Kirk Russell: Night Game

Beneath the trees the light faded and wind cut through his coat. He climbed the steep trail, hiked through another long switchbacking turn, then saw them standing near an outcrop, silhouetted by red-orange sky. Both men turned to watch him. Even from here he could tell it was the same pair.

When he reached them, Marquez looked first at the bearded man, then at the bullet-headed kid. “Tell me again, why it is we can’t do these deals in a warm bar?”

“Let’s just get it done,” the beard said and clicked on a small flashlight.

Earlier this afternoon their seller, the man Marquez’s undercover team couldn’t seem to get close to, had lingered on the line, a voice changer mechanically flattening his tone as he bragged about being better than the Chinese at bear farming, though the Chinese had been at it for more than a thousand years. Marquez had seen photos of bears living out their lives in cramped cages. He’d watched videos on the Internet of bears banging their heads against cage bars, catheters running from their abdomens to milk bile juices. The traditional method was a knife gash to open the bear’s abdomen. Bile dripped through cage bars onto collection plates. Ounce for ounce, the bile on the plates was worth more than cocaine. But until this seller Marquez had never heard of bear farming in California or anywhere in the States.

The beard produced a couple of small, dark glass bottles and sprinkled bile powder onto Marquez’s palm. The thin flashlight beam caught the powder sifting. The fiber-optic line feeding the camcorder sewn into Marquez’s coat recorded everything.

“I need to meet the man you’re working for,” Marquez said. “I want to see these bear farms.”

The beard shook his head. “Come on, man, let’s not do this tonight.”

Bullet-head said, “This is bullshit.”

Marquez turned to him. “Look, I’ve got clients with cancer.” “It matters that these farms are clean. I’ve got to know it’s not coming out of some backwoods rat hole.”

The beard answered for him. “He means we don’t know where he keeps the bears. Like we told you last time.”

Marquez got the money roll out, snapped the rubber bands off. He’d done five deals with this pair and believed them when they claimed they’d never seen the man they worked for. He recorded the beard pocketing the cash, then pulling a CD from the same pocket.

“What’s this?”

“Supposed to give it to you.”

“Yeah, but what is it?”

Neither answered.

Bullet-head started drifting away and the beard followed him. Marquez put the CD in his coat and cut back to the main trail. After rounding the first bend he called Carol Shauf, one of the wardens on his Fish and Game undercover team. She was hidden near the gravel road running over Barker Pass, positioned to cover his exit.

“I’m dropping down the trail.”

“Hold up,” she said. “I’ve got movement on the slope up off to your right.”

“I’m less than a hundred yards from the car. I’ll be there in under two minutes.”

“I see you, but hang on, Lieutenant. There’s someone up on the slope in the trees to your right. Wait until I get another look.”

“Probably a hiker.”

Her voice tensed. “It’s not.”

“Okay, I’m moving into the trees and I’ll come down through them.”

“I’ve got him again and he’s looking your direction.”

The “show car” used for buys, a Ford Taurus, sat in a dusty clearing near the trailhead sign, its white paint ghostly in the dusk.

“All right,” he said, “how about you go to your van and come back over the pass with your brights on. That’ll get his attention, and I’ll drop down to the car and follow you out.”

He waited. There were dark clouds stacked over Lake Tahoe, purple an hour ago, almost black in the dusk. First snow wasn’t far away. When Shauf was seconds from cresting the pass, her headlights touching high in trees swaying in wind gusts, he came down across the exposed face to the car. He started the engine and bounced through the ruts toward the gravel road, glanced up the treed slope and then at a red laser dot on the dashboard. It danced across under the windshield, skipped over the face of the radio, and started crawling up his arm like an insect. He jerked the wheel left, scraping the underbody as he hit the road at a bad angle, bottomed out, and then kicked up gravel as he accelerated away. His tires squealed through the first turn. His heart hammered. He had the feeling if he could hear across the distance the sound would be laughter.

Now Shauf’s taillights were visible ahead, and he wound down the steep canyon behind her, ran the seven miles out to the lake road thinking about what had just happened. In Tahoe City the rest of the Special Operations Unit was waiting. Brad Alvarez and Melinda Roberts had picked up Chinese food, and the team met up near recycling bins outside a Raley’s supermarket. Sean Cairo pulled in alongside Marquez’s car. They opened the doors of Shauf’s van, and Marquez went through the sequence of events while they ate. When he finished, Alvarez spoke for the others.

“This changes everything, Lieutenant. It’s going to make it harder to trip with this guy.”

Going without backup, staying with the suspect, “tripping with him,” was all they’d been able to pull off. Marquez looked around at the faces of the SOU. For over a decade before coming to California Fish and Game, he’d worked undercover for the DEA, making drug buys where guns were flashed routinely. Sometimes a seller would run a test before a big buy. That could be what was happening here. Might be the sign they were getting close to the takedown, but no way to know tonight. They talked it over some more, then broke up. Most of the team would finish the night at the safehouse outside Placerville, roughly eighty miles away.

Marquez sat in the dark car talking with Shauf after Roberts, Alvarez, and Cairo had left. He pulled on latex gloves, took the CD case out of the evidence bag, and cut the tape with a razor.

“Let’s see what we’ve got.”

“You sure you want to handle it?”

“I think we need to know.”

He slid it in the CD deck, and there was loud crackling, then abruptly a toneless filtered voice. He reached, turned the volume up.

“I’ve downloaded all Fish and Game personnel records. I know about the SOU. I’ve got names, addresses, and phone numbers for every single one of your undercover team. Lieutenant Matt Fong, 23 Yolando Road, Sacramento, California, wife, Lisa Fong, home phone number as follows.” He read Matt’s home number and then a cell number. “Lieutenant John Marquez, patrol lieutenant heading Special Operations, lives off Ridge Road on Mount Tamalpais in Mill Valley. A couple of phone numbers, here.” He read the numbers off. A sound like a chair sliding, some words lost, then much louder, “Marquez has a wife named Katherine, stepdaughter, Maria, age sixteen. If that’s you, better disappear, better lose yourself before I kill you.”

The CD ended abruptly, and Marquez stared at his right hand, pale latex reflecting the dash lights. His family, his wife and stepdaughter, were often home without him. From time to time his team got tailed by poachers trying to discover where they lived, and threats got made in the field or left anonymously on the CalTIP anti-poaching line. Most were vague, and SOU records were supposed to be bombproof, though, of course, they weren’t. Still, he’d never worried too much.

Fong was no longer with the SOU team. He’d made captain, was behind a desk, but their seller didn’t seem aware of that, so that was a clue to the timing of whatever computer hacking or bribing had been done to get the information. He heard Shauf sigh and looked at her profile in the darkness as she stared at the CD player.