Shell Games (30 page)

“The boat isn’t going to sink; they stabilized it,” Douglas said. “There was another charge and if it had gone off, the boat would have sunk in minutes, taking everybody with it. Several people here would like to meet you.”

“I’d like to get back on board the
Bosporus
tomorrow.”

“I’ll get you on. You want to get to that abalone.”

“Yeah.”

“Let me introduce you here.”

“I’m going up the elevator first. I’ll sit down with you after I come back down.” He put a hand on Douglas’s shoulder. “I’m sorry about the agents who were killed.”

“We’ve got two in surgery.”

“How are they doing?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Petersen was conscious and saw him come in. Stuart was at her bedside dabbing her forehead with a sponge a nurse had left him. She brought her hand up to push the sponge away, and he saw she was very pale, her eyes too bright, Stuart explaining quietly that she had a high fever, the result of a blood infection. They’d pumped her full of antibiotics and were confident she’d be okay in a few days, but the real loss was in her heart and Marquez could see the sad emptiness in her eyes. He’d already been told that what Davies had reported was correct. She’d miscarried in her third day of captivity. He talked to her now, took her hand, tried to make her smile. When she spoke the thoughts were in fragments, the effort at forming sentences evident, and a nurse returned and asked that Marquez leave soon. Keeler had told him earlier this afternoon that a doctor had said she wouldn’t have made it another forty-eight hours without antibiotics.

“You were hard to find,” he said, and leaned over her. She tried to smile and he touched her face. “I’ll check in tomorrow.”

“I’m really tired, John,” she said, and then as he turned to go, she added, “He saved me, John. All the way along he had them fooled.”

“Marquez saved you,” Stuart cut in, but Marquez understood. He turned back and leaned to hear her last sentence, saw tears flood her eyes. “Don’t let them wreck his name,” she whispered.

Marquez caught a ride
out to the
Bosporus
the next morning from the
Marlin.
Douglas was already aboard, wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt that read FBI in black letters across the back, a casualness of dress Marquez had never seen in him. Douglas’s face bore the marks of the emotional ride of the last day and they were both quiet and stood on the main deck looking at the San Francisco skyline before going below to the cold storage where the abalone was. There had to be five thousand.

“What happens to it?” Douglas asked.

“We hand it off to charities. Why don’t you take a couple home? Tenderize them, pound them, and then cut them into steaks. You’ll find out what this is all about.”

“I might take you up on that.”

He knew what Douglas had on his mind and waited for it now, heard him clear his throat and suggest they go to the walk-in where Marquez had fought with Kline. They climbed back to that
level and followed the narrow passageway through the galley with Douglas talking as he walked in front.

“You finally got him, Marquez.” Douglas opened the door of the walk-in and Marquez saw the arcing blood splatter dried on the walls, the dark, almost black pool of blood at their feet. “Life or death,” Douglas said, and Marquez knew where Douglas was going. “We recovered the telelocator in case you’re wondering.”

“Keep it. I don’t want to lose another one.”

Marquez stared at the pooled blood, his blood mixed with Kline’s. He waited.

“Did you really keep the hood on until he was holding a knife on you?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you keep yourself still?”

“I knew I had to.”

“Man, that’s unreal, that’s just unreal.” He could hear the edge in Douglas’s voice, Douglas working him. “How’s it making you feel looking at this now?”

Marquez looked at the blood and thought of his friends in Mexico and silently told them it was done. He knew where Douglas was going and shrugged, not giving away much yet.

Douglas asked, “So you struggled with him and you managed to get control of his knife?”

“We wrestled.”

“Rolled around on the floor?”

“Something like that.”

“Was he losing strength from blood loss?”

“He was going to,” and they looked at each other. “He might have even bled out.”

“They’re telling me the neck wounds weren’t fatal. They were bad but not fatal.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s what they’re saying. The other one was definitely
fatal. You wrestled and what happened? You get on top of him and all of a sudden you’ve got the knife in your hand?”

