Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(54)
“I’m going to text the girls,” Marybeth said, pushing her plate aside and reaching for her phone. “They need to know what’s going on. Plus, I really miss them.”
“I do, too,” Joe said. This he absolutely meant.
*
JOE’S PHONE LIT UP at 5:00 a.m. and he rolled over in bed and squinted at the screen.
“Who is it?” Marybeth asked.
“Duane,” Joe said, instantly awake. He swung his feet out from under the covers and padded into the hallway.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Things are happening,” Patterson said in a rush of words. “The sheriff got a tip about the shooter. We have a suspect.”
“How do you know about this?” Joe asked.
Patterson sighed. “Judge Hewitt asked me to be in his chambers a half hour ago to meet with Kapelow and to approve a search warrant.”
“Who is it?” Joe asked, furiously rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Do we know him?”
Patterson paused a beat, then said, “I’m afraid so. And you’re not going to like it.”
SIXTEEN
NATE ROMANOWSKI SPUN A FALCONRY LURE THROUGH the predawn air in ever-growing circles by playing out a few feet of line with each rotation. The lure was made of a severed duck wing that he’d fashioned himself and weighted with lead shot clamped to the base of its primary feathers. It whistled through the still morning like a scythe.
The sun was about to shoulder its way over the summit of the eastern mountains and the grass was wet with sequin-like sparkles of melting frost. In the distance, a bank of fog rose from the contours of the Twelve Sleep River.
The activity with the lure was designed to attract the attention of a young peregrine falcon he’d released to the sky a few minutes before. The falcon had risen so quickly on the waves of a thermal current that it could barely be seen against the light pink belly of a cumulus cloud.
As the lure extended into wider circles, Nate kept his eyes on the peregrine. The falcon was not only the fastest raptor in the natural world, capable of speeds over two hundred miles per hour, but its advanced binocular vision enabled it to literally see the individual feathers of the distant lure in mid-flight. The circling lure looked enough like flying wild prey to become a target.
The exercise was one of the many preliminary steps to training a falcon to eventually join the Yarak, Inc. Air Force. The peregrine was learning quickly to come to the lure and Nate estimated it would take another few months before the bird connected with him in that special way that confirmed it was tuned in to his activities and movements on the ground. Once that happened, that almost mystical bond they formed between falcon and falconer, the peregrine could take its place with the older and more experienced birds. Either that, or it could simply fly away, never to be seen again. That sometimes happened as well.
“Nate, you’ve got a call,” Liv shouted from the front porch of their house. “It’s Joe.”
Nate glanced over to see her cradling Kestrel with Loren Jean Hill hovering next to her.
“I’ll call him back,” Nate replied.
“He says it’s urgent.”
Nate frowned while he whipped the lure in a circle. Joe didn’t use words like “urgent” unless something was . . . urgent.
“Okay,” Nate said. “I’ll be right there as soon as I can bring her in. He’ll understand.”
There was no way to suspend the training and resume it later without running the risk of losing visual and elemental contact with the peregrine, so Nate vastly sped up the pace of the exercise. He continued to loop the lure around him, but he shortened the length of line with every rotation. The peregrine obviously tracked the change and that prompted it to tuck its wings and begin a harrowing dive toward Nate and the lure.
In his peripheral vision, Nate saw Liv hand Kestrel off to Loren so the nanny could take the baby back into the warm house from the early fall chill of the morning. Liv stood huddled on the porch in her robe, watching him bring in the falcon.
The peregrine dropped like a missile and closed the gap on the lure in seconds. Just before the falcon could smack the lure with its balled-up talons, Nate jerked the wing to him out of the path of the attack. The peregrine recovered quickly and shot its wings out to break the momentum of the dive. When it landed a few yards from Nate’s boots, he bent over it, slid a tooled leather hood over the head of the peregrine, and loosely wrapped jesses from the falcon’s talons around his gloved hand.
He carried the falcon aloft on his fist as he walked over to Liv and reached for the phone. While he did, he was distracted by the fact that he would soon have more capable falcons than he could reasonably fly himself. He needed another falconer on staff he could trust as Yarak, Inc. grew. That Joe had called reminded him that he had the perfect apprentice in mind . . .
“Nate,” Joe said, “I shouldn’t be calling, but I wanted to give you a heads-up . . .”
As he listened to Joe, he heard the whine of oncoming engines from the direction of the state highway. So had Liv. He followed her line of sight and he turned to see three sheriff’s department SUVs speeding toward him on the gravel road. The lead vehicle had its lights flashing. The two vehicles behind it were close and partly obscured by the cloud of dust kicked up by the lead car.
“I see them now,” Nate said before Joe could continue. “Three sheriff cars led by Barney Fife himself, I suspect. What’s this all about?”