Out of Range

THIRTY-TWO

At least once a day he takes his birds out," Bello said, while driving. "He lets them fly around and he puts food out for them or holds it in his hand. The birds drop out of the sky to eat it."

"He's training the birds to hunt with him," Barnum said. "It's called stooping."

"I don't care what it's called," Bello said testily. "I just care that he does it once a day, usually in the afternoon."

The ex-sheriff felt a rise of anger but said nothing. Bello shouldn't talk like that to him, he thought. He was getting sick of the lack of respect people showed him, Bello included.

"Like I told you," Bello said, swinging his SUV off the state highway onto the two-track that led to the stone house and the river, "before we actually get to his place the road goes up over a rise. It's about three hundred yards from the house. He can't see a vehicle approaching until it comes over the top. When I was scouting him, that's where I put the sandbags, up there on that rise behind some sagebrush. He never looked in my direction. The sandbags are about a hundred yards apart, so we'll have sight lines from two angles."

"What if he hears us coming?" Barnum asked. "The noise of a car carries a long way out here."

"That's why we walk the last mile to the rise," Bello said tersely. "I'm guessing your old legs can handle that."

"Fuck you, Bello," Barnum said, not fighting his anger this time.

Bello laughed dryly. "That's the spirit, Sheriff."

Their rifles were between them on the seats, muzzles down. Bello's.300 Winchester Mag had a satin finish and an oversized Leupold scope. Barnum's old.270 looked like a hillbilly gun beside it, Bello said when he saw it.

"Forty elk and a drunken Mexican with a shovel would disagree," Barnum shot back.

Bello had told him the story almost casually the night before, as they sat on opposite sides of Bello's room at the Holiday Inn. Both had cocktails in hand that Barnum had mixed.

Nate Romanowski had been known by a code name, the Falcon, and was one of the best the agency had, Bello said. He was out of the country for years at a time. But like others who were too tightly wound and too independent, Romanowski had started to choose which orders to follow and which ones to disregard. When he was called back to headquarters, it took three months for him to show up, and he clashed immediately with the new director. The Falcon quit loudly, in agency terms, intimating he would talk if they tried to stop him. "You've never seen paranoia like the paranoia we had in our outfit," Bello said, showing his teeth.

Two operatives, one a friend of Randan Bello and the other his son-in-law, were sent to find the Falcon and assure themselves, and the agency, that he had no intention of talking after all. The operatives took annual leave to do it, so the agency couldn't be accused of official covert activity within the country. Their last dispatch was from northern Montana, via e-mail, reporting that they had heard about a loner who fit the profile of the Falcon. The suspect was a falconer who drove an old Jeep and packed a.454 Casull from Freedom Arms in Wyoming. The next day, the bodies of the operatives were discovered by a passing motorist, who reported the accident to the Montana State Patrol.

"Romanowski killed them both?" Barnum asked. "Why didn't we hear anything about it?"

Bello drained his glass of scotch and held it out for a refill.

"The inquiry concluded that the engine on their vehicle quit on a switchback road and they lost control and rolled eight times. Both were crushed."

Barnum looked over his shoulder as he poured. "You're pretty sure he did it though." It was a statement, not a question.

"Sure enough that the day after I retired I headed out here to Wyoming," Bello said. "My daughter has never remarried."

"Kids?"

"Nope. I've got no grandkids."

Barnum thought of his own grandchildren, teenage dark-skinned delinquents on the reservation he had never even met. No great loss, he thought.

"Why are you telling me all of this?" Barnum asked, finally.

"Because you asked," Bello said, drinking and looking out the window. "And you offered to help."

Barnum hadn't believed him at the time-Bello's explanation just hadn't sounded right. Nevertheless, he had gone along, because he had reasons of his own.

Bello pulled off the two-track more than a mile from the rise and turned off the engine. Climbing out, he pocketed the keys, slung the.300 over his shoulder, and buckled on a large fanny pack. Barnum followed suit, sliding his.270 out of the truck. He loaded it with 150 grain shells and worked the bolt.

