Blood Trail - C. J. Box [67]
While they ate, Nate and the restaurant owner—he introduced himself to Joe as Large Merle—talked falconry and hunting. Joe looked around the house, which was dark and close and messy. Merle obviously lived alone except for his falcons, four of them, all hooded and sleeping, perched on handcrafted stands in the living room. The place smelled of feathers, hawk excrement, and eighty years of fried grease and cigarette smoke.
“D’you get your elk this year?” Large Merle asked Nate.
“No,” Nate said. “I was in jail.”
“Poor bastard,” Merle said. “And now you can’t go, since Governor Nut closed the state down. Man, if I could get my hands on the guy who shot those hunters I would break him in two.”
Large Merle eyed Joe for the first time. “You gonna find that guy?”
“We hope to,” Joe said.
“You better,” Merle said. “Or we’re going to do it for you. That’s why we live here. And it won’t be pretty. How’s your steak?”
“Huge.”
Merle smiled and nodded. One of his prairie falcons dropped a plop of white excrement onto his ham-sized forearm like a dollop of toothpaste being squeezed from a tube.
“Borrow your phone, Merle?” Nate asked.
“You bet, buddy,” Merle said, then turned back to Joe as Nate took the phone into the other room.
“I’ve heard of you,” Merle said, looking at Joe’s nameplate with narrowed eyes.
“Is that good or bad?” Joe asked.
“Mostly good,” Merle said, not expounding. “Me and Nate go way back. He’s the only guy know who scares me. Whoever that knuckle-head is killing hunters? He don’t scare me. But Nate scares me.”
Joe sat back and put his knife and fork to the side of his plate. He’d eaten half the steak and couldn’t eat any more.
Merle leaned forward. “Did Nate ever tell you about that time in Haiti? When the four drugged-out rebels jumped him?”
“No.”
Merle shook his head and chuckled, the fat jiggling under his arms and his chin. “Quite a story,” Merle said. “Especially the part about guts strung through the trees like Christmas lights. Ask him about that one sometime!”
Joe nodded.
“It’s a hell of a story,” Merle said, still chuckling.
BACK IN the Yukon, Joe said, “Don’t ever tell me about Haiti.”
“Okay.”
“Because I don’t want to know.”
“Okay.”
“It’s gone pretty well so far over the years with you not telling me what you do for a living. I think that’s best.”
“Since you’re in law enforcement, I’d agree.”
“And let’s not eat at Large Merle’s again soon.”
“I needed a big steak. Merle and I go way back.”
“So I heard. SO,” Nate asked, “how’s my girl?”
“Marybeth?” Joe asked, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck bristle.
“Sheridan,” Nate said, rolling his eyes. “The falconer’s apprentice.”
Joe calmed. “She’s sixteen. That’s a tough age. She can’t decide if her parents are idiots or what. All in all, though, considering what she’s been through in her life, she’s doing well, I’d say. I sort of miss her as a little girl, though.”
“Don’t,” Nate said. “From her letters, she sounds smart and well adjusted. And she doesn’t really think you’re an idiot. In fact, I think she admires her parents very much.”
Joe had forgotten about the letters. “So why did you ask? You know more about her than I do now.”
Nate laughed but didn’t disagree.
IT WAS nearly midnight as Joe crossed over into Twelve Sleep County. The full moon lit up pillowy cumulus clouds over the Bighorns as if they had blue pilot lights inside, and the stars were white and accusatory in the black sky.
“You can drop me here,” Nate said, indicating an exit off the two-lane that led eventually to his stone house on the banks of the Twelve Sleep River. Joe slowed.
“You’ve got a ride?” Joe asked.
Nate nodded. “Alisha. I called her from Large Merle’s. It’s been a while.”
Alisha Whiteplume was a Northern Arapaho who had grown up on the reservation