Shell Games

by Kirk Russell

  “What about the car?”

  “Rental and we’re getting a name, right now.”

  “How long have they been inside?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  Marquez was aware that they were making a series of assump-tions here. They had nothing on the men other than they were vis-iting the Li family. But they might also be doing an ab count at the garage freezer or threatening Li.

  “We’ve got the warrant,” Alvarez said. “If he let these two in the door he might be happy to see us afterwards. Maybe today is the day to talk to him after all.”

  Marquez took in Alvarez for a moment. Brad wore ragged jeans, sandals, a loose faded Hawaiian shirt with a surf shop logo and was growing a small goatee again. It occurred to him that Brad was dressed a little like Bailey.

  “We want Li to talk to us,” Marquez said, “but nothing we’re going to say will make him believe we can protect him. We can’t watch his back and we can’t convince him that we can watch his back—I know him well enough to say that.”

  Alvarez’s phone rang. He answered and motioned that they needed to go. As he hung up, he said, “They’re out.”

  Marquez was on the phone to Shauf as the men drove away. He picked up the gray car as it turned a corner three blocks ahead of him. Alvarez trailed and Shauf and Roberts stayed with the house. The car drifted through downtown Oakland, not pushing it, not in a particular hurry. They drove down Broadway, moving slowly in the right lane, the only car to brake and stop as a light turned yellow. At Jack London Square the men parked in an underground garage and walked across the plaza to one of the bars along the water. When Marquez entered the bar he saw a third man talking to them before moving toward the door alone. Marquez phoned Alvarez from the rest room, describing the third man.

  Marquez took a table in a corner of the room. He ordered a beer and a fish sandwich and could only see the back of their heads, but found something familiar in the Hispanic. He couldn’t put his finger on it, though, and he asked the waiter for a newspaper, anything he could read, and the waiter came back with the San Francisco Chronicle sports section. The A’s had lost again, Giants had won 10–3, and the men at the bar ordered another round. He heard one order vodka and lime and read how the Giants got their runs as he watched. He was certain they were eyeing the estuary, watching the boats through the big windows, while keeping an eye on him, and on everyone else in the room. His phone vibrated and Marquez spoke quietly, leaning over, back turned.

  “Number three is in the Barnes and Noble browsing books. Are you sure he connects?” Alvarez asked.

  “No, he may have just been talking. It may have been a chance encounter.”

  “Do I stick with him?”

  “At least until these two move.”

  The men downed their drinks, put money on the bar and stood, giving Marquez a clean look at their profiles. They went out the door, and when he was outside, Marquez hit speed dial for the Marlin, got Hansen, and laid out what he thought would happen next. The pair moved toward a boat that was slowing to dock. He read the CF numbers off to Hansen and heard him call them to one of the Marlin crew. A few minutes later the men boarded the boat and Marquez watched it pull away, while Alvarez crossed back to the bookstore to check on the browser.

  “It’s going to depend which way they turn,” Hansen said, “but if it’s a fast boat we might have a problem, if they kick it up when they clear the estuary. Who are they?”

  “We think they link to the buyer we’re looking for.”

  The next call was Alvarez saying the browser had left the bookstore and he didn’t know which direction he’d gone. Marquez scanned the crowd up toward the Boatel and out on the plaza.

  “Check the garage,” he said.

  “Already on my way there, Lieutenant.”

  Marquez took a call from dispatch. They’d run the numbers on the boat and it had come back as a rental from a marina up in Stockton, which made sense. It had an offshore design, yet looked decked out as a river boat. He relayed the information to Hansen.

  “Bad news,” Hansen said. “He must have hit the bay and got around the islands before we came up from the south and that means he’s clicking along. I can run the docks and sweep toward Richmond but he’s not in sight on the bay. We’re scheduled to check the San Rafael Bridge anyway, so it’s no problem. But if I were you I’d beat him back to the marina in Stockton, or get a uniform over there.”

