Below Zero (14 page)

 

 

 

MISSY WAS OUTSIDE,
starting up her Hummer, when Joe came out of his office.

Marybeth said, “Good timing.”

He nodded. Sheridan was holding up the Indonesian skirt, turning it one way and the other, with bemused puzzlement. “Where would I possibly wear this?” she asked rhetorically. As if to answer her own question, she dropped the skirt over the back of a chair and went down the hall to her room to get dressed.

To Marybeth, Joe said, “I need to go to Cheyenne and see the governor.”

Marybeth nodded. “Well, it was good to see you.”

That hurt. But she softened quickly. “Go,” she said.

 

 

 

AS HE EMERGED from the shed with the eagle bound once again in his sweatshirt with duct tape, Sheridan came outside, and asked, “Where are you taking the bird?”

“Eagle rehabilitation center,” Joe said, not meeting her eyes. “I can’t get it to eat.”

“She’s stressed,” Sheridan said. “There are stress lines in her feathers from the day she got shot. Feathers are like the rings in a tree—you can tell all sorts of things from them. She won’t eat until she feels safe. So tell Nate hi for me.”

Joe flinched.

“I’ll keep my phone on,” she said, “and I’ll call you if I hear from April. I have a feeling it might be tonight.”

“I’ve got a list of questions I want you to ask her,” Joe said. “It’s in on my desk. Of course, you’ll need to do it casually, in that text-speak language you use. That’s why I can’t ask her. I don’t know the code.”

Sheridan nodded, keeping her eyes on him. “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“If you’re going to go find her, I’m going with you.”

Joe took a step back. The eagle screeched, sensing his angst. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

“Think about it,” Sheridan said. “She’s texting
me
on
my
phone. If I’m with you, we might be able to find her.”

He started to object, but he knew she was making sense.

“Talk to your mother,” he said. “We’re talking about you missing some school, not to mention what else might happen.”

She beamed. Her smile filled him with joy. “You’ll need to talk with her, too.”

“I will,” Joe said.

“She wants you to find her more than anyone.”

“Yup,” said Joe.

Sheridan said, “I’ve been thinking about something, Dad. The last thing you guys told me the day April’s mom came to school and took her was to watch over her. I didn’t do it. I really feel bad about that.”

“Don’t,” Joe said. “No one knew that would happen.”

Sheridan shrugged. “Still . . .”

“Look,” Joe said. “April called you, Sheridan. Not your mom. Not me. She’s doesn’t blame you.”

Sheridan looked at him, bored into him with her green eyes. “Do you realize what you just said?”

Joe shrugged.

“You said April. You didn’t say ‘whoever sent you those messages’ or something. You said April.”

“Slip of the tongue,” he said, flushing. “You know what I meant.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know what you meant.”

Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, “What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance?” We have to hear that question from them, now.

—AL GORE,
An Inconvenient Truth

 

 

HOLE IN THE WALL CANYON WAS ON PRIVATE RANCH LAND west of Kaycee. It was an abrupt and harrowing scalpel slice through the heart of the high country sagebrush steppe rising toward the Bighorn Mountains. The single rough two-track passed by a ramshackle log home in a stand of cottonwood trees outside the town limits occupied by Large Merle, a bearded giant who was outside splitting wood when Joe approached in his Game and Fish truck. Hearing the vehicle, Merle stood up his entire seven feet and rested the ax on his shoulder and squinted. His bearing was pure intimidation, as was the lever action Winchester leaning against a tree but within Merle’s reach. Out of habit Joe did a quick mental inventory of his weapons: .40 Glock on his hip, .308 carbine in the gun rack, 12-gauge Remington Wing-master behind the seat.

Merle recognized him and nodded, and Joe waved back. To get to the Hole in the Wall, it was necessary to get Merle’s nod. A hooded prairie falcon sat on a stump near Merle, a perfectly still sentinel Joe might have missed if it weren’t for the rustling of feathers from the breeze.

Joe was always taken when he neared the canyon, not by what he could see but what he couldn’t. From the road he couldn’t discern the lip of the canyon or its far rim, but he could sense a void in the rolling landscape itself. That’s where the canyon was. It couldn’t be seen from the highway, the road he was on, or even from the other side in the foothills except for a jagged dark line in the prairie. To get there, one had to travel across the wide-open treeless plain for miles under the big sky, not a tree in sight. As he drove through the sagebrush and knee-high cheater grass, a heavy-winged squadron of sage grouse lifted off on both sides of him with the rhythmic thumping of miniature overweight helicopters. In the distance, a herd of pronghorn antelope were grazing, three dozen auburn bodies splashed with strategic patches of white that made them nearly invisible on the prairie among scattered drifts of snow in the winter and spring. It was impossible to sneak up on Hole in the Wall, which was why it was the dedicated haunt of old west outlaw gangs, most famously Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Joe thought how odd it was that two days before he’d been in Baggs, where the old-timers swore that Butch lived among them into old age under an assumed name, and now he was at the place where Butch, Sundance, and the rest of his gang hid out between bank and train robberies with scores of other infamous Western outlaws.

Recently added to the list was Nate Romanowski.

 

 

 

THE TRAIL FROM the rim of the canyon was narrow, strewn with loose baseball-sized rocks, a sharp declination that switchbacked down. Joe carried the eagle in his arms like a baby, trying not to squeeze too hard when he misstepped on loose shale, lost his balance, and sat down hard with a thump that jarred his spine.

He stood up gingerly and dusted himself off, picked up the bird, and continued. It was usually at this depth into the canyon when he felt eyes on him and knew he wasn’t alone.

