Shell Games Page 4

Marquez called Ruter and related the Davies conversation, said it sounded to him like Huega would be dumped somewhere south of Punta Gorda, beyond the abandoned lighthouse, maybe between Sea Lion Gulch and Randall Creek. There were stretches where the cliffs were on top of you and the beach was a white ribbon that sleeper waves could cover completely. You had to keep your eye on the ocean, but there was no fog tonight and Huega would see a big wave well before it happened. He’d see a black hump rise and roll toward him with moonlight glistening off its shoulder.

  “You might ask the Coast Guard to take a run up there and see if they spot him on the beach,” Marquez told Ruter.

  “Is he hurt?”

  “He may be.”

  “Thanks for the call.”

  “Let me know what happens.”

  Ruter never answered. Marquez was in Oakland, a block and a half from Li’s house, parked alongside an empty house for sale. A half-eaten burrito, two chicken tacos, and a thermos of coffee were on the passenger seat. The food would carry him until another SOU warden, Cairo, took over after midnight. Lately, he’d been liv-ing off Mexican food; fish tacos, burritos, tostaditos, guacamole, and chips. Since Katherine and Maria had moved out he’d barely been to the store, other than for the most basic staples and for din-ner on the nights they came over. He had tomatoes growing on the deck, wrapped in chicken wire to keep the deer off. He’d make a dinner out of bread, tomatoes, peanut butter, and rum or beer.

  He had all his gear with him tonight, two guns, the takedown vest, all the cameras and night vision equipment, everything he needed if Li rolled, though the team reported that Li hadn’t left the house all day. He thought more about Davies as he sat in the darkness. Davies had gone over some edge and the question was whether it was before he’d called from Guyanno or after. He reached over and closed up the bag with the tacos, lowered his window, and leaned back in his seat. Another hour went by and then his phone rang.

  Davies’s voice was remorseful, slowed, and thick. “He slid against a knife, Lieutenant, but he’s fine. He’s onshore. I dropped him. He got cut when the boat pitched, but it was no big deal, maybe a couple inches long, a quarter-inch deep. He’s walking out to Gitchell Creek. You’ll want to pick him up there. That’s going to be a good time to lean on him.”

  “How much farther do you want to cross over the line?”

  But Davies didn’t seem to hear him.

  “I got some information from him and he got on the phone for me. We made some calls to his friends. You sit Danny down, Lieu-tenant, and he’ll talk to you. Put his feet to the fire, though. That’s the way to get results.”

  “Bring your boat in, Mark.” He hoped this Huega was okay, figured he probably was, and felt a quiet regret for Davies, who’d be looking at prison time for this. “You’re blowing it; they’ve got an all-points bulletin out on you.”

  “If I come in I’ll be sitting in a cell with some dweeb-ass county defender trying to tell me to plead guilty because he’s never won a case in his life. You don’t have to tell me I fucked up today, Lieu-tenant.” He hung up.

  Marquez stared at Li’s house after Davies clicked off. He phoned Ruter, left a message, and was surprised by a call back two hours later.

  “We got him,” Ruter said, “and we’re looking for Huega. You ready to admit you were wrong about Davies? Maybe you ought to check out your informants more carefully.”

  “Do you have anything tying him to the killings?” Marquez asked.

  “No one is going to teach you anything about denial, Marquez. You could write the goddamned book. I’ll call you after we sit down with him.”

  5

  Marquez took another call from Ruter while watching a teenage kid with his hands buried in the pockets of his sweat-shirt, shoulders rolled forward, hood all but covering his face, walk past with a Doberman on a leash. The dog sensed his presence, but the kid’s head bobbed only to the music piped through his earphones and never looked over. Marquez listened to Ruter’s certainty as the kid disappeared down the street.

  “Davies has taken his last boat ride for a while,” Ruter said. “But I need to get with you again and tighten up the time frame. When are you north again?”

  “Could be tomorrow.”

  “Call me, it can’t wait.”

