Several years before, she’d begged Paul to buy some life insurance. She made the appointment for him with Bernard, the insurance salesman she’d met in Saddlestring who said they could get $100,000 in term life for less than $20 a month. Paul drove to town with the checkbook and came back with a new hunting rifle. He shook it like a war lance and said, “This is all the life insurance I need.” Completely misunderstanding what she’d sent him to do, as usual. When she blew up, he’d promised he’d go see the insurance guy later. He never did, and Bernard had just confirmed it.
She looked at her reflection in a cracked, flyspecked mirror next to the door. She was too old, too fat, too crabby, and too used up to ever get another man in her life now.
“It just ain’t fair,” she said aloud.
The cows milled around in a mucky pen on the north side of the collapsing old barn, and the two horses were in a corral on the south side. When she emerged from the cabin, the horses pawed at the soft dirt and whinnied. They wanted to eat. “Calm down,” she said to the mare and her colt.
The cows just looked up at her dumbly, the way they always did.
As she grasped the rusty door latch to the barn, she wondered what she could get for the stock. She’d heard beef prices were on the rise and she figured among all the cattle they weighed maybe five thousand pounds total. There should be some cash in selling the cows, and she sure didn’t want to have to keep feeding them. The hay supply was low, and the bales too heavy for her to stack on her own if she ordered a couple of tons. And the horses? They weren’t worth anything except to a slaughterhouse. The French could eat them, she thought. They liked eating horse meat, she’d heard.
She swung the door back and reached for the light switch, which was mounted on the inside of the doorframe, when a hand grasped her wrist and twisted her arm back. The pain was sudden and excruciating, and she collapsed to her knees, gasping for air. She heard a muffled pop, and fireworks burst in front of her eyes. It felt like her arm had been jerked out of the socket.
The light came on, and she looked through the tears and starbursts at the Game Changer, the man she’d seen at her kitchen table talking with Paul, Stumpy, and Ron Connelly. The man who gave her arm another wicked twist.
He said, “I believe we’ve met.”
11
When they were sure the girls were in their rooms with their doors closed, Joe and Marybeth sat together on the couch and he told her about his conversation with Nate. He left out the part about the falconry website. Although it was his practice to share everything with his wife, in this case he felt the need to hold back a little for her own protection. She wouldn’t agree with his decision — he was sure of it — but Nate had spooked him.
“Nemecek?” Marybeth asked.
“Nate said we wouldn’t find out much about him,” Joe said. “He said he was off the grid as well.”
“No one is completely without identity.”
Joe shrugged.
“I have my ways,” she said.
He nodded. “I know you do.”
Marybeth’s part-time job at the library gave her access to data and networks that rivaled those of most local law enforcement, and certainly the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. She’d used that access to her advantage many times, and, through a coworker who had once worked for the police department, had obtained passwords and backdoor user names that allowed her into N-DEx, the U.S. Justice Department’s National Data Exchange, and ViCAP, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.
“I’m curious to hear what you find,” Joe said.
“Of course, we could just go to the source and ask him,” she said.
“I’m holding that in reserve.”
She shook her head. If it were up to Marybeth, Joe knew, she would have had Nate spilling everything.
They sat in silence for a while on the couch, each consumed by their own thoughts.
Finally, Marybeth asked, “Do you think we’ll see Nate again?”
Joe shrugged. “I hope so.”
“If he said the things you told me, he must be really worried. I’ve never heard him talk like that.”
“Me either.”
She said, “I can’t help wondering what it was he did that drew him here. What was so awful that he thinks he deserves to die?”
At 2:30 in the morning, Joe slipped out of bed and pulled on his robe and walked quietly down the hallway to his tiny and cluttered home office. He shut the door, turned on the light, and sat down at his computer.
Emails from Game and Fish headquarters flooded his inbox, but nothing looked urgent. The department was temporarily without a new director, and a search by the governor was under way. Governor Rulon, who in the past had employed Joe directly but off the books in a bureaucratic sense, had two years left in his second and last term and had seemed to have mellowed somewhat. Joe hadn’t received an assignment from Rulon in more than a year, which was fine with him, although if forced to admit it, he’d come to crave the adventure and uncertainty of his missions. The respite had been healthy for his family, though, and being able to stay home was something he’d never regret.
It didn’t take long to find the falconry website Nate had given him. He took a few moments to register a username and a password, and he was in. The site was rudimentary and cluttered, no more than a screen filled with topics and comment threads:
WHAT KIND OF HOOD SHOULD I BUY
FOR A PRAIRIE FALCON?
<17 COMMENTS>
FLYING SHORT-WINGS
<21 COMMENTS>
HOW LONG WILL MY BIRD KEEP MOLTING?
<7 COMMENTS>
How do I recognize a state of yarak?
<14 COMMENTS>
Joe clicked on that one because he was unfamiliar with the word yarak and recalled Nate had used it earlier. The thread had begun more than ten years before, and the last comment was eight years old. Nevertheless, he read the thread with interest. Yarak was a Turkish word describing the peak condition of a falcon to fly and hunt. It was described as “full of stamina, well-muscled, alert, neither too fat nor too thin, perfect condition for hunting and killing prey. This state is rarely achieved but a wonder to behold when observed.” In order to achieve an optimum state of yarak, one commenter wrote, full-time care, exercise, diet, and training were required.
“Don’t think you can get your bird into primo yarak by working with it at night or on weekends. This is a twenty-four/seven commitment, and there are no guarantees.”
Joe didn’t expect to find a new thread with the word “kestrel” in it, and it wasn’t there.
He wondered if Nate would launch the thread before he achieved his state of yarak.
12
Fifteen minutes later, on the Wind River Indian Reservation, Bad Bob Whiteplume had a dream in which he was hunting for pronghorn antelope. As he raised his rifle, a car horn blared from somewhere behind him and spooked the buck. He watched in vain as the pronghorn he wanted zoomed away and turned its small contingent of does and fawns, and the herd raced away trailing a dozen plumes of dust. The horn wouldn’t stop, and he rolled over in bed and wrapped the pillow around his head and it helped a little. In his dream, the buck antelope he’d been after had run so far away Bob would never get a decent shot.