Force of Nature

1

His name was Dave Farkus, and he’d recently taken up fly-fishing as a way to meet girls. So far, it hadn’t worked out very well.

It was late October, one of those wild fall days containing a fifty-five-degree swing from dawn to dusk, and Farkus stood mid-thigh in waders in the Twelve Sleep River that coursed through the town of Saddlestring, Wyoming. River cottonwoods were so drunk with color the leaves hurt his eyes.

Farkus was short and wiry, with muttonchop sideburns and a slack expression on his face. He’d parked his pickup under the bridge and waded out into the river at mid-morning just as a late-fall Trico hatch created clouds of insects that billowed like terrestrial clouds along the surface of the water. A few trout were rising for them, slurping them down, but he hadn’t hooked one yet. Trico flies were not only tiny and hard to tie on his line, they were difficult to see on the water.

He was at wits’ end since he’d relocated to the Twelve Sleep Valley from southern Wyoming.

He’d landed in Saddlestring with no job, and he didn’t intend to look for one, except the damned natural-gas pipeline company was challenging his disability payments, claiming he’d never really been injured. And his ex-wife, Ardith, had contacted a lawyer about several missed alimony payments and was threatening to take him back to court.

FARKUS WAS intently aware of each car that sizzled by on the bridge over his shoulder. When he heard a car slow down to look at him, he made a long useless cast that, he hoped, looked practiced and elegant, as though he was Brad Pitt’s double in the movie A River Runs Through It. He wondered how long it would be before a pretty doe-eyed twentysomething tourist would come down to the river and ask for a lesson. But he was starting to believe it would never happen.

He tied on a new fly — something puffy and white that he could see on the water — and felt the power of the current push against his legs.

That’s when he heard, upriver, the distinctive hollow pock sound of a drift boat striking a rock.

He barely looked up, so intent was he on tying the nearly invisible thin tippet through the loop of his fly. Drift boats filled with fishermen were common on the river. There were several commercial guide operations in town, and it seemed like every other home in Saddle-string had a drift boat on a trailer parked in front of it. The river was shallow because it was late fall and water was at a premium, and it wasn’t unusual for guides to miscalculate and hit a rock.

But when he heard a series of mishaps—pock-pock-pock, rock-rock-rock — he glanced up from his knot.

The white fiberglass drift boat was coming right at him, sidewise, bumping along the river rocks in a shallow current. No one was at the oars. In fact, no one seemed to be in the boat at all.

Farkus squinted and cursed. If the boat continued on its path it would hit him, maybe knock him right off his feet. Farkus couldn’t swim, and if his waders filled with water and he was sucked into that deep pool under the bridge …

He uneasily shuffled a few steps back. The river rocks were slick and the current pushed steadily at his legs. The boat kept coming and seemed to pick up speed. He looked around at the bank, then at the bridge, hoping someone would be there to help. But no one was there.

At the last second, before the boat hit him from the side, Farkus cursed again and managed to turn toward it and brace himself with both feet. His fly rod dropped into the water at his side as he reached out with both hands—“Goddammit!” he cried out — to grasp the gunwales of the oncoming boat and stop its momentum.

The boat thumped heavily against his palms and he felt the soles of his boots slip and he was pushed a few feet backward. Somehow, though, his right boot wedged between two heavy rocks and stopped fast. So did the boat, although he could feel the pressure of it building, wanting to knock him down. He was sick about his lost fly rod, and thought that if nothing else he could wrestle the boat to shore and sell it for three or four grand, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to return it to the idiot who let it get away from him in the first place.

As he stood there in the river, straining against the pressure, he realized it was harder work than it should have been. There was real weight inside the boat, but he was at an angle, bent forward with his head down and his arms straining and outstretched, so he couldn’t rise up and look inside without losing his balance and his footing.

Over the next ten minutes, muscles trembling, he worked the boat downstream and closer to the bank. Finally, he stepped into a back eddy of calmer water with a sandy bottom and pulled the boat into it as well. Sweat coursed down his neck, and his thigh muscles twitched with pain.

Then he looked over the gunwale into the bottom of the boat and said, “Jesus Christ!”

He’d never seen so much blood.

Nate Romanowski approached the stand of willows from the north with a grim set to his face and a falcon on his fist. Something was going to die.

It was an hour until dusk in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, near the North Fork of the Twelve Sleep River. Storm clouds that had scudded across the big sky all day now bunched to the southeast as if they’d been herded, and they squeezed out intermittent waves of snow pellets that rattled across the dry grass and shivered the dead leaves. A slight breeze hung low to the ground and ferried both the scent of sage and the watery smell of the river through the lowland brush.

The peregrine falcon was blinded with a leather hood topped by a stiff white bristle of pronghorn antelope hair. The bird sat still and upright, secured to the falconer’s hand by thin leather jesses tied to its talons and looped through his gloved fingers. The falcon, Nate thought, was still and regal and hungry — tightly packed natural explosives encased by feathers, just waiting for a fuse to be lit.

Although slightly less than twenty-four inches tall, the female he held, once released, was the fastest species on the planet, capable of speeds during its hunting dive of more than two hundred miles an hour. When it balled its talons and struck a bird in flight with that velocity, the result was a concussive explosion of blood, bones, and feathers that still took Nate’s breath away.

The falcon, like all his raptors over the years, had no name. And every time he released one to hunt there was a chance she would fly away and simply never return.

He slowed his pace and listened as he approached the wall of willows. Through the brush was a shallow, spring-fed pond not more than three acres across. It was hard to see from the ground but was obvious from the air, and it was the only substantial body of water for miles around except for the river itself. Therefore, it attracted passing waterfowl. And when the breeze shifted he could hear them: the rhythmic, almost subsonic clucking of paddling ducks. The peregrine heard them, too, and responded with an instinctive tightening of her talons on his hand.

Nate raised the bird so he could whisper directly into her hood, “They’re here.”

Nate was tall and ropy, with long limbs and icy blue eyes set in a hawklike wind-burned face. The hair he’d cut and dyed months before was growing back long and blond but hadn’t reached its customary ponytail length. He wore stained camo cargo pants, laced outfitter boots, a faded U.S. Air Force Academy hooded sweatshirt, and a thick canvas Carhartt vest. Strapped to his rib cage on his left side, between the sweatshirt and the vest, was a scoped five-shot .500 Wyoming Express revolver. A three-inch braid of jet-black human hair was attached to the thick muzzle by a leather string.

He reached across his body with his right hand and gently untied the falcon’s hood and slipped it off. The peregrine cocked her head at him for a moment, then returned to profile. The single eye he could see was black, piercing, and soulless — the amoral eye of a killer.

Nate opened his left hand to free the jesses, and raised her up. Her wings unfurled and stretched out for a moment, then her talons bunched and pushed off his glove. He turned his face away as he was pummeled with thumping blasts of air from her beating wings and brushes of her wingtips. The first moment of flight was ungainly; she dropped slightly and thrashed to the left, the jesses swinging through the air, her feet long and extended, until she found invisible purchase and began to rise. She cleared the tops of the willows ahead by inches.

The falcon climbed in circles that were tight at first and then larger as she rose above the treetops and found a current. Then, as if she’d burned through the first stage of a booster rocket, she catapulted into the sky.

The past month had been spent in a state of training and trepidation, ever since his longtime colleague Large Merle had shown up gutted at his front door. Nate had transported all seven feet and four hundred fifty pounds of Merle toward the town of Saddlestring in his Jeep, with his friend gasping for breath through chattering teeth. The last thing Large Merle had said before he collapsed was: “The Five. They’ve deployed.”

Nate knew exactly what that meant. The showdown he’d been anticipating for years was at hand, and Merle was the latest victim. Large Merle had died with a moaning death rattle five miles out of town, and Nate had flipped a U-turn and returned to his stone house on the banks of the North Fork. He’d said a few private words over the body and had it shipped via Freightliner to Merle’s only living relative, a sister in North Dakota. Then he began to prepare for visitors.

The peregrine falcon was little more than a pinprick in the sky, a tiny black speck set against roiling thunderheads. Nate watched the bird circle in the ellipse of a lazy thermal spiral. The falcon was so high in the air it took a knowing eye to see it. But the ducks knew the falcon was there because none had attempted to fly.

Nate nodded to himself and tugged on the end of an empty burlap sack he’d tucked through his belt. He flipped the sack over his shoulder to keep it out of the way, and approached the willows in silence.

