Dark Sky, page 4
part #21 of Joe Pickett Series
Earl didn’t respond right away. He slowly panned the scope from right to left.
The two pickups, the big SUV, and the horse trailer were the only vehicles in the clearing. The rancher was backing horses out of the trailer one at a time and tying them nose-first to the side of the unit. The game warden—easily identified by the red sleeves of his uniform shirt, although he was wearing a dark vest—was pulling bag after bag of gear and equipment from the back of the SUV and stacking it in a large pile on the flat, unpaved surface. Three others milled together on the periphery of the staging area, looking on. Earl stopped his lens on them.
“There he is,” Earl said to Kirby. “There’s that son of a bitch.”
Price stood out. He was fairly tall and slim, willowy and pale, and despite his camo hunting clothing he looked like he was wearing a costume, Earl thought. Like he was about to go trick-or-treating on Halloween. His ginger hair was like an ill-fitting skullcap.
The two men with him didn’t seem comfortable with each other. One was shorter than Steve-2 and he fidgeted and bounced from foot to foot as he stood there. He kept glancing at the screen of an iPad. The other was thick in the chest with dark hair, dark clothing, and a way of holding his arms out away from his sides that suggested his bulging muscles wouldn’t allow him to stand comfortably. He wore a tight parka and his eyes swept the area around them. Earl recognized the big man’s actions and demeanor: security.
“Let’s see if my plan works,” Brad said, almost to himself.
Earl could hear the muffled click of a handheld radio behind him. Then Brad eased the volume up.
For a moment, Earl assumed the signal was bad. After all, there was a considerable distance between the staging area below and their position on the mountainside. Plus, there were other considerations.
“Maybe somebody noticed it and turned it off,” Brad said.
“Or maybe it was a fucked-up idea to begin with,” Kirby countered.
“Boys,” Earl hissed.
Then the radio crackled. Brad turned up the volume.
“I want everyone to grab a canister of bear spray and a PLB,” said a distant voice. “Test your PLB to make sure it’s fully charged. Then I’ll show you how to use the bear spray.”
“That’s Joe Pickett,” Brad said. “I recognize his voice.”
“I do, too,” Kirby said.
“Yeah,” Brad agreed. “Too bad he had to do this. I’ve always gotten along with the guy.”
“Ol’ Dudley Fucking Do-Right,” Kirby said with derision.
“Boys, keep it down,” Earl said without looking at them. The reception on the radio wasn’t clear. All he could hear was murmuring and men talking over one another.
“Don’t worry about using all the battery,” someone said. “We brought a couple of booster chargers and a solar unit.”
“We can’t pack it all up there, though.” Joe again.
“I’m supposed to wear this thing on my belt?” someone else asked.
“What’s this orange thing do?”
“Do you spray it at a bear like a hose or do you, you know, blast a bunch of short bursts?”
Earl could make out what was going on by watching gestures and body language. The game warden was demonstrating how to pull the orange safety clip from the nozzle of the bear spray and trigger it to spray. He stepped away from the three onlookers until he was downwind from them. He extended his arm and Earl could clearly see a big bloom of pepper spray shoot from the canister Joe held. The cloud of red floated away from them until it dissipated near the tree line.
Afterward, Joe walked back to the group of men and personally showed each one how the spray worked. Then he helped to clip a unit of the bear spray onto Steve-2’s web belt. The other two watched and did the same.
“Now we need to make some decisions,” Joe said to the men. He chinned back toward the big pile of gear and equipment. “We need to decide what we absolutely need and what we have to leave behind.”
One of the three moaned. Earl didn’t think it was Steve-2.
Earl followed while Joe Pickett led the three over to the gear. Unfortunately, it was out of the range of the live radio because their voices trailed off into nothing.
“What’s going on now?” Brad asked.
“They’re making two piles of gear,” Earl said. “Stuff that stays and stuff they’ll take with them, is my guess. Jesus, they really brought a shitload of crap.”
