Kirk Russell: Shell Games

When Marquez saw the forested ridge at the end of the canyon he knew he was close. He rounded the last curve and lowered the driver’s window, smelling pine pitch and dry grass as afternoon heat swept the truck cab. As he slowed to a stop near the steel posts at the campground entrance, Davies stepped out onto the road and started toward him, a smile on his sweat-streaked face as though they shared some joke played on the dead men.

“Guess they weren’t as smart as they thought, Lieutenant,” Davies said.

“Guess not. Where are they?”

“About half a mile up the creek trail.”

Marquez drove over the entry chain and the quarantine sign attached to it. He parked near a rusted iron barbecue at one of the campsite slots and sat on a picnic table, his fingers tracing initials carved in the top as he phoned the sheriff’s office in Mendocino. He identified himself as the patrol lieutenant of California Fish and Game’s covert SOU, the Special Operations Unit, telling the detective he was with a Mark Davies, who’d found the bodies of two men along the canyon wall northeast of the Guyanno Creek campground, south of Fort Bragg. The detective drew a breath and Marquez heard a pen scratch paper.

“And when did this Davies call you?” the detective asked.

“Roughly three hours ago.”

“Why did you wait so long to call?”

“He said if I didn’t come alone he’d leave.”

“Who is he?”

“An urchin diver. He works out of Noyo Harbor in Fort Bragg. He’s helped my team a couple of times.”

“An informant?”

“More like a concerned citizen.”

“Right. Your name again, officer?”

“John Marquez.”

“Hold for a second, Marquez.”

When the detective got back on the line he wanted to confirm it was the campground that had been closed by a bubonic plague outbreak and then said they were on their way and not to leave, not to touch anything. Marquez hung up guessing it would be more than an hour before detectives arrived, at least twenty min-utes before a county cruiser. He folded his phone and walked up to where Davies stood cleaning his sunglasses with his T-shirt, near a car parked at one of the campsites, an ‘80s model with faded black paint, a salt-rusted body, a beater with a set of new tires that were probably worth more than the vehicle. He saw dive weights and flippers in the passenger foot well, a yellowed newspaper on the back seat, a sweatshirt turned inside out.

“The owner of this got the shady side of the tree,” Davies said. “Somebody really did a number on them.”

“You knew him?”

“I recognize him, but I didn’t know him that well. Knew his dive partner better.”

Marquez decided he’d run the license plate of the Supra after Davies showed him what he’d found. They started up the creek trail, skirting waist-high greasewood and taller poison oak with red leaves curled and drying. He smelled creek mud and the dry oaks, and for a third of a mile the trail shadowed the water and then climbed into sunlight where a yellow two-man tent was pitched on a patch of grass and thistle, its flap open, two sleeping bags visible, rumpled clothes, a battery-powered lantern with a shattered light. No blood, no sign of violence.

“Did you toss their campsite?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Messing with them, letting them know they weren’t alone up here like they thought.”

Marquez nodded as though that made sense, but it didn’t. Why tip the poachers off that you were here? He felt Davies study-ing him as he looked over at the campsite. Bottlenose flies rested on the tent sides. A cooler lay in the dry grass nearby with an open package of hotdogs spilling out. A jar of mayonnaise had its lid off and the ants had found it. He pictured Davies tearing up this campsite in the early morning.

“They didn’t cook up here,” Davies said, as if somehow that was important. “They probably cooked down at the barbecues or ate in town.”

He knew Davies easily could have left without making any calls. He could have burned everything he’d touched in a barbecue pit, left it smoldering and taken off, and with the campground closed there was no saying when these bodies would have been found.

“How did you know to look further up the trail?”

“I figured they were shucking it up here somewhere. I looked all around down at the main campsite before I ever came up here. You ready to take a look?”

Marquez picked a couple of bay leaves as they passed through a stand of trees. He folded the leaves, bringing the pungent smell close to his nose before letting them fall to the trail. Nervous antic-ipation started in him. Something didn’t feel right in Davies’s story, not that he was lying, but leaving something out. When they came out of the trees he studied the terrain ahead, remembering how the canyon narrowed as it funneled toward the mountains, the country steep and thick with brush. The path didn’t go much farther and you had your choice of a deer trail or staying in the rocky creek bed. He heard a faraway police siren like an animal calling from down the canyon and turned his back on the sound, looked upstream through the brush and trees, trying to spot the poachers’ setup. He saw a flat table of dark rock and a flash of orange in the brush. He pointed at it.

“There?”

Davies nodded but didn’t move, blocking the trail instead, the long muscles of his arms rippling as he folded them over his chest. His face carried white streaks of dried sweat and he was unshaven, his whiskers black, eyes bright with urgency.

“I know you’re wondering about me, Lieutenant, but I didn’t kill them. I was done with anything to do with killing when I left the navy, but I did get in a fight a couple weeks ago with one of these guys and that’s going to fuck things up. It was a bar fight; he got a lawyer to sue me. Supposedly, I fucked up his eye with a chair leg.”

“What else haven’t you told me?”

“I was going to tell you that.”

They started moving again, working their way down to the creek. He left his shoes on, but rolled up his pants and the water felt cool and smooth against his calves. Rocks turned and slid under-foot as he walked up the stream bed with the light current pulling against him. When they reached the work area the poachers had built he put a hand on a flat boulder and stepped out of the creek.

A wood plank had been laid across two aluminum sawhorses to make a table to shuck on, and a pile of abalone shells was at one end, hundreds of them spilling under the brush and into the creek, their silvery green and pink interiors iridescent and reflect-ing underwater. Flies buzzed around the pile and as he flipped one of the bigger shells with his foot they swarmed around his ankle. White, green, red, pink, threaded, and black abalone had once been plentiful up and down the coast, but only the red were left in any quantity, and Fish and Game was fighting poachers for those, losing a quarter million a year to the black market and to divers who ignored the state limit of twenty-four. There’d been twenty grand in abalone here. He slapped at a fly on his neck and decided he’d get his camcorder and notebook from the truck and come back up here alone.

“There’s someone with cash to burn who wants it all, Lieu-tenant. He’s paying fifty, sixty dollars an ab. You’ve got to be hearing the same thing.”

Marquez stared at the shell pile knowing the truth in that. It was the main reason he’d driven up here before calling the county. The global black market in animal parts was second only to drug run-ning, but until now California had dodged the commercial poachers. That they were up against one he didn’t doubt at all. They hadn’t been able to touch him and biologists and recreational divers were reporting abalone beds that looked like they’d been vacuumed. Bars and docks were boiling with rumors of big money. He pictured the pair here lugging their catch up the creek trail, then carrying shucked abalone back out to the parking lot packed on ice in coolers. Deals going down in the campground, the chain dropped, coolers of abalone transferred under headlights, and then sitting around after-wards near their tent, drinking and smoking under the long arc of the stars, feeling like they had it all figured out.