Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“Whoever he is, John, we’ll take him down.”

Marquez looked out at the ocean. He thought of a Mexican Federale captain who’d told him about rumors in the mountain pueblos that Kline wasn’t really a human being, that he was the devil himself. “Diablo,” the officer had said, and then smirked.

When they got back to the safehouse in Fort Bragg, Marquez sat down with Melinda Roberts. She’d work with him tomorrow as he met with Jimmy Bailey, the Pillar Point informant. It would be a chance to work one-on-one with her, something he hadn’t done enough of, a casualty of budget cuts. But with Petersen leaving in a month there was more urgency. Integrating a new warden into the team was easier when the SOU was a ten-person unit, but he didn’t know when those days would come back, if ever. Roberts was a natural for covert work, very observant, very aware, and blended easily-very quick to assimilate, but she was also will-ful and there was a perspective issue that showed itself again now.

“Bailey is a flake,” she said.

“He is, but we’re not going after his parents.”

She frowned at the obscure humor, not finding anything funny in it. A lot of their informants were flaky and had no more ambition than to leach CalTip dollars for beer money, get even with an ex friend, or take out a competitor. Tomorrow he’d meet Bailey, alone, but figured Roberts would drive down to Pillar as well and they could evaluate together what to do with the information Bailey delivered, if he delivered anything. From the numerous messages he’d begun to believe Bailey might have something, but he didn’t say that now, and didn’t really want to allow himself that hope yet. They left it that Roberts would meet him in San Francisco and they’d drive tandem down the coast.

Marquez left Fort Bragg, cut through the coastal mountains on Highway 20 and followed 101 back to the Bay Area. He was tired and the ride felt longer than usual, the glare of headlights hard on his eyes. When he got close to home he called Bailey. A young woman answered.

“Jimmy is here, but he’s partying,” she said.

“Any chance he could take a break? I really need to talk to him.”

There was a long delay and he heard her ask somebody nearby if they knew where Jimmy was. Then she came back on.

“He’s in the hot tub.”

“Tell him it’s Banner. He’s been trying to get me all day.” The name was an alias he used with Bailey, but it sounded odd tonight, like the name of somebody’s dog. The phone dropped on the counter and he didn’t really know whether she’d gone for Bailey or not, but he stayed on the line, listened to Santana playing in the background. Five minutes later, as he was coming across southern Marin and close to hanging up, Bailey coughed into the phone, said he was getting water everywhere and couldn’t talk right now anyway. Marquez confirmed 8:00 tomorrow morning. He’d found that you had to make these final phone calls with Bailey or you got a shit-eating grin and an excuse about forgetting the next time you saw him.

Now he exited into Mill Valley and climbed the steep road up Mt. Tamalpais. His house was two bedrooms and a study and looked like a cedar-sided cabin from the outside. It had a stone chimney and a deck on the backside and the gravel driveway was narrow and dipped and then rose to the knoll where the house sat. A wooded shoulder of Mt. Tam fell away to the right of the house and below there were stands of trees, open flanks of dry grass and folded ravines with oak and brush, then the ocean. In winter he watched the leading edge of storms approach and in the clearest months, April and November, there were mornings when the ocean was the blue of a sapphire. He had a partial view of the top of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and the pinnacle of the Trans-America building and the taller buildings of the city, and still, it was dark enough at night up here to where you could see the stars.

His grandfather had deeded ten acres of the land below to the county in exchange for permanent release from property taxes and on the agreement that it would never be built on. Marquez had inherited the house but there was a funny disconnect to that because it wasn’t property that anyone with his job could afford. The joke within Fish and Game was they always backed the wrong candidate for governor, so their budget increase requests typically got blue-lined and their pay now was well below what a highway patrol officer made. He never forgot the luckiness of having this house or the perseverance and hard work of his grandparents. It was his thought that he’d leave the house to Maria one day, and had made a will to that effect and had resolved that if the separation from Katherine turned into divorce he’d still leave the will alone.

He parked and reached for the light switch as he got inside the door. Six months ago Katherine and Maria would have been home, the lights would have been on, and maybe he would have heard them talking or Maria’s laughter as he walked up. He felt the emptiness and wished he could have the moment back and could talk it out with Kath. He wished he’d been more open-minded and less stubborn and hadn’t withdrawn hurt and angry so fast.

He walked into Maria’s room. She lived or had lived in the study, the room that had been his office before he married Katherine. A lot of her stuff was still there and they had an awk-ward thing going where she was still spending a certain number of nights here as he and Katherine tried to get things worked out. On the nights they’d been able to pull it off they’d have dinner together, and then the next morning he’d drive her to school. They’d gone along okay that way in the spring, but since school let out in the summer she’d been here less and not at all, lately.

He poured rum in a tumbler, dropped in a couple of ice cubes, then wrote his report to Chief Keeler on his laptop and e-mailed it. When the rum was finished he searched around for something to make a sandwich, settled for peanut butter, poured another drink and sat out on the deck and thought about tomorrow. He felt tired, tense, too wound up from lack of sleep and hoped the rum would loosen him, free him for a couple of hours, maybe even help him see things differently. His team thought he should have taken Li down sooner and that unspoken judgment weighed on him tonight. They’d had Li on commercial trafficking, which in addi-tion to impounding his boat, dive equipment, and car, allowed a judge to fine up to $40,000. They should be able to get him to talk.

Now he turned on the TV, looking for late-night local news, and found a report on the drowning and then a longer piece on the Huega murder, including a headshot of Huega, whom they de-scribed as having a minor criminal history and known drug ties. They all but called it a drug killing, didn’t name Davies, but said police had a man in custody they were questioning. The report ended and he flicked through other stations. His nerves hummed and yet he knew he should get some sleep. He thought of the younger Li boy’s face pale in death, his blue parka rising on a swell before the ocean took it. The TV reporter had cited the unusual weather, the thunder cells on the north coast, an area that didn’t usually see that. He clicked the TV off and went out the front door with a flashlight.

Low on the western side of the house was the crawl space door. He unlatched it and stepped over the foundation grade beam. There was maybe five feet of clearance underneath and he had to stoop below the floor joists. Cobwebs brushed his face as he made his way over to the base of the stone fireplace his grandfather had built out of rocks gathered from the property. He’d mixed aggregate, cement, and sand in the old iron-handled wheelbarrow that Marquez still stored under here. He’d hated banks and had embedded an iron box in the base of the fireplace. A stone concealed the face and for years this was where his grandfather had kept his money and the land deed and the things he’d treasured, the vault of the Bank of Marquez, not a very big bank, but an honest one run by the truest man Marquez had ever known, a Spanish immigrant who’d married a native San Franciscan with English roots. He moved the rock, opened the box, and took out the Kline file.