Redback (26 page)

‘The Airborne Agent returns,’ she said and handed him coffee. She sat down across from him. As she did her robe fell open and she asked, ‘Did you miss me?’

‘I always miss you.’

‘How was your trip?’

‘It was a long flight.’

‘Was it worth it?’

‘No.’

‘Who gets the airline miles?’

‘We do.’

‘You and the Feds, or you and me?’

‘When I say we, I always mean you and me.’

‘I’ve been wondering about that.’ More of her robe slid open. ‘Did you see any new sights?’

‘I went to the animal market in Pramuka. If anything, it’s a little bigger.’

‘Long way to go to look at a market, isn’t it?’

‘It was.’

‘Do you know what I think?’

She was going to tell him either way. The belt holding her robe at the waist came undone and on one side her robe fell open. Her nipples were a dark brown-red, her breasts a creamy white. He looked at the curve of her belly as she looked at him and then reached and touched smooth skin. He ran his fingers along the curve of her and then took a drink of coffee with the sound of the plane’s engines still in his head.

‘You’re never going to stop doing this, not until you retire. That’s what I think.’

She sat down on his thighs, robe sweeping open, legs straddling him. He kissed the breast nearest him. Some hard things had gotten said in the past week and more probably would, but they were talking and both knew if they kept talking there was a way through. He reached and drew her close, and they made love and fell asleep.

When they woke they took a walk up on Mount Tamalpais out a trail that cut across an open slope of grass brown and dry with fall. Earlier there was fog, but the fog was gone and blue sky was laced with strands of cirrus clouds. It was warm on the sun-hard trail with the smells of the dry grass and oak and the salt in the wind off the ocean. They left the trail, went down to a nearly flat spot between the trees where long ago after separating and nearly divorcing they had sat and talked their way through.

The conversation today was nothing like that day, but it was right to come here. From this spot you could look north to Point Reyes and down at the curving sand of Stinson Beach and trace that crescent to Bolinas and the tide running out of the lagoon. Katherine’s warm hand touched his and he took her hand in his and the certainty and anger dimmed a little. This choice of his had hurt her. There was no getting away from that.

‘It’s about everything I’ve ever done,’ he said.

‘That’s the sort of drama I’m afraid will get you killed. If you do get killed I’ll be angry at you for the rest of my life. I’ll flush your ashes down a toilet. I want to have fun with you. I want to have time together. We’ve gone a lot of years with too much time apart and if the new deal is running around the world chasing bad guys and calling me from unpronounceable places, then it’s hard to see when we’re going to get that time. I know why you’re doing it and I know I’ll never love anyone like I love you, but I need you to answer something for me, and I don’t want the answer today. This is my question. What is it in you that lets you risk everything we have? Not today, not here, but I need to know. I need you to tell me.’

FIFTY-THREE

‘
W
ell, so that was our first round,’ Desault said, as they talked on the phone. ‘There’s going to be some of that, and I’m sure you’ve thought about it.’

This was cheerleading. This was having a direct supervisor, but that was part of the deal and he was getting a feel for Desault. He liked Desault’s candor and that he wasn’t afraid to take a chance. They talked over the Indonesia trip and how much the world had shrunk since they both had started in law enforcement. Marquez had thought plenty about that on the ride home. A decade ago he chased poachers into Oregon or Nevada or tried to cut off poached abalone coming in from Mexico, but now they talked in terms of shipping points and global routes.

As Desault revisited Stoval’s bighorn hunt and the failure to apprehend him in Vegas, Marquez’s thoughts floated back to the nineteenth century when skin hunters in the US slaughtered the great herds of buffalo, antelope, and bighorn. A naturalist named Ernest Thompson Seton recorded it. He watched species that once had no fear of man taken to near extinction, but he couldn’t do anything to slow it. It took the Lacey Act of 1900 to do that. Seton wrote that the bighorn had no fear of man in those days. He wrote that we have to acknowledge that animals have rights. He meant the right to exist and have habitat. He wrote stories about animals to try to make his point, to try to bridge the disconnect. He wrote about an angel of the wild, a guardian that watched over the wild creatures, and if they ever needed one it was now as we crossed another threshold of extinctions with more or less the same excuses, the same fear that giving animals space risks necessary economic development of increasingly scarce resources. In truth, it risked something more threatening than that. It risked changing our view of how we inhabit the world.

On the flight home from Indonesia Marquez turned off the overhead light and around him most in the half-full business section were sleeping. Many had their window shades down. The engines thrummed, but the cabin was still. The long trip was a failure, yet he had made something of it by going to the Pramuka Market and taking in the scale again, the systematic marketing of life, the stacked cages.

It was an opportunity Desault had given him. It was a small window barely open, an idea forming. He felt in his coat for the maroon passport, took it out and held it in his hand for several minutes, gripping it like a ticket not to be dropped, and in some new way it was. Desault used the old-school slang name, redback, for the passport, and like him, Desault was long into a law enforcement career and trying to adapt to a changing world where criminals had gone global. This passport symbolized a new opportunity, one Marquez knew wouldn’t come for him again.

He had to make everything of the moment. Some inward fire relit in him as he walked the Pramuka Market. He did not see the way yet, but he knew this was his last best chance to make a difference.

‘We scoured Vegas looking for Stoval,’ Desault said. ‘We put effort into it. We ran that alias, Patrick Maitland, through everything and everybody.’

And they did the same in Alaska and believed they had a bush pilot with a sideline helicopter scenic tour business, who had yet another sideline that was bear hunting from the copter. In Phoenix there was a credit card used in the name of Patrick Maitland, and again in Houston, and from informants there, whispers of Stoval meeting with Zetas in Texas.