Before he entered the brush, he paused and looked over his shoulder and scanned the terrain. His small house was far below in the river valley, his Jeep parked next to it. The old structure was bordered by massive old river cottonwood trees with gnarled gray bark and skeletal limbs. Because most of the leaves were gone, he could see his clapboard mews for housing falcons, and an upturned flat-bottomed boat on the bank of the river he used for crossing. On the east side of the North Fork, a steep red wall rose sixty feet into the air. The top was flat and dotted with scrub. Beyond the flat the country rose at a gentle pitch in a series of waves and folds until it melded into the multicolor pockets of aspen and then the dark timber fringe of the mountains. Rounded peaks above the timberline were dusted with the fresh first snow of the fall.

To the west was an undulating treeless sagebrush flat that continued for miles. A single two-track road cut through the sagebrush and meandered its way through cuts and draws to the stone house. There was no other way in, and if someone was coming he could see them from miles away. On the sides of the sections of road out of his vision, he’d installed motion-detection sensors and hidden closed-circuit cameras that would broadcast images of visitors into his house well before he could see them with his naked eye or through his binoculars.

From his vantage point on the plateau where the willows hid the pond, Nate noted how the river had risen. Although there had been little rain and only a few bursts of fall snow, the thirst of the river cottonwoods for water had subsided as the trees withdrew their appetite and focused inward, preparing for winter. Without thousands of trees sucking water from the Twelve Sleep, the level of the river rose high enough to be navigable again.

All was quiet and still in every direction.

Nate turned back around, reached out and parted the stiff willow branches, and stepped inside.

As the brush closed around him he could no longer see the peregrine, but he knew she was there by the nervous tittering of the ducks ahead. The ducks weren’t alarmed because of his presence or the noise he was making as he pushed through the willows, but because of the falcon in the sky.

He sensed an opening through the branches a moment before he was knee-deep in stagnant water. The bottom of the pond was silty beneath his boots but solid underneath, and with a few more steps he was waist-deep in the pond as mallard and teal ducks scattered in his path, motoring across the surface of the water and sending the alarm to the entire population of twenty or twenty-five ducks. The silt he’d disturbed underfoot plumed through the dark pond water and turned it the color of chocolate milk near his legs.

But not one of the ducks took flight. Nate smiled to himself as he beheld one of nature’s brilliant secrets.

For ducks, geese, and other waterfowl, the very silhouette of a peregrine falcon in the sky — even if they’d never encountered one before — was deeply imprinted into their collective psyche. They knew somehow the predator thousands of feet in the air would kill them in an instant if they became airborne, just like they somehow knew the falcon would not hit them on the ground or on the surface of the water. So as long as the ducks didn’t fly, they were safe. Their instinct was so ingrained that it superseded even his own intrusion into their world.

He waded across the pond with the burlap sack and gathered up four mallard drakes and dropped them inside as if selecting ripe zucchini. As he chose them, the others swam away and bunched against the reeds, practically climbing over one another to get away. Four was enough, he thought, for two good meals and duck soup later. He’d use the wings as lures for falconry exercises and the feathers as stuffing for training dummies.

Knotting the open end of the sack, Nate waded across the pond and grabbed a fat mallard hen from the flock. As he lifted the bird, her bright orange feet windmilled under her belly, as if she was trying to run through the air. Droplets of pond water beaded on her feathers.

He leaned back and looked up into the sky and held the duck out from his body in full view. Peregrines had incredible eyesight, and he could almost sense the falcon locking in on him and the object in his hand.

Nate drew the hen in close and said, “God bless you and thank you,” something he always said to wild creatures before he took an action that would result in their death, then hurled the duck into the air, where it had no option but to fly or drop back to the earth like a rock.

He called out: “For my hunting partner.”

The duck came alive with a burst of energy, and started to climb. It flew horizontal and fast, skirting the top of the brush in a mad dash toward the far river.

Hundreds of feet above, in a move made silent by its distance, the peregrine deftly shrugged out of the thermal, tucked its wings tight against its body, balled its talons so they resembled twin hammers, and began to drop headfirst through the sky.

Nate could hear it coming as it shot earthward like a missile. The sound was a kind of high-pitched whistle that increased in volume as it built up velocity.

He glanced over toward the retreating duck. The hen had cleared the willows and was aiming for the river valley, its wings beating so fast they were blurs. It didn’t fly in a straight line but seemed to know its only chance was to feint and zigzag through the air.

Somehow, while dropping through the sky at incredible speed, the peregrine homed in on the flying duck and was able to make microscopic flight adjustments in its stoop attack so that when the two objects intersected — with an audible whap sound and an explosion of feathers that seemed to fill the sky — Nate took a sharp intake of breath and almost fell back into the water from the sheer bloody beauty of it all.

As he made his way down the slope toward the river with the sack of wriggling mallards, he paused next to the peregrine. The falcon was eating the remains of the dead duck. Flesh, guts, bones, and feathers filled its gullet to the size of a billiard ball, and its hooked beak was shiny with bright red blood. The bird paused and looked up, their eyes locked, something was exchanged, then the falcon resumed eating.

Nate untied the sack and reached in and grasped a drake by its neck and pulled it out. He cinched the top to contain the others and stashed the sack of live ducks beneath a mountain ash tree and weighted it with a rock. He would have the duck for dinner. This completed the circle — hunt, kill, eat — and always reminded him he was of the natural world and not simply striding atop it.

Knee-deep in the cold water, Nate wrung the neck of the duck with a sharp swing of his arm and held it out away from him as its wings beat in death throes. A full gust of wind roared up the river, roiling the surface of the water and shaking the trees. Golden spade-shaped cottonwood leaves fell into the water like upturned palms and bobbed and floated in the current.

He pushed both thumbs through the taut belly skin of the duck and worked them under its breastbone. The blood inside was hot, and the smell was metallic and pungent. With his left hand, he grasped the body of the duck and with his right he broke the entire breast away until it came free. After tossing the carcass toward the bank, he bent and dipped the breast into the water to clean and cool it. Spirals of dark blood snaked between his knees.

The gust of wind played out and silence returned and he thought he heard a sound. Nate looked up at his falcon to see she had stopped eating and was focusing on something upriver. He followed her gaze as the pointed snout of a drift boat emerged from around a grassy bank.

The wind had overridden the distinctive noises of an approaching boat — the slight lapping of the current on the sides of the fiberglass hull, the squeak of oars being dipped through oarlocks, the shuffle of boots on the boat deck, the scrape of a shallow river rock against the flat bottom.

He was caught, he thought. There was no way he could turn and splash toward the shore and find cover before he was seen. Warning jolts fired through his nerves.

His vest was open, and he reached up and slipped the thong loose that secured his .50 caliber weapon in its shoulder holster. Instinctively, he flexed his fingers in and out and stood up tall as the boat made the turn and came into full view. It was a low-profile open McKenzie-style Hyde drift boat, off-white in color, with a green-and-brown horizontal stripe on the side. There were three men in the boat — one standing behind the casting platform in front, one at the oars, and the third seated in the back. The man in back was slumped over and looked to be injured — or sleeping.

“There’s somebody,” the man standing in front said over his shoulder to his companions. Then: “Hey, mister. We’ve got a hurt man here. Can we pull over and call for some help?”

Nate didn’t answer. They certainly weren’t making any effort to sneak up on him. He made several quick determinations. First, the assassins sent for him in the past had been professionals and had come from out of state. These men looked like locals. Second, it was hunting season, and therefore not unusual to see hunters about. Third, he’d been spotted and would have to deal with them one way or the other.

“Hey,” the man in the front of the boat called out, standing and straining forward over the casting platform. “Did you hear me, mister? We need help. We’ve got a hurt man here. …”

Nate could see the boat and the occupants clearly now. The big man in the bow was thick and tall, with a full black beard and hair curling out from beneath an orange cap. Red hands grasped the top of the casting platform so he could lean over it. Dark eyes pierced out from beneath a flat, wide forehead. He wore a camo jacket and black jeans. The orange cap and the tip of the compound bow that jutted above the hull indicated he was a hunter, not a fisherman. Nate thought he’d seen him before and tried to place him.

Seated low in the center of the boat was a hunched younger man with a knob for a head and tiny hands that wrapped around the grips of the oars. He had a couple of fingers missing. Nate guessed the oarsman to be in his mid-twenties, but there was something shrunken and repellent about him. He had a wide nose that had been smashed flat against his face, high cheekbones, and large ears that ended in points: a gargoyle of sorts.

The slumped man in the back wore a thick jacket and a slouch hat, and his head was dropped forward so Nate couldn’t see his face.

“Man, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” the dark man in the front said to Nate, knowing his voice would carry through the quiet valley as if he were standing next to him. “We’ve been looking for someone — anyone — for a while now. We haven’t even seen a house anywhere.”

“There aren’t any,” Nate said.

“No shit,” the gargoyle spat, spinning the boat so the front of it faced the other bank. He began to pull the oars to propel the drift boat toward Nate.

