by Box, C. J.
While the performer sang, special-effect machine gun rounds stitched across the screen, as well as red gouts of blood. Crime scene photographs flashed by of mutilated roadside corpses and hooded bodies hung from a bridge. Nate couldn’t understand the lyrics, but he noted that the singer wore an Abriella T-shirt under his leather vest and the same image took over the screen at the end of the music video.
“It’s called ‘The Bloody Ballad of Abriella,’ ” Sandburg said. “Are you familiar with narcocorridos?”
“Yes.”
Sandburg continued on as if Nate hadn’t answered in the affirmative. “Narcocorridos are folk songs about notorious criminals,” he said. “They’re officially banned on Mexican radio and television, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t wildly popular. Drug lords hire songwriters to sing about them, and plenty of gangsters on this side of the border listen to them. The songs get more violent and graphic all the time, just like the cartels get more violent. This one, ‘The Bloody Ballad of Abriella,’ is the most popular narcocorrido in Mexico, SoCal, and Arizona right now.”
“Okay,” Nate said, waiting for more.
“Do you understand Spanish?” Sandburg asked.
“Some. Not much.”
“I know just enough to be dangerous myself, but I asked a buddy of mine in the Bureau to translate a couple of lines I think you’ll find interesting.”
As Sandburg dug out a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, Nate braced himself.
Sandburg read:
She ventured north into the white gringo mountains and the snow
Avenging her people with a goat’s horn and fire
She was a deadly angel, our Abriella
Until she was tricked and tracked down by a gringo like a dog
Who tore off her beautiful limbs and fed them to his hawks
This is the bloody ballad of our lovely and dangerous Abriella.
“They refer to machine guns as ‘goats’ horns,’ ” Sandburg said. “Don’t ask me why. Anyway, you’re famous, and not in a good way. I think we both know what happens to guys who get this kind of famous within a cartel. They don’t last very long. There are known homicides down there where the songwriters of narcocorridos themselves get whacked by rival drug lords. But when you’re the actual villain in one of them—watch out.”
“Where did they get that version of what happened?” Nate asked through gritted teeth. “We both know it wasn’t like that.”
Sandburg shrugged. “They probably went with the narrative that cast Abriella in the best light and the villain with his hawks in the worst. Who knows? But it’s too late to put that genie back in the bottle.”
Nate took a long breath and held it.
Sandburg said, “I guess this is what can happen when a guy thinks he’s somebody special and he can take justice into his own hands.”
Nate said, “Now I get it. I know why you’re here. It’s not to warn me. It’s so you can look me in the eye and tell me I’m a target. Joe said you were a true believer. You’re so FBI you shit special agent turds. You think armed feds like yourself should run the world.”
Sandburg grinned and confirmed everything Nate had just said by doing so. “They may send another hit team like the Wolf Pack,” Sandburg said. “Or they may just send one guy. Or maybe the cartel will just put the word out that there’s a big reward for the pistolero who brings them your head. It might be like one of those old Western movies where the cocky kid comes to town to knock off the old gunslinger. Who knows?”
He leaned forward on the table and glared at Nate. “All I know is that you had better keep your head on a swivel. You won’t know who they send or when they’ll show up. But you can count on the fact that they’ll want revenge on the man who tricked their Abriella and fed her to his hawks, even if that never happened. They’re violent and depraved—but they’re also smart. They want to send a message that anyone who fucks with their people gets wiped out. It’s good for morale and it’s good for business. Fentanyl distribution is a multibillion-dollar industry. They don’t want anybody messing that up.
“Oh,” Sandburg said, sitting back, “I suppose there have been discussions in DC that the Bureau could put the word out that it didn’t actually happen that way. The Sinaloans might even believe it. But when the target is somebody who has embarrassed the Bureau more than once and gamed the system to have a passel of charges dropped, well, that didn’t give my friends a lot of incentive to do so.”
Nate said nothing.
Sandburg said, “Some of us made it our life’s work to nail the drug lords who are pumping that poison into our country. We were getting close to fucking taking them out. But you and your friend Joe had other plans. You went your own way. I lost a partner and my boss, and I can hardly walk because of what you two decided to do.”
“We did what was right,” Nate said. “Joe doesn’t do otherwise, even when he should.”
Sandburg waved that away. “Ah, your good friend Joe Pickett,” Sandburg spat. “The game warden who does no wrong. Well, I’ve had plenty of time to think about what happened that day on the courthouse steps and I have my issues with him.”
“What issues?” Nate asked.
“I’ll keep that to myself. In the meanwhile, you have other things to worry about. The bad guys might be closer than you think. In fact, they may already be here. I got some gas in Saddlestring before I came out here and all anybody can talk about is that someone took a shot at your judge.”
Nate was stunned. “Judge Hewitt?”
“Last night, I guess,” Sandburg said. “It sounds like a drive-by to me. Someone took a pop at him and hit his wife.”
“I didn’t know.”
Sandburg tilted his head. “They’ll know about that big gun of yours, so they might go after you from a distance like they did him. Your wife and kid are inside the house, right? You might want to shut the curtains and tell them to keep their pretty little heads down.”