“What kind of gear are they leaving behind?” Brad asked.
“Who cares?” Kirby hissed. “What are you going to do? Go down there and root through it?”
“It’s probably worth a lot of money,” Brad said. “We could sell it for a lot. Those boys are richer than hell.”
Earl took in a deep breath and sighed. He was getting impatient with their bickering, and both boys knew the signal and shut up.
Earl grunted as he bent around so he could see them both. Brad, the older one, was an ungainly bear of a man. Earl was big himself—over six feet tall and thick through the middle—but Brad was an even larger version of that. He wore a curly black beard and his metal-framed glasses with thick lenses were always smudged. The lenses made his eyes look bigger at certain angles, which gave him the appearance of always being puzzled and a few beats behind whatever was going on. Which, in most cases, was true.
Brad wore a camo Carhartt hunting parka the size of a tent and huge lug-soled black lace-up outfitter boots. He could pack two quarters of elk out of the backcountry with one haunch on each shoulder. His size made it necessary for him to ride a draft horse instead of a mountain quarter horse.
Kirby, meanwhile, was wiry and compact with close-cropped sidewalls and a mop of dark brown hair on top, a recent haircut that made him look like a 1930s mobster or a Nazi party member, Earl thought. Kirby looked mean, like his mother, and he was. He was also smart and quick and ruthless. Earl often told clients Kirby could put the sneak on a bull moose in the willows, leap on its back, and cut its throat from behind. And Brad was there to pack it out.
His younger son favored tight-fitting high-tech KUIU camo clothing. Unlike Brad, Kirby was meticulous in his dress. There were no motor oil stains on his jacket and no mud on his knees. Under his left arm, he wore a shoulder holster with a .44 Magnum revolver, and on his right thigh, an exterior sheath with a twelve-inch bowie knife.
Earl said to both of them, “We’re not going down there and looting the crap they leave behind.”
Brad instantly looked away. He hated being chastised by his father, and Earl knew it. So did Kirby, who looked smug and triumphant.
“We’ve got a job to do,” Earl said. “We can’t be screwing around with things like that.”
“My radio trick is working,” Brad said, gesturing to his handheld.
“Except we can’t hear a goddamned thing,” Kirby replied.
“He’s right,” Earl grunted as he turned back around and positioned himself at the spotting scope. “Hearing them talk to each other doesn’t help us at all. Plus, it could backfire on us if even one of them notices there’s a radio on in a day bag. I’m just not sure it was worth the risk.”
Kirby said, “The tracker we planted on them is good enough.” That had been Kirby’s idea, of course.
Earl said, “We don’t need any of that high-tech shit. You know how I feel about relying on technology. It’s like counting on horses. Both will always let you down when you need ’em most. These guys won’t be hard to track at all.”
The radio in Brad’s hand crackled.
“. . . time to match up horses to riders,” said a faint voice over the radio. The three Thomases got quiet.
It was Joe Pickett again, moving closer to the horse with the radio in the saddlebag. Earl watched as the game warden spoke to the three Californians and then obviously stepped aside and deferred to the wrangler.
They couldn’t hear the wrangler speak, except a word here and there.
“Brock’s sizing up each guy,” Earl reported quietly to his sons. “He’s matching each one to a specific horse. Like they was some kind of dude ranch or something.”
“It kind of is,” Brad said with derision.
“Where’s Pickett in all of this?” Kirby asked.
“Off to the side saddling his horse,” Earl said.
“I bet he doesn’t want anything to do with these dicks,” Kirby said.
Earl chuckled. He was thinking the same thing.
“Now he’s putting the panniers on the packhorses,” Earl said after a few minutes. “The rancher is helping him. They seem to know what they’re doing.”
“Can Pickett tie a diamond hitch?” Brad asked.
“Looks like it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
* * *
—
An hour later, Earl slid backward from the juniper with his spotting scope. “They’re moving out.”
