C. Box - Nowhere to Run

He closed his eyes tightly, trying to visualize who he’d glimpsed.

Thinking: No. You’ve seen her face so many times the past two years on fliers put up by her parents. Her face has been burned into your subconscious. You’re seeing things. It couldn’t have been her.

Later, behind him, he heard the cabin collapse in on itself with the rough crackling of timber.

The stream to his left, trees and boulders to his right, the sky filled with pulsing stars and a moon bright enough to see by, the injured game warden started walking slowly out of the Sierra Madre.

The stream would lead somewhere; a ranch house, a road, a natural-gas field serviced by energy workers.

He had no answers, only questions.

He hoped his questions could somehow keep him occupied and alive long enough to get off the mountain.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 29

Nate Romanowski tramped up the Switchback Canyon trail with a fifteen-pound mature bald eagle perched on a thick welder’s glove. As he hiked, the eagle maintained its balance by clamping its talons on the glove and shifting its weight with subtle extensions of its seven-foot wingspan, often hitting Nate in the face.

“Stop that,” he said, flinching.

The bird ignored him.

A satellite phone hung from a leather strap around Nate’s neck, and his Freedom Arms.454 Casull, the second most powerful handgun in the world, was in a shoulder holster beneath his left armpit. It was a warm late-summer day, in the high eighties, and as he approached the rim of the canyon, it got warmer and a slight breeze blew hot and dry.

Exactly two cotton-candy cumulus clouds paraded across an endless light blue palette of sky that opened up as he rose out of Hole in the Wall Canyon, where he lived in a cave once occupied by infamous Old West outlaws. He’d chosen the location a year and a half before, when the FBI office in Cheyenne had declared him a high-profile felon and a first-priority suspect in crimes he’d committed and some he hadn’t. Hole in the Wall was perfect for him to hide out in due to its remote location on private land in north-central Wyoming and the fact that no one could descend into it unseen. He’d booby-trapped the trail with snares and wires tied to alarms and explosives, which he’d carefully stepped over on the way up, and only three people knew of his existence: his love Alisha Whiteplume, his friend Joe Pickett, and Sheridan Pickett, his apprentice in falconry.

Nate was a master falconer: tall, lean, with broad shoulders, long legs, and a footlong blond ponytail that hung down his back. He had a hawk nose and icy blue eyes, and he went weeks without talking except to himself and his birds of prey. In a clapboard mews he’d constructed of weathered barn wood he’d raided from outlaw cabins and corrals, he boarded a redtail hawk, a prairie, a massive gyrfalcon, a wicked little merlin, and his prized peregrine that would pursue and kill anything that flew or ran. Plus the bald eagle he carried. The eagle had been shot with an arrow the year before and was seriously damaged and ineffectual. Joe Pickett had delivered the wounded eagle to him, hoping Nate could rehabilitate it. So far, despite hundreds of hours of care, the eagle was still dependent on him and useless for any purpose other than show-horsery. It had no desire to fly, to hunt, or to become independent and eagle-like. He was beginning to seriously dislike the bird and suspected it was an incorrigible head case.

If it weren’t for the fact that Sheridan was his apprentice and Joe had once gone to the mat for him and earned his undying loyalty and his vow of protection for the Pickett Family, Nate would have long before snapped the neck of the national symbol and buried her at the bottom of the canyon. Some creatures, he’d decided years before when he was overseas with Special Forces, were better off dead. That included many, many human beings. This eagle, who would no longer fly or hunt, was on borrowed time. The predator had inadvertently become prey.

“You need to be an eagle,” he said to her as he climbed.

Again, as always, she ignored him and righted herself by spreading her wings and hitting him in the face.

He paused at the rim of the canyon. The terrain in front of him was flat and without features. He could see for miles all the way to the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains and the one two-track road that led to Hole in the Wall. The late-summer grass was yellow like straw, interspersed with sagebrush clawing up toward the sky. There were no vehicles on the road or parked on the side of it.

Behind him, the other rim of the deep canyon was less than a quarter mile away. It was clear as well.

He emerged from the canyon and sat down in the grass, sweating from his exertion from the climb out. He put the bald eagle next to him and let her step off of his gloved hand where she stood next to him, inert and majestic. No bird, he thought, looked better on principle than a bald eagle. No bird was more complicated, either, with its seven thousand feathers perfectly engineered to withstand extreme weather and conditions. But if the eagle wouldn’t fly or hunt or protect herself, what could he do?

There was a single message on his satellite phone from Marybeth Pickett and it was less than an hour old. He dialed her cell phone number in Saddlestring.

“Nate?” she answered.

“You sound agitated. Is everything all right?”

A short pause. Then: “You know I’ve never called you before.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“I’m worried about Joe. I think something’s happened to him.”

“Down in Baggs? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. He went on a horseback patrol Monday and I haven’t heard from him in four days. He left a message saying everything was okay Tuesday night, and then nothing. I haven’t heard from him since.”

Nate said, “Maybe his phone went out or something. You know things like that happen.”

“Yes, I know. But I just have a feeling something’s terribly wrong. I can’t shake it. I’m really worried about him. We’ve been married a long time and sometimes you just know things. I can’t explain it.”

Nate said, “Where did you hear from him last?”

“Some lake in the Sierra Madre. He left a message. It’s killing me I didn’t talk to him personally. I keep listening to that message over and over again. He says everything’s fine, but I get a bad vibe. Like he didn’t even know things were going to go bad for him. He’s got Buddy and Blue Roanie with him, but I’ve got a really bad feeling.”

Nate scrunched his face although he knew she couldn’t see it. This was unusual. She was a tough, attractive woman, pragmatic and not prone to panic. He had a soft spot for her.

He said, “Have you talked to anyone else?”

“Everyone I can think of. I called Game and Fish dispatch in Cheyenne and they hadn’t heard from him either. I talked to the director of the agency, and he didn’t even know Joe was gone. And I left a message for Governor Rulon, who is at some national conference in Washington, I guess.”

“You did?”

“I’m desperate,” she said. “He expects Joe to be on call for him whenever he needs something. I told him he needs to be on call for us .”

“So Joe’s by himself as far as you know?”

“Yes, damn it. He told me before he went there was some kind of incident down there. Some hunters said they shot an elk and somebody butchered it before they could tag it. He was going up into the mountains to find whoever might have done it.”

“No backup?” Nate said.

Marybeth groaned. “He never has backup. That’s the way game wardens work, Nate. It drives me crazy.”

“What else have you done?”