Nate assumed the three men had put their boat in at a public access six miles upriver and had planned to float to another access closer to town. The route was used often in the summer fishing months but rarely in the fall or winter, when the level of the river dropped and the locals turned their attention from fishing to hunting. All of the river miles between the put-in and Nate’s stone house were through private ranch land owned by an out-of-state mogul. The mogul’s house was miles away from the river, tucked in a valley, and it wasn’t likely he would have been home, anyway, even if the men in the boat had gone there. Wyoming law allowed the public to float any river, but it was considered trespassing if the boaters got out or even anchored. The landowners were notorious for prosecuting anyone who pulled ashore, even if the reason was an emergency, so most fishermen chose to float much farther downriver toward Saddlestring, where there was more public land and the fishing was better.

“Do you have a phone we can use?” the man in front asked.

Nate had a satellite phone but ignored the question. He asked, “What’s the problem, anyway?”

“Old Paul,” the dark man said, pointing at the slumping man. “He’s got a bad heart and some kind of nerve condition. He just seized up about an hour ago and started jerking. Shit, he was even foaming at the mouth. He needs to see a doctor fast.”

“He’s my dad,” the gargoyle said with a nasal twang, “and I ain’t gonna lose him.”

Nate noted that Paul still hadn’t moved, and even the shift in the boat hadn’t caused him to lift his head.

As the gargoyle pulled back on the oars and moved the drift boat across the current toward Nate, the dark man in front said, “We seen a few deer but nothing to get excited about. Them damn things just stand in the river while we float right past ’em. We coulda killed a half dozen of them if we’d wanted to.” He laughed. “God, they’re stupid.”

“No,” Nate said, taking a long second look at the big man and seeing a dangerous idiot. “That’s just the way they are.”

Like ducks that wouldn’t fly when a peregrine was above, big-game animals — even during hunting season — didn’t perceive that a threat could come from the water. Nate had harvested deer on the banks or in the river from his own boat. He’d also encountered elk, bears, and moose on the river who watched him float silently by with a mixture of curiosity and familiarity.

“Are you the only one hunting?” Nate asked the dark man as the boat drew closer. The gargoyle and his father weren’t wearing blaze orange, and Nate couldn’t see additional compound bows or hunting rifles in the craft.

“Yeah,” the dark man said. “Stumpy ’n Paul wanted to come along to see a master at work.”

“Shit,” the gargoyle said in response, shaking his head and making a face.

“I know you,” Nate said to the dark man, recalling the circumstances.

“I don’t think so.” The dark man smiled. But his eyes showed sudden caution.

“You’re known as the Mad Archer,” Nate said. “My friend Joe Pickett put you in jail a few years back for shooting wildlife with your bow and leaving the meat.”

The time he’d encountered the Mad Archer, Nate was with the game warden Joe Pickett in northeastern Wyoming. Joe had handcuffed the man to the bumper of his own truck and called another game warden to come out and pick him up. The Mad Archer, Joe had said, was both evil and bloodthirsty. He was suspected of using his arrows to kill dogs and cats as well, and had wounded the dog Joe rescued, a Labrador/corgi mix named Tube. Nate had heard Joe use the Mad Archer’s real name, but he couldn’t remember it.

The man flushed. “That might have been,” he said, “but it was before I went straight. I play by the rules now, man,” he said, gesturing toward his orange hat. He patted his back pocket. “I even got my license back if you want to see it.”

“Show it to Joe,” Nate said as the bow of the boat came within reach. The gargoyle expected Nate to grasp the bow and pull the boat to the bank. Instead, Nate shoved it away and the boat swung back into the current. A redheaded duck had swum out of the reeds with ten little ducklings in tow in a straight line behind her, and she angled to her right to avoid the floating boat.

“Keep moving,” Nate said to them.

“Hey, what about my dad?” the gargoyle asked, his face contorted. He did several front-strokes on the oars to pull the boat back into the calm eddy. “You’re fuckin’ heartless.”

“I’ll call the clinic and have them send an ambulance to the take-out,” Nate said, stepping backward toward the bank, keeping the men and the boat in front of him. “They should be waiting when you get there. You’re not saving any time bringing him onshore now and calling them, anyhow. It would take them longer to get here than it will for you to float to the take-out.”

Nate didn’t want the Mad Archer anywhere near his house. If the man was as unstable as Joe claimed, his friends Paul and Stumpy were suspect as well. Men who hunted together shared certain characteristics and values, and this was guilt by association with the Mad Archer. Nate had never been troubled making judgments of this kind.

Plus, he’d been seen and the men would talk. Which meant the minute they were gone, he’d have to clear out.

The Mad Archer glared, his fists clenched at his side. As Nate neared the shore, his boot slipped off a river rock and he had to wheel and crow-hop to keep standing.

Then before Nate could look back over his shoulder at the boat and the three men to confirm they were floating downriver, he heard a single whispered word: “Now.”

Nate spun around in the river and reached across his chest for his weapon. The soles of his boots again slipped on the moss-covered rocks, and he stumbled to his left but not far enough. An arrow tipped with a razor broadhead sliced through the air and hit him between his left shoulder and clavicle.

The figures in the boat who had been still just a moment before were now a blur of motion. The gargoyle was sliding a pump shotgun out of a saddle scabbard that had been hidden beneath his boat seat. The old man Paul was awake and standing, and his long coat was open and he was swinging the muzzle of a military-style carbine toward Nate.

The Mad Archer cursed because his shot had been misplaced due to Nate’s stumble, and he was frantically fitting a second arrow into the nock of his bow before drawing the bowstring back again. Because both the old man and the Mad Archer were now standing, the boat pitched slightly from side to side.

Although his left shoulder screamed with pain, Nate pulled his big revolver out from its holster and cocked the hammer and leveled it with a single motion and fired.

The first bullet hit the Mad Archer in the right center of his wide forehead and blew his orange hat straight up into the air. His body collapsed forward across the casting platform.

Nate cocked the revolver on the down stroke from its tremendous kick and swung it left and shot the old man through the heart. Old Paul stiffened and sat straight back onto his swivel seat. His rifle fell into the water. Blood, bits of bone, and tissue pattered across the surface of the water behind him. He slumped forward into the same posture he’d assumed before.

Stumpy the Gargoyle nearly had his shotgun clear of the scabbard, and he looked up at Nate and their eyes met for an instant before he was hit under the right armpit with such great impact that it threw his body to the other side of the boat. The bullet exited clean and smacked the surface of the water a few inches from the other bank, nearly taking out the mother duck.

Nate staggered onto the gravel bank. His ears rang from the three explosions, and the hum blocked out any natural sound. The entire left side of his body felt as if he was hooked up to pulsing electric cables. He holstered his weapon and touched the feathered end of the arrow that was buried in his body. He looked over his left shoulder and could see the bloody tip of the razor broadhead poking out. The arrow was stuck fast, but as far as he could tell it hadn’t pierced a major artery or broken bone. All that was destroyed was shoulder muscle.

Out on the river the drift boat turned slowly from left to right and rocked slightly from the fallen crashes of the three dead bodies that were crumpled within it. The still air smelled of acrid gunpowder and the metallic odor of pooling blood.

The mother duck and her ducklings continued downriver in an undulating line, speeding up to get as far away as they could from the disturbance.

On trembling legs, Nate approached one of the thick old cottonwoods that hugged the bank of the river. As he neared it he turned so he faced the water and his back was to the trunk. Slowly, he stepped backward until he felt a jolt of pain as the tip of the broadhead bit into the soft gray bark. Reaching up, he grasped the aluminum shaft with both hands to steady it and leaned back with all his weight, burying the arrow as far as he could into the wood and pinning himself to the tree.

Standing as still as possible, Nate stripped the fletching off the back end of the arrow until it was smooth. Then he took a breath, gritted his teeth, and walked forward, letting the arrow slide through his shoulder.

When it was clear, he glanced over his shoulder at the bloody shaft that remained embedded in the tree trunk. Hot blood coursed down his skin in both front and back, and his shirt was stained dark with it.

As he lurched toward his home for his medical kit, he noted that the boat had drifted away a few hundred yards downriver and was spinning slowly in the current.

He cursed himself. Like the deer and elk in the valley, he hadn’t anticipated the threat to come from the water. Or from locals.

2

The next morning, a Wyoming game warden swung his green Ford pickup and stock trailer into a pull-through site in Crazy Woman Campground in the Bighorns and shut off the motor. He glanced at his wristwatch—0900, a half hour before he was to meet the trainee — and checked for messages on his cell phone. There were none.

It was Monday, October 22, the heart of elk-hunting season in the mountains. Although opening day had been a week before, the lack of heavy snow meant the hunters wouldn’t be out in force yet because they couldn’t track the herds.

