Nate laughed but didn't disagree. IT WAS nearly midnight as Joe crossed over into Twelve Sleep County. The full moon lit up pillowy cumulus clouds over the Bighorns as if they had blue pilot lights inside, and the stars were white and accusatory in the black sky.
"You can drop me here," Nate said, indicating an exit off the two-lane that led eventually to his stone house on the banks of the Twelve Sleep River. Joe slowed.
"You've got a ride?" Joe asked.
Nate nodded. "Alisha. I called her from Large Merle's. It's been a while."
Alisha Whiteplume was a Northern Arapaho who had grown up on the reservation and returned to teach third grade and coach girls' basketball at the high school. She was tall, dark, and beautiful with long hair so black it shimmered blue in the sunshine. Nate and Alisha had gotten together the previous year, and Joe had never seen him so head over heels in love.
Joe stopped and got out with Nate. The night had cooled and Joe could see his breath. The air smelled of sage, drying leaves, pine, and emptiness.
"You don't have to wait," Nate said.
"I don't mind. I don't want to just leave you out here."
"It's okay," Nate said. "Really."
Joe looked at his watch-after midnight. JOE FELT it before he actually saw it, a falcon in the night sky, silhouetted against a cloud. The falcon, Nate's peregrine, dropped from the cloud into the complete darkness beneath it and Joe lost track of it until it streaked through the air directly above their heads with a swift whistling sound.
"How could the bird know you're back?" Joe asked, as much to himself as to Nate.
"The bird just knows," Nate said.
The falcon turned gracefully before swooping against the wall of a butte and returned, landing in the darkness of the brush about a hundred feet from the truck with a percussive flap of its wings.
Nate turned to Joe. "You can go now. Let me get reacquainted with my bird."
"I'll be in touch tomorrow, then," Joe said. "Where will you be? Here or at Alisha's?"
Nate shrugged.
"Nate, I'm responsible…"
Nate waved him off. "Give me a couple of days. I need to get reoriented, get the lay of the land. I need to spend some time with Alisha and get my head back on straight."
Joe hesitated.
"Besides," Nate said, "you've gone the tracking-and-forensics route on this shooter, right? And you figured out exactly nothing. I need to try another angle."
"What other angle?" Joe asked.
"Go home, Joe," Nate said. "I'll be in touch."
Joe sighed.
"Don't worry. I'll be in touch. Get going-go home and see Marybeth." AS NATE RECEDED in the rearview mirror, Joe had a niggling feeling about the brusque way Nate had said good-bye. While Joe had witnessed, in the past, Nate doing some horrendous things-like ripping the ears off suspects-he'd never known his friend to be rude.
After cresting a rise and dropping down over the top, Joe killed his lights and pulled off the highway and took a weeded-over two-track to the north. The old jeep trail serpentined through the breaklands and eventually culminated at the top of a rise. When he used to patrol the area, the rise had been one of his favored places to perch and glass the high meadows and deep-cut draws of the terrain. With his lights still out and using the glow of the moon and stars, Joe climbed the vehicle up the rise and carefully nosed it just short of the top, carefully keeping the mass of the hill between himself and where he'd left Nate on the highway. He was thankful there were binoculars in the utility box of the Escalade.
On his hands and knees, Joe scuttled across the powdery dirt, crying out when he kneed a cactus whose needles easily pierced through the fabric of his Wranglers.
He eased over the top of the rise, fighting back feelings of suspicion and guilt, trying to convince himself he was looking out for Nate, not spying on him.
He couldn't see Nate in the darkness, but he could see the black ribbon of highway where he'd left him. And from the direction of Nate's stone house, he could see a pair of headlights slowly picking their way across the breaklands toward Nate. Joe pulled the binoculars up and adjusted the lens wheel until the vehicle came into sharp focus. It was a light-colored Ford or Chevy SUV. He couldn't yet see the plates. He didn't know what Alisha Whiteplume drove these days so he didn't know if it was her car.
As the vehicle drew closer, Nate, with the peregrine on his fist, became illuminated in its headlights. He stood out, bathed in the halogen lights, darkness around him in all directions. Nate raised his arm with the falcon on it in greeting. The SUV stopped twenty feet from Nate. Dust from the tires lit up in a slow-motion swirl in the headlights. Joe swung the binoculars back to the car.
When the passenger door opened, the dome light inside the SUV lit up and Alisha Whiteplume, looking tall and thin and striking, hurled herself out into the brush and ran toward Nate with open arms. Joe started to follow her with the glasses when he realized there were others in the vehicle, something he hadn't expected.
Steadily, he moved the binoculars back. The dome light was still on because the passenger door was open. The man behind the wheel was Bill Gordon. In the backseat were Klamath Moore and his wife.
Joe's mouth went dry and his heart thumped in his chest. His hands went cold and slick and the binoculars slipped out of them into the dirt.
19
ON TUESDAY MORNING, Joe Pickett stood at the stove in an apron and made pancakes for his daughters whom, he hoped, would eventually wake up and want to eat them. When the pancakes were cooked he moved them to a large serving plate that he warmed in the oven so they'd be hot and ready. Bacon sizzled in his favorite cast-iron skillet and maple syrup warmed in a pan of water. The morning smells of breakfast cooking and brewed coffee were good smells, and he tried not to think of the roof that needed repair or the fence that needed fixing. It was nice to be home and doing something routine, although he didn't yet consider this house on this street to be home. He could see his neighbor Ed outside already in his perfectly appointed backyard, prowling the lawn while smoking his pipe, apparently targeting thin places in the turf where weeds might get a stonghold and grow when spring came. While Joe watched, Ed raised his head to look over the fence at the Pickett house, and Ed shook his head sadly, as if the mere sight of it made him want to weep.
For years, whether at the state-owned house on Bighorn Road or the old homestead house they'd lived in on the Longbrake Ranch, there had been no neighbors except wildlife. When the bathroom was occupied, which was nearly full-time with a houseful of females, Joe was used to going outside to relieve himself, which felt normal and good because there was no one around. Sometimes, he would go outside and sit on a stump and smoke a cheap cigar and watch antelope or deer moving cautiously toward water. On the ranch it was cows. Sometimes he would just sit and think and dream, trying to figure out why things were, how they worked, what his role was in the scheme of life. He ended up short on answers. His only conclusion was that his purpose, his reason for being, was to be a good husband and father and not to shame either his wife or his daughters. Why he'd been chosen by the governor to be his point man in the field still baffled Joe. Rulon once said, "When I think of crime committed out of doors, I think of Joe Pickett. Simple as that." But it wasn't as simple as that, Joe thought.
In this house in town Joe felt contained, bottled up, tamped down. He longed to look out the window and see an antelope or a cow and not Ed. But he didn't have a choice at the moment other than to make more pancakes and try not to speculate that Nate Romanowski had betrayed him. MARYBETH RETURNED from her morning walk with Maxine on a leash. She'd scarcely unclipped the leash before the Labrador collapsed in a heap and went immediately to sleep. "Poor old girl," she said, patting their old dog. "She still wants to go, but she sure doesn't have the energy she used to have."