  Marquez slid the phone in his pocket and lights started wink-ing out at Li’s. It was either bedtime, or else Li would use the dark-ness to move. Nothing happened and the street was quiet until after midnight when a tricked-out Honda Prelude with a spoiler drag ran a “sideshow,” racing a Subaru Impreza. They blew past Marquez and he guessed they went through the stop sign down the street at close to eighty. He watched their taillights and then sporadic house lights coming on, dogs barking. When it quieted again he replayed the saved voice mail messages from Davies, the calls made before Davies had gotten through to him from Guyanno Creek. There were two of them, the first at 7:55 yesterday morning.

  The first went, “I’m up at Guyanno Creek campground, Lieu-tenant. There’s a bad scene up here. There’s a ton of abalone shells, but the divers who were doing the poaching are dead. Give me a call, okay? I don’t want to do anything until I hear from you, but call me soon, all right? It’s a bad situation, I mean, these guys were carved up. I don’t know about hanging around here.” There was a gap now, a long silence, then, “Okay, Lieutenant, I’m waiting here for your call.” He’d left his cell number.

  The second call was more controlled, but equally anxious. When he replayed them yet again it was still hard to picture Davies staging it all as Ruter believed. Davies wasn’t who Marquez had thought he was. That much was obvious, but still it didn’t fall together for him the way Ruter wrote the script.

  At around 1:30, Cairo and Alvarez took over the surveillance and Marquez checked into an Oakland motel along the frontage road just off 880. He lay on his back on a squeaking motel bed, smelling the dust in the room, listening to heavy trucks rumbling past on the freeway and to his heartbeat. He thought about Kather-ine and Maria, the silence on the other end of the phone when he’d tried to talk to Maria tonight. He missed her a lot and he’d have to find a way to spend some time with her tomorrow. That might mean driving down late in the afternoon from Fort Bragg. Couldn’t get there before her school let out, but maybe he’d take her to dinner and talk over this food thing.

  He didn’t remember falling asleep but awoke anxious and momentarily unsure of where he was. The red numbers of the nightstand clock glowed 4:37. He sat up, thinking he’d shower and get breakfast somewhere before hooking up with the team, and was dressing when the phone rang.

  “Lights are on, looks like we’re a go,” Alvarez said. “He’s in the garage.”

  “All right.”

  “Are we going to do it today, Lieutenant?”

  “We are.”

  He made a quick stop at a convenience store, bought a bagel he could barely bite into and a large black coffee. They gave Li plenty of room, hanging way back, closing some as he came up the east shore of the bay through Richmond and across the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge. He had both sons with him and was loaded with dive gear. He drove a steady seventy-eight miles an hour up High-way 101, then broke for the coast on Highway 128 where he could see any lights well behind him. The road rolled and climbed and then ran past Boonville and through tall stands of redwoods before reaching the coast.

  In the predawn Marquez called Ruter’s cell, figuring the detec-tive would have been up all night questioning Davies. But it sounded like he woke him up, got a bleary, “Ruter, here.”

  “It’s Marquez. Did they find Huega?”

  “Shit.” The phone clicked off and Marquez smiled, punched in the numbers again. “No, they didn’t.” The phone went dead again.

  Li was almost to Fort Bragg. The dark shapes of three heads were visible in the truck’s front seat, Li’s younger son in the mid-dle nearest his dad, the older boy slumped against the passenger window, styled haircut getting crushed flat, shoulders buried in a baggy camouflag
e jacket. According to Alvarez, the kids had shuffled like zombies to the truck, barely awake when the drive started at

  4:45. Marquez was sorry the kids were along. He was okay with charging the older son with poaching, they had enough on video-tape to do that, but he regretted that the kids would see their dad get busted, particularly the younger son. He keyed his mike, talking to his surveillance team as Tran Li dropped down to Noyo Harbor. Marquez wondered how he’d take it this time. Last time they’d busted him he’d acted as his own lawyer, arguing his case, his pale gold face animated by determination as the jury leaned forward and tried to connect his broken English.

  Li loaded equipment into his black Zodiac and Petersen joined up with the team. She spoke quietly as the kids lugged dive equip-ment from the back of the pickup.

  “He’s taking a chance with the weather. We had thunder cells last night.”

  “He’s got a couple of hours,” Marquez said. “Water is still calm.”

  “A couple of hours at the most.”