Nate was across the table and had Sandburg’s left ear in his grip so fast that the man couldn’t react.
“Go ahead,” Sandburg said. “Rip it off. I’ve read that you do that. Rip the ear off a disabled special agent of the FBI. Show everyone how tough you are.”
Nate let go and stood up. He was black with rage. The casual mention of his family had triggered him into an instant state of yarak, the Turkish falconry term that describes the perfect condition for hunting and killing prey.
Nate hadn’t been in a state of yarak for a long time, and he didn’t welcome it back.
He said to Sandburg, “Get off my property. You’ve got thirty seconds.”
Sandburg said, “I’m busted up. It might take me a little longer than that.”
Nate wheeled and kicked the door open. He knew if he stayed with Sandburg any longer, anything could happen. He didn’t want Liv to look outside and see Sandburg’s body parts flying out of the RV.
Outside, he kicked the door shut. He stood there until Sandburg lumbered his way to the cab and started the engine. The big RV slid away.
Sandburg reached his arm out the open driver’s-side window and extended his middle finger as a bitter goodbye.
*
STILL FUMING, NATE strode through his house toward the master bedroom. Liv asked what had happened and he found he couldn’t talk to her yet. Kestrel was almost asleep in her crib and he didn’t want to scare her back awake.
Nate opened the closet doors and removed the metal lockbox from the top shelf and placed it on the bed. Inside was his five-shot Freedom Arms .454 Casull scoped revolver and its coiled shoulder holster. There were four heavy boxes of cartridges. He hadn’t carried, handled, or fired the weapon in months, but it felt comfortable in his hand.
Liv asked, “Nate, are you okay?”
“Not really,” he replied.
Nate stepped back out on his porch and scanned the horizon. The dust spoor from Sandburg’s RV was still in sight.
*
OVER TWO MILES away, a
man named Orlando Panfile leaned into a spotting scope and adjusted the focus until he could see Nate Romanowski clearly. The falconer had been hidden from his view until he stepped off the front porch of his home and moved into the yard on the side of the structure. Waves of heat wafted through his field of vision, but he made a positive identification of his target. The intel he’d received from his employers turned out to be exactly correct. He could even see the blond ponytail when the man on the porch turned to watch the motor home drive away.
The spotting scope was screwed into the base of a short tripod and hidden within the tough gnarled branches of a sagebrush. Panfile had set it up the night before on the top of a ridge so that his prone body behind it would be out of view from the falconer’s compound below in the basin.
When the falconer went back into the house, Panfile wriggled backward until he was far enough down the hill to stand up without being viewed from below. He brushed the dirt and debris from the front of his shirt and pants and started for his camp fifty yards down the hill.
FOUR
THE TWELVE SLEEP RIVER VALLEY OPENED UP BELOW THE helicopter as it cleared the summit of the Bighorn Range. The town of Saddlestring appeared in the distance as a smattering of sparkling debris on either side of the cottonwood-choked river. It looked to Joe like a mighty being had filled a giant cup with houses and low-slung buildings, shaken it like dice, and tossed the contents across on both sides of the banks.
He was always fascinated to see his district from the air since he spent so much time driving and patrolling its back roads, but he wished there were some way he could get the same view without having to be inside a small plane or chopper. Flying terrified him, and it was hard to appreciate the view when he could barely breathe and his heart whumped in his chest.
For the first time, though, he spotted the green metal roof of his new game warden station tucked into a heavily wooded curve of the river. The Picketts had been in the home for less than a year, after his old station had burned to the ground. He was still getting used to it, but he liked the location and he loved being close enough to the river to keep his fly rod strung and ready near the front door.
The palette of fall colors near the river and the multicolored aspen groves in the folds of the mountains made it hard to pick out individual objects. The valley was drunk with color, and Joe had left his shades in his agency pickup in Jackson.
Which was a problem.
He was about to land at the Saddlestring Municipal Airport, but his truck was six hours and three hundred and fifty miles away in Jackson. This wasn’t very good planning, although it wasn’t unusual when it came to state government.
Joe looked up at his death grip on the overhead strap. He’d been clutching it since he’d lifted off, and his fingers were white with strain. Although the helicopter flight had been smooth and without incident and it was very unlikely that it would suddenly buck in the air and throw him outside through the window, letting go of the strap was something he refused to do.
His phone had a single bar of cell service as it neared Saddlestring and he quickly texted his wife, Marybeth.
Can you please pick me up at the airport? No truck. Long story.
*
JOE SAW HER driving to the small airport in her white Twelve Sleep County Library van just as the helicopter began to descend. It was the only vehicle on the road.
Touchdown was gentle, but Joe didn’t begin to relax until he could hear the rotors decelerate and he was convinced they were on solid ground on the tarmac.
The pilot, a navy vet from Riverton, turned in his seat and made a thumbs-up, indicating Joe could get out. Joe thanked him for the lift, opened the door, and clamped his hat tightly on his head.
He jogged toward the van in a hunched-over crouch well past the range of the rotor blades so there was absolutely no chance his head would be lopped off by them. He had the .308 in one hand and his shotgun in the other.
