Dark Sky, page 5
part #21 of Joe Pickett Series
“I’ve never heard her complain,” he said.
“It’s not something she’d bring up to you. You aren’t exactly a sympathetic ear.”
“I thought I was,” he said.
Liv laughed and smiled at him. “Don’t forget she’s a twenty-four-year-old single girl who has barely seen the world. She may want a lot more in her life than a bunch of falcons to take care of.”
Nate didn’t know how to respond.
“My question is,” Liv continued, “are we holding her back? Is she staying with us because she feels obligated, because all of the things you and Joe have been through together? I don’t want her to get to a point where she resents us.”
“I don’t either,” he said.
“And when you say she has a lot more to learn, I hope you’re talking about falconry in particular and the business in general. You’re not having, you know, philosophical discussions with her, are you?”
“What’s wrong with my philosophy?” he asked.
“In the past it got a lot of people killed,” Liv said, deadpan. “Sheridan doesn’t need to know what led to all that . . . mayhem.”
“If it weren’t for that, I never would have met you,” Nate said.
“No,” Liv said, waving a finger back and forth, but unable to completely stifle her grin. “You don’t want to go there with me right now.”
“Even though it’s true,” he said.
As he did, the trespass alert chimed again. Nate turned back to the window.
“Here she comes now.”
* * *
—
Once you get cocky about rock climbing,” Nate had lectured Sheridan, “your chances of doing something sloppy or stupid go way up. That’s how you fall and die, and then I have to find another apprentice falconer.”
His bedside manner left a lot to be desired, she’d thought at the time, but his words stuck with her.
Nate had been an important player in Sheridan’s life—and her family’s—since she was ten years old. He’d always simply been around—despite long absences that were whispered about by her parents and kept from their daughters, and then showing up at odd times. But when he did show up, he was larger than life and he filled the room with a kind of smoldering charisma that she’d never encountered in a man before.
Nate was a self-described “outlaw falconer” with a Special Forces background. He was proficient with large-caliber five-shot revolvers, especially the .454 Casull and the .500 Wyoming Express, both manufactured by Freedom Arms in Freedom, Wyoming. He was also a master falconer, and that had captured Sheridan’s imagination to a greater degree than his shadowy past or weaponry.
She could recall the first time, in her early teens, when she’d accompanied him to a small series of willow-choked beaver ponds in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. After releasing his peregrine to the sky, he’d waded into one of the ponds, gathering up paddling ducks who were too scared to go airborne. She’d never seen anything like it and it had opened her eyes to a natural order of things she thought long bypassed by the twenty-first century. And it had made her want to become a falconer herself.
Over the years, despite both of their individual journeys, they’d tracked each other. He’d presented her with a tiny kestrel and taught her how to feed, nurture, and fly the smallest of falcons. When it had flown away and never come back, he took her aside and explained that it happened to the best of them. A falconer could “train” a bird to always return, but only at the cost of breaking its wild and predatory instincts. It was better to watch a bird fly away than to turn it into a parakeet. It was a hard lesson.
Nate’s relationship with her dad was contentious, yet devoted. It was also very complicated, since her father operated by the letter of the law and Nate operated under his own. She knew they’d had serious disagreements, and she’d witnessed some of them. It was only after she’d gotten older, after graduating from college, working as the head wrangler on an exclusive dude ranch, and returning back to Twelve Sleep County, that she’d realized in a moment of revelation that the bond between her dad and Nate was very much like the bond between Nate and his falcons.
That bond was deep, but predicated on achieving the same goal in the end. With a falcon, it was delivering its next meal. With her dad, it was achieving an end, even if he didn’t necessarily approve of every step taken to get there.
Her mother’s relationship with Nate was even more complicated. Sheridan couldn’t help but notice how her mother lit up when Nate came into the room. Despite some of the crimes Nate had been accused of—several of which Sheridan had no doubt he’d committed—her mother was absolutely loyal to the falconer. She’d once overheard her mother telling her best friend after one too many glasses of wine that if anything ever happened to Joe she’d know where to turn. Sheridan tried hard not to think about that very much.
And, of course, Nate had found Olivia Brannan.
* * *
—
For the past year, Sheridan had shadowed Nate on bird abatement calls throughout Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and South Dakota. She’d also spent the long winter reading through Nate’s library of ancient Scottish falconry tomes and modern techniques. It was her job to feed Yarak’s Air Force, which consisted of nine mature falcons and two “trainers.” Feeding them was easy because they were voracious, but keeping a supply of their food—pigeons, rabbits, mice, gophers, sometimes ducks—was an elemental and bloody business. She’d finally learned to think of prey species as exactly that, although she still found herself turning away when a bird ripped a living creature limb from limb and ate everything: bones, hide, guts, and head.
“Circle of Life” from The Lion King was a fine song and she’d loved it growing up, but seeing nature, red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson wrote, up close was gritty and difficult. Although she revered the birds of prey for their capabilities and grace in flight, she had come to be wary of them for their ruthlessness and cold-blooded disposition.
