Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“What are you talking about, Chief?”

“I’ll have a better explanation when I see you.”

Marquez debated calling Baird and got as far as dialing Baird’s home number after Keeler hung up. He stared at the numbers on his screen as his thumb touched the call icon. Baird already knew Keeler was on his way down here and would want him to hear it from his deputy-chief. He pressed the call button anyway, then killed it before the phone rang at Baird’s house, his hand trembling as he tossed the phone down. Why in the hell would they do that? What possible reason? He watched Petersen’s headlights swing into the marina parking lot. She got out and walked over.

“You okay?” she asked.

“No.”

Petersen smiled. “I’ve been working with the locals here, trying to run down our friend Jimmy.”

“Anything?”

“Not yet.” She pulled at the torn cuff of red fleece coat that had long ago faded to pink. “I think he got a ride out of here, John, maybe even by boat. A couple of fishermen went out about an hour after things went bad.”

“We’ll go looking for him at home later today. I’ve got to meet with Keeler first.”

“Do you want us to keep searching for him?”

It had been three hours since Bailey had run, but dawn wasn’t far off, the sky already white toward the east. Maybe daylight would compromise his hiding spot, which was really what Petersen was asking about. It was 6:10.

“Okay, give it another round. I’m going down to his boat and see what I find on board.”

Marquez watched her drive off and then walked down to the dock to board the Condor. He recovered the GPS transponder first. He dropped that in his pocket. They’d impound the Pacific Condor, move it to Yerba Buena, and try to put heat on Bailey when they caught up to him. They couldn’t charge him but they could question him and they didn’t need a search warrant to go through his boat.

Marquez started at the stern, worked his way through the equipment there, opened a cooler that was tied off to the deck and found a couple of Coors talls, an empty Doritos bag floating in the water, and a seven-inch abalone lying on the white plastic bottom underneath it. When he lifted the abalone out and turned the algae-stained shell he could still smell the mineral brine of the sea. He let it slide back and opened the hold, thinking it was more likely that Bailey’d had a car parked somewhere near or a ride waiting for him. Petersen, Alvarez, and the Sausalito police had gone building-to-building around the dock. They’d checked bushes and walked the area. He used a flashlight to look in the hold and saw another basket down there, one they hadn’t had time to transfer, and he winched it up now, counted forty abalone.

He lowered the basket back into the water in the hold and checked the rest of the deck before going into the cabin. Once inside, he pulled on latex gloves and began a search for evidence, anything he could hold Bailey with. There was a full baggie of marijuana and a couple of roaches. There was a large McDonald’s bag packed with fast-food trash in a corner of the cabin and the smell filled the space when he opened it and rooted through it. He found a piece of abalone shell with a hole drilled in it on a leather shoelace and turned it in his hand. An odd design had been etched on the smooth green shiny part of the shell, a pyramid shape with what looked like the letter Hon one face, a beach thing, maybe, worn around the neck. Was the Hfor Heinemann? How long had Bailey known Heinemann? He dropped it in an evidence bag and went methodically through the storage compartments, the emergency equipment, life preservers, a flare gun, a fire extinguisher, a ship-to-shore radio, bottled water. There were a couple of coats and he searched the pockets, found a handful of Mexican pesos in one, which he counted before putting back in the coat. He came to a locked cabinet and said quietly, “Too bad you locked it, Jimmy.” He searched the pilot’s section for keys, then decided to walk up to his truck and get something to open it with.

He came back with a small pry bar and ripped the cabinet door off, feeling a base satisfaction as the hinges tore out of the aluminum and the door fell on the cabin floor. Inside, he found a red metal toolbox. The upper tray carried a couple of screwdrivers, pliers, a tool for stripping electrical wires and a roll of electrical tape. He lifted the tray and underneath was a gun with a taped handle and a box of nine millimeter shells. He moved the gun with the screw-driver and saw that the serial numbers had been filed and burned.

“What have we got here, Jimmy?”

He knew Bailey would say he’d bought it or won it from some-body in a bar, that he didn’t do the serial number work, didn’t even know about that and kept it on board out of fear of poachers, particularly since he was working for the government. If he got the right judge, and there were a few of them, he’d get nothing more than a lecture.

“Marquez, who are you talking to in there?”

He turned at the voice, something familiar in the timbre, stepped out of the cabin and saw Charles Douglas. He lifted a gloved hand in recognition, but didn’t say anything yet. Five years ago, Douglas had been an FBI special agent, but he’d probably advanced since then. He’d had the moves of a guy on his way up. They’d worked together briefly on a child-kidnapping case Douglas had been assigned to. Four kids had disappeared at random out of California coastal towns and the FBI came up with the idea they were looking for a lone male boat owner. Douglas had requested Fish and Game’s help. As far as Marquez knew the kidnappings had stopped, but the case had never been solved. He figured Douglas was here as the emissary from the Bureau because they’d worked together before.

“Did they send you to explain it away?” Marquez asked.

“It was my call to back the pursuit off.”

“Then you’re just the guy I’d like to talk to.”

“Let’s go sit down somewhere we can talk. Let me buy you a cup of coffee. There’s a little place, Flora’s, Floradito, something like that, I’m sure you know where it is.” He pointed down the water. “Why don’t you meet me down there in fifteen minutes?”

“See you there.”

Marquez put the tray back in the toolbox, shut the lid and was still thinking about it. He slid the dope into an evidence bag and dropped the bag in his pocket. He took another thirty seconds in the cabin. When he came back out he climbed off the boat with the toolbox and evidence bags in hand, then set them down as he peeled the gloves.

Douglas was already outside his car in front of Flora’s when Marquez drove up. The deli faced the bay and had tables outside that were damp with dew and splattered with gull guano. Flora’s did its true business at lunch and through the afternoons when the weather was good, but also sold coffee, bagels, and pastries to the early crowd. They carried their coffee outside and gulls wheeled overhead looking for food as they cleaned a couple of chairs.

Douglas looked unchanged. He was black with Cherokee blood and especially proud of the Cherokee. He was a history buff and could tell you anything you wanted to know about the Cherokee tribe. He’d come through 9/11 and the partial reorganization of the Bureau, and looked just as confident as the last time Marquez had seen him.

“Since when does the Bureau give free passes to poachers?” Marquez asked.

“I’m going to explain what I can.”

Of course he was. He was here to explain and the only prob-lem with that was the FBI was as stingy with information as a politician with the truth, and it was the Bureau’s habit to always make their investigations more important than any other-9/11 had given them another magnitude of throw weight, but as near as Mar-quez could tell, it hadn’t made them more competent. More busy, definitely. Under the direction of the Coast Guard, the Department of Fish and Game had done numerous patrols with the Marlin, checking bridge abutments at the Golden Gate, Bay Bridge, and Richmond/San Rafael, as well as watching the bay. Calling off the Marlin probably felt like calling off one of their own. There were stories floating all the time now about boats loaded with explosives, bridges targeted, the deeper fears of nuclear bombs delivered with cargo ships. The Marlin now carried automatic weapons, .308’s. But the terrible new possibilities didn’t cancel out his own job and he hoped Douglas wasn’t going to throw terrorism at him.