Redback kr-4

by Kirk Russell

  The meeting ended twenty minutes later. That afternoon Marquez bought flowers from a florist near his apartment and then drove to the Osiers’ house with the big vase and lilies filling his car with fragrance. Last night he’d written a letter that he now gave to Jim’s oldest son, telling the boy that the letter was for his mother and for himself and his two brothers. He came home to his empty apartment and the Saturday mail that included a small package with two micro-cassettes and a one-phrase note in Billy Takado’s handwriting on a piece of lined paper.

  ‘In case something happens to me. Billy.’

  For a minute Marquez didn’t move and then dug in his gear bag for his recorder. He locked the door and closed the slider to the deck, then put the tape labeled #1 in and stood the little recorder on a kitchen counter.

  ‘I’m making these tapes and giving them to a friend to mail to you. There’s a guy named Emrahain Stoval. I saw him yesterday. He was with the Salazars at that restaurant I told you about in Tijuana and he didn’t see me, but if he does I’m dead.

  ‘In 1971 I was a twenty-two year old hunting guide with a small business in San Fernando, Mexico. Mostly, I guided dove hunts. Some of my clients were Mexicans and some came down from Brownsville. My father was Japanese, my mother Mexican, maybe I told you that once. My mother came from San Fernando and there was a lot of white-wing dove in that area. Flying knuckleballs is what they got called and you could shoot what you wanted, so it drew plenty of hunters. I had a good business and I was in love and engaged to get married. Her name was Rosalina and she was everything to me.

  ‘One day Stoval showed up. He was a big wing hunter and we got to be friends and he had a lot of money and pretty soon he was taking me places I could never have gone on my own. He had all kinds of money and liked to hunt with me, so we went all over the world. Africa, Asia, everywhere. We left for Canada and a bear hunt the day Rosalina disappeared. I was one of the last people to see her alive. Her body turned up on a dirt road out near a farm in Tamaulipas and that’s pretty much where my life ended. She’d been raped and strangled and the federales didn’t have any suspects so started looking at me. They thought I killed her before I left.

  ‘They would have charged me, but Stoval backed them off. He hired a good lawyer. He knew the right people to call and he even paid for a beautiful headstone. He was my only real friend and he got me back to work guiding again. He’d come into town and check on me every month or two, or he’d call me. He invested money in my business and I hired other guides and Stoval was my silent partner. That’s how he works. He’s like a disease you get and the symptoms show up gradually.

  ‘One morning we were sitting in a duck blind and I told him we needed more money to start bringing in richer clients. I wanted to build cottages and a hunter’s bar and restaurant.’

  Billy coughed. A glass touched a counter and Marquez heard Billy swear as something spilled. No doubt a drink from his slowed voice.

  ‘He listened to me and said we could do it, but it was a lot of money and it was going to change our relationship. He’d become the real owner. I’d still have a share and I’d make a much better living, but I’d be working for him. Man, I was just a kid and trying to get over Rosalina and I trusted him – I wasn’t always the mess I am now. We made the deal and bought a new bus to bring rich Texans down. They liked the idea of being able to drink on the bus and not have to drive in Mexico. We got the bus and built the cottages and the restaurant and by then I knew what he was doing with me. It was what he’d been doing from the start and I hadn’t realized it. He broke me down a little at a time until I was just a servant to him. He started talking to me like he owned me. Once after a hunt he had me wait outside with the dogs.

  ‘The bus got a special compartment so it could carry cocaine under the bed. He showed that to me after he got me hooked on coke. My job was to take the bus to a mechanic’s shop on every run north. They’d unload it there. We went three or four years that way, but I got myself off coke and I watched how people he didn’t like disappeared. I started making a plan and one day after dropping the bus at the mechanic’s, I walked out and didn’t stop until I got to California.

  ‘I heard later that he put out a contract on me so I hid for a long time, and eventually enough years went by that I stopped worrying. But it’s not like I ever stopped watching. When I saw him yesterday I knew he’d still kill me if he could because I’ve told people he killed Rosalina. I never had any proof. I just knew.

