Dead Game jm-3

by Kirk Russell

  Anna had done things here for her ex, though not necessarily willingly. Coercion and extortion were sacred values etched deep in the granite pillars of organized crime, so maybe it all strung together, Anna delivering stolen cars or running caviar a thousand miles because she felt she didn’t have a choice. He debated what the implications were to their investigation. If there’d been any lingering question about Anna’s compromising them, there was no question anymore, and he was mulling that over when Katherine called. She was so upset her voice quavered.

  “Maria didn’t come home after school and now she’s called and says she’s moving out.”

  “Moving where?”

  “In with two of her friends who have an apartment in San Francisco. Wendy and Stacey. You’ve met them.” He’d met them but wasn’t sure which was Wendy and which was Stacey. “John, where are you?”

  “In Seattle. We followed a suspect moving caviar from the delta.” He sketched for her quickly how they’d gotten here, then said, “I’ll call Maria, right now.”

  Maria answered on the third ring.

  “I can’t deal with it anymore.”

  “What can’t you deal with?”

  “Fighting with Mom, and I’m eighteen. I’m a legal adult. I can work and pay rent and still go to school. I can’t handle it anymore, besides it’s totally dysfunctional around there. You’re never home, and Mom is always working too much because you’re not home. It’s time for me to make my own life.”

  “You need to finish high school first.”

  “I will. And I’ll go to college when I’m ready.”

  He heard resolution in her voice that gave him hope, a fierceness that caused him to smile. Nothing was said for a moment, and he looked into the blank fluorescence of the garage, stripes painted on the floor.

  “I’m at Wendy and Stacey’s apartment.” Then she added for no obvious reason. “And Shane is going to quit if Mom doesn’t stop dissing him.”

  He knew Shane worked at the Presto on Union because Maria had talked about him. But don’t question her about Shane. This thing has got to be unraveled a different way.

  “Are you with Mom?” she asked.

  “No, I’m in Seattle. We chased a suspect up here. Your mom called me a few minutes ago.”

  “Did you drive to Seattle?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s crazy. Is this on the sturgeon thing? Is it really worth it?”

  Marquez heard a young man’s voice say, “Hey, babe, we got to go,” and he realized whoever had said that was so nearby that he must have been listening in and there was enough push to the voice to show he wanted to control the situation.

  “I have to go,” Maria said.

  “Don’t hang up yet.”

  “Shane has to be at work early tomorrow morning. We went to dinner, and he just dropped me off. I’m at Wendy and Stacey’s, and I’m fine here, dad. I just can’t do it anymore.”

  “Where is their apartment?”

  “In the Mission.”

  “What address?”

  “You’re just going to say it’s a bad area.”

  “Have you ever heard me say stuff like that?”

  She didn’t answer. Behind her, “Come on, babe.”

  “I’m going to hang up, Dad.”

  He wasn’t sure what to say to her. He was very surprised she’d packed and left, but he couldn’t argue her home. He could order her home and she might obey, probably would, but it was already midnight and Katherine knew the two young women she was camping out with. This Shane figured in, but now wasn’t the time to try to figure that out.

  “I’ll see you at home tomorrow night,” he said.

  “What do you mean if you’re in Seattle?”

  “We’ll talk tomorrow night.”

  Not long after hanging up, Marquez had another conversation with the FBI special agents who’d given up on the lawyer and conferred with their supervisor, who’d then bumped the situation up to the S.A.C. running the Seattle Field Office. The Special-Agent-in- Charge was in contact with Ehrmann. The agent on the street with Marquez said, “You guys ought to pack it in. Looks like we’re going to deal with all of it from here.”

  “Are you going to stake out the building tonight?”

  “I’m going to do whatever they tell me. They’re going to get back to me. The S.A.C. is involved now. You stumbled into a big one.”

  “We didn’t really stumble into it, and we don’t want to lose track of this caviar. If these two guys come down the elevator barehanded in the morning and drive off, you’ll go with them.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you get Ehrmann on the line?”

  “No, he’s talking to my supervisor and my supervisor is talking to the S.A.C.”

  Marquez had a pretty good idea how the fifty-six FBI field offices worked. Many decisions got made at the task force and supervisory level, and the S.A.C. got informed of the progress of operations and had to give approval for aspects, but he was also the bureaucracy fall guy if a fuckup had to be contained to a particular field office. That way the big guys back east were protected from blame. A great thing about the Bureau was if they really set out to make something happen, it went down fast, but most of the time when they started talking about supervisors and S.A.C.s you could forget about anything happening fast, particularly if you weren’t talking about Federal violations.

  “You understand the problem,” the special agent said.

  “Sure.”

  The guys upstairs might be tied into Ehrmann’s larger investigation. They might go down on much larger violations than trafficking in illegal animal products. Sturgeon was very low on the list, but this special agent wasn’t going to say it. The agent took a phone call and stepped away. When he walked back over he said, “Ehrmann will explain when you get back to California.”

  “These boxes may move tonight. How many people have you got?”

  “We’ll handle it from here. I mean it. The word is your team is to pull out.”

