Dark Sky, page 14
part #21 of Joe Pickett Series
“Well, there you go.”
Joe checked his wristwatch. It was midafternoon and snowing hard. They had three hours before it would start to get dark. He tried to estimate the time it would take on foot to hike down out of the mountains and locate the trailhead. He estimated twelve to fifteen hours at least, since they’d ventured so far away from the most direct route.
“I believe in forgiveness,” Price declared. “Tim doesn’t.”
Then: “We’re going to die out here, aren’t we?”
“Maybe.”
“I was kind of hoping you’d say something else.”
“Sorry.”
“It’ll go viral,” Price said. “I’d kind of like to see it blow up.”
* * *
—
Joe noted a flicker in the lower branches of the spruce trees just ahead of them, so he stopped and squinted. Price bumped into him before backing off.
Through the tangle of boughs there was a flap of wings and a chicken-sized bird landed heavily on the ground and began strutting between the tree trunks. There were maybe a dozen others, Joe guessed, half in the trees and half on the ground.
“What are they?” Price asked.
“Pine grouse,” Joe said. “Some people call them fool hens.”
“Why?”
Joe backed up and Price followed.
Joe searched through a tangle of downed branches until he found two that were about three feet long and still green enough to be solid and heavy with sap. He trimmed the dried shooters off the bark and handed one to Price.
“They’re called fool hens because sometimes they’ll stay in one place long enough that you can whack their head off with a stick.”
“Why would we do that?” Price asked incredulously.
“They’re good to eat,” Joe said. “Pine grouse have saved me before.”
Joe cleared some space and demonstrated to Price how to swing the stick like a baseball bat. Price did a practice swing.
The two of them walked abreast back into the trees where they’d seen the birds. Joe stepped up behind the nearest one and took aim. The swing resulted in a thunk sound and the grouse bounced up and down on its back in its death throes. Joe stepped over it and targeted another that launched into flight as he neared it. The bird flew so close to his head that he felt the tips of feathers on his neck.
Price took a wild swing at the bird in flight and whiffed. His stick hit a tree branch, which blew up a shower of snow. The birds spooked, but not before Joe thumped another one on the ground. The rest of the flock vanished into heavier timber.
“Shit,” Price said. “I missed.”
“We got two,” Joe said, picking up the warm carcasses off the ground. “They’ll keep us alive.”
He was standing there, a bird in each hand, when Brock Boedecker stepped out from behind a thick pine tree.
“Good hunting,” he said to Joe. “I was sneaking up on them from the other side. I got one myself.”
To demonstrate, he held up the pine grouse by its feet. It had been beaten bloody.
Joe glared at Boedecker. “Why did you take off back there? Where did you go?”
“To make sure I could find the cabin where we can stay the night and get out of this damned snow,” Boedecker said. “And if you’ll come with me, I’ll show you where it is.”
Joe and Price exchanged a worried look, but they followed him.
FOURTEEN
Thousands of feet below on the valley floor, Nate Romanowski downshifted and grabbed a gear so he could muscle the old truck up a steep embankment on a slick dirt road that climbed west into the foothills. He was driving on County Road 189, which was also known as Spring Creek Road because it hugged the contours of the creek to where it originated in the mountains. The snow had started an hour before and the Bighorns behind him were encased in dark clouds. It looked like a serious storm up there, he thought. Snow had just begun to stick within the gnarled twists of sagebrush around him, making the landscape look like a cotton field.
He’d traded the Yarak, Inc. van for a vintage 1948 Dodge Power Wagon that he’d purchased at an estate auction the previous spring. He’d always wanted one because ranchers he’d grown up around extolled its virtues and they considered it the greatest working vehicle ever made. A version of the three-quarter-ton 4×4 had been first used in World War II, and afterward rural ex-GIs wanted a truck at home in the mountains as tough as the one they’d had in Europe. That original 94-horse, 230-cubic-inch flathead six wouldn’t win any races, but it could grind through the snow and mud, over logs, through the brush and willows. This one had been lovingly restored and included big knobby tires, high clearance, and a winch welded on the front. It had a toothy front grille and a split windshield with two headlamps mounted on high, wide fenders. In low light, they looked like dead eyes. Blooms of black smoke huffed through the tailpipe. From a distance, he thought, he’d be mistaken for some ancient set-in-his-ways rancher puttering up the road to the Twelve Sleep Senior Center before the afternoon lunch buffet closed down.
His .454 Casull was coiled in its holster on the cracked leather seat next to him.
It was the perfect vehicle, he thought, for making a personal call on a falcon smuggler and rearranging the man’s face and his future plans in the area.
* * *
—
Sheridan’s research had helped narrow down the focus of their investigation, and both Liv and Marybeth Pickett had chipped in with their computer skills. For the first time, Nate realized the advantage Joe had possessed these many years. His secret weapon was Marybeth and her ability to find information from both public and private sources. It had taken only a few hours for the three of them combing through records and websites to narrow down his target.