  ‘I’m going ahead with the meeting at the bull ring with you because that’s the deal, and he won’t be there. But the brothers know him, so I’ve got to take off, man. I’ve got to go a long way away. You’re getting these tapes so you know nothing bad happened to me. I left these with a friend and asked her to mail them. I’ll get back in touch with you sometime, but it might be a while. You always treated me fair and never made me feel like something that should be wiped off a shoe. You take care, John. Sorry to skip out on you.’

  Marquez clicked off the recorder, opened a beer, sat out on the deck and thought it over. By the time he called Kerry Anderson’s home number it was 2:10 in the morning on the east coast and he woke Anderson up. But Anderson didn’t mind and even thanked him. He said, ‘I need you to send me those tapes.’

  TEN

  Marquez and Steiner watched the tour boat through a chain link fence from the corner of a port parking lot. Steiner was gray at the temples, fit though nearing fifty, too old to be sitting in a car watching a boat, and he was having trouble with it.

  ‘Holsten called me Friday afternoon,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t say what the Saturday meeting would be about but I was sure it was good news. My wife went out and bought a good bottle of champagne and steaks to celebrate. Ninety-five bucks for the champagne – I thought for sure it was a promotion.’

  ‘Did you drink the champagne?’

  ‘We drank it Friday night. I should have known better.’

  ‘He said you’re old friends. You started at the DEA together.’

  ‘Oh, he was everybody’s friend, you know what I mean. He was climbing the first day he got here. You know why I’m here, right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  One of the rumors swirling was that all of Group 5 was dirty. Osiers took money and it was going to turn out all of them were in on it. When Marquez walked through the squad room yesterday his presence hung like second hand smoke, and that was very hard on his pride. He felt an untethering from what he’d been so loyal to and anger moving around inside him like something alive.

  He lifted binoculars and scanned the white-painted hull now, nervous energy billowing in him. Four foot high blue and red lettering read Captain Jack’s Sea Tours. For seventy-five bucks you got a bumpy sea cruise that might include whale and dolphin sightings and lunch. If you wanted a beer with your lunch you paid at the bar where the Fab Four featured Pacifico, Bohemia, and Corona smuggled in from Ensenada. They bought caseloads of beer and avoided duties and taxes by selling it for cash on the boat. In the tour schedule were gaps where Group 5 had figured out the runs to Ensenada got made. The boat was just back from one of those. They should have drugs to move but whether it would be today was anybody’s guess.

  But now all that changed. The captain of the boat, Tony Marten, appeared and as Marquez focused the binoculars, Marten wheeled a large suitcase down the gangway on to the dock. Within minutes the other three followed also pulling black suitcases. It was improbable and comic and he understood Steiner’s chuckle, but it was also disturbing in a way Marquez couldn’t name yet. Maybe because the Fab Four were older and obviously awkward and uncomfortable in this role, Keystone Kops of crime. More than that, he thought, their actions looked forced, unplanned. It felt wrong.

  They rolled the suitcases out to an old diesel Mercedes and a maroon Chrysler LeBaron in the same lot Steiner and Marquez were in. Two suitcases went into each trunk and as they drove east out of the LA basin they separated by more than a mile and then traded off the lead. />
  Watching them switch the lead car again, Marquez guessed, ‘This part they’ve done before. We’ve been looking for a place they call the ranch. Maybe that’s where they’re headed.’

  Marquez felt the change. He radioed Hidalgo and Green and gave them their position.

  On the road to Palmdale the Mercedes and LeBaron were half a mile apart. The Mercedes turned off first and tracked down a dirt road running a straight half mile to a rundown ranch complex. A rooster tail of dust rose behind it, and the LeBaron came behind it a few minutes later. Marquez watched a man open sliding barn doors and both cars drive in. He brought the glasses back to the sagging ridgeline of the two-story house and told Steiner, ‘I’m going to call for more help in case we end up going in.’

  For an hour nothing more happened and then a white refrigerated truck drove out of the barn and bumped down the dirt road to the highway. Marquez radioed Brian Hidalgo.

  ‘OK, now we’ve got a refrigerated truck with two Hispanic males leaving the ranch and turning south on to the highway. The name Campania Poultry is painted on the side. We’re going with it; stay with the ranch.’

