Dead Game

by Kirk Russell

  “It’s not much further. One of these guys got laid off from work and he’s got a kid sick with leukemia so he fishes sturgeon to pay for medicine. The fish they called about isn’t huge but he says it has roe.”

  “How many times have you bought from them?”

  “I don’t know. Enough.”

  Raburn cut the throttle as they came through the bend. The bow dropped, and they slowed.

  “Let’s talk about Beaudry’s Bait Shop,” Marquez said. “What else you know about Richie Crey?”

  “He did time for drug dealing and he doesn’t want to go back in. That’s the thing you’ve got to know about him. He won’t deal directly with you. He’s got these two guys who work for him who handle the fish.”

  “What are their names?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did Beaudry know he was selling to an ex-con?”

  “He must have.”

  The last time Marquez had been in Tom Beaudry’s shop a faded Goldwater bumpersticker had been tacked up in a corner up behind the counter. If you asked about it you’d wish you’d brought a bag lunch, because Beaudry had a lot of theories to share. According to Beaudry, when the country went for Johnson over Goldwater in 1964, that was a turning point. He felt sure that if Goldwater won, he would have nuked Hanoi and the war in Vietnam would have been an easy win afterward.

  For years, in addit ion to the bait shop he’d also run a sport fishing boat out of Benicia and occasionally called CalTIP to report poaching. He was one of the first sport fishing captains with a website and sold custom sturgeon hooks and bait mixes off it. He also posted his political opinions on the website, along with the essays of other deep thinkers who proposed ideas such as defoliating Humboldt County in northern California to put the dope farmers out of business. From what Marquez remembered, Beaudry had a problem with all drug use, so it didn’t make much sense he’d sold his shop to an ex-con who’d been in for trafficking.

  “Basically, I didn’t know Beaudry well,” Raburn said. “I stopped there and bought bait from him once, and he wouldn’t even let me use his bathroom—told me to go up the street to a bar.”

  Ten minutes later, they met up with the two fishermen, and Raburn introduced him to the pair, one a blond kid, with a chromeplated construction toolbox bolted down in the back of his pickup, and an older Latino carpenter. It took all four of them to get the sturgeon into the boat. Marquez’s hand slid along the bony armor, the gray skin. He felt the abdomen for eggs and helped Raburn cover it before talking to the guys. Raburn pointed at Marquez.

  “He’s your new money. I can’t afford you anymore. You call his cell phone from now on.”

  Marquez shook hands with both. He scribbled down a number to call him at.

  “Good to meet you guys, nice-looking fish. Call me when you land another like it.”

  When they got back to Raburn’s houseboat a neighbor kid helped hump the fish up to Raburn’s truck. At the truck Raburn gave the kid ten bucks, and Marquez followed Raburn down to the pear packing shed where they took the ovaries out and made the call to Ludovna.

  “He wants it,” Raburn said as he hung up with Ludovna. “But not until tomorrow.”

  “Didn’t sound like you told him you’re bringing a friend.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Raburn didn’t answer at first, instead lifting the heavy knife and hacking into the sturgeon again.

  “Because you don’t understand this guy at all, and I don’t want anything to happen to me.”

  10

  Marquez walked with Chief Baird from headquarters to an Italian restaurant that Baird liked. It was early for lunch, and there wasn’t anyone in the dark room other than a bartender doubling as a waiter, sitting at a table folding napkins. He led them to a booth, took an order for two draft beers, and dropped a couple of heavy leatherbound menus on the table. Baird waited until he was behind the bar pulling the drafts.

  “I think you know what I’m going to say, but what you don’t know is how proud I am of what you’ve done with the team in the past decade.”

  So they were done. Marquez looked from Baird to the bartender drawing two pint glasses of beer.

  “Lieutenant, you know my heart is in the field, always has been, that’s where our real job is.”

  What Marquez knew was last year he had a one point one million–dollar budget to work with and this year 13 percent of that. Next year was slated to be less again and with no equipment upgrades. He had vehicles with 275,000 miles on them, but Baird was telling him that didn’t matter anymore. He wouldn’t need them.

