Shots Fired: Stories From Joe Pickett Country Read online

  Nate shrugged.

  Joe rolled the bottle of beer between his palms, thinking. “I don’t know if I can issue a permit when I think the purpose of capturing the falcons is to sell them.”

  Nate said, “That’s what I thought you would say.”

  “Who is the potential buyer?”

  “His son just entered the bar,” Nate said, stealing a look over the top of the booth. Rocky and Khalid were with two of the blond women. Every eye in the place was on the women, who wore black skintight bodysuits. No women in Saddlestring had ever entered the Stockman’s Bar in a bodysuit.

  “Might as well look,” Nate said. “Everyone else is.”

  Joe turned and looked, maybe a few beats longer than necessary. When he faced Nate, he said, “They don’t exactly go incognito, do they?”

  “They don’t think they need to.”

  “Is that your buyer?”

  “His son, Rocky. And his bodyguard.”

  “Who are the women?”

  “Rocky’s toys.”

  Joe paused for a while before looking up at Nate and asking, “What’s really going on here?”

  Nate said, “I met him years ago. He was a friend of ours in Special Forces. Not because he liked us or we liked him, but we had common interests. I never talked politics with him once. Instead, we talked falconry. He’s paid me before to get him birds.”

  Joe said, “Hmmm.”

  “Al-Nura is Wahhabi. He’s got billions from the royal family, and he’s one of the biggest funding sources for foundations and mosques all over the world. If you’re looking for one of the main guys establishing a violent religion that exists to wipe us out, you’re looking at Al-Nura. Yet here he is, flying all around our country, doing as he pleases. No one even challenges him.”

  Nate sighed. “A guy like that can have anything in the world. If he wants peregrines, he can get them from any number of good breeding programs. Hell, he could buy the breeding program.”

  He jabbed a finger at Joe and lowered his voice. “But what’s important to Al-Nura isn’t just that he gets the falcons but that he gets them from me. It’s important to him to know I can be bought. He needs to know that like all the other westerners he’s ever dealt with, I have my price. It confirms his worldview.”

  Two more beers arrived at the booth. When Nate looked up, the barmaid said, “The man with the dollies bought the house a round.”

  “I don’t want it,” Nate said, pushing the bottle away.

  “You tell him,” the barmaid said, going back to the front.

  “You’re in a situation, aren’t you?” Joe asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You really don’t care about a permit, do you?”

  “Not really. And it gets worse,” Nate said. “Alisha told me she noticed a white new-model SUV following her to school this morning. Khalid drives a rented Escalade. The description of the driver matched up. The car drove on when she pulled into the school parking lot, but they’re letting me know they’re ramping up the pressure.”

  The barmaid came back. “The gentleman who bought you the beer said to tell you he doesn’t appreciate the insult.”

  “Tell him I still don’t care what he thinks and I never will.”

  “Nate . . .” Joe cautioned.

  “You’re right,” Nate said, standing. “I’ll tell him myself.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Joe said from the booth.

  As Nate walked to the bar, he saw Shorty stand up and approach Rocky. Shorty was drunk.

  “I don’t appreciate being left out there to walk to town,” Shorty said, his face red, his finger wagging in Rocky’s face. “I don’t care who in the hell you think you are. Out here, you don’t treat a man like that, especially when he helped you out.”

  Rocky leaned back so Shorty’s finger wouldn’t touch his face. As he did so, Khalid reached through the air, grabbed Shorty’s finger in his fist, and snapped it back with a sound like a dry branch breaking underfoot.

  Shorty gasped, then howled. Khalid kept a grip on the finger and pulled it, and Shorty, toward the door. With his free hand, Khalid opened the door and pulled Shorty through. It happened very quickly, and no one at the bar moved or said a word.

  Nate nodded at Rocky as he walked by and followed Shorty and Khalid outside. Khalid had Shorty bent over the hood of a car, facedown, while he rifled through his pockets and pulled them inside out. A wallet, loose change, and a pocketknife clattered to the pavement.

  “A knife,” Khalid said.

