Kirk Russell - Redback

‘Miguel.’

‘Miguel Salazar?’

‘Yeah, man, Miguel Salazar. Who else would I call?’ He belched and laid a twenty dollar bill on the table. ‘I was working for him.’

‘Jim Osiers got set up.’

Now Rayman smiled. ‘The bitch is in trouble, isn’t she? It’s why you’re here. She came to my parole hearings and fucked with me and now she’s going to get hers. I’m talking to the DEA, I’m out with it, man. I’ve told them how the Salazars made me lie.’

‘Who else did you call that night?’

‘No one.’

‘Yeah, you called Miguel and you made at least one other call, didn’t you? Then you figured it was a done deal. You disappeared back across the California border. But it didn’t end there and it was still waiting for you when you walked out of prison. It’s waiting for you now.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I can’t follow your crap.’

‘What happened has to be answered for. Pass that on to Stoval. Tell him I said it’s not over for him either.’

‘You’re like a prophet, man. You’re like this crazy dude who lives down the street from me and dresses like Jesus. He knows all about the future because he reads the Bible. Is that what you read?’ Rayman leaned forward, his bloated face hovering over the table. ‘Fuck you, Marquez.’

Marquez stood. He tucked the chair back in.

‘Pass the message on, Rayman.’

‘ Stoval is in Indonesia,’ Desault said. ‘Have you ever heard of the Pramuka Market in East Jakarta?’

Marquez looked through the slider out toward the dark of the ocean and knew this was the call.

‘I’ve been there,’ he said. ‘I once rode along on a raid there, but it was all a big joke. Everyone was in on it but me. They set up these raids for illegal trade in endangered animals and I learned later they tip off the traders first, so the traders either don’t show up or leave the illegal animals at home. We were zeroing in on four people in LA who were bringing in orangutans and selling them for thirty thousand dollars each. They’d buy them for nothing and then ship a half dozen babies hoping one or two would survive the trip.’

‘Stoval got there last night. His jet is in Jakarta. If he flies out of Jakarta we’ll get some help tracking the flight, but you could be landing and taking off again. You could be coming right back home.’

‘I get it.’

And that’s what happened. Stoval flew out when Marquez was still in the air. Marquez got the word when he landed, but still went out to see the Pramuka Market, see if anything had changed. Not much had. It was still about the size of a football field and packed with animals that were terrified and for the most part marked for death. He walked through aisles with a pair of men trailing him as he took photos without buying. But no one bothered him and he spent a day there before returning to Jakarta. When he flew home Katherine gave this first run her appraisal.

‘The Airborne Agent returns,’ she said and handed him coffee. She sat down across from him. As she did her robe fell open and she asked, ‘Did you miss me?’

‘I always miss you.’

‘How was your trip?’

‘It was a long flight.’

‘Was it worth it?’

‘No.’

‘Who gets the airline miles?’

‘We do.’

‘You and the Feds, or you and me?’

‘When I say we, I always mean you and me.’

‘I’ve been wondering about that.’ More of her robe slid open. ‘Did you see any new sights?’

‘I went to the animal market in Pramuka. If anything, it’s a little bigger.’

‘Long way to go to look at a market, isn’t it?’

‘It was.’

‘Do you know what I think?’

She was going to tell him either way. The belt holding her robe at the waist came undone and on one side her robe fell open. Her nipples were a dark brown-red, her breasts a creamy white. He looked at the curve of her belly as she looked at him and then reached and touched smooth skin. He ran his fingers along the curve of her and then took a drink of coffee with the sound of the plane’s engines still in his head.

‘You’re never going to stop doing this, not until you retire. That’s what I think.’

She sat down on his thighs, robe sweeping open, legs straddling him. He kissed the breast nearest him. Some hard things had gotten said in the past week and more probably would, but they were talking and both knew if they kept talking there was a way through. He reached and drew her close, and they made love and fell asleep.

When they woke they took a walk up on Mount Tamalpais out a trail that cut across an open slope of grass brown and dry with fall. Earlier there was fog, but the fog was gone and blue sky was laced with strands of cirrus clouds. It was warm on the sun-hard trail with the smells of the dry grass and oak and the salt in the wind off the ocean. They left the trail, went down to a nearly flat spot between the trees where long ago after separating and nearly divorcing they had sat and talked their way through.

The conversation today was nothing like that day, but it was right to come here. From this spot you could look north to Point Reyes and down at the curving sand of Stinson Beach and trace that crescent to Bolinas and the tide running out of the lagoon. Katherine’s warm hand touched his and he took her hand in his and the certainty and anger dimmed a little. This choice of his had hurt her. There was no getting away from that.

‘It’s about everything I’ve ever done,’ he said.

‘That’s the sort of drama I’m afraid will get you killed. If you do get killed I’ll be angry at you for the rest of my life. I’ll flush your ashes down a toilet. I want to have fun with you. I want to have time together. We’ve gone a lot of years with too much time apart and if the new deal is running around the world chasing bad guys and calling me from unpronounceable places, then it’s hard to see when we’re going to get that time. I know why you’re doing it and I know I’ll never love anyone like I love you, but I need you to answer something for me, and I don’t want the answer today. This is my question. What is it in you that lets you risk everything we have? Not today, not here, but I need to know. I need you to tell me.’

‘ Well, so that was our first round,’ Desault said, as they talked on the phone. ‘There’s going to be some of that, and I’m sure you’ve thought about it.’

This was cheerleading. This was having a direct supervisor, but that was part of the deal and he was getting a feel for Desault. He liked Desault’s candor and that he wasn’t afraid to take a chance. They talked over the Indonesia trip and how much the world had shrunk since they both had started in law enforcement. Marquez had thought plenty about that on the ride home. A decade ago he chased poachers into Oregon or Nevada or tried to cut off poached abalone coming in from Mexico, but now they talked in terms of shipping points and global routes.

As Desault revisited Stoval’s bighorn hunt and the failure to apprehend him in Vegas, Marquez’s thoughts floated back to the nineteenth century when skin hunters in the US slaughtered the great herds of buffalo, antelope, and bighorn. A naturalist named Ernest Thompson Seton recorded it. He watched species that once had no fear of man taken to near extinction, but he couldn’t do anything to slow it. It took the Lacey Act of 1900 to do that. Seton wrote that the bighorn had no fear of man in those days. He wrote that we have to acknowledge that animals have rights. He meant the right to exist and have habitat. He wrote stories about animals to try to make his point, to try to bridge the disconnect. He wrote about an angel of the wild, a guardian that watched over the wild creatures, and if they ever needed one it was now as we crossed another threshold of extinctions with more or less the same excuses, the same fear that giving animals space risks necessary economic development of increasingly scarce resources. In truth, it risked something more threatening than that. It risked changing our view of how we inhabit the world.