Simply put, there were very few prominent falcon smugglers in the world. Although extremely lucrative, because the primarily Middle Eastern buyers were willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for wild-caught falcons, the skills, equipment, contacts, and subterfuge required to make it all work quickly weeded out amateurs looking for a fast score. Nate knew this because he’d once been involved in the illegal trade himself, but that had been years before. He had no idea who was still active.
As far as Sheridan, Marybeth, and Liv could determine, there were only three big-time falcon smugglers whose names popped up time and time again on the watch lists of the National Wildlife Crime Unit in the UK, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Rhodesian Ornithological Society, as well as on the website of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. They’d also searched through falconry blogs with threads and comments about missing birds and speculation on who might have taken them.
Frank Szofran, from South Africa, was being held by Welsh authorities after being arrested for taking peregrine eggs from cliff ledges in the Rhondda Valley in southern Wales. His travel records revealed that he’d made dozens of trips to Dubai, presumably where he sold the eggs to Middle Eastern falconers. A rental cottage he’d used was filled with incubators and other equipment designed to keep the eggs alive.
Keith Geis, from Canada, had been arrested the previous year at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago after a bathroom janitor found thin shards of eggshells in a bathroom sink and identified the man who had just exited the lavatory in a hurry. Geis had been pulled out of line in the departure lounge and a search of his body revealed that he had fourteen peregrine and two red-tailed hawk eggs stuffed in thick socks and taped to his torso to keep them warm. Thirteen of the sixteen eggs were shown to be viable. The eggs, along with a ticket to the United Arab Emirates, had been confiscated and Geis was charged with federal crimes. If sold individually, the eggs were estimated to be worth over $650,000 on the illicit Arab falconry market. As far as they could tell, Geis was in custody awaiting trial.
It was possible, Nate thought, that he was up against a falcon thief who was so clever and so diabolical that he’d never been suspected or named. That seemed unlikely, though. The falconry world was small and specialized, and although practitioners often didn’t all like each other, they knew each other. For someone to glide through that world without raising a red flag seemed unrealistic.
Which left Axel Soledad, a thirty-five-year-old Utahan and former special operator who had recently moved to Colorado. Soledad was suspected of not only stealing falcon eggs but sending raptor chicks to international buyers via FedEx and private courier. Soledad was a political activist. Background searches revealed that he purportedly used much of the money he made smuggling birds to finance growing antifa movements in Denver, Portland, and Seattle. A warrant was out for his arrest for the beating of a photographer during a Denver antifa rally, and there was a photo attached.
The image showed Axel Soledad to be tall, rangy, and lean with a hawklike nose and piercing dark eyes. He had a shaved head with black stubble on his face. His military background suggested he might have contacts in the target countries. He looked like trouble, Nate thought.
“He looks like you,” Liv observed while cradling Kestrel. “Same stare. Same intensity.”
“And he’s a former special operator,” Sheridan had added. “What is it with you guys?”
“There is no you guys,” Nate had said, offended by the implication.
Colorado shared a border with Wyoming, and north-south traffic was significant. Coloradans, with their distinctive green-and-white mountain license plates, were ubiquitous throughout Wyoming and wouldn’t draw a second look. Intuitively, Nate knew they’d identified the man who had looted his bluffs. The man who would pay for it in bruised flesh, broken bones, and possibly his life, if he got chippy.
* * *
—
So where is he?” Nate had asked.
He knew that successful falcon smuggling required certain resources. It couldn’t be done by an itinerant in a rental car. In addition to the climbing equipment and the bownet traps used to capture birds, a semipermanent place had to be secured with room, electricity, and most of all privacy. Eggs couldn’t be kept alive or young birds fed and housed for long in a motel room or vehicle without arousing suspicion. The smuggler would need to secure the young birds while he built his inventory. Falcons needed to be hooded, fed, and watered.
The captured birds could be held anywhere—an outbuilding, garage, workshop—as long as they were kept out of view from locals or passersby. Trying to figure out who might have recently rented such a space seemed all but impossible, the three of them decided.
But falcon food was a different story. Young raptors needed to eat prey on a schedule, as Nate could attest. Buyers didn’t like it if the wild falcons they wanted to purchase had subsisted on commercial feed. Rabbits, pigeons, ducks, grouse, and other wild species had to be available in quantity to keep the birds healthy. Nate spent more than half of his hours hunting and trapping to keep his Air Force maintained. Sheridan had taken on a big chunk of that burden.
And it was Sheridan who asked the question aloud that put Nate on the trail of Axel Soledad.
“If you just showed up in Saddlestring with a dozen hungry birds,” she asked, “where would you go to find food for all of them in a hurry?”
* * *
—
He’d taken Sheridan with him to town in the Yarak, Inc. van and parked it in front of Rex’s Taxidermy on Main Street. Nate had stayed in the van while Sheridan went inside to see Dusty Tuckness, the owner.
Tuckness was small, plump, odd, and very energetic. He’d purchased the shop from Matt Sandvick a few years before, and his obvious goal was not only to run the busiest taxidermy facility in a thriving hunting community, but to create a destination for visitors. He had a loading dock in the back for receiving big-game carcasses and a showroom in front with local mounts, as well as exotic animals that hunters had sent him from all over the country, including tigers, lions, and Cape buffalo.
