Kirk Russell - Dead Game

“Sure, everything will be great. You have a good day,” Marquez said and watched him drive off.

But Ludovna didn’t have a good day. Marquez got a call from him around dusk. His voice was tight, uncomfortable, perhaps sensing something deeper was wrong.

“There’s nothing on the TV,” he said. “They’re just talking about steroid baseball. Did you go to the boat?”

“Yes, and there was no problem.”

“Did the detective call you?”

“No.”

“Turn on your TV.”

“Turn my TV on?”

“Turn it on the Sacramento news.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s nothing on about them.”

“So what, maybe this morning is all they’re going to report. Now you’re the one who needs to relax.”

“There’s something wrong.”

“What could be wrong?”

Ludovna hung up, and Marquez called Selke.

“He’s getting nervous. He’s looking for more news.”

“He’s not going to get it. The media wasn’t too wild about the whole idea. It took a call from the Feds to make it work.” He added, “They’ve started surveillance of Ludovna, and there are two special agents here with me.”

“Are you with Torp?”

“No, with Perry. Torp got out of surgery a couple of hours ago, but he’s not talking. He wants a phone and a lawyer.”

“Has anything been said to him about the Raburns?”

“Not yet. Perry’s here in an interview box, and he’s wobbling. He may rat out his friend if a deal can be structured. The Feds have looked over what I have on Sherri La Belle and agree, better to try to get a confession before anything is said about the Raburns. Get the confessions, lock them up, then the Feds can go to work on them.” Before Marquez could ask about Crey, Selke answered the question. “He’s still on the table. The bullet shattered his shoulder, and he was pretty dicey from loss of blood when they got him in here, and it turns out he’s anemic and doesn’t clot worth a shit. The bastard is trying to die on us.”

“I’m supposed to take over his business anyway.”

Selke chuckled. He’d already recounted the conversation at Raburn Orchards for Selke, but Selke surprised him now.

“There’s a better life out there than dealing with these punks. My brother has a cabin up along the Boundary Lakes in Minnesota. It gets cold, the black flies are a bitch in the summer, but it’s beautiful. A guy like you could run a sport boat and when you think about being out on the bay on those warm still nights in the fall and the moon rising, a scotch in your hand instead of trailing these lowlifes.” He sighed, exhaling into the phone. “What they did to her with a knife I just can’t believe, and if Torp and Perry weren’t stupid we wouldn’t be catching them, but I tell you, I’m tired of this. I talk to my brother, he’s up there fishing, he’s happy. Anyway, I’ll call you as it changes here. FBI got to you yet?”

“They’re on their way.”

Marquez sat in the front room of his house with two FBI agents. The gun he’d placed on Crey’s boat had been recovered, and they had more than enough to take Ludovna down, but without saying so directly, they indicated that the Bureau was waiting for something more. They were somber and quiet and watched as Maria came in the door and had an awkward but friendly exchange with her mother. Then Maria and Katherine drove down to Mill Valley to do some shopping after Marquez explained he’d have to talk to the agents alone.

It was dark now and cooling down in the room. Marquez turned on another lamp, asked the agents if they wanted anything to drink. No one wanted coffee, water, anything except to hear again Ludovna’s last instructions.

“He said that occasionally I’d have to take the boat out in the ocean and pick up a passenger.”

“How far out?”

“Didn’t say.”

“How are these passengers supposed to get onto the boat?”

“That one sentence was all he said, but I had the impression Crey had made similar trips. He thinks Crey is dead, and I’ll step into Crey’s shoes and do whatever Crey did for him. Ludovna put the money up for Crey to buy Beaudry’s business, and it’s understood that I’m assuming Crey’s debt. He made it clear he’s got the leverage of being a witness to the murders.”

One of the agents spoke now. “He ought to be worried you’re going to take him out.”

“He made it clear he’s got other partners, and he seems to think it’s all going to be worth it for me and that I’ll like the deal once I get dialed in.”

“Is that what he called them? His partners?”

“Yeah.”

The agents on the couch glanced at each other. Marquez looked from one to the other. The Feds hadn’t said anything about what they’d found or not found at Weisson’s. If they’d found sturgeon or caviar, no one had told him. Nothing had been in the news, other than Karsov was a known arms trafficker and there were national security issues.

“Are you going to pick up Ludovna tonight?”

“No.”

Torp would have a lawyer by tomorrow, but that was about Sherri La Belle, and Torp wouldn’t be calling Ludovna anytime soon to chat. Neither would Perry or Crey.

“You’re waiting for him to make a phone call.”

One of the agents nodded. Marquez got up and made coffee. The agents stood. They were almost done here, and now everyone watched as Marquez’s cell phone rang and he checked the screen. “Selke,” he said to the agents as he answered.

“We just got a confession from Perry on La Belle, and he says he was there when the Raburns were killed but did not participate. The charge will get cut to manslaughter for Perry on the La Belle murder, and he’s going to testify that Torp stabbed her to death and cut her up. Perry helped Torp dispose of the body.”

“Who killed the Raburns?”

“He claims the shooters were Torp and Ludovna. Ludovna shot Abe. Torp shot the kids, and I can tell you Perry is lying, that he was part of the Raburn killing, but we’ll get that from the others. But get this, he says he doesn’t know why they killed the Raburns. He says for Torp it was just about money. He got paid for it. I’m going to throw something else at you. This is from piecing together what Perry told us. I think Crey knew his ‘boys’ were going to get offed out in that vineyard and he came up with you as a lure to get them out there, but that pissed off Ludovna, who just wanted them driven out there and shot. That’s why Ludovna was angry when he drove up and found you chained to the Blazer.”

The pager of one of the agent’s went off, then a cell phone. Marquez hung up with Selke, and the agents thanked him and were suddenly more forthright as they were leaving.

“It’ll be no later than tomorrow,” one of them said.

“Are you hoping he’ll try to contact Karsov?”

“We are. We’re sorry we couldn’t tell you before. We’ve monitored every call Ludovna has made for the last year.”

DBEEP picked Marquez up at the Benicia dock the next morning. They glassed a couple of fishing boats out along the Mothball Fleet then rode up the San Joaquin River before backtracking and going up the Sacramento with a strong wind at their back. Marquez and Ruax compared notes, looking at fishing holes and sloughs and docks and boat launches they’d determined had been used by poachers. They rode past Raburn’s houseboat. They pooled their notes on who was left, talking above the wind and boat noise and much more quietly as they docked and dropped Marquez in Walnut Grove.

The day was bright and clear, the sky wind-scoured. He bought coffee at Mel’s and waited outside across the road looking down at the river, the coffee keeping his hand warm. DBEEP was gone, and the SOU operation was basically done, though it felt unfinished. He turned as Shauf and Cairo drove up, and they bought a couple of sandwiches and sodas and sat and talked about where they were at with everything. With the exception of August, the players they’d tracked were going down or had gone down, but in some larger sense the importance of stopping the poaching had been subsumed by human crimes. The Raburn murders. The grisly killing of Sherri La Belle. The deaths of the FBI agents and the intrigue still surrounding what the Feds were after. It left a disturbing sense of incompletion or imbalance.