Force of Nature

by C. J. Box

  “You have a strange relationship,” she said.

  “Yup.”

  “Do you think he’s capable of something like what we saw back there in the garage?”

  Joe didn’t hesitate. “Nate is capable of anything, but he’s not random. That’s the thing about him. He has his own code and he can be ruthless and cold, but he doesn’t do things like that unless provoked. Unless they drew down on him first. And presuming the sheriff is right, why would three low-rent characters like Connelly and the Kellys even want to tangle with someone like Nate? That’s why this doesn’t make any sense.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe they were involved with him in some way? In the way he makes his mysterious money?”

  “Not possible,” Joe said. “He wouldn’t associate with people like that. Not to say he doesn’t know some unsavory types—he does. But he operates on a whole different level.”

  “Maybe they were after his money?”

  Joe said, “In that case, they were even stupider than I thought. But as soon as we get clear of this, I’m going to go out to the Kelly place and talk to Paul’s wife and Stumpy’s mother. Pam is her name, I believe. She might know something, and I don’t trust the sheriff to follow up with her.”

  Dulcie rubbed her chin. “Was there a federal reward out for him?”

  “If there was, this is the first I’ve heard of it,” he said, tumbling that idea over in his mind.

  She said, “And even if there wasn’t, one or all of these three might have trouble with the Feds over something or other. It’s possible they went after Nate as a bargaining chip.”

  “It’s a possibility,” Joe said. “I never thought of that.”

  “Let’s keep an open mind,” she said.

  Joe eyed her skeptically and held his tongue.

  “I learned a few things in Missy’s murder trial,” she said defensively. “One is never to fully trust McLanahan’s theories or judgment. The other is never to underestimate the depth of depravity of the criminal mind.”

  “You’re being a little rough on yourself, Dulcie,” he said after a beat. “You’re young. Don’t get too hard.”

  She looked over at him, puzzled.

  “When it comes to folks, I always try to err on the side of goodwill,” Joe said. Then: “It’s gotten me in a lot of hot water, but it’s better that way.”

  She laughed, surprised, and asked, “How is that?”

  Joe said, “I’ve never tried to find out what terrible thing Nate was involved in that drove him out here. I just take him at face value. From what he’s shown me and what he’s done for my family, that’s good enough. That was what I meant earlier about not always needing to know everything. When a man wants a whole new life, I guess I’m okay with that.”

  A minute later, she said, “And Marybeth—she’s okay with you knowing him? From what you’ve told me I don’t think I’d want him around my children, provided I had any.”

  Joe looked ahead. Deputy Sollis was in the lead, followed by two other deputies, Mike Reed, and Sheriff McLanahan. It was less than four miles to the turnoff to Nate’s place on the bank of the river.

  “We’re both comfortable with him,” Joe said. “In fact, he’s been the master falconer to my daughter Sheridan, who is his apprentice. Marybeth and Nate, well, let’s just say they have a special friendship.”

  “Explain.” Her eyes sparkled wickedly, Joe thought.

  He tried to think of the right words. He decided on, “Marybeth and I have a marriage based on trust. But if we didn’t …”

  She grinned. “So he’s hot.”

  “So they tell me,” Joe sighed.

  “I’ll have to ask her about him the next time we go riding,” she said.

  Joe moaned. “He might not even be at his place. Nate has a habit of vanishing for weeks and then suddenly showing up where you don’t expect him to be. He might have been gone this whole time, and this entire deal we have going here might be a waste of time and effort.”

  “I’m looking forward to meeting him,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard a word Joe said. Dulcie Schalk was attractive and unmarried, and he’d heard the local gossips having coffee at the Burg-O-Pardner restaurant speculate about her sexuality, but Joe had never doubted she liked men. As Marybeth had said, pickings were slim in Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming.

  Sollis began to slow down on the highway. The two-track road that led three miles to Nate’s had no markings or signs. In the winter, it drifted over and was inaccessible.

