Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(90)
If he’d figured correctly, time and distance were actually in Joe’s favor in this scenario. The closer Joe got to Arthur and his weapon, the harder he’d be to hit.
He hoped.
“Here we go,” Joe said into his radio.
He eased the safety off his shotgun and held it at his side in his left hand. After pulling on the compression straps of his game warden ballistic vest as tightly as he could, he grasped the reins in his right. He clicked his tongue and Rojo moved through the last of the brush into the open meadow. Joe spurred Rojo with his boot heels and the horse broke into a dead run. Joe held on. His hat flew off his head and landed somewhere behind him.
Rojo ran fifty yards straight at the cabin when Joe saw the front kitchen window slide up. Arthur had seen him coming. After a beat, a rifle barrel emerged from the opening and rested on the sill.
Joe was not the horseman Marybeth was, but he tried to re-create her cutting horse exercises with Rojo outside their house in the corral. He laid the reins across the left side of Rojo’s neck and squeezed with his right leg. The horse responded and Rojo cut quickly to the right in full stride. So quickly, Joe nearly lost his balance and flew off.
Righting himself, Joe guided Rojo back toward the cabin at more of an angle. After fifty more yards, he cut the horse to the left. This time, Joe was ready for the sudden shift and he leaned into it and didn’t have to recover from it as clumsily as he had the first cut.
Rojo seemed supercharged. He was a horse on a mission. It was as if the gelding could sense Joe’s terror and trepidation through the close contact of seat, legs, and reins.
Joe could only imagine Arthur inside looking through his powerful rifle scope, trying to keep it steady and on a target that was filling his optics with blurred images as it zigzagged in front of him and got steadily closer.
Joe cut Rojo to the right again, then left, then right and right again. He was close enough to the cabin now that he could see Arthur inside the window holding the rifle stock to his cheek. The muzzle swung back and forth erratically. A glint of reflected sunlight flashed from the lens of the optics.
When Joe was twenty yards from the front porch, he dismounted on the fly with the intention of hitting the ground running. Instead, his boots got tangled up on the landing and he tumbled forward face-first. His shotgun flew out of his grasp.
He rolled to his side and looked up at the window. Arthur wasn’t there. Joe shakily got to his feet.
Before he could scramble to recover his weapon, though, Arthur threw open the front door and emerged. Ignoring his big scope, he thrust the rifle toward Joe like a heavy lance.
“Drop it,” Joe ordered.
Arthur didn’t. He pointed the rifle toward Joe without aiming and pulled the trigger.
BOOM.
The impact of the bullet spun Joe around and he lost all feeling in his lower body. It felt as though he’d been hit with a baseball bat. In slow motion, he fell again to the ground, accompanied by a fusillade of two .308 rifles firing multiple rounds into Arthur on the porch.
The last thing Joe Pickett saw was the wide blue sky and the underbelly of a fat cumulus cloud.
TWENTY-NINE
AT THE SAME TIME, NEARLY A THOUSAND MILES AWAY IN the tiny and eccentric lobby of the Flying Saucer Motel on the outskirts of Roswell, New Mexico, the desk clerk scrolled through his cell phone for a number he’d entered years before. As he did it, he was observed by dozens of pairs of oval black eyes from alien figurines that occupied the shelving behind him. Each figurine cost $29.99 and supposedly resembled the beings from outer space that had crashed their ship near the town in 1947, an incident that had allegedly been hushed up by the U.S. government but was still celebrated—only partly tongue-in-cheek—by local businesses and the chamber of commerce.
The desk clerk was named Arthur Youngberg, and he’d had the job at the inn for five months after moving south from Townsend, Montana.
Youngberg had vacated his home up north after receiving a tip that armed agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were planning a dawn raid with the purpose of arresting him and confiscating golden and bald eagles, red-tailed and prairie falcons, and a magnificent goshawk. To Youngberg, Roswell seemed to be a good place for an outlaw falconer without official federal eagle permits to go off the grid. Thus far, he’d been correct.
Roswell, population 48,000 people, was located in the southeastern quarter of the state, 155 miles from Lubbock, Texas, and 162 miles from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. It was warmer than Townsend, but just as arid, and the wind blew gritty and stiff.
Youngberg was stocky and he moved with the gait of a cautious black bear. He came from a family of Wyoming farriers, but he’d gone his own way. He had a long beard streaked with gray and black military-style horned-rim glasses. All of his hunting birds had been relocated to a mews he’d constructed behind his double-wide trailer twelve miles from town. The birds seemed to have taken to the harsh terrain, and Youngberg ventured deeper and deeper with them, hunting prairie chickens and grouse on federal lands that were once occupied by the Walker Air Force Base—the place where the recovered aliens were supposedly hidden away.
Youngberg had been suspicious about goings-on at the motel since he’d been hired. Rather than families on vacation, the overwhelming majority of guests at the motel had been single men from Mexico who exuded menace. Many didn’t speak a word of English, but they had plenty of cash to pay the bill. They drove new cars and often partied hard while they were there. The owners of the business seemed to have an understanding with people south of the border, he thought. Recently, three men had stayed nearly a week before they simply vanished.