  Marquez hung up with Hansen. Alvarez reported that he’d located their browser again, but that the car was gone from the garage. Someone had picked it up and they’d missed it. The browser had bought himself an ice cream cone and Marquez knew they’d been burned. Good chance the browser was a decoy and they missed the whole dance step. He made a decision now and gave Alvarez the address of the Stockton marina.

  “Call you when I get there,” Alvarez said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Talk to Li.”

  “You’re going to knock on the door?”

  “I think we have to.”

  Half an hour later he was asking for Tran Li and showing his badge at the front door to an older woman. Li turned the corner of the hallway and came into view and Marquez had the feeling he’d anticipated the visit. He wore slippers and shuffled on the old oak floor. His left arm was in a sling and he looked as though he’d aged years in the night. His eyes looked through Marquez, then showed recognition and he said something to the woman in Viet-namese. As she moved away from the door Li motioned him in. He led Marquez to the door off his kitchen that led to the garage and his hand scraped over a light switch. He opened the old freezer and gestured at the abalone, but still hadn’t said anything.

  “I’m very sorry,” Marquez said. “I can’t think of anything harder.”

  “This is what I take.” He slowly pointed at the contents.

  “You had two visitors earlier who weren’t part of your family and I need to ask you about them.”

  “This abalone for a friend’s wedding.”

  After Li had lost the abalone case three years ago Marquez had made the point of calling him up and going to lunch with him. He’d wanted to try to cut through the cultural gap and communi-cate what the state was trying to do, because he’d seen the shame on Li’s face as the judge had told him he was guilty of robbing the people of California. He’d realized that Li hadn’t really understood what the judge meant. He knew also with the boy’s death they weren’t going to push the charges against him, but neither would they let him go. He was their link. Marquez had been on the phone to both Keeler and the Mendocino DA’s office this morning, trying to get permission to negotiate with Li. He’d work hard on Li to get him to reveal his buyer. Li had to come across.

  Marquez reached into the freezer, moved abalone around and did a rough count. He cut a finger on a shell and pressed the cut against ice, watched the blood dilute in water and felt uncomfortable. The timing was wrong, the moment wrong, though fifteen years ago he knew he would have barged in here, badged and busted him. His perspective had changed, although the urgency had only increased. A faction of the public had grown weary of trying to save species, of competing with animals for space and the right to make a living. Fishermen were baffled by overlapping regulations and laws that inadequately struggled to juggle competing interests. He thought of the divers they’d busted whose tag line was the same; leaving the courthouse steps they’d toss a last jibe, make the com-ment there was more than enough abalone and the Gamers drove trucks, didn’t dive, didn’t know. Even beyond the mask of grief it was in Li’s eyes that he still didn’t see a crime in taking the abalone.

  “When is the wedding?”

  “Now only two weeks. Everything I take is here. You take it now.”

  Marquez had done the rough count. Maybe a tenth of what Li had taken was here and he didn’t think he needed to argue this for long with Li. He thought he could explain fairly fast.

  “We’ve followed you for over a week, Tran. We have videotape and a strong
case.” He let a beat pass. “You have a prior conviction within a three-year time frame, which is bad in California.” Li stared past him and Marquez heard someone in the hall, then the older son looked in. He moved into the garage as though he needed to protect his father and the suffering in the older boy’s eyes was unmistakable. Marquez turned toward him. “I need to talk with your father alone, and it’s all right, we’re just talking. Nothing is going to happen today.” He studied him, gauging how much was boy, how much was man, whether he ought to sit in on the conversation because there was a real possibility he knew what Li knew. “Unless you can tell me something about the two men who were here earlier.”

  Joe Li looked at his father, then back at Marquez. He spoke in rapid Vietnamese and his father answered quickly. Marquez had the feeling the boy was arguing they should talk with him.