  Shorty moaned, “It’s just . . .”

  Khalid stepped back and crouched. Nate could see what would happen next. Khalid intended to leap into the air and come down with his elbow extended to break Shorty’s spine.

  “You do it and it’s murder,” Nate said.

  Khalid paused, looked over, his eyes black and glistening.

  “He has a knife,” Khalid said.

  “Everybody carries a pocketknife,” Nate said. “He never pulled it out of his pocket. You did.”

  “This is justifiable.”

  “No,” Nate said, “it isn’t.”

  A hint of a smile ghosted across Khalid’s face. Nate heard the door behind him open and smelled Rocky’s cologne. Rocky must have signaled Khalid, who lunged forward with all of his weight to drive Shorty’s face into the hood of the car with enough power to dent the sheet metal. Shorty crumpled back into a bloody pile, pink bubbles indicating where his nose and mouth were.

  “You all saw that,” Rocky said to the blondes and Khalid. “The little man had a knife.”

  The bartender and Joe Pickett came out of the bar and stared at Shorty. Joe ran up to make sure he was breathing.

  “Call an ambulance,” Joe said to the bartender.

  Nate saw the smile return on Khalid. That did it. His .454 was under the driver’s seat of his Jeep half a block away, but Nate wanted to take on Khalid with his hands and stepped toward him. Khalid set his feet, getting ready.

  “That’ll be enough of that,” Sheriff McLanahan shouted.

  Nate looked up to see McLanahan sticking his face through the window of a sedan that had stopped on the street.

  “Mr. Romanowski, I’d suggest you call it a night and go home.”

  Nate squinted at the sheriff in confusion. The man wasn’t in his county pickup, and wasn’t in uniform. His wife sat next to him, staring straight ahead through the windshield as if she hadn’t seen or heard what just transpired.

  “Yes, go home,” Khalid said in heavily accented English.

  Joe Pickett stood up. “Sheriff, we have an injured man here.”

  “I heard it on the scanner,” McLanahan said. “The ambulance is on its way. And stay out of this, Joe.”

  “I saw what happened. Nate wasn’t at fault.”

  “He never is,” McLanahan said, moving his eyes from Joe to Nate. “It just seems like wherever he shows up, people get hurt or killed.”

  “Go home,” Khalid taunted, now smiling widely.

  Nate looked over McLanahan’s new car. It had dealer plates and the sticker was still in the window.

  “Nice ride,” Nate said. “I hope it was worth it.”

  McLanahan’s wife continued to stare stonily ahead, but Nate thought he saw her wince a little. McLanahan’s face got red, which looked dark in the glow of the streetlight.

  “This is what they do,” Nate said. “They buy us with our own money. Your price was pretty damned cheap.”

  “Move on,” McLanahan said through gritted teeth.

  Nate felt a tug on his arm. Joe. “The odds aren’t good right now,” he whispered. Nate loved Joe at that moment. Joe wasn’t telling him to back off, or give up, or go home. Instead, he was advising Nate to regroup and fight later, when he held the high ground. The thought calmed him.

&
nbsp; Rocky walked between Nate and Khalid. “No more trouble,” Rocky said. “Let’s all go back in and enjoy another drink. I’m buying, my friends. This is over.”

  Nate said, “I don’t think so.”

  Nate walked away and Joe stayed with Shorty. As Nate climbed into his Jeep, he looked down the street toward the Stockman’s. Rocky was patting backs and shaking hands, offering loudly to buy the house another round, not even looking over his shoulder as the ambulance appeared from around the block. McLanahan had parked his new car and was joining them.

  • • •

  “HE’S OUT THERE,” Alisha said. “I can feel it.”

  Nate threw off the quilts and his bare feet slapped the floor of her bedroom. A trough of moonlight split the floor. He approached the window, but didn’t open the curtains farther.

  Nate said, “I can see the grille of the car shining in the moon. It’s parked behind the willows out front.”

  She said, “Are you sure it’s him?”

  “Who else would drive a white Cadillac onto the res?” he said.

  She reached for the bed lamp but Nate stopped her, whispered, “Keep it dark in here.”

