Kirk Russell - Dead Game

“If Raburn was going to set us up, Razor Slough would be the place to do it,” Shauf said. “After what happened at Weisson’s, if anything happened to us that sure would be the end of any undercover sturgeon operation. How close to Crey’s call was Raburn’s?”

“Close. What are you wondering?”

“Whether anybody is working together.”

“Let’s go take a look. I’ll call and leave the message with this Whitey character that we’re coming up early in the afternoon.”

Razor Slough was worse than he remembered. Brambles and blackberries tugged at their clothes and scratched their faces. They left the Zodiac tied off on a tree and climbed up the bank. The mud was sticky, and on the hike in it rained on and off and was cold, though there were patches of blue sky now. Marquez pointed out where someone had used a machete to create a channel in the slough. Cuts on the tree branches overhanging the water looked fresh.

It was an hour before they saw the faded plywood structures of the encampment. Smoke rising from a hole in the roof of one of the buildings bent in the wind, and Marquez looked for Whitey. He saw his blue skiff but not him.

The preacher had his brethren carve a swath of earth maybe ten feet above the slough and then level back seventy yards to low hills. Marquez had heard it was a rancher, a follower of the evangelist, who’d allowed this gash cut into land he leased from the government. In the winter runoff silted into the slough, and he remembered something about a lawsuit getting filed. No one had lived here since, except drifters like this Whitey and people hiding out.

They headed for the blue smoke, but it was Anna they found in the shack, not Whitey. She’d set it all up; she’d asked Whitey to call and gambled Raburn would call him. She looked scared.

“You picked a good spot,” Marquez said.

“I was hoping you would come. I was hoping Abe would get a hold of somebody at Fish and Game who would get a hold of you.”

“Do you have any idea how many people are looking for you?”

“I want to turn myself in, but after what’s happened I don’t want to do it alone. I’m afraid of them.”

“They won’t kill you.”

He thought about how they were going to do this as he looked at her. He saw the kayak covered with a tarp in a corner of the building.

“I hid it along the slough. I rode a mountain bike to it. I’m sure they found my bike.”

She pulled a small radio from her pocket, showed it to him, and put it back in her pocket. She probably had some idea of how the FBI would view this meeting, as well.

She kept her eyes on him, the planes of her cheeks sharp, acne scars in the hollows of her cheeks, eyes bloodshot, nose too narrow for her face. She didn’t seem to realize how deep she was in now. He looked around. The Feds couldn’t land one of their helicopters here and wouldn’t know how to get up the slough.

“We’ll bring you out,” he said. “Then we’ll turn you over and you’re going to need to get yourself a lawyer.”

“I don’t know anything about what happened. What I told you last time was the truth.”

Shauf used the kayak, and Anna rode in the skiff with him. He figured it was the last opportunity to ask her what she knew about the sturgeon poaching, but he didn’t ask anything. She didn’t have much credibility with him anymore. As they reached the Zodiac it started to shower again, and he covered the phone as he punched in Ehrmann’s cell. When he got voice mail he hung up and redialed. Same thing happened and he did it again. On the fourth try Ehrmann answered. “I’m in Washington, Marquez. I can’t talk to you.”

“Then tell me who to call. I have Anna Burdovsky with me.”

“Where are you?”

“Coming out of a slough in the delta. I’ll give you coordinates.”

He read them off and gave Ehrmann the boat landing they were headed to.

“You’ll get a call in a few minutes.”

Marquez turned and asked her as he waited for the call, “When did you get into Razor Slough?”

“I had to paddle out into the river to get away and waited for dark, and even then they almost found me. Then I paddled all night. I had food stowed in the kayak, enough for a week.”

“How did Karsov know the raid was coming?”

“They’re always on guard. They got raided in LA a couple of times. They look for buildings they can defend. I told the FBI to watch out because they’re always talking about what they’ll do to anyone that comes after them.”

“Did they ever talk about car bombs?”

“Never with me.”

They turned from the slough into the river, and Marquez kept the speed slow so he could hear her answers. She’d stowed a kayak and mountain bike, and she had used scuba gear to swim out of the slough. She told him how she got away and that she’d stashed the equipment in case the FBI showed up.

“Seems like you knew the bust was going to go down,” Marquez said.

“How would I possibly have known? That’s ridiculous.”

“You’re up a slough hiding when the bombs go off.”

“I was hiding because I knew they were using me like bait. I was afraid I was going to get killed, so I figured out a way to hide, and I didn’t lie to you. I was going to tell you everything, but now after what’s happened I don’t want to say anything until I talk to a lawyer.”

Another shower raked the water, and the heavy rain ended all conversation. Marquez pulled a hood over his head, and the Zodiac plowed through the waves. When the rain lightened they were in view of the boat landing and there was no more time to talk.

“Look at them all,” Anna said, and one agent looked like he was ready to wade into the river.

“Anna Burdovsky, you are under arrest.”

Marquez listened as she was read her rights and handcuffed. She looked small and scared as they took her away. She looked back at him once as though he might help her, and then she was gone, and once more the Feds were asking him what she’d told him and why she’d contacted him. They had a lot of questions, and they wanted him to come in.

Marquez cinched down the straps holding the Zodiac to the boat trailer, then checked to make sure there was nothing in the boat that would catch in the wind and blow out after they got on the road. The FBI was gone, the lot had emptied, and the rain had stopped. It was just Cairo, Shauf, and him. He cleaned mud from his boots and waited for Shauf to get off the phone. She’d drifted out into the middle of the lot. Cairo was near him, one foot on the boat trailer. Roberts was back in the Region IV office until either they resumed the operation or it was declared over, which was what everyone assumed would happen. Alvarez had gone home though he wasn’t back in uniform yet.

The New York Times, citing sources high in the FBI, ran a frontpage story this morning indicating that top brass saw the blown bust as a “failure of high-risk warrant service protocol.” Translated to English, that meant they were going to blame Ehrmann. It struck Marquez that the cowardice of leaking information to the press first as a way of testing public reaction, a habit common to presidential administrations, was particularly unfitting for law enforcement. It had a permanent self-serving sleaze quality to it. TV pundits, including a retired FBI expert that Marquez had watched last night, said more patience was all that had been required. Ehrmann should have waited for the suspects to come out of the building. It was that simple, and it was always that simple. He should have run instead of passing on third down. And now these high-ranking officials on the east coast, guys who picked up their Starbucks lattes on the way into headquarters every morning, they were going to pass judgment on how the bust went down.