“Because bonobos got busy?” Mandy retorted with a straight face, and Carl had chuckled.
Now, picking up the landline and calling Stirling, he sort of wished they hadn’t.
“You’re not back yet,” Stirling growled, and in the background Hunter said, “Give me that!”
“Hey!”
“Carl?” Hunter said, voice brisk, “Give us the sitch before Stirling’s circuits fry. I didn’t realize how fond he’d gotten of you, but you’re apparently one of his people now, so we need you to not explode and die.”
“Uhm, yeah,” Carl said, looking nervously at Michael, who sat glaring at him on the stuffed brocade couch that faced the television. “About that. We’ve got a plan.”
Carl outlined his idea, which was mostly that he would fly the Cessna 206 that was Mandy’s connection to the outside world to the airfield Hunter had landed in earlier that day.
“Why can’t Mandy fly you out?” Hunter asked, sounding aggrieved.
“She can’t leave the stock unattended—or the special-needs teenagers,” Carl told him. “Apparently she needs to prep everybody and everything for a good week before she goes on a supply run. Right now, she doesn’t have time for the prep work it would take before she left. She was going to go next week, and she can’t take the plane out without coming back with some of the shit on her list.”
Hunter grunted. “That’s… unfortunate. So you land the plane and nobody dies. What happens next?”
“We need to send it back with supplies,” Carl replied. “I have a list. Then Michael needs Chuck so they can fix the damned Cherokee up so they can drive it out down a goat track.”
“Well,” Hunter said, sounding put out. “You just took a difficult assignment and made it more interesting. If you hadn’t discovered the damned velociraptor birds and the missing piece to our investigation, I’d say you liked to start trouble.”
“Ha, ha,” Carl retorted sourly. “Look, someone needs to tell Torrance Grayson where to dig on this. Serpentus had monster birds manufactured and then released into the ecosystem because they’re fuckers and they need to be brought down. Or there’s another explanation that involves them. And someone at the wineries is definitely using murder birds to police their grapes—or they were—and had Matteo killed to cover it up. Mandy is proof this is happening, but she can’t tell a soul until we make sure she’s safe and the bad guys are taken care of, you understand?”
“Yeah. yeah. You’re bragging because you cracked the case. Don’t you want to know what Grace and I discovered?”
Carl blinked. “Sure. Hit me.”
“We discovered that one glass of wine makes Grace spin around in a thousand circles and throw up. It’s a bad idea. Don’t do it.”
“Helpful,” Carl said, failing to keep the laughter out of his voice. “What about Chuck and Lucius?”
“Well, they discovered that Jesse and Jewel are—and I quote Chuck on this—‘Super fun people who wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ which of course helps nobody, but he also discovered that they may run the odd monster-truck event on their property, but they mostly lease their name and business connections out to the outfit Molly’s working for, and that business does most of its work at the stadium at the Aerie. We’ll keep an eye on them, but Chuck is pretty sure the person involved in Matteo’s accident would have to be more than a little acquainted with the vehicle or they would have ended up in their own blood puddle at the end of the maneuver.”
“So the Aerie?” Carl asked, grimacing.
“You saw the picture, Carl. All those smiling white people can’t possibly be up to anything good.”
Carl grunted. “You know, I swear someone in that picture looked really fucking familiar. If there was anything like internet out here, I’d take another look. So we’re pretty sure Jesses and Jewels is on the up-and-up because Chuck thinks they’re ‘super nice.’”
“His people sense is usually right on. Don’t tell him I said that, by the way.”
“I’ll skywrite it when I fly in tomorrow. Just for you.”
Hunter let out a sigh. “Are you really going to fly?”
“It’s our only option. The Cherokee won’t make it without modifications, and it would take us a day, maybe two, through rattlesnake country, to hike out of here.”
“We need you tomorrow,” Hunter said grimly. “Before Michael’s bird gets us kicked out of the fucking hotel room.”
“Did you feed it?”
“Yes, moron, we fed it. And we kept the hood on, and we smuggled in old mattresses to soundproof the bathroom. But it smells, man. Predator poop is something special.”
“You should smell the murder-bird shit,” Carl agreed, tamping down on the gag reflex that had been threatening to give since he’d first gotten out of the Cherokee. “So bad. So bad. But yeah, there’s early bird check-in for the bird training events. We can check in Michael’s bird tomorrow, but it’s gotta be us.”
There was a silence over the line.
“What?” Carl asked, suspicious.
“Did you just say early bird check-in for the murder-bird training?”
Carl blinked. “Fuck you,” he said pleasantly. “Are you going to tell me how to fly the damned plane or not?”
Hunter took a deep breath. “I’d rather make bird jokes,” he said. “Murder bird. You gotta admit, it’s got a nice sound.”
“That’s because one of them didn’t try to eat you,” Carl muttered.
“How big are they?”
Carl thought about it. “Four feet, toes to nose, and probably a fourteen-foot wingspan, maybe sixteen on a good day. They could eat a California condor for breakfast.” Carl shuddered, thinking that the condor had only recently come back from near extinction. The murder birds could have wiped them out again.
“Are you shitting me? Why don’t you just put a halter on one of those fuckers and fly it over!”
“Because it would spend most of its time eating me. And then when it was full up on art lawyer, it would move on to mechanic. I’m serious. I’ve seen these birds in action. They can break your arm with one snap of the beak. It is not funny.”
“I believe you. I’m going to have nightmares ab—”
At that moment, two of the birds began shrieking, the tones ripping through the mews, across the considerable yard, and into the house.
“What in the hell is that?” Hunter asked tonelessly.
“That would be a murder bird. Two of them.” Carl fought the sudden urge to pee.
“How far away from the house are they?”
“About a hundred yards, if not more.”
“Bwah!” Hunter let out the sound someone made after a shudder. “So, a Cessna 206, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s get you the fuck out of there.”
“Don’t get too excited. Someone’s going to have to fly back.”
“Well, let it be me and Chuck, then. I want to see the thing that made that noise.”
Carl looked at Michael. “He wants to see the thing that made that noise.”