Joe Pickett was on the lead horse, followed by Steve-2, the big dark guy, and the nervous weasel. The rancher trailed them, leading a string of three packhorses. The live radio hadn’t been discovered and turned off, but the sounds from it were muffled and random.
All that the Thomases could hear over the radio was the sharp punctuation of horseshoes striking rocks and an occasional nervous word or two from the riders.
“Are you sure my saddle is tight enough?”
“Is this how you steer a horse?”
“How can I make this horse pick up the pace?”
“My butt is going to hurt like hell tonight.”
Brad extended his hand and helped his father stand up. Earl’s joints got stiffer every year. As he pulled Earl to his feet, Brad said, “Sounds like a bunch of guys who have no business coming into our mountains.”
“I think we knew that,” Kirby responded.
“Do you have to comment on everything I fucking say?” Brad said to him, raising his voice.
“Boys, please,” Earl said. “Put all that bullshit aside until we’re done.”
“Okay, Dad,” Brad said, looking down at his big boot tops. “Sorry.”
Kirby rolled his eyes and turned away. Earl couldn’t recall a time in Kirby’s twenty-eight years on earth when he had apologized for anything. It was the way he was.
* * *
—
The three of them walked silently through the forest to where their horses were tied up. They’d learned long ago how to move through the timber without making a sound—stepping deliberately and walking heel-first, heel-first. Avoiding dry twigs and branches. Skirting thick dead leaves that might crackle. Spotting static branches that would make scratching sounds against the fabric of their clothing and ducking away.
As they walked, Brad fitted in an earpiece. He said he’d report anything he heard that seemed significant.
Earl untied his big bay gelding and swung up into the saddle. He tried not to grunt, even though the action was getting more difficult by the year. Once he was deep in the saddle, his knees and back stopped aching. Sometimes he wished he could live out the rest of his life on horseback.
“Brad,” Earl said, “you lead the packhorses.”
Brad grunted and rode to where they were tied up to trees. There were two of them, their panniers packed with gear and food. He untied the knot of the lead rope and did a quick hitch with it around his saddle horn.
One horse, a black gelding with a single white sock, bristled with rifle butts that made him look like a pincushion. The weapons were in scabbards lashed this way and that to the packsaddle.
Earl said to his boys, “Keep a good distance between us when we ride. No nose-to-tail bullshit. This ain’t no sightseeing trip.”
Brad and Kirby acknowledged the order. They knew that if a horse spooked, even if it were for a dumb reason like a flushing grouse or a branch snapping back into their eyes, the trailing horse might do the same if it was close enough. Although Earl’s string was well trained and considered bombproof, even the best horse was capable of doing stupid things.
Earl shot out his arm so his coat sleeve hiked up and he could see his wristwatch.
It would be eight and a half more hours until dark.
FIVE
Thirteen miles away to the southwest, twenty-four-year-old Sheridan Pickett stood near the precipice of a vast cliff face and stepped into her climbing harness. The wind whipped her blond hair across her eyes until she pinned it down with a stocking cap and tucked its length into the back of her collar. It also made her eyes tear up, and she used the back of her hand to dry them.
After double-checking the security of the anchor bolt that was wedged tightly between two truck-sized boulders and pinned into the soil by a steel rod, she threaded the climbing rope through the rappel anchor in a figure-eight follow-through knot, grasped the downhill length of it in her right hand, and backed toward the edge of the cliff.
It was at that moment, one step away from leaning back into the void, that her stomach always gripped itself and her head swooned with momentary panic. There was nothing beneath her for three hundred and fifty feet until the pile of sharp scree at the base of the sandstone feature.
If the anchor bolt gave way or her harness or equipment failed or she’d overlooked procedural safety steps on her checklist—it would be over for her.
But the rope held and pulled taut and it reassured her that she’d prepared well. The belay device on her harness held her in place, her feet in her climbing shoes were splayed wide on the vertical face of the rock, and her back was parallel to the ground below. The light blue sky filled her scope of vision and the wind had been cut, now that she’d dropped over the rim.
