Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“Definitely looking for a spot,” Petersen said. “He may be suit-ing up again. It looks like he’s putting on his mask and fins.”

“What about the older son?”

“He’s steering or trying to, but they’re bouncing around out there. The younger one is using an air tank to reinflate the floats on the urchin baskets.”

“Then Li is going to try to float the abalone in,” Marquez said.

“Yeah, he just got in the water. Can you see him yet?”

Marquez had cut over to the shoulder and parked. He saw Li in the water, the younger kid struggling to get the urchin bags overboard and the older son leaving his position steering the boat and going to help. When he did, the Zodiac drifted closer to the rocks and Marquez read it the same way Petersen did, heard her calm but worried voice saying, “This is no good, John. No good.”

He got out of the jeep and the wind stripped her words as he left the shoulder and started picking his way down, keeping his eyes on the boat, wary still, not wanting Li to spot him, then realizing it didn’t matter anymore. He told Petersen he was going to get down there as fast as he could and to call the Marlin; tell them to close and not worry about whether Li saw them or not. Just get here.

He scrambled onto the black shore rock, all of it slick with rain and he slid down, fell, got up again as the Zodiac stalled and one side rose against the rocks. He saw the younger boy catapulted face forward out of the boat and tried to keep his focus on where the boy went. His head showed briefly, a blue parka rose on a wave, then Marquez was sliding again, tearing his palms open on the drop down the last steep face to the sand. He couldn’t lose sight of the boy’s parka. Had to spot his head again. He kicked his shoes off and the Zodiac rose against the rocks and flipped as Marquez ran and dove through a breaking wave, swimming hard underwater as the cold hammered his chest. When he surfaced he swam toward where the parka had been, eyes blearing with salt water and rain as he scanned the sea. But the parka was gone and the boy nowhere on the surface. He looked toward the Zodiac trying to see if a kid was hanging from a gunwale rope, couldn’t tell and swam toward it, circling wide of the rocks, fighting the swells and aware the current would take him, but seeing Petersen on the beach, trusting she had an eye on him. He spotted Li now, close to the rocks.

The Zodiac slid along the surface as though greased, Hansen finally bringing the Marlin in close, nosing into the debris that floated away from the Zodiac. A cooler top and plastic bottles went past as Marquez swam out. The cold reached deeper into him, he felt time going and kept hoping that somehow the kids were hang-ing onto the boat, off the rope ringing the gunwale, that the older boy had gotten a hold of his brother and that somehow they’d stayed with the Zodiac. He swam for the Zodiac, was close enough now to see two then three sides, and as it spun, the fourth empty as the rest, and then Hansen’s voice came over the bullhorn as the Marlin ’s lights washed over him.

“John, grab hold.”

They pulled him on board and continued searching, Hansen running as close as he dared to the rocks and beach. They could see Tran Li onshore with Petersen and then the lights picked up a swimmer and Marquez saw it was the older son, fifty yards off-shore and struggling to get in.

“I need a wetsuit and flippers,” Marquez said. “I’ll go get him.”

Hansen pointed at an approaching Coast Guard boat. “They’re closer,” Hansen said.

“Keep the light on him, let him know we’re coming for him,” Marquez said, and he took the bullhorn. “Joe Li, hang on, we’re coming for you.” He had no idea whether his words carried, but kept at it, and then they saw the kid stop fighting the current and let the tide carry him as they kept the light on him.

“He heard you,” Hansen said.

Marquez scanned the water again for the other boy as the Coast Guard reached Joe Li. Petersen reported Tran Li was with her, but injured, had a possible broken collarbone and she was having trouble controlling him. He wanted to go back in the water and look for his younger son, and had told her that the boy couldn’t swim. She needed assistance holding him and Hansen confirmed that help was on the way. Marquez put on a weatherproof coat. His pants stuck tight to his skin and he’d started shaking so hard it was difficult to talk. He heard a helicopter, saw it coming at them with a spotlight on the water. It was too late but they kept search-ing with the Marlin, as well, Marquez working the light.

A half hour later, Hansen turned the wheel over and crossed the deck to Marquez. They were too close to shore and the Marlin was his responsibility. He had to make the call, but that was hard with Marquez on board, something about the presence of the guy, Marquez still acting like they’d find him alive. He put a hand on Marquez’s shoulder.

“John, we’ve got to back away,” and Marquez nodded, but didn’t take his eyes from the ocean. “We’re going to run you back. You did all you could.”

“The boy is dead.”

“You did what you could to save him.”

But Marquez didn’t see it that way, at all.

Li’s wife was in her car, sitting at the end lot out near the mouth of the harbor when Marquez and Roberts drove past the construction equipment assembled under the bridge. Two Fort Bragg police cruisers followed and parked nearby, but it was Marquez who walked across the wet asphalt to her car. His body trembled with cold though the wind felt strangely warm. As her pale face turned toward him he read her apprehension and fear through the rain-streaked windshield. His heart hurt for her, but he didn’t show it now, raised his badge instead as she opened the door. He couldn’t find it in himself to tell her so bluntly.

“Mrs. Li, your husband is down the coast on the beach. There’s been an accident and we’ll take you down to him.”

She pointed past the rock jetty out into the opening of the harbor. “He come soon.”

“He’s already onshore.”

“No, no, he come now.”

The Fort Bragg officers walked up to help and Roberts stayed in the van, scanning the cliffs, trying to find who else might be watching this. They escorted Mrs. Li to a patrol car, helped her into the backseat as her limbs went weak, and Marquez and Roberts waited until the police units crossed under the highway bridge, then followed, climbing back up to Highway 1.

The memory of another woman came at him, the wife of a federal prosecutor, her expression freezing in horror and disbelief as Marquez told her that her husband had been murdered. He remembered a beautiful woman on the cusp of middle age, the lines beginning to deepen around her mouth and eyes, a word forming and reforming on her lips but no sound.

“They’ve found the boy,” Petersen said, sighing. “I’m rolling with them. He’s on a beach about half a mile south of where they flipped.”

When Marquez and Roberts got there firemen and Coast Guard personnel were grouped together on the rough-pebbled beach. Li and his wife arrived a few minutes later in the back of a CHP cruiser. Marquez watched Mrs. Li run down across the rocks to the beach, to her son. She dropped to her knees, pressed her face to the boy’s, cradled his head, wiped sand from his face, ignored the hands reaching to restrain her, the voices trying to be firm with her as tears streamed down her cheeks at what had been taken so unfairly. She straightened her son’s clothes and scolded him, admonishing him to get up off the sand, and Marquez had to turn away.

When he looked back, a fire captain had squatted near her and put an arm around her shoulder. A white coroner’s van was just arriving and turning off the highway onto the tiny parking lot. Li was still up in the CHP car, had never gotten out. His head was bowed, unmoving. Marquez looked back at Mrs. Li, saw her rise to her feet and two firemen grab her arms as she crumpled to the sand. He felt Petersen touch his arm.