  “I don’t agree with Chief Bell that we can fill in the gap with uniform wardens,” Baird said, “but I agree we’re taking too many chances without sufficient backup. This event with the informant wouldn’t have happened if the team was at its former strength.”

  “It depends on what happened.”

  “The point is we’re stretched too thin.”

  “Take everything that’s happened in the last decade, Chief, and this sturgeon poaching operation we’re up against now is the most organized and efficient we’ve dealt with.”

  “This Raburn character is efficient?”

  “No, but getting to the traffickers beyond him is hard. From the rumors and the number of CalTIP calls coming in, we know a lot of sturgeon is going out. We may be starting to feel pressure from the collapse of the Caspian Sea stocks.”

  “You don’t really have any evidence to back that up, do you?”

  “We know the overall poaching has heated up.”

  Baird was quiet and watched the bartender return with the beers. He obviously wanted to do this in a way Marquez could accept.

  “You’ve always spoken highly of DBEEP,” he said.

  “Sure, they’re great. But they’re not enough.”

  Baird took a sip of beer and Marquez looked at his own but felt no desire to pick it up. He listened to Baird order a meatball sandwich. When the bartender turned in his direction, Marquez shook his head. He didn’t have any appetite.

  “Maybe you should work with DBEEP,” Baird said after they were alone.

  “Give me another month, Chief. Let’s see if it works out flipping Raburn. Give us until the first of the year. The storms are coming through and that kicks up the bottom and gets the sturgeon biting. We can use the fog to our advantage.” He heard himself plead, couldn’t believe it had come to this. “We’ve got some new contacts and leads.” He told Baird the story of Beaudry, the bait shop, Richie Crey.

  The bartender tried again to take an order from Marquez and finally gave up, refilled the bread sticks, brought Baird’s meatball sandwich, and the chief couldn’t find a way to take a bite out of it. The meatballs were too big. He had to cut them.

  An hour later Marquez had until Christmas to make whatever arrests he could, and he’d told Baird the focus would be on Ludovna, August, and this Richie Crey who’d bought Beaudry’s Bait Shop in Rio Vista. Leaving the restaurant with Baird, he felt a strange mix of gratitude and emptiness. Big picture, it was over, no more SOU. Three more weeks and then finished until new money could be found. That after a decade of running the team.

  As they walked back toward headquarters Marquez asked for one more thing. “Let me get some of the old team back.”

  “Who?”

  “Brad Alvarez and Melinda Roberts. Roberts has been bouncing around, and she’s up in the Region IV office right now. Alvarez is back in uniform down along the central coast, but I know he’s got a vacation coming up that he’s planned for a while.”

  “You want to talk him out of his vacation.”

  “I’d like to talk him into postponing it. You’d have to give him the time off later.”

  “All right, if they’re both willing, you can have them both.”

  Baird slowed as they neared headquarters. He stopped and faced Marquez before going back inside the Water Resource Building and up the elevator, and for a moment Marquez
thought he’d changed his mind.

  “John, you are the finest field officer I’ve ever known. I want you to know that, and I don’t want you to quit when we close down the SOU.”

  “I don’t know if there’s a place for me here, sir.”

  “We’ll make a captain out of you.”

  Marquez nodded toward the building. “You wouldn’t want me in there.”

  He thanked the chief and watched him go inside. From his truck he called Alvarez, then Roberts.

  “Sounds like fun,” Roberts said. “I heard these sturgeon poachers are kicking your ass.”

  “Who’d you hear it from?”

  “Alvarez.”

  “He’s going to spend his vacation with us.”

  “I guess the fun never stops.”

  “We need you.”

  “And I miss the SOU. Tell me where to be and when.”

