by Kirk Russell
She waved a self-deprecating hand at herself and the agent alongside.
‘You may also have been in love and afraid now you’re being unfair to him and blowing things out of proportion, but you’re not. He set that fire, Maria. He’s planning other operations and we’re racing the clock. I need you to help me, right now, here in this room. We don’t have a lot of time and you could save lives. Who else should we talk to? Give me some other names.’
Maria didn’t have any other names. Hosfleter thanked her, but later that night after Gant’s face showed on national news and the FBI announced a fugitive warrant naming him as wanted in connection with the fire bombing of the Wonder Rock Condominiums, Maria’s name got leaked as a former girlfriend questioned today. It sounded as if she’d been picked up and brought in. It was unfair and a decision to sweat Maria, despite Maria having come forward. Marquez listened to the TV report and then called Carol Shauf.
‘I’ll meet you there tomorrow,’ Shauf said. ‘I’ll borrow a DBEEP boat. See you around noon. Do you really think we can find this island?’
‘I don’t know, but I think we’ve got a better chance than anyone else.’
‘You might have a short comeback as a Fed if you go poking into someone else’s investigation.’
‘They’re coming after Maria.’
‘See you tomorrow. Look for a DBEEP boat.’
FORTY-FIVE
The next morning as Marquez drove toward the delta he talked to his sister. Darcey asked, ‘Do you remember when we were out of money and living in Berkeley in that trailer on that lot next to Mom’s friend’s house?’
‘Sure, on Blake Street, it’s hard to forget.’
‘Mom’s friend let us use that bathroom in the basement, only there was no shower so we had to wash in the sink or else go up to that lake in the park. What was the name of that lake?’
‘Lake Anza. Good times.’
‘Yeah, good times. It’s why I’ve never had kids. Something happened last night that made me think about that summer and helping Dad sell dope on Telegraph Avenue. Mom had that little colored tape for the baggies and you and me and Dad would go up there after dark and he’d find clients and then send us to get the money and deliver the dope because we were still minors.’
‘We were good at it.’
She laughed and said, ‘No, we were great, especially you. But remember that night that weird guy led us down the street to his van. We were carrying the baggies and he was going to pay us at his van.’
‘Durant Street toward the parking lot; there’s a building there now.’
‘We both knew that man was going to try to do something. Remember that feeling?’
‘What brings this back?’
‘Last night I started to go to my car after I locked up, and I just felt something was wrong, I don’t know what. I park my car where I can see it from my office, and we don’t have many problems like that here, but when I’m locking up late I’m more careful. I got that same feeling as that night in Berkeley, so I went back inside and sat up in the office with the lights out. I sat in my chair where I can look out the window and after awhile I fell asleep. When I woke up, I decided I was crazy. But when I looked outside, there was a man standing back behind the right rear of my car. It was like he stood up to stretch his legs. He must have been crouched down between a truck and my car.’
Her voice slowed now. She wanted him to register and remember what she was going to say next.
‘He stood for a minute or two and then crouched down again and I called the state troopers. Before they got there he took off in a Jeep Cherokee, so I called the troopers back and told them he was leaving Seward. They pulled him over in Moose and he had two guns in the car with suppressors. Turns out he’s wanted for a double murder in Georgia and the FBI agents up here think he’s a hit man.’
‘Have you got the agents’ names?’
She had their cards and read off their names and phone numbers.
‘I’ll call them. Is there somebody who wants your restaurant?’
‘You mean, like my partner hiring someone to kill me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jesus, John, this is Seward, Alaska.’
She didn’t have the fishing boat anymore and she’d never remarried, but she had a partner in the bar/restaurant and they were doing enough business to get by and he had never heard her talk about any strife with the partner. What he was going to ask now was unfair to Darcey, but even after being sworn in only yesterday, it was possible. Unlikely, but with a leak with the Bureau, it was possible.
‘Do you have some place outside of Seward where you could stay?’
‘Who would run the restaurant and bar?’
‘Your partner.’
‘John, I’ve got my dogs.’
‘Take them with you.’
‘You say it like it’s easy. John, all I have for money is this business.’
‘I’ll send you some money.’
‘You’ll send me some money? What are you talking about? I’m supposed to go hide? Until when? Is it because of what you’re getting into?’
‘It could be, Darcey, and I’m very sorry.’
‘What does that mean, that you’re sorry? You’re crazy if you think I can just pick up and go. Come on, John, is there really somebody out there who would come all the way here to hurt me because of something you’re doing? I don’t believe that. People like that don’t exist.’
‘There is somebody and the task force I’ve joined is targeting him.’
‘OK, then I’ll just leave everything and wait for you to tell me when I can come back. When are you going to tell me that?’
He didn’t have a good answer and he drove thinking about what to do. The Sacramento River was off to his right, green and smooth in the morning sun and he remembered Captain Viguerra saying that there are a few men that you should never go after unless you are prepared to give up everything you love. Some will take it all from you to stop you. Viguerra had brought his hands together slowly to demonstrate Miguel Salazar crushing the skulls of his enemies, then said, ‘But the ones to fear will kill you from the inside out. They will find out what you love and take it away. You will be alive still but dead inside. These you can only fight if you have nothing to lose.’