"Are you ready?" Bello asked in a low voice.

Barnum nodded, and they shut the car doors softly. There was a slight breeze coming from the direction of the river, which was good because it made it even more unlikely that their car had been heard.

Bello walked around the SUV and handed Barnum a small Motorola Talkabout set to channel four.

"Keep the volume all the way down," Bello said. "If you need to talk to me about something, hit the chirp key and then turn the volume up a quarter of the way. But I hope we don't need to talk."

Barnum clipped the radio to his shirt pocket.

"Remember the plan?" Bello asked.

"No, I forgot it," Barnum said gruffly, being sarcastic.

Bello's eyes bored into the ex-sheriff. "Strange time for jokes."

"When we have a visual," Barnum said, using the same words Bello had used earlier, "we signal each other by waving our hands, palms out. Then we both sight him in and when you give the signal, a double chirp from the radio, we fire at the same time so we increase our chances of knocking him down for good."

"Aim for his chest," Bello said, interrupting, "with the crosshairs on the middle of the widest part of him. Forget about taking a head shot at this distance."

"When he's down," Barnum continued, stepping on Bello's words, "we wait an hour, keeping the body in the scope and checking for movement. If we don't see any, you'll go down and drag him into the river. I'll stay back and keep watch down the road."

Bello listened intently, his eyes on Barnum, making sure the ex-sheriff had everything correct. Barnum didn't like being looked at that way, and didn't make a secret of it in his rehearsed delivery.

"Okay, then," Bello said, turning and walking down the middle of the two-track. Barnum followed.

There were problems with Bello's plan, Barnum thought. He'd reviewed it the night before, turning it over again and again, and finally figured out what was wrong with it: He was being set up. When Bello double chirped and Barnum fired, Bello would deliberately miss, so the only slug to be found in Romanowski's body would be the.270 round. Everyone knew Barnum hunted with a.270, and a ballistics check would tie the slug to the rifle.

Barnum was well known as a drinker and a talker, and the whole town was aware of his humiliation at the Stockman's. If Romanowski's body was found, and it would no doubt wash up somewhere downriver, Barnum would be a suspect.

By then, Bello would be long gone.

Of course, Barnum would implicate Bello. But, Barnum had realized, what did he really know about the man from Virginia? Was his name even Randan Bello? Barnum had never seen an ID. Was he even from Virginia, or were those stolen or counterfeit plates on his car? The man had been meticulous since arriving about leaving no records by paying for everything with cash. He had spilled everything out to Barnum so easily about the agency, and his son-in-law, and his intentions. Bello didn't seem like the kind of man to expose himself that way. The only reason he had done so, Barnum concluded, was because he saw in the ex-sheriff a way to pin the murder on someone else.

But that wasn't going to happen, Barnum said to himself while he walked. When that double chirp came, the ex-sheriff was going to swing his rifle around and shoot Bello in the head.

That would give the morning men at the Burg-O-Pardner something to talk about.

"I went to the sheriff with my concerns," Barnum would say, widening his hound-dog eyes, looking at each community leader in turn, "but he practically threw me out of his office. So I had to take care of things myself."

"Sounds like we need a new sheriff," someone would say, should say, perhaps the mayor. And they would all look to him.

"I don't know, fellows," Barnum would say humbly. "I was just getting used to being retired."

Bello stopped and gestured at the sky. Barnum squinted, seeing the black speck of a falcon streaking across a pillowy cumulous cloud.

"His birds are out, which means he's in the open," Bello whispered over his shoulder, his back to Barnum. "This will work perfectly."

"Yup," the ex-sheriff said absently, seeing something in his peripheral vision. He turned, and learned he could actually see a bullet coming when it was aimed straight at his head from a quarter of a mile away, even before he could hear the shot.