Die-Off (27 page)

‘Tell Voight you’ll talk to him as long as he doesn’t mess with you. He’ll get it. I’m sure he’s had to cut deals with all kinds of scuzzballs over the years. You got to do what you’ve got to do to get information.’

Kevin really didn’t like that. He stared super hard at her and she knew there was never any going back from today. But that was fine. This is where it ended forever and it was better to make sure it was done.

‘You only care about yourself, Kevin.’

‘That’s all anyone cares about, you stupid bitch.’

‘When they were killed what you said was they ran into some bad energy. You’re bad energy, dude. You suck the good stuff away from people. You live like a leach and you’re a coward for not helping the investigator.’

‘I’m gone, but here’s the takeaway. If you mess with my business something will happen to you.’

‘Something will happen to me? What does that mean? Are you’re going to hurt me?’

‘It means don’t make a mistake. Go back to your bullshit job and never call me again and it means Voight better not call me after talking to you.’

‘Or what?’

‘Fucking find out if you want. Later, Maria, have a good life.’

M
arquez followed the Smith River down past Panther Flat and Middle Fork Gorge and finally to the Redwood Highway and Crescent City. He checked into a motel before driving to the bar where he was supposed to be at six o’clock. It was less than a mile from the Methuselah and he couldn’t help think about that as he took a stool. He signaled the bartender as outside gusting wind turned into rain. The streets darkened with night and he nursed a beer and waited.

When the meeting time came and went and he was close to leaving, he signaled the bartender for one more beer. The bartender reminded him of a poacher they had busted in ’04, who then did two years in prison and now a fire-breathing, blade-faced preacher way out in the desert in Nevada. His flock prayed for apocalypse and retribution to unbelievers. Not long ago he sent Marquez a YouTube clip of a sermon where he had sacrificed a lamb.

The beer came and he watched the bartender discourage an older fellow from anymore drinks with a loud, ‘Get the fuck out of here, Charley.’ The old boy cussed out the bartender then got down off his stool and left. Now, as it was just Marquez, the bartender moved over in front of him.

‘I always have to run him off. He’s a drunk and I don’t like him in here.’

‘I’m about to leave myself. What do I owe you?’

‘Don’t leave until we talk about tomorrow.’

‘What about it?’

‘I’m your ride at six in the morning.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Wherever they tell me to bring you.’

‘You don’t know.’

‘I wouldn’t tell you if I did.’

Marquez took a harder look at him. ‘You and I know each other, don’t we? You’ve lost your hair since I last saw you. You were still a guard at Pelican Bay. That was in 1997. I came up to see a prisoner and the next time I came back they said you’d moved on to another prison. That was before you were arrested.’

‘I paid for what I did and it’s none of your business.’

But it agitated him and he got busy with his cell phone and came back with a photo on his phone of a newspaper article headline he wanted Marquez to see.

‘That’s the boy who testified against me.’

Marquez read: ‘Disturbed Ex-Con Takes Own Life.’

‘I look at that every day. That boy framed me and I don’t care what you think about me. When you come out of prison there are no jobs. You make money however you can. They took everything from me for it. I had twenty-five years in and didn’t end up with any pension. I’m sixty-three years old and if someone comes in here and offers me five hundred dollars to guide some asshole of a warden out a dirt road, I don’t have any problem doing that and then forgetting where I left him.’

‘Sure, not much different than when you were selling new inmates to prison gangs. You pocket the money and forget about it.’

His name came to Marquez now. York. Pierce York and one of four guards paid by a prison gang to get access to new prisoners they wanted for sex. It worked until one of the unwilling sex partners needed intestinal surgery following a gang rape. That was the young man in the headline Pierce just showed him.

‘York thumped the top of the bar with a calloused index finger. ‘Get out of here and show up in the morning or don’t, I don’t give a damn which.’

Marquez drove back to the motel. He cleaned his gun as he talked with Hauser. Hauser was at the Best Western Marquez had booked him into and had no new information and was very down. As cleaning fluid sat in the gun barrel, Marquez leaned back in the motel room’s one chair and listened.