* * *
—
The cliff face Sheridan was negotiating now, above the meandering Twelve Sleep River, was remarkable in that four of the six species Nate used in his bird abatement business (red-tailed hawks, prairie falcons, peregrines, and the occasional gyrfalcon) maintained nests there. Since he preferred to use birds he caught himself, it was an amazing resource. No one but Liv and now Sheridan knew about the location, and it told Sheridan a lot that he trusted her enough to show it to her and ask her to rappel down its face.
She rotated her shoulders so she could turn her head and look down. His Jeep was just arriving at the base of the cliff after dropping her off twenty minutes before. The road he’d used was rocky and washed out and it had taken him a while. The top of the fabric roof was a square far below her. Once the Jeep stopped, Nate got out and looked up.
He flashed her a thumbs-up, and she extended her left hand and reciprocated. Her right hand gripped the rope beneath the rappel anchor.
Before descending farther, she checked to make sure the carabiners were screwed down tight where the rope would thread. She knew they were—she’d checked everything twice as instructed—but a third time was always a good idea.
Sheridan relaxed the tight muscles of her legs, bent slightly at the knees, and pushed off while letting the rope slide through her right hand until she dropped four feet. Then she did it again. She wasn’t yet ready to fly down a mountainside in a single graceful swoop.
Her thin-soled climbing shoes gripped the texture of the sandstone and she could feel the cold of the rock on her feet. It was still a couple of hours until the sun would warm the surface of it.
She wore tight climbing pants over a thin wool inner layer and a windproof shell on her upper body. Baggy clothing was dangerous, as folds of it could snag on brush or roots that stuck out from the cliff. A chest pack was cinched tightly against her breasts, containing the gear she’d need.
The first falcon nest, which belonged to a family of redtails, was ten feet below her and slightly to her right. It was tucked in a wind-hollowed alcove and it consisted of a two-foot-wide tangled bed of branches and twigs festooned with the small pinfeathers of consumed prey, almost like macabre decoration.
Sheridan stepped a few feet to the right and then carefully lowered herself to the side of the nest. Although it was unlikely there was anyone home, she’d been cautioned by Nate never to approach a nest straight-on until she could see it clearly and assess if it was occupied.
If there was a resting falcon on the nest and she surprised it, the bird might react in a panic and slash her face with its talons, trying to escape. More than a few falconers had been blinded that way, and some years back a couple had plunged to their deaths.
So she secured the rope to the side of the alcove and carefully peered in.
The nest, as she suspected, was empty. In the hollowed-out bed were more stray feathers, tiny white bones from prey that had been eaten within it, and slivers of eggshells that looked like weathered costume jewelry that had been smashed with a hammer.
Being as close as she was to a falcon nest, so close she could reach inside and pluck a bone from the twigs, made her feel like a voyeur, as if she were walking through the empty bedroom of an unsuspecting stranger.
* * *
—
Her purpose for checking out the redtail nest was to ascertain if it was viable or abandoned, even though any hatchlings would have been born in the spring and since flown away. Not all nests were used annually, and different species of raptors sometimes took them over and made them their own. Occasionally, snakes would move in and make the nest uninhabitable, until the snakes themselves left or died.
This nest, Sheridan thought, looked viable. The remnants of eggshells proved that it had been used just that previous spring to raise little ones. The bones of the prey delivered to the nest looked just a few months old.
But since she was new at judging the condition of existing nests, Nate had told her to photograph the location so he could study it and make a final determination. Sheridan unzipped the chest pack and dug into it for her cell phone.
As she powered it up and punched in the passcode, something about the nest struck her as odd. At first, she couldn’t figure out what it was—maybe she simply hadn’t studied enough wild nests.
There was something off about the edge of the nest itself, she decided. It was positioned within the alcove on a natural shelf and it didn’t completely fill the space as an eagle’s nest would have. There was exposed shelf on both sides, and on the right side of the nest, beneath a film of dust, was what looked like a symmetric dark C shape. The opening of the C arched around the nest. It was smooth and without a flaw. Nothing in nature was perfect like that. She took several pictures.
It wasn’t until she shifted her position that she noted something else: a glint from a long thread extending across the mouth of the nest. It stretched from the left side of the nest across the top of the structure and vanished in the twigs and debris of the nest edge near the opening of the C.
“A spider’s web?” she said out loud. But it was too straight. Too perfect. A single strand of spider’s web would have dislodged in the wind, wouldn’t it?
After dropping her cell phone back in the pack and zipping it closed, Sheridan continued to study the C and the line. It made no sense to her.
When she turned and looked down at Nate, he gestured up to her with both hands out, as if to say, What are you doing up there? After all, there were three other nests for her to check out before she could get firm footing on the ground. One had been occupied by prairie falcons, another by peregrines, and the last and biggest by gyrfalcons. Nate obviously thought she was taking too much time with this one.