  Joe looked to the southwest. A lazy curl of black smoke rose from where the river coursed through the valley where Nate’s place was located.

  “Trouble,” Joe said, chinning toward the smoke.

  5

  NATE ROMANOWSKI watched the procession of vehicles stream down the two-track through binoculars. He counted seven of them—four look-alike sheriff’s department SUVs, the sheriff’s pickup, and two green pickups with decals on the doors bringing up the rear.

  “Joe,” he said aloud. He glanced down at his satellite phone. An hour before, Joe had tried to call him but he hadn’t picked up. Five minutes later, there had been another call from Marybeth Pickett that he declined to answer. But both calls coming so close to each other told him all he needed to know.

  Nate was on his belly in a tangle of aspen high on the slope not far from where he’d hunted ducks the day before. His peregrine and prairie falcon were hooded a few feet behind him in the gold carpet of fallen leaves. The birds stood erect like still little sentinels, waiting to be unleashed.

  For the hundredth time that day, he cursed his actions the evening before. He’d let himself be taken in by the three men in the boat simply because they were locals, and he hadn’t connected their presence with The Five, the Special Forces unit he’d been in. That had been his first mistake. His second was that in the pain from the arrow through his shoulder, he’d let the boat simply float away downriver where it would eventually be found.

  The two calls from Joe and Marybeth confirmed that it had.

  So he’d been off his game. But an arrow in his flesh and the killing of three men had focused his mind, and he knew he was in the midst of a battle that might turn out to be his last. The rules hadn’t changed as much as they’d been adapted to his location and circumstances. And he hadn’t seen it coming.

  THAT MORNING, he’d made his plan. Through a haze of pain and with the use of only one arm, he’d sunk his boat, burned the mews to the ground, and gathered all his gear and clothing into piles on the floor of his house before torching that, too. He’d smashed his electronic gear into bite-sized pieces and thrown only a few of his possessions into an old military duffel bag, along with the last bricks of cash, to take with him.

  On a gravel bar in the river, he’d found the carbine the old man Paul had aimed at him. The rifle was in good shape after he’d dried and cleaned it. It was an all-weather Ruger Mini-14 Ranch rifle chambered in 6.8-millimeter with a thirty-round clip and a scope. He’d decided to keep it because the weapon would be good for precision work and for laying down cover fire, if necessary. The stock was black synthetic. The rifle, along with his .500, would serve his needs, he thought.

  NATE HAD KILLED an antelope several days before and packed the carcass in ice in a dug-out icehouse fifty yards downriver. After cleaning his wounds with alcohol and taping on compresses, he’d sliced off the tenderloins and back straps and ate one of the back straps whole after searing it and seasoning it with salt and pepper. The light and flavorful lean meat seemed to help speed the replenishing of his blood supply. It was pure protein from the wild, and he thought it had healing properties.

  IN HIS CIRCUMSTANCES, he’d decided to trim his life down to the bone. He’d taken only what he could carry. He’d eat only wild game and fish that he caught. And he’d get rid of his phone now that he’d made three calls on it; one to the Wind River Indian Reservation, the next to colleagues in the Idaho compound, and the third to a man in Colorado Springs.

>   IT HURT TO SHIFT his position, even to follow the oncoming procession through his field glasses. His shoulder screamed at him, and he’d noticed that his skin was purplish near the entry wound, and the dark wine color was expanding out. He had no painkilling drugs available and had spent most of the previous night fighting back waves of delirium. He’d lost a lot of blood.

  As the caravan neared, he removed the satellite phone from its cover and placed it on a rock and smashed it into pieces with the butt of the rifle. In the pile of shards, he located the memory chip and therefore his call record, and flicked it into a mud bog on the edge of the aspens. By doing so, he was eliminating the last object in his possession that would leave a digital trace of his whereabouts.