He got out and pulled his gray wool Filson vest over his red uniform shirt and buttoned it up. Over the right breast pocket of the vest was a two-inch brass pin that read joe pickett game warden. On his shoulder was a patch embroidered with a pronghorn antelope. His badge, pinned over his heart, indicated he was GF-48—number forty-eight of the fifty-two game wardens in the state, ranked by seniority. He had once been up to number twenty-four before being fired and later rehired. Unfortunately, when they sent him the replacement badge, he was relegated to starting in the numeric system again. He’d thought about contesting it, but when he considered going up against the thoughtless maw of the bureaucracy it didn’t seem worth the trouble.

Joe exhaled a small cloud of condensation. The morning had not yet warmed above freezing, and the sun hadn’t risen high enough to melt the scrim of frost on the pine tree boughs all around him or the frozen mat of grass. He loved the snap of a fall morning in the mountains.

The stock trailer door moaned as he opened it, and he led both geldings, the older paint Toby and sprightly young sorrel Rojo, out of the trailer and around the side of it and tied their halters to the barred windows. He saddled Rojo and slid his shotgun into the right saddle scabbard and a scoped Winchester .270 into the left. The saddlebags were already packed with maps, permits, gear, and lunch, and he lashed them to the skirt of the saddle. Toby pawed the ground and blew through his nostrils impatiently, wanting to get going.

“Soon,” Joe said to his wife’s horse. “Just chill.”

Joe Pickett was in his mid-forties, lean, and of medium height and build. He wore a battered gray Stetson and faded Wranglers over lace-up outfitter boots. His service weapon that he rarely drew, a.40 Glock 23, was on his hip, along with handcuffs and a long cylinder of bear spray. A citation book jutted from his back pocket.

With the hot engine block ticking behind him, Joe Pickett leaned against the grille of his unit and speed-dialed his daughter Sheridan, a freshman at the University of Wyoming. She’d been at school since late August.

Her phone rang five times before she picked up.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “Sleeping in on your birthday?”

“No, Dad. I just got back to my room from the shower. I don’t have class until ten on Mondays.” Her voice was clear but she sounded tired, he thought. “Mom already called me, but I guess you know that.”

He smiled. Since Sheridan had been born at 6:15 a.m. nineteen years before, Marybeth always woke up her daughter at exactly that time on her birthday. It used to mean opening her bedroom door and rousting her. Now it was an early-morning call. He pictured her in her dormitory room in Laramie with wet hair, speaking in a low tone so she wouldn’t wake her roommate.

“You guys aren’t going to do that forever, are you?” Sheridan said softly but with a slight exasperated edge. “I mean, no one in their right mind is up at that hour here. Some people are just getting in.”

Joe chuckled. “How are things going, kiddo? Are you settling in? Making some friends?”

“Both, I guess,” she said. “The classes are the easy part. You know how that goes. I know a lot of kids here from high school, but everything’s different. I miss you guys …” she said, then caught herself.

“It’s okay,” Joe said. “We miss you. I miss you.”

“April doesn’t,” Sheridan said with a laugh. April was their sixteen-year-old foster daughter who had taken over Sheridan’s vacant room. Previously, she’d had to share it with fourteen-year-old Lucy. Marybeth, Joe’s wife, had discovered a bag of marijuana in April’s underwear drawer during the move. Battle lines had been drawn. April had been grounded and had one week left before she could go anywhere other than school, and they’d confiscated her cell phone. But having her at home all the time was no picnic for the rest of the family, either, because no one could darken a room like a sullen April. Lucy did her best to avoid April and all the drama by staying late at school for rehearsals and keeping her bedroom door closed at home.

“I just know she’s wearing all my clothes and using all my stuff without asking,” Sheridan said. Joe thought about it and recalled April wearing one of Sheridan’s sweaters just the day before. “She’ll stretch everything out with her big … chest.”

“No comment,” Joe said. Then: “What about friends?”

“A couple,” Sheridan said. “One girl in particular named Nadia. We’ve got a couple of classes together and we started hanging out. She’s pretty cool.”

“Where’s she from?”

“Maryland somewhere. She says she really likes Wyoming.”

“Wait to see what she says this winter,” Joe said. “There’s already some snow in the mountains here.” Then: “Hey — you’re coming home for Thanksgiving, right?”

“At this point, yes,” Sheridan said with hesitation.

Joe felt his ears get hot. “What do you mean, ‘At this point’?”

“Nadia asked me if I wanted to go east with her. I’ve never been east before. I’d like to see D.C.”

Joe tried to think of what to say.

“Her parents will cover the ticket,” Sheridan said quickly.

“It’s not that,” Joe said. “I think your mom and your sisters would like to see you. In fact, I know they would.”

Silence.

“You’re making me feel guilty,” she said.

“That’s my job.”

He heard Sheridan chuckle again. “It might be cool coming home without having Grandmother Missy around.”

Joe nodded. Marybeth’s mother was supposedly on a world cruise, burning through some of the money she’d inherited from her former husband’s death. Joe had encouraged her never to come back.

“Talk to your mother about Thanksgiving,” Joe said.

“I will.”

As they talked, Joe looked up to see a banged-up green Game and Fish pickup with state plates turning into the campground off Hazelton Road. His trainee had arrived. Joe waved at the pickup, and it turned into the pull-through and swung around the stock trailer.

“Hey!” Joe shouted. “Watch those horses.”

The driver hit the brakes with his front bumper just eighteen inches from Rojo’s hock, then reversed so he could park in back of the trailer. The trainee looked fresh-faced and humiliated already.

“Where are you?” Sheridan asked.

“Up in the mountains. Area thirty-three and thirty-four — Middle Fork and the Upper South Fork Twelve Sleep River areas. It’s time I get out and check all the elk-hunting camps up here. Unfortunately, the department assigned me a trainee to tag along. He looks to be about your age but dumb, based on how he drives.”

Sheridan said, “You know, Dad, I miss going with you to do stuff like that.”

The statement caught him by surprise. “You do?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I miss the mountains, and our horses. I even miss Nate, even though he sort of hung me out there as far as our training goes.”

Sheridan had been an apprentice to the master falconer. At one point, she’d desperately wanted to fly her own falcon, but circumstances and Nate’s situation had prevented it.

“Maybe someday,” Joe said, doubting there would be a someday. “Sheridan, I’ve got to go before this trainee does something stupid. But happy birthday, kid.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He closed the phone and dropped it into his vest pocket as the trainee appeared from around the horse trailer. He was short and stocky, with a thatch of brown hair with highlights in it. He had a square jaw and a nose that had been broken and a walk with an athletic spring in it. He seemed easygoing and eager to please, and he didn’t look much older than Sheridan. A good-looking kid, though, Joe thought.

“Joe Pickett?” the trainee asked.

Joe nodded.

“I’m Luke Brueggemann. I’m your trainee. Sorry about nearly hitting your horses.”

“You’d have had to answer to my wife if you had,” Joe said. “And believe me, it wouldn’t be pretty.”

Brueggemann nodded. He had a large duffel bag thrown over his shoulder. His red uniform shirt was fresh out of the box, as were his denims.

“Can I say, sir,” Brueggemann said, “it’s a real thrill for me to meet you. I’ve heard about you over the years.”

Joe took Brueggemann’s measure. He remembered being a trainee sixteen years before, when he was right out of college. His mentor had been a man named Vern Dunnegan, and it was in the days when game wardens often made their own law within their districts. He’d learned more from Dunnegan than he’d wanted to. But some of the legitimate skills and lessons from those years still stuck with him.

“I hope it was good,” Joe said.

“Most of it,” Brueggemann said, grinning and looking away.

“Are you from around here?”

The trainee nodded. “I grew up in Sundance,” he said. Sundance was located in Wyoming’s Black Hills country, in the northeast section of the square state. “Then I worked with my uncle as a commercial fisherman in Alaska to get money for college. When I came back, I did my four in Laramie and graduated with a wildlife biology degree.”

“Good for you,” Joe said.

“Thank you.”

“My daughter’s at UW now,” Joe said. “I was just talking to her.”

“Go, Pokes,” Brueggemann said, nodding in recognition.

“That’s Toby,” Joe said, gesturing toward the paint horse. “Do you know how to put on a saddle?”

By his expression, Joe could tell Brueggemann had never been this close to a horse before.

“Here’s what you need to know about horses: the front end bites and the back end kicks and the middle bucks you off,” Joe said. “Come on, I’ll show you. And after we get Toby saddled, you need to go through that big bag and figure out what you can tie behind the saddle, because that’s all the storage you’ll have.”

With both horses saddled and ready, Joe spread a topographical map across the hood of his Ford and pointed at the eleven outfitter camps they would try to inspect over the next two days. Brueggemann paid close attention, and stubbed a finger near one of the first camp locations.