  • • •

  NATE SMELLED THE SMOKE of strong cigarettes long before he saw the car. He had gone out the back door of Alisha’s house, forded the creek, and looped far around her lot so he could approach the Escalade from behind. He kept inside the brush, breathing evenly, stepping slowly and quietly, his gun hanging loosely at his side.

  The interior of the SUV was dark, but as Nate stood and looked, letting his eyes adjust, he could see the familiar blocky head at three-quarter-rear profile behind the wheel. Khalid turned his head slightly and Nate could see the orange glow of his cigarette ash.

  Nate looked around. The powwow grounds near Alisha’s home were empty except for the naked pole frames of tipis and the tall sun dance pole that shone blue in the moonlight. Dried leather ropes hung down from the sun dance pole and waved gently like kelp in the night breeze. The structures should have been dismantled weeks ago, after the powwow, but in the Indian way, they weren’t.

  Nate thought of his birds. He thought of Shorty’s face bubbling blood. He thought of that white Escalade following Alisha to school. And he thought of mosques and madrassas all over the world teaching the young to hate.

  Khalid was genuinely surprised when Nate reached in through his window and snatched the cigarette out of his mouth, and he started to say something but his open mouth filled with the huge muzzle of a .454.

  “Do you know what a sun dance is?” Nate asked. “It’s a way for a boy to become a man.”

  • • •

  THE CURTAIN PARTED on a cabin window of the 737 and Rocky looked out. Even at that height and distance, Rocky’s face looked pale and his eyes bleary from alcohol and lack of sleep. It was minutes before dawn and the western sky was washed with a deep pink about to dissolve into the first blast of morning sun.

  Nate stood up in his Jeep and gestured to the heavy wooden crate that filled his backseat. There were holes in the crate.

  Rocky’s face vanished from the window.

  Nate stood in the cold of dawn, feeling the last rush of icy pre-morning breeze flow across the tarmac as if looking for a place to hide until it was dark again. A meadowlark warbled somewhere behind him.

  Nate turned to the crate. He could hear the rustle of feathers, and one of the birds answered the meadowlark with a sharp chirp.

  The door of the airplane opened. Rocky stood in a bathrobe, one hand shielding his eyes from the light and the other waving Nate in. Nate climbed the stairs carrying the crate, and he could smell fetid alcohol and strong garlicky sweat through Rocky’s skin. “Late night, huh?”

  “Come in, come in, so I can close the door.”

  Nate stepped inside the dark cabin.

  “You brought the birds?” Rocky asked.

  “What does it look like?” Nate asked.

  Rocky nodded, uncomprehending. “You are here much too early. Let me wake my father.”

  Nate sat while Rocky walked gingerly through the cabin, as if the sound of his footsteps hurt his head. The darkness of the plane seemed to have calmed the birds in the crate, although he could still hear them rustling inside. In a few minutes, Nate heard the low rumble of Arabic through the door.

  While he waited, Nate perused the movie library and selected Fort Apache with John Wayne. John Ford directing. A classic. He got it running and the dark cabin flickered with screaming Indians and frightened soldiers.

  Al-Nura entered fitting his headscarf on. Nate appreciated the formality, in a way.

  “You are early,” Al-Nura said, settling down in his big chair. Rocky followed. Al-Nura’s eyes lit up when he noticed the crate. “Six of them?”

  “Seven, actually,” Nate said.

  “You flatter me.”

  Nate said nothing. He listened for the sound of a vehicle outside on the tarmac.

  Rocky lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. “We kept the bar open until very early this morning,” he said. “The owner wanted to close at two, but we sweetened the pot for him. The whole town had a wonderful time.”

  “It wasn’t the whole town,” Nate said. “Just some drunks and derelicts. Your friend Khalid wasn’t with you, though.”

  Rocky looked up, the match still burning in his fingers. His ever-present smile was missing.

  Nate said, “He was with me.”

  Al-Nura used his hands on the arms of the chair to turn himself so he could see Rocky behind him. Father and son exchanged glances.