  “We want to work with you,” Marquez said while looking at Joe Li. “But you’re going to have to help us.” Tran shook his head, said something in Vietnamese and as his son left the garage Li murmured in barely audible Vietnamese, speaking to himself, as though responding to voices only he could hear. Marquez waited and then spoke softly, explaining where they stood in very frank tones. He made no threats but repeated that he had to know today who the men were.

  “Did these men threaten you?” He waited. He could smell the abalone in the garage. “Did they tell you they’d hurt you and your family if you didn’t cooperate? You want to talk to me, Tran, because I’m going to try to get the DA to work with you.” It was the third time he’d said it but still wasn’t getting any acknowledg-ment. “Did they come here to warn you?” Li shook his head. “Have you dealt with those two men before?”

  Li’s fingers worked on the cuff of his shirt. “We’re going to arrest them and they’ll go to prison. You want to be on our side when it goes down.” The statement sounded like hollow cop talk and he knew as he said it, he wouldn’t get through to Li today.

  “I go to prison and my wife and son move to Colorado. After prison I go there.”

  “You don’t have to go to prison.” Li shook his head in dis-agreement and Marquez couldn’t remember a suspect arguing his way into prison. “You can work with us to take them down.”

  “You arrest me and take everything.”

  “I’m not going to arrest you, today.”

  “Yes.”

  Marquez didn’t know whether he meant yes he should arrest him, or yes, he was acknowledging he wouldn’t be arrested. There was a vacant emptiness to his eyes that made it pointless to try to reach him today and he regretted knocking on the door. They’d lost whatever shock value they’d have and had gotten nothing in return and Li’s resignation would only deepen.

  He moved out in the hallway and toward the front door and gave Li a card with phone numbers for Sacramento headquarters and Chief Keeler. He’d give Keeler a heads-up call now and looked at Li standing like a ghost at the end of the hall, then softly shut the door. When he started down the steps he heard a voice call, “Officer,” and stopped, recognizing the son, Joe, who was standing behind a fence screening the backyard.

  “I’m here,” Marquez said.

  “I heard them tell dad they’d kill me next. That’s why he won’t say anything. They said there was nothing any police could do to stop them. They aren’t afraid of you.”

  “No one is going to kill you, Joe.”

  “My dad says they would.” A door opened in the backyard and Marquez heard a woman call for Joe. “I have to go.”

  “Don’t be afraid, we’ll take them down. But I need your help.”

  There was no answer. He’d already gone.

  10

  Toward dusk Marquez returned a call from Ruter. It sounded like the detective was having trouble breathing. “Give me a second,” Ruter said, and Marquez heard him coughing, heard something knocked over and Ruter swearing before coming back on the line. “Sheriff’s orders are to lose weight, so I’ve got a tread-mill in my garage and I’m out here with my cat. My wife is in there watching TV with a bag of cookies, but I’m not supposed to eat anything except carrots. But that’s not your problem. I’ve got a tape of an interview with Davies we made this afternoon that I want you to hear parts of. I can play it for you over the phone, right now, if you’re okay with that. I want to know if this is the guy you thought you were dealing with.”

  “Okay, go ahead.”

  “Hang on a minute.” Marquez held the phone wondering what had happened that made Ruter willing to pick a phone up and call him. “Okay, here we go.” He heard the whine of the tape and then Ruter’s voice, its pitch made higher and tone more mechanical by the recording equipment, asking, “Did you force Danny Huega onto your boat?”

  “No, he took a ride with me because he wanted to talk.”

  “What about?”

  “His friends.”

  “He got on your boat because he wanted to talk about what friends? Mutual friends?”

  “I told him Stocker talked before he died and he’d better come see me.”

  “You were playing him?”

  “Same as you goofballs are playing me right now.”

  “Did you tell Danny Huega that you killed Stocker and Han?”

  “Sure, and I told him the same thing would happen to him, that you and your partner weren’t smart enough to take me down. I told him he’d better get his ass down to my boat and talk to me.”

