DBEEP picked Marquez up at the Benicia dock the next morning. They glassed a couple of fishing boats out along the Mothball Fleet then rode up the San Joaquin River before backtracking and going up the Sacramento with a strong wind at their back. Marquez and Ruax compared notes, looking at fishing holes and sloughs and docks and boat launches they’d determined had been used by poachers. They rode past Raburn’s houseboat. They pooled their notes on who was left, talking above the wind and boat noise and much more quietly as they docked and dropped Marquez in Walnut Grove.
The day was bright and clear, the sky wind-scoured. He bought coffee at Mel’s and waited outside across the road looking down at the river, the coffee keeping his hand warm. DBEEP was gone, and the SOU operation was basically done, though it felt unfinished. He turned as Shauf and Cairo drove up, and they bought a couple of sandwiches and sodas and sat and talked about where they were at with everything. With the exception of August, the players they’d tracked were going down or had gone down, but in some larger sense the importance of stopping the poaching had been subsumed by human crimes. The Raburn murders. The grisly killing of Sherri La Belle. The deaths of the FBI agents and the intrigue still surrounding what the Feds were after. It left a disturbing sense of incompletion or imbalance.
Shauf drove Marquez into Sacramento, and he picked up an old Ford Explorer, one of the early models before they’d become so large. He liked the vehicle and hadn’t driven it in a while. He made sure it still started and then walked over to Shauf’s window.
“Time to go see your niece and nephew.”
“I’m leaving tonight. What about you, John?”
“I’ll be home.”
And he would have been, but for taking a call from Ehrmann. The call could have come from another special agent in the Sacramento Field Office, and it wasn’t clear from the questions he’d asked yesterday that Ehrmann was still part of the investigation. He’d gotten the impression Ehrmann might be on involuntary leave.
“Ludovna made a call we were hoping he’d make, and we’re going to take him down tonight,” Ehrmann said.
“I’d like to be there.”
“Sure, if you want.”
Ludovna was at a girlfriend’s, a woman who lived alone not two blocks from his house. She was very surprised when she opened the door. It was all very polite. There were eight of them and one of her. Two agents went in and buttonhooked left with their guns drawn, two went right, and four straight ahead. Ludovna was in the shower. When Marquez saw him, Ludovna stood naked and handcuffed on the tiled floor of the kitchen. He’d come out of the shower and tried to get a gun from near the bed, and they’d taken him down on the bedroom floor. Water dripped from the dark hairs of his chest, abdomen, and groin. Ludovna’s eyes focused on Marquez.
“You’re FBI?”
Marquez shook his head, showed his badge. Special Operations Unit, Department of Fish and Game.
“I should have killed you,” Ludovna said, and an FBI agent cut him off.
The last Marquez heard was an agent telling Ludovna they were going to unhook him so he could dress. They’d already read him his rights, and he was demanding a lawyer. Marquez walked outside with Ehrmann.
“I’ll drop you back at your car,” Ehrmann said. As they drove away he added, “I guarantee you he won’t be buying fish for a very, very long time.”