31
“You knocked out Torp’s front teeth,” Crey said.
“Yeah, he owes Lisa a chair.”
“Man, you’re too much. What did I say to you about working with my crew? This really screws everything up.”
“He started to pull a gun, and Perry came at me with a knife.”
“He was just trying to get another drink. He couldn’t get inside. The door was locked.”
“Tell him to drink out of the toilet next time he’s thirsty. You and I know he was going upstairs.”
“No, he wasn’t, and you read too much into everything. At the most he was going to borrow a bottle of Jack Daniels.”
“He had a gun.”
“He’s always got a gun. That doesn’t mean anything. You think he was going up to do her, then what, the cops are there in the morning, and how long do you think it would take them to figure out who did it? He ain’t that stupid, man, and the point is I asked you to work with my crew.”
“I took a mask and gloves off him. He had a bottle of chloroform.”
Crey was silent, then quietly said, “Lou didn’t tell me that.”
“Because Perry planned to follow him upstairs. They were both on the deck. Start meeting me yourself because I can’t deal with them anymore. I’ve got a drop for you later today, and I don’t want to see anybody but you.”
“What time will you get here?”
“Before 2:00.”
He hung up as Raburn came back from dropping the kids off. Marquez had left the canning room and walked the gravel road through the orchards back to the packing shed. He was at his truck when Raburn came up alongside him.
“I’m leaving,” Marquez said. “The key is on the table in the room.”
“When is all this going to end?”
“You know, that’s a question I ask myself. How long is it going to take to shut these guys down?”
“What am I supposed to tell the kids when you’re rooting through their family’s business?”
“You could tell them that the man going through cabinets in the canning building is trying to keep Uncle Abe out of prison, and Uncle Abe still doesn’t get it.”
Marquez loaded the fish and caviar and left to meet Crey in Rio Vista. After the drop with Crey he’d continue on to Grizzly Bay to make another buy. He met Crey at the bait shop, and Crey wanted him to follow. They drove out to the end of the street and moved the sturgeon and caviar from Marquez’s truck to Crey’s. Almost nothing got said, and Crey was very jumpy. When Marquez wasn’t watching he’d dropped an envelope with the cash in it on the driver’s seat of Marquez’s truck. He pointed it out without identifying it.
“Is that money for me?”
“I gotta go,” Crey answered.
“You okay with me counting it before you take off?”
Marquez lifted the envelope off the seat. He let the bills slide into his hand. But Crey had already turned and was getting in his truck. Without waiting for the money to be counted he drove away, and after he left Marquez had a quiet conversation with the team. Alvarez would go with him to make another sturgeon buy in Grizzly Bay, and the rest of the SOU would stick with Crey.
Grizzly Bay was the color of lead, then bright silver where the sunlight broke through onto the water. Marquez could remember when troops were trained here in preparation for fighting in the Mekong in Vietnam. He rechecked his directions, then pulled over on the shoulder 2.3 miles from the last stop sign. About twenty minutes later a couple of kids pulled up in a gray minivan, neither looking older than eighteen. The driver got out, walked up to Marquez’s window, and then introduced himself. Julio Rodriguez. He was clean-cut, hair short and gelled, a cheerful guileless face. Marquez could tell the kid hadn’t done this before.
“You want to look at the fish first?” Julio asked.
“Sure would.”
Marquez got out and looked at the sturgeon in the mini-van. It was a decent size, over the slot limit by a foot. The kid was very proud, said it was the biggest he’d ever caught. The other young man stayed in the cab, looking around once but apparently just there to help lift the sturgeon, didn’t have anything to do with catching it.
“How long have you known Abe?” Marquez asked.
“My uncle knows him. I don’t know him.”
Marquez counted out the bills, and Alvarez drove slowly past, videotaping the exchange of money. Julio couldn’t have been more unaware. They moved the sturgeon, and Marquez questioned him.
“What are you going to do with the money?”
“I’m saving for college.”
“You’ll have to catch a lot of sturgeon to get through college.”
“I’ve got two jobs.”
“Yeah, where do you work?”
“In Suisun.”
He kept talking. He played baseball and hoped to play in college. He lived in Suisun, so did the uncle who knew Raburn and taught him how to fish for sturgeon. He was the oldest kid in his family and had four brothers and sisters. He shook Marquez’s hand before leaving, and Alvarez trailed him as he drove away with the money, said the kid never looked in the rearview mirror except slowing at stoplights.
“Looked to me like he went shopping for the family,” Alvarez said later. “He went straight to a grocery store and then home. Must have been his brothers and sisters who helped unload groceries.”
“Where’s home?”
“A little asbestos-shingled house facing the water.”
Marquez called Ludovna with this one and got told to bring it over to the Sacramento store. A couple of guys working for Ludovna helped him unload. The team was already jokingly calling today the “sturgeon derby.”
At 2:00, Crey’s boat left the dock with six sport fishermen and worked sturgeon holes around the Mothball Fleet and later went farther upriver and docked at the Delta Queen. After the sport fishermen filed off the boat and went into the bar, Perry and Torp drove up in their van. They boarded Crey’s boat, then left again a few minutes later with a blue plastic cooler and drove to Weisson’s Auto. Shauf and Roberts stopped a third of a mile back. Shauf radioed Marquez.
“What do we do now?”
“Stay with them when they leave there.”
“Can we call the Feds?”
“I’ll call Ehrmann and let him know we took it this far and we think caviar was delivered here. That’s the cooler I delivered to Crey’s Rio Vista house so we’ve already got it on tape.”
Cairo sat on Ludovna’s house, and late in the afternoon Cindy Raburn backed into Ludovna’s driveway and stayed only as long as it took to load a cooler into her Volvo backseat. Hard to tell for sure, but it looked like the same blue cooler, and now Marquez came up alongside the Volvo at a stoplight. He looked down through the back windows and saw the Save Lake Tahoe sticker they’d put on the cooler.
“It’s the same one,” he said.
They followed Cindy Raburn back into the delta and home. But rather than drive her car to the house, she stopped at the canning building and lugged the cooler inside. They watched the lights come on.
“No wonder Raburn was so nervous this morning,” Marquez said. “Let’s let it unfold now. She must be in there to jar the caviar. They went to a lot of trouble to get it here. Let’s see what happens and let’s follow it from here.”
He broke the team into shifts and drove into Walnut Grove with Shauf. There he bought bread, peanut butter, apples, a couple of candy bars, and filled a thermos with coffee before Shauf dropped him off along the southwestern side of the Raburn property. With Alvarez he came down the steep levee bank in the darkness and then out along the property line, following the edge of the trees. Shauf would stay with her van and watch the roads, and, with Alvarez, Marquez started through the orchards. The rest of the team would go to the safehouse, and they’d rotate in the morning.