  Depending on how Li played it. Marquez checked the horizon again. Close to shore the water was slate smooth in the calm of early morning, but a heavy band of rain clouds lay along the hori-zon and cirrus had begun to fan overhead. Isolated thunder cells were forecast, unusual for this area, squalls, periods of high wind. Li left the harbor, his wake rocking off the concrete jetty. He cleared the gray rock of the breakwater and turned north, the Zodiac look-ing small, dark, and vulnerable as it moved out to sea. The boat was well offshore as it passed the town and Marquez’s covert team on land drifted with it. They followed Highway 1 and spread out along the cliffs where they could trace the silken line of its wake. Sooner or later, he’d come in because the abalone beds were all in the first sixty feet of water.

  Roughly a mile north of Fort Bragg he turned shoreward, and Marquez adjusted the positions of the SOU wardens. He had let everyone know they’d take Li down today and he could feel the excited tension, and yet, he wanted to play it as far as they could. Maybe Li would return to the Sea-Lite Motel after diving, maybe today they’d take down his connection, as well.

  Li skirted the coast, moving from cove to cove, several times reversing direction, and Petersen observed, “He knows he’s taking too many chances. He may feel us.”

  Marquez agreed. “I called Hansen from Noyo, didn’t get him though.”

  He was trying to reach the skipper of one of the Fish and Game boats, the Marlin, working out of San Francisco Bay. He expected a call back soon enough, though Hansen’s crew was doing a lot of homeland security patrols and was less available. He’d also had another call from “Docktalk,” the Pillar Point informant, Jimmy Bailey, claiming his lead was worth five thou-sand dollars.

  Fifteen minutes later, Li had on scuba gear and was sliding into the water. The wind was rising and the Zodiac rose and fell on oily rollers. Marquez watched the two black-haired sons riding the swells, the younger boy’s fingers tightly gripped around a rope. The sky had been blue overhead after sunrise, but was milk-colored now and Petersen was right; Li should have sat out today. But he’ll try to get it over fast, Marquez thought. Li was a capable enough diver and he had his sons with him.

  They waited for him, ready to videotape whatever happened next, expecting an urchin bag with a float attached to bob to the surface. They’d confiscate his dive equipment and impound his boat. Last time, he’d been selling to restaurants and out the back door at card games, taking twenty, thirty red abalone a week, net-ting a grand in cash, putting the money in an education account for his sons. He’d brought bank statements to court.

  This time would be different. It would be harder to lean on cultural differences, much harder to argue ignorance. But poaching was low-level crime in California, not exactly a hot-button issue for the public. Counties rarely had the money to prosecute or supply public defenders and judges were reluctant to give poachers prison space that could go to a three-strikes shoplifter.

  An orange float surfaced. The boys maneuvered the Zodiac over, and wrestled the bag aboard, then Li hooked an arm over the gunwale and his older son pulled him up. He rested and ate. He unzipped his wetsuit and smiled and joked with his boys while his eyes scoured the cliffs.

  When it was time to dive again, the older boy, Joe, suited up with him. Marquez watched them disappear under the surface and then picked up his phone.

  Bailey had called again and left a message as though he’d for-gotten their prior conversations. Listening to it reinforced that he was on the make. Bailey drifted, repeating himself, droning on as though his stream of consciousness made a message, but finished with “I might have something on the dude you’re looking for.”

  Marquez called Bailey back, left a quick “Got your message, let’s meet tomorrow.”

  Li and son surfaced with another urchin bag and climbed on board. A puff of blue smoke rose from the engine and the Zodiac moved out and then circled, as if he was trying to decide whether to continue north and dive another bed. With the wind rising he was probably gauging the weather. Petersen sung a corny, “Should I stay or should I go?” as the Zodiac did another loop, a big donut on the water.

  He went farther up the coast and dove again, Joe going in with him. Then it began to look like rain. Wind gusted along the cliffs and the light flattened as the seas rose. The young boy alone in the boat looked frightened and Li must have felt the change, because he surfaced with only a partial bag. After they were on board and Li had shed his tanks, he reassured his younger son, tousling his hair, and it occurred to Marquez that the boy might not be a swimmer.

