaved his beard and called Katherine. He’d sent several postcards and a couple of letters and it was great to hear her voice. He smiled as he talked to her. He flew to San Francisco the next morning. The next day he drove to Sacramento and dropped his resume with the California Department of Fish and Game. Two days later he got a call from the chief of Fish and Game who said, ‘This job is only for someone with the passion for it. It doesn’t pay well. We can’t even pay you what you were making before.’

‘It’s where I belong.’

‘You need to be very sure about that.’

‘I’ve had time to think about it.’

‘Then come back this afternoon and let’s talk. You might be just what we need.’

Moat Creek, California

Every warden in California’s Department of Fish and Game keeps a logbook, but only the SOU, the Special Operations Unit, carries the green, hardbound Boorum amp; Pease. In fourteen years as patrol lieutenant of Fish and Game’s undercover team Marquez had filled six logbooks. They rode with him, were water and coffee stained, and held countless notes about interviews, suspects, tips, vehicles, busts, court appearances, and anything that might help solve or make a case now or later. The books were the record of his time. They told of the war against poachers fought in California at the end of the twentieth century and into the first decade of the new one.

This morning half of the SOU team was along the north coast with Marquez sweeping down from Fort Bragg, checking beaches and coves for abalone poachers. In California you couldn’t legally dive for abalone with air. You had to free-dive and today there was a very low, minus two-foot tide, so the dive was shallower and easier. Before dawn the beach lots and access roads filled with cars. South of Bragg and not far from Moat Creek the team picked up on four divers in an old gray Chevy. The divers visited three coves, each time staying long enough to dive, yet returning to their car empty-handed. Which can happen, but this didn’t feel right.

Lieutenant Carol Shauf ran point as the team tracked the foursome. Shauf called out their changing locations over the radio and as Marquez heard her description of one of them he eased over to the road shoulder north of Moat Creek.

To his left beyond the road and the cliffs was the dark blue of the Pacific, to his right a barbed-wire fence and pasture. In the distance, dark trees on the coastal mountains. Fog blew overhead, but it was burning off and the green field to his right alternately darkened and brightened. Sunlight and shadow touched the pages of one of his old logbooks as he flipped through the pages. He listened to the back and forth over the radio as he worked his way back in the logbook. He found what he was looking for just as his cell phone rang.

‘John Marquez?’ a voice asked, and Marquez recognized him right away. He remembered the distrust in Desault’s stare the day of the lie detector test. ‘It’s Ted Desault. Remember me?’

‘Sure, I remember you, Ted. You must be calling to apologize? It’s taken you long enough.’

Desault chuckled and Marquez could ask how he got this phone number, or what it was he needed so badly that after twenty years he was calling, but he decided to wait for the explanation.

‘I head an FBI task force to take down Emrahain Stoval.’

‘Stoval.’

‘Yes, and I know you keep tabs through Kerry Anderson.’

‘I try not to think about him much anymore. I’ve got my hands full here.’

Marquez listened to a quick back and forth between Shauf and another of his team. He knew Desault could hear it too and he wanted him to.

‘I need your help, Marquez.’ If you didn’t need something, you wouldn’t be calling, Marquez thought. ‘Stoval traffics in animal parts. We think he’s vulnerable there.’

Marquez knew about the trafficking. Desault was right, he still kept track through Anderson. But he was also two decades away from what had happened then. According to Anderson, Stoval had made himself untouchable after 9/11 by providing continual intelligence about terror related smuggling through Mexico. But then that was the kind of thing Anderson would say. Anderson and Sheryl Javits were about all the connection he had left from those days. Sheryl was at the wedding when he married Katherine. Sheryl came to dinner occasionally at their house. She was well up in the DEA brass now. It was Sheryl who had confirmed years ago that after Miguel Salazar was killed the contract on Marquez had gone away.

‘I want to talk face-to-face,’ Desault said. ‘I’ve got an offer I’d like to make you. I think you’ll like what we’re doing.’

Marquez looked out at the ocean and said, ‘Give me a number where I can reach you.’

‘When can we meet?’

‘I’ll call you. We’re in the middle of something, right now.’

But Desault knew that. He’d heard Shauf. As he hung up, Marquez thought of the passive distrust in Desault’s eyes the day of the lie detector test. He got only a few seconds to think about it before Shauf’s voice crackled over the radio.

‘Hey, they’re back at the first harbor. I’m betting they left a dive ring down there full of ab and will bring it up now.’

‘Can you see the driver?’

‘I’m looking at him.’

‘Has he got a tatt on the right side of his neck?’

‘If he does the wetsuit collar is hiding it. He’s got a buzz cut. He’s big. No, he’s fat. Black wetsuit, bright blue stripes on the arms. Why are you asking?’

‘I recognize him.’ Marquez had found the page with the notes from 2003 on a poacher named Greg Lahzouras. Images from long ago, Billy Takado’s face, buzzed in his head, but he made himself focus. ‘If it’s who I think it is he’s got a tatt that’s supposed to be a dragon, but looks like a red lizard on his neck.’

‘You might be right. This looks like a guy we busted in Shelter Cove in ’03 or 4. Remember, he got off with almost no fine? What was his name?’

‘Lahzouras.’

‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right, it is him.’ Her voice speeded up. ‘OK we’ve got some more action, the backpacker we saw out on the road earlier is walking back up like he’s carrying a dead body on his back. I think they filled his pack with ab. If I’m right they’ll pick him up when he reaches the road, unload what he’s carrying, and do it again at the other places they dove.’

And that’s what happened. The backpacker let other cars go by and then stuck his thumb out as the Chevy with the divers approached. They put his pack in the trunk alongside a big cooler and he got in. At the next beach lot the divers went down to the water, leaving the backpacker to transfer the abalone from the backpack to a big cooler in the trunk. When he finished he strolled down to the beach with the empty pack. Not the most sophisticated method, but it was getting the job done.