  “Pick up the gear you turned in and start with the computer. We’re trying to find out everything we can on a Nikolai Ludovna. We’re calling him N-I-C-K, but I think the Russians leave out the C, so you’re looking for a N-I-K L-U-D-O-V-N-A, or N-I-K-O-L-A-I. He may have been a former KGB officer. We haven’t had time to check that out.” He briefed her on what they had learned. “See what you can find out about former residences, what he did before moving here, who sponsored him, anything at all. Start there and we’ll meet at the Sacramento safehouse tonight.”

  Marquez met Shauf now outside the dirty stucco apartment where Anna rented a two-bedroom unit. It was where she’d told him she was moving back to. They went in to meet the manager, a sarcastic kid who seemed annoyed at their presence, chattering about how many police officers had already been in her apartment as he walked them up a flight of concrete stairs. When he started to go inside with them, Marquez stopped him, told him they’d bring him back the key.

  The apartment looked like it had been tossed. They found a window wide open in one of the two bedrooms.

  “What did the county take from here?” Shauf asked.

  “Selke told me he pulled a computer, photographs, and a record of bills she’d paid. He said he took everything he thought might help locate her, but I don’t see him leaving it like this.”

  “I don’t either.”

  Marquez started in her bedroom, a mattress on the floor, no sheets, no covers, but a sleeping bag and pillow. In the bathroom only a Crest toothpaste tube and a frayed toothbrush in a drawer. He heard Shauf in the kitchen opening cabinets, and he moved into the second bedroom, the one Selke had described as resembling a Big 5 Sporting Goods store. Where a bed might have gone were two kayaks, one bright yellow, the other green, each with significant scrapes along the sides and bows. Several sets of oars, an O’Brien water ski board, a wake board, snow skis, a snowboard, a backpack, cycling equipment, assorted helmets, and a whole lot of other equipment and clothing.

  “This is some nice stuff in here,” Shauf said and lifted a ski. “These are new. I looked at them myself this fall.”

  “Are you starting to ski again?”

  “I would if I could afford to. Over six hundred bucks for these, and that’s a new board she’s got there too, not the surfboard, the snowboard. What sport doesn’t she do?”

  They moved into the kitchen/dining/living area. Shauf had already been through the kitchen, but Marquez felt the need to work his way along checking the cabinets, listening to the hollow slap of their doors shutting again. He hadn’t told Shauf yet about the lunch with Baird and needed to tell her. Wasn’t sure why he hadn’t yet.

  He checked the refrigerator. Empty, but the manager had told Marquez the Sacramento police had advised him to clear it out. There was a round dining table with a simulated wood top, a tired white sofa, a TV. The rest of the room was green-brown carpet and an aluminum sliding window without a drape. It was hard to picture a river rat like Anna living here. She’d told him the year she was twenty-six she didn’t sleep a single night under a roof. Either was in a tent in a national park or wilderness area or was under the stars, and that was the year her mother had died, the year she said she realized she had no one. Which in some ways was a connection between him and her, a feeling that he’d thought he understood. He’d once checked out of everything and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail alone, a long hike that hadn’t healed him but did give him the time he needed to figure out how to fit in again.

  He walked back to the room with the sports equipment. Anna’s identity was in that room. There were trophies that he’d only glanced at on the first pass. Most of them were from playing in a softball league. He went through the contents of the backpack again, a couple of empty suitcases, knelt on the floor and shined a flashlight down each end of each kayak. The stop at the end of the flotation compartment in the bow was a different color than the one at the stern. Probably no big deal and from a repair, but since he was here to check everything he prodded at the bow compartment. He couldn’t reach it to touch it, but after shining the light on it and then studying the edges and the proportion, comparing it to the stern, he began to wonder if there was a false piece there ahead of the real flotation compartment. Shauf walked in, and he found an oar they could slide in and poke at it. It moved but didn’t pop free.

  “Let’s flip the boat over,” he said. “You hold the bow end up, and I’ll reach up there.”

