Kirk Russell: Shell Games

When they got back to the creek trail the siren was much closer. They climbed and Marquez saw a clearing ahead. His eye followed the trampled grass and thistle to a man’s body on the far side of the clearing, sitting against a large oak, head tilted slightly up, as though he’d been resting in the shade waiting for them to arrive. As they got closer and he saw the wound in the man’s abdomen a buzzing started in his head. Davies’s voice floated in the distance.

“That’s Ray Stocker,” Davies said. “He was a grade-A asshole.”

Marquez looked at the knife buried in the tree above Stocker’s head and an image from another killing rose in his memory, one from his DEA years.

“What else do you know about Stocker?”

“He hung with a guy named Danny Huega you’ll want to talk to. I don’t know for sure Huega was working with them, but there’s a pretty good chance. He’s another urchin diver.”

“Does he have a boat?”

“The Coney Island. ”

Marquez knew the boat and had an idea who Huega was, pic-tured a brown-haired diver with a coffee-colored birthmark on one side of his neck. They’d find him and talk to him, if not today, then tomorrow.

Davies pointed. “See the tattoo on Stocker’s right arm?” The bluish blur was hard to make out at this distance. “That’s the con-stellation Orion. Stocker called himself Orion. That’s the kind of bullshit he was. The guy around back of the tree is the one who owned the Supra. Name is Peter Han. He showed up in Bragg about seven or eight months ago and was probably selling dope with Stocker. No one is making a real living off the water or anything else around here anymore. That’s why there’s more poaching. They’re closing the Georgia-Pacific plant in October so there’s not going to be shit left of Fort Bragg. They talk about tourism but who’s going to stay in Bragg when they can stay in places like Mendocino.”

Even with the heat, decomp had barely started and Marquez guessed they’d died last night. The second man sat with his legs splayed, right arm falling to the side, but Marquez couldn’t get a good look at his face without getting closer, and didn’t see a way to do that without contaminating the crime scene. He could make out abrasions on Han’s face and wondered if he’d had answers beaten out of him. Was this a robbery, torturing them to find out where money was hidden? Why take it to this degree? He took in the broader scene again, Stocker facing out toward the clearing, Han toward the brush and steep canyon wall. A heavy link chain had been wrapped around the tree and their necks, then ratcheted tight with a rusty come-along that looked like an old coyote trap. Wrists and ankles bound with wire.

Stocker’s intestines had sagged onto his groin and Marquez looked again at the knife stuck in the tree above his head, a military blade or a knockoff of one. He’d been a big man, heavy-boned, tall, about two hundred-fifty pounds. Both wore boxer shorts, so maybe they’d been asleep in the tent. That would be the time to take a man Stocker’s size. Hold a gun to his head and tell him to get up very slowly. Bind his wrists before backing him out and walking him up here.

The siren closed in now and then shut down abruptly. Marquez guessed the county cop was just reaching the campground entrance and looking for him, probably thinking about the quarantine, the young girl who’d contracted plague here a month ago in August. The girl had survived but the media had played it up and the cop was probably wishing he hadn’t caught this call.

When they hiked back down there were three county patrol cars parked in the lot with their lights still spinning. Marquez showed his badge. He could tell the uniforms had been told to sequester Davies and after they sat him in the back of a patrol car, Marquez got his video camera from the truck and walked back up to film the shucking table and shells. He’d wait for the detectives to clear him before removing any evidence, but he documented and made a rough count. He wrote his notes and made a sketch of the setup, putting the creek in his drawing, the brush and the flat rock, reasoning that the poachers had carried the abalone up here in case anyone visited the campground, though they’d also cut the entry lock and put on their own.

Two detectives had arrived while he was filming and had gone up to look at the bodies. They had put an end to the sightseeing, confining the county cops to the paved area, ordering crime tape strung across the upper end of the campground as though they could close the canyon off. When he returned from the shell pile, Marquez sat on the table near his truck and finished his notes as the cops running the yellow tape behind him agreed that this had been a drug hit and that it was no surprise. One cop said the last case of plague had been in Ukiah, you never saw it this close to the coast and that probably it was because of global warming. He said last winter’s rains were proof, and then their conversation went sideways into the poor quality of tires on county cruisers nowadays.

Marquez watched the two county detectives come down off the trail and start toward him. Detectives Ruter and Streatfield. They shook his hand, listened, and took notes, their eyes offering neither acceptance nor judgment, their smiles a formality. The taller one, Streatfield, had a tired brown mustache and eyes that looked like they wanted to sit in a porch chair and get out of this heat. The other, Ruter, was clearly in charge. He exchanged cards with Marquez and wanted to know about the Fish and Game covert team, but Marquez said little by way of explanation, which was his habit because they were often working small towns where word traveled fast and cops gossiped as much as anybody, maybe more.

They took his statement, working it chronologically, moving slowly up the timeline from Davies’s first phone call this morning, an edge creeping into their voices as he admitted not following protocol by delaying his call to them. They wanted him to say he was a friend of Davies and kept coming back to it.

“He’s helped you before,” Ruter said. “Isn’t that right?”

“It is.”

Poaching tips were the rainwater that nourished the Fish and Game system and Davies had helped his team without ever asking for CalTip money, the fund used to pay tipsters. Marquez had a lot of respect for that, but this was something else and he wasn’t sure what he thought yet and wasn’t going to speculate with the detectives.

“And he was here for you today. He hiked up the creek last night on a mission for Fish and Game.”

“We don’t run missions.”

“He talks like he’s on a mission and he’s an ex navy SEAL, did you know that?”

“Yeah, he told me once.”

“He reported in to you and maybe you said you’d handle us. You’re fighting a war to save the abalone and he’s on the front lines.”

“I think I already saw that movie, Ruter. Why don’t you cut to the chase?”

“All right, I will. You ought to be full of apologies for giving the killer or killers an extra three hours to get away, but you’re not and Davies talks like what he did was the right thing to do, calling you first. So I’ll be calling your chief this afternoon and asking him when shellfish became a higher priority than murder.”

“I’ll give you his phone number and my cell. That’s the best way to get ahold of me.”

“You’re not leaving yet. You stick with your picnic table a little longer.”

Marquez made phone calls. He picked up his voice mail and listened to a message from Jimmy Bailey, a ponytailed informant out of Pillar Point, near Half Moon Bay, thirty miles south of San Francisco, a man his team had nicknamed “Docktalk.” Next, he called Fish and Game dispatch and ran the Supra, got the name Peter Han and a Bay Area address, Daly City. He asked dispatch to check Stocker’s and Han’s names for boat registration and they came up negative. It was another hour before Ruter came back to him.