by Dan Ames
And the explosions weren’t just in her dreams. They were outside her window.
She sat up and listened.
Dr. Sirrine had mentioned that the military trained a lot at night. And sure enough, the gunfire was loud and intense. One of the explosions was so close it rattled the walls.
She got out of bed and went to the bathroom, filled a cup with water and drank deeply.
Eventually, she went back to bed and slept for a few hours but when she woke up in the morning, she felt more tired than when she’d gone to sleep.
After an ice-cold shower, Pauling went to the kitchen area and discovered that while there was no organized breakfast, someone had at least made coffee.
It was the large, aluminum tower coffee pot that Pauling associated with banquet halls and church basement get-togethers. She poured herself a cup and walked over to the living area, to the window that overlooked the cliff’s edge and the ocean beyond.
She had to laugh.
This would be primo real estate anywhere else. If, instead of a set of buildings belonging to a wildlife group, it was a six bedroom house in La Jolla, Malibu or Miami with this kind of ocean view it would be worth tens of millions of dollars and owned by a movie star, a professional athlete or a business mogul.
Here, it was just taken for granted.
Outside, behind the main building, Pauling noticed a pair of horseshoe pits and a gas grill. It appeared that was the extent of the entertainment options.
“So I hear you’re going out with me today,” a voice said behind her. She turned and saw a tiny man, stocky, with a shaved head and chubby cheeks. He had on jeans, hiking boots and a shirt with a vest that had about twenty pockets.
“Gabe Rawlins,” he said. He stuck out a thick hand with stubby fingers and Pauling shook it. The hand was warm, almost sweaty, but the grip was like iron.
“Lauren Pauling,” she said.
“I see you’ve got the most important thing for today. Coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.”
She smiled. “It’s not going to be terribly exciting, is that what you mean?”
Gabe put his hands on his hips and considered her question.
“Let me put it this way. I’ve had more people fall asleep on me than a hooker at a narcolepsy convention.”
He waited for her reaction with obvious expectancy and when she chuckled, he beamed at her.
“You probably had preconceived notions of what bird people are like,” he said. “Which is fine. Because I had a preconceived idea of what a computer geek who was coming to help us out would look like. And boy was I wrong.”
Pauling didn’t take the bait and easily sidestepped the trap.
“So what exactly is on our schedule today?” she asked. Gabe’s face gave away his disappointment at not being able to comment on her appearance, which Pauling knew he was hoping to do.
“Sitting, watching birds and taking notes,” Gabe said. “All day. If we really want to get crazy maybe we’ll take some soil and plant samples. But I don’t want to get your hopes up.”
She smiled. “It actually sounds sort of interesting.”
“Wow, you’re a cheap date,” Gabe said.
Again, he looked to her for a reaction and she gave him none.
“Why don’t we meet outside in five minutes or so?” he said, glancing at his watch. It was an oversized piece of hardware that must have been able to tell him every scientific measurement there was to make.
He left and walked down the hallway behind the kitchen where Dr. Sirrine had gone. Pauling figured that the men were on one side of the building and the women were on the other. Once again, she couldn’t help but compare it to a college dorm.
Pauling went back to her room, grabbed a fleece jacket and a windbreaker. Her plan was to dress in layers while she was here. It seemed like the kind of place where weather could change on a dime.
When she got outside Gabe was already in the truck, an old white Ford with the engine idling. She climbed inside, smelled coffee and cigar or cigarette smoke. Maybe even the hint of marijuana.
Gabe put the truck in gear.
“Just so you know, I tend to say a lot of inappropriate things, but my goal is to never offend,” Gabe explained. “So just let me know if I’ve crossed the line. I’m a bit of a failed comedian if you hadn’t already noticed.”
“Get out of town,” Pauling said.
Gabe grinned at her. “I like you. I think we’re going to get along just fine.”
Chapter Eighteen
A light mist began to cover the windshield and Gabe had to use the wipers to clear it.
“We’re going to head to the southwest side of the island, near a place called Horseshoe Canyon. We’ve got a small bird group there and today’s task is to try to determine how well they’ve been feeding and if there’s been any noticeable change in habitat growth.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll start at an observation post but depending on what we see, we may venture into the habitat in order to take some measurements.”
They drove on and Pauling was again struck by the landscape. So foreign it almost felt alien. They weren’t on a gravel road anymore, this one was plain dirt and she was glad the truck was four-wheel drive. She could imagine some serious storms out here and with the road being little more than mud, a loss of traction could be devastating. Especially as there wasn’t a single guardrail on the entire island.
Thankfully, Gabe was a better driver than Dr. Sirrine but sometimes the road went right up to the edge of the cliff and there was nothing between them and the ocean save for a steep cliff of jagged rock. If you lost control and went over the edge there was nothing to stop you from a horrific fall into the ocean.
Twenty minutes later Gabe pulled up to a spot that was marked off from the road. There was a wooden pole stuck into the ground next to something that looked like an overgrown mailbox. A garbage can with a metal lid and a lock and chain was next to it.
