Kirk Russell - Night Game

“Watch my drink for me,” Marquez said, and started across just as Petroni and the man came to blows. He saw Petroni take hard jabs to the gut and one to the chin. Petroni went down on one knee, then fell to the floor. The man reached down, wadded Petroni’s shirt, started to lift him, was swearing at him, calling him a cocksucker when Marquez got there and forced him to lower Petroni back to the floor.

“This is the part where the lowlifes haul ass,” Marquez said. “That’s you.”

“Let go of my wrist, fucker, before I kick the shit out of you.”

A moment later he threw his weight sideways, trying to knock Marquez off balance. A table upended but Marquez kept his feet, blocked a hard punch that hurt. He waited for the man to come at him again, but surprisingly, he didn’t.

“Kick his ass, Nyland, kick his ass!” But Nyland had changed his mind, and the same voice egging Nyland on called to Marquez, “She’s his girlfriend, asshole.”

Two Placerville officers pushed through the bar doors. Nyland tried to back away, but the police closed on him and looked as though they recognized and didn’t like him. Petroni got to his feet, wiped blood from his nose. Sophie handed him a napkin. Marquez didn’t take his eyes off Nyland. If Nyland was local, he had to know Petroni was the warden out of Georgetown, and not many people come after law enforcement officers, at least not in a crowded bar.

“Take him in,” Petroni told the officers.

But they didn’t work for Fish and Game and went about it their own way. They stopped Nyland from walking away and asked Marquez and Petroni to come outside as well. Marquez waited near the bar entrance away from the patrol cars. But Petroni got close enough to Nyland to where one of the cops put a hand on Petroni’s chest and pushed him down the sidewalk. Nyland swore as one officer clicked on cuffs and the other read him his rights. He yelled over at Marquez.

“I’m watching for you.”

Marquez ignored him, instead watched Bobby Broussard, who stood in front of one of the cops and kept pointing down the street. Nyland’s keys got handed over to Bobby, and Marquez realized that must have been what the conversation was about. After Nyland was in the back of the patrol car, Marquez moved close to Petroni. One of the cops walked over. He asked Petroni, “Are you going to press charges?”

Petroni shook his head. “I’ll take care of it.”

“What do you mean, warden?”

“I mean, I’ll deal with it.”

The officer looked to Marquez. “And who are you?”

“A friend of Bill’s. I was at the bar and saw Nyland or whatever his name is cross the room and start the fight.”

“And how did he do that?” The cop started writing.

“He came up from behind and yanked Bill off his chair.”

Marquez gave terse answers and then his alias as a name. The police cruiser pulled away.

Petroni’s voice was thicker, his nose clogged with mucus and blood as he explained. “Nyland used to be her boyfriend. They lived together for years.”

“Is that his truck Bobby’s driving?”

A Toyota pickup went past on Main Street, and Petroni nodded, touched his lip, and looked at the blood on his fingers.

“He’s got dogs in the truck. That’s why they let him take it,” Petroni said. “Nyland’s close with the Broussards, and he used to go out with Sophie. That’s what that was about.”

“How long have you been going out with her?”

“She’s not one of them if that’s what you’re thinking. She left home when she was sixteen.”

Petroni turned to face him, his nose still bleeding, teeth streaked with blood, the tissue paper in his hand saturated. He forced a strange pained smile, and Marquez didn’t think it was the pain of the blows.

“This isn’t over,” Petroni said.

Marquez left it alone. Petroni was angry, humiliated, and he needed to cool down. He ought to go down to the station and press charges, let Nyland sit in a cell for a month.

“Want me to run you by the clinic and get your nose looked at?”

“No.”

“Where does Nyland live?”

“I’ll deal with him.”

“I’ve got a different problem with him.”

Marquez got directions to Nyland’s place before Petroni went back inside to Sophie. Shauf was waiting for Marquez near his truck. As they got in he told her.

“Nyland was at the wheel the other night. That’s the truck that followed me.”

The next morning Marquez took an early run with Shauf, then sat at the kitchen table in the safehouse, cooling down, talking with Roberts and Cairo while Shauf showered. Shauf came back out, and her wet hair dripped onto the Crystal Basin Wilderness map as they talked about the day ahead. Marquez would make his first trip home in over a week, combining that with a reinterview of Kim Ungar at Ungar’s apartment in San Francisco today. While he was gone, Shauf would start the team on a systematic sweep of the fire and logging roads in the Crystal Basin. Get the keys to all the gates and look for any signs of bait piles. He didn’t yet know how he wanted to deal with last night’s buy, but after finding the poached sow and cubs it made sense to look for other bait piles.

An hour later he grabbed his gear and left for the Bay Area. Traffic bled slowly across the Central Valley, and every year it seemed there were more strip malls and stucco houses alongside the freeway. The orchards were all but gone. He drove past Vacaville and Fairfield, climbed the dry rounded hills before Vallejo, making phone calls, still juggling thirty cases or leads, one in particular that sounded promising, a sturgeon poaching tip coming from a bait shop owner in the delta. Then Kendall called.

“I heard you ran into Eric Nyland last night,” Kendall said. “We’ve got a file on Nyland you might want to take a look at, and I’ve got a story for you, if you want to hear it.”

“I’d like to see the file, and, yeah, anything you know about Nyland I’d like to hear.”

“Petroni could tell you all about his girlfriend.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“This happened about five years ago, just after I started here. A Tuolumne County sheriff’s deputy showed up looking for help locating Nyland-this was in the fall, September the year I was hired. This Tuolumne deputy had traced Nyland through a partial license plate after a road rage incident in Yosemite where a camper went off the road and an older fellow was killed. The old boy’s wife survived. She got a partial license plate and gave a description of the truck and driver. She and her husband had been on their way home to Lee Vining after staying in Yosemite Valley, so they were climbing toward Tioga Pass. I’m sure you know Yosemite.”

“Yeah.”

“A pickup came up behind them and got aggressive about passing, and the old boy got angry, started swinging wide when the truck tried to go around him. Eventually, Nyland, and I’m sure it was Nyland, got around him or rather, came alongside, lowered his passenger window, and shot a hole through the camper’s windshield.

The old boy swerved, lost control, hit a tree, and was DOA. So this Tuolumne deputy comes into the sheriff’s office, tells us this story, and we all drove out to where Nyland still lives at the end of Six Mile Road. There’s a meadow where a subdivision project went bust. Do you know where that is?”

“I know the road.”

“Then you know where it ends. Do you know the story with the Miwoks?”

“No, but let’s stay on Nyland.”

“Remind me to tell you the local legend sometime about the Miwoks who got slaughtered out there. People claim their ghosts still haunt the area. There are three house foundations in that meadow that never got built on, and out past that are trailers the construction crews lived in. Nyland worked on the subdivision briefly as a carpenter, and the bank let him stay on because the bank officer was a friend of his dad’s. Deal was he’d trade rent to watch the property, and believe it or not, his dad was respected around here, a lawyer that even the cops liked.”