‘He may have come back through California and he may have returned to California again recently. We had a call this morning that he’s here, right now.’

‘That’s where you’re going with this?’

‘Yes. I’m wondering if there’s a hunting reason he’d return to California. He wouldn’t be after more bighorn, would he?’

‘No.’

‘You can’t think of anything?’

‘Not offhand.’

‘Are you on your way in?’

‘Yeah, I’ll see you soon, and I’ve got to tell you something, Ted. I passed a message through Rayman yesterday. I want Stoval to know that if anything happens to anyone in my family, I’ll turn in my badge and then I’ll be coming for him.’

‘You told that to Raymond Mendoza?’

‘I asked him to pass it on.’

Desault muttered something he couldn’t hear and hung up.

FIFTY-FOUR

S
toval knew of Rayman. He knew what Raymond Mendoza looked like and could name nearly everyone he had ever met. He’d never met this man, Rayman, who worked clubs in LA for the Salazar brothers and was now part of the reorg and new network. Mendoza was responsible for overseeing the management and harvest of a handful of grow fields in California. He was in charge of the field where the game warden was shot. He was smart, but not bright, and had it been his decision, after the game warden Stoval would have made Mendoza disappear. But though he was heavily invested the low level management decisions were not his call. Mendoza wasn’t his to worry about, at least not until now.

Raymond Mendoza was the man John Marquez chose to deliver a message and for that reason Stoval chose to meet with him. He needed to know why Marquez chose him, but now having sat with Mendoza for twenty minutes he was convinced there was nothing special about this man. They were along the coast highway coming through Malibu in Rayman’s black Hummer, a vehicle that was large for the road and drew unnecessary attention. He listened to Mendoza’s patter, the false earnestness about wanting to do more and move up in the organization, and then cut him off.

‘I don’t make those decisions and want you to stop talking about yourself. Tell me where you first met John Marquez.’

‘In Baja.’

‘Where and when in Baja?’

The man shouldn’t be running anything, Stoval thought. He was a self-absorbed idiot.

‘I met him in Loreto. I was the contact with the DEA for the Salazars. He was the one in charge when Miguel killed the DEA agent.’

‘Marquez trusts you.’

‘No, man, no, he is afraid of me. He hates me, but he thought I would be able to know how to reach you. He thought I could get the message to you.’

‘But you hadn’t ever met me.’

‘No, I know, I told him.’

‘Listen to me and then repeat back what I say to you.’

‘OK.’

‘You passed the message on to the people you work for and that’s all you know. You didn’t meet with me today.’

‘Oh, OK, that’s what I tell Marquez?’

‘You’ve never seen me.’

‘Right.’

‘Repeat what I just said.’ Stoval listened and then said, ‘Pull over, here. I’m going to borrow your vehicle.’

‘What do you mean, man?’

‘I’m borrowing your vehicle.’

Mendoza was slow. It took him another several seconds to pull over. Then he stalled leaving.

‘When will I get my Hummer back?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

Stoval smiled at him and adjusted the seat as Mendoza blinked in the sunlight on the road shoulder. Like a stray dog he’d have to be careful crossing the highway. Stoval pulled back on to the highway. In his rear view mirror he saw Mendoza run across the road and smiled as a pickup nearly hit him. Mendoza was worried about losing his Hummer, but soon enough he’d wish he’d never owned it.

FIFTY-FIVE

S
heryl ordered two glasses of red wine, Marquez a Corona. The waitress looked puzzled and asked Sheryl, ‘Two glasses?’

Sheryl held up two fingers and as the waitress left, said, ‘They’ve gone to my bank, the credit card companies, my neighbors, and not only are they prying into my life in any way they can, they expect me to remember every day I was ever in Mexico. They want me to remember in detail things that happened eighteen years ago. I can’t remember to get milk at the grocery store unless I write it on a Post-it and stick it on my dashboard. How am I going to remember what happened in Baja in 1989?’

She looked away from him before adding, ‘I’m about to get put on paid leave. My DEA career is over and I don’t have anything else to go to. What am I going to do?’

By the time the wine arrived Sheryl’s hands were shaking and her face had paled. The last week had visibly aged her. He watched her take a sip of wine and could hear Desault saying, ‘John, there’s a possibility she links to Stoval.’

‘It’s what I told you the other night, they went back to Pete. He showed them the checks written as part of the divorce settlement, and then agreed to sign an affidavit swearing there was no other money. But there was other money. He paid me the rest of the divorce settlement on the side. The settlement was as fucked-up as our marriage.’

‘So that money was the money you used for your house down payment here.’

‘Yes.’

‘You never declared the money?’

She didn’t want to say it aloud. She nodded. Marquez got it now. Murkowski alleged that Sheryl’s down payment on the house came from bribe money.

‘When does Murkowski think you got this bribe money?’

‘She goes all the way back to the Salazar Cartel or Stoval paying me via deposits made into the La Paz bank that Jim Osiers got tagged with. Then I hid the money offshore in that ALCRON account she told you about.’

‘You hid it for years until you bought the house?’

‘That’s right.’

‘OK, back to Phelps, where did a guy with an ATF agent’s salary get four hundred thousand dollars he could split with you?’

‘From a real estate deal he did with his brother and two sisters after their parents died. I don’t know any of the details of the deal, so don’t ask me.’

‘Come on, Sheryl, don’t say that. Don’t tell me you took it without knowing where it came from. Tell me some rich uncle died and was sleeping on a mattress stuffed with hundred dollar bills, and taxes were paid on it fifty years ago. But don’t tell me the Phelps I knew gave you a big chunk of cash and you don’t really know the details of where it came from, other than it was some real estate deal with siblings. That’s just not good enough.’