Kirk Russell - Dead Game

“My friends are game wardens, Abe.” Marquez showed his own badge. “We’re here to talk to you.”

“I’ll be damned.” He shook his head. “Sonofabitch. I should have known.”

Raburn wore sandals, shorts, and a T-shirt under a windbreaker. Stenciled let ters on the back of his windbreaker announced a police golf tournament in ‘92. Hairs on his legs glistened with rain. He was a gregarious man, but you didn’t have to look through the windows of the boat very long before you knew he lived alone. He did his business in bars, used them as offices, and watching him Marquez had decided that Raburn also needed to be among people before coming back here at night alone to his boat.

“We’ve got a proposition,” Marquez said. “We’re not in a hurry. We’re here to talk with you.”

Raburn tried to catch his stride again. He took a pull of beer that was on a shelf near the barbecue.

“Anybody else want a sandwich?”

“I’ll take you up on that,” Marquez said, “but I think you’d better lay off the beer until we finish.”

Cairo shook his head no. Shauf never answered the question, and Raburn laid another piece of fish over the coals. He went inside, cleared magazines and newspapers off his table, grilled bread and finished making the sandwiches, offered Marquez a beer, and found another couple of chairs for the table. Then, inside, in the small space around the table, tension gathered. Through the windows the tarp swelled and lifted as if the houseboat was in an America’s Cup race.

“We’re going to offer you a deal,” Marquez said. “The best one we’ve offered anyone in a long time.”

Raburn was fifty-one, bloodshot eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, three or four days’ stubble of beard going gray, an eccentric in a part of California that prided itself on eccentricity. They’d followed him over hundreds of miles of delta waterways, told him that now, let him adjust to the truth that he’d been under surveillance for months.

“I don’t know much about sturgeon.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t poach as many if you did,” Marquez said and took a bite of sandwich. “You seemed to know a fair amount about it the other night.” He held the sandwich up. “Thanks for this. What we want you to do is switch sides and start working with us. In return we won’t charge you and arrest you. That’ll keep you out of prison. Here, take a look at some of the videotape and photos.” Marquez wiped his hands, checked the camcorder, and then showed Raburn how to operate it. “If we arrest you, then anything we negotiate would have to go through the DA, so we thought we’d try to work it out with you first and keep the District Attorney out of this. But if you feel like you should hire an attorney and defend yourself, that’s your call.”

Raburn didn’t answer and picked up the camcorder. He played it back and then dismissed it.

“I can’t tell anything. It’s not clear enough.”

He laid the camcorder down.

“I can’t even tell if that’s me.”

“Do you think it could be your brother?”

He scowled and said, “Isaac’s not involved. He doesn’t know anything about it.”

Raburn’s twin brother, Isaac, owned a pear and apple orchard in Courtland called Raburn Orchards. It wasn’t far from here. The word was Abe and Isaac’s father had been a TV preacher who’d given his twin sons biblical names, then raised them with the brutality the self-appointed righteous seem to have such a gift for. The brothers had run away from home in their teens. They’d come to the delta and been here since, and even now, better than thirty years later, they lived just a short drive apart.

As far as the SOU knew, Isaac wasn’t involved in sturgeon poaching. But there was a twist. Isaac boxed and shipped pears from the packing shed in the orchard. He also produced organic apple and pear butter, and Marquez had seen the pear butter in August Foods.

“Okay, Isaac’s not involved, so it’s all you, and I can tell you it’s fairly certain we’ll get the sentence we want. Most likely three years, though you may only do a year to eighteen months. Then a fine for each felony count. The fines can get pretty big.” He laid a finger on the first photo after sliding it across the table to Raburn. “I was there for that one,” he said, waited, looked out at the rain on the river, caught Shauf’s eye as Raburn went through what they’d decided to show him.

“You work on the DBEEP boat,” Raburn said to Shauf from across the table, taking it to the next level, trying to sort it out, figure out where he’d screwed up.

Once again, Shauf didn’t answer, preferred to glare at him, and Marquez answered for her.

“No, we’re not part of DBEEP, though they’re good. They know the delta salmon, sturgeon, and striped bass a lot better than we ever will. We’re undercover officers for Fish and Game, part of a special operations unit, the SOU.”

“I’ve never heard of you.”

“Well, now you’ve met us, that’s even better.”

Marquez finished the sandwich as Raburn picked up the camcorder again. He turned the camcorder in his hands, probably looking for the erase button and the way out of this mess. Marquez had learned over the years that you can lay it all out for them, read them the riot act, but they still have to come to it on their own.

“Sometimes I loan my boat out.”

That got the start of a smile from Shauf, improved her day. Raburn’s twenty-three-foot Chris-Craft was tied off on a buoy just upriver from the houseboat. It left a persistent stain of blue smoke anywhere it went, and Shauf had joked about expecting to see it sink one day. Raburn pointed across the rain-pocked river at his boat. Marquez pointed at two sturgeons in a photo.

“See, there you are, and you look good there, relaxed, the sun on your face, nice day. You don’t want to celebrate your next three birthdays in a prison cell.”

“That’s what my father said would happen.”

No one fielded that. They didn’t want any part of his childhood this morning. He was a complex man, cunning, a born smuggler, Shauf claimed. He earned part of his living brokering fish to a handful of markets in Stockton and Sacramento and lived modestly, but he had to be putting away cash with the amount of roe and sturgeon he was moving. He did other work as well, repaired appliances, did odd jobs, and they’d watched him install lights on a marina dock and tap into a PG amp;E line to draw illicit power for a friend living up a slough. He sold T-shirts with names like New York, Steamboat, Cache, or Terminous Slough across the front. Under the hundred or so shirts he routinely carried on his boat were two blue plastic coolers used to transport poached fish.

Marquez rested an open hand on the file. “Either we cite you, arrest you, and take you in, or we try to see if there’s some way you can help us shut down the sturgeon poaching operation you’ve been selling into. If you do help us, we’ll forget the charges against you.”

“I may as well kill myself.”

He made his big face look sorrowful.

Only Marquez heard Shauf’s whispered, “Sounds good to me.”

“Who are you afraid of?” Marquez asked.

“Will I be going into the Witness Protection Program?”

This time Shauf spoke up. “Oh, sure, and live on a clear blue lake in a nice new cabin,” Shauf said. “How would Lake Tahoe be, or is that too close to the guys who will want to do you?”

“We don’t have Witness Protection,” Marquez said. “That’s more a Federal deal. It takes a lot of money to relocate people. You’d still be here on your houseboat when it was over.” Marquez looked behind him across the small galley kitchen and at the thin wall of the bedroom. He realized the fish smell in here was probably permanent. “Still, this is bigger than any cell I’ve seen. Who exactly is going to kill you?”