C Box - Blood Trail

While they ate, Nate and the restaurant owner-he introduced himself to Joe as Large Merle-talked falconry and hunting. Joe looked around the house, which was dark and close and messy. Merle obviously lived alone except for his falcons, four of them, all hooded and sleeping, perched on handcrafted stands in the living room. The place smelled of feathers, hawk excrement, and eighty years of fried grease and cigarette smoke.

“D’you get your elk this year?” Large Merle asked Nate.

“No,” Nate said. “I was in jail.”

“Poor bastard,” Merle said. “And now you can’t go, since Governor Nut closed the state down. Man, if I could get my hands on the guy who shot those hunters I would break him in two.”

Large Merle eyed Joe for the first time. “You gonna find that guy?”

“We hope to,” Joe said.

“You better,” Merle said. “Or we’re going to do it for you. That’s why we live here. And it won’t be pretty. How’s your steak?”

“Huge.”

Merle smiled and nodded. One of his prairie falcons dropped a plop of white excrement onto his ham-sized forearm like a dollop of toothpaste being squeezed from a tube.

“Borrow your phone, Merle?” Nate asked.

“You bet, buddy,” Merle said, then turned back to Joe as Nate took the phone into the other room.

“I’ve heard of you,” Merle said, looking at Joe’s nameplate with narrowed eyes.

“Is that good or bad?” Joe asked.

“Mostly good,” Merle said, not expounding. “Me and Nate go way back. He’s the only guy know who scares me. Whoever that knuckle-head is killing hunters? He don’t scare me. But Nate scares me.”

Joe sat back and put his knife and fork to the side of his plate. He’d eaten half the steak and couldn’t eat any more.

Merle leaned forward. “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 his chin. “Quite a story,” Merle said. “Especially the part about guts strung through the trees like Christmas lights. Ask him about that one sometime!”

Joe nodded.

“It’s a hell of a story,” Merle said, still chuckling.

BACK IN the Yukon, Joe said, “Don’t ever tell me about Haiti.”

“Okay.”

“Because I don’t want to know.”

“Okay.”

“It’s gone pretty well so far over the years with you not telling me what you do for a living. I think that’s best.”

“Since you’re in law enforcement, I’d agree.”

“And let’s not eat at Large Merle’s again soon.”

“I needed a big steak. Merle and I go way back.”

“So I heard. SO,” Nate asked, “how’s my girl?”

“Marybeth?” Joe asked, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck bristle.

“Sheridan,” Nate said, rolling his eyes. “The falconer’s apprentice.”

Joe calmed. “She’s sixteen. That’s a tough age. She can’t decide if her parents are idiots or what. All in all, though, considering what she’s been through in her life, she’s doing well, I’d say. I sort of miss her as a little girl, though.”

“Don’t,” Nate said. “From her letters, she sounds smart and well adjusted. And she doesn’t really think you’re an idiot. In fact, I think she admires her parents very much.”

Joe had forgotten about the letters. “So why did you ask? You know more about her than I do now.”

Nate laughed but didn’t disagree.

IT WAS nearly midnight as Joe crossed over into Twelve Sleep County. The full moon lit up pillowy cumulus clouds over the Bighorns as if they had blue pilot lights inside, and the stars were white and accusatory in the black sky.

“You can drop me here,” Nate said, indicating an exit off the two-lane that led eventually to his stone house on the banks of the Twelve Sleep River. Joe slowed.

“You’ve got a ride?” Joe asked.

Nate nodded. “Alisha. I called her from Large Merle’s. It’s been a while.”

Alisha Whiteplume was a Northern Arapaho who had grown up on the reservation and returned to teach third grade and coach girls’ basketball at the high school. She was tall, dark, and beautiful with long hair so black it shimmered blue in the sunshine. Nate and Alisha had gotten together the previous year, and Joe had never seen him so head over heels in love.

Joe stopped and got out with Nate. The night had cooled and Joe could see his breath. The air smelled of sage, drying leaves, pine, and emptiness.

“You don’t have to wait,” Nate said.

“I don’t mind. I don’t want to just leave you out here.”

“It’s okay,” Nate said. “Really.”

Joe looked at his watch-after midnight.

JOE FELT it before he actually saw it, a falcon in the night sky, silhouetted against a cloud. The falcon, Nate’s peregrine, dropped from the cloud into the complete darkness beneath it and Joe lost track of it until it streaked through the air directly above their heads with a swift whistling sound.

“How could the bird know you’re back?” Joe asked, as much to himself as to Nate.

“The bird just knows,” Nate said.

The falcon turned gracefully before swooping against the wall of a butte and returned, landing in the darkness of the brush about a hundred feet from the truck with a percussive flap of its wings.

Nate turned to Joe. “You can go now. Let me get reacquainted with my bird.”

“I’ll be in touch tomorrow, then,” Joe said. “Where will you be? Here or at Alisha’s?”

Nate shrugged.

“Nate, I’m responsible…”

Nate waved him off. “Give me a couple of days. I need to get reoriented, get the lay of the land. I need to spend some time with Alisha and get my head back on straight.”

Joe hesitated.

“Besides,” Nate said, “you’ve gone the tracking-and-forensics route on this shooter, right? And you figured out exactly nothing. I need to try another angle.”

“What other angle?” Joe asked.

“Go home, Joe,” Nate said. “I’ll be in touch.”

Joe sighed.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch. Get going-go home and see Marybeth.”

AS NATE RECEDED in the rearview mirror, Joe had a niggling feeling about the brusque way Nate had said good-bye. While Joe had witnessed, in the past, Nate doing some horrendous things-like ripping the ears off suspects-he’d never known his friend to be rude.

After cresting a rise and dropping down over the top, Joe killed his lights and pulled off the highway and took a weeded-over two-track to the north. The old jeep trail serpentined through the breaklands and eventually culminated at the top of a rise. When he used to patrol the area, the rise had been one of his favored places to perch and glass the high meadows and deep-cut draws of the terrain. With his lights still out and using the glow of the moon and stars, Joe climbed the vehicle up the rise and carefully nosed it just short of the top, carefully keeping the mass of the hill between himself and where he’d left Nate on the highway. He was thankful there were binoculars in the utility box of the Escalade.

On his hands and knees, Joe scuttled across the powdery dirt, crying out when he kneed a cactus whose needles easily pierced through the fabric of his Wranglers.

He eased over the top of the rise, fighting back feelings of suspicion and guilt, trying to convince himself he was looking out for Nate, not spying on him.

He couldn’t see Nate in the darkness, but he could see the black ribbon of highway where he’d left him. And from the direction of Nate’s stone house, he could see a pair of headlights slowly picking their way across the breaklands toward Nate. Joe pulled the binoculars up and adjusted the lens wheel until the vehicle came into sharp focus. It was a light-colored Ford or Chevy SUV. He couldn’t yet see the plates. He didn’t know what Alisha Whiteplume drove these days so he didn’t know if it was her car.