Dead Game

by Kirk Russell

“I’m very lucky. The police thought he left me, but he would never do that. They drove around and looked for his car but that was about it. I made posters and put them up and somebody tore a lot of them down, but Chris doesn’t have any enemies. He’s a very sweet man.”

  “Did he tell you he was going fishing with Abe?”

  “He said he thought they were going to meet after Chris got off work down at the boat landing at the state park.”

  “Brannan Island?”

  “Yes, and the police checked. Chris didn’t go through the booth. You know, you have to pay a fee. No one knows where he went. He just disappeared with his truck.”

  “But he had his fishing gear with him?”

  “Yes, he has it.”

  She folded her hands in front of her, and his heart went out to her. He knew what the police had likely alluded to, what they would have suggested without directly saying it. She needed psychiatric help in a big way, but he also guessed she knew Chris was never coming home again. Her instincts told her it had something to do with Raburn, which made him wonder why Raburn brought the poster out when he did.

  “I don’t know that I’ll find out anything, but if our investigation overlaps anything to do with Chris’s disappearance, I’ll call you.” He paused. “Do you have family in the area?”

  “No.”

  “Any close friends?”

  “Not since I went part-time.”

  “I think you need someone to talk to. I’m going to call somebody.”

  “I don’t accept visitors unless it’s about Chris.”

  She stood, and he put an arm around her shoulders, held her for a moment, thanked her for talking to him, and left. He didn’t want to make any calls that triggered her ending up a ward of the state. She was obviously getting by somehow, feeding herself, must have some income. But she needed help.

  He talked to the team, then started for home, didn’t want to sleep in the safehouse tonight. On the run back to the Bay Area his phone rang, and when he saw the number he knew Katherine and Maria were home.

  “We just got in and stopped at the store and picked up some food for dinner,” Kath said. “Where are you?”

  “An hour away and welcome home, but aren’t you three days early?”

  “Four.”

  When he got home it was tense between Katherine and Maria, though both were in the kitchen cooking. Kath’s cool fingers laced through his, and he kissed her, saw fatigue on her face, disappointment in her eyes.

  “How was it?” he asked Maria.

  “It was great.”

  “How was New York?”

  “Didn’t I already tell you?”

  A pasta was on the table, and the room smelled like bacon. Maria tossed lettuce with oil, vinegar, and an expensive French salt she’d been trying to get her mother hooked on. The dinner was stiff. He asked the only questions, and neither wanted to talk, begging off by saying they were jet-lagged, but obviously the decision to come home was unhappy. No great school had become the sweetheart hope, no mother/daughter bonding.

  After dinner Marquez opened the heavy iron damper in the old stone fireplace and built a fire, an old defense for him. Wind gusted hard over the mountain, rattling the windows, and it took a while to get the fire to draw. The quiet coming off of Katherine was like a weight dragged around. The kindling caught and then small oak branches he’d been drying for a couple of years. He pulled a chair up close to the fire.

  “I’m thinking of starting to serve tea at the coffee bars,” she said, and he thought of Amy Stevens. “It may be too late since everyone knows them as coffee bars, but I’m playing with changing the store identity.”

  She’d made another tea to try a different flavor and offered him a cup. He adjusted a log, and Katherine launched into it.

  “She was more interested in shopping in New York than looking at schools.”

  “I already got that part.”

  “But you didn’t get it with attitude.”

  Marquez adjusted the fire again, liked the pungency of the oak. He got up and found the bottle of a Cuban rum he’d been given last spring. He loved the taste and smell of the rum and poured an inch. The windows rattled in the wind. Another storm was forecast to hit a few days from now. If it stayed on track across the Pacific it would drop several inches of rain and maybe a couple feet of snow. The rivers would swell, and the runoff would churn the bottom. Sturgeon loved the brown muddy water.

  Katherine’s cool fingers touched his right hand. She slid her chair over as Maria walked down the hallway.

  “Dad, can I ask you something in my room? Mom, I’m going to bed.”

  Marquez set the rum down gently on the hearth. He walked down to the room he’d added on and still hadn’t finished. It had been a year. The walls were sheetrocked and painted, but the trim work wasn’t complete, and he wasn’t a carpenter.

  “What’s the question?” he asked.

  “Is my bathroom door ever going to work?”

  He’d hung the door himself after watching a rerun episode of This Old House on a cable channel. The door latch didn’t meet properly. He knew he was going to have to remove the casing and rehang the door, and he hadn’t gotten to it.

  “I talked to Mom on the way home, and she’s afraid it’s going to offend you if we hire a carpenter to finish the room.”

  Offend was not a word Maria would have used a year ago. Marquez tried the doorknob out of habit. It still didn’t work.

  “Will it offend you?”

  “I’d still like to fix it for you.”

  “Dad, it’s not happening, and Mom has plenty of money.” She quickly added, “I don’t mean it like that.”

  “Then don’t say it that way. Tell you what, if I don’t get it fixed in the next two weeks we’ll hire a carpenter.”

  “The door swings open when I’m using the bathroom.”

