That night it rained hard, and in the morning the clouds were low and the wind blew hard over the mountain. Marquez listened to the rain lash the windows and made calls. He talked to his team about the Crey offer, then picked up a message from Raburn and phoned him back.
“This is one you might be interested in or not,” Raburn said. “There’s an old Mexican albino they call Whitey. He called me yesterday because he’s got one.”
“How long have you known him?”
“A while. He’s into peyote and mushrooms and used to live down in the desert in New Mexico. Came up here about a dozen years ago. He knows how to keep a sturgeon alive. He’s got one with eggs. I usually hear from him once every six months, but he called twice yesterday. He says he’s up Razor Slough.”
Marquez had never heard of sturgeon biting up Razor. There was little flow, it was shallow, narrow, and last time he was there it didn’t look like either the Army Corps or the state had done any dredging or clearing of deadfall in years. Razor was out along the edge of the delta, deep in the Central Valley, and there was little up there but mosquitoes in summer and the rotted remains of an evangelist’s attempt to set up an encampment. It was also too early, far too early for a sturgeon to migrate that far.
“He’ll meet you there,” Raburn said. “That’s if you’re interested.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Wouldn’t make any difference if I did or not. I got a number you’ve got to call back before noon if you’re interested.”
Marquez looked outside. Raining hard and his boat was at Loch Lomond. Wouldn’t be easy to launch his boat and run it all the way up to Razor on just the possibility of a sturgeon. But something nagged about it. He copied the number he was supposed to call.
“I’m not saying he’s really got one, but he never calls unless he does. Do you know how to get to Razor Slough?”
“I can probably find my way back.”
“ ‘Cause I can’t go with you. I’ve got to meet my brother.”
“How’s the weather where you are?”
“The rain has let up.”
“Razor is where the preacher left that mess?”
“You got it. One end is closed off, but you can’t get in there
unless you want to hike. You got to go by water, but you can’t go the whole way. If I was you I wouldn’t do it, but you wanted me to call you with every offer.”
Marquez felt a vague unease. He hung up with Raburn and called Shauf to talk it over. There was a Zodiac they could borrow and put in well upriver. That would cut the boat time to forty minutes, and they’d still have the hike.
“Is it worth it?” she asked.
“If I partner with Crey it might be, and the storm is supposed to taper off.”
Marquez looked at Bob the cat sitting on the fireplace mantel where he’d been sitting since last night. Katherine had fed him on the mantel. A little can of something called Fancy Food was sitting in front of him. He’d eaten out of the can without knocking it off the mantel. Marquez looked at him and thought about why he’d brought him home. Maybe because the way Bob had been abandoned angered him, or maybe because when he’d first met Katherine she and Maria had a cat they loved that had died of cancer about four years ago.
“If Raburn was going to set us up, Razor Slough would be the place to do it,” Shauf said. “After what happened at Weisson’s, if anything happened to us that sure would be the end of any undercover sturgeon operation. How close to Crey’s call was Raburn’s?”
“Close. What are you wondering?”
“Whether anybody is working together.”
“Let’s go take a look. I’ll call and leave the message with this Whitey character that we’re coming up early in the afternoon.”
Razor Slough was worse than he remembered. Brambles and blackberries tugged at their clothes and scratched their faces. They left the Zodiac tied off on a tree and climbed up the bank. The mud was sticky, and on the hike in it rained on and off and was cold, though there were patches of blue sky now. Marquez pointed out where someone had used a machete to create a channel in the slough. Cuts on the tree branches overhanging the water looked fresh.
It was an hour before they saw the faded plywood structures of the encampment. Smoke rising from a hole in the roof of one of the buildings bent in the wind, and Marquez looked for Whitey. He saw his blue skiff but not him.
The preacher had his brethren carve a swath of earth maybe ten feet above the slough and then level back seventy yards to low hills. Marquez had heard it was a rancher, a follower of the evangelist, who’d allowed this gash cut into land he leased from the government. In the winter runoff silted into the slough, and he remembered something about a lawsuit getting filed. No one had lived here since, except drifters like this Whitey and people hiding out.