Gabe got out and Pauling followed him.
He opened the box and she saw a stack of papers, binders and various implements that looked like they belonged in a hardware store.
Gabe slid one of the binders into his backpack, a sturdy thing made of green burlap.
“Okay, let’s go,” he said.
He turned and trundled off onto a well-worn foot trail and Pauling walked along behind him. She was glad she had packed a sturdy set of hiking boots. It was cool but not cold. Just a slight chill in the air exacerbated by the slight mist.
Pauling was also glad she’d dressed in layers and only now wished she’d thrown in a baseball cap for good measure.
Well, next time, she thought.
The trail wound down away from the ocean and thick ground cover quickly grew in height.
There were isolated stands of trees, mostly scrub oak and one time Pauling heard something scurry away from them into the underbrush.
Eventually, they made their way to an area roughly six feet by ten feet, cleared, with a trap spread out and an overhang made of tent poles and thick camouflage netting.
It was a lean-to and Gabe slid into one side and Pauling took the other.
Gabe pulled out an enormous set of binoculars and began to scan the surrounding tree lines. He stopped occasionally to make some notes. He grunted a few times at what he saw.
Pauling sat with her knees up and her arms hugging her legs. She wasn’t sure what she was looking at.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Seeing if they’re eating,” Gabe answered. “That’s the big thing. When the bird population almost died out it was because they were starving. The goats and the military had decimated all of the habitat and their prey was almost completely gone. Nowhere to hide, that kind of thing.”
Pauling remembered that Dr. Sirrine had told her some of the same details.
“Oh yeah, they’re eating well today,” Gabe said, looking through the binoculars.
“How can you tell?”
/> “Take a look.”
He handed her the binoculars.
“Okay, look straight out toward that stand of trees.”
Once she got herself oriented Pauling was able to bring the group of small oak trees into focus.
“Okay, look at the top of the tree,” Gabe said. “And then go down about one branch level.”
“Got it,” Pauling said.
“Now do you see the lizard impaled on the branch?”
She scanned and was about to say no but then she saw it. She gave a sharp intake of breath. A lizard had literally been skewered onto a vertical, dead branch. A small bird with black and white feathers was picking at its flesh, tearing it away in chunks with its beak.
“You didn’t know how the Shrike of San Clemente hunt and eat their prey?” Gabe asked, an amused expression on his face.
“No,” Pauling replied truthfully, her voice soft.
“They go after small vertebrates like that native lizard and dive bomb them,” Gabe said. His face was alive with a bizarre kind of enthusiasm. “They strike them in the head with their beaks and knock them unconscious. After that, they take them up and impale them on a branch and then slowly pick away at the meat. It sometimes takes days for them to eat one.”
“Interesting,” Pauling said.
“That’s how they got their nickname.”
Pauling lowered the binoculars and looked at Gabe.
“What nickname?”
He smiled at her, an odd expression in his eyes. It momentarily gave Pauling a chill.
And then she remembered the name from Paige’s journal.
“The Butcher Bird,” she said.
“Exactly,” Gabe agreed.
Chapter Nineteen
The afternoon saw a slight break in the light rain and the sun even came out briefly before being swallowed once again by a wall of gray in the sky.
Gabe continued to make notes in his field journal, alternating between his binoculars and a camera equipped with an extremely long lens.
“A picture’s worth a thousand pages of notes,” he said, shaking his hand, tired from writing in his field notebook. Pauling had noted that his handwriting was very similar to Paige’s. All caps, block letters, neat and readable. A scientist’s penmanship.
Eventually he put away the camera and the binoculars and checked his watch.
“Not a great day to go out and collect anything. Too wet. And with some of the population still actively feeding, not a good idea to disturb them too much.”
There was something about the island and its abandoned-planet vibe that was getting to Pauling. It had a sense of lawlessness to it. That observation gave her pause, and she wondered about Paige and the psychological effects, long-term, of being out here. Could it drive someone to murder?
There was a very definite sense of lawlessness here. No highway patrol. No speed traps. No local cops. What, were they going to be pulled over on the way back to the bird headquarters? A suspicious vehicle pulled over by Johnny Law?
Not hardly.
Pauling wondered if that mentality existed for others and to what degree? If there was somebody on the island with bad intentions, a bad guy, how much did they feel they could get away with? Pauling was sure there was a military police presence here, although she imagined it wasn’t very large.
In the reports from Nathan, she knew that civilian law enforcement was handled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, but their nearest office was on Catalina Island, which was some twenty miles away. Which meant there was no civilian police force on San Clemente at all.
She thought back to Nate’s reports about the discovery of Paige. It had immediately been deemed a drowning. But how long had it taken the cops to arrive from Catalina Island? A few hours? A day or two? And who watched over the body during that time?
“You look lost in thought,” Gabe said.
“Just thinking,” she said. “This place seems conducive to thinking. Daydreaming. Wondering.”
“It does,” Gabe agreed. “I’ve done fieldwork in a lot of places but nowhere as isolated as this. It’s an unusual place.”