Marquez pointed at the floor where the struggle had left long streaks of blood, smeared by a knee, a shoe, an elbow. There were stainless shelves on either side with frozen food products sitting on them, bloody handprints on those where he’d stood as he got up off Kline’s body.

“Yeah, I was able to pin him down.”

“Was he still struggling?” Marquez looked at him and nodded. “But you had the upper hand by then. You must have seen how he was bleeding.”

“Sure.”

“And what were you thinking, or do you remember? Did you realize those wounds weren’t fatal?”

“He made one more attempt, tried for my eyes.”

“So you made sure.”

Marquez stood silent with emotion sweeping through him, all the inner promises he’d made to the dead, all the years wondering and knowing Kline was out there still. Yeah, he’d driven the blade through Kline’s heart and he’d known what he was doing, which was the question Douglas was asking. He’d pushed down until he felt the tip of the blade slide off a rib and snap on the metal floor. He’d crossed Davies’s abyss.

“You’re asking if I had a choice,” Marquez said. The Feds had anticipated capturing Kline. Douglas had counted on questioning him.

“Maybe I am, but I don’t want an answer. Or maybe you don’t remember. Basically, you were defending yourself, trying to save your life.” Douglas paused. “You’re going to get asked a lot of questions this afternoon, but I can understand the actual moment being a little hazy. They say the knife went in and then was pushed through with great force and the tip snapped on the floor decking after it exited his body. The ribcage was compressed enough by force to allow the knife to go all the way through him.
You sliced a rib almost in half and buried the knife hilt in his chest, but then you’re a big man. Still, you’re going to get questioned about it.” Marquez felt Douglas’s hand on his back. “Let’s go back up top.”

“You go up; I’ll be there in a minute.”

Marquez stepped out of the walk-in and shut its door. He laid a palm on the cold metal door and knew he’d had a choice. He’d held the knife over Kline and brought it down into his chest with all his strength. Douglas was letting him know not to say or remember much about the fight, but that didn’t feel right either. Marquez lifted his hand away, walked out the passageway and climbed the stairs into the sunlight. He stood at the rail looking out across at the City again, at the mare’s tails of cirrus fanning from the west, thinking about Kline, just the things he knew Kline had done, the people he’d killed. He didn’t hear Douglas walk over, but then felt a hand on his back.

“You answer some questions this afternoon and then it’s over, Marquez.”

“It all happened fast, but I had a choice.”

“No, you didn’t, and fuck him.” Douglas pointed at the
Marlin,
Hansen clearly visible at the wheel on the top deck. “There’s your ride. When they ask, you say you were rolling around fighting on the floor. Kline had the knife, then you had it and you don’t even know what happened. You were fighting for your life. Or say noth-ing.” Marquez didn’t answer that, wasn’t sure what he’d do yet, and Douglas moved the conversation on. “Where do you go now?”

“A bear poaching deal.” The answer sounded hollow and out of place.

“Never ends, does it?”

“Not really.”

Douglas offered his hand and Marquez shook it. “We owe you, Marquez. You take care of yourself.”

“You, too.”

He rode across the bay without looking back. He knew he wouldn’t be able to lie about killing Kline and decided he’d say nothing. If they wanted to take it further, that was their call. The boat dropped him and he spent the afternoon with the FBI and their many questions about Kline, about whether Marquez had a personal score to settle. They read his silence as an admission and they brought Douglas into the room and walked through the sequence of questions again, let him know they’d put a lot of resources into finding Kline and had expectations about unraveling his network, following the tentacles back to the cartel and the murders of three American judges. Cases that had gone back years in addition to the new killing here in San Francisco.

He watched the nostrils of the man across from him flare as he insinuated that Marquez had murdered a suspect. They walked him through the sequence again, coming up to the point of holding the knife, to the point where if he’d seconded the empathetic voices in the room who suggested he was fighting to defend himself, he could have walked out easily. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that and when they let him leave at dusk, he knew he’d left them to an internal debate.