  “If it doesn’t move tonight, we’ll pull out at dawn.”

  “You’re just going to make a problem for me and you.”

  Marquez was nonconfrontational but adamant. More phone calls got made and then it was agreed to. What could it hurt? He told Shauf to get some sleep and then sat awake in his truck. At first light it was still drizzling and the streets were dark and wet. The streetlight near the van hummed. Marquez got out and walked around. He knocked on Shauf’s window and then went over to talk to the FBI before leaving.

  Shauf followed him to the wharf. They found a place to eat, and Marquez ordered scrambled eggs with salmon and toast cooked dark and just barely touched with butter. Shauf ate a bagel and drank four cups of coffee. Then they woke up the team, and everyone headed south within an hour. As he left Seattle he saw the Olympic Range in his rearview, sunlight between the clouds reflecting off patches of snow high on the mountains. He drove slowly, fatigue heavy in him, and less than a hundred miles down the road he had to pull over and sleep.

  Now he was driving again and approaching the Klamath River in southern Oregon. Ehrmann called and the reception was bad, but Marquez didn’t expect to learn anything. Ehrmann’s voice was dry, rasping, a cough interrupting sentences that crackled and stretched with the poor connection.

  “We’re with her.”

  “Is she in custody?”

  “We’re not bringing her in.” Ehrmann coughed, and Marquez held the cell away from his ear. “We haven’t found your caviar.”

  After hanging up, Marquez crossed the Klamath River, and the brief glimpse of the Klamath conjured memories of the largest die-off ever in the United States, thirty-two thousand Chinook salmon as a result of the ongoing struggle for water rights. Plenty of people on either side to tell you exactly why it happened and how the other side was in conspiracy to perpetrate a lie, but one truth that couldn’t be argued very far was that the fall run this year of Chinook was down twenty-five percent. The biologi
sts guessed it would stay down at least another couple of years. That assumed normal rainfall and no more water diversions that killed the young.

  But even that was hardly news anymore. Perhaps we’d grow accustomed to eating salmon raised in pens. Only 2 percent of the salmon sold now was wild, and the pen farmers who fed their salmon dye to color it for market and fought regulating the antibiotics in the feed, they’d eventually get it figured out, wouldn’t they? Salmon had once swum in every ocean, but it didn’t need to be wild as long as we could build farms, pack them in ocean pens, and choose flesh colors like paint chips.

  Besides, trying to live in balance with these wild creatures was a hassle. Farmed salmon was cheaper, simpler, and the only way to meet the demand. Problems of funguses and lack of musculature from living in crowded pens, those were solvable. Perhaps growth hormones would speed up the time it took to get them to market and bring the price down further. That should please the shareholders, and look at what the chicken farm factories and hog operations had faced and solved. Eventually, no one would remember what wild salmon tasted like anyway, or maybe they’d finally get sold on the idea that farmed salmon tasted the same, or even better. It was just a matter of the right ad campaigns.

  The Lacey Act passed in the early part of the twentieth century was still the one law game wardens could count on, the strongest measure ever passed in the States to protect wildlife, but it hadn’t come from Congress’s desire to achieve a balance with the wild. It passed out of fear that we’d lose everything at the current rate of slaughter. We’d lose what we believed we rightfully owned, and maybe that view was a big part of the problem. We didn’t really own the wild or the right to wipe out species. We’d beaten back our predators and just assumed the right to whatever we wanted with the rest of the creatures.

  But fast forward a hundred years. A different battle was underway in the West for habitat and species survival. Whether it was economically feasible to preserve salmon runs for future generations, or fair to make hardworking businesses suffer to allow a species to survive, those were open questions. The debate wasn’t so much about how to live in balance with nature, but whether it was worth the effort, whether the wild meant anything to us.

  Let it go, Marquez thought. You think too much and you’re beat. He put the Klamath behind him, remembering the rants of radio talk show hosts as the controversy was in full swing, radio hosts whose only real art was in turning issues needing discourse into venal political standoffs. It all took him down today. His usual resilience wasn’t there, and when another call came from Ehrmann he let it go to voice mail and only took calls from the team. He told everyone to break the drive in half, find a motel, and finish the drive tomorrow. But he kept driving. When he was still three or four hours out he called Maria.

  “I’m going to be late, Maria.”

  “How late?”

  “I probably won’t get home until after 10:00.”

  “Then I’m going to stay at Stacey’s again. I’m at Stacey’s, and I was going to leave pretty soon, but if you’re going to be that late I may as well stay here.” She sounded calm, said it without any attitude. “I’m here and working on my homework. I have another three hours of homework.”

  “Okay, stay there tonight, but understand it’s not going forward this way. It’s not okay to move out.”

  “I know everyone thinks I’m completely ungrateful, but Mom is the one who said the worst things.”

  What he felt like saying was knock it off, Maria, grow up and come home. You’ve got a pretty good life, a lot better than what your mom or I had at your age. But he held back. He’d see her tomorrow. He made two other calls on the way home, one dependent on the other, the first to his ex-chief, Bell, to reconfirm, then a call to Ludovna.