  An hour and a half later, south of LA, the refrigerated truck exited and drove past a new strip mall and subdivision and five miles out into dry hills. Marquez and Steiner hung back as it climbed into low hills and disappeared over a crest down into a valley. There, another vehicle, a black BMW four-door, waited on a dirt turnout. Beyond the vehicles the road dead-ended, so they’d have to come back out this way. The BMW driver got out and opened his trunk. The driver of the refrigerated truck and his companion were also out of their vehicles. One man relieved himself on the side of the road and Marquez didn’t see the suitcases. The men looked around and watched the road their direction, but he didn’t get the feeling this was a drug transfer.

  ‘If that poultry truck has the suitcases in it, he’s only going to be able to carry two of them,’ Steiner said. ‘He’ll have to put the other two in the backseat.’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t know what they’re doing here.’

  ‘They’re up to something.’

  Marquez agreed. He just wasn’t sure what it was yet. When the BMW driver pulled two orange plastic gas containers from the trunk another thought hit him and he touched Steiner on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m going to radio for county backup.’ Now he hustled back to where they left the car and radioed for help. Then he pulled the car forward to where the men below could not see it and leaned on the horn. Sound carried out over the valley, but only briefly.

  The low heavy whumph of the gas igniting drowned the horn. An orange-yellow ball of fire enveloped the poultry truck and the BMW was already accelerating their way.

  ‘Get in the car,’ Marquez yelled to Steiner, as the Beemer climbed toward them.

  Now the BMW driver rode his horn and their bumper, and then tapped them hard as Marquez drove slowly and blocked them from passing. As the Beemer hit them, the car fishtailed and Marquez fought for control. He straightened it out. He swung over to the right and the Beemer roared up alongside with the front passenger window lowering. Marquez hammered the accelerator, turned into them and rode the BMW right off the road. It plowed down the embankment, making terrible metal ripping sounds as the rocks and brush tore its guts out. At the bottom it spun sideways. It slammed into a tree.

  ‘You’re fucking crazy, Marquez. We need to call an ambulance.’

  ‘Call it in.’

  Marquez started down with his gun out, Steiner at the edge of the road on the radio. One man made it out a window before he got there, but that guy had a big bump on his forehead and a confused stare. Marquez walked them all back up the slope and with Steiner handcuffed the biggest and put restraints on the other. County backup arrived within minutes and the men went into county cars.

  At the bottom of the hill the poultry truck still radiated heat, though a fire crew had sprayed foam and then cooled it with water. The stench was acrid, burned rubber and plastics. Part of the rear door had melted and after he got inside the county detective waved everybody back and then talked to Marquez.

  ‘I’m going to ask you to take a look and tell me what you can,’ he said. ‘There are four of them but it’s not pretty. You OK getting in there?’

  Seeing the charred bodies of the Fab Four left Marquez quiet and he was only able to ID two of them. They’d need dental records for the other two. When he left there with Steiner they drove back toward Palmdale. A SWAT team moved in before they got there and Hidalgo radioed, ‘We’re in the barn with four suitcases packed with coke and we’ve made one arrest, a Jose Pinza, but I don’t think he knows much more than he’s supposed to guard these suitcases. Someone else took off on a dirt bike as we were coming in. We’re trying to find him, but he may have gotten away. Why did they kill those guys?’

  ‘That’s what we need to figure out and we’re not coming to you anymore, we’re heading back to the harbor.’

  Marquez and Steiner put on tactical vests and DEA jackets in preparation for boarding and literally ran into a man leaving the boat with a duffel bag. The man dropped the bag and took off running. They lost him but got the duffel bag and as Harbor Police searched for him, Marquez and Steiner went through the bag. It held business records. Five minutes more and the man he’d chased would have gotten away with it.

  Marquez locked the bag in their trunk and then boarded the boat with Steiner and two local officers. In the main cabin were benches with red cushions and a vending machine for coffee drinks and cocoa. There was a bar. You could whale watch from the bar. Below were sleeping quarters, a bathroom, and a tiny galley. They ran crime tape but they didn’t find anything.

