Auto body Ray checked in a little after 5:30. He was off early and wanted to get started.
“You’re going to stop at an ATM on the way here, right?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll have the money to pay you.”
“I can’t take a check.”
“I’m not writing one. I’ll have cash, but what I need right now is an address.”
He copied down the address and made a stop on the way, at a convenience store for beer and a bag of potato chips. But it turned out Ray didn’t want to drink while working, and he dismissed the potato chips.
“You eat the grease, man. I get enough at work.”
But then as the Bondo dried they opened a couple of beers. They sat on the curb. Ray had plugged in an extension cord in his garage but hadn’t wanted to work there because Bondo dust would get all over everything stored inside. Out here on the street the wind would take care of the dust.
;That’s a big operation there at Weisson’s,” Marquez said. “How many employees?”
“Something like a hundred.”
“Come on, not that many.”
“I’m not shitting you. Sometimes they run twenty-four hours a day.”
“How long have you been there?”
“Two years too long.”
Marquez nodded as though he understood that. He let a beat go by.
“When I was there today I saw some guys carrying a big cooler like they were going to a tailgate party. What do you have to keep cold in a body shop?”
“The boss is a big fisherman.”
“He brings his fish to work?”
“Naw, they deliver to him there. You know, he’ll catch something on the weekend, drop it off to have it cleaned and cut up, and then they’ll deliver it to him.” He smiled at some memory. “We get fish deliveries all the time, and he does all kinds of trades for that. You wreck your car, and Al will end up owning your boat before it’s over.”
“The way that shop is running he probably could afford a fleet of boats, especially if the estimates are like mine was.”
“He’s got three businesses in there. One shop is union so he can get some of the city and county contracts. And he’s got a specialty shop with a different crew. They don’t talk to us, and they do a lot of custom shit. The building is divided up, and they’re off by themselves. You’ve got to have the lock code to even get in there, but, yeah, the shop does a lot of business, runs overnight on the bodywork sometimes. They got mechanics, detailers, upholsterers, a lot of work going on. He buys and sells cars like no one’s business, wrecks out of auctions, that kind of work. Why do you want to know?” “Just got curious walking through today. You wouldn’t really know it from the outside, but it’s a big deal once you get inside.”
“Damn straight, and low pay for lousy hours.”
He crumpled his can. Bondo had dried on his fingers, and he picked at it. He stood and tried to get a crick out of his neck.
“Look, I got to get going,” he said.
Marquez went around to the driver’s side and got his wallet. He counted out the twenties and said, “I saw a gold Le Mans parked in there. Kind of a beater but I wouldn’t mind having it. Cars like the Le Mans were right about my time.”
“Too late, man. Car’s going to be rebuilt and sold as a classic. The guys who brought it in traded for a van. I’m supposed to do some work detailing a couple of things on it in the morning. They got a high-mileage piece of shit, a ‘99 Ford E-150, half ton with a V-6 for trade, but if you ask me they wanted to get rid of the Le Mans.”
“Get rid of it for what reason?”
“You’ve got me, I don’t know.”
At the safehouse that night Marquez cooked dinner with Roberts and Cairo. Too often they ate fast food. That was just the way it was with surveillances. But late this afternoon Roberts had bought a bass from a commercial fisherman she ran into at the Benicia dock. She had cleaned the fish, salted and oiled the fillets. Coals glowed in the grill in the backyard. But it was Cairo who’d taken the real interest in eating better, and when the SOU had been larger they had pooled their per diems and had given him the money to work with.
One of the things about moving around California undercover was they saw what was for sale along the road in the different seasons. Marquez knew where to buy Gravenstein apples in August in Sonoma and when the best tomatoes showed up in the farmers markets, or when Last Chance peaches came down from Donner in October, right about the time the bear hunters were gearing up. If you worked for the department you could always find out where the boats were bringing in the first salmon or crab. He knew which towns had farmers markets and when, and from time to time he’d stop and buy apples because Maria loved the tart ones, or tomatoes, something on his way home to Mill Valley, and in some ways undercover for the SOU was the perfect job for knowing where to find the best produce and fruit.
But it was most fun when the team was still ten wardens, and on a given night six could make it to dinner at a safehouse. It became a way to relax and step away from an ongoing operation. Information and ideas got passed around.
“Are we going out again tonight?” Roberts asked.
“No, we’re down.”
“Good, I bought some wine.”
“Open it up.”
They grilled the fish, roasted potatoes and red bell peppers, and drank the wine, which was smooth going down and left him wishing he was home with Katherine tonight. There was some existentialist quality to being here, as if they weren’t legit anymore because they were going to get shut down. He listened to Roberts talking about working at headquarters and in the Region IV office, and the changes she saw coming inside the department. Then there was gossip about Bell’s divorce papers and a more earnest discussion of Cairo’s dry-farming tomato idea, which none of them, including Cairo, knew much about. But he had books on it, loved tomatoes, and he had a friend already farming tomatoes who wanted a partner.
A team couldn’t be on all the time. You couldn’t sit night after night on surveillance without going flat, and one of the harder things to juggle as the team shrank was picking and choosing where they put the energy. Tonight as the wine was gone a quiet settled over them. The moon blurred in fog. The coals burned down, and it got colder outside, the near-winter damp cutting through their clothes and the warmth from drinking wine fading to tiredness. Roberts and Cairo called it a night, Shauf not long afterward. Marquez stayed outside and waited until the coals burned down.
He dreamed of Anna that night. She had a bullet wound at her right temple. Her body was folded into the refrigerator that had held the body of the unknown woman. She wore a blood-drenched shirt and in the dream struggled to get out of the refrigerator. When he helped her climb out her face was gray, hair matted, and she had another wound high on her forehead. A stone bench appeared in sunlight along the slough road, and as he sat down she sat next to him. He saw then that a large piece of the back of her skull was missing.
“Who was it that did this to you?” he asked.
“There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine. That’s why I’m sitting here talking to you. I told the detective the same thing. I feel fine. Quit worrying about me.”
When Marquez woke it was just before dawn. He dressed and made a pot of coffee, opened the door to the back patio and let the cold, damp with the smells of the wet grass and the fallen leaves, chill the kitchen. Roberts walked in barefoot as he was watching the coffee drip through.
“Are we going to get somewhere today?” she asked.
“Today is the day we take them all down and roll up the whole poaching operation. Do you want to start with coffee or vodka?”
“I’m going to make tea. Where’s Cairo? Out planting tomatoes?”
“I’m right here.”
Cairo had come in quietly, and Marquez got down another mug and, as he poured coffee for Cairo, had a thought he’d had many times before, that they were all from completely different walks of life and separated by years in age. In his late forties now, he had better than fifteen years on Roberts, twenty on Cairo. Only Shauf was his contemporary and she was forty, so eight years younger than him. But for banding together for this cause, they never would have met each other. He handed Cairo half a mug of coffee and watched him fill the other half with milk. None of them had to be here. He took a sip of coffee. Looking at them filled him with pride.