Kirk Russell - Dead Game

He took a call from Chief Baird as they were cleaning up. It had been Marquez’s plan to return to the hospital and try to get word on Douglas. After that, he wasn’t sure. But now, Baird wanted him to come in.

On weekends Baird took his fourteen-year-old and twelve-yearold grandsons fishing on Buck’s Lake where he had a small cabin. He often said he’d like to live at Buck’s and forget about the rest of the world. He wanted to live the rest of his life simply, but Baird was anything but simple and had the gift of seeing things in perspective sooner than others. Marquez drove to headquarters and answered the chief’s questions.

“Did they know it was the FBI?”

“They knew.”

“And they went ahead and detonated these car bombs and then shot at those trying to help the wounded?”

“Correct. The shooting was probably to cover Karsov’s escape.”

“And these are some of the same people you’ve been watching?”

“Probably not. We’ve watched caviar delivered to and shipped back out of the building, but we haven’t had any contact with anyone who was in that meeting room last night.”

“Are you sure? The FBI has only identified three, and you say there were five. Could one of the men in the room be an informer for the FBI?”

“From the audio and visual equipment they had set up, I don’t think they need an informer.” But Baird was asking if one of the unnamed men could have been Ludovna.

“No, Ehrmann would have told me.”

Baird pondered that and said, “I want you to go home. That’s an order.”

He called Katherine on the drive home. Now he looked at the fall light on the gravel beyond the front porch and walked through the house and out onto the deck. A cold wind blew in from the ocean, and he turned the idea that Katherine was right, it was time he turned in his badge. He’d be fifty in a couple of years, and watching that last night only brought home how precious life was. Maria was almost grown, and they were getting older. Maybe he’d given his fair share to dealing with society’s misfits and the backwash of the gene pool.

There were drives Marquez remembered, coming back from somewhere or getting an early start, dawn along the north coast when the ocean was silver-blue and the steep coastal mountains still edged with night. Or a full moon rising over the Los Padres on a dusky June night, or the first snow as he crossed Tioga Pass in October, the fall light on the eastern slope as the aspens turned, the Kern River, the Eel, and wading into the Sacramento above Sweetwater to fish for trout, and a morning in March in the desert when the spring flowers bloomed. What he remembered best was the light and the feel of the land, the long dark velvet of the ocean, and Katherine was right, he didn’t have to give the rest of his life to chasing bad guys.

He was still sitting on the deck when Ehrmann called, and he knew two things as he heard his voice. Ehrmann was at an airport, which probably meant he was being summoned east, and two, Ehrmann had bad news to deliver. He’d heard the tone too many times before, heard Ehrmann sigh and explain, “I wanted to call you before it was public, because I know you were friends and they tell me you came by last night.”

“Aw, don’t tell me that, Ehrmann. Tell me something else.”

“Charles Douglas died this morning at dawn.”

Marquez laid the phone on the railing. He leaned on the railing and bowed his head into his hand.

Douglas had once made a cryptic remark to Marquez about religion. As they leaned against the metal railing of a boat and looked out at the clean sky above the water, Douglas had said he believed in God too much to ever sit in a church.

But a memorial service is for the living, not the dead. Douglas’s was held in a chapel adjacent to the East Bay mortuary and graveyard where he was to be buried alongside his mother. A pastor who’d never met Douglas conducted the service. He quoted often from the Bible and gave no sign that he had any feeling at all for Douglas’s life or death.

After the chapel service Marquez followed a line of cars up the long hill to the gravesite, where two men were at work adjusting a dark wooden coffin so it would lower properly into the grave in the steep manicured lawn. A second service began, and those in the audience were asked if they wanted to say anything. An old friend of Douglas’s, a man who said he’d known Charles forever, said, “It was simple with Charles. You could always count on him to do the right thing. It didn’t matter what it was, he would do it.”

Marquez took a long look at Douglas’s sons, square-shouldered and brave as Douglas would want them to be, though tears ran steadily down their cheeks. His wife, Amelia, sobbed as the moment overwhelmed her, and Douglas’s brother pulled her close and held her. When the coffin lowered Amelia broke free and sank to the grass. She grabbed at the chains, tried to stop it from lowering, and a deep sadness came over Marquez. He felt the tears on his own face, couldn’t take this one stoically. He wished he’d found the words to speak earlier and looked away now down the long falling slope and at the dark green of the big oaks and out across San Francisco Bay, at the whitecaps, gray-black clouds at the horizon.

He and Douglas used to talk about what they’d do someday when they had more time. Douglas wanted a house where he could have a big vegetable garden and barbecue on a back deck that looked out on nothing but hills. He’d move north until he could afford a good house, or inland if he had to. He was tired of the fog. He wanted to be where it froze at night in the winter, someplace north where you could toss a football around on New Year’s Day and you were warm in the sun in a T-shirt, but where you knew there was winter.

“Do you think about what comes next?” Douglas had asked, and he’d been serious. “I mean after you get tired of chasing perps and the geeks stealing from our children’s future.”

When the crowd began to break up and move toward the cars, Marquez went to Amelia to tell her how sorry he was. He felt her desperation as she gripped his hands.

“My dreams are gone,” she said. “I had so many dreams of the things we were going to do.”

Marquez walked to his truck. Only as he unlocked it and was getting in did he become aware of someone behind him. A young FBI agent had come up behind him, and he turned to face him, wondering what it was. Another special agent, a woman, backed him up. She stood within earshot but out of the line of confrontation.

“What are you doing here?” the agent asked.

“Charles was a friend of mine.”

“I don’t think you belong here, and I’m not alone thinking that.”

“What’s that about?”

“Don’t show up at the wake.”

The agent waited for a response as though the statement warranted it, but Marquez turned back to his car and got in. He drove away without looking in the rearview mirror, but it had affected him. He did not attend the wake. He’d been unsure whether he would or not, and maybe he deferred to the agent’s words.

An hour later he was on the sidewalk outside the Presto on Union where Maria was working this afternoon. As he came inside her elbows were on the yellow marble of the counter, two customers, two friends of hers he guessed, standing at the bar across from her, cappuccinos in front of them, as she leaned toward them, chatting. A young man with a goatee cleaned an espresso machine to the side of her. He had a feeling that was Shane. He read Maria’s quizzical smile at his black suit and then saw her put it together and the smile vanish.

“Why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and walk with me?”

They walked up Union Street, then climbed up toward Pacific Heights and walked along Broadway where the wind was stronger.