Kirk Russell: Shell Games

“I tried you earlier,” Katherine said, her voice low and husky.

“I was in a meeting.”

Separated after seven years of marriage, he didn’t go two hours of any day without thinking about her and his stepdaughter, Maria. They’d been apart now long enough to have some distance. Katherine’s friend, the marriage counselor who’d suggested it, had insisted that separation helped couples talk things through and break “patterns of conflict.” Katherine and Maria had moved back into the house she’d owned since before they’d married. Every other weekend or so, they’d come up to his house and stay the night as though they were guests. Sometimes they’d come for dinner during the week and then leave, and all of it felt completely unnat-ural and ate at him. It didn’t seem to him that the separation had allowed them to get any nearer to sorting their problems out, and if anything, it had created a new distance in him. Hurt pride, perhaps. The counselor’s idea that they talk on the phone or meet for coffee seemed more a slow breaking away than anything else.

He knew Katherine was throwing herself at expanding her business. She had a coffee bar on Filbert Street in San Francisco that both the tourist magazines and the locals liked. She was close to opening another one in a little space south of Market on Spear Street. He still hadn’t seen the new place. An Italian manufacturer of espresso machines had paid for a hotel stay in Rome and she was over there for five days. He didn’t doubt what the manufacturer wanted, all she’d had to come up with was the airline ticket. And he knew Katherine was trying to build a life that was financially secure and gave Maria a fair shot at a good college. Fish and Game paid one of the lowest salaries in law enforcement. You had to do a lot of interviewing and work hard to find a lower salary. You could do it, but only if you found a small enough city or went to work for one of the bankrupt Sierra counties and though Kath might say all day long that money never figured in, it did. It affected quality of life and it affected Maria’s chances.

He glanced at the dashboard clock, realized it was after midnight for her. She was in her hotel room with the windows wide open looking out over a piazza on a warm night.

“I’ve got this big bed, but no you,” she said.

He didn’t know how to answer, unsure whether she even meant it. They hadn’t slept together in three months. He changed lanes without commenting. It looked like a fender-bender slowing traffic, two young guys scuffling on the highway shoulder.

“How’s my Maria?” she asked. “Have you seen her?”

“No, we’ve been talking on the phone. She had a sleepover with Alice last night.”

“Is she eating?”

“She says she is.” He added, “She’s going to a movie tonight with her friends.”

“She shouldn’t be doing that on a school night.”

“One night won’t kill her grades.”

“Have you been home at all?”

“No.”

Call waiting interrupted her response and then she wanted to hang up, telling him first that Maria was losing too much weight, that there was a problem that needed to be dealt with, now. He rolled to the incoming call. The reception was poor, the connection crackling with static, Davies’s voice fading in and out.

“That fat fuck of a detective is trying to figure out how to charge me with murder.”

“Then come back and defend yourself.”

“In the navy they taught us to be ready for anything.”

“Did they teach you to run away?”

“You can be pretty cold, Lieutenant.”

“You’re starting to look like a man hiding something.”

“You were in the service, weren’t you?”

Marquez stared out through the windshield, still thinking about Katherine. He figured he was about to get Davies’s justification for taking off.

“I was in the marines getting ready to ship out of Oakland to Nam when the war ended,” Marquez said.

“You stayed in the world?”

“That’s right.”

“Lucky, man.”

But there wasn’t much about that year that was lucky. He remembered having a shaved head and getting spit on for wearing the uniform.

“I was a SEAL until I hit a kid on a bike when I was driving home one night,” Davies said.

“Where was that?”

“Georgia. Where’d you go when the marines let go of you.”

“Africa.”

“Africa?”

“You need to come back and keep talking to these detectives.”

“I didn’t kill Stocker.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

“I’m out here getting answers.”

“Yeah, what answers? Where are you?”

“North of Shelter Cove up off the Lost Coast with that diver I told you about, Danny Huega. I’m going to drop him on the beach up here when I’m done with him.”

“What’s he doing on your boat?”

“He’s helping me put it together.”

“Put him on the phone.”

“He can’t talk right now, Lieutenant.”

“Don’t make another mistake.”

“Hey, it’s his mistake. He lied to the detectives.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Those detectives offered him a deal. See, he’s got some old beefs with the county they can help him on, but we’re just getting to those details. After I get some answers he’ll be humping it down the beach toward Gitchell Creek. I think he can help you out, but I’d get to him before that fat fuck and his sidekick.”

“Don’t hang up.”

Marquez tried to keep him on the line. He was pulling over onto the shoulder when the line went dead.

Marquez called Ruter and related the Davies conversation, said it sounded to him like Huega would be dumped somewhere south of Punta Gorda, beyond the abandoned lighthouse, maybe between Sea Lion Gulch and Randall Creek. There were stretches where the cliffs were on top of you and the beach was a white ribbon that sleeper waves could cover completely. You had to keep your eye on the ocean, but there was no fog tonight and Huega would see a big wave well before it happened. He’d see a black hump rise and roll toward him with moonlight glistening off its shoulder.

“You might ask the Coast Guard to take a run up there and see if they spot him on the beach,” Marquez told Ruter.

“Is he hurt?”

“He may be.”

“Thanks for the call.”

“Let me know what happens.”

Ruter never answered. Marquez was in Oakland, a block and a half from Li’s house, parked alongside an empty house for sale. A half-eaten burrito, two chicken tacos, and a thermos of coffee were on the passenger seat. The food would carry him until another SOU warden, Cairo, took over after midnight. Lately, he’d been liv-ing off Mexican food; fish tacos, burritos, tostaditos, guacamole, and chips. Since Katherine and Maria had moved out he’d barely been to the store, other than for the most basic staples and for din-ner on the nights they came over. He had tomatoes growing on the deck, wrapped in chicken wire to keep the deer off. He’d make a dinner out of bread, tomatoes, peanut butter, and rum or beer.

He had all his gear with him tonight, two guns, the takedown vest, all the cameras and night vision equipment, everything he needed if Li rolled, though the team reported that Li hadn’t left the house all day. He thought more about Davies as he sat in the darkness. Davies had gone over some edge and the question was whether it was before he’d called from Guyanno or after. He reached over and closed up the bag with the tacos, lowered his window, and leaned back in his seat. Another hour went by and then his phone rang.

Davies’s voice was remorseful, slowed, and thick. “He slid against a knife, Lieutenant, but he’s fine. He’s onshore. I dropped him. He got cut when the boat pitched, but it was no big deal, maybe a couple inches long, a quarter-inch deep. He’s walking out to Gitchell Creek. You’ll want to pick him up there. That’s going to be a good time to lean on him.”