Dead Game (17 page)

“You knocked out Torp’s front teeth,”
Crey said.

“Yeah, he owes Lisa a chair.”

“Man, you’re too much. What did I say to you about working with my crew? This really screws everything up.”

“He started to pull a gun, and Perry came at me with a knife.”

“He was just trying to get another drink. He couldn’t get inside. The door was locked.”

“Tell him to drink out of the toilet next time he’s thirsty. You and I know he was going upstairs.”

“No, he wasn’t, and you read too much into everything. At the most he was going to borrow a bottle of Jack Daniels.”

“He had a gun.”

“He’s always got a gun. That doesn’t mean anything. You think he was going up to do her, then what, the cops are there in the morning, and how long do you think it would take them to figure
out who did it? He ain’t that stupid, man, and the point is I asked you to work with my crew.”

“I took a mask and gloves off him. He had a bottle of chloroform.”

Crey was silent, then quietly said, “Lou didn’t tell me that.”

“Because Perry planned to follow him upstairs. They were both on the deck. Start meeting me yourself because I can’t deal with them anymore. I’ve got a drop for you later today, and I don’t want to see anybody but you.”

“What time will you get here?”

“Before 2:00.”

He hung up as Raburn came back from dropping the kids off. Marquez had left the canning room and walked the gravel road through the orchards back to the packing shed. He was at his truck when Raburn came up alongside him.

“I’m leaving,” Marquez said. “The key is on the table in the room.”

“When is all this going to end?”

“You know, that’s a question I ask myself. How long is it going to take to shut these guys down?”

“What am I supposed to tell the kids when you’re rooting through their family’s business?”

“You could tell them that the man going through cabinets in the canning building is trying to keep Uncle Abe out of prison, and Uncle Abe still doesn’t get it.”

Marquez loaded the fish and caviar and left to meet Crey in Rio Vista. After the drop with Crey he’d continue on to Grizzly Bay to make another buy. He met Crey at the bait shop, and Crey wanted him to follow. They drove out to the end of the street and moved the sturgeon and caviar from Marquez’s truck to Crey’s. Almost nothing got said, and Crey was very jumpy. When
Marquez wasn’t watching he’d dropped an envelope with the cash in it on the driver’s seat of Marquez’s truck. He pointed it out without identifying it.

“Is that money for me?”

“I gotta go,” Crey answered.

“You okay with me counting it before you take off?”

Marquez lifted the envelope off the seat. He let the bills slide into his hand. But Crey had already turned and was getting in his truck. Without waiting for the money to be counted he drove away, and after he left Marquez had a quiet conversation with the team. Alvarez would go with him to make another sturgeon buy in Grizzly Bay, and the rest of the SOU would stick with Crey.

Grizzly Bay was the color of lead, then bright silver where the sunlight broke through onto the water. Marquez could remember when troops were trained here in preparation for fighting in the Mekong in Vietnam. He rechecked his directions, then pulled over on the shoulder 2.3 miles from the last stop sign. About twenty minutes later a couple of kids pulled up in a gray minivan, neither looking older than eighteen. The driver got out, walked up to Marquez’s window, and then introduced himself. Julio Rodriguez. He was clean-cut, hair short and gelled, a cheerful guileless face. Marquez could tell the kid hadn’t done this before.

“You want to look at the fish first?” Julio asked.

“Sure would.”

Marquez got out and looked at the sturgeon in the mini-van. It was a decent size, over the slot limit by a foot. The kid was very proud, said it was the biggest he’d ever caught. The other young man stayed in the cab, looking around once but apparently just there to help lift the sturgeon, didn’t have anything to do with catching it.

“How long have you known Abe?” Marquez asked.

“My uncle knows him. I don’t know him.”

Marquez counted out the bills, and Alvarez drove slowly past, videotaping the exchange of money. Julio couldn’t have been more unaware. They moved the sturgeon, and Marquez questioned him.

“What are you going to do with the money?”

“I’m saving for college.”

“You’ll have to catch a lot of sturgeon to get through college.”

“I’ve got two jobs.”

“Yeah, where do you work?”

“In Suisun.”

