Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(7)
Nate washed his hands and the falconry bag that had held the live pigeons under the ice-cold stream of water from a spigot, dried his palms on the fabric of his thighs, and ambled toward the house. He was tall and rangy with long blond hair tied off in a ponytail by a leather falcon jess. He had icy blue eyes and a smile described by most observers as cruel.
The landscape surrounding him was largely scrub in all directions, but it was framed on the east and west by distant blue mountain ranges. There wasn’t a single tree for miles—which is how he liked it.
Although the property might have seemed conventionally unattractive to those who took a wrong turn on the gravel county roads and wound up there, Nate appreciated the strategic location of his home. Because it was located in the bottom of a vast natural bowl, the property he’d chosen had the same attributes as frontier-era forts such as Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger: it was impossible to sneak up on it without being seen. Nate had learned the tactic by observing the herd behavior of pronghorn antelope.
He paused before entering the house because he sensed movement. He turned on his porch to see a light-colored plume of dust looking like a comma in the distance. It was from the tires of a large vehicle of some kind. Since he rarely got visitors, he assumed the driver was lost and would turn around long before arriving at his place.
His forty acres contained an aging three-bedroom house, a detached garage, a metal building that served as vehicle storage and a welding shop, and the mews for his Air Force. The land and the buildings—except for the mews, which he’d recently constructed—had formerly belonged to a welder who’d serviced the energy industry until he was arrested for dealing meth on the side. When the welder’s property was put up for auction by the feds, Nate was the high bidder. Which meant that, for the first time in his life, he was a homeowner and a landowner. Nate was in the process of transforming the place from a welding-and-meth-friendly outpost to a falcon-and-family-friendly environment.
Because he now had a family. For Nate, who was an outlaw falconer with a Special Forces background and a long list of alleged federal offenses (since dismissed), nothing had caused him more terror than getting married and having a child. He went back and forth trying to decide if it was the best or worst thing he’d ever done. But he leaned toward the former.
*
NATE WAS A fifty percent owner of Yarak, Inc. His partner in business and life was Liv Brannon, his wife of four months. Liv ran the public side of the company, including marketing, booking jobs, maintaining social media, billing, finance, and compliance.
Liv was a stunning African American woman originally from Louisiana, and she sat at the computer on her desk in her home office wearing a headset. A Squash Blossoms CD played gently in the background. Cradled in her lap was six-week-old Kestrel, their daughter. Named after a small but feisty falcon, Kestrel opened her eyes when Nate came in the room. Her tiny hand raised up from her blankets and her arm trembled slightly. She didn’t yet have the motor control to still her limbs.
Kestrel was a tiny verson of her mother and she had Liv’s full mouth and long eyelashes. He was devastated by her presence.
Nate placed his index finger in her palm and she gripped it.
Yes, he thought, the former.
“Are you still going into town today?” Liv asked him.
“Yes.”
“Can you pick up some Pampers on your way home?”
“Pampers?”
“Yes, the ones called ‘Swaddlers,’?” Liv said. “I’m giving up on the cloth diapers. It’s too hard to keep up.”
“Swaddlers,” Nate repeated.
“You might want to write that down. They’re for newborns. The last ones you got were for a six-month-old.”
“They were?”
“Yes,” Liv said. “I’ll save them and use them when she’s older. But you need to look at the type.”
“I thought diapers were diapers,” Nate said.
Liv gave a They aren’t look and then jabbed a finger toward the screen.
“We got an inquiry from Hamilton, Montana,” she said. “A rancher needs to get rid of a barnful of starlings, but it’s eight hours away. What should we tell him?”
Before he could answer, Liv said, “Never mind. I think I can pair this job with another job for pigeon abatement in Bozeman.”
She waved him away, but he didn’t move. Kestrel still gripped his finger. He wouldn’t leave until his daughter tired of him. Nate knew deep in his heart it would be like that forever.
“Loren?” Liv called over her shoulder.
Loren Jean Hill emerged from the hallway with a gentle smile on her face. She was barely five feet tall and slight. Loren had answered an online ad Liv had placed for a live-in nanny, and had been the best-natured applicant by far. A redhead in her twenties from South Dakota, where Liv had once lived, Loren had never had children of her own, but she’d grown up wrangling kids in an extended family and she was a wise and knowledgeable caregiver.
Employing Loren meant Liv could continue to work full-time for Yarak from their new home. The bird abatement business and commercial falconry in general was a highly specialized field. Liv and Nate had discussed hiring a general manager from the outside but decided against it. Yarak was too close to their hearts to turn over to an executive. Plus, Nate knew, Liv wanted to continue to be closely involved with the enterprise. She knew, and Nate conceded the point, that left entirely to his own devices, there was a very real probability that people on the outside might be hurt or killed.