“Isn’t that a road that goes right to it?” he asked.

Joe nodded.

“Then why don’t we drive there?”

Joe looked at him. “Are you nervous about the horses?”

Brueggemann hesitated, but his answer was obvious: “A little.”

“I understand,” Joe said. “Always be cautious around horses. As soon as you start to count on them, they’ll stab you in the back.”

“Then why don’t we drive to the camps?” Brueggemann asked softly, not wanting to seem obstinate.

Joe said, “We could drive right to most of them. But they’d hear us coming miles away. And even though most of these guys are good hunters, there are a couple I don’t want to know we’re out there. So instead of driving right up on them and giving them a chance to hide or stash illegal carcasses away where we can’t see them, I’d rather approach them in silence. That way we can circle the camps up in the timber from all sides before we decide to ride in.”

Brueggemann sighed and nodded.

“If someone’s doing something illegal, like too many elk or dead cow elk in an antler-only area, they’ll likely hang the carcasses within walking distance of the camp but out of sight from the road. It works better to know what the situation is before we talk to the hunters.”

Joe continued, “I know most of these guys. Half of them are local, and three run guide operations, so they’ll have clients in the camps. Of the eleven camps, ten are familiar names. There’s only one new guy this year, and I want to find out who he is and what he’s up to.” He tapped his finger on Camp Five, which was four and a half miles away along the old logging road they’d soon be riding on.

Joe’s cell phone rang in his pocket. He grimaced as he pulled it out and looked at the display. It read twelve sleep county sheriff’s office.

“This is never good,” Joe mumbled out loud. Then: “Joe Pickett.”

“Joe, this is Sheriff McLanahan.”

Joe rolled his eyes. He and McLanahan had a long history, mostly bad.

“Joe,” McLanahan said, “a fisherman down in the river in the middle of town just called me in a panic. He saw what he thought was an empty drift boat floating toward him in the current. When he looked inside, he found three dead bodies.”

Joe felt his scalp crawl.

“I need you to come in and take a look at these guys,” the sheriff said. “I think they’re friends of yours.”

“Friends?”

McLanahan hung up.

Joe looked to Brueggemann. “Now you’ll learn how to unsaddle a horse and lead it into the trailer. We’ve got a hitch in our plans,” he said.

3

Joe located the sheriff, the boat, and the bodies in the garage adjacent to the old county building in Saddlestring. On the way into town he’d listened to the chatter over the radio. Word of the triple homicide was rocketing across the state. Although nearly every resident had several guns at home and many carried weapons in public, there were only fifteen to twenty murders a year in Wyoming. So three at once was big news, and Joe understood the magnitude, just as he was puzzled by McLanahan’s mention of the victims as his “friends.” He had a dark premonition that one of the bodies might belong to Nate Romanowski, although the idea of anyone actually getting to Nate seemed incomprehensible.

As he entered town he was greeted with a new reelect our sheriff kyle mclanahan billboard. On it, the sheriff leaned out of his pickup window to offer a carrot to a horse. Joe shook his head.

Sheriff Kyle McLanahan had it in for him, and their professional relationship had gotten worse in the past few months. McLanahan had made it clear to his deputies that they wouldn’t be chastised for making Joe’s life miserable. They did it in subtle ways, such as not responding to help requests and losing or delaying paperwork Joe filed. He’d gotten around it somewhat by working directly with County Attorney Dulcie Schalk and bypassing the sheriff’s department.

As election day neared, McLanahan had spent a good deal more time than usual out of his office, meeting voters and playing up his persona of a western caricature. Joe had heard from a few residents that the sheriff cited him in particular as one of the biggest reasons why he’d been humiliated during the trial of Missy, Joe’s mother-in-law, who’d been accused of murdering her former husband. Up until the trial, McLanahan seemed to be cruising toward reelection. Not anymore.

Joe parked next to a sheriff’s department SUV outside the garage. Three other departmental vehicles were lined up on the other side of the open garage door, as was an ambulance and Sheriff McLanahan’s pickup. Dulcie Schalk’s red Subaru wagon was also out front. Dulcie was also stinging from the outcome of the trial and was still cool to Joe, but he thought he sensed a warming. Dulcie was young, tough, professional, and one of Marybeth’s friends. Their mutual love of horses and riding was strong enough that the trial hadn’t derailed their friendship.

Joe killed his motor and jumped out and took a deep breath before going inside.

“Hey,” Luke Brueggemann called out. He’d parked behind Joe’s pickup. “Should I tag along, or what?”

After all he’d been thinking and worrying about, Joe had forgotten about his trainee. Joe put his hands on his hips and thought about it.

“Well?” Brueggemann asked, stopping short of reaching Joe.

“Have you ever seen a dead body?” Joe asked.

“Sure,” Brueggemann said, hitching up his pants.

“You have?”

The trainee looked above and to the right of Joe. “My grandma. At her funeral.”

Joe smiled, despite the situation. “It’s up to you, Luke. I won’t force you, but I won’t keep you away.”

With that, Joe turned and headed for the garage. No footsteps sounded behind him.

“Ron Connelly,” Joe said, as he fought to keep his stomach from churning, “He’s known as the Mad Archer. I arrested him twice. The other two are Stumpy and Paul Kelly. They have a shady outfitting business outside of Winchester. I’ve been trying to catch them poaching for years.”

The sheriff had arranged to have all of the county vehicles moved out of the big garage to make space. The three victims were laid out next to one another on thick plastic sheeting on the concrete floor. When Joe first saw them, he was reminded of Old West photos of dead outlaws on display. All three were stiffened into the unnatural positions in which they’d been found.

Joe asked, “Why didn’t you just pull their wallets to see who they were?”

Before McLanahan could answer, Dulcie Schalk said, “I told the sheriff not to touch the bodies again until the forensics people could get here.”

McLanahan made a face, obviously displeased that Schalk had taken over.

Joe looked around.

The boat they’d arrived in was on the concrete next to the bodies. It smelled of blood. Joe imagined there were gallons of it congealing inside, but he didn’t look to confirm it. He did note that the Mad Archer’s compound bow and a Savage twelve-gauge pump shotgun with a synthetic stock had been tagged and placed on a tarp.

“See?” Sheriff McLanahan said to Dulcie Schalk, who stood off to the side, holding her hand over her mouth in horror. “I told you he’d know ’em. They’re of his ilk.”

Joe ignored the comment and spoke directly to Schalk. “Ron Connelly killed dozens of game animals with his bow and arrows over the years. Down in southern Wyoming where I was stationed for a while, he took potshots at cows and horses, too. I know he wounded an eagle once, and that time I caught him and threw him in the clink. But the penalties for poaching and injuring animals are so weak he didn’t spend much time in jail.

“Our department has — I should say had—alerts out on him,” Joe said. “All the game wardens in the state kept a good eye out for this guy. He used to be a tweaker, but I’d heard he cleaned up his act. Apparently not well enough,” he said, nodding toward the body.

“The Kellys are real backwoods types,” Joe said. “Paul Kelly and his wife, Pam, run a few cows and lease out their stud horse, but other than that they survive off welfare payments and some kind of disability pension Paul got from an accident he’d had when he worked for the county road crew. The disability didn’t stop him from running illegal guided hunts, though. Both Paul and Stumpy got the boot from the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association a few years ago because of client complaints and their general lack of ethics. One client claimed they dropped him off up in the Savage Run country and forgot to come back and pick him up so he had to walk out for two days. I’ve had my eye on them for years, but they’re pretty slippery.”

He nodded toward the bodies. “Or they were, anyway. What doesn’t work for me is how the three of them got hooked up. The Mad Archer was too nuts to keep any friends, and the Kellys stayed completely to themselves.”

Two of McLanahan’s deputies bookended him. Both were young, muscle-bound, and menacing, and both wore large campaign buttons that read reelect our sheriff. Deputy Sollis smirked at Joe through heavy-lidded eyes. Sollis wore a uniform shirt that was a size too small, to show off his biceps and pectorals, and a black mock turtleneck underneath that didn’t fully hide the acne rash on his neck from steroid use. Behind the sheriff and his men was Deputy Mike Reed, McLanahan’s opponent in the election, who was older, rounder, and balding. Joe liked Reed, and tipped his hat brim to say hello. Reed nodded back.

The sheriff hadn’t gotten rid of Reed, which had surprised Joe before he learned the strategy behind it. Keeping him in the department showcased the sheriff’s good-guy credentials, but the idea had actually come after McLanahan watched The Godfather II and heard Michael Corleone say, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Although Reed was the senior investigator, McLanahan steadily undermined him in the eyes of voters and observers by assigning him to the most menial tasks, such as supervising random DUI roadblocks, overseeing county road cleanup crews, and in one case sending his deputy on a meth-house raid to the wrong address.

