Joe had an empty weapon and again he was losing blood. His strength was fueled by pure adrenaline and anger and nothing more. But he couldn’t just leave her. Could he?
He waited fifteen minutes hidden in streamside buckbrush, absently fingering the shotgun pellet that was lodged under his scalp. They weren’t coming. Which meant they’d stayed in the cabin with her. Doing what?
Joe stood uneasily. His only advantage was they no doubt thought he was down for good after the shotgun blast. They wouldn’t expect him to come back from the dead.
It puzzled him that they hadn’t pursued him or searched the brush for his body to administer a kill shot, if necessary. The brothers had pursued him for miles over rough terrain to find him at the cabin. Why would they simply assume he was dead? And if they did, why would they leave a body to be found?
As he trudged back up the mountainside toward the cabin, he put his questions aside and made a plan.
LIKE TWO NIGHTS BEFORE, he smelled wood smoke before he could find the cabin. The smoke was strong and hung in the trees. Which meant they were still there. Joe was puzzled as to the reason, unless Caleb had finally collapsed and Camish was tending to him. That Caleb had taken a .40 round and barely reacted still bothered Joe.
He wanted to believe Terri Wade was still alive and unhurt.
He kept his eyes open wide. He’d adjusted to the darkness and could see much better than when he’d run. If Camish or Caleb were searching for his body where Camish had fired and seen him go down, Joe was confident he’d see them first. His shoulder was numb from the pellets and his right arm hung uselessly at his side.
His plan, such as it was, depended entirely on surprise. He’d quickly enter the open front door and wrench his .308 from Caleb and shoot Camish first. Then Caleb. And keep Terri Wade at bay so she couldn’t stop the carnage.
It almost didn’t register that the forest was getting lighter until he realized why: the cabin was burning.
“No,” he said aloud, and began to lope through the trees. His head swooned from the pain.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing. Tongues of flame licked out through the windows and illuminated the dark wall of trees that hid the cabin. The fire crackled angrily, and there were soft POOM sounds of the canned food exploding inside.
Had they left her to burn to death?
Rather than rush the cabin, he skirted it in the tree line until he could see the front. Fire filled the open front door. If she was in there, he’d have to run through it. He tried to see inside, tried to get a glimpse of her on the floor or the bed.
A spout of orange flame shot out of the roof, and the fire started to consume the wooden shingles where Caleb had stood.
Joe took a deep breath and prepared to run toward the cabin when he suddenly froze to his spot. He’d seen something in his peripheral vision, three faces like faint orange moons, hanging low in the dark trees to his left.
He stayed behind a tree trunk and turned away from the bright flames, trying to make his eyes adjust again. Trying to find what he thought he’d seen in the darkness.
Then he saw them: Caleb, Camish, and Terri Wade a hundred feet away. Watching the cabin burn. Their disembodied faces reflected the fire like orange orbs. Tears streamed down Wade’s face and glistened in the firelight. She looked upset but unhurt. Most disturbingly, she appeared to be with them willingly, standing by their side. Caleb was stoic, likely in shock from his bullet wound. Camish looked demonic, his eyes reflecting the fire. They obviously hadn’t seen him, probably because they didn’t expect to.
Wade turned away into the darkness, dousing her face.
Then a moment later, to Caleb’s left, a fourth face appeared. She must have been looking away before, he thought, toward where they were headed as opposed to where they’d left. The sight jarred him and he waited for another look, which didn’t come. All had turned and were walking away and could no longer be seen.
He closed his eyes tightly, trying to visualize who he’d glimpsed.
Thinking: No. You’ve seen her face so many times the past two years on fliers put up by her parents. Her face has been burned into your subconscious. You’re seeing things. It couldn’t have been her.
LATER, BEHIND HIM, he heard the cabin collapse in on itself with the rough crackling of timber.
The stream to his left, trees and boulders to his right, the sky filled with pulsing stars and a moon bright enough to see by, the injured game warden started walking slowly out of the Sierra Madre.
The stream would lead somewhere; a ranch house, a road, a natural-gas field serviced by energy workers.
He had no answers, only questions.
He hoped his questions could somehow keep him occupied and alive long enough to get off the mountain.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 29
9
NATE ROMANOWSKI TRAMPED UP THE SWITCHBACK CANYON trail with a fifteen-pound mature bald eagle perched on a thick welder’s glove. As he hiked, the eagle maintained its balance by clamping its talons on the glove and shifting its weight with subtle extensions of its seven-foot wingspan, often hitting Nate in the face.
“Stop that,” he said, flinching.
The bird ignored him.
A satellite phone hung from a leather strap around Nate’s neck, and his Freedom Arms .454 Casull, the second most powerful handgun in the world, was in a shoulder holster beneath his left armpit. It was a warm late-summer day, in the high eighties, and as he approached the rim of the canyon, it got warmer and a slight breeze blew hot and dry.
Exactly two cotton-candy cumulus clouds paraded across an endless light blue palette of sky that opened up as he rose out of Hole in the Wall Canyon, where he lived in a cave once occupied by infamous Old West outlaws. He’d chosen the location a year and a half before, when the FBI office in Cheyenne had declared him a high-profile felon and a first-priority suspect in crimes he’d committed and some he hadn’t. Hole in the Wall was perfect for him to hide out in due to its remote location on private land in north-central Wyoming and the fact that no one could descend into it unseen. He’d booby-trapped the trail with snares and wires tied to alarms and explosives, which he’d carefully stepped over on the way up, and only three people knew of his existence: his love Alisha Whiteplume, his friend Joe Pickett, and Sheridan Pickett, his apprentice in falconry.
Nate was a master falconer: tall, lean, with broad shoulders, long legs, and a footlong blond ponytail that hung down his back. He had a hawk nose and icy blue eyes, and he went weeks without talking except to himself and his birds of prey. In a clapboard mews he’d constructed of weathered barn wood he’d raided from outlaw cabins and corrals, he boarded a redtail hawk, a prairie, a massive gyrfalcon, a wicked little merlin, and his prized peregrine that would pursue and kill anything that flew or ran. Plus the bald eagle he carried. The eagle had been shot with an arrow the year before and was seriously damaged and ineffectual. Joe Pickett had delivered the wounded eagle to him, hoping Nate could rehabilitate it. So far, despite hundreds of hours of care, the eagle was still dependent on him and useless for any purpose other than show-horsery. It had no desire to fly, to hunt, or to become independent and eagle-like. He was beginning to seriously dislike the bird and suspected it was an incorrigible head case.
If it weren’t for the fact that Sheridan was his apprentice and Joe had once gone to the mat for him and earned his undying loyalty and his vow of protection for the Pickett Family, Nate would have long before snapped the neck of the national symbol and buried her at the bottom of the canyon. Some creatures, he’d decided years before when he was overseas with Special Forces, were better off dead. That included many, many human beings. This eagle, who would no longer fly or hunt, was on borrowed time. The predator had inadvertently become prey.