She took several deep breaths to calm herself.
She could feel her heart race. Although she’d had dozens of hours of instruction from Nate, from a climbing wall to windmills and the sides of local barns, she’d only rappelled down half a dozen cliffs in the past few months. She still wasn’t comfortable doing it. According to Nate, he hoped she never would be.
* * *
—
Two hours earlier, before Sheridan had arrived at his place, Nate Romanowski had been sipping coffee at the dining room table at his compound in the sagebrush foothills when he’d heard a chirp from a speaker on the counter. Instantly, he’d narrowed his eyes and done a quick mental inventory of where his weapons were located within the house in case he needed to grab them.
The chirp meant a vehicle had entered through the distant gate.
Nate was tall and rangy with sharp blue eyes, and his blond ponytail cascaded down the yoke of his thick flannel work shirt. He’d gotten up before dawn to feed his falcons and had gotten distracted by two coyotes passing through the field who seemed to be doing surveillance on his birds in their mews. The coyotes had a sneaky way about them, how they loped along tossing their heads from side to side as if looking for rodents when they were actually scoping out the birds with sidelong glances. Nate was well aware of that particular tactic, and he’d stood up and flapped his arms to make his presence known to them.
Nate had a way with wildlife and his message had been received. The two coyotes had quickened their pace and kept going until they vanished over a hillside.
Kestrel, his thirteen-month-old daughter, had toddled into the kitchen from the hallway. He loved to watch her figure out the act of walking, the way she held her arms out at her sides for balance and took small mincing steps. When she saw him there, her face lit up and she cried, “Da!” and broke into a gallop until she tripped over her feet and crashed to her hands and knees.
Before she could realize she was hurt and start to cry, Nate scooped her up and held her out away from him at arm’s length and said, “How’s my little angel?”
“Da!”
“She’s fine now,” Liv said. “She found her daddy.” Liv had followed Kestrel down the hall from the baby’s bedroom.
Liv had accomplished something no woman had ever been able to do before: she’d convinced Nate to come back on the grid, open a legitimate business, and remove his shoulder holster while eating.
“Did I hear the trespass alarm?” Liv asked.
The arrival of his daughter had pushed everything else out of his thoughts, he realized.
“Yes,” he said, and handed Kestrel to Liv.
Nate parted the curtain on the dining room window and looked out. Their property was wide and treeless, and his view of the road was unencumbered. He liked it that way, especially since they rarely got visitors and those who found the place usually brought bad news of some kind, like the ex-FBI agent the year before who’d informed Nate there was a Sinaloa cartel hit out on him. Not long after that, Nate had installed the alarm at the front gate so he’d at least have some warning that someone was coming.
But there was no vehicle on the road.
Instead, a liquid herd of twenty pronghorn antelope slid in an undulating line up a hillside to the right of the gate. They’d obviously passed through and triggered the alarm. The herd trailed a spoor of dust as they ran.
“All clear,” he said.
“I thought it might be Sheridan,” Liv said. “She’s coming this morning, right?”
“Yes.”
Sheridan Pickett was Yarak, Inc.’s lone full-time employee, Nate’s apprentice in falconry, and Joe’s oldest daughter. She had been with them for nearly a year.
“Are you sure you want to get her involved in all of this?” Liv asked Nate. “I mean, everything?”
“I do,” he said. “She’s really coming along. She’s smart and she has bird-sense. It’s time she learned every aspect of the job.”
“I worry about her,” Liv said, bouncing Kestrel on her hip while pouring a cup of coffee.
“What about?”
“Put aside the fact that she’s your best friend’s daughter,” Liv said. “I get worried that she’s isolated out here and on her own. I know she used to have a pretty steady boyfriend back on that ranch she worked at, but pickings are pretty slim in these parts. I think about her all by herself in that little cabin, with no friends or social circle. Women need people, Nate. Even if you don’t.”
