Winterkill (23 page)

After what seemed like forever to Joe, Marybeth had pulled off the road and parked her car next to the Jeep. She got out with an armful of groceries. Sheridan walked around the
car, her eyes fixed on Romanowski and the hawks. Joe could tell she was entranced.

Joe introduced Marybeth and Sheridan to Nate Romanowski.

“I was just telling your husband what a nice family you have,” Nate said. “I’m happy to find people like you.”

Marybeth and Joe exchanged glances.

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Romanowski . . .”

“Call me Nate,” he interrupted.

“ . . . Nate,” Marybeth amended, “But I’ve got to get these things in and get dinner started.”

Nate shook his head ruefully. “And get dinner started,” he repeated. “That’s lovely.”

“Would you like to join us?” Marybeth asked.

“Please?” Sheridan pleaded. “I’d like to ask you some questions about falcons and falconry.”

Everyone looked to Joe.

“I already invited him in,” Joe grumbled.

W
hile
Marybeth prepared dinner in the kitchen, Joe listened as Nate Romanowski discussed his birds with Sheridan in the living room. Nate spread newspaper on the floor and borrowed two chairs from the table for the birds to perch on. He lowered the birds to the tops of the chairs, where they perched facing backward with their tail feathers down the chairbacks. Missy had taken Lucy to town in the van for dinner. If Nate thought the sight of two identically dressed females with a fifty-something age difference was odd, he didn’t say anything.

Nate and the falcons seemed to fill the living room, Joe thought. Although the birds were no more than twelve inches tall on the chairbacks, they projected a much larger aura. Like Nate himself, they seemed to be creatures of a different, wilder, and more violent world.

While Sheridan sat enraptured, Nate explained the accessories on the birds themselves, from the tooled leather hoods that covered their eyes but not their hooked beaks, to the long, thin leather jesses that hung from their ankles. The jesses, Nate said, were how the falconer kept a bird secured on his hand. Gently, he lifted the peregrine on his gloved fist and showed Sheridan how he twined the jesses through his fingers.
The grip of the jess in his hand, he said, provided balance and stability for the bird and also prevented it from taking flight or walking up his arm. At the end of the jess was a swivel and a leash.

“What if it tries to fly?” Sheridan asked.

“Then the bird just kind of flops around like a chicken,” Nate answered. “You’d be surprised how much lift they’ve got and how much power. A scared falcon flapping his wings can almost pull you off your feet.”

He held the peregrine close to Sheridan, letting her examine it.

“I feel sorry for it, having to wear that hood,” Sheridan said, gently stroking the bird’s breast with the backs of her fingers.

“Then let’s get rid of it,” Nate said, pulling two small strings and slipping the hood off.

The falcon cocked its head toward Sheridan, studying her with rapid, almost mechanical snaps of its head. The bird’s eyes were preternaturally alert and piercing. Nate told Sheridan how those eyes worked, how they had more cell surface area inside than human eyes so they could see in the dark and catch movement, like a mouse, from more than a mile away.

“I’ve heard it said that if you look into a falcon’s eyes you can see forever,” Nate said softly, in his strange blunt cadence. “I’ve also heard it’s bad luck, because looking into a falcon’s eyes is like looking into your own black, murderous heart.”

Sheridan’s own eyes widened at that, and she looked to Joe.

Joe shrugged. “I’ve never heard either one of those.”

Nate smiled mysteriously.

“One thing I do know is that you can tell the difference between a falcon that’s wild and a falcon that’s broken by the look in their eyes. I’ve seen it at aviaries and zoos. The falcons there look at you, but something is missing behind the stare.”

After a moment, Sheridan said, “Why don’t we put his hood back on?” And Nate did.

“How do you get these birds?” she asked.

“Some I trap them when they’re young,” he said, describing how he mountaineered on cliffs to find the aeries, or nests, to set the mesh webs. He would stay at the site, ready to pounce if a bird hit the trap. “Others I’ve rescued when
they’ve been hit by a car, or shocked by high wires.”

“Falconry is considered the sport of kings in some Middle Eastern countries,” Joe added, nodding.

“How long can you keep them?” she asked.

“It’s not how long you keep
them
. It’s how long they decide to stay with
you.
They can fly away any time they want and never come back. So every time they come back, it’s a precious gift.”

“What do they hunt?”

Nate explained that while all falcons are hawks, not all hawks are falcons. He said that each bird had its particular specialty, and that falconers often chose the birds based on that. Red-tailed hawks, like the one on the chair, were best on rabbits and squirrels. Falcons were best on sage grouse, ducks, and pheasants—upland game birds. The mere silhouette of a falcon in the sky, he said, would make ducks on the water freeze or seek cover, because a duck in flight would be instantly intercepted and destroyed. Ducks knew the imprint of a falcon from birth, and knew to fear it.

“The peregrine, though, is unique: It will hunt just about anything. That’s why peregrines are so prized, and why they were protected for so many years when it looked like they were going extinct. For a peregrine, its specialty is prey in general, and they can hunt ground game, upland game birds, or waterfowl.

“You can’t just keep a raptor like a pet and be a true falconer,” Nate said. “Falconry requires hours of patience, training, and communicating with your bird. The birds must be exercised daily and kept in top condition—to hunt well, and in case they leave. You have to think like a falcon, like a predator, but at the same time you can’t dominate the bird. If you do that, you break it. If it’s broken, it’s ruined forever. It’ll fly off for sure, and its defenses will never again be as sharp. You’re imposing a death sentence on a falcon if you break it. So if you respect the bird, you’ll work to keep that wild, sharp edge the bird naturally has.”

Then he nodded toward a thick glove in his falconry bag.

“You want me to put that on?” Sheridan asked.

“Don’t you want to hold the bird?”