Joe asked the sheriff, “They were all in the same boat?”

“Literally,” McLanahan guffawed.

Joe shook his head. “Did they get into a tussle and start blasting at each other?”

Deputy Reed said, “We can’t say for sure, but we doubt it.”

The sheriff acted as if Reed hadn’t spoken.

Dulcie Schalk parted her fingers to talk. She was clearly nauseated by the scene in front of her, and likely the enormity of the crime itself. When she spoke, she bit off her words in a tight-mouthed way, as if trying to avoid breathing the fetid air. “Coroner Will Speer is on his way here to take them for autopsies, Joe, but from what we can tell they were all shot to death at the same time. It appears each was killed by a single fatal gunshot. From what the sheriff told me, the firearm used was … huge.”

She attempted to continue but had to look away. Joe had an odd impulse to go over and hug her, but he knew she’d be embarrassed by the gesture in front of the sheriff and his men.

Sollis said, “Huge as in fucking massive. There’s entry wounds as big as most exit wounds. And the exit wounds, well, look at that Connelly guy. Half his head is just gone.” He said it with what sounded like twisted admiration, Joe thought. He refused to look closely at Ron Connelly’s wound, despite Sollis’s prompting. Joe didn’t think he could take it.

“Which means,” McLanahan said, “we may not recover the slugs because they passed right through. Even Stumpy there with a full body shot. It looks like the slug went in under one arm and out under the other.”

Schalk said through her fingers, “That’s why I asked Sheriff McLanahan to call DCI and bring the FBI in. He may not think we need their expertise, but we do need their resources.”

Joe looked over to the sheriff. McLanahan’s gunfighter mustache was trimmed, but it still obscured his mouth. He wore a battered cowboy hat and suspenders over his uniform shirt. He’d traded his departmental Glock for a low-slung Colt .45. McLanahan was from West Virginia but chose to look, dress, and talk like a frontier rube. Some were fooled. Joe wasn’t. The sheriff’s response to Dulcie Schalk’s suggestion was to roll his eyes.

Joe knew the sheriff well enough to know he hadn’t been called there simply to identify the bodies.

McLanahan rocked back on his boot heels and stabbed his thumbs through his belt loops. To Joe, he said, “Who do we know that is rumored to live upriver from time to time and carry a great big gun?”

Joe was thinking the same thing, but he didn’t reply.

“Tell me,” McLanahan said, “when is the last time you saw your buddy Nate Romanowski? The fugitive?”

Nate was still being sought by the Feds because Joe had arranged a temporary release the year before and Nate had never turned himself back in. Instead, his friend had gone to ground and had managed to elude them. Which is why Joe saw very little of his friend these days and rarely communicated with him. It was protection for the both of them.

Joe felt Schalk’s eyes on him as the sheriff talked.

“It’s been a while,” Joe said.

“What’s a while?” McLanahan asked. “I mean, being that you’re sworn to uphold the law and all? It’s hard to believe you know the location of a wanted man but you don’t find it within yourself to turn him in or arrest him.”

“It’s not that simple,” Joe said. He knew he was flushing. And he knew McLanahan had a point and was making it so the county attorney would hear it.

“Rumor is,” Sollis said, cutting in, “your buddy Nate has a history of violence. Some even say he had something to do with the disappearance of our former sheriff, although we could never get enough evidence to make that case. You wouldn’t know anything about any of this, would you?”

“Not really,” Joe said, grateful the sheriff hadn’t asked him about things he did know about, like Nate’s habit of ripping ears off suspects. In regard to the end of former Sheriff Bud Barnum, Joe had a suspicion about Nate’s involvement, but he’d never voiced it with anyone except Marybeth.

“So,” McLanahan said to Joe, shooting a glance at Dulcie Schalk to make sure she was fully engaged in the implication, “you probably wouldn’t want to go with us in a few minutes when we drive upriver to check out Nate Romanowski’s alleged place of residence? To see if he knows anything about these yahoos that lay before us?”

Joe avoided Schalk’s eyes. He said, “I’ll go.”

McLanahan feigned surprise. “You don’t need to put yourself out. Besides, you’ll probably get in the way. You always do.”

“I said I’m going.”

Behind Joe, he heard a sudden retching sound. He turned to see Luke Brueggemann covering his mouth. His eyes were bulging and wet. He turned and threw up on the concrete floor.

“For Christ’s sake,” McLanahan said to Sollis, “call maintenance and get them to clean that up.” To Joe he said, “Can’t you control your people?”

Joe put his hand under Brueggemann’s arm and led him outside. “It’s okay,” he told his trainee. “It happens.”

“Has it happened to you?”

“Yup.”

“Those guys aren’t going to let me forget about this, are they?”

Joe said, “No, they won’t.”

Brueggemann wiped at his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “I’ve seen plenty of dead things before. You know, deer and elk. And I’m not squeamish when it comes to things like that.”

Joe nodded, walking them toward a strip of grass on the edge of the parking area in case Brueggemann had to get sick again.

“I did a full head mount of an antelope once, and an eight-point buck,” Brueggemann continued, “and I like my venison bloody.”

“You can stop,” Joe said, wondering what it was his trainee had just said that struck an odd note. But before he could follow it up, Deputy Mike Reed called his name.

“Stay here,” Joe said to Brueggemann. He met Reed in the middle of the parking lot.

Reed spoke in low tones that likely couldn’t be overheard by his colleagues inside. “You know what’s going on here, don’t you?”

“What’s that?”

Reed said, “The sheriff needs a big win right now. He thinks he’s slipping with the voters. Bagging a guy like Romanowski and solving a triple murder would put him back on top.”

Joe nodded and looked closely at Reed. “Is this the candidate talking?”

Reed looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”

Joe said, “You know how I get along with the sheriff, but this is a triple homicide. He’s got to do everything he can to close it fast. I understand that.”

“Yeah,” Reed said, looking down at his boots. “I guess you’re right. But with this guy,” he said, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder toward the open garage, “there’s always an angle. We both know him well enough to know that.”

“What’s the angle?” Joe asked.

“You mean besides making you look bad in front of the county attorney?” Reed asked.

Joe sighed and conceded the point.

“All I’m saying,” Reed whispered, “is watch your back.”

Joe thanked him and said, “You, too.”

Reed smiled bitterly. “For me, it’s a twenty-four/seven operation.”

Joe nodded and left Brueggemann and went back inside the county garage.

WHILE THE SHERIFF gathered his deputies around him and issued orders for arming up for the raid, Dulcie Schalk gestured for Joe to follow her outside. Once they were clear of the garage and the odors inside, she said, “Tell me what he was saying isn’t true. Tell me you don’t know about a fugitive who might be a cop killer.”

Joe looked over his shoulder to make sure Brueggemann and Reed were out of earshot. Reed was back inside the garage. He saw the trainee over by his truck, leaning his head against the front bumper. Joe said to Dulcie, “Like I said. It’s complicated.”

Her eyes flared. “I’m riding out there with you, and you’re going to explain everything to me. And if I’m not satisfied, Joe, there will be hell to pay.”

He nodded and held her eyes. He said, “I’ll tell you the truth. But I want to give you some advice. It’s something Marybeth and I agreed to a long time ago when it comes to Nate Romanowski.”

“And that is?” she asked, skeptical.

“Don’t ask me things you may not want to know. Just think real hard about that before we talk.”

She looked at him quizzically. She whispered, “You aren’t threatening me, are you, Joe?”

He shook his head quickly. “Not at all, not at all. It’s just that sometimes it doesn’t help to know everything there is to know about someone else. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Marybeth knows Romanowski?” she asked.

“Oh, she does,” Joe said. “She does.”

Dulcie Schalk went to get fitted for body armor, and Joe used the opportunity to speed-dial Marybeth on his cell phone. His wife worked from nine to three at the Twelve Sleep County Library, and he knew she’d likely just dropped off April and Lucy at school and was settling into her desk. Marybeth was blond with green eyes, and she was slim and attractive. Joe was always surprised he’d landed her. So was his mother-in-law.

“I’m surprised you’re calling,” she said when she picked up. “I didn’t think you’d have a signal up there.”

“I’m not in the mountains,” he said, and quickly recapped the morning. He heard her gasp when he told her the sheriff was preparing to storm Nate’s home.

“Should I warn him?”

Joe closed his eyes. Nate had a satellite phone, and he’d given them both the private number. He’d asked them not to call him unless it was a dire emergency.

“No,” Joe said after a few beats. “You shouldn’t. I don’t want you to get involved in this. Who knows if the sheriff or the Feds can trace back a call? It’s possible, you know. And if Nate’s involved in this, you could go to jail for tipping him off.”

