Off the Grid (Joe Pickett, #16)

by C.J. Box

When he got closer he saw the gyrfalcon. It was the one from his dream.

Man has emerged from the shadows of antiquity with a peregrine on his wrist. —ROGER TORY PETERSON, Birds over America

Joe could care less. In fact, he found himself fighting back a grin. It came from the realization that he loved this. He loved being on assignment. He got a thrill out of walking into a microculture with a mission when no one knew him or why he was really there. Joe liked getting the lay of the land, listening to the conversations of locals to try and discern their backstories, motivations, and agendas.

As if she could read his thoughts, the woman at the bar rotated a slow quarter turn on her stool and looked at him over her shoulder in a sidelong stare. She was striking, he thought: alabaster skin, long black bangs, big brown eyes, a bee-sting mouth. Her expression was both bold and amused. She doesn’t belong here, he thought, but she acts like she owns the place.

To become a legal falconer in Wyoming, the applicant had to pass an exam based on the California Hawking Club guidelines, unless he or she was a certified master falconer. In that case, the nonresident master falconer could obtain a hunting permit from the local game warden for sixteen dollars.

“Interesting,” Joe said. “I’ve probably not issued more than a half-dozen falconry permits in my career.” He could have added: None to Nate. Nate didn’t believe in government-issued permits.

“Daisy, get away,” he ordered when she assumed that because he was on all fours he’d like to have his face licked.

THERE IS A MOMENT when a peregrine falcon, hundreds of feet in the sky, identifies a target below. The raptor stalls for a moment in the thermal current, draws in its wings, and gracefully does a 180-degree rotation to its back. Now bullet-shaped and sleekly aerodynamic, the peregrine falls through the sky, gaining more and more velocity until its speed reaches more than two hundred miles an hour. It is the fastest creature on earth, and as it shrieks through layers of changing crosscurrents and atmosphere, it subtly keeps a perfect bead on its prey by slightly shifting a wing or moving its head a degree. As it drops, the falcon’s focus narrows until the target—whether an unsuspecting duck rising from a pond or a rabbit foraging for young shoots of grass—becomes the one true thing to the exclusion of everything else. As the peregrine closes in on its target at tremendous speed, its talons descend like the landing gear of an airplane on final approach. The talons are balled into fists. It is known as the state of yarak to falconers, and the end result is a concussion of blood and tissue from the target as the peregrine strikes home.

“How about we worry about that later?” Joe said. “Right now we’ve got six people, three falcons, and a dog, and we need to try and get out of here in one Jeep. Not to mention, there are trucks out there filled with killers on the way to the interstate highway system.” Nate laughed grimly. Without looking over his shoulder, he said, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

“I never really bonded with that bird in the first place,” Nate said after the falcon was gone. “I always thought of it as a spy. I want nothing to do with it whatsoever.” Joe had no idea how to respond to that.