FORTY-SIX
Maria remembered the island as close to the Antioch Bridge, so he and Shauf worked slowly away from the bridge, island to island. They circled several and returned a third time to one. Shauf dropped him at a rotting dock and Marquez climbed up to a levee road where he found a fishing rod and a tin bucket with anchovies, but no fisherman. He walked the road looking down to his left at the island and watching on the other side in the trees and brush near the water for the fisherman. He figured it was someone was looking for catfish in the tules.
On the island side of the levee was an ancient apple orchard and falling-down sheds with corrugated metal siding. Even from here he could see someone had walked through the dry rye grass between the trees in the orchard to one of the sheds, and momentarily he considered hiking down, but they’d already been on the river four and a half hours and Shauf was ready to call it an afternoon. She needed to get the boat back. He studied the sheds out across the orchard, and then walked back to the rotted dock and Shauf’s DBEEP boat.
On the way home he called Hosfleter and gave her the coordinates of three islands. Then he made another call and a stop in the town of El Cerrito where Alicia Guayas and her son, James, lived in an apartment just off the freeway. Maybe he stopped today because he felt the past returning. Alicia handed him a mug of rich Mexican hot chocolate with canela and frothed milk. A Telenova soap opera played on TV. She turned that off and their conversation turned first, as it always did, to family.
Alicia named James after his father, Jim Osiers, and he was like any other American kid that had grown up here. He sounded and acted like a typical American teenager, and Alicia expressed her worry that she was still illegal and that everything coul
d come crashing down for James. Years ago, Marquez wrote letters for her to try to help her get legal status, but he didn’t think she ever did anything with them. She was either afraid of being deported or blew it off.
On his last trip to Loreto in 1990 Marquez discovered that Alicia had gone north with the baby and crossed the border. It took him two more years to track her down in California and longer to get her to understand he didn’t mean her any harm. He helped her out financially and she paid him back. She always insisted on paying him back. She worked two jobs and had never remarried. Her focus now was on James going to community college next year.
Beautiful Loreto with its sand and Sea of Cortez was just a tourism poster on her kitchen wall now. Sitting at her kitchen table he could hear the trucks going by on the freeway. The hot chocolate mug vibrated on the table when he set it down and stood to leave. He had asked new questions about Jim Osiers and after walking him to the door she said, ‘For me, I just want to be here with my son. For you, the past is still alive, isn’t it?’
When he got back on the road Katherine called and reported factually, but sounded very disturbed as she said, ‘We got broken into today. When I got home the slider to the deck was open.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘In my car waiting for the police to get here. I didn’t go in. Where are you?’
‘Leaving El Cerrito. I stopped to talk to Alicia Guayas and I’m stuck in traffic now. It’s going to take me forty minutes.’
‘Here come the police.’
‘Call me after you walk through.’
Katherine walked through with two police officers and couldn’t find anything missing except a photo of Maria. The photo had been stripped from its frame and the frame dropped on the hardwood floor.
‘Why would anybody do that? Who would do this? It can’t be about getting her picture. They can get that from Facebook. So who is it, John? Who would do that?’
FORTY-SEVEN
Katherine loaded a carry-on suitcase with all the photos in the house of Maria. That included Maria’s baby book. She locked those in her car trunk and then sat trembling on the front steps.
‘I can’t stay here tonight,’ she said, and though he doubted the burglar would return and had already put the sliding door back in its track, Marquez said, ‘We’ll get a room.’
They didn’t drive far, checking into the Best Western in Corte Madera, and then walked across the road to the Il Fornaio restaurant where they found an open table on a small patio off the bar. They ordered drinks and as they waited a waiter brought breadsticks.
‘This happened tonight because you’ve joined this task force.’
‘It could be anybody. It may have been some nut who saw Maria’s face on TV last night as Gant’s former girlfriend.’
‘Then how did they find our house?’
Marquez didn’t have an answer or any real theory yet. He shrugged. He poured his beer into the glass and thought Katherine was overreacting. He looked at her thinking he should cancel the motel room and they should head home.
‘Are you going to say anything? Are you going to answer me or are you practicing your spy craft so you can trap Stoval?’
‘Easy, Kath.’
‘For years I’ve looked forward to the day when we wouldn’t have to think about people trying to get even with you. I’ve looked forward to a normal life like other people have. But instead of that, now you’re going to go after a monster. You haven’t even really started yet, but already things are happening. Stoval knows he’s a target and the FBI knows how dangerous he is, so they’re not sending their agents. They’re putting you out there like some hunting dog.’
‘I was brought on to a task force. There are six others who’ve been working nothing but Stoval for almost a year.’