As he opened the van door and swung inside, he could hear the engine of the helicopter roar as it lifted off. The pilot planned to fly back to Jackson and resume the search for Jim Trenary. Joe had heard some back-and-forth between the pilot and Mike Martin. While they were in the air, Martin had reported that he thought they were getting close to the location of the grizzly attack.
“Good thing I just got out of a meeting when your text came through,” Marybeth said.
“Thank you.”
Marybeth was the director of the county library and Joe thought she looked sharp in her dark pantsuit, white blouse, and single strand of pearls. She looked and smelled much better than Mike Martin, Julius Talbot, or Peaches.
The van Marybeth had commandeered also served as the county bookmobile. Joe liked the musty smell of all the books on the shelves in the back.
“I heard about Sue Hewitt,” Marybeth said. “It’s just bizarre.”
Sue Hewitt was on Marybeth’s library foundation board and she was very involved in the community. Marybeth had once said that Sue’s generosity with her time and money was partly designed to offset the judge’s cranky reputation and disposition, and it had worked.
“Have you heard how she’s doing?” Joe asked.
“Hanging by a thread,” Marybeth said. “They kept her here in the hospital because they were afraid to airlift her to Billings last night. Plus, Judge Hewitt wouldn’t let them.”
Joe grunted. He’d told Marybeth about the grizzly incident the night before because they talked every night on the phone when he wasn’t home, but at the time the news wasn’t out about the shooting.
“Does anyone know what happened?” he asked.
Because of her job and her local friends and connections, Marybeth always knew more about what was going on in the valley than Joe did. Since they now had an empty nest, she’d gotten even more involved with activities, fund-raisers, and charity work. Marybeth was plugged in.
She said, “Whoever did it wasn’t even close to their house at the time. As you know, the Hewitts live up at the club on the golf course. I’ve heard some people say they think it was a stray round that just happened to go through the window and hit Sue. That it was some kind of freak occurrence—or a drive-by shooting.”
Joe was puzzled. “How can there be a drive-by when there isn’t a road?”
The Hewitt home backed up to the eighteen-hole course. There was no road behind them for a long distance, although golf carts likely drove by in the summer when the course was open.
The judge and his wife were rare local members of the Eagle Mountain Club, an old but still very exclusive members-only resort on the eastern flank of the valley. It offered lodging, dining, fishing, and golf primarily. Since most of the members were from out of state, the club was practically vacant in the fall and winter, except for the few members who lived there for the entire year like the Hewitts.
If it was indeed a drive-by shooting, Joe thought, the shooter must have been somewhere on the golf course itself—which was closed. Meaning someone had sneaked onto the property with a weapon and a target in mind. But sneaking onto the Eagle Mountain Club wasn’t easy to do. It was surrounded by a high perimeter fence on all sides and the only access was through a gate at the front entrance that required a code or key-card entry. The gatehouse was usually staffed with a guard, who knew each guest by sight. There were cameras and sensors hidden around the exterior fence as well. Anyone who parked outside the club would have left their vehicle on the side of the road near the fence, where it could easily be seen by passersby.
A stray round was just as unlikely, Joe thought, although it wasn’t inconceivable. Everybody had guns in Wyoming, and shots were fired—at game animals, predators, targets, whatever—at all times of the day. Bullets traveled much farther than most people realized. The county shooting range was several miles from the club, and stray rounds could easily travel that far and still be lethal upon impact. But the targets at the gun range faced east, and the Eagle Mountain Club was south of the facility. A round that m
issed the target high—and it would have to be very high to clear the berm backstop—wouldn’t land anywhere close to the club.
Odd occurrences and random bullets had happened before, Joe knew. There had been a civil suit recently, north in Casper, where a man watching television had been struck by a .50 round fired two miles away from his home that tore through his wall.
“Any suspects you’ve heard about?” Joe asked her.
“There’s all sorts of speculation,” she said. “Judge Hewitt has lots of enemies. But I haven’t heard any names.”
Joe snorted. The judge did indeed have lots of enemies, including the many criminals he’d sent to jail and prison, as well as most of the lawyers who’d pleaded before his bench. Hewitt didn’t suffer fools in his courtroom, and for years he’d humiliated attorneys he considered unprepared or feckless.
Judge Hewitt was brutal when it came to sentencing defendants who were found guilty. He lectured them, called them “pukes,” “mouth breathers,” and “moral degenerates,” and ended many sentencing statements by saying if it were up to him the criminal would be sentenced to hard labor breaking up rocks. If the crime victimized seniors or children, he’d declared from the bench several times that he’d like to take the defendant outside the courtroom and shoot him himself.
An equal opportunity authoritarian in the courtroom, Judge Hewitt had castigated prosecutors and law enforcement officers whom he considered incompetent or derelict in the cases they brought before him. Joe had witnessed both the former county prosecutor and former sheriff get the bark peeled off them by the judge in public. Joe hadn’t been immune either, although after calling him a “poor excuse for a game warden” during one trial, Judge Hewitt had invited Joe back to his chambers during the recess. Joe had expected further abuse, but it turned out Hewitt wanted to talk about his upcoming hunt in Texas for feral pigs. He was looking forward to shooting them out of a helicopter with an AK-47.
