C Box - In Plain Sight

The sound of the river was awesome in its power. He could feel the spray from it well before he got to its new edge.

He laid the rabbits out on a sandy rise so they could be seen clearly from the air. In the past, it took less than ten minutes for either the peregrine or the red-tailed hawk to see the meat. Joe never had any idea where the falcons were, or how they always knew he was there. But they did, and they came to eat.

Joe could never get used to the relationship-or more accurately, the lack of a relationship-he had with Nate’s falcons. It was something Nate had once told him about, how different and unique it was with birds of prey compared to other creatures. The cold partnership between falconer and falcon was primal and unsentimental. Quite simply, the birds never warmed up to the falconer and certainly not to Joe. To anyone. Raptors weren’t like dogs, or horses, or even cats. They didn’t pretend to like humans, or show even a flicker of affection. They simply coexisted with people, using them to obtain food and shelter but never actually giving back anything but their own ability to hunt and kill. The falcon could fly away at any time and never come back. There was nothing a falconer could do to retrieve a bird. It was a relationship based on mutual self-interest and a kind of unfeeling trust.

After twenty minutes, Joe saw a dark speck dislodge from the gunmetal clouds. He stood and wiped the rain from his face and watched as the speck got larger. It was the peregrine, the ultimate killer. The red-tail appeared shortly thereafter.

The peregrine buzzed Joe twice before flaring and landing on the edge of the rise. The red-tail made two false landings, close enough to see the meat, then climbed back up into the sky and disappeared.

He looked at the peregrine closely. The bird wasn’t the least bit interested in the rabbits. And there was something else: the bird’s gullet was swelled to bursting and there were blood flecks and bits of white down on its breast. It had already eaten.

Joe squatted and looked into the falcon’s eyes, which were as impenetrable as shiny black stones.

“Who fed you?” Joe asked. “Or did you kill something yourself?” Then he thought about the red-tail. “Did you both make a kill?”

Something made him turn and look at the stone house that had stood empty for half a year.

Fresh lengths of pine boarded up two of the windows. The front door had been replaced. And half a row of new shingles were laid out on the roof.

Despite the drumming of the rain, Joe felt his heart whump in his chest.

He called out, “Nate, where are you?”

Then he saw him. Downstream, where he’d been hiding and watching in a thick stand of reeds. The reeds were dancing around him with falling rain. Nate rose from them, naked, holding his huge.454 Casull in his right fist. Joe didn’t even want to ask.

“Have you come to kill me?” Nate called out.

“No.”

“I deserve it.”

“I know you do.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did,” Nate said.

They stared at each other for a minute. Nate was slick with rain and his white skin was mud streaked from hiding in the bog. His long blond hair stuck to the tops of his shoulders. His eyes bored into Joe.

Nate had once vowed to protect Joe’s family. Joe had promised to keep Nate’s birds fed. Despite everything that had happened, both had lived up to their obligations, something greater than mere friendship.

Joe said, “Why don’t you put on some clothes?”

J. W. KEELEY DIDN’T LIKE THE WAY HANK SCARLETT was talking to him. He didn’t like it at all.

The rest of Hank’s men had been dismissed from the dinner table-only he and Hank remained. The men had gone back to their bunkhouse a mile from Hank’s lodge. They had grumbled through a huge steak dinner about the rain, how it had knocked out their telephone service in the bunkhouse and how the lights kept going on and off. Especially annoying was the fact that the cable was out for television and they would miss the third game of the NBA playoffs. And the worst thing of all was the news that the river had jumped its banks and was flooding the roads to the highway. The men would be trapped on the ranch until the water receded, so they couldn’t even go to town to see the game. They had complained without quarter until Hank finally pushed away from the table, threw his napkin onto his plate as if spiking a football, and said in his loudest and most nasally voice, “Why don’t you boys just get the hell out of my house and go bitch somewhere else?”

That had shut them up, all right.

“Not you, Bill,” Hank had said. So Monroe sat back down at the table.

Because the electricity was out again, the dining room was lit by three hissing Coleman gas lanterns. The light played on Hank’s face, making the shadowed hollows under his cheekbones look skull-like and cavernous. The glass eyes on the head mounts of the game animals on the walls glowed with reflection.

That’s when Hank began to annoy him, chipping away with that damned high voice, each word dropping like a stone in a pond, plunk-plunk-plunk.

“You need to stay away from that game warden,” Hank said.

Keeley had told Hank and the boys the story over their thick steaks: how he’d dropped the buck right in front of the game warden, then watched the warden’s truck break down in an aborted hot pursuit. The boys had laughed. A couple of them had laughed so hard that Keeley considered spilling the beans on the other things he’d done to get under the warden’s skin. Luckily, he held his tongue, because that would have led to too many questions. Hank had appeared to be smiling, but now Keeley understood that it hadn’t been a smile at all. It was too damned tough to tell if Hank was smiling or not. That was just one of the things wrong with the man.

Keeley glared at Hank. “That’s my business,” he said in response. “It ain’t no concern of yours.”

“The hell it ain’t!” Hank snapped back. “I didn’t make you my foreman so you could draw the cops in here because of your fucking antics with the local game warden. Joe Pickett knows for sure you’re out here now, and I would guess he’s told the sheriff.”

Keeley gestured toward the ceiling at the sound of the rain thrumming the roof. “That sheriff couldn’t get out here right now even if he wanted to. Didn’t you just tell the boys the river’s over the road?”

Hank nodded. “Except for one little two-track on high ground down by Arlen’s place, my guess is there is no way in or out.”

“Where’s that?”

“About a mile downriver,” Hank said. “I’d guess that road is still dry. But if the river gets any higher, that one’ll be underwater too.”

Keeley filed away the information.

“What’s your problem with him, anyway?” Hank asked.

“Personal.”

“That’s what you always say,” Hank said. “But since what you do could bring the wrath of God down on my ass, you need to tell me just what it is between you two.”

“The wrath of God?” Keeley said, thinking, from what he had observed, that it was an odd way to describe Joe Pickett.

“Him and his buddy Nate Romanowski,” Hank said. “Didn’t I tell you about them?”

Keeley nodded.

“Why don’t you grab that bottle of bourbon from the kitchen?” Hank said. “I’d like a little after-dinner snort. You can join me.”

Keeley hesitated for a beat as he always did when Hank asked him to do something that was beneath him. He wasn’t the fucking kitchen help, after all. He was the new ranch foreman. But Keeley sighed, stood up, and felt around through the liquor cabinet until his hand closed around the thick neck of the half-gallon bottle of Maker’s Mark. A $65 bottle. Nice.