‘I wish I’d never gotten involved. I’ve destroyed my career and my personal life.’

‘Return the money.’

‘I’m not a thief.’

‘You gambled ENTR wouldn’t go public with the missing money, but they surprised you. Now they have to tie you to the pike project and they’re working on that and you still aren’t giving me what I need to help you.’

‘You want some real world, Lieutenant? Go online and Google my name and you’ll see people questioning my microclimate models. Those questions weren’t there a month ago. That’s ENTR working at discrediting me. Do you know I was considered for a Nobel Prize?’

‘I hadn’t heard but I know you’re letting a criminal case get built. Call your lawyer tomorrow morning and let him float some ideas by ENTR management. It came out of accounts you were overseeing. You’re probably the one guy who could figure out how to get it back.’

‘If it got returned tomorrow the pike in the third hatchery would get released into the rivers. Do you want that?’

‘They won’t get released if your biologist friend helps us.’

‘He can’t do anything without risking his career.’

‘He needs to take that risk.’

Hauser hung up and Marquez reassembled the gun then phoned Voight and the two wardens who would back him up tomorrow. The Del Norte sheriff was also backing him up with three deputies. The wardens would be out of uniform and in a faded blue pickup carrying chainsaws. If Marquez was taken down a dirt road they would be there with the cover of being out there to cut firewood from deadfall. Marquez also had a small GPS tracker stitched into the tongue of his right boot and another in his coat. He made the call to Waller as promised and then went through his gear again, feeling nervous in a way he didn’t usually experience.

He lay on his back on the motel bed and talked with Katherine before trying to sleep. At three in the morning just after he had dozed off his phone rang. He recognized the biologist Barry Peason’s cell number, but when he answered all that was on the other end was someone breathing and listening. He tried for a couple of minutes to get Peason to talk and left the line open.

‘We need your help, Barry. Talk to me. You can do that without any risk to yourself.’

Marquez paused. He listened and waited and the phone screen threw blue light on the motel room wall.

‘The best thing you can do now is help us.’

There was a soft click as the line went dead.

T
here were rain showers in the early morning as Marquez waited in the dark outside the bar, but it looked like it was going to clear. When a pickup drove up it wasn’t the bartender, instead a sun-weathered older guy who said he was a boat captain and that Marquez should follow him to the wharf.

Marquez talked to the two wardens and the Del Norte officers as he followed the pickup to a pier and a fishing boat. Ten minutes later the boat’s diesels fired and the boat vibrated with the engines’ thrum as the captain pushed the throttle forward. They cleared the harbor and churned south in good-sized swell.

After sunrise as the visibility improved a Zodiac came into view, and then ran alongside them. The captain slowed and put the boat on autopilot. He took Marquez to the crane used to bring supplies onboard and lift out the fish catch and told him to get in the basket.

‘Why?’

‘I’m going to lower you onto their boat.’

‘Have you ever done this before?’

‘Plenty of times with illegals and I’ve only lost a couple of them.’ He smiled. ‘When you lose one they don’t pay you. I haven’t done this in a while but you’re fine. I haven’t forgotten how.’

Marquez climbed into the crane basket and the boat captain swung him out over the ocean as the fishing boat pitched and rolled and the Zodiac alongside rose and fell underneath the basket holding Marquez. He climbed over the edge of the basket and they grabbed at his legs. When he let go and dropped he knocked both men down, catching one on the cheekbone with his elbow.

The Zodiac accelerated away, angling for the shore with Marquez seated at the bow. They put in at a broken-down pier, got out fast and hurried over to a green Suburban. Guns came out and a canvas sack went over Marquez’s head. He felt the poke of a needle and heard a muffled, ‘Have a nice sleep.’

He didn’t remember losing consciousness but he knew from the sound of the tires as he came to that they were now on a smooth dirt road. He touched his coat. His phone was still with him. The bag was tied loosely at his neck and his face and hair were drenched in sweat. He slowly moved his left boot to his right. His boots were still on so the GPS tracker was intact.