He kept talking. He played baseball and hoped to play in college. He lived in Suisun, so did the uncle who knew Raburn and taught him how to fish for sturgeon. He was the oldest kid in his family and had four brothers and sisters. He shook Marquez’s hand before leaving, and Alvarez trailed him as he drove away with the money, said the kid never looked in the rearview mirror except slowing at stoplights.

“Looked to me like he went shopping for the family,” Alvarez said later. “He went straight to a grocery store and then home. Must have been his brothers and sisters who helped unload groceries.”

“Where’s home?”

“A little asbestos-shingled house facing the water.”

Marquez called Ludovna with this one and got told to bring it over to the Sacramento store. A couple of guys working for Ludovna helped him unload. The team was already jokingly calling today the “sturgeon derby.”

At 2:00, Crey’s boat left the dock with six sport fishermen and worked sturgeon holes around the Mothball Fleet and later went farther upriver and docked at the Delta Queen. After the sport
fishermen filed off the boat and went into the bar, Perry and Torp drove up in their van. They boarded Crey’s boat, then left again a few minutes later with a blue plastic cooler and drove to Weisson’s Auto. Shauf and Roberts stopped a third of a mile back. Shauf radioed Marquez.

“What do we do now?”

“Stay with them when they leave there.”

“Can we call the Feds?”

“I’ll call Ehrmann and let him know we took it this far and we think caviar was delivered here. That’s the cooler I delivered to Crey’s Rio Vista house so we’ve already got it on tape.”

Cairo sat on Ludovna’s house, and late in the afternoon Cindy Raburn backed into Ludovna’s driveway and stayed only as long as it took to load a cooler into her Volvo backseat. Hard to tell for sure, but it looked like the same blue cooler, and now Marquez came up alongside the Volvo at a stoplight. He looked down through the back windows and saw the Save Lake Tahoe sticker they’d put on the cooler.

“It’s the same one,” he said.

They followed Cindy Raburn back into the delta and home. But rather than drive her car to the house, she stopped at the canning building and lugged the cooler inside. They watched the lights come on.

“No wonder Raburn was so nervous this morning,” Marquez said. “Let’s let it unfold now. She must be in there to jar the caviar. They went to a lot of trouble to get it here. Let’s see what happens and let’s follow it from here.”

He broke the team into shifts and drove into Walnut Grove with Shauf. There he bought bread, peanut butter, apples, a couple of candy bars, and filled a thermos with coffee before Shauf dropped
him off along the southwestern side of the Raburn property. With Alvarez he came down the steep levee bank in the darkness and then out along the property line, following the edge of the trees. Shauf would stay with her van and watch the roads, and, with Alvarez, Marquez started through the orchards. The rest of the team would go to the safehouse, and they’d rotate in the morning.

Leaves stuck to his boots as they walked the mud between the pear trees. They worked their way closer. The Raburns didn’t have any dogs, and it was unlikely anyone was behind a darkened window in the main house with night-vision equipment. The single light outside the canning shed door glowed yellow and hazy at this distance, but with light-enhanced cameras they could read the terrain, and the lines of the canning shed took form. Her car was still out front, Isaac’s pickup near the house. Up on the levee road Shauf drove slowly past and on down toward Raburn’s houseboat. She said the lights were off there, his pickup gone.

“Take a drive through Walnut Grove and Isleton and check the bars. Maybe you’ll find him in town,” Marquez said.

The cold deepened, and a few more lights came on in the main house. Marquez read Alvarez’s face in the dim light from his cell screen, saw his breath cloud in the cold. The wind picked up. Cindy Raburn was still in the canning building at 10:00 when lights started clicking off in the main house. Not long after, Isaac stepped out onto the porch, and they watched him walk up the gravel road to the canning building.

“Bringing her dinner,” Alvarez said, and it looked like he was carrying a plate.

Isaac stayed in the shed an hour then walked back to the house.

“We’ll stay until she locks up and leaves,” Marquez said. “She may be doing more than one thing in there. There may have been a whole other delivery we missed.”

Traffic died off on the levee road, and the night quieted. Marquez talked to Shauf on and off. She was about a mile away from them off the side of the road.

“How is it?” she asked.

“Cold out here. It feels especially cold tonight.”

“Yeah, it does, and you know, that’s the part I’m not going to miss.”

“We’re getting older, I guess.”

“Think we’ve made any difference?”

