As Sandburg dug out a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, Nate braced himself.
Sandburg read:
She ventured north into the white gringo mountains and the snow
Avenging her people with a goat’s horn and fire
She was a deadly angel, our Abriella
Until she was tricked and tracked down by a gringo like a dog
Who tore off her beautiful limbs and fed them to his hawks
This is the bloody ballad of our lovely and dangerous Abriella.
“They refer to machine guns as ‘goats’ horns,’ ” Sandburg said. “Don’t ask me why. Anyway, you’re famous, and not in a good way. I think we both know what happens to guys who get this kind of famous within a cartel. They don’t last very long. There are known homicides down there where the songwriters of narcocorridos themselves get whacked by rival drug lords. But when you’re the actual villain in one of them—watch out.”
“Where did they get that version of what happened?” Nate asked through gritted teeth. “We both know it wasn’t like that.”
Sandburg shrugged. “They probably went with the narrative that cast Abriella in the best light and the villain with his hawks in the worst. Who knows? But it’s too late to put that genie back in the bottle.”
Nate took a long breath and held it.
Sandburg said, “I guess this is what can happen when a guy thinks he’s somebody special and he can take justice into his own hands.”
Nate said, “Now I get it. I know why you’re here. It’s not to warn me. It’s so you can look me in the eye and tell me I’m a target. Joe said you were a true believer. You’re so FBI you shit special agent turds. You think armed feds like yourself should run the world.”
Sandburg grinned and confirmed everything Nate had just said by doing so. “They may send another hit team like the Wolf Pack,” Sandburg said. “Or they may just send one guy. Or maybe the cartel will just put the word out that there’s a big reward for the pistolero who brings them your head. It might be like one of those old Western movies where the cocky kid comes to town to knock off the old gunslinger. Who knows?”
He leaned forward on the table and glared at Nate. “All I know is that you had better keep your head on a swivel. You won’t know who they send or when they’ll show up. But you can count on the fact that they’ll want revenge on the man who tricked their Abriella and fed her to his hawks, even if that never happened. They’re violent and depraved—but they’re also smart. They want to send a message that anyone who fucks with their people gets wiped out. It’s good for morale and it’s good for business. Fentanyl distribution is a multibillion-dollar industry. They don’t want anybody messing that up.
“Oh,” Sandburg said, sitting back, “I suppose there have been discussions in DC that the Bureau could put the word out that it didn’t actually happen that way. The Sinaloans might even believe it. But when the target is somebody who has embarrassed the Bureau more than once and gamed the system to have a passel of charges dropped, well, that didn’t give my friends a lot of incentive to do so.”
Nate said nothing.
Sandburg said, “Some of us made it our life’s work to nail the drug lords who are pumping that poison into our country. We were getting close to fucking taking them out. But you and your friend Joe had other plans. You went your own way. I lost a partner and my boss, and I can hardly walk because of what you two decided to do.”
“We did what was right,” Nate said. “Joe doesn’t do otherwise, even when he should.”
Sandburg waved that away. “Ah, your good friend Joe Pickett,” Sandburg spat. “The game warden who does no wrong. Well, I’ve had plenty of time to think about what happened that day on the courthouse steps and I have my issues with him.”
“What issues?” Nate asked.
“I’ll keep that to myself. In the meanwhile, you have other things to worry about. The bad guys might be closer than you think. In fact, they may already be here. I got some gas in Saddlestring before I came out here and all anybody can talk about is that someone took a shot at your judge.”
Nate was stunned. “Judge Hewitt?”
“Last night, I guess,” Sandburg said. “It sounds like a drive-by to me. Someone took a pop at him and hit his wife.”
“I didn’t know.”
Sandburg tilted his head. “They’ll know about that big gun of yours, so they might go after you from a distance like they did him. Your wife and kid are inside the house, right? You might want to shut the curtains and tell them to keep their pretty little heads down.”
Nate was across the table and had Sandburg’s left ear in his grip so fast that the man couldn’t react.
“Go ahead,” Sandburg said. “Rip it off. I’ve read that you do that. Rip the ear off a disabled special agent of the FBI. Show everyone how tough you are.”
Nate let go and stood up. He was black with rage. The casual mention of his family had triggered him into an instant state of yarak, the Turkish falconry term that describes the perfect condition for hunting and killing prey.
Nate hadn’t been in a state of yarak for a long time, and he didn’t welcome it back.
He said to Sandburg, “Get off my property. You’ve got thirty seconds.”
Sandburg said, “I’m busted up. It might take me a little longer than that.”
Nate wheeled and kicked the door open. He knew if he stayed with Sandburg any longer, anything could happen. He didn’t want Liv to look outside and see Sandburg’s body parts flying out of the RV.
Outside, he kicked the door shut. He stood there until Sandburg lumbered his way to the cab and started the engine. The big RV slid away.
Sandburg reached his arm out the open driver’s-side window and extended his middle finger as a bitter goodbye.
*
STILL FUMING, NATE strode through his house toward the master bedroom. Liv asked what had happened and he found he couldn’t talk to her yet. Kestrel was almost asleep in her crib and he didn’t want to scare her back awake.
Nate opened the closet doors and removed the metal lockbox from the top shelf and placed it on the bed. Inside was his five-shot Freedom Arms .454 Casull scoped revolver and its coiled shoulder holster. There were four heavy boxes of cartridges. He hadn’t carried, handled, or fired the weapon in months, but it felt comfortable in his hand.
Liv asked, “Nate, are you okay?”
“Not really,” he replied.
Nate stepped back out on his porch and scanned the horizon. The dust spoor from Sandburg’s RV was still in sight.
*
OVER TWO MILES away, a man named Orlando Panfile leaned into a spotting scope and adjusted the focus until he could see Nate Romanowski clearly. The falconer had been hidden from his view until he stepped off the front porch of his home and moved into the yard on the side of the structure. Waves of heat wafted through his field of vision, but he made a positive identification of his target. The intel he’d received from his employers turned out to be exactly correct. He could even see the blond ponytail when the man on the porch turned to watch the motor home drive away.
The spotting scope was screwed into the base of a short tripod and hidden within the tough gnarled branches of a sagebrush. Panfile had set it up the night before on the top of a ridge so that his prone body behind it would be out of view from the falconer’s compound below in the basin.