  Ruter clicked the recorder off. “Marquez, when he called Huega, Huega called me right after and said Davies had just told him he’d murdered Stocker and Han. We wired Huega and told him not to get on the boat under any conditions, but he did any-way. We were ready to arrest Davies right there, but Davies must have guessed what we’d do and got him on the boat, ran him out of range, then stripped the fuckin’ wire off him.”

  “That’s how you got the jump on finding Davies that night.”

  “That’s right, as soon as the boat started out of Shelter Cove I was on the phone. Okay, here we go again. It’ll be me talking first.” Marquez heard the tape recorder whine as it started up.

  “Are you saying you killed them?”

  “No, I didn’t kill them, but I was there when they died. There were three men, but only one did the real cutting, a tall man. When the knife work started, Stocker kept saying Huega’s name over and over. He was trying hard to give the right answer, but there weren’t any right answers that night.”

  “The killer was a tall man?”

  “Yeah, about six foot three. You could see Stocker’s eyes bulge and the tall man, he made it go slow.”

  “You watched this?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “From where?”

  “From the brush off to the right. I’ll take you up there, Ruter, if you can handle the distance. It’s about half a mile, but we can rest along the way.”

  “Cut the shit.”

  “I followed when they led the prisoners out across the grass, then maintained a forward position near the edge of the clearing.”

  “You watched two men chained to a tree get murdered?” Davies didn’t answer. “Without trying to stop it?”

  “I was outmanned and unarmed.”

  “Did you think of making noise or throwing something?”

  “Sure, I thought of a lot of stuff.”

  A long silence followed and someone cleared their throat, then Ruter asked Davies to describe everything he’d seen from the point he’d heard yelling, a man calling for help up the creek canyon. Davies thought that had been Peter Han.

  Marquez tried to reconcile the story Davies had told him with what he was hearing now, Davies telling about hiking up the creek at midnight and arriving at 3:00 A.M., following the voices up the canyon and seeing them marched across the clearing, chained to the tree, and questioned by the tall man who’d knelt near them and asked his questions in a voice too low to hear. Ruter clicked the recorder off again.

  “You hear what’s missing,” Ruter said.

  “No gunshots.
”

  “He wasn’t there.”

  “He’s doing a pretty good job of winging it,” Marquez said.

  “I know. Think about it. Here goes again.”

  “We saw you force Huega onto your boat,” Ruter said on the tape. “Did you pull a gun on him?”

  “He got on willingly. What happened was I told Danny I had photos to show him, pictures I took myself up at Guyanno before the lieutenant got there.”

  “Is that Lieutenant Marquez you’re referring to?”

  “Yes, sir, the lieutenant is the only pure play here.”

  “We looked at your camera and didn’t see any pictures of Ray Stocker. Where are these photos you showed Huega?”

  “They’re gone, but here’s the deal. I switched memory cards before you got there and taped the other one to my leg. I didn’t want to take a chance on you and your partner’s honesty and I already knew I’d have to talk to Danny Huega because I knew you two would come after me.”

  Ruter cut to Marquez. “He had night vision equipment stored in a day pack. There was a Canon digital camera in there and when we looked at what he had stored there were photos of the abalone table and the campsite. He may have switched the memory card just like he said.” He paused a beat. “Is this the guy you thought you knew?”

  “He’s much more aggressive than I’ve heard him.” Marquez thought about the description of the killer Davies had given. It wasn’t much. A tall man, on the thin side, long head, hair that reflected the moonlight. “Maybe he’s feeling the heat.”

  “He’s going to feel it like a Tomahawk missile up his ass. Okay, here we go again.”

  The tape made a high-pitched whine and as it started again Marquez tried to put himself in the interview box, tried to picture Davies as he was pulled off his boat under the glare of the Coast Guard searchlight, being brought in and interviewed after pulling a wire off Huega and torturing information out of him.