That night he chopped oak kindling, split a log, and built a fire. He poured a scotch and sat on the stone bench near the fireplace and used a knife to cut the pages from his Kline file. One by one he fed them to the fire and watched the cardboard backing curl and burn and the photos color and smoke, then darken at the center and burst into flame. And he wept for his dead friends, tears no one would see that dried with the fire heat, tears he’d held back for more than a decade. He broke the ashes apart with an iron poker, poured another scotch, and then walked out onto the deck under the stars and knew that for him, it was over.

A few weeks later
on a cloudless morning in October when the sky was a dark blue and the sunlight gold with the fall, Marquez drove up the coast to an abalone festival with Katherine and Maria. They turned off the coast highway onto an open grassy field above the ocean about a mile before Mendocino. A volunteer wearing a fluorescent vest waved them toward a parking spot at the end of a long row of cars. It was a cook-off, an annual deal put on by the Mendocino Area Park Association.

Blue cooking smoke rose in the clearing and pickups, cars, and campers were backed up to barbecues and grills. Beyond it all was the dark blue line of the ocean. They walked in and Marquez handed all but one of the tickets he’d bought months ago to Maria, then bought a couple cups of chowder and stood with Katherine in the sunlight as Maria wandered off. You handed a ticket over and got to taste somebody’s abalone recipe and he watched to see what line Maria would get in. But she went first to the tables of beaded
jewelry, T-shirts, and other fairground paraphernalia. She leaned over a table, a long-legged young woman wearing a tube top and jeans.

“Gaining weight,” Katherine said.

“She’s going to be okay, Kath.”

And so were they, he thought, finding their way to some dif-ferent space. It would take time but he was more patient with that now and knew they’d get there. He checked his watch, glanced back toward the entry gate. He’d had another conversation with the FBI yesterday and though the man he’d talked to didn’t seem happy about it, they were going to treat his killing Kline as self-defense. They wanted him to sign something tomorrow and he’d agreed to.

Katherine slipped her hand into his and he moved closer to her. He scanned the crowd out of habit, took in the faces and saw the DFG table and the uniformed officer talking to a couple of women, probably explaining the habitat of abalone and the effort at sustainability.

“Here she comes,” Katherine said, and they watched Maria walk back across with a plate of fried abalone. One of the pieces had a little American flag stuck in it.

“Try this,” Maria said. “It’s got this great sauce,” and Marquez picked up a piece and bit into it. He reached for another and she pulled the plate back, her eyes lit with a wry humor he hadn’t seen in a while. “Get your own,” she said. “You’ve still got a ticket.”

An hour later, Maria and Katherine were ready to leave and went on ahead to the truck while Marquez waited through the last of a line to use the remaining ticket. The cook was pounding abalone on his tailgate, then grilling it in strips on a barbecue. Marquez watched it cook, got served a plate and walked toward the exit. He looked back once, figuring she’d made other plans and had decided not to stop by. Then he spotted her. She was with Stuart and stand-ing with another couple, people who looked like they were friends. Petersen wore a cap and stood a little back from the group and to
the side. He could see Stuart laughing and judging from their faces it looked like the other man was telling a funny story. Marquez took a bite of abalone and lingered near the exit, debating whether to cross the clearing. But he was unsure whether to interrupt.

He’d talked with her plenty on the phone and had been to see her in Redding about a week and a half after Petersen had gotten home. They’d sat in her living room drinking tea while she told him how she’d find herself crying unexpectedly and how her mind would go blank at times. She was getting help with it, seeing a psychotherapist. He saw her face turn in sunlight, the cap that had shadowed her eyes coming off as the man with the funny story started talking to her. When she smiled that light quick smile of hers he felt a rush of warmth.

There were some things you never really got over, but you could get past them. Petersen put her arm around Stuart and looked out across the clearing and saw him now. Marquez saw her nod and held up his index finger, an old joke between them, signaling her that she was the number one warden. But it wasn’t a joke today and he wanted her to know that. He held her gaze and smiled back at her, then waved and slowly turned away. It was time to go home.