Kirk Russell - Dead Game

“I’ll talk to her today or tomorrow,” she said. “She’s going to get really upset.”

Katherine had gone one semester to a college in Vermont twenty-five years ago and had loved being away from home and in college. Then her mother had been diagnosed with ALS and she’d had to drop out, return home to help care for her and get her younger sister through high school. She’d signed herself up at the local junior college. Now what she hadn’t had she wanted for Maria.

After hanging up with Maria he drove into Freeport and parked across the street from a restaurant the SOU used occasionally as a rendezvous point. He bought three coffees to go, walked up to the levee road, then down the wood stairs and around the old building to the marina dock. Gusts shoved two plastic chairs around, and he caught one to sit on. He propped the other so it couldn’t move and rested the coffees on a splintered dock board at his feet. He tried to drink his but found his gut was already churning.

He looked out over the river. The fog was gone and cirrus clouds were running ahead of the forecast storm. Shauf and Cairo were still fifteen minutes away, and he thought back to the first contact with Anna and his first meeting with August. Because of the smaller size of his team he’d done something he wouldn’t ordinarily do, made direct contact with the suspect, visiting August at his San Francisco store under the guise of opening a catering business.

Marquez had bought tiny olives imported from a boutique Spanish producer, capers from the Aegean Islands, ghost shrimp from the delta that August advertised with the old line, “So fresh you can’t see them.” He’d bought Caspian caviar that the Ashland, Oregon, wildlife lab had tested and come back negative on for Pacific white sturgeon DNA, though the SOU was fairly sure August was buying poached sturgeon roe from the Sacramento/ San Joaquin delta and repackaging it as Caspian beluga, or mixing it with Caspian beluga. Unfortunately, “fairly sure” was as far as they’d gotten with August, which was why Anna had seemed like such good luck.

He’d given August his card with the name John Croft, told him he was a cook going into business on his own, starting a catering business called Three Bridges Catering, meaning he’d go anywhere in the San Francisco Bay counties. You build a cover story, make it whole enough to stand up, make it so it wears like a comfortable shirt.

August sold walnut oil, honeys, tins of sardines, dried fishes and seaweed, balsamic vinegars, olive oils, a whole vocabulary of artisanal products. He spoke seven languages, made a point of telling Marquez that, eyes glittering, the kind of guy who needs you to be impressed by his credentials, wants you to think he’s superior to you. He claimed to travel the world looking for “what was left,” and Marquez didn’t doubt that. Some of the best of what was left of sturgeon was in the Sacramento/San Joaquin delta, and August certainly had been there.

Marquez had stood on the polished chestnut floor of August Foods, handling tins of Iranian caviar, talking business, August memorizing his face while explaining that he was working through his stock of the 2003 harvest of Caspian caviar. He didn’t know what he would do next, because the UN through CITES had banned any commercial trade in sturgeon roe from the Caspian Sea. They’d shut down the 2004 harvest, blaming the poaching for decimating sturgeon stocks. But that was in September. By October CITES had reversed itself, and the ban was lifted. Go figure.

Now Shauf and Cairo walked around the corner. Marquez handed out the coffees and Shauf freed the other plastic chair. She sat across from him in the chair, the wind at her back, and Cairo sat on the dock.

“So when do we get the word?” Shauf asked.

“Bell told me to keep my phone close this afternoon.”

“We may as well go home.”

“No, with Baird there’s a good chance he’ll want to think it over this weekend, so I’m thinking we’ll go see Raburn tomorrow, and see if we can flip him. It’ll shock him hard when he sees my badge.”

Shauf shook her head, saw the reasoning but had a hard time with it. She’d handled the surveillance of Abe Raburn. She had him nailed for commercial trafficking in sturgeon, and they’d hoped to take him down along with the rest once they’d built the full case.

“This is all so wrong,” she said. “If it turns out Burdovsky is alive I want to see her do time.”

Marquez looked to Cairo, who’d been quiet through all this. Cairo nodded. He was for giving it a try with Raburn.

An hour later Marquez was on the phone to Jo Ruax, the lieutenant who ran the DBEEP boat. They’d worked in pieces with the Delta-Bay Enhanced Enforcement Program crew. He figured from the way Bell had talked this morning he’d already called DBEEP, possibly Ruax directly. He followed Ruax’s directions and parked along a road on San Pablo Bay, then walked down the trail and found her sitting between trees, binoculars focused on a boat on the bay. Her lips were chapped, her cheeks red from the cold wind. She smiled a tight smile, handed him the glasses, and behind her the horizon carried the dark gray band of the approaching storm. She was a hard-charger and had wanted to direct the surveillance on the sturgeon operation. She’d argued against bringing in the SOU.

“I heard this morning you’re going to get shut down,” she said.

DBEEP was funded by both the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Water Resources. Their focus was the fisheries, and Ruax knew a lot more about sturgeon than he did. What she didn’t know more about was undercover work. “If that happens we’ll get together, and I’ll make sure you’ve got everything on everyone we’ve been watching. Did my chief call you?”

“He did. He wanted to know if I’d ever met Anna Burdovsky and what I thought of her. I told him what I told you.”

“That you think she’s a flake?”

“Yeah.”

In a lot of ways he liked Ruax, and he had a lot of respect for DBEEP. They had an identity, knew who they were, and Ruax was tough and serious and good at what she did.

“We’re supposed to get the word this afternoon, Jo. If we go down, I’ll call you.”

“What happens otherwise?”

“We’re going to try to flip Raburn and take another run at it.”

He caught the faint shake of her head. “Good luck,” she said. “He’s just about the last guy I’d want to have to rely on.”

Bell never called, and the next morning Marquez led the way down a muddy path in the rain. Off to their right was a rotting dock, then a clot of willow, cottonwood, and bay trees. Beyond that was a row of houses, each with river access and a modest dock, and though he lived near them, Abe Raburn wasn’t really part of their community. He moored his houseboat in a small cove beyond where the road ended. His work boat, the Honest Abe , was tied off on a buoy near shore. His old Ford pickup was parked between eucalyptus trees well above the river. Shauf called the cove “Raburn’s homestead.”

Raburn saw them coming, and if he recognized Marquez, gave no sign of it. He was outside on the rear deck of the houseboat standing over a barbecue under a blue plastic tarp he’d rigged from the roof of the houseboat out to shoreline trees. Smoke from the barbecue swept violently sideways in gusts. White cotton line had been strung through the corner grommets of the tarp, but little had been done to cinch the tarp tight, and it snapped and pulled against the lines so hard it was just a matter of time before the tarp ripped loose, not unlike the way Raburn’s life was about to change.

“Hey,” Raburn said, “good to see you, and I’ve got plenty of fish and beer. I was about to watch a football game.” He looked quizzically at Marquez, his joker’s expression frozen for a moment. “Who are your friends?”