“I don’t mind taking that chance,” she said defiantly. “After what he’s done for us …”

“Marybeth, we can’t risk it. You can’t risk it. Besides, Nate is smart. If he’s involved, he’ll expect the sheriff to show up, and he’ll take precautions. And if he wasn’t involved, he has ways of knowing that we’re on the way.”

“This feels rotten, Joe.”

“It has to be this way.”

“I don’t have to like it, and I’m not making any promises.”

“I don’t like it, either,” he said. He said he’d call her as soon as he could to let her know what happened.

“Joe,” she said, “don’t let any of McLanahan’s goons get trigger-happy. I could see one of them going over the top.”

He agreed. After they’d disconnected, he made sure the coast was clear in all directions — Brueggemann was still recovering, and Schalk wasn’t back with her vest — before he stepped behind his pickup and called Nate’s number.

There was no answer.

4

“This reminds me a lot of the first time I ever met Nate Romanowski,” Joe said to Dulcie as they sped down the state highway in the midst of the sheriff’s department caravan of SUVs. “Nine years ago, different sheriff, similar situation.”

Joe recounted how Nate had been arrested for murder, beaten, and jailed. The former sheriff considered it a slam-dunk case, but Joe was able to prove Nate’s innocence, and the outlaw falconer had pledged to protect Joe and his family.

“Over the years,” Joe said, “we’ve been through a lot and he’s never broken his word. We’ve had our disagreements, and I don’t want to get into all the details, but he’s been there for us. So I hope you understand that it isn’t an easy thing to turn him over to the Feds. That’s where he comes from, and we’re not sure he’d make it out alive.”

Dulcie recoiled. “What do you mean, he might not make it out alive? This is our government you’re talking about, Joe.”

He nodded. Luke Brueggemann was in the caravan as well, his pickup hovering in Joe’s rearview mirror.

Joe recalled other incidents over the years, things he’d stored in his memory drawer but never reopened. When they’d first met Nate he mentioned he’d just come from Montana. Because of Nate’s sudden violent appearance and the way he’d said it, Marybeth was curious and did some research on the library computers, and keyed on a headline from the Great Falls Tribune that read “Two Dead in U.S. 87 Rollover.” The story said that a damaged vehicle with out-of-state plates had been called in to the Montana Highway Patrol twenty-one miles north of town near Fort Benton. The identities of the occupants were unknown at the time, but authorities were investigating.

On the next page, a smaller story identified the victims of a multiple-rollover accident as two men, aged thirty-two and thirty-seven, from Arlington, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., respectively. Both were killed on impact. The highway patrol suggested that judging by the skid marks, it was possible that the engine to the late-model SUV had lost power or died as the vehicle approached a sharp grade with several turns, and that the driver was unable to negotiate the sharpest of the turns and blew through a guardrail and rolled to the bottom of the canyon, flipping at least seven times. The passenger was thrown from the vehicle, and the driver was crushed behind the wheel.

“Witness Sought in Rollover Investigation,” the third, and smallest, headline read. In the story, the highway patrol reported that they were seeking a potential witness to the rollover on U.S. 87 that killed two men from out of state. Specifically, they were looking for the driver of an older-model Jeep with Montana plates that was seen passing a speed checkpoint near Great Falls. The authorities estimated that the Jeep may have been in the vicinity of the rollover near the time it occurred, and that the driver could have seen the accident happen.

Joe later learned that Nate drove a Jeep, and that his preferred weapon at the time, a five-shot .454 Casull manufactured by Freedom Arms, in Freedom, Wyoming, was the only handgun designated a “car killer” by the U.S. Secret Service because the bullets had the power to penetrate the engine block of a vehicle and render it useless.

Several years later, a man named Randan Bello arrived in Saddlestring from Virginia and started asking around about Nate Romanowski. He found a source in the former sheriff, Bud Barnum, and the two became fast friends. One particular fall morning, a housekeeping employee at the Holiday Inn observed Barnum arriving at the hotel and waiting for Bello to join him in his SUV. The two left together and didn’t come back. The sheriff’s vehicle was never located, although two years later a couple of elk hunters reported that they’d seen wreckage deep in the bottom of Savage Run Canyon. Joe had investigated, but their directions were poor and he’d never spotted anything.

He remembered Large Merle, a restaurant owner who lived on the road that led to Outlaw Canyon, where Nate had relocated after federal warrants were issued for him, asking Joe, “Did Nate ever tell you about that time in Haiti? When the four drugged-out rebels jumped him?”

“No.”

Merle shook his head and chuckled, the fat jiggling under his arms and under his chin. “Quite a story,” Merle said. “Especially the part about guts strung through the trees like popcorn strings. Ask him about that one sometime!”

Joe never did. But he’d heard that Merle was missing as well. He’d simply not shown up to open his little restaurant in Kaycee one morning a month before.

Joe said, “I’ve never gotten the whole story from Nate, and I’ve never wanted to hear it. He’s tried to tell me a few times, but I shut him down because I don’t want to know. But it involves something he did in Special Forces. It’s one of the reasons he moved out here — to get away.”

Dulcie asked about Nate’s age and background.

“Late thirties, early forties,” Joe said. “I don’t know his birthday or where he grew up, but I’ve always been under the impression he was familiar with Wyoming and Montana from his youth because he seems to know his way around. He’s also familiar with Idaho.” Joe let that just hang there and hoped she wouldn’t ask about Idaho in particular.

She didn’t, but she asked how Nate supported himself. “From what you say, he seems to have no problem getting weapons and equipment.”

Joe shrugged. “I don’t think it’s criminal, but I wouldn’t swear to it. All I know is he’s never seemed to be hurting for money. He’s tried to tell me some things, but I wouldn’t listen.”

“You have a strange relationship,” she said.

“Yup.”

“Do you think he’s capable of something like what we saw back there in the garage?”

Joe didn’t hesitate. “Nate is capable of anything, but he’s not random. That’s the thing about him. He has his own code and he can be ruthless and cold, but he doesn’t do things like that unless provoked. Unless they drew down on him first. And presuming the sheriff is right, why would three low-rent characters like Connelly and the Kellys even want to tangle with someone like Nate? That’s why this doesn’t make any sense.”

She shrugged. “Maybe they were involved with him in some way? In the way he makes his mysterious money?”

“Not possible,” Joe said. “He wouldn’t associate with people like that. Not to say he doesn’t know some unsavory types — he does. But he operates on a whole different level.”

“Maybe they were after his money?”

Joe said, “In that case, they were even stupider than I thought. But as soon as we get clear of this, I’m going to go out to the Kelly place and talk to Paul’s wife and Stumpy’s mother. Pam is her name, I believe. She might know something, and I don’t trust the sheriff to follow up with her.”

Dulcie rubbed her chin. “Was there a federal reward out for him?”

“If there was, this is the first I’ve heard of it,” he said, tumbling that idea over in his mind.

She said, “And even if there wasn’t, one or all of these three might have trouble with the Feds over something or other. It’s possible they went after Nate as a bargaining chip.”

“It’s a possibility,” Joe said. “I never thought of that.”

“Let’s keep an open mind,” she said.

Joe eyed her skeptically and held his tongue.

“I learned a few things in Missy’s murder trial,” she said defensively. “One is never to fully trust McLanahan’s theories or judgment. The other is never to underestimate the depth of depravity of the criminal mind.”

“You’re being a little rough on yourself, Dulcie,” he said after a beat. “You’re young. Don’t get too hard.”

She looked over at him, puzzled.

“When it comes to folks, I always try to err on the side of goodwill,” Joe said. Then: “It’s gotten me in a lot of hot water, but it’s better that way.”

She laughed, surprised, and asked, “How is that?”

Joe said, “I’ve never tried to find out what terrible thing Nate was involved in that drove him out here. I just take him at face value. From what he’s shown me and what he’s done for my family, that’s good enough. That was what I meant earlier about not always needing to know everything. When a man wants a whole new life, I guess I’m okay with that.”

A minute later, she said, “And Marybeth — she’s okay with you knowing him? From what you’ve told me I don’t think I’d want him around my children, provided I had any.”

Joe looked ahead. Deputy Sollis was in the lead, followed by two other deputies, Mike Reed, and Sheriff McLanahan. It was less than four miles to the turnoff to Nate’s place on the bank of the river.

“We’re both comfortable with him,” Joe said. “In fact, he’s been the master falconer to my daughter Sheridan, who is his apprentice. Marybeth and Nate, well, let’s just say they have a special friendship.”

“Explain.” Her eyes sparkled wickedly, Joe thought.