Tuckness was preparing his shop to host a Chamber of Commerce social later that night. He wanted to show off the changes he’d made in the facility and urge locals to send tourists his way.
His newest and most lucrative venture was selling “prairie dog skin rugs” that looked like miniature versions of bearskin rugs and were meant to be used as place mats at the dinner table. The tanned rodent skin had all four paws splayed out and an intact head with beady plastic eyes and an open mouth to show its yellow teeth. Tuckness sold them in sets of four for two hundred dollars a set or individually for seventy-five. He didn’t care that most of the tourists who bought them intended them as gag gifts.
But because Tuckness couldn’t rely on a steady flow of dead prairie dogs from local varmint hunters—or the carcasses he received from them were too blown up by gunfire to be salvaged—he’d built an add-on facility next to his shop to raise the creatures himself. Nate had purchased a few of the prairie dogs to feed to his falcons when the valley was buried by snow or when he hadn’t been able to trap or hunt himself. He’d also sent Sheridan to pick up a few of the rodents from time to time.
That’s how he found out that Tuckness had a crush on the girl. The taxidermist not only gave her significant discounts on her purchases, but he also called Liv every few weeks to say that he had excess rodents if Sheridan wanted to stop by and procure them.
Nate knew that Tuckness would do just about anything to keep Sheridan in the shop and talking to him, which was why he’d ask her to go inside while he waited in the van.
Twenty minutes later, Sheridan emerged on the street carrying a small box in her arms. She climbed into the van and placed it at her feet.
“He only had four he could spare,” she said with a triumphant grin.
“Only four?”
“That’s because somebody bought two dozen of them earlier this week. Wiped him out, he said.”
Nate raised his eyebrows, waiting for more.
“Dusty said he’d never seen the man around here before. He described him as a fidgety tweaker type wearing all black. Dusty charged the guy more than double per prairie dog, fifty bucks each, and the guy paid it.”
Nate narrowed his eyes, thinking. The photo and description they’d found for Axel Soledad didn’t fit the man Tuckness had described.
“The guy didn’t have enough cash on him,” Sheridan said, “so he had to pay the balance with a credit card.”
Before Nate could ask, Sheridan drew out her phone and showed him a photo of the credit card receipt. “Raylan Wagy is his name,” she said.
“Never heard of him,” Nate said.
“Neither had Dusty before then. He said Wagy left the shop pretty agitated, like he was under pressure to buy the prairie dogs, but he didn’t want to have to use his card.”
“Interesting.”
“I looked up his name on my phone. A Raylan H. Wagy was arrested in Denver for assault at an antifa rally three months ago. This has to be him.”
Sheridan said, “So when Wagy drove away from here, he burned rubber on the street and got picked up by one of the local cops for reckless drivng or something. Dusty said he watched the whole thing go down. Which means I now need to call my mom.”
Nate pulled away from the curb in a reasonable manner, looking both ways for local police cruisers. He had to be very careful these days, he knew.
“Why your mom?” he asked.
“She knows everybody at town hall,” Sheridan said. “She can get Raylan Wagy’s address from the citation.”
Nate whistled and shook his head. The investigative skills of Sheridan, Liv, and Marybeth continued to amaze him.
They were nearly back to his compound when a text chimed on Sheridan’s phone. She read it and said, “It’s a temporary address, but it’s an address: Raylan Wagy, 114 County Road 189.”
“Spring Creek Road,” Nate said. “There are a bunch of old ranches out there with plenty of empty buildings.”
* * *
—
While Nate checked the oil on the Power Wagon in preparation for taking it out, both Sheridan and Liv had asked him not to go out there alone. He’d assured them it was strictly a reconnaissance run, which might or might not turn out to be true.
The snow continued to fall harder as he drove. The ancient heater beneath the dashboard howled as if injured and it filled the cab with an acrid burned-dust smell. The wipers smeared the windshield but kept up.
As he’d mentioned to Sheridan, there were a series of old ranches and homesteads on Spring Creek Road. In an area where cattle companies comprised thousands of acres each, these properties seemed tightly spaced. They’d been founded by some of the first settlers in the valley, who’d been drawn by the water, which was sparse everywhere else. Some of the ranches were still in operation with cattle grazing in meadows or penned in corrals, but most of the properties had been abandoned and bought up by bigger operations.
Fourteen miles up Spring Creek Road, he passed a battered wooden sign mounted on a leaning T-post with 114 hand-lettered on it. The exit was a deeply rutted two-track that plunged off the roadbed. Beyond it on the bank of the creek was a smattering of structures that were dark but ill-defined in the snowfall. It was also hard to tell where the buildings ended and the tall willow brush that lined both banks of the creek began.
Rather than make the turn into the property and announce his arrival, Nate continued over a rise a half mile beyond it. On the other side, he pulled over out of view from the old ranch and slipped his arms through his shoulder holster and got out.
* * *
—
Nate kept to the heavy willows of the creek as he approached the buildings from upstream. The snowfall hushed all sound and muffled his footsteps. He followed a cow path that conformed to the S-curves of the stream and led him under low overhanging branches that were starting to droop with accumulation.