  The Zodiac turned south and the team started back toward Noyo Harbor. Not much doubt that he’d run straight there, though it would be a slow ride in these swells. Two wardens, Cairo and Melinda Roberts, were already waiting at Noyo. Marquez drove through Fort Bragg, bringing up the rear, a nervous anticipation vibrating in him as he waited at the stoplights. He played back Bailey’s message again and took a call from Nick Hansen on the Marlin, who deadpanned their old, running joke.

  “Sorry, guy, I’m going to spend the day with my girlfriend. You’ll have to take him down without me holding your hand,” Hansen said. Marquez smiled, some edge taken off the morning. Hansen went on, “I got your message and we’re already on our way to you. We’ll be another thirty minutes. You’re going to want us to stay clear, right?”

  “Yeah, we’ll call you if we need you to close, but it should go down in the harbor.”

  “Check with you in half an hour.”

  Hansen clicked off and Marquez took the little jeep out onto the flats above Noyo. He watched the Zodiac slow and hold up before entering the harbor, a small black boat rolling on the swells. Li was on his cell phone now, but didn’t seem to be talking to his wife. She was in the passenger seat of an old maroon Nova parked in the lot beyond the businesses and the bridge reconstruction, right out along the harbor mouth where Roberts and Cairo had a good view of her. She was staring out at the harbor. She wasn’t holding a phone.

  “He’s not talking to her,” Cairo said.

  “Who’s on the dock?” Marquez asked.

  “A couple of locals.”

  “Anyone else on a phone?”

  “No.”

  “He’s holding up and he’s on his phone. Someone is tipping him off. Are you sure it’s not his wife?”

  “Roger that, we’re positive, and we’re scanning the cliff, but we don’t see anybody from down here. Unless they’re in a motel room.”

  They knew the watcher could be in one of the rooms on the bluffs above the harbor. They’d look for light, a reflection off binoculars, but a watcher could sit ten feet back in a room with the window open and Marquez’s gut told him it was someone in the motel, in the Sea-Lite. It had to be and he tried to work his way along its windows as the Zodiac rolled off a swell and faced the open sea. Lightning flashed at the horizon as Li took control of the Zodiac from his older son, backed away from the harbor and started down the coast. Marquez was unable to h
old the disappointment from his voice because he knew Li had been warned off and would likely dump the catch at sea.

  Melinda Roberts repeated again that it didn’t look like the woman in the car was talking, but she was definitely Li’s wife. They’d just run her plates and gotten back an Oakland registration address, a different name, not Li, not Li’s address, but maybe a car borrowed from a friend or relative, and Marquez returned his focus to the Zodiac. Li had kicked his speed up and bumped south through rain showers and heavier swells. Marquez checked in with the Marlin, talking to Hansen.

  “What’s your position?”

  “Two miles south of you.”

  “He spooked and is headed south not far offshore, moving slow, and could be looking for a place to beach. We’ve got one of these rain cells moving through.”

  “Do you want me to close?”

  The Marlin was a relatively new department boat, a stainless, high-speed catamaran built by Kvichak out of Seattle. Would Li recognize it? Hard to say, but with the heavy seas and curtains of rain he had his hands full and probably wasn’t as watchful.

  “Yeah, to within a quarter mile, and I’ll keep talking to you.”

  Marquez hopscotched along the road shoulder as rain ham-mered the windshield. Petersen was furthest down and had the best view. Gusts shook the jeep and he knew Li didn’t belong out there anymore. It looked like he was running scared and without a plan.

  “Definitely looking for a spot,” Petersen said. “He may be suit-ing up again. It looks like he’s putting on his mask and fins.”

  “What about the older son?”

  “He’s steering or trying to, but they’re bouncing around out there. The younger one is using an air tank to reinflate the floats on the urchin baskets.”

  “Then Li is going to try to float the abalone in,” Marquez said.

  “Yeah, he just got in the water. Can you see him yet?”

  Marquez had cut over to the shoulder and parked. He saw Li in the water, the younger kid struggling to get the urchin bags overboard and the older son leaving his position steering the boat and going to help. When he did, the Zodiac drifted closer to the rocks and Marquez read it the same way Petersen did, heard her calm but worried voice saying, “This is no good, John. No good.”