Lieutenant Carol Shauf ran point as the team tracked the foursome. Shauf called out their changing locations over the radio and as Marquez heard her description of one of them he eased over to the road shoulder north of Moat Creek.
To his left beyond the road and the cliffs was the dark blue of the Pacific, to his right a barbed-wire fence and pasture. In the distance, dark trees on the coastal mountains. Fog blew overhead, but it was burning off and the green field to his right alternately darkened and brightened. Sunlight and shadow touched the pages of one of his old logbooks as he flipped through the pages. He listened to the back and forth over the radio as he worked his way back in the logbook. He found what he was looking for just as his cell phone rang.
‘John Marquez?’ a voice asked, and Marquez recognized him right away. He remembered the distrust in Desault’s stare the day of the lie detector test. ‘It’s Ted Desault. Remember me?’
‘Sure, I remember you, Ted. You must be calling to apologize? It’s taken you long enough.’
Desault chuckled and Marquez could ask how he got this phone number, or what it was he needed so badly that after twenty years he was calling, but he decided to wait for the explanation.
‘I head an FBI task force to take down Emrahain Stoval.’
‘Stoval.’
‘Yes, and I know you keep tabs through Kerry Anderson.’
‘I try not to think about him much anymore. I’ve got my hands full here.’
Marquez listened to a quick back and forth between Shauf and another of his team. He knew Desault could hear it too and he wanted him to.
‘I need your help, Marquez.’ If you didn’t need something, you wouldn’t be calling, Marquez thought. ‘Stoval traffics in animal parts. We think he’s vulnerable there.’
Marquez knew about the trafficking. Desault was right, he still kept track through Anderson. But he was also two decades away from what had happened then. According to Anderson, Stoval had made himself untouchable after 9/11 by providing continual intelligence about terror related smuggling through Mexico. But then that was the kind of thing Anderson would say. Anderson and Sheryl Javits were about all the connection he had left from those days. Sheryl was at the wedding when he married Katherine. Sheryl came to dinner occasionally at their house. She was well up in the DEA brass now. It was Sheryl who had confirmed years ago that after Miguel Salazar was killed the contract on Marquez had gone away.
‘I want to talk face-to-face,’ Desault said. ‘I’ve got an offer I’d like to make you. I think you’ll like what we’re doing.’
Marquez looked out at the ocean and said, ‘Give me a number where I can reach you.’
‘When can we meet?’
‘I’ll call you. We’re in the middle of something, right now.’
But Desault knew that. He’d heard Shauf. As he hung up, Marquez thought of the passive distrust in Desault’s eyes the day of the lie detector test. He got only a few seconds to think about it before Shauf’s voice crackled over the radio.
‘Hey, they’re back at the first harbor. I’m betting they left a dive ring down there full of ab and will bring it up now.’
‘Can you see the driver?’
‘I’m looking at him.’
‘Has he got a tatt on the right side of his neck?’
‘If he does the wetsuit collar is hiding it. He’s got a buzz cut. He’s big. No, he’s fat. Black wetsuit, bright blue stripes on the arms. Why are you asking?’
‘I recognize him.’ Marquez had found the page with the notes from 2003 on a poacher named Greg Lahzouras. Images from long ago, Billy Takado’s face, buzzed in his head, but he made himself focus. ‘If it’s who I think it is he’s got a tatt that’s supposed to be a dragon, but looks like a red lizard on his neck.’
‘You might be right. This looks like a guy we busted in Shelter Cove in ’03 or 4. Remember, he got off with almost no fine? What was his name?’
‘Lahzouras.’
‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right, it is him.’ Her voice speeded up. ‘OK we’ve got some more action, the backpacker we saw out on the road earlier is walking back up like he’s carrying a dead body on his back. I think they filled his pack with ab. If I’m right they’ll pick him up when he reaches the road, unload what he’s carrying, and do it again at the other places they dove.’
And that’s what happened. The backpacker let other cars go by and then stuck his thumb out as the Chevy with the divers approached. They put his pack in the trunk alongside a big cooler and he got in. At the next beach lot the divers went down to the water, leaving the backpacker to transfer the abalone from the backpack to a big cooler in the trunk. When he finished he strolled down to the beach with the empty pack. Not the most sophisticated method, but it was getting the job done.
They watched this routine three times before the divers left the coast, drove east through coastal mountains, and north on 101 forty miles to a convenience store lot, where in about sixty seconds they moved two big coolers from the Chevy into a white minivan. The Chevy with the divers headed south back down 101 and Marquez sent three of the SOU with it. Shauf and the others stayed with him and trailed the minivan to a small airport way up in Yreka.
As he drove he thought about Desault’s call and the time that had passed. His face showed the years of wind and sun. He was gray at the temples now. Gray was the color when he shaved and washed the razor, but he still had the rangy broad-shouldered strength and lankiness. Wildlife enforcement had been the right decision long ago, but he knew also that his role as patrol lieutenant of the SOU was going to end in the next few years. Chief Blakely, who headed the law enforcement end of the California Department of Fish and Game, wanted him to accept a promotion, move up the ladder, and bring his experience into one of the regional offices.
He’d floated a different idea with Blakely, that she create a new job in the field for him as he left the SOU. Her bemused smile told him how ridiculous that was. Thirty-eight warden positions were currently unfilled because the salary was so low. There was absolutely no way she could create a new position. How much of that did Desault know, and where did Desault get his cell number if not from Blakely? It would be easy to ask her.
Marquez had married Katherine and helped raise his stepdaughter, Maria, from age five and a half to adulthood. He was a legend among the commercial market poachers, but he took fewer risks nowadays. Poachers who had tried to track the team told stories and speculated that the SOU had secret airplanes and helicopters because they seemed to disappear and then arrive impossibly fast on the other end of the state. But that was the art of casting a long shadow, and that’s what they were up to again tonight. Half the team was with him and the rest working a sturgeon operation in the delta.
They could have busted the abalone poachers at the little airport in Yreka, but instead videotaped the coolers getting loaded into a Cessna. An hour and a half later, Oregon game wardens arrested three men, including a well-known Portland restaurateur as he came out to meet the plane when it landed. Meanwhile, Marquez and the team followed the minivan driver back out to the coast and arrested him and his companion outside a Crescent City bar.
Crescent City is way up on the north coast of California and Marquez didn’t get out of there until late. He never found the time to call Desault back and he didn’t get as far south that night as he’d hoped to. He slept four hours in a motel in Ukiah and at first light was on the road south again. He was late and as a consequence didn’t meet up with one of the ten wardens on his SOU team in time. An investigation would later determine fault, but for Marquez the results of the investigation would never matter. He believed that if he hadn’t slept in Ukiah, if he’d just pushed on, it would have gone down differently. He would always blame himself.