  “I’m calling to invite you over the day after tomorrow. What kind of vodka do you like?”

  “Cold.” A laugh. “Hey, my new friend, whatever you like is good for me.”

  “Let me give you an address, and we’ll meet right around dark.”

  When he got home it was nearly midnight. He found Katherine sitting in the darkness on the couch. The only light on was down the hallway. Her arms were crossed and she held herself. He touched her face, felt the wet streaks of tears, and her face was hot.

  “I am so upset. I remember when her father left I promised her what I would do for her. She doesn’t remember, she was too young, but it was about this time of year, and Jack hadn’t had a job offer in eleven months. Then he got the offer from the security firm, and the only position they had for him was in Alaska. He had just one day to decide, and I think he was as relieved as I was. I knew when he left he wouldn’t be back and that the marriage was over. I don’t even know where he stayed when he got there, but I think he had a girlfriend later on and he didn’t call very often. He never came home again.”

  Katherine was quiet, looking at him in the darkness. These were memories he knew she’d rather leave undisturbed, but she continued now.

  “I let Maria sleep in my bed for six months. She turned inside herself. Her little smile went away. She used to smile all the time, and she stopped laughing. I made her promises then, one of those was that we would always be close and I would always take very good care of her. Do you know what she said tonight, John? She said she can’t live around me. Sometimes I think she hates me.”

  “I think a lot of it is about struggling with herself. She’s eighteen and wants to be independent but can’t be. She’s not financially independent, but if she was she might be ready to get out there on her own.”

  “That’s ridiculous, she’s in high school. When I was a senior in high school that would never have occurred to me, and of course I got angry with my mother, but wanting to move out of the house, I would never have thought like that. She says I’m a control freak and I’ve always micromanaged her life. Am I a control freak?”

  “Sure.”

  “All I’ve ever tried to do is make sure she has the most opportunity she can.”

  “And you’ve done that. Now she wants to do it on her own.”

  “She doesn’t know what she wants. She doesn’t know what she wants to study or where to go to school.”

  “She’ll figure it out.”

  “She’s been eighteen for all of two weeks. She’s just a girl still, so what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying she wants to grow up, and the best thing you can do, or we can do, is show her a way to be. I was on my own as soon as high school was over. I remember what it feels like.”

  “This is my daughter, and she’s still in high school. She’s sleeping on a couch in some ratty apartment in San Francisco. Are you telling me that I should accept that?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Then, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying talk to her as though she was thirty. She’s not, she’s just a kid in so many ways, but she’s ready to step it up a notch.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Try her.”

  34

  Early the next morning he sat at the dining room table and wrote his report on his laptop. In a separate file he added what they’d learned in the past two days, and then he read through everything to date. He had coffee with Katherine. She left for San Francisco, and he was on the phone with headquarters and the team as they continued driving home.

  Outside, the sky was white and smooth, and when he talked with Shauf she was still way up north but said it was the same blank sky. He made more coffee, grilled a cheese sandwich, cleaned his gear and guns, switched trucks, and drove into San Francisco to the FBI Field Office.

  “I can only give you five minutes,” Ehrmann said.

  “My questions won’t take long. You let us follow her all the way up there before backing us off. That’s a long ride, Stan. Why didn’t you tell me before you’ve had her under surveillance?”

  “I did tell you. I said we lost her, and we’re lucky you found her again.”

  “Why didn’t y
ou tell me last week she was alive?”

  “Because we’re very close to our takedown, and it’s a very dangerous group we’re targeting. You’d seemed to have already accepted the idea that she burned you. I had planned to brief you when the time came.”

  “You’re putting a lot of energy into following her. You could pick her up but you’d rather follow her. You’re hoping she’ll lead you somewhere.”

  “We are.”

  “Where?”

  “To more individuals associated with this crime ring.”

  No kidding, Stan, but what individuals? If he asked about Karsov again he’d get a blank answer.

  “Why did she go to the trouble to stage her abduction?”

  “We’re not sure who she was trying to fool.”

  “Not us.”

  “No, not you.”

  “The FBI?”

  Ehrmann shrugged.

  “Make a guess.”

  “I can’t do that for you.”

  Nothing about Ehrmann was squirrelly, but he was acting squirrelly, and Marquez felt like the guy in the room who was only getting part of the picture. He understood the Feds thought Anna might lead them to more players in this Ukrainian mob group they were targeting, but there were gaps, and he could tell he wasn’t getting the whole picture. Maybe he wasn’t asking the right questions. Ehrmann waited for the next one, and Marquez didn’t ask it. Instead, he stood up. Ehrmann’s five minutes was up, and if it was an hour it wouldn’t make any difference today.

  From his truck he checked in with the team. They’d started driving early this morning from the Oregon border and were still a hundred miles from Sacramento and the safehouse. He recrossed the Golden Gate, drove up the mountain, and waited for Maria to get home. She didn’t have a sixth or seventh period today so was home by 2:00. She came in the door, then called, “Dad, where are you?”