He tried to think of the right words. He decided on, “Marybeth and I have a marriage based on trust. But if we didn’t …”

She grinned. “So he’s hot.”

“So they tell me,” Joe sighed.

“I’ll have to ask her about him the next time we go riding,” she said.

Joe moaned. “He might not even be at his place. Nate has a habit of vanishing for weeks and then suddenly showing up where you don’t expect him to be. He might have been gone this whole time, and this entire deal we have going here might be a waste of time and effort.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting him,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard a word Joe said. Dulcie Schalk was attractive and unmarried, and he’d heard the local gossips having coffee at the Burg-O-Pardner restaurant speculate about her sexuality, but Joe had never doubted she liked men. As Marybeth had said, pickings were slim in Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming.

Sollis began to slow down on the highway. The two-track road that led three miles to Nate’s had no markings or signs. In the winter, it drifted over and was inaccessible.

Joe looked to the southwest. A lazy curl of black smoke rose from where the river coursed through the valley where Nate’s place was located.

“Trouble,” Joe said, chinning toward the smoke.

5

Nate Romanowski watched the procession of vehicles stream down the two-track through binoculars. He counted seven of them — four look-alike sheriff’s department SUVs, the sheriff’s pickup, and two green pickups with decals on the doors bringing up the rear.

“Joe,” he said aloud. He glanced down at his satellite phone. An hour before, Joe had tried to call him but he hadn’t picked up. Five minutes later, there had been another call from Marybeth Pickett that he declined to answer. But both calls coming so close to each other told him all he needed to know.

Nate was on his belly in a tangle of aspen high on the slope not far from where he’d hunted ducks the day before. His peregrine and prairie falcon were hooded a few feet behind him in the gold carpet of fallen leaves. The birds stood erect like still little sentinels, waiting to be unleashed.

For the hundredth time that day, he cursed his actions the evening before. He’d let himself be taken in by the three men in the boat simply because they were locals, and he hadn’t connected their presence with The Five, the Special Forces unit he’d been in. That had been his first mistake. His second was that in the pain from the arrow through his shoulder, he’d let the boat simply float away downriver where it would eventually be found.

The two calls from Joe and Marybeth confirmed that it had.

So he’d been off his game. But an arrow in his flesh and the killing of three men had focused his mind, and he knew he was in the midst of a battle that might turn out to be his last. The rules hadn’t changed as much as they’d been adapted to his location and circumstances. And he hadn’t seen it coming.

That morning, he’d made his plan. Through a haze of pain and with the use of only one arm, he’d sunk his boat, burned the mews to the ground, and gathered all his gear and clothing into piles on the floor of his house before torching that, too. He’d smashed his electronic gear into bite-sized pieces and thrown only a few of his possessions into an old military duffel bag, along with the last bricks of cash, to take with him.

On a gravel bar in the river, he’d found the carbine the old man Paul had aimed at him. The rifle was in good shape after he’d dried and cleaned it. It was an all-weather Ruger Mini-14 Ranch rifle chambered in 6.8-millimeter with a thirty-round clip and a scope. He’d decided to keep it because the weapon would be good for precision work and for laying down cover fire, if necessary. The stock was black synthetic. The rifle, along with his .500, would serve his needs, he thought.

Nate had killed an antelope several days before and packed the carcass in ice in a dug-out icehouse fifty yards downriver. After cleaning his wounds with alcohol and taping on compresses, he’d sliced off the tenderloins and back straps and ate one of the back straps whole after searing it and seasoning it with salt and pepper. The light and flavorful lean meat seemed to help speed the replenishing of his blood supply. It was pure protein from the wild, and he thought it had healing properties.

In his circumstances, he’d decided to trim his life down to the bone. He’d taken only what he could carry. He’d eat only wild game and fish that he caught. And he’d get rid of his phone now that he’d made three calls on it; one to the Wind River Indian Reservation, the next to colleagues in the Idaho compound, and the third to a man in Colorado Springs.

It hurt to shift his position, even to follow the oncoming procession through his field glasses. His shoulder screamed at him, and he’d noticed that his skin was purplish near the entry wound, and the dark wine color was expanding out. He had no painkilling drugs available and had spent most of the previous night fighting back waves of delirium. He’d lost a lot of blood.

As the caravan neared, he removed the satellite phone from its cover and placed it on a rock and smashed it into pieces with the butt of the rifle. In the pile of shards, he located the memory chip and therefore his call record, and flicked it into a mud bog on the edge of the aspens. By doing so, he was eliminating the last object in his possession that would leave a digital trace of his whereabouts.

The first SUV entered his yard and stopped with a lurch in front of his smoldering house. A strapping sheriff’s deputy in full assault gear blasted out of the door with a semiautomatic rifle and aimed it toward the front door. The other SUVs roared in on both sides of it, and the occupants flew out of their vehicles in a similar fashion. They were so far away that he couldn’t hear their shouts and warnings but assumed what they were yelling by their gestures and body movements. Nate had done enough assault training that he knew all the moves and objectives. These guys were sloppy and predictable and wouldn’t have lasted long if he’d decided to make a stand against them, he thought. They were overgrown boys playing army with real weapons. Considering their leadership, he wasn’t surprised.

He shifted his field of view over to the sheriff, who had parked his truck behind the row of SUVs. McLanahan ambled out, shouting instructions to the deputies in front of him and talking on a handheld radio to someone else. The first green pickup continued on through his yard and braked to a stop near the river. Another green pickup stuck close behind it. Nate sharpened his focus a bit.

Joe Pickett and the county attorney climbed out of the first truck. Joe wasn’t armored up and didn’t carry a long gun of any kind. Nate watched as Joe fitted his gray Stetson on his head. Even from that distance, and through undulating waves of condensation from the still-moist earth, Nate could tell that Joe had a pained expression on his face.

“Sorry, my friend,” Nate whispered.

As the deputies cautiously approached the smoldering structure and the sheriff walked around uselessly behind them, Nate kept his binoculars on Joe. He watched as his friend ordered another Game and Fish employee to lead Schalk away from the open to cover behind the SUVs.

Then he shifted back to Joe, as the game warden kicked through the remains of the falcon mews, then walked down to the river and gazed into the water. On the bank, he leaned back and scanned the horizon on top of the high bluff. Apparently, the sheriff shouted something at him — probably for walking around in the open without a long gun in his red uniform shirt — but Joe waved him off.

Joe walked over to the side of the stone walls of the house where Nate parked his Jeep, and bent over to look at the ground. Then he walked a distance downriver, surveying ahead of him in the mud and sand. What was he following? Nate’s tracks?

The game warden stopped suddenly near the old river cottonwoods as if jerked on a leash. He stared at the tree trunks, then cautiously looked over his shoulder toward the SUVs and the assault team.

With a feeling like a slight electric shock through his bowels, Nate realized what Joe was looking at. He’d made three mistakes.

“Uh-oh,” Nate whispered. The arrow he’d been hit with was still embedded in the bark of the tree. An arrow likely covered with dried blood and his DNA. If the arrow was analyzed, the investigators would know that Nate had not only been there, but he’d been wounded. And so would The Five.

Nate said, “What are you going to do, Joe?” He felt for his friend. Joe was straight and upright and burdened with ethics, responsibility, and a sense of duty that had gotten him into trouble many times. It was something Nate admired about Joe, and a trait he’d shared many years before it had been destroyed.

He watched as Joe checked again to make sure no one was looking, then reached up quickly and wrenched the arrow from the tree. Then he ambled down to the river with the shaft hidden tight against the length of his leg and he flipped it into the fast current.

Nate closed his eyes for a moment and said, “Thank you.”

LATER, after the assault team had finally left and the sun was slipping behind the western mountains, Nate freed the jesses and unhooded both birds. With his good right hand, he raised the prairie falcon and released him to the sky. He lifted the peregrine, and she cocked her head and stared at him with her black eyes.

“Go,” he said, prompting her by lifting her up and down. She gripped his hand, and her talons tightened painfully through the glove.

“Really,” he said. “Go.”

Although she was likely hungry and there were ducks and geese cruising the river to find a place to settle for the night, she didn’t spread her wings.

“I mean it,” he said. “It’s been good. You were a great hunter, but we both need to be free right now. We’ll meet again in this world or the next. Now go.”

As he flung her into the air, his wounded shoulder bit him like a jackal and the pain nearly took him to his knees.

The peregrine shot out her wings and beat them until she grasped the air. He watched her climb, but she didn’t seem to be concentrating on the river, the ducks, or the geese. She rose almost reluctantly, he thought. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, he told himself. When a falconer and falcon parted, it was supposed to be the falcon’s idea.

But she was still up there, a dot against the evening clouds, when he hiked down the other side of the rise to where he’d hidden his Jeep in a tangle of junipers.