Holding the rabbit carcass in one hand and opening the side of the mews with the other, he threw the rabbit on a big stainless-steel platter he’d affixed next to the falcon’s perch, before dodging back outside. The bird shrieked and dove in, ripping at the jackrabbit and slashing with his beak, shrieking approval.
Carl made an eww sound and stepped back. “Damn,” he said. “That’s… that’s terrifying.”
“Yeah, I know.” Michael shrugged. “I mean, I guess a bird’s gotta bird. I like watching ’em fly, and even hunt, but still…. I’m kinda glad he’s not doing it to the prairie chickens that live out back too.”
“Prairie chickens?” Carl frowned. “Aren’t those endangered?”
Michael held his hand out, palm down, and rocked it side to side. “Comes and goes. I looked it up, and this place out back is sort of protected acreage. I think that’s why they don’t hay it up like the rest of the area. I wonder if the Salingers did that?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Carl said, suddenly thoughtful. “It’s something they’d do, you know?”
“I know they’ve been nice to me,” Michael said. Chuck had called them his new “crew” and had gotten Michael a job with them, but so far Michael hadn’t seen anything crewish about them. They didn’t seem to be bank robbers or thieves. In fact, Felix Salinger and his husband, Benjamin Morgan, were almost local celebrities. Felix ran a cable network of news and movie stations, and Benjamin—whom Michael had heard called “Uncle Danny”—was a docent of some sort at the Art Institute. They lived together in a mansion with Felix’s ex-wife, Julia, which would have seemed strange if you hadn’t met the three of them. Julia was like the sister the two men had never had, and the young people who flocked to Julia and Felix’s son, Josh, had been taken under Felix, Julia, and Benjamin’s wings like fledgling birds.
Even Michael had been “adopted,” he supposed. He’d been asked out to the mansion to eat four or five times in the past two months, and everybody at the table had treated him like a friend.
In a way it had been intimidating, all these rich people, all of them pretty, some of them even sort of famous—Torrance Grayson was a YouTube phenom, and he was there all the time—but it had also been… sweet.
Everybody had talked, their voices rising and swelling in a tide of chatter, and every voice had been welcome. If it hadn’t been for the one thing that hung over the mansion like a pall, Michael would have said it was Camelot.
But there was that one damned thing.
“The Salingers are nice to most people,” Carl said. “But, you know, not so nice to bad guys.”
Michael gave a humorless little grunt, thinking about the day Chuck had saved his and his brothers’ lives and gotten them arrested at the same time. The guys who would have killed him had been left dead on the bank’s marble floor, and it was an image Michael would live with for the rest of his life.
But he couldn’t get over the idea that he’d heard them plotting murder. He’d even seen proof that they’d been planning to sabotage the job and get out of it with the money. Michael’s brothers had been dumb and willing, but Michael had been desperate. He’d had a wife and three kids, and the bank had been about to foreclose on his garage and then probably take the house his children lived in. Part of that had been because his brothers kept stealing from his business and he’d been too afraid of them to do anything about it, but another part had been that Michael had been in over his head in the business department.
He was so glad to get a second chance, and he couldn’t regret having to walk over the bodies of the two guys on the bank floor to get it.
He had to side with the Salingers on this one—bad guys need not apply.
“Well, someone needs to get the bad guys, you think?” Michael asked, and was relieved when Carl nodded.
“It’s hard to know who they are,” Carl said, “but once that’s clear, I think you’re right.” He let out a sigh. “You said birds? Your, uhm, savage friend here is only one.”
The falcon was still ripping apart the jackrabbit, and they both winced at the sound of a particularly loud cracking bone.
“Yeah, well, the other ones are the prairie chickens. Look out there and you might see a few.”
Carl turned so he could scan the empty acreage, and Michael heard his surprised chuckle as one of the distinctive round birds with striped plumage and red faces broke cover and ran, pell-mell, for a little huddle of shelter on the ground.
“Oh wow,” Carl said, sounding charmed. “They’re all over. That’s amazing!”
Michael was so proud of this. “I sort of dug a little trench out from the irrigation ditch. You see?” He pointed toward the oak trees. “And I put some big pieces of plywood in the middle of the field on top of big prairie grass hummocks, like lean-tos for the birds. I figured if I could bring a little water to the area and give them protection from assholes like this,” he nodded at the falcon, “I could make their protected land a little more protected.”
Michael had been exposed, and he’d been helpless. Even when he was a kid and his brothers and mother put a crossbow in his hand and told him to go find something—bird, squirrel, something—for dinner, he’d always had more of an affinity for the hurt creature than the hunter. The first thing he’d vowed when he’d held his children had been to keep them safe. It was such a relief, here in this new home, to be able to care for hurt things, to show kindness to those silly chubby birds, and not to worry that it might get his ear boxed or his eye blackened because “real” men shouldn’t be kind.
Something about Carl’s smile, the way his eyes crinkled in the corners, the way they got shiny and bright, gave Michael more than approval—it hinted at sadness as well.
“That’s wonderful,” he said. “That’s… that’s so smart. It’s….” Carl bit his lip and took a long, deep breath.
“What’s wrong?” Oh. Things had been going so well!
“It’s good to see people being kind for the sake of being kind,” he said, his voice gruff. “Let’s hope that’s catching.”
Michael frowned. “Why? What are you talking about?”
Carl grimaced. “Gah! I shouldn’t have said anything.” He shook his head and looked away, but inadvertently he looked to where the falcon was still savaging the poor dead bunny. He turned his gaze back to Michael almost like he was running away. “It’s sort of confidential,” he said, grimacing. “And there are enough sketchy things about it for me to not want you to know anything, okay?”
Michael scowled, hurt. “You know, I’m not a fainting flower. I did two years in prison. You know that, right?”
“Yes, I know that,” Carl retorted. “And Chuck made it very clear to everybody that you were to be left absolutely in the land of ‘plausible deniability.’ Which I’m trying to do.” Some of his irritation seeped out of him. “But the important part isn’t the sketchy details anyway. The important part is that Josh Salinger isn’t doing well, and we’re hoping that the results of this trip to Belgium that Chuck, Hunter, and I are taking might save his life.”