Page 7

Chapter Seven

Nate Romanowski sat in the passenger seat of Geronimo Jones’s matte-black 2015 Chevy Suburban 2500 as they sped along the almost empty roads of Yellowstone National Park en route to Gardiner, Montana. Most of the park’s accommodations had already been closed for the season. They’d entered the park via the East Entrance and were working their way up the right side of the figure-eight road system hugging the contours of the Yellowstone River. Geronimo drove much faster than the park-imposed forty-five miles per hour, and as he did so, he cursed at occasional recreational vehicles poking along and a herd of bison, who lazily crossed the blacktop and created a one-car traffic jam.

Geronimo had explained to Nate that he’d purchased the massive vehicle the month before at a Denver Police Department impound auction. It had previously belonged to a gangbanger who had installed smoked bulletproof glass in the windows and steel plates in the front passenger and driver’s doors. The gangbanger had also replaced the inflatable tires with pure rubber ones that could absorb bullets and power over road spikes without going flat. There were secret compartments in the doors, floorboard, and cargo area for weapons, gear, and, most likely, drugs.

Geronimo said, “It ain’t subtle.” Nate agreed.

—

Geronimo had removed the second row of seats in the Suburban and replaced them with a latticework topped by a thick horizontal dowel rod. Balanced on the rod were Nate’s peregrine and red-tailed hawk. Both were hooded and they learned quickly to lean into turns and brace themselves when Geronimo slowed down or sped up. Next to Nate’s falcons was Geronimo’s huge white and black mottled white gyrfalcon, which was also hooded. Geronimo had spread a bedsheet over the floor to catch splashes of excrement that made the inside of the vehicle smell like a combination of musk and ammonia.

They stopped the vehicle periodically to retrieve fresh roadkill on the side of the road, including, in one instance, a mule deer fawn. While Geronimo drove, Nate fed the falcons in the back and then climbed into the passenger seat.

—

At Canyon Village, Geronimo took a left and gunned it on the road that cut across the middle of the figure eight to Norris Junction. The road existed simply to connect the loops and featured no special attractions—no geysers, mud pots, fumaroles, or waterfalls. The most interesting thing on the drive to Nate was the ability to judge how tall the pine trees had grown since the devastating fires of 1988, which had collectively formed the largest wildfire in the history of the massive park and scorched nearly eight hundred thousand acres. The once-burned landscape was covered with young pine trees again.

“You could slow down a little,” Nate said as they topped a steep rise going seventy-five.

“We’re in a hurry,” Geronimo replied.

—

“Remember when I told you I couldn’t invite you to stay with us in Colorado?” Geronimo asked.

“Yes,” Nate said. His eyes stayed on the road ahead in case a wandering buffalo or elk suddenly appeared.

“I didn’t tell you why.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“It’s because my house was burned to the ground.”

Nate looked over. He recalled the million-dollar home set on ten acres on a mountainside with a magnificent view of the Denver city lights. He’d stayed in a guest bedroom and had breakfast the next morning with a then-pregnant Jacinda and Geronimo. Pearl wasn’t in the picture yet.

“If it wasn’t for a child’s broken necklace,” Geronimo said, “I’d have burned up with it, along with my wife and child.”

“Explain.”

“It happened a month ago, in September,” Geronimo said. “Pearl was playing with a cheap bead necklace some friend of hers had given her as a party favor. Can you believe two-year-old girls get invited to organized birthday parties these days? Anyway, my Pearl-girl loves her jewelry, which doesn’t bode well for me in the future.

“So, like with all of Pearl’s toys, she broke it. The beads went everywhere, and Jacinda told her to pick them up. I helped her, which meant crawling around on my hands and knees and fishing them out from under the couch and such. Somehow, one of those beads went straight up into Pearl’s nose.”

“That sounds like something Kestrel would do,” Nate said. He recalled his daughter inserting a Barbie shoe into her ear once, and the wailing she did as Liv removed it.

“I don’t mean perched in a nostril,” Geronimo said. “I mean straight up her nose so far we couldn’t see it. She really shoved it up there. Don’t ask me why. I guess to see how far it would go.

“So, Jacinda called our clinic and they said to pinch her other nostril and hold her mouth open and blow in it. They thought the bead would come shooting out like a bullet.”

“But it didn’t work,” Nate said.

“It didn’t work. So even though it was dark out and time to eat dinner, we had to bundle up Pearl and take her to the nearest emergency room. I guess we left the lights on when we left because we were shaken up by the whole ordeal.”

“Go on,” Nate said.

“We saw the glow up in the trees when we drove back from the clinic two hours later,” Geronimo said. “I knew it was our house, and it was like a kick in the gut. I mean, everything was in that house. Paintings, jewelry, cash, family photos, everything . My triple-barrel shotgun. Thank God my gyrfalcon was in its mews out back and it didn’t get burned up.

“Jacinda and I accused each other of being careless and causing the fire to start. She thought I left a lit cigar in my man cave and I thought she’d forgotten to turn off the stove or something.

“But it turns out,” Geronimo said, “that our neighbors saw a car on our road fifteen minutes after we’d left. They described it as a muddy four-by-four with no license plates. There were two men in it, but it was too dark to see them clearly enough to get a description that’s worth anything. Those guys torched our house. The fire department’s arson investigator confirmed it. The guy said a fast-acting accelerant caused the fire and was put on all the outside doors and triggered at once.”

“Sounds professional.”

“It does. And get this: The arson investigator said the accelerant was likely diethylene glycol gel packs adhered to the doors.”

“Diethylene glycol?” Nate said. “That stuff will stick to anything and burn really hot, even on wet wood in the rain. I remember using them in the military.”