Tough junipers rose on either side of the trail, and in the windless still air of the canyon they smelled sharp and musky. The Hole in the Wall, because of its vertical walls and the angry stream that coursed through the floor of it and kicked up waves of moisture, was a lush green oasis in the middle of high country desert. The bottom was thick with pines, ash, and ferns, and there were birds, including bluebirds and cardinals, and reptiles he’d rarely seen in the mountain west.

At a sharp switchback shadowed by a canopy of intermarried branches from a family of aspen, whose turning leaves were weeks behind those on the surface, Joe stopped, paused, and wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his shirt. He studied the trail immediately in front of him until he saw it—the glint of the trip wire. He carefully stepped over it in an exaggerated movement. There was no way, he knew, he would have seen it if he hadn’t known it was there. He had no idea what the wire connected to—bells? someone’s toe?—but he didn’t want to find out.

The unique feature of the canyon itself, and why outlaws loved it, was the naturally eroded caves in the opposite wall, their open mouths mostly hidden by brush. But from inside the caves looking out, the trail was in plain sight, a zigzag scar on the face of the canyon. In the daylight, no one could enter the canyon on the trail unobserved. And at night, there were the trip wires.

The roar of the stream increased in volume as he climbed down, and he could feel spray on his face and hands. There was a path through two-story boulders to the hissing whitewater, a crude footbridge, and the trail up the other side between the trunks of two massive ponderosa pine trees. Two hundred feet up the path, Nate Romanowski sat on a stump with his arms crossed in front of him, smirking.

“I watched you the whole time,” Nate said. “That fall was kind of comical.”

“I did it for your amusement,” Joe said.

“Was Large Merle up there watching the road?”

“Yes, he was.”

“And what did you bring me?”

“A bald eagle.”

“Ah, that’s what I thought.”

Nate Romanowski was tall, lean, with intense ice-blue eyes, a hawk nose, and long ropy muscles. He was wearing a gray flannel henley shirt and a shoulder holster for his scoped .454 Casull revolver, the second most powerful handgun in the world. As always, Joe felt the sense of calm Nate projected, a calm that could erupt into brutal violence swiftly and naturally, the way a soaring raptor would suddenly collapse its wings and drop to kill its prey in an explosion of blood and snapped bones. After Joe had cleared Nate on trumped-up murder charges years before, Nate had vowed to help protect Joe’s family. Their relationship had taken several odd and unsettling turns, but it held, and Nate was a man of his word.

“You remembered the trip wire this time,” Nate said. “That’s good, because I armed it with a shotgun.”

Joe shook his head. “Now you tell me.”

“Watch it on the way out, too.”

“I will. Do you have room for this bird?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“A guy shot it with an arrow.”

Nate’s eyes narrowed. “Is the guy still alive?”

“I arrested him.”

Nate mock spit into dirt beside his boots to show Joe what he thought of
that.

 

 

 

JOE FOLLOWED NATE
up the trail and through a thick greasy stand of caragana. The mouth of Nate’s cave was obscured from the outside by curtains of military camouflage netting, and Nate pushed it aside so Joe could enter. Because the netting was translucent, the depths of the cave were lit in an otherworldly olive green glow, similar to what one saw through night vision goggles. It took a moment for Joe’s eyes to adjust.

“Here,” Nate said, “let me see that bird.”

Joe was grateful to hand the eagle over.

“You want your sweatshirt back?” Nate asked, pulling a wicked-looking eight-inch knife from a sheath on his belt and slicing through the duct tape.

“Yup.”

“You want the sock back?”

“You can keep it.”

“What would I want your sock for?” Nate asked.

Joe shrugged.

Nate talked to the eagle, telling it she was a pretty bird, a beautiful bird, that everything was going to be just fine now. Slowly, Nate removed the sock from her head and stared into her brilliant yellow eyes. The eagle opened her beak to screech, but Nate said, “None of that, none of that,” and the eagle kept silent.

Joe was amazed, said, “
How
did you do that?”

Nate didn’t respond. He was running his hands over the eagle, talking to her, acclimating her to his touch, keeping her calm.

“How do you know she’s a she, for that matter?”

“I always know,” Nate said. “I could tell when you were carrying her.”

Joe didn’t pursue it. He watched as Nate slipped the sweatshirt off the eagle, tossing it into a heap near Joe’s feet, and continued running his hands over the bird, smoothing her feathers, pausing to feel the scarred-over entrance and exit wounds. From a bulging pocket in his cargo pants, Nate fished out leather jesses that he tied to her talons and a large tooled leather hood that he slipped over her head. He carried her to a heavy stoop made of branches with the bark still on and tied the jesses to the structure. Like a vintner slipping plastic webbing over wine bottles to keep them from clinking together in the sack, Nate gently fitted a sleeve of tight mesh over her body from her shoulders to her talons.

To Joe, he said, “She’s going to be all right, I think. You did a good job binding her up like that so the broken bones could start to knit. We’ll see in a few weeks if she can fly. This mesh sleeve will keep her from flapping her wings and breaking the bones again. Whether she can fly again will depend on how much other damage there is. I can’t fix severed tendons.”

“And if she can’t fly?”

Nate used his index finger to simulate cutting his throat. “An eagle that can’t fly is a deposed king: humiliated and useless to anybody or anything.”

 

 

 

AS NATE BREWED
cowboy coffee in an open pot on a Coleman stove, Joe took in the cave. It was as he remembered. Gasoline-powered generator, satellite Internet, bookshelves filled with battered tomes on falconry, volumes on warfare and world history, newer books on American Indian culture and spirituality. A table and ancient four-poster bed had been left by outlaws. Near the entrance of the cave were stacks of scarred military footlockers containing clothes, equipment, food, explosives. In an alcove near the cave entrance a skinned pronghorn antelope carcass hung from a hook, the backstraps and most of a hind-quarter sliced away. Nate followed Joe’s gaze and waggled his eyebrows.