  “You’re too big, better let me do it, but you know all that’s going be in it is more gear. This girl has more gear than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

  Marquez gripped the bow and felt her weight as she leaned in and reached toward the bow. He heard something give, a scraping, and she came out holding boat booties. But also a waterproof pouch and, inside it, a package of documents they opened up and started going through. Anna’s face on photos. A different name and her face on a Russian passport. Photos taken of her at nineteen or twenty, he thought. Snow on the ground around her, a man next to her, the same guy who’d been in the photo in her wallet. The passport name was Anastasia Illyach.

  “So an alias,” Shauf said.

  “Or maybe her real name, her father’s name.”

  There was a pale blue ink handwritten letter in Cyrillic that he unfolded, then another and more small photos, a few that were black-and-whites, faces that could be relatives though, from the clothes and age of the photos, probably were long dead. He studied the photo of a small boy standing on snow, with Anna’s hand resting on his shoulder. The photo was black-and-white, and they were both looking directly at the camera. He opened the passport while Shauf turned another photo in her hand. Passport stamps indicated Anastasia Illyach left Moscow in September 1994. In December she’d returned. She’d flown to Tokyo twice and Stockholm once. He looked at the rest of the stamps, guessing that she’d traveled to Moscow on an American passport, then traveled from there under this passport.

  “When did she and her mom immigrate here?” Shauf asked.

  “In 1989, when Congress upped the amount of Russians who could come over.”

  Marquez did the arithmetic, calculating years. “Look at this closely,” Shauf said. “What do you see? You see it, right.”

  “Sure.”

  “I bet she’s four and a half to five months.” She touched her own belly as if she were pregnant, and Marquez focused on the man standing next to Anna. “She’s just starting to really show.” She looked up at Marquez’s face. “So where’s the kid? Is that the little boy in this other photo?” She picked that one up again.

  “There was a photo that came out of the wallet found at the fishing access. Selke showed it to me. There was a kid in it, young, a toddler or a little older. That looks like him.”

  “Did she ever say anything to you about a child?”

  “No.”

  Shauf angled the photo to study it again.

  “Well, she’s definitely pregnant in this.

  11

  Late in the afternoon Marquez pulled into the lot alongside Beaudry’s Bait Shop. He was still on the phone to Ruax of DBEEP as he parked. She was giving h
im her take on Richie Crey.

  “Crey looks like one of these geeks who screw up the way they look trying to figure out who they are. He’s tall and probably weighs over two hundred. Got a shaved head and tattoos running down his arms, you know, real prison sleeves, not the hip variety you see kids running around with. What else? Let me think, oh, he’s got a couple of silver rings in one ear. Look for torn jeans, cowboy boots, leather coat, kind of like a biker playing businessman. But he does know the delta.”

  “Where’d he learn it?”

  “Oh, he’s homegrown. He’s one of ours,” and Marquez remembered that she was from Isleton. “I think he was raised in Rio Vista, though I’m sure no one was holding their breath waiting for him to get out of prison and come back. His family is from there. What’s up with him?”

  “We’re going to try to sell him some sturgeon. He’s bought a couple of times from Raburn. Do you know anything about two guys who work for Crey?”

  “No, but you know what they say about shit and flies.”

  Like many bait shops, Beaudry’s sold cold drinks, maps, a medley of hooks, sinkers, and various bait. It was also a source of advertisements and newsletters, a gathering spot for finding out where anyone was getting a bite. Marquez smelled crawdads when he walked in. He picked up a Pepsi and paused near the maps. He opened a copy of the Fish Sniffer, and a young Asian American girl came out to the counter and asked if she could help him. Behind her, silhouetted in the doorway of the old office, was the guy Ruax had just described.

  “I’m looking for Tom Beaudry.” The man behind her moved toward the counter. “I’m John Croft, a friend of Tom’s.”

  “You’re a year late,” the man said. “I guess you’re not that close a friend.”

  “Well, he’s such a mean old bastard I wasn’t in a hurry to get back.”

  “So you do know him.” Crey smiled a big yellow-toothed, affable smile, though his eyes were flat. He looked at the card Marquez had handed him. “I bought his business, but why are you looking for Beaudry?”