Then he nodded toward a thick glove in his falconry bag.
"You want me to put that on?" Sheridan asked.
"Don't you want to hold the bird?"
"Dad, is it okay?"
Joe wasn't sure what to say. Sheridan's eyes were glowing, and Romanowski continued to smile inscrutably.
"Sure," Joe finally said.
Nate took off the hood and leveled his fist near Sheridan's gloved hand, and slightly swiveled his wrist, urging the falcon to step forward. It did, gracefully, and Sheridan's arm dipped a little from the weight of the falcon on her fist. Nate helped her wrap the jesses through her fingers and pulled them tight near the heel of her hand. It was an oddly intimate moment that made Joe squirm a little. Nate was a big man, with a soothing veneer that was somehow calming as well as magnetic. Sheridan was only eleven years old. As Joe studied the falconer, he sensed the same kind of natural, violent wildness under the surface that Nate described in his birds. Nate is a raptor, Joe thought. He's a hunter and a killer, and he lives closer to the earth than anyone I've ever known. In a way, Nate was terrifying. He could also be, Joe thought, a hell of an ally. To Joe's chagrin, Marybeth served meat loaf. It wasn't her fault that she had played to type this way and further entertained Nate's ideal fantasy of the Picketts-happily married, picket fence, loving family, Labrador, and now meat loaf for dinner-but that's how it looked.
Nate smiled happily and took a double portion. He moaned almost obscenely as he ate it, which caused Joe and Marybeth to stifle smiles of their own. No one had ever loved Marybeth's meat loaf quite so much, or so obviously. Sheridan picked at her food, spending most of her time either watching Nate or looking over her shoulder at the two birds on chairs in the living room.
The telephone rang and Marybeth left the table to answer it. After a beat, she handed it to Joe.
"Please hold for Melinda Strickland," Marybeth said, mocking what the secretary had told her.
Joe winced, and excused himself. He felt Nate's eyes on his back as he took the telephone into the living room.
After a moment, Strickland came on. "Joe!" She cried, "You got one of the bastards! Good work, Joe!"
"Thank you," he mumbled. He knew that both Marybeth and Nate were quietly listening at the table.
"Too bad he didn't have an accident on the way into town, though."
"Excuse me?"
"You know, too bad the guy didn't try to escape or something."
He knew what she meant, but he wanted her to actually say it. But she was too good a bureaucrat to admit anything outright.
"Is there any news on Spud Cargill?" he asked.
What she told him froze him to his spot. He found himself still standing, still holding the telephone to his ear, long after she had said goodbye and hung up. The dull pain in his stomach that had been with him for days reappeared, and once again he felt the tightening jaws of the vise. "What's wrong?" Marybeth asked as he sat back down on the table.
"Joe?"
He looked up. "They still haven't found Spud. Melinda Strickland said that someone thinks they saw him in a stolen truck on the way to Battle Mountain, and McLanahan said that a truck fitting that description ran his roadblock just a couple of hours ago."
"Didn't someone also say they saw him on the football field?" Marybeth asked skeptically.
"Yes."
"So why are you acting this way?"
Joe noted that Sheridan was watching him carefully.
Nate leaned back in his chair and he spoke in almost a whisper. "What this means is that Strickland and her FBI hit team can now go after the Sovereign compound. She can say that they're harboring a fugitive suspected of murdering a federal employee."
"I was thinking this thing was going to calm down," Joe said. "But Melinda Strickland is determined to prove there's a war on. And now she's got a much better reason to start it."
Marybeth instantly understood. "She wouldn't do that, would she?" Her eyes flashed. "April…" Joe walked Nate Romanowski to his Jeep in the dark. The sky was clear and gauzy with stars. The melting snow had frozen into a slick cold skin on the sidewalk and road.
Nate perched his falcons on the top of the backseat and secured the jesses to metal swivels he had installed on the framework for the purpose. Joe watched, his breath condensing into snaky wisps, his mind twenty miles away in the deep snow of Battle Mountain.
When he had secured the birds, Nate reached under his Jeep seat and pulled out a bundle that turned out to be a shoulder holster and his massive revolver. He looped a strap over his head and buckled it below his sternum. Another strap fit around his midsection. The curved black grip of the stainless-steel.454 Casull now offered itself to Joe.
"Why do you carry a gun like that?" Joe asked.
Nate smiled slightly. "Because I know how to use it and it's all I need. It gives me the mobility of a handgun but with more firepower and velocity. It's a Freedom Arms Model 83 with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. A hand cannon. I did my research and went to the factory in Freedom, Wyoming and paid twenty-five hundred for it. It shoots a 300-grain bullet and it can literally shoot through a car."
Joe whistled.
"Or I could fire into the trunk and hit the driver. If three bad guys were lined up, I could put a single slug through all of them. And I could do it from three hundred yards away."
Joe had been waiting for this moment. "I suppose you could even knock out the engine of an SUV driving down U.S. Highway 87 near Great Falls, Montana."
Nate turned and leaned against his Jeep, folding his arms across his chest. His uncommonly sharp eyes bored into Joe.
"Theoretically, yes," Nate said evenly. "That could happen. Now I really owe you."
"No, you don't, I told you that."
"Do you want me to get your little girl back?"
Joe paused, and thought. He was torn. The question wasn't unanticipated. Nate was well aware of the empty chair at the table, as they all were.
"We've got a lawyer working on it," Joe said. "That's our only recourse right now."
Nate didn't scoff, but his silence said enough.
"I worry about her, Nate. She's been abandoned once already, then taken away from her school. If you go in and grab her, she might be even more messed up. We love her too much to put her through that right now. Plus the fact that we would be facing kidnapping charges. The law isn't on our side in this."
Nate nodded. "You've thought about it."
"For days."
"Something bad is going to happen up there in that compound. I think we both know that."
Joe rubbed his eyes and sighed, and said nothing.
"Maybe something could happen to Melinda Strickland," Nate said.
Joe looked up, shocked. Nate was deadly serious. He had also crossed a line by threatening Strickland in front of Joe, who had a duty and obligation to take some kind of action. Nate knew all of this.
"Don't ever say anything like that to me again, Nate," Joe said, his voice low and hard.
Nate didn't react.
"Joe, thank you for dinner and the very nice evening. Your wife and daughter are wonderful. Sheridan is something special. I think she would make a good falconer."
Joe nodded, half-hearing Nate. His head was swimming with situations and consequences.
"I'll be available if you need me," Nate said. "Do you hear me, Joe?"
It seemed to have gotten much colder in the past two minutes, Joe thought.
"Joe?"
"I hear you." Twenty-four At the same time on Battle Mountain, a convoy of vehicles had driven up the road outside the Sovereign compound. As they approached the fence, their engines rumbling, Jeannie, Clem, and April had pulled back the curtain and watched through the trailer window. Clem doused all the lights so they could see out but not be seen.