  They’d had this conversation a few times. “Shut your bedroom door when you use the bathroom.”

  He thought of Raburn talking about the room he and his brother had rented in Isleton after they’d left home and moved to the delta. They were younger than Maria was now. Raburn had said the bathroom was downstairs and they didn’t need a window because the wall was open to the back of the lot. The shower was a garden hose with a nozzle set on the spray function and held pinned in place by two nails. He and Isaac had gotten to be great fishermen just so they could eat. It was why Isaac wouldn’t eat any fish anymore, or so Raburn said, and the more Marquez turned in his head the way Raburn talked about his brother, the more likely it seemed that Isaac knew absolutely everything going on.

  Now as he got ready to leave her room, Maria said, “It’s not my fault we came home early. We got in a fight, and Mom said there was no reason to stay. I made her sad. I’m a big disappointment to her. She wishes she had a different daughter.”

  That was a mix of childish and true and a way of getting it out.

  “What were the schools you liked?”

  “The University of Virginia and Boston College, but I won’t get in to either.”

  “You won’t?”

  She explained as though it was obvious. It was all demographics, and she had nothing going for her. She hadn’t excelled at a sport, didn’t have any extra-currics. She’d done some community service but not enough. She didn’t have legacy anywhere. You just about had to have better than a 4.0 GPA, and she didn’t have that. You needed top SAT scores, and she’d taken them twice and said her combined total still sucked.

  “What’s your combined total again?” he asked.

  “1305.”

  He’d graduated from high school, gone to a state college for two years, then two in the National Guard and back to college. He’d met and married Julie, and they’d planned to travel the world for a year, finding work wherever they could. When Julie was murdered in Africa everything changed.

  “I think what you’ve done is pretty amazing.” She’d turned her grades around completely in the past two years.
Kath had driven her to better herself, and the effort had taken root, but only because she had it in her. “You’re too hard on yourself sometimes.”

  “Mom pretty much thinks I’m wasting my life.”

  “I’ve never heard her say anything like that. If you want to take a year off and work and earn money for college, go for it. But whether you go next year or the year after, you should get a degree and you should find something you really care about to learn.”

  “I know I’m just the ungrateful kid, and I should listen to both of you, and I don’t know anything about the real world.”

  “It’s got to be a conversation, Maria, not an argument, not a posit ion statement, and I don’t really need you to tell me how I think. I’ve got a pretty good idea already.” He repeated it. “You and your mom need to try to have a different conversation. You need to give each other a chance.”

  “Tell that to her.”

  Then he was out in front of the fire again with Katherine. He took a sip of rum.

  “What did she say to you?” Katherine asked.

  “She feels like she’s failed you and she’s lashing out, but I also hear something I haven’t before. She sounds afraid she’s going to be rejected everywhere she has applied.”

  “Every kid has the same challenges and most don’t have the advantages. It’s time for her to grow up.”

  “It is time, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that insecurity isn’t figuring into saying she doesn’t want to go to college.”

  “There’s always another excuse.” After a pause, Kath added, “I’m going to go unpack.”

  He stayed near the fire, drawing some comfort from it, his head not in the college issue. He heard Katherine unpacking in the bedroom and thought about the SOU ending, whether Baird would hold him to the Christmas deadline if they were putting together prosecutable cases. He added another small piece of wood, and the wind was a low moan blowing over the top of the chimney. Kath came back out, wearing only a robe now, sitting near him, the robe sliding off one leg, her skin golden in the firelight. He reached and touched her smooth thigh.

  “How’s your team taking the shutdown?” she asked.

  “They’re starting to make plans. Cairo is going to grow tomatoes.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going to shut these guys down before I make other plans.”

  Her skin was very smooth. He closed his eyes a moment.

  “It would sure be nice to see you more. Keep that in your plans, John.”

  “I will.”

  “My business really is growing. I know it sounds crazy, but you could think about it.”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean it.”

  He slid his hand higher on her thigh, felt the warm heat there. The way her coffee bars had taken with some good press had caught even Kath completely by surprise. They took all of her time now. Growing the business had become her main thing and maybe a way of dealing with loneliness when he was gone. Undercover had taken its toll, and they’d never talked about the fact that she made so much more money than he did. When she’d opened the first Presto he’d written her a check for all his savings, twenty-two grand, not much, but all he’d had. She’d opened the store with it, and no one could have predicted how successful the coffee bar would become. He knew that to some of her new friends his job was detached from normal life, and hers was not a situation any of them would want to be married into. And in some insidious way the new money was working against them, as well as providing great opportunities, like this trip she’d just taken with Maria.

  Katherine would pay for Maria to go to college, and with his salary he wouldn’t contribute much. Kath had no problem paying the money. In truth, she looked forward to it because it meant Maria would get a better start in the world than she’d had. She was looking at opening more stores, while he was fighting for enough time to finish one undercover operation.

  “How would I fit in?” he asked.

  “We’d have to come up with a role, but with your charisma you’d make a lot of things happen. And I’d get to see you a lot more. That would be good.”

  “Yeah, it would.” He looked over at her. “Hey, remember where Maria was a few years ago.”