  THE FIRST SUV entered his yard and stopped with a lurch in front of his smoldering house. A strapping sheriff’s deputy in full assault gear blasted out of the door with a semiautomatic rifle and aimed it toward the front door. The other SUVs roared in on both sides of it, and the occupants flew out of their vehicles in a similar fashion. They were so far away that he couldn’t hear their shouts and warnings but assumed what they were yelling by their gestures and body movements. Nate had done enough assault training that he knew all the moves and objectives. These guys were sloppy and predictable and wouldn’t have lasted long if he’d decided to make a stand against them, he thought. They were overgrown boys playing army with real weapons. Considering their leadership, he wasn’t surprised.

  He shifted his field of view over to the sheriff, who had parked his truck behind the row of SUVs. McLanahan ambled out, shouting instructions to the deputies in front of him and talking on a handheld radio to someone else. The first green pickup continued on through his yard and braked to a stop near the river. Another green pickup stuck close behind it. Nate sharpened his focus a bit.

  Joe Pickett and the county attorney climbed out of the first truck. Joe wasn’t armored up and didn’t carry a long gun of any kind. Nate watched as Joe fitted his gray Stetson on his head. Even from that distance, and through undulating waves of condensation from the still-moist earth, Nate could tell that Joe had a pained expression on his face.

  “Sorry, my friend,” Nate whispered.

  AS THE DEPUTIES cautiously approached the smoldering structure and the sheriff walked around uselessly behind them, Nate kept his binoculars on Joe. He watched as his friend ordered another Game and Fish employee to lead Schalk away from the open to cover behind the SUVs.

  Then he shifted back to Joe, as the game warden kicked through the remains of the falcon mews, then walked down to the river and gazed into the water. On the bank, he leaned back and scanned the horizon on top of the high bluff. Apparently, the sheriff shouted something at him—probably for walking around in the open without a long gun in his red uniform shirt—but Joe waved him off.

  Joe walked over to the side of the stone walls of the house where Nate parked his Jeep, and bent over to look at the ground. Then he walked a distance downriver, surveying ahead of him in the mud and sand. What was he following? Nate’s tracks?

  The game warden stopped suddenly near the old river cottonwoods as if jerked on a leash. He stared at the tree trunks, then cautiously looked over his shoulder toward the SUVs and the assault team.

  With a feeling like a slight electric shock through his bowels, Nate realized what Joe was looking at. He’d made three mistakes.

  “Uh-oh,” Nate whispered. The arrow he’d been hit with was still embedded in the bark of the tree. An arrow likely covered with dried blood and his DNA. If the arrow was analyzed, the investigators would know that Nate had not only been there, but he’d been wounded. And so would The Five.

  Nate said, “What are you going to do, Joe?” He felt for his friend. Joe was straight and upright and burdened with ethics, responsibility, and a sense of duty that had gotten him into trouble many times. It was something Nate admired about Joe, and a trait he’d shared many years before it had been destroyed.

  He watched as Joe checked again to make sure no one was looking, then reached up quickly and wrenched the arrow from the tree. Then he ambled down to the river with the shaft hidden tight against the length of his leg and he flipped it into the fast current.

  Nate closed his eyes for a moment and said, “Thank you.”

  _______

  LATER, after the assault team had finally left and the sun was slipping behind the western mountains, Nate freed the jesses and unhooded both birds. With his good right hand, he raised the prairie falcon and released him to the sky. He lifted the peregrine, and she cocked her head and stared at him with her black eyes.

  “Go,” he said, prompting her by lifting her up and down. She gripped his hand, and her talons tightened painfully through the glove.

  “Really,” he said. “Go.”

  Although she was likely hungry and there were ducks and geese cruising the river to find a place to settle for the night, she didn’t spread her wings.

  “I mean it,” he said. “It’s been good. You were a great hunter, but we both need to be free right now. We’ll meet again in this world or the next. Now go.”

  As he flung her into the air, his wounded shoulder bit him like a jackal and the pain nearly took him to his knees.

  The peregrine shot out her wings and beat them until she grasped the air. He watched her climb, but she didn’t seem to be concentrating on the river, the ducks, or the geese. She rose almost reluctantly, he thought. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, he told himself. When a falconer and falcon parted, it was supposed to be the falcon’s idea.

