Winterkill - C. J. Box [90]
Nate smiled happily and took a double portion. He moaned almost obscenely as he ate it, which caused Joe and Marybeth to stifle smiles of their own. No one had ever loved Marybeth’s meat loaf quite so much, or so obviously. Sheridan picked at her food, spending most of her time either watching Nate or looking over her shoulder at the two birds on chairs in the living room.
The telephone rang and Marybeth left the table to answer it. After a beat, she handed it to Joe.
“Please hold for Melinda Strickland,” Marybeth said, mocking what the secretary had told her.
Joe winced, and excused himself. He felt Nate’s eyes on his back as he took the telephone into the living room.
After a moment, Strickland came on. “Joe!” She cried, “You got one of the bastards! Good work, Joe!”
“Thank you,” he mumbled. He knew that both Marybeth and Nate were quietly listening at the table.
“Too bad he didn’t have an accident on the way into town, though.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know, too bad the guy didn’t try to escape or something.”
He knew what she meant, but he wanted her to actually say it. But she was too good a bureaucrat to admit anything outright.
“Is there any news on Spud Cargill?” he asked.
What she told him froze him to his spot. He found himself still standing, still holding the telephone to his ear, long after she had said goodbye and hung up. The dull pain in his stomach that had been with him for days reappeared, and once again he felt the tightening jaws of the vise.
“What’s wrong?” Marybeth asked as he sat back down on the table.
“Joe?”
He looked up. “They still haven’t found Spud. Melinda Strickland said that someone thinks they saw him in a stolen truck on the way to Battle Mountain, and McLanahan said that a truck fitting that description ran his roadblock just a couple of hours ago.”
“Didn’t someone also say they saw him on the football field?” Marybeth asked skeptically.
“Yes.”
“So why are you acting this way?”
Joe noted that Sheridan was watching him carefully.
Nate leaned back in his chair and he spoke in almost a whisper. “What this means is that Strickland and her FBI hit team can now go after the Sovereign compound. She can say that they’re harboring a fugitive suspected of murdering a federal employee.”
“I was thinking this thing was going to calm down,” Joe said. “But Melinda Strickland is determined to prove there’s a war on. And now she’s got a much better reason to start it.”
Marybeth instantly understood. “She wouldn’t do that, would she?” Her eyes flashed. “April . . .”
Joe walked Nate Romanowski to his Jeep in the dark. The sky was clear and gauzy with stars. The melting snow had frozen into a slick cold skin on the sidewalk and road.
Nate perched his falcons on the top of the backseat and secured the jesses to metal swivels he had installed on the framework for the purpose. Joe watched, his breath condensing into snaky wisps, his mind twenty miles away in the deep snow of Battle Mountain.
When he had secured the birds, Nate reached under his Jeep seat and pulled out a bundle that turned out to be a shoulder holster and his massive revolver. He looped a strap over his head and buckled it below his sternum. Another strap fit around his midsection. The curved black grip of the stainless-steel .454 Casull now offered itself to Joe.
“Why do you carry a gun like that?” Joe asked.
Nate smiled slightly. “Because I know how to use it and it’s all I need. It gives me the mobility of a handgun but with more firepower and velocity. It’s a Freedom Arms Model 83 with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. A hand cannon. I did my research and went to the factory in Freedom, Wyoming and paid twenty-five hundred for it. It shoots a 300-grain bullet and it can literally shoot through a car.”
Joe whistled.
“Or I could fire into the trunk and hit the driver.