by Kirk Russell
‘You went to Loreto in 1990 looking for Alicia Guayas.’
‘That’s true, I did, but I didn’t find her and I learned later she’d gone north and crossed the border.’
‘We have reason to believe you murdered Alicia Guayas and dumped her body in the Sea of Cortez in May 1990.’
‘You don’t stop, do you?’ Marquez turned and looked at the other agent. ‘You two came here believing I murdered Alicia?’
‘You went back to Loreto and you found her.’
‘I went back but I didn’t find her. I found her in California later and she’s not dead. She lives here in the Bay Area and I still see her about once a month. Her son lives with her.’
‘Where? Give me an address.’
‘She’s not legal. She never took the steps. I’m not ready to give you an address.’
Murkowski had to think awhile on that one. She had several options including going to the SAC here and requesting that he get Alicia Guayas’ address from Marquez. Instead, she demanded, ‘Are you in a relationship with her?’
‘As in an affair, no, and my wife knows her. Alicia and her son have been to our house for dinner.’
‘Why?’
Marquez understood what she was asking. ‘It’s complicated, but let’s say I have always believed that Jim Osiers may have been innocent. I saw his body. I made the identification. Miguel Salazar tortured him.’
The agent next to her snorted and said, ‘You knew ahead of time he was in the truck outside the Field Office.’
Marquez glanced at him, but spoke to Murkowski after reaching and tapping the first document she’d slid at him.
‘There were two cartel guards in the bull ring, both with AK-47s. One was a Tijuana cop Billy recognized.’ He held her eye and acknowledged her work. ‘I see how you got there.’
He did see it. She stepped out of the room now with her assistant and Marquez picked up his cell and scrolled down to the address book. He found Alicia’s phone number. Murkowski walked back in just as Alicia answered. An hour later Murkowski stood in Alicia’s apartment looking at a photo of Alicia retrieved from her bedroom. In the photo she was young and Osiers looked trim and fit standing alongside her. Behind them was the Sea of Cortez. Osiers was smiling. He was a month from dying. Alicia cradled the framed photo as Murkowski studied it.
Marquez watched her change as she talked to Alicia. They were there two hours and outside she allowed she’d made mistakes, but took a parting shot before getting in her car.
‘If you interfere at all with my investigation of Sheryl Javits, you’re going to end up with an obstruction charge. I’ll give you my word on that. Is that clear enough?’
FIFTY-ONE
Early the next morning Marquez flew into LAX and then drove to Venice. He walked into the Rose Café a little after 9:00 and told the hostess, ‘I’m looking for a friend.’
Without missing a beat, she answered, ‘So am I.’
They both laughed and she led him to a table outside under a covered area where Raymond Mendoza aka Rayman sat alone with an omelet and a plate of toast. He wore a leather cowboy hat, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, jeans, and sandals. He looked like an artist.
‘Rayman.’
‘Hey man, what’s going on, long time.’
There were no handshakes, smiles or pretense of liking each other, no pretending that they were both just living their lives doing their thing. Marquez slid one of the plastic chairs back and sat down. Rayman took another bite of omelet and spread jelly on a piece of toast. Sheryl didn’t know whether Rayman knew yet about Holsing, but said use the information with Rayman if you need to, and Marquez dropped it right on him now.
‘They found Holsing’s body last night.’
Rayman briefly put his toast down, then reconsidered and took another bite as Marquez guessed he already knew Holsing was dead.
‘Do you want to know where he was found and how he died?’
Rayman, mouth full of toast, shook his head, no.
‘I need you to pass a message to Stoval for me. It’s personal.’
Rayman’s face had filled out and his eyes sat back in it, coal black, watchful, the student who studied economics in college still back there somewhere, the guy who did a ten spot in prison watching him.
‘The message is that if anything happens to anyone in my family I’m going to quit my job and hunt Stoval until I find him. The message is this time I won’t stop. Pass it up the chain. It’ll get there.’
‘I’m not in the biz anymore. I did ten years in prison.’
‘From what I know about him he wouldn’t want you to sit on the message. But that’s your decision to make. Do you want me to try somebody else and tell them I tried you and you refused to pass the message on?’
‘You don’t want to send that message, man.’
Rayman ate some more and then got agitated. He pushed the plate away and waved the waitress off as she tried to refill his coffee. He pulled his wallet out to pay as Marquez asked, ‘After you made that phone call eighteen years ago and gave Sheryl the tip that the Salazars were going to rip off a load, who did you call next?’
‘Miguel.’
‘Miguel Salazar?’
‘Yeah, man, Miguel Salazar. Who else would I call?’ He belched and laid a twenty dollar bill on the table. ‘I was working for him.’
‘Jim Osiers got set up.’
Now Rayman smiled. ‘The bitch is in trouble, isn’t she? It’s why you’re here. She came to my parole hearings and fucked with me and now she’s going to get hers. I’m talking to the DEA, I’m out with it, man. I’ve told them how the Salazars made me lie.’
‘Who else did you call that night?’
‘No one.’
‘Yeah, you called Miguel and you made at least one other call, didn’t you? Then you figured it was a done deal. You disappeared back across the California border. But it didn’t end there and it was still waiting for you when you walked out of prison. It’s waiting for you now.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I can’t follow your crap.’
‘What happened has to be answered for. Pass that on to Stoval. Tell him I said it’s not over for him either.’
‘You’re like a prophet, man. You’re like this crazy dude who lives down the street from me and dresses like Jesus. He knows all about the future because he reads the Bible. Is that what you read?’ Rayman leaned forward, his bloated face hovering over the table. ‘Fuck you, Marquez.’
Marquez stood. He tucked the chair back in.
‘Pass the message on, Rayman.’
FIFTY-TWO
‘Stoval is in Indonesia,’ Desault said. ‘Have you ever heard of the Pramuka Market in East Jakarta?’
Marquez looked through the slider out toward the dark of the ocean and knew this was the call.
‘I’ve been there,’ he said. ‘I once rode along on a raid there, but it was all a big joke. Everyone was in on it but me. They set up these raids for illegal trade in endangered animals and I learned later they tip off the traders first, so the traders either don’t show up or leave the illegal animals at home. We were zeroing in on four people in LA who were bringing in orangutans and selling them for thirty thousand dollars each. They’d buy them for nothing and then ship a half dozen babies hoping one or two would survive the trip.’
‘Stoval got there last night. His jet is in Jakarta. If he flies out of Jakarta we’ll get some help tracking the flight, but you could be landing and taking off again. You could be coming right back home.’
‘I get it.’
And that’s what happened. Stoval flew out when Marquez was still in the air. Marquez got the word when he landed, but still went out to see the Pramuka Market, see if anything had changed. Not much had. It was still about the size of a football field and packed with animals that were terrified and for the most part marked for death. He walked through aisles with a pair of men trailing him as he took photos without buying. But no one bothered him and he spent a day there befo
re returning to Jakarta. When he flew home Katherine gave this first run her appraisal.
‘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
‘Well, 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
Stoval 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 warde
n 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.’