  “She put herself in that spot.”

  “And she worked her way out of it.”

  “I don’t want to see her get in another rut. She works at the Presto on Union, and her friends come in and hang out for hours. Her picture of a good life is living with them in the city and going out clubbing at night. I’m around her, I know what I’m talking about. She’ll be with a completely different crowd at college.”

  “What I remember of college is everybody having a good time, then working hard for a week or two around midterms and again at finals.”

  “It’s not at all like that everywhere.”

  The fire burned lower. Colder air drafted from the thin window glass, and Katherine shivered. She drew her robe back over her leg and turned toward him. “I’m sleepy,” she said and then put her head against his chest, and Marquez held her.

  “I promise we could create a job for you that you would really like. I promise, and we would get to see each other so much more. You’ve given so many years already. You’ve done your share. We can travel like we’ve talked about.”

  He didn’t answer but pressed her close, never wanted to let go of her. He saw Raburn’s face in the last firelight, heard him say again as he held up the poster, “This guy disappeared.” The look on his face like he couldn’t believe it.

  30

  Sturgeons are toothless bottom-feeders that use long whiskers to feel their way along. Their backs carry armored sections called scutes, and they love churned-up water and feed on worms and shrimp kicked up off the bottom, yet they’ll also rise to the surface to eat the bodies of salmon that have spawned and died upriver. Depending on how the storm went through, Marquez figured the bite would be on later today.

  The rain started as he crossed the Antioch Bridge. Along the top of the concrete arc of the bridge his truck shook in sheeting gusts. The big SUV ahead of him swayed and overcorrected. He gave it more room and listened to a radio talk show host demanding that Congress force OPEC to bring down the cost per barrel of oil so gas prices would fall again at the pumps.

  “We have to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling,” he said. “The namby-pamby, complain-about-everything environmentalists are destroying the country’s strength.”

  Marquez knew the vehicle in front of him now on the bridge got no better than sixteen miles to the gallon. His team had used one for a couple of years. They were solid vehicles, but the low gas mileage was a problem, and it was hard to see how it was OPEC’s problem that Americans had embraced gas-guzzling SUVs. Hadn’t the great strength of the country always been in solving problems, rather than in biting accusatory whining or blaming someone else? We’d known for thirty years we had to build more efficient vehicles. After another few minutes he turned the radio off.

  Dropping into the delta he called Ruax and continued up the river road past fields of cut sorghum and orchards of apple and pear, their branches near bare and black in the wet morning. Wind had stripped more of the last leaves. The Sacramento River was a dark green, pitted with rain when he turned down the fishing access entrance. He walked the line of cottonwoods and oak bordering the lot, then out to the river, and standing near the water spotted a pair of jeans that had washed ashore into the reeds and were half-buried in mud.

  The jeans made a sucking sound as he retrieved them, and his shoes got wet. But that was the doubt still lingering in him. He knew Selke was almost certainly right; she’d staged her disappearance. He found a wallet in the jeans—amazing it hadn’t fallen out long ago. Silt had worked its way between the plastic protector and the driver’s license. He slid the license out and rubbed the mud off with his thumb. Buffington. John Buffington. He dropped the jeans in the trash can on his way out and dropped the wallet on the passenger seat. If he ha
d time later he’d get a phone number for Buffington and give him the good news.

  Continuing upriver he drove past redtail hawks hunkered down on the power lines. Rain dripped heavily from the eucalyptus, oak, and palm trees surrounding the big pink stucco frame of the Ryde Hotel. He parked next to Ruax’s truck.

  “Probably best if we go in two vehicles,” she said. “I’ve got some other names for you also. They all have to do with the case we were building against Raburn. I should have turned them over last time I saw you. The pair we’re meeting this morning I’ve bought from twice before.”

  Half an hour later Marquez counted out twenties to a couple of guys from San Jose who’d hooked a big sturgeon out in a hole in the river and then dragged it into the slough after jabbing it with a gaff. They were nervous and pushing to get the deal done. Marquez negotiated and recorded their voices and faces, pointed the fiber optic sewed into his sleeve at the face of one and then the other, recording their faces.

  He called Crey and left a message that he had the fish, then went into Big Store in Walnut Grove to buy more bags of ice. Bought ten and packed them around the sturgeon, went back and bought another four, told the young guy working the cash register that he was getting a jump on a football party he was having this coming Sunday. He took a call from Roberts as he got back in the truck.

  “I found something interesting going back in the newspapers. There was a Federal tax lien on Raburn Orchards, sixty-eight thousand dollars for unpaid taxes in 2001. I’m trying to find out now whether they settled it. I’ll call you back when I know more.”

  She called back half an hour later and had gotten an IRS agent to confirm that it had been paid in full.

  “Paid off in early November of 2001, including interest. One check paid off the whole thing?”

  “So we know they were behind with their creditors.”

  “And there were other liens from suppliers.”

  She read off the liens. A farm equipment supplier. A firm supplying fertilizers. She’d found five liens by private firms and the IRS lien. He knew it was likely she’d uncover a state tax lien as well.