“It seems almost a little dangerous,” she said. “I heard on the plane ride over here that a girl drowned.”
Gabe nodded. “Yeah. Her name was Paige. She was a good scientist, very meticulous with her notes and observations.”
“How did she drown?”
Gabe shrugged his shoulders. “No one really knows. The ocean is dangerous around the island, a lot of wicked currents.”
“I would never get in that water,” Pauling said. “Screw the currents, I’d be worried about the sharks.”
Pauling suddenly thought of Paige’s poem. It wasn’t about Gabe. Gabe had brown eyes.
“We should get back,” Gabe said, a bit too abruptly for Pauling’s taste. “I think Abner said something about giving you a tour of the place. Fascinating, I’m sure,” he said with a forced smile.
They gathered their gear and climbed back into the truck. As they drove, Pauling gazed out at the sea and wondered again what kind of psychological impact there would be if a person had to work here day after day, month after month.
She realized almost immediately how it could make someone feel.
Lonely.
Pauling realized she would feel a lot better if she could find Jack Reacher.
Chapter Twenty
“Ah, there you are,” Dr. Sirrine said when she and Gabe entered the main building. He was at the table, working on a laptop with a can of Diet Coke next to him.
Dr. Sirrine snapped his laptop closed and got to his feet.
“I want to give you an overview of the rest of the place so you have a better idea of how this whole thing works.”
“Sounds good,” Pauling said. “Also, is there a place where military police have an office?”
Dr. Sirrine looked strangely at her.
“There are no military police on the island,” he said. “But I can take you to the headquarters of the military folks.”
“Ok, let’s do that after the tour,” Pauling said. Certainly the military folks would know where Reacher was.
Dr. Sirrine looked at his watch. “Take five minutes or so to put away your gear and meet me back here,” he said.
She went to her room, unlocked it and threw her gear on the bed. Pauling went into the bathroom and splashed some cold water on her face and brushed her teeth.
Pauling went back to the lobby and Dr. Sirrine led her out of the front door of the building. They followed a stone path around to another long, low aluminum-sided structure.
He opened the door and Pauling was surprised to find the space flooded with a ton of natural light.
She looked up, saw that huge chunks of the ceiling had been cut out and filled with jerry-rigged skylights. They weren’t real skylights, but homemade versions built with wood framing and a type of acrylic or hard plastic, mixed in with intersecting sections of camouflage netting. The skylights were clearly not made of glass.
“Hard polypropylene,” Dr. Sirrine said, noticing her upward gaze. “Someone tried conventional skylights a few years back and they were destroyed either by a storm or some wayward mortar shells. No idea which story is true.”
Pauling wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not. After some thought, she realized he wasn’t. He wasn’t the kind of guy to joke around.
“This is our nursery,” he said. He gestured toward multiple rows of unique structures made with a combination of wood, chicken wire and more camouflage netting. Small trees were growing in the space and some of the enclosures were built around segregated shrubbery.
“We’ve managed to foster several dozen birds and bird families here,” he said. “It’s been crucial to the repopulation of the island.”
They walked through the space and Pauling noted the precision with which the area had been filled out. Everything was neat and clean and well-organized.
“Ted does a great job here, with some assistance from
Janey,” Dr. Sirrine said. “But Ted’s main job is the nursery and he’s a natural.”
He led through a set of doors at the far end of the building and they passed under an overhang and directly into the next structure.
“This is the herbarium,” Dr. Sirrine said. “This is Janey’s domain.”
Gone was the purely aluminum shed and in its place was a greenhouse of similar size and dimension. When they stepped inside, Pauling immediately felt the cloying moist heat. With the high amount of natural light and the quality of the air, she figured Janey was successful in her efforts.
There were plants along the middle row of tables and various stands, pots and assorted plantings, all fed by a mist of water that rotated in intervals throughout the rows of plants.
“The first step in understanding the decline of the Shrike was to understand the decline of the habitat,” Dr. Sirrine said. “The environment was made of native plants, trees and wild grasses. There hadn’t really been any introduction of foreign plant life. Once we understood what happened to the native species and what was still happening to them, we would have our first clue as to what was going wrong.”
He looked up.
“Oh, there’s Janey now,” he said.
Janey set down a garden hose and approached them. She had on an old sweatshirt and there was dirt on the side of her face. Her hair was tied back into a short ponytail.
“Hi Abner,” she said. “Hey, Pauling.”
“How are things going, Janey?” Dr. Sirrine asked.
“Good, we had a bit of a fungus problem on the Castilleja grisea seedlings but I think I was able to eliminate most of it.”
“Excellent.”
“How was your first day in the field?” Janey asked Pauling.
“It was actually very interesting,” she said evenly. “I’m enjoying learning more about the kind of work you do out here. And the Shrike is a fascinating bird.”
Janey nodded but Pauling could sense the skepticism in her. Why was this young woman so cynical? Or perceptive, in this case?
“Gabe behaved himself?” Janey asked with a small grin.
