Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“Don’t let him get under your skin.”

“Except that can is more litter in the water now. The guy is a dock toad and so far we’re watching a party boat. That’s about his sixth beer.”

“They’re waiting for twilight.”

He couldn’t hear what she said next but he could feel the pulse of the air compressor on the boat. Bailey had turned it on when he pulled this last beer from the cooler. They watched the sun redden, the black jagged face of Elephant Rock smooth with shadows, and Roberts was right, the clock was running down. He glanced at her. She looked cold now, apple spots on her cheeks.

The cabin door opened and the bow-legged, black-bearded Heinemann came out. They watched his white-foaming splash as he entered the water, trailing an air hose, a hookah spooling from the compressor at the stern where Bailey worked as tender and kept watch, operating the davit, swinging the boom out and waiting, while underwater on the floor of the cove Heinemann used the air hose to inflate pop-ups, urchin baskets with floats. Two bobbed to the surface and in steady succession six more, and they were both quiet on the cliff until Heinemann’s head broke the surface. He lifted his mask and hooked the first basket to the boom as Marquez refocused the camcorder, the light-enhancing feature turning Bailey’s hair white as the first basket swung toward the boat. The urchin basket bulged and was edged in a way that said hard abalone shells were pushing at the fabric, not the small forms of urchins. Marquez videotaped and listened to Roberts’s careful recording of the facts as the baskets were lowered into the hold.

Within ten minutes the anchor rose and the Condor turned south toward San Francisco. They hustled back up the trail and Marquez drove as Roberts talked to the Coast Guard and tracked the boat with the GPS locator. So far, it had gone as Bailey had said it would. He listened as Roberts let the rest of the team know and then talked with Petersen who’d swung in behind them. He felt upbeat. It had gone well. They had good footage; they’d have Bailey’s testi-mony and if Bailey was right about Sausalito, they might get all the way to the buyer tomorrow. The Marlin and the Coast Guard would help track the boat the catch was transferred to and he hoped that would take them all the way home.

“Signal good?” he asked.

“Perfect.”

The Kline file lay on the seat between them, Roberts’s Gatorade on top of it. She picked up the Gatorade, wiping at the ring the bottle had left, as though somehow the file was sacred to him and she was worried he’d be upset. Earlier, he’d asked her to take a look at it, but so far she’d only thumbed through it as a curiosity. She tapped it now.

“How come there aren’t better photos?”

“The FBI has better photos.”

That got her more interested. The FBI added another level of credibility for her and he knew from talking to Roberts that she’d once considered an FBI career. She’d told him about being younger and imagining she’d be like Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs.

“What’s the closest you got to him?”

“There were a couple of times. Once, in Mexico, when I was still DEA, we were up in a mountain pueblo-this was a joint task force with the Mexicans where we’d set up surveillance ahead of a wedding. A man invited to the wedding was the Mexican equivalent of a district attorney. He’d made a name for himself prosecuting drug traffickers and we’d heard the Juarez cartels were either going to buy him off or shut him down. We had our own reasons for wanting him to survive and keep doing his job, so we were trying to help the Mexicans protect him until he prosecuted a couple of cases we were very interested in. Two days prior, we’d been tipped that the cartels had hired Kline to take him out. The DA had come to this wedding with his daughter, a beautiful girl, maybe twelve or thirteen.”

The last sentence came out like it felt, a stand-alone truth, a side fact until you knew what had happened and he paused, drew a slow breath, having never really gotten over this one. There were times driving along a freeway or a road anywhere, times when his mind drifted to her and for reasons in himself he didn’t understand he’d calculate how old she’d be if she was alive still. He pictured her face easily as he talked to Roberts.

“The DA went to the ceremony at the church, then made a bee-line with his daughter for their car. He’d made his appearance and was avoiding the party. We’d asked him to avoid the party, and he was okay with it.” Marquez glanced over. “I’m talking about a small church, crowded, old wood doors, stone steps, everybody spilling out after the ceremony. I was well up the slope on one side of town and I could see them walking across the plaza. It was a high desert kind of cold with a wind blowing and kicking up dust. A man came out of a side street and at first he seemed to be headed away from them, then turned back and raised his hand to get their attention. He called to them. Not in a hurried way, but I focused on him, and his face was hidden to me. I started down as soon as the DA took a step backwards, looked like he was trying to shield his daughter. Then it went fast. We think the man asked the DA a question, got the wrong answer and shot the girl through the forehead while her father had an arm around her. There was a delay, maybe fifteen seconds, time enough for more questions, and we got a shot off.”

“You?”

“No, I was running down and Kline drove past me. Another agent shot at him but missed. Kline didn’t kill the Mexican prose-cutor and the man didn’t quit his job, but he lost his guts to pursue the traffickers. I heard there were other threats against his family and he folded up after that.”

“Resigned?”

“Yeah.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Marquez didn’t answer and she returned to Kline. “It’s not like we have much to go on. Not like there’s much proof about him being here, Lieutenant. What does the FBI say about him being in California?”

“I made one call and so far I haven’t had a call back from the Feds.”

She turned quiet and he didn’t begrudge her skepticism. In fact, he respected it. He wanted SOU wardens who were skeptics. His theory of Kline being here could turn out to be a fantasy. He hoped it was. Roberts was young, unafraid, and strong. She was an expert markswoman, had a black belt, ran marathons, and had been scuba diving since she was ten. She had the shoulders of a swimmer and grew up in a generation where the young women pumped iron the same as the men. What she hadn’t tested herself against was the absence of morality and he’d wanted to communi-cate Kline to her without overdramatizing, but felt like he’d failed. It was better left alone now.

At 10:27, the Condor passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and angled toward the north bay. It berthed in Sausalito as Bailey had said it would and Marquez got set up with the local police and the rest of the SOU. Roberts went for food while he talked to the Sausalito police, letting them know they were on location and as far as he knew the bust would still be early morning.

When Roberts got back, they ate, then moved down to a position on a docked boat. They’d trade off every four hours through the night, and she was asleep now, her head on a coil of rope, a blue plastic tarp hiding her body like a blanket. Sodium lights strung along the dock hummed and swung in the wind and the shapes of Bailey and Heinemann flickered through the pale light of their rear cabin window. Across the bay, the skyline of San Francisco glowed with a hazy brilliance and as the night deepened and quieted he listened to the water lapping at the dock and faint strains of music carrying from the Condor. He watched Bailey come out, pee off the boat into the water and he was near to waking Roberts to change shifts when a light came on in the boat berthed next to the Condor.