  “Where is he now?” Rocky asked, almost in a whisper.

  “Outside.”

  “Let me see the birds,” Al-Nura said, turning back to Nate. His eyes were hard.

  “Where are my falcons?” Nate asked.

  Al-Nura gestured outside with his chin. “They are safe in the hangar we rented. It’s the second one from the left out there. They’ve been watered and well fed.”

  Nate nodded, backed up, and pried the lid off the crate. The birds began to chirp furiously when exposed to light.

  Al-Nura asked quickly, “Are they hooded?”

  “Nope.”

  “They’ll see us!” he said angrily. “They’ll be imprinted for life!”

  “You said—”

  “Close the box!”

  Nate put the lid back on. While he fastened the clips, a horn honked outside. Rocky looked at the curtained window, then back to Nate.

  “You asked about Khalid,” Nate said, gesturing toward the window.

  Rocky inhaled deeply on the cigarette and crossed the cabin to the window and brushed the curtain aside. Nate watched Rocky’s eyes widen and the cigarette dropped from his fingers, then Rocky stumbled backward, flailing his arms.

  “What?” Al-Nura asked his son. “What has happened?”

  “Khalid . . .” was all Rocky could say.

  The sound of war cries erupted from the monitor as the Apaches attacked the fort.

  Al-Nura reached up and opened the curtain. Nate could tell from Al-Nura’s lack of alarm that he had seen worse in his life, and it had probably been on his orders. Bastard, Nate thought.

  It had taken two hours to mount the sun dance pole onto the back of the flatbed truck, spearing it through a missing fifth-wheel mount on the truck bed. But it had taken only twenty minutes to hang Khalid from the leather ropes from sharpened bones pierced deeply through his pectorals. Now the bodyguard was suspended in the air, his hands limp at his sides, his face tilted to the sky.

  “He comes to every once in a while,” Nate said. “He screams a bunch of crap in Arabic, then he passes out again.”

  “How could you do that to a man?” Rocky said, his face contorted.

  “It’s not so bad,” Nate said. “I did it once myself. But when h
e gets cut down, he’ll be a warrior.”

  Al-Nura swiveled slowly to Nate, his face a mask. But Nate could see his lower lip tremble involuntarily.

  “It’s time for you to go,” Nate said. “You’ve got five minutes to order your pilot to fire up the jets.”

  Al-Nura was frozen with rage. He looked like he wanted to leap out of the chair and attack Nate with his hands.

  “You don’t threaten my father,” Rocky said.

  Nate nodded toward the windows on the other side of the plane. “Check that out,” he said.

  Nate didn’t even need to look because he knew what Rocky would see: a dozen Northern Arapaho warriors in full dress on horseback on the edge of the tarmac, feathers from lances and rifles riffling in the breeze.

  “Just like Fort Apache,” Nate said.

  Al-Nura slowly shook his head back and forth. “You’ll never get the rest of the money,” he said.

  “Don’t need it,” Nate said. “And don’t ever contact me again or you and your little boy will end up on the sun dance pole, too.”

  “But don’t you want the money?” Al-Nura asked.

  “I’ll be the first: no.”

  With that, Nate opened the hatch and clambered down the steps. He helped Bad Bobby Whiteplume cut Khalid down. The man stumbled toward the plane as the jet engines started up. Nate watched Khalid climb up the stairs on his hands and knees and wondered for a moment if Rocky would shut the door on him before he got in. Khalid made it, barely, without ever looking back. Twin spoors of blood snaked up the aluminum steps from Khalid’s wounds.

  The door closed behind him and the stairs scissored back into place and Nate and Bob drove their vehicles to the side of the airport, where they met the warriors. The roar of the plane shook the ground itself and split the sky in two.

  While the 737 rose into the air, Nate checked the birds in the hangar. The peregrine screamed at him when he opened the door. He rejoined Bob and Bob’s crew with the hooded falcon on his fist.

  It was minutes before the jet was far enough away that they could hear themselves speak.

  Bad Bob yawned. “Too damned early for this kind of stuff.”