Kirk Russell - Shell Games

Marquez walked down to Bailey, who wore nothing but a pair of shorts that hung loosely on his hips and wraparound mirrored sunglasses. He held a two-inch putty knife that he’d been using to peel paint from the cabin door with and cleaned the knife as though Marquez wasn’t there, dropping a curled paint strip into a plastic bucket on the deck of the boat.

“We’re working on a way to charge you, Jimmy.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong except use a shit batch of primer that didn’t dry tight. This is going to be a bitch to repaint.” Bailey’s pupils were pinpricks, his eyes carrying a hardness Marquez didn’t know he had in him. “I knew you’d come by today.”

“You’ve done a pretty good job burning us, but we’re not far from bringing it down around you. You could be standing in a lineup tomorrow.”

Bailey flicked a large paint chip into the water. He scraped the knife blade on the top of the bucket and started on the door again, saying, “Did you drive all the way down here to dump shit on me again?” Bailey grinned at a thought, his chapped lips pulling back over his teeth. “If you go through my house again and you find another babe in the attic, you’re welcome to her. You can use my mattress. I know that’s what you were thinking last time and she was pretty fun when she was coked up.”

“I found her in the truck after your friends rolled it down the ravine. The cab collapsed on her and snapped her neck. Her head was turned around.”

“I never liked her face anyway, but she had a nice ass.”

“What did you say?”

“I said she had a nice tight little ass. Too bad you got her killed.”

“Did you get Mark Heinemann killed?”

“Last I heard he was up north.”

“Heinemann’s body washed up this morning south of San Francisco. I pointed the detectives toward you and said I’m sure you know what happened. I told them you’d played it both ways with us and we’re trying to take you down on something new now. We’ve got someone looking at a six-pack of photos with your face as one of them. We hope he’ll pick you out today and then we’ll haul you in.”

Bailey turned and wagged the putty knife at him. “You know, you’re total bullshit. I helped you people and you’ve treated me like garbage because I got scared. My lawyer says you’re frustrated by your own inabilities and that’s why you come after me.”

“The people I work with think you’re a beach rat, Jimmy. They think you don’t have much upstairs and the wind blows through empty rooms, but I think they underestimate you. You’re a lot more connected and a lot smarter. You were dealing successfully out of San Diego for years and I think that’s where you first hooked up with him. That’s how come he’s willing to hire you up here. You’re a known quantity and you’ve got your cover all worked out. You look like a sunburned dock toad living on gin and tonics, but that isn’t the case at all, is it? But, you know what, Jimmy? The fun is just starting.”

“Dude, I know that, and I wish I was going to be there when it gets to you. I really fucking do.”

“When was the last time you were in Mexico?”

“Fuck off.”

“You’re going to get on your new phone when I leave here, but that conversation isn’t private either. It’s closing around you, Jimmy. You think you’re riding on a former relationship with the man, but you’re way over your head. They’ll come for you just the way they did Heinemann because you’re a liability.”

Bailey turned his back and farted loudly as he started scraping paint again. “That’s the last word, dude,” and Marquez walked away. He heard Bailey call after him, “Fucking asshole,” but Marquez never turned again.

The call came from Cairo at two that afternoon when Marquez was crossing the Golden Gate after leaving a meeting with the FBI. He could hear the worry in Cairo’s voice. Cairo had lost touch with Petersen and when he’d last talked to her she said she had a vehicle behind her that she was unsure of.

“The reception was bad. You know how it’s okay along the coast for a while, then goes bad immediately after you turn in?”

Marquez did know. “What do you think she was trying to tell you?”

“I couldn’t hear her well enough. I could hear her truck engine straining. I think she was on an uphill grade and pushing it.”

“How long ago?”

“Twenty minutes now.”

That wasn’t a lot of time, but Cairo didn’t spook easily. It must have been her tone. Cairo heard something, fear, maybe.

“When did you last try her?”

“Just before I called you.”

“What about her telelocator?”

“It’s not with her. I’m at the cold house. I just found it in the bedroom.”

“I’m coming to you.”

When he hung up, fear gripped him and his stomach knotted. But don’t think like that, yet. Cairo is going to call you back and say she just turned up. Twenty minutes is nothing. She could be in the Burger King; she could be anywhere. Maybe she’s lying above a cove with a video camera. He tried to hold that idea as he started north.

An hour later he had the whole team on the road headed to Fort Bragg and had called Keeler and Baird and asked for help from uniformed wardens and from the Coast Guard with a helicopter. He called the Fort Bragg police, gave them a description of her Toy-ota 4Runner and a physical on Petersen. When he got into Bragg, Marquez drove through town and continued north to where Cairo was.

The late afternoon sunlight had faded to an orange haze over the ocean. Cairo believed that Petersen had been somewhere in this area and Marquez left the coast highway and turned up Teague Ranch Road because he and Petersen had used spots up here on a surveillance a few years back. The road climbed steeply and he thought the steepest stretch would also have been the last place with clear phone reception. You could make calls from farther inland, but the reception sketched in and out on you and a lot of calls got dropped. The road climbed through grassland and hills that rose into coastal mountains, then folded back on itself and ran across forested slopes.

His radio crackled a couple of times and he talked to Cairo, then to Chief Keeler who let him know several uniformed wardens were on their way to help. The road entered trees and dipped as it crossed a creek bed, then climbed steeply up switchbacks to the next ridge and he turned around there because he could no longer see the ocean and reasoned that her purpose for driving up here would have been surveillance of the coves or bluffs below.

And then another idea occurred to him, of what she might do if she was being pursued and couldn’t get through on a cell phone or radio. He drove slowly back down, remembering the places they’d used before, locations where you could get a vehicle off-road. He returned to the concrete culvert that carried a creek beneath the roadbed, parked and walked down to the dry creek bed, looked in through the culvert pipe. A circle of light came through from the other side, the downhill side. Cool air flowed down through with the faint breeze up from the ocean. The bottom was stained dark and powdery moss had dried well up the curve. He crouched and walked through the culvert and on the other side saw a turned-over rock, the raw soil underneath. He looked down the dry bed and saw tire marks against a boulder. He found marks from scraped paint, studied the color, then tried to get Cairo on the radio to tell him he was going to hike down the creek bed. Farther down, he began to put it together, found a second set of tire prints and realized it had been a pursuit. He paused at broken taillight glass, knelt and picked it up.

Petersen wouldn’t wreck a vehicle to chase a jeep or anything else down a creek bed unless there’d been a very good reason for it. But this could be something altogether different, the paint color coincidence aside. Kids out four-wheeling and drinking beer, could easily be kids, he thought. He stopped at a gash in a tree, touched the blue paint left there, and looked at the V-shaped tire prints alongside the trunk, touched the grooves with his fingers. It was too violent. Someone had been chased. He tried Cairo again.