  When they got back to the Field Office the green duffel bag was checked in as evidence and inventoried. Marquez checked it out again immediately and took it upstairs. He spread everything out on a table and started going through it as he waited for Hidalgo and Green to make it back from the ranch. With Steiner he made one pass through all the documents in the duffel bag, and in the early evening after Steiner went home, he worked his way slowly back through the leather bound account books. Accounting wasn’t his deal. He wasn’t any good at it and it took him hours to figure out how they were coding things.

  Hidalgo and Green picked up some food on their way in and brought him a burger and fries. When they walked in he said, ‘Look at this. There’s a plane in San Diego and this almond grower out in the valley. This could be how the Salazars move much bigger loads.’

  They looked over his shoulder but they were done for the day. For Hidalgo and Green it could wait until tomorrow.

  ‘Try the burger,’ Green said. ‘It was good.’

  But Marquez was just getting to his point. He looked at Hidalgo, and then Green.

  ‘The Salazars knew we were going after the tour boat. These guys died because they knew too much and we had them targeted. They lured them out to that ranch house and then sent someone to clean documents off the boat.’

  ‘Osiers,’ Green said, and Marquez didn’t answer because that didn’t explain it. He looked at Green, then Hidalgo, and said, ‘Let’s find this almond orchard and the pilot in San Diego.’

  ELEVEN

  Before dawn Marquez retrieved his copy of the LA Times. When he slipped the rubber band off he found a sealed envelope with his name on it taped to the front page. In the envelope was a sheet of paper with typed excerpts of an autopsy report that could only have come from the LAPD detective, Ed Broward, though Broward didn’t sign it.

  He read and then laid the sheet of paper on the newspaper. The skin of his face felt as if he had just walked into a very hot wind. When he picked up the autopsy report again, his hand trembled with anger and visions of revenge surged in him.

  ‘Severe skull fracture as a result of cranialencephalic trauma… No contrecoup-type injuries were found but severe contusions occurred most likely a result of bone fragmentation and subsequent impact of brain surface… Injuries indicate the victim’s head was in a fixed
position… hemorrhaging and contusions indicate victim was alive…’

  He reread the paragraph. Osiers was alive for hours as his skull was mechanically crushed. They drew it out. Marquez stared at the words and then made a decision that he tried to tell himself wasn’t impulsive and fueled by anger. He refilled his coffee, gassed up the car at the corner Chevron and rolled south with the dawn traffic, running in a stream of lights toward San Diego.

  From the San Diego Airport he phoned Sheryl and left the message that he was checking out the pilot of the Sherpa aircraft whose name they found in the tour boat documents. When she called back he didn’t take the call. He let it go to voice mail, as he did with all calls he received that morning. He located the Sherpa, a boxy former Coast Guard transport plane, sitting on a runway, gray and cool in the early light. He copied down the tail numbers and took photos, and then drove south toward the border, toward the San Ysidro Gate and Mexico, and crossed to Tijuana, fully aware of what he was doing.

  He drove the main drag past the discount everything stores, the instant auto-body repair shops, the massage parlors, the few remaining floristas, and then left La Revo and worked north until he found the restaurant Takado showed him, a place where the narco-juniors, the wannabes, gathered and hung with Miguel Salazar.

  He parked, went in, asked for a table in a corner just inside the back patio, knowing that he was going to do something he might later regret. He told himself he’d already known Osiers’ skull had been crushed, but that didn’t change him. Morning sunlight fell through the leaves of a jacaranda tree and the shadows of the leaves flickered over his wrists and hands as he rested them on the table. The waiter came and he ordered huevas a la Mexicana, eggs scrambled with chili, onion, and tomato, and drank coffee and watched the iron gate at the back of the patio garden.

  Just before 9:00 a.m. a white Porsche parked across the street near his car and two young and well-dressed men entered the restaurant. They walked toward the patio, shoes clicking on the tile, hard stares searching for anything and finding Marquez, as he knew they would, as he willed them to. He lifted his coffee cup in a mocking salute as they passed by, his eyes answering their promise of violence.