‘Then why do they need you? And when exactly are we going to have this normal life you’ve promised me and that I’ve waited for? Is that going to be when you’re done locking up all of the people wiping out wildlife? What year should I look forward to, 2025, 2040? Or do I have to wait until the last wildlife is wiped out?’
She lowered her voice to a rushed whisper.
‘You could disappear out there, just vanish because you’ve followed him into some jungle and he knows you’re there. Then what, I sit by the phone and wait and your new FBI boss comes by and holds my hand and reassures me everything is going to be fine, that they’re going to find you? I can hear him saying they’ve got forty agents looking for you. They’re always looking for somebody and they don’t find half of them.’
Her eyes glistened with tears and she formed a fist and hit the table.
‘I’m so angry at you. This isn’t some conniving diver up on the north coast trying to poach abalone. This is a monster and you know it. You left the DEA and got away from this type of person a long time ago. Now you’re bringing the worst of the worst of human beings into our lives. How can you do that to us?’
‘We’re down to the wire with a lot of animal species-’
‘Oh, please, spare me. I’m not going to listen to this tired speech. Get over it. The animals are all going away. The earth is going to be wall to wall with humans. It’s already wall to wall and there are what, maybe three thousand wild tigers left? You do the math. Any idiot can see what’s going to happen. On top of that the seas are going to rise a meter and an area the size of West Virginia is going to vanish from the United States, not to mention what’s going to vanish from the rest of the world. This is about you and me and our lives. We don’t have forever and you can’t stop what’s happening. They’re raping places like the Galapagos Islands now for shark fin, so what chance do unprotected places have?’ She stood up. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t listen to you talk this way.’
Katherine pushed her chair back and left, and not through the front door, instead walked through the hedge surrounding the patio. He watched as she crossed the street and went into the motel. He stared out across the parking lot. When the waiter came back he ordered another beer.
‘Is your wife coming back?’
‘Not tonight.’
The waiter cleared her wine and left. He returned with the new beer and Marquez sat and listened to the freeway. He knew the odds were that Katherine was right. In the end there wouldn’t be anything left. All the real complexity and mysterious beauty of earth would be gone and replaced by the things we made. He was pushing his marriage into a bad place. She vented tonight, but she was trying to reach him. She meant everything to him and yet he was willing to do this to her. What did that say about him? Nothing good.
Yet he held her close that night and early the next morning they went home. Katherine drove into San Francisco for an early meeting as he tinkered with the slider, opening and shutting it, checking the lock, and then walking out on to the deck. Boards creaked underfoot, but it was otherwise quiet. He smelled the trees and brush downslope wet from the fog and went down the stairs and walked along the house to the corner, looking for footprints there and in the redwoods leading out to the street. He didn’t find any.
Marriage is a promise made to another and in Katherine’s anger was a plea for fairness. He heard that. He understood her frustration. He locked up the house, drove down off the mountain, and was still thinking about Katherine as he crossed into San Francisco. He was on Van Ness Street when he learned about it by turning on the radio.
Two out of three Californians depended on water from the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta. So much depended on the delta pumps that damage estimates were already running in the tens of billions. The rivers feeding the delta would run to sea again until this was repaired. The judge, who two years ago ordered the pumps shut down as fish counts plummeted, wouldn’t need to issue another ruling anytime soon, and a small band of environmentalists had formed an impromptu parade down Market Street in San Francisco.
A local reporter was on the scene at the pumping stations near Tracy and she was doing her best with the information she had so far, but it was
sketchy and confused and the early information got repeated and repeated. Still, you could hear in her voice that this was the big story of her career and she knew it.
‘Significant pieces of two major pumps supplying water to southern and central California have been severely damaged this morning in explosions that may be terrorist related.’
The report was live and as he worked through the different stations word seemed to be getting out that the FBI had some prior knowledge, though no one at the Bureau was commenting yet. Marquez clicked the radio back to the first station.
‘Patty, are the pumps shut down?’
‘Yes, and I’m hearing that the damage is extensive, but they don’t know how extensive yet.’
‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘Bob, we’re not hearing any reports of any injuries.’
‘Is the FBI calling this a terrorist act? Does this mean Al-Qaeda?’
‘It could mean that, Bob. We don’t know yet. We’re waiting for more information now, and at this point we can only say that whoever is behind it is endangering thousands if not millions of people.’
‘Thank you, Patty, and we’ll stay with this live throughout the day. For those of you who haven’t heard yet, terrorism reached California this morning…’
Marquez clicked the radio off, took the call from Desault.
‘Where are you?’
‘On my way in, I just heard the news.’
‘Jane Hosfleter is looking for you. You got the right island.’
‘I gave her three islands.’
‘Well, it’s the one with the apple orchards that you emphasized and she’s there now. They found a shed where he assembled what they think were very sophisticated self-propelled mines. Think missile underwater with onboard GPS guidance. The first mines blew the grills over the pumping stations and the follow-up mines blew the pumps. The Navy disarmed one that didn’t detonate and they’ve pulled it out of the water.’