“Meet you back here in a minute,” he said to Liv.
—
LIV SHOULDERED on a light rain jacket, looped her violet scarf around her neck, and, grabbing her clipboard, approached the old Suburban. The bulky woman in the passenger seat watched her with hooded eyes. She looked like a tough old ranch wife, Liv thought.
The woman rolled down her rain-beaded window and arched her eyebrows as if to say, What?
“Hello. I’m Liv from Yarak, Inc. Are you Mrs. Wells? The one who sent me the email that you needed some falconry services done?”
The woman nodded. She seemed placid and stoic. There was no smile. Her eyes seemed intelligent, though.
“I didn’t realize there would be two of you,” the woman said.
“We cover our own expenses and accommodations and such,” Liv told her. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
The woman tipped her head back slightly in a way that indicated Liv’s answer hadn’t addressed her statement. She said, “My husband is in the barn. That’s where the birds are.”
Liv looked over her shoulder to see Nate pause at the open barn door, test the flashlight, and walk inside.
“Well,” Liv said. “Do you want to look over the agreement before you sign it?”
“We always do that,” the woman said. “But this is my husband’s deal. He’s the one with the key to the gate. He watches over the place in the winter when the owners are away. I’m just along for the ride.”
Liv said, “So should I go inside and find him?”
“In a minute,” the woman said. “Let’s let your guy talk with him first. Let them get their business out of the way.”
Liv was slightly puzzled. The woman wore a plastic rain bonnet to cover her hair and an old dark green coat. Liv knew style, and guessed the coat may have been fashionable in the mid-sixties.
Liv said uncomfortably, “Well, we’ll have to get these contracts signed before any work can be done.”
“You’ll have to take that up with John,” the woman said. “Like I told you, I’m just along for the ride.”
The woman had penetrating eyes, Liv thought. They were the same eyes she saw when she took the hoods off Nate’s falcons to feed them.
“We don’t see a lot of Negroes around here,” the woman said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re very pretty. I can see why he took up with you.”
“Do you know Nate?” Liv asked, confused.
“I just know of him,” the woman said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” Liv said, trying not to sound as offended as she felt.
“Kitty,” the woman said. “Kitty Wells.”
Liv cocked her head, thinking. The name was familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
—
INSIDE, Nate swept the beam of his flashlight across the high rafters. He saw old splashes of white excrement from birds who’d inhabited the building years before, but no starlings.
The barn smelled pleasantly of decades of horses. Hay and manure lingered in the air. The dirt floor was packed down to the consistency of cement. A series of empty stalls lined both walls of the barn. Obviously, the owners hadn’t brought the guest horses to the ranch yet for the season. In the rear of the barn was a closed-up tack room.
“Are you Nate Romanowski, the falcon guy?” a harsh male voice asked from inside one of the closest stalls.
“I am,” Nate said. “Where are your problem birds?”
“Oh, they’re here,” the voice said.
“Where?”
“Keep lookin’.”
Nate lowered the flashlight until the beam illuminated the lantern-jawed face of an old man wearing bib overalls and a crumpled straw hat. Nate could see only his face and the top of his shoulders above the uppermost rail of the stall.
“Who are you?” Nate asked.
“John Wells. I’m the caretaker.” He paused. “I’m the man who gets you out of our way.”
Then, raising his voice, the man said, “Now, son.”
The muzzle of a shotgun suddenly poked out from between two planks of the stall. Nate heard the unique snick sound of two safeties being thumbed off simultaneously.
He thought: Ambush.
Nate instinctively crouched and reached under his left arm for the handgrip of the weapon that wasn’t there.
With a heavy boom, an orange fireball erupted from the hayloft over the old man’s head, followed closely by the discharge of Wells’s shotgun.
Nate staggered back. The flashlight dropped from his hand. He’d been hit. It was as if he’d been whacked in the chest several times with a baseball bat by someone swinging for the fences. There was a hot stinging sensation in his cheek and on the right side of his neck.
Wells fired again.
Nate went down. His mind was sharp and he knew what had happened. Two men had fired on him with shotguns likely loaded with double-ought buckshot. Each shell contained at least eight pellets that were the equivalent of .33-caliber bullets. Most of the pellets had ripped into his flesh.
He thought that, in the past, he would have drawn his weapon and taken out Wells before the first shot, and then put down the other man above him in the hayloft.
But now, he was flat on his back. His arms and legs were dancing to their own rhythm. He could smell gunpowder in the still barn and his own hot blood coursing through hay on the floor.
Outside, Liv screamed.
He thought: I tried to tell you.
Through what seemed like a tunnel, he heard the old man say, “Get down out of there, boy. We got to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“That wasn’t so hard,” the son said with a surprised laugh. “I thought the guy was supposed to be tough.”
“He don’t have that gun of his,” the old man said.
A moment later, heavy footfalls thundered by Nate toward the open door.
—
LIV HAD FROZEN momentarily at the sound of the first shot. It seemed so loud and harsh in the quiet mountain air. She was too stunned to react when the woman reached out of the Suburban and grabbed a handful of her scarf and pulled her close. Kitty was remarkably strong, given her appearance.
There were two more heavy booms from inside the barn, but Kitty had cinched the scarf tight and pulled most of it inside the vehicle. She rolled up the window to secure the scarf—and Liv—in place.
Liv screamed, but she couldn’t twist away. Kitty had hardly moved, but she’d taken action. Now her hawklike eyes raked Liv’s face with smug triumph through the dirty passenger-side window.
In Liv’s peripheral vision, she saw two big and rough men run toward the Suburban from the barn door. They each carried a long gun.
Nate wasn’t with them.
9
That night in Billings, Marybeth Pickett tossed aside a magazine she’d been scanning in the waiting lounge of the ICU and rubbed her eyes. She’d realized she’d read the magazine before—twice—and she wished she’d thought to bring the charger for her iPad. Before it ran out of power, she’d answered a dozen library-related emails and had updated Joe, Sheridan, and Lucy on April’s condition, like she had every few hours since they’d arrived on Friday.
April had looked peaceful as the propofol was administered via IV, Marybeth told them. Her shallow breathing and severely reduced vital signs were normal responses to a drug-induced coma. One of the doctors compared the procedure they were doing to April to a bear hibernating in the winter. Her metabolism and heartbeat slowed drastically as the beeps on the monitor came farther apart. Marybeth had held April’s limp hand and massaged her knuckles while she slept. Her daughter’s total lack of response was troubling and upsetting, but that was normal, too.
The worst thing, she’d told her family, was how impotent she felt. There was nothing she could do now. She couldn’t really comfort April, but she wrote that she’d feel horribly guilty leaving the hospital. What if she was gone when April suddenly showed improvement? Or if April’s condition rapidly deteriorated? Marybeth couldn’t stomach the thought of her daughter somehow realizing she was alone in a strange room and in a strange city, even though she knew rationally it was unlikely April would be able to think those thoughts.