When he woke the sheets were drenched in sweat and he heard a vehicle slow on the street. When he didn’t hear it pull away he slid over to the side of the bed and sat up. Seconds later, he heard a door downstairs kicked open. It slapped against the wall and hob-nailed boots clicked like hooves across the floor as above Marquez scrambled for his gun. He heard splashing, a sloshing of liquid, and then the smell came in a wave up the stairwell, stronger than gasoline, sharp as acetone, vapors that stung his eyes as he dragged the dresser over, climbed up and broke the skylight loose. He pulled himself up and on to the roof just ahead of the roar of heat and light.
Later he had little memory of sliding, of the brittle old asphalt shingles slaking away underfoot. The rotted gutter held just long enough to slow him. He remembered a doctor leaning over him, skepticism in his eyes about Marquez’s ability to comprehend his words but saying it anyway, ‘You’re a lucky man.’
His search for Stoval ended there. He knew he couldn’t even risk staying in the hospital. He limped across the lobby and out into the heat. An hour later he was on a bus headed out of Texas. He zigzagged north and got his health back in small mountain towns in the Rockies before returning to California and then lived out of a motel for five months using a false name.
But he also made contact with friends in law enforcement. He had his letter of recommendation from Holsten and he got his resume together. He tried the Department of Justice, hoping his resume would get him an interview at DOJ and maybe a job. It didn’t get him either.
When his tenants blew out of the lease on the Mount Tamalpais house his grandparents left him, he moved in there and applied to the San Francisco Police. SFPD was interested in his experience dealing with gangs, but they sensed what DOJ had, that something was missing, so he went to work for a private eye friend. But he still couldn’t move forward. On a Friday afternoon when a case was resolved and it didn’t look like his private investigator friend needed him in the near term, he got out his backpack.
He called his sister first, and then a woman named Katherine that he’d met recently and found himself thinking about every day. He told both and the next morning turned the water heater off and shut the house up.
Two days later he was along the Mexican border again, only this time he turned north. He took his first steps along the two thousand six hundred fifty miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. He figured this was where he’d get his life sorted out. It was a safe place to think and plan, and he wouldn’t spend any money or at least not much. He’d made mistakes and Sheryl was right, he’d lost his way. He hiked into the highest mountains and it was okay being alone. It was fine to be alone and think about what had happened and where to go from here.
Marquez was north of Whitney at Rae Lakes when they came for him again. His tent was pitched so that an outcrop of rocks sheltered him from the night downwind off the peaks. A warning had been passed along about a black bear in the area and though he had his food in a bear canister, it was the bear snuffling around the tent that woke him and it was the bear that scared one of the two men into talking.
A few words called out, a hushed whisper, and Marquez had time to get out of the tent. They fired twenty or more silenced rounds through his tent before checking inside. When they did he hammered a rock down on to the skull of one and drove the same hard granite through the lenses of the night vision goggles the other wore. He struck the eyes again and again as the man clawed at the goggles straps. Marquez stripped his gun from him and left him kneeling, nearly blinded.
At gunpoint he forced both to walk into the cold lake. He questioned them, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, the one man unable to see and supported by the other.
‘You’ll die here if you don’t tell me who sent you.’
They gave him a name and when the name didn’t mean anything he got angrier. They gave the same name again, where they were contacted, how it worked, how they got paid, the photos they were supposed to take of his body. But their contact name still didn’t mean anything and he used the silenced gun of one and shot into the water near them. He forced them back. He listened to their ragged breathing and kept the flashlight on them as he packed his gear. He took their clothes, shoes, and guns, and then walked away when they were still in the water. The one with the eye wound wouldn’t last another four hours. Hypothermia would get the other.
‘You guys have a nice night.’
But half a mile away from them he did a thing he’d think about for years after. Slipping the pack off, he removed their shoes, clothes, coats, and walked back. He found them stumbling along the trail around the lake, the one he’d blinded crying out and shivering uncontrollably. He dropped their gear with them and left them a flashlight, and in a strange way letting them live freed his heart from an anger he’d carried since Takado’s murder.
He hiked out. He called. He made sure Darcey and Katherine were fine, and then returned to the trail. Three weeks later, on a ridge along a canyon on the west shore of Tahoe, he stopped to eat, and sitting on a granite shelf looking down at that graceful improbable lake moved him in a way he couldn’t put in words. The moment marked him and months later in the fall, as he ate a lunch of hard flat biscuits, tuna fish, and half a chocolate bar and black coffee with a game warden in Oregon, it began to gel. The warden was working a bear poaching case. Marquez stayed at a campsite three nights to help him. He taught the warden some undercover tricks and was there when the warden took two poachers down.
On the first of November after completing the Pacific Crest Trail he shaved his beard and called Katherine. He’d sent several postcards and a couple of letters and it was great to hear her voice. He smiled as he talked to her. He flew to San Francisco the next morning. The next day he drove to Sacramento and dropped his resume with the California Department of Fish and Game. Two days later he got a call from the chief of Fish and Game who said, ‘This job is only for someone with the passion for it. It doesn’t pay well. We can’t even pay you what you were making before.’
‘It’s where I belong.’
‘You need to be very sure about that.’
‘I’ve had time to think about it.’
‘Then come back this afternoon and let’s talk. You might be just what we need.’
II
TWENTY-TWO
Moat Creek, California
Every warden in California’s Department of Fish and Game keeps a logbook, but only the SOU, the Special Operations Unit, carries the green, hardbound Boorum amp; Pease. In fourteen years as patrol lieutenant of Fish and Game’s undercover team Marquez had filled six logbooks. They rode with him, were water and coffee stained, and held countless notes about interviews, suspects, tips, vehicles, busts, court appearances, and anything that might help solve or make a case now or later. The books were the record of his time. They told of the war against poachers fought in California at the end of the twentieth century and into the first decade of the new one.
This morning half of the SOU team was along the north coast with Marquez sweeping down from Fort Bragg, checking beaches and coves for abalone poachers. In California you couldn’t legally dive for abalone with air. You had to free-dive and today there was a very low, minus two-foot tide, so the dive was shallower and easier. Before dawn the beach lots and access roads filled with cars. South of Bragg and not far from Moat Creek the team picked up on four divers in an old gray Chevy. The divers visited three coves, each time staying long enough to dive, yet returning to their car empty-handed. Which can happen, but this didn’t feel right.