Kirk Russell - Shell Games

She hesitated, then spoke. They’d been drinking daiquiris on the Condor. Jimmy and Mark were smoking. She’d had one daiquiri, didn’t smoke, and the Hispanic guy had straight rum. Bailey told her she had to split for a while because they were going to talk private business. Mark pretended like he hadn’t heard what Bailey had said. Mark wouldn’t look at her and she’d been real angry when she left the boat. She’d gotten into a bad fight with him later that night and they’d broken up, for the second time, she said.

Petersen spoke up now, telling her they were going to check Heinemann’s boat for anything Bailey might have asked Mark to hold for him. She asked Meghan if she had anything private she wanted to remove first, deftly explaining that they didn’t need a warrant because they were deputized as customs agents. Petersen went through everything, found nothing, and they questioned her more, then gave her phone numbers to call. Marquez knew her first call would be to Heinemann.

As they walked away, Marquez said, “That story about Bailey had the ring of truth.”

“Yeah, it did.”

“We’ll borrow the condo and I think we’ll watch her.”

“Do you want me here?”

“Yeah, I think you and Cairo.”

He called Cairo as they drove up the highway a few miles to check out Bailey’s house. Bailey leased an avocado-colored stucco ranch house in an old subdivision. The house had a small lawn of dead Bermuda grass and a white concrete path to the front door that ran like a freeway through a desert. Neither Bailey’s black Suburban nor any other vehicles were in the driveway, but Mar-quez knocked on the door anyway. He looked in through the liv-ing room window at brown shag carpet, a few pieces of furniture, a widescreen TV.

“We’re going to hear from his lawyer next,” Petersen said from the porch steps.

“That’s right, and then he’ll surface.”

As they drove away from Bailey’s they talked over how to make the surveillance of the girlfriend worthwhile. There was no way they’d get a warrant for Meghan Burris’s phone records, but they had an application in on a cell phone number of Heinemann’s they’d gotten from Bailey. If Burris called him they wouldn’t get real-time notification, though he’d made that request as well, but would get a location, an area to work. He dropped Petersen in San Francisco.

Late in the afternoon, Marquez crossed the Golden Gate and drove home, talking on the phone with Keeler as he walked in, telling him about Heinemann’s girlfriend and his plan with the team.

“I dropped the gun at DOJ,” Keeler said, “and I’ve thought more about the FBI. We don’t want to interfere with anything they have going on. I don’t want you to go up the coast.”

“We go up the coast all the time.”

“Don’t go near the Emily Jane. Is that clear enough?”

He hung up with Keeler and called Shauf and told her to stick in Fort Bragg. He wrote out the report he hadn’t finished earlier, talked to Petersen again, took a run to clear his head, and at dusk showered, made a sandwich and drank a beer as he went over his notes of the last twenty-four hours. He put on music, an old Gram Parsons, then tried Maria’s cell phone and left a message. She was probably out with her cousin, he thought. Katherine was due in late and had declined his offer to pick her up at the airport, said it was easier to take a cab, and it left him sad and then he tried not to think about it and went back over all his notes, worked the sequence of events on the calendar, again, because sometimes things fell together.

Near midnight, he went to bed and when he woke again it was to the front door opening and footsteps. He reached for his gun, but pulled his hand back as he heard a suitcase drop and the door shut and lock. He heard her footsteps in the hallway and felt both surprise and unexpected happiness.

“It’s me,” Katherine said, leaning over him.

“Bonfire.”

“I missed you.”

Her hair cascaded down around his face and he slid his fingers along the nape of her neck and then pulled her on top of him and kissed her. He took her in his arms and touched the ghost streak of white hair at her right temple, traced her spine with his fingers, then the curve of hip and ass and long thigh muscle, as Katherine’s hands slid along his belly and over his chest and face. He took her shirt and bra off and felt the warm heat of her. Then she was smoothly against him and he was in her and for a little while there was nothing else in the night.

He woke before dawn and lay on his back, not moving yet, not wanting to wake Katherine. Her face pressed against his chest and he felt the slow rise and fall of her breathing, the quiet exhale. He smelled last night’s sex, the shampoo she used in her hair, felt the warmth of her and was afraid if he moved he’d lose the feeling of having her here again. But when he closed his eyes his cell phone beeped somewhere on the floor near his head. It must have rung earlier and probably it was the ringing that woke him. He slid an arm slowly down alongside the bed, fingers grazing the floor, finding the phone as Katherine shifted.

Five minutes later he was making coffee and talking to dis-patch. It was 5:10. There’d been a call to Fish and Game during the night, a message left that Marquez listened to as he poured coffee.

“Hey,” a man’s voice said, “I don’t want to give my name or nothing, but I know who those guys killed up at Guyanno Creek were selling to. There’s a whole bunch of guys in on that.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not leaving my number, man, but you can reach me through this one.” Marquez listened carefully to the numerals again, moved the pencil swiftly from one to the next com-paring them to what he’d written down the first time he’d listened. The message concluded with, “Leave me a way to get ahold of the warden that was up there at Guyanno and I’ll call him back.”

Marquez clicked off, laid the phone and pencil down, the phrase “the warden that was up there at Guyanno” still chasing him. It was an easy thing to know. The place had been crawling with police and the story of what had happened had gone out from there. It was unusual to get a request for a particular warden, but you could explain that away with the murders.

He turned to Katherine’s footsteps and then held her as she pressed against him. He ran his hand down her bare back, the smooth skin there, the curve of her rump.

“I need your help today,” she said. “Do you think you can be there when I talk to Maria?”

“I don’t know yet, but I’ll try. When do you want to do it?”

“After school.”

“All right, but I’ll have to call you, Kath. Depends how today goes.”

“This is the kind of thing, John.” She tensed and pulled away from him, from his inability or unwillingness to say absolutely he’d be there, and when she turned it was as if suddenly she was self-conscious of her nakedness and no longer comfortable around him.

He watched her go down the hallway, heard the shower run-ning a few minutes later. He called Petersen while Katherine showered and dressed. Nothing had happened during the night in Pillar Point and Petersen sounded tired, said she didn’t feel well. It was too early to call the number from the tipster and he folded the paper and walked back to the shower to talk with Kath, try to explain what was going on with work and why he couldn’t commit to the afternoon yet. They had coffee together. Katherine said she had to go get Maria to drive her to school, then would head into the city to Presto. He watched her car disappear, walked back into the house, made more calls, and read through a fax he’d gotten on Heinemann. At 7:30 he called Ruter.