There was no way to communicate with him—her cell phone had no signal and they hadn’t brought radios. To try and indicate what she’d found, she locked the rope anchor to hold her in place and formed a C with her arms and gestured into the alcove.
Nate shook his head, not understanding.
“I don’t know what I found,” she yelled. But the distance between Sheridan and Nate was too far and the wind at the base didn’t help. He couldn’t understand her.
She sighed and decided to simply show him the photos when she got down. Maybe Nate would know what it was.
Before she unlocked the anchor and rappelled to the next nest, though, Sheridan’s curiosity got the best of her and she reached out with her hand and tapped the string to free it.
The result was instant. There was a metallic snap and a flash of movement and her entire head, shoulder, and arm were suddenly engulfed within the jaws of some kind of large trap. Her vision blurred and she could taste grit in her mouth.
She pushed away from the cliff involuntarily while she screamed and found herself twisting slowly in the air, looking out from inside the mouth of the device.
It took her a few moments to get her breath back and realize that she wasn’t actually maimed—the pressure of the trap was firm but not tight, the jaws of the device were made of fiberglass tubing connected by springs, and the mouth of it enveloping her consisted only of light mesh.
Sheridan locked her rope tight and used both hands to pry the device open and duck underneath it, where it hung in the air. When she realized the trap was secured to the sandstone beneath the ledge, she reached up and pulled the stake free. Then she watched as the trap floated slowly to the ground like a damaged parachute until Nate reached out and snagged it.
* * *
—
There were two other set traps hidden on the sides of nests on her way down and she dismantled them both and dropped them to the ground.
At the fourth nest, she paused and cringed and cursed. A prairie falcon had been caught days before. Its body was a hard ball of feathers and its eyes had been eaten out by insects.
She was instantly enraged. Not only had someone set falcon traps on every viable nest on the cliffside of Nate’s secret falcon location, they’d failed to check the traps in a timely fashion. The bird had either starved to death or had been so frightened that its heart had given out.
* * *
—
Nate stood at the base of the cliff as still as she had ever seen him. The dismantled mesh traps surrounded him in a pile.
“All of them?” he asked Sheridan through clenched teeth.
“Yes.”
“These are bownet traps,” he said evenly. “Someone is trespassing on my cliff. And someone is going to die.”
Falconers, she’d come to learn, had a strict code about encroaching on other falconer’s territory. It wasn’t done, and the penalty for it was fierce.
“Maybe we should tell my dad,” she said. Game wardens were empowered to sign off on falconry permits in their area after the applicant had passed the California Hawking Club’s written test. Maybe her dad would have an idea of who else was operating in the district.
“Any scumbag who would set up traps on another man’s honey hole isn’t the type who would apply for a license,” Nate said.
“But we should try that first, right?”
He glared at her. “That sounds like something Joe would say. No. Falconers take care of their own business. Haven’t you learned that yet?”
SIX
While Nate and Sheridan headed back to his place, Marybeth Pickett sat across a table in the Burg-O-Pardner restaurant from interim county prosecutor AnnaBelle Griffith, who seemed nervous and a little agitated. It was midafternoon and the lunch crowd had dispersed, so the two women were the only customers in the place, which smelled of faint cigarette smoke and grease from the kitchen, where the specialty, deep-fried Rocky Mountain oysters, had been served for twenty-seven years.
The interior of the restaurant was dated; its light-colored paneling buckled near the ceiling and its deer and elk mounts were interspersed with fading Gordon Snidow Coors Beer prints between them. There were no menus. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner items were written on a whiteboard in quivering script.
Marybeth had suggested they meet at a coffee shop on Main Street, but Griffith had insisted on the Burg-O-Pardner. Since they’d both ordered coffee, Marybeth wasn’t sure what Griffith was thinking.
“I’ve heard of the Burg-O-Pardner since I moved here,” Griffith said as the coffee was served. “I wanted to see it for myself. I was kind of expecting more.”
“It doesn’t look like much,” Marybeth said. “But for whatever reason it’s the place where all the city fathers meet every morning to discuss local issues. It’s our shadow city hall.”
“Are any of the city fathers women?”
“Rarely.”
Griffith nodded. “I understand that the decision to reach out to me for the job was made here.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.”
AnnaBelle Griffith, dressed in a dark business suit over a white top and wearing a thin strand of pearls, was in her early thirties, trim, and tightly wrapped, Marybeth thought. She’d recently been asked by the Twelve Sleep County commissioners to fill in as county prosecutor until the next local election, after the last county prosecutor, Duane Patterson, had met his sudden demise. Prior to that, Griffith had been an assistant district attorney in Natrona County.
The commissioners had been busy, and Marybeth understood the pressure they’d been under the past year. Not only had Patterson been gunned down by an associate in the street, but the newly elected sheriff, Brendan Kapelow, had simply packed his belongings and moved away before the state’s Division of Criminal Investigation could open a review of his past actions. Although there were some concerns that Kapelow would file suit against the county for the injuries he’d sustained while on the job, he hadn’t done so yet.
