Kirk Russell - Redback

‘I’m making these tapes and giving them to a friend to mail to you. There’s a guy named Emrahain Stoval. I saw him yesterday. He was with the Salazars at that restaurant I told you about in Tijuana and he didn’t see me, but if he does I’m dead.

‘In 1971 I was a twenty-two year old hunting guide with a small business in San Fernando, Mexico. Mostly, I guided dove hunts. Some of my clients were Mexicans and some came down from Brownsville. My father was Japanese, my mother Mexican, maybe I told you that once. My mother came from San Fernando and there was a lot of white-wing dove in that area. Flying knuckleballs is what they got called and you could shoot what you wanted, so it drew plenty of hunters. I had a good business and I was in love and engaged to get married. Her name was Rosalina and she was everything to me.

‘One day Stoval showed up. He was a big wing hunter and we got to be friends and he had a lot of money and pretty soon he was taking me places I could never have gone on my own. He had all kinds of money and liked to hunt with me, so we went all over the world. Africa, Asia, everywhere. We left for Canada and a bear hunt the day Rosalina disappeared. I was one of the last people to see her alive. Her body turned up on a dirt road out near a farm in Tamaulipas and that’s pretty much where my life ended. She’d been raped and strangled and the federales didn’t have any suspects so started looking at me. They thought I killed her before I left.

‘They would have charged me, but Stoval backed them off. He hired a good lawyer. He knew the right people to call and he even paid for a beautiful headstone. He was my only real friend and he got me back to work guiding again. He’d come into town and check on me every month or two, or he’d call me. He invested money in my business and I hired other guides and Stoval was my silent partner. That’s how he works. He’s like a disease you get and the symptoms show up gradually.

‘One morning we were sitting in a duck blind and I told him we needed more money to start bringing in richer clients. I wanted to build cottages and a hunter’s bar and restaurant.’

Billy coughed. A glass touched a counter and Marquez heard Billy swear as something spilled. No doubt a drink from his slowed voice.

‘He listened to me and said we could do it, but it was a lot of money and it was going to change our relationship. He’d become the real owner. I’d still have a share and I’d make a much better living, but I’d be working for him. Man, I was just a kid and trying to get over Rosalina and I trusted him – I wasn’t always the mess I am now. We made the deal and bought a new bus to bring rich Texans down. They liked the idea of being able to drink on the bus and not have to drive in Mexico. We got the bus and built the cottages and the restaurant and by then I knew what he was doing with me. It was what he’d been doing from the start and I hadn’t realized it. He broke me down a little at a time until I was just a servant to him. He started talking to me like he owned me. Once after a hunt he had me wait outside with the dogs.

‘The bus got a special compartment so it could carry cocaine under the bed. He showed that to me after he got me hooked on coke. My job was to take the bus to a mechanic’s shop on every run north. They’d unload it there. We went three or four years that way, but I got myself off coke and I watched how people he didn’t like disappeared. I started making a plan and one day after dropping the bus at the mechanic’s, I walked out and didn’t stop until I got to California.

‘I heard later that he put out a contract on me so I hid for a long time, and eventually enough years went by that I stopped worrying. But it’s not like I ever stopped watching. When I saw him yesterday I knew he’d still kill me if he could because I’ve told people he killed Rosalina. I never had any proof. I just knew.

‘I’m going ahead with the meeting at the bull ring with you because that’s the deal, and he won’t be there. But the brothers know him, so I’ve got to take off, man. I’ve got to go a long way away. You’re getting these tapes so you know nothing bad happened to me. I left these with a friend and asked her to mail them. I’ll get back in touch with you sometime, but it might be a while. You always treated me fair and never made me feel like something that should be wiped off a shoe. You take care, John. Sorry to skip out on you.’

Marquez clicked off the recorder, opened a beer, sat out on the deck and thought it over. By the time he called Kerry Anderson’s home number it was 2:10 in the morning on the east coast and he woke Anderson up. But Anderson didn’t mind and even thanked him. He said, ‘I need you to send me those tapes.’

Marquez and Steiner watched the tour boat through a chain link fence from the corner of a port parking lot. Steiner was gray at the temples, fit though nearing fifty, too old to be sitting in a car watching a boat, and he was having trouble with it.

‘Holsten called me Friday afternoon,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t say what the Saturday meeting would be about but I was sure it was good news. My wife went out and bought a good bottle of champagne and steaks to celebrate. Ninety-five bucks for the champagne – I thought for sure it was a promotion.’

‘Did you drink the champagne?’

‘We drank it Friday night. I should have known better.’

‘He said you’re old friends. You started at the DEA together.’

‘Oh, he was everybody’s friend, you know what I mean. He was climbing the first day he got here. You know why I’m here, right?’

‘Sure.’

One of the rumors swirling was that all of Group 5 was dirty. Osiers took money and it was going to turn out all of them were in on it. When Marquez walked through the squad room yesterday his presence hung like second hand smoke, and that was very hard on his pride. He felt an untethering from what he’d been so loyal to and anger moving around inside him like something alive.

He lifted binoculars and scanned the white-painted hull now, nervous energy billowing in him. Four foot high blue and red lettering read Captain Jack’s Sea Tours. For seventy-five bucks you got a bumpy sea cruise that might include whale and dolphin sightings and lunch. If you wanted a beer with your lunch you paid at the bar where the Fab Four featured Pacifico, Bohemia, and Corona smuggled in from Ensenada. They bought caseloads of beer and avoided duties and taxes by selling it for cash on the boat. In the tour schedule were gaps where Group 5 had figured out the runs to Ensenada got made. The boat was just back from one of those. They should have drugs to move but whether it would be today was anybody’s guess.

But now all that changed. The captain of the boat, Tony Marten, appeared and as Marquez focused the binoculars, Marten wheeled a large suitcase down the gangway on to the dock. Within minutes the other three followed also pulling black suitcases. It was improbable and comic and he understood Steiner’s chuckle, but it was also disturbing in a way Marquez couldn’t name yet. Maybe because the Fab Four were older and obviously awkward and uncomfortable in this role, Keystone Kops of crime. More than that, he thought, their actions looked forced, unplanned. It felt wrong.

They rolled the suitcases out to an old diesel Mercedes and a maroon Chrysler LeBaron in the same lot Steiner and Marquez were in. Two suitcases went into each trunk and as they drove east out of the LA basin they separated by more than a mile and then traded off the lead.

Watching them switch the lead car again, Marquez guessed, ‘This part they’ve done before. We’ve been looking for a place they call the ranch. Maybe that’s where they’re headed.’