“Sure, we’ve slowed it all down. Some of those people would still be out there poaching.”

Marquez talked with Alvarez about a case they’d never solved, a hunter who’d made it his mission to hunt down and kill mountain lions. As far as they knew he was still out there, and the rumor was he claimed his wife had been killed by a mountain lion. They knew he was from out of state and didn’t know much more about him, except that he had a knack for tracking lion. At midnight Alvarez said he’d rather take the first than second shift.

“Then I’ll see you at around 4:00.”

Shauf picked Marquez up on the levee road, dropped him at his truck, and he told her to go on to the safehouse and sleep. He’d see the night through with Alvarez. He ran the engine long enough to heat the cab, plugged his phone in to recharge, lowered the seat, turned the radio on low, and listened to Lucinda Williams singing. It didn’t take long for cold to seep back into the truck, and when he finally dozed he was listening to the wind high in the trees. He
dreamed of a simpler time when he’d been much younger and the world had looked more open.

At 4:00, before hiking back out along the edge of the orchard to take over from Alvarez, he drank a cup of cold coffee. Then he made the mile walk from his truck. The cold wind had strengthened, and Alvarez said he’d been moving around to try to stay warm.

“She’s still in there, Lieutenant.”

After Alvarez faded into the pear trees Marquez repositioned himself. He zipped his coat collar up and about twenty minutes later saw headlights he recognized as Abe Raburn’s slow on the levee road. Checked his watch, 4:22, thinking, okay, here we go, we’re on. Shauf hadn’t found Raburn’s pickup when she’d checked the bars or his houseboat earlier, but here he was now. His headlights flashed through the bare orchard trees. He pulled up in front of the shed, parked, and went in. A few minutes later Cindy Raburn left the canning building. She hurried down the road to the house, and Marquez waited for Raburn to come out.

But nothing happened. Marquez had been close to calling the safehouse and waking the team, had expected him to load and go, but instead, the lights went out in the canning building and Raburn was still in there. Now, he came out and walked around on the gravel. It took Marquez a minute to realize Raburn was talking on a cell phone. Then up on the levee road a car slowed and turned down. Marquez read the profile as a Toyota hybrid, a Prius, as it drove past his position. It drove slowly along the gravel road until Raburn stepped out into the headlights and directed the driver to park near the canning building door.

The driver got out, and Marquez used the light-enhanced feature to tape boxes getting loaded into the rear of the hybrid. He called Shauf.

“Raburn showed up and took over for Isaac’s wife, and now we’ve got a driver picking up a load of boxes. Looks like Raburn Orchards boxes. Get everyone up at the safehouse. We’re rolling.”

He called Alvarez and woke him as the hybrid started moving. Alvarez picked up the car as it climbed up to the levee road and then gave it a lot of room. Marquez hustled out and up to the road, and Shauf dropped him at his truck.

“She’s going toward I-5,” Alvarez said.

“You say, she?”

“Looked like a white female at the wheel when it passed me, but I’m not sure yet.”

“How good a look did you get?”

“I didn’t. The driver is wearing a cap. I’m running the plates right now.”

“Good, because I didn’t get them when it went past.”

The hybrid got on 5 northbound and continued into the darkness beyond Sacramento. Cairo passed it and reconfirmed the driver was female and they already had a registration address in Thousand Oaks. Southern California.

“A long way from home,” Marquez said, and thought of the car Ludovna had stolen and burned.

“Who’s closest?” Marquez asked.

“I am,” Roberts said, “and I like it. It’s a nice color blue. I think it’s an ‘05. I wish Detroit would get off its ass and start making a good hybrid. I’d like to get one of these.”

“Keep working at headquarters,” somebody said, and Marquez asked, “How can you tell it’s an ‘05?”

“Some article I read, the detailing is a little different.”

Marquez felt the subdued optimism running through the team. They were still in darkness but they had the car surrounded. They
wouldn’t lose it. He hadn’t said so yet, but he’d also thought it was a woman who’d gotten out and helped Raburn load boxes in the rear. With night-vision goggles it was difficult, things bulked out, but in general men and women walk differently, not all, but most, and then something in the way she moved her arms, shifted to let Raburn slide a box in. You carry a memory of the way somebody moves.