“Sue sounds right,” Ewig said. “Anyway, she’s in critical condition and Judge Hewitt has demanded that all local law enforcement meet with him immediately. He suspects a drive-by shooting and he wants the guy caught. That includes you.”
Joe grimaced. “It’ll take me four hours just to get back to my truck.”
“No it won’t,” Ewig said.
The volume of the spinning rotors of the helicopter increased in volume as they spoke. Joe understood. Ewig had diverted the helicopter to pick him up.
Joe handed the sat phone back to Martin.
“Gotta go,” he said.
Martin shook his head in disgust. His feelings about aggressive top-down management were well known. Martin was old-school: he thought local game wardens should manage their districts as they saw fit with minimal interference from the “suits” in Cheyenne, even though Ewig had once been a game warden himself.
“Can I go with him?” Talbot asked Martin.
“Not a chance,” Martin growled.
“I’ll be back,” Joe said to Martin with a side glance toward Talbot. “I’m really interested to see how this ends.”
Julius Talbot looked away.
THREE
AT THE SAME TIME, INSIDE A FALCON MEWS ON THE SAGEBRUSH prairie outside of Saddlestring, Nate Romanowski firmly grasped a pigeon in his left hand and twisted its head with his right, producing an audible snap. When the bird’s body responded with a last-breath flurry of flapping wings, he held it out at arm’s length until it went still. Then he chopped it up with an ax and fed it piece by piece to his raptors. It was the fifth pigeon of the morning, and the air was filled with tufts of downy feathers and the crunching sound of falcons eating the birds, bones and all. The morning air inside the mews smelled of the metallic odor of fresh blood and the pungent smell of splashy white bird droppings. The gullets of the falcons swelled to the size of hens’ eggs as they ate, and Nate made sure all nine of his hooded birds were satiated.
It was the daily circle of life and death for a master falconer.
Nate inspected each bird—two red-tailed hawks, a gyrfalcon, three prairie falcons, a Swainson’s hawk, and two peregrines—to make sure they were all healthy and fit. One of his prairie falcons had damaged its left wing the week before during an ill-fated swoop on a prairie dog, but it seemed to be recovering nicely.
He referred to the falcons as his Air Force. They were the instruments of his bird abatement company incorporated as Yarak, Inc. Yarak, Inc. was hired by farmers, ranchers, golf course operators, and industrialists to rid their property of problem birds, many of which were invasive species like starlings. Business was good. To keep up with demand, he knew he needed more birds and possibly an apprentice falconer by the next spring.
Nate washed his hands and the falconry bag that had held the live pigeons under the ice-cold stream of water from a spigot, dried his palms on the fabric of his thighs, and ambled toward the house. He was tall and rangy with long blond hair tied off in a ponytail by a leather falcon jess. He had icy blue eyes and a smile described by most observers as cruel.
The landscape surrounding him was largely scrub in all directions, but it was framed on the east and west by distant blue mountain ranges. There wasn’t a single tree for miles—which is how he liked it.
Although the property might have seemed conventionally unattractive to those who took a wrong turn on the gravel county roads and wound up there, Nate appreciated the strategic location of his home. Because it was located in the bottom of a vast natural bowl, the property he’d chosen had the same attributes as frontier-era forts such as Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger: it was impossible to sneak up on it without being seen. Nate had learned the tactic by observing the herd behavior of pronghorn antelope.
He paused before entering the house because he sensed movement. He turned on his porch to see a light-colored plume of dust looking like a comma in the distance. It was from the tires of a large vehicle of some kind. Since he rarely got visitors, he assumed the driver was lost and would turn around long before arriving at his place.
His forty acres contained an aging three-bedroom house, a detached garage, a metal building that served as vehicle storage and a welding shop, and the mews for his Air Force. The land and the buildings—except for the mews, which he’d recently constructed—had formerly belonged to a welder who’d serviced the energy industry until he was arrested for dealing meth on the side. When the welder’s property was put up for auction by the feds, Nate was the high bidder. Which meant that, for the first time in his life, he was a homeowner and a landowner. Nate was in the process of transforming the place from a welding-and-meth-friendly outpost to a falcon-and-family-friendly environment.
Because he now had a family. For Nate, who was an outlaw falconer with a Special Forces background and a long list of alleged federal offenses (since dismissed), nothing had caused him more terror than getting married and having a child. He went back and forth trying to decide if it was the best or worst thing he’d ever done. But he leaned toward the former.
*
NATE WAS A fifty percent owner of Yarak, Inc. His partner in business and life was Liv Brannon, his wife of four months. Liv ran the public side of the company, including marketing, booking jobs, maintaining social media, billing, finance, and compliance.
Liv was a stunning African American woman originally from Louisiana, and she sat at the computer on her desk in her home office wearing a headset. A Squash Blossoms CD played gently in the background. Cradled in her lap was six-week-old Kestrel, their daughter. Named after a small but feisty falcon, Kestrel opened her eyes when Nate came in the room. Her tiny hand raised up from her blankets and her arm trembled slightly. She didn’t yet have the motor control to still her limbs.
Kestrel was a tiny verson of her mother and she had Liv’s full mouth and long eyelashes. He was devastated by her presence.
Nate placed his index finger in her palm and she gripped it.
Yes, he thought, the former.
“Are you still going into town today?” Liv asked him.
“Yes.”
“Can you pick up some Pampers on your way home?”
“Pampers?”
“Yes, the ones called ‘Swaddlers,’ ” Liv said. “I’m giving up on the cloth diapers. It’s too hard to keep up.”
“Swaddlers,” Nate repeated.
“You might want to write that down. They’re for newborns. The last ones you got were for a six-month-old.”
“They were?”
“Yes,” Liv said. “I’ll save them and use them when she’s older. But you need to look at the type.”
“I thought diapers were diapers,” Nate said.
Liv gave a They aren’t look and then jabbed a finger toward the screen.
“We got an inquiry from Hamilton, Montana,” she said. “A rancher needs to get rid of a barnful of starlings, but it’s eight hours away. What should we tell him?”
Before he could answer, Liv said, “Never mind. I think I can pair this job with another job for pigeon abatement in Bozeman.”
She waved him away, but he didn’t move. Kestrel still gripped his finger. He wouldn’t leave until his daughter tired of him. Nate knew deep in his heart it would be like that forever.