He listened to the road and talking that was low and indistinct. The road climbed and he felt the curves and heard the engine pulling harder as it got steeper. They bounced in ruts that jarred and the driver swore, and maybe half an hour later they slowed and as they stopped the bag came off and he smelled pine and fir and felt the cold air.

‘Out. Time to walk.’

Now it was just two men and him and a shadow of a trail climbing along a creek. They startled a black bear and the one in the front took a couple of steps toward it to get the big bear moving. An orange Coast Guard plane passed overhead and the man nearest looked at him and smiled as if the plane was searching for Marquez and the idea of finding him up here was a joke.

The trail steepened as it left the creek and under the brush and along the rocks was a few inches of icy new snow. They struggled upward and then hit another dirt track and followed that up and a mile later walked into an encampment that looked to Marquez like a back to the earth group inhabiting a failed settlement from a former century. Blue plastic tarps stretched over lean-to structures and the remains of cabins, smoldering wood fires, beards and beads, and faces turned toward them but the men leading him didn’t say a word to anyone.

They walked through the encampment and picked up a trail through cedars that led to a cabin with a stout wood door and two guards. One held a shotgun, the other an AR-15 on a sling over his right shoulder. That man rapped on the door and said, ‘The prisoner is here.’

Now Marquez was looking at an injured Jim Colson. His head was shaved. An angry red scar that looked very raw and was laced with black stitches curved in a half moon under the back of his skull. His left eye was also bruised and he looked weak and pale though his look was one of disdain. He motioned Marquez to a chair and the cabin door was pulled shut.

‘You may have made a bad mistake coming here, but we’ll talk.’

‘What happened to your head?’

Colson didn’t answer at first and Marquez sat down. The only light was a battery lantern and a dying fire in the stone fireplace.

‘I’ve come close to killing you more than once, Marquez. I’ve got a twitchy sniper working for me, an Afghan vet, I gave the go to take you down in the Washougal Basin. Half of your skull would have been in the brush behind you if he hadn’t missed.’

Marquez knew about the shot taken. He had backed away fast. He listened as Colson explained a change he’d come to after receiving the head wound that he touched now with his left hand. His voice was deep and hoarse.

‘I’ve had to reconsider many things since I got hurt and there is an opening here for you. There is a way we could do a deal. You won’t like it and I’m not sure what I’ll do with you if you turn it down, but if you want to hear it I’ll lay it out for you.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I have more than enough money and I could give you lists of people, networks, smuggling lines, shippers, law enforcement officers, as long as I have in writing a guarantee no one will come after me.’

‘You want out.’

‘That’s right, I want out, but not a plea deal. I’m not admitting to anything and I want to leave with everything I’ve earned and a guarantee no charges will ever be filed.’

He said this without turning his head from the fire, but turned now, his eyes dark in the shadowy light, face impassive, his voice slow and soft.

‘It’s not a decision you’re going to make, Lieutenant, but you are the one who can make it happen. It means you wouldn’t hunt for me any longer and I wouldn’t think about killing you anymore. I would go away and you’d have all the names.’

‘How long have you used this place?’

‘Hippies settled this place forty years ago. They tricked the government and ended up with a ninety-nine-year lease. They grow dope and ratty vegetables and make craft-type crap they sell at flea markets. Some were born here. I killed one of the natives when I first got here. He was a young man whose girlfriend I slept with and he wanted to fight to the death. He’s buried down by the creek and they don’t like me much here, but they don’t dislike me anymore either. I give them money. I built a building with showers and put in a septic system so they don’t have to shit in the woods. I rebuilt this cabin and use it when I need to rest.’

‘Were you once a cop?’

‘Did she give you that?’

‘No.’

‘Who did?’

‘It doesn’t matter who.’

Marquez took in the cabin. It was no more than fifteen feet by twelve feet. Stone walls, a stone fireplace, a cedar plank floor, a bed, a small iron stove and a grill in the fireplace that looked like it had been used to cook on. A five-gallon jug held water.

‘This is where I figured out I was Rider.’

‘And we’ve figured out who you were before.’

There was a long silence and then, ‘Well, he doesn’t exist anymore.’