They headed for the blue smoke, but it was Anna they found in the shack, not Whitey. She’d set it all up; she’d asked Whitey to call and gambled Raburn would call him. She looked scared.
“You picked a good spot,” Marquez said.
“I was hoping you would come. I was hoping Abe would get a hold of somebody at Fish and Game who would get a hold of you.”
“Do you have any idea how many people are looking for you?”
“I want to turn myself in, but after what’s happened I don’t want to do it alone. I’m afraid of them.”
“They won’t kill you.”
He thought about how they were going to do this as he looked at her. He saw the kayak covered with a tarp in a corner of the building.
“I hid it along the slough. I rode a mountain bike to it. I’m sure they found my bike.”
She pulled a small radio from her pocket, showed it to him, and put it back in her pocket. She probably had some idea of how the FBI would view this meeting, as well.
She kept her eyes on him, the planes of her cheeks sharp, acne scars in the hollows of her cheeks, eyes bloodshot, nose too narrow for her face. She didn’t seem to realize how deep she was in now. He looked around. The Feds couldn’t land one of their helicopters here and wouldn’t know how to get up the slough.
“We’ll bring you out,” he said. “Then we’ll turn you over and you’re going to need to get yourself a lawyer.”
“I don’t know anything about what happened. What I told you last time was the truth.”
Shauf used the kayak, and Anna rode in the skiff with him. He figured it was the last opportunity to ask her what she knew about the sturgeon poaching, but he didn’t ask anything. She didn’t have much credibility with him anymore. As they reached the Zodiac it started to shower again, and he covered the phone as he punched in Ehrmann’s cell. When he got voice mail he hung up and redialed. Same thing happened and he did it again. On the fourth try Ehrmann answered. “I’m in Washington, Marquez. I can’t talk to you.”
“Then tell me who to call. I have Anna Burdovsky with me.”
“Where are you?”
“Coming out of a slough in the delta. I’ll give you coordinates.”
He read them off and gave Ehrmann the boat landing they were headed to.
“You’ll get a call in a few minutes.”
Marquez turned and asked her as he waited for the call, “When did you get into Razor Slough?”
“I had to paddle out into the river to get away and waited for dark, and even then they almost found me. Then I paddled all night. I had food stowed in the kayak, enough for a week.”
“How did Karsov know the raid was coming?”
“They’re always on guard. They got raided in LA a couple of times. They look for buildings they can defend. I told the FBI to watch out because they’re always talking about what they’ll do to anyone that comes after them.”
“Did they ever talk about car bombs?”
“Never with me.”
They turned from the slough into the river, and Marquez kept the speed slow so he could hear her answers. She’d stowed a kayak and mountain bike, and she had used scuba gear to swim out of the slough. She told him how she got away and that she’d stashed the equipment in case the FBI showed up.
“Seems like you knew the bust was going to go down,” Marquez said.
“How would I possibly have known? That’s ridiculous.”
“You’re up a slough hiding when the bombs go off.”
“I was hiding because I knew they were using me like bait. I was afraid I was going to get killed, so I figured out a way to hide, and I didn’t lie to you. I was going to tell you everything, but now after what’s happened I don’t want to say anything until I talk to a lawyer.”
Another shower raked the water, and the heavy rain ended all conversation. Marquez pulled a hood over his head, and the Zodiac plowed through the waves. When the rain lightened they were in view of the boat landing and there was no more time to talk.
“Look at them all,” Anna said, and one agent looked like he was ready to wade into the river.
“Anna Burdovsky, you are under arrest.”
Marquez listened as she was read her rights and handcuffed. She looked small and scared as they took her away. She looked back at him once as though he might help her, and then she was gone, and once more the Feds were asking him what she’d told him and why she’d contacted him. They had a lot of questions, and they wanted him to come in.