  But she was still up there, a dot against the evening clouds, when he hiked down the other side of the rise to where he’d hidden his Jeep in a tangle of junipers.

  6

  IT WAS UNNATURALLY dark on the wide, rutted roads of the Wind River Indian Reservation because, Nate guessed, someone had once again decided to drive around and shoot out all the overhead lights. He confirmed his suspicion when he heard the crunching of broken glass from the shattered bulbs beneath the tires of the Jeep as he slowly cruised down Norkok Street toward Fort Washakie. Despite the chill of the evening, he kept his windows down so all his senses could be engaged. Dried leaves rattled in the canopy of old trees and skittered across the road. The last sigh of the evening sun painted a bold red slash on the square top of Crowheart Butte in his rearview mirror.

  In the 1860s, Chief Washakie of the Eastern Shoshone tribe ended a war with the encroaching Crow by fighting one-on-one with Chief Big Robber, the Crow leader. Washakie killed Big Robber and cut his heart out and stuck it on the end of his war lance in tribute to the fallen enemy. Hence the name of the butte. The reservation itself was huge, 2.2 million acres—the same size as Yellowstone Park. It was home to 2,500 Eastern Shoshone and 5,000 Northern Arapaho. In the old cemetery Nate drove past the last shard of sun glinting off rusted metal headboards and footboards that reached up out of the ground. Because the Indians interred their dead on scaffolds and the Jesuits insisted on burial, a compromise was reached: the bodies had been buried in their deathbeds.

  Nate felt a sudden dark pang as he looked over the cemetery when he thought of Alisha, his lover. He had left her body on scaffolding of his own construction just two months before. He hadn’t been back to the canyon where she’d been killed. He’d never go back.

  All that remained of her except for his memories was the braided strand of her hair tied to the barrel of his .500 Wyoming Express revolver.

  AS NATE slid down the roads in the dark, he glanced at still-life scenes of the residents through their windows. For some reason, the Indians seldom closed their curtains. He saw families gathered for dinner, people watching television, and in the lit-up opening of a single-car garage, a pair of young men in bloodied camo skinning a mule deer.

  Alice Thunder’s faded white bungalow was located just off Black Coal Road, and Nate cruised by it without slowing. Muted lights were on inside, and her GMC Envoy was parked under a carport on the side of her house. She
lived alone there, and it appeared she didn’t have company.

  He did a three-point turn in the road and came back and turned onto a weedy two-track behind her house and parked where his Jeep couldn’t be seen from the road.

  Nate padded up the broken concrete walk to her back entrance and tapped on the metal screen door. Dogs inside yipped and howled, but through the sound he could feel her heavy footfalls approach. She didn’t turn on the porch light but stood behind the storm door and squinted at him. Small mixed-breed dogs boiled around and through her stout legs.

  “Is that you, Nate Romanowski?” she asked.

  He nodded and leaned his head against the peeling doorframe. His legs felt suddenly weak from his injury.

  “If I invite you in this house, am I committing a federal crime?”

  “Maybe,” Nate said.

  She yelled at her dogs to get away from the door, then cracked it open. He smelled a waft of warm air mixed with the smell of baking bread and wet dog hair.

  “Get in here before someone sees you,” she said. “You’re hurt, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, letting her lead him into the kitchen. Four or five dogs sniffed at his pants and boots. Alice Thunder was not a hugger or a smiler or an open enthusiast.

  “Do you want to sit?” she asked, gesturing toward the table. She’d not yet set it for her evening meal.

  “I brought you some ducks,” he said, handing over the burlap sack.

  “I love duck,” she said.

  “I remember you saying that. Careful, they’re live.”

  “I’ll twist their heads off in a minute,” she said, ushering him to the table. “We can eat two of them. Do you want to eat duck?”

  He sat heavily. His shoulder pounded at him, each pulse of blood brought a stab of pain. “Duck would be good,” he said.