“Dad, is it okay?”

Joe wasn’t sure what to say. Sheridan’s eyes were glowing, and Romanowski continued to smile inscrutably.

“Sure,” Joe finally said.

Nate took off the hood and leveled his fist near Sheridan’s gloved hand, and slightly swiveled his wrist, urging the falcon to step forward. It did, gracefully, and Sheridan’s arm dipped a little from the weight of the falcon on her fist. Nate helped her wrap the jesses through her fingers and pulled them tight near the heel of her hand. It was an oddly intimate moment that made Joe squirm a little. Nate was a big man, with a soothing veneer that was somehow calming as well as magnetic. Sheridan was only eleven years old. As Joe studied the falconer, he sensed the same kind of natural, violent wildness under the surface that Nate described in his birds.
Nate is a raptor,
Joe thought.
He’s a hunter and a killer, and he lives closer to the earth than anyone I’ve ever known.
In a way, Nate was terrifying. He could also be, Joe thought, a hell of an ally.

T
o
Joe’s chagrin, Marybeth served meat loaf. It wasn’t her fault that she had played to type this way and further entertained Nate’s ideal fantasy of the Picketts—happily married, picket fence, loving family, Labrador, and now
meat loaf
for dinner—but that’s how it looked.

Nate smiled happily and took a double portion. He moaned almost obscenely as he ate it, which caused Joe and Marybeth to stifle smiles of their own. No one had ever loved Marybeth’s meat loaf quite so much, or so obviously. Sheridan picked at her food, spending most of her time either watching Nate or looking over her shoulder at the two birds on chairs in the living room.

The telephone rang and Marybeth left the table to answer it. After a beat, she handed it to Joe.

“Please hold for Melinda Strickland,” Marybeth said, mocking what the secretary had told her.

Joe winced, and excused himself. He felt Nate’s eyes on his back as he took the telephone into the living room.

After a moment, Strickland came on. “Joe!” She cried, “You got one of the bastards! Good work, Joe!”

“Thank you,” he mumbled. He knew that both Marybeth and Nate were quietly listening at the table.

“Too bad he didn’t have an accident on the way into town, though.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, too bad the guy didn’t try to escape or something.”

He knew what she meant, but he wanted her to actually say it. But she was too good a bureaucrat to admit anything outright.

“Is there any news on Spud Cargill?” he asked.

What she told him froze him to his spot. He found himself still standing, still holding the telephone to his ear, long after she had said goodbye and hung up. The dull pain in his stomach that had been with him for days reappeared, and once again he felt the tightening jaws of the vise.

“
W
hat’s
wrong?” Marybeth asked as he sat back down on the table.

“Joe?”

He looked up. “They still haven’t found Spud. Melinda Strickland said that someone thinks they saw him in a stolen truck on the way to Battle Mountain, and McLanahan said that a truck fitting that description ran his roadblock just a couple of hours ago.”

“Didn’t someone also say they saw him on the football field?” Marybeth asked skeptically.

“Yes.”

“So why are you acting this way?”

Joe noted that Sheridan was watching him carefully.

Nate leaned back in his chair and he spoke in almost a whisper. “What this means is that Strickland and her FBI hit team can now go after the Sovereign compound. She can say that they’re harboring a fugitive suspected of murdering a federal employee.”

“I was thinking this thing was going to calm down,” Joe said. “But Melinda Strickland is determined to prove there’s a war on. And now she’s got a much better reason to start it.”

Marybeth instantly understood. “She wouldn’t do that, would she?” Her eyes flashed. “April . . .”

J
oe
walked Nate Romanowski to his Jeep in the dark. The sky was clear and gauzy with stars. The melting snow had frozen into a slick cold skin on the sidewalk and road.

Nate perched his falcons on the top of the backseat and secured the jesses to metal swivels he had installed on the framework for the purpose. Joe watched, his breath condensing into snaky wisps, his mind twenty miles away in the deep snow of Battle Mountain.

When he had secured the birds, Nate reached under his Jeep seat and pulled out a bundle that turned out to be a shoulder holster and his massive revolver. He looped a strap over his head and buckled it below his sternum. Another strap fit around his midsection. The curved black grip of the stainless-steel .454 Casull now offered itself to Joe.

“Why do you carry a gun like that?” Joe asked.

Nate smiled slightly. “Because I know how to use it and it’s all I need. It gives me the mobility of a handgun but with more firepower and velocity. It’s a Freedom Arms Model 83 with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. A hand cannon. I did my research and went to the factory in Freedom, Wyoming and paid twenty-five hundred for it. It shoots a 300-grain bullet and it can literally shoot through a car.”

Joe whistled.

“Or I could fire into the trunk and hit the driver. If three bad guys were lined up, I could put a single slug through all of them. And I could do it from three hundred yards away.”

Joe had been waiting for this moment. “I suppose you could even knock out the engine of an SUV driving down U.S. Highway 87 near Great Falls, Montana.”

Nate turned and leaned against his Jeep, folding his arms across his chest. His uncommonly sharp eyes bored into Joe.

“Theoretically, yes,” Nate said evenly. “That could happen. Now I really owe you.”

“No, you don’t, I told you that.”

“Do you want me to get your little girl back?”

Joe paused, and thought. He was torn. The question wasn’t unanticipated. Nate was well aware of the empty chair at the table, as they all were.

“We’ve got a lawyer working on it,” Joe said. “That’s our only recourse right now.”

Nate didn’t scoff, but his silence said enough.

“I worry about her, Nate. She’s been abandoned once already, then taken away from her school. If you go in and grab her, she might be even more messed up. We love her too much to put her through that right now. Plus the fact that we would be facing kidnapping charges. The law isn’t on our side in this.”

Nate nodded. “You’ve thought about it.”

“For days.”