Free Night Game by Kirk Russell Page B

fifteen years, when he’d fallen for Katherine. Theirs was a soft, warm-rounded, gentle love, a comfortable easiness together. It wasn’t a lesser thing, but different.
    When he’d gone to Africa with Julie he’d been so in love that the world felt completely open. That was youth and this was middle age and the two were different, even for those that liked to say they felt the same inside.
    “Give me something I can call reassurance or tell me you can’t,” Katherine said.
    “This guy seems to be carefully checking me out. He sent a couple of aggressive guys out on the last buy and called me today to apologize, to keep stringing it along. He wants to keep the money coming.”
    “What’s his trip then?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “But not like Kline?”
    “No.”
    Kline had been a drug smuggler, a contract killer, a career black marketeer who’d branched into abalone because they brought fifty dollars each and he could gather thousands of them.
    Breaking that ring had been violent.
    “He’s using guys he hires to do these buys with you?” she asked.
    “He insulates himself.”
    “Someone must know him.”
    “That’s what I’m betting, Kath.”
    Marquez turned up the mountain road and they began to climb away from the ocean. They could see the moon over the water, a long line of reflected light.
    “You’ll take him down,” she said and smiled at her own use of those words. She lived a totally different urban life, running her two San Francisco coffee bars. Her friends called her Cappuccino Kathy. She laughed and recovered the earlier mood of the night.
    “And I’m going to take you down when we get home,” she said. “You’re going down tonight.”

12
    Katherine and Maria were asleep when he climbed into his truck. A couple of deer bolted through the darkness down the slope into the brush and trees, and a few minutes later he was on the road, holding a coffee cup in one hand, adjusting the heat and defroster fan with the other. He liked the early mornings, the quiet chance to think. The conversation with Ungar yesterday disturbed him, was on his mind this morning. When he finished his coffee he talked with Shauf, listening closely to her report of the search for bait piles and her plan to return to the Crystal Basin.
    “We’ve heard fresh reports of off-road vehicles at night and we’re checking those areas today,” she said. “Where are you?”
    “On my way to Nyland’s trailer park.”
    “You heard they kicked him loose, right?”
    “Yeah, Kendall called me.”
    “Hey, he’s our new best friend.”
    Marquez didn’t want to get into a Kendall conversation this morning. “I’ll call you after taking a look at Nyland’s place.”
    Ducks lifted from the rice paddies along the Sacramento River flood plain as he crossed the causeway. He drove through Sacramento and then into the foothills and an hour later exited onto Six Mile Road, remembering Kendall’s wry “There should be a road sign for peace officers that reads 5.7 miles to the Nyland trailer overlook.”
    Marquez stopped short of the ridge, turning down a dirt track and following that until he could hide his truck. He walked back out the dirt road, smelling oak, pine, and brush, dry and waiting on rain. Near the ridge he cut left into the trees and found a place where he could see the meadow below. He saw the flat gray house foundations in the middle, the abandoned sales office on one end, a broad deck off it layered with brown pine needles. On the far end were three aluminum-skinned trailers, one of which Kendall had told him Nyland lived in. The trailer with the propane tank. Nyland’s Toyota and an older blue Ford F-150 were parked nearby. A hound sat on the Toyota hood.
    Nyland’s trailer had a window like an opaque eye facing the meadow, the interior hidden from Marquez’s binoculars by curtains, iron stairs running down from the trailer door to the dry meadow grass. Behind that one and up the slope were two other