“Yeah, me too. I guess you can buy them commercially, but you’d need to know what to buy, you know? My assumption is that the arsonists have a military background.”

“Uh-oh.”

“And because we’d left all the lights on when we left with Pearl, I’m pretty sure they thought we were inside.”

“Any idea who did it?” Nate asked.

“Not at first,” Geronimo said. “But after I sent Jacinda and Pearl to Detroit to stay with her mother, I did some digging.”

“Axel Soledad’s thugs,” Nate said.

Geronimo nodded. “And if it weren’t for that bead up Pearl’s nose that made us leave the house unexpectedly, he would have killed us all.”

Nate continued to look ahead.

“I should have finished off that dude when I had the chance,” Geronimo said. “He was down and I should have gotten close and blown his head off.”

“I wish you would have,” Nate said.

Both men went silent until they descended into Norris Junction, where steam from the geyser basin wafted up through the heavy pines. Nate thought about how different his life would have turned out if Geronimo and Joe Pickett hadn’t left Soledad to bleed out in a lot in downtown Portland. How they’d assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that the man they’d chased across half the country was gone for good.

He had no doubt that Geronimo was thinking the same thing.

—

“How did you figure out that Soledad was behind the attack?” Nate asked as Geronimo turned north at Norris Junction for Mammoth Hot Springs.

“A few ways,” Geronimo said. “First, when I found out that Soledad survived, I knew he’d come after me just like he came after you. I mean, I’ve made some enemies in my time, but only one of them would send goons to my house to burn it down with me and my family inside.

“Second was what I learned on Bal-Chatri,” he said.

“Ah.”

Bal-Chatri was a special portal within a crude retail website that sold falconry gear like hoods, jesses, nets, traps, and other paraphernalia. The name of the portal came from an especially effective trap for capturing wild raptors. Most users scrolled right past the tiny button on the site with the strange foreign-sounding name. But when the button was clicked, it took the user to an encrypted other world on the dark web. Bal-Chatri was used by authorized falconers to communicate, exchange best practices and tips, and to call out unscrupulous falconers who had violated the unwritten rules that had been agreed upon within the small but fervent universe.

The community with access to Bal-Chatri was highly specialized, and the members could only access it with a series of passwords and prompts. The members were limited to outlaw falconers with a libertarian bent, most with military backgrounds like Geronimo, Nate, and, for a time, Axel Soledad. The discussions within the portal were candid. Names were named.

Most falconers hunted a great deal on public lands, which were largely undeveloped and comprised half or more of the surface area of the western states. Federal land managers, depending on the administration and the whims of bureaucrats two thousand miles away in Washington, D.C., could make life miserable for falconers who wanted to hunt their birds on public lands. Many of the falconers on the Bal-Chatri site thought their freedom and liberty were under attack as new rules and regulations were handed down and administered. The group was largely pro–Second Amendment and profoundly anti-fed. One of the longest and best-documented threads was of the many encounters members had had with agents of the federal law enforcement community who suspected them of being traitorous insurgents.

But they also policed themselves. Members within Bal-Chatri insisted on maintaining a strict code of conduct among falconers, which included not encroaching on one another’s backyards and not trapping birds strictly for commercial sale to foreign customers.

Axel Soledad had been kicked out of the group long before for breaking most of its rules. He had targeted other falconers to trespass on their private nesting sites and steal their birds outright. Soledad then sold the birds to unscrupulous buyers, who were the representatives and officials for corrupt and criminal regimes, primarily in the Middle East. Soledad then used the money—hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth—to finance anarchists in the U.S. and to foment riots and violence in cities throughout the country.

Since Geronimo was one of the administrators on the site, he monitored it closely and had special access to the actual identity of nearly all of the members. He referred the site as “BC.”

He said to Nate, “For being a bunch of cranky individualist paranoid types, many of our fellow outlaw falconers on BC are outright gossips. They want to know what’s going on with other members of the group, and they like to engage in too many conspiracy theories for my taste.”

“That’s why I don’t go there much,” Nate said. “I like to keep my conspiracy theories to myself.”

Geronimo chuckled at that. Then he said, “There was one thread I found after my house burned down that I found especially interesting. One of the guys, named C. W. Reese, said he’d been approached by an ex–BC member about joining his group. The ex-BCer was pretty cagey, but this group had something to do with taking serious action against the government. This ex-BCer knew that Reese is a hothead. Like us, he’s ex-military and he had bad experiences with his superiors. So he must have seemed like a good recruit.”

“How so? What’s C. W. Reese like?” Nate asked.

“He’s extreme,” Geronimo said. “There’s no doubt about that. He hates all politicians equally and he describes himself as an ‘armed anarchist.’ I can’t tell you if he’s really serious about that or just blowing smoke.”

“Who approached him?”

“His name was never spelled out on the thread, but I read between the lines.”

“Your Reese guy wasn’t specific as to what Soledad is up to?”

“No. I’m not even sure he knows. All he said was that even though he likes the idea of making some bureaucrats accountable, he got a weird vibe from the guy. And before he made a decision to join Soledad or reject him, some crazy lawyer showed up at his house and demanded to know all about the exchange. Some big Amazon-type woman, is the way my guy described the lawyer. It spooked him, knowing that this lawyer was investigating him.”

“Does she have a name?”

“He calls her the Giantess. But he never said her actual name. Two other BCers weighed in and said a woman lawyer of the same description had contacted them . Of course, these guys are all worked up and they think it might be a setup by the feds to entrap them.”

“Of course they think that,” Nate said. “I would, too.” Then: “How did the Giantess get access to the site?”

“I wish I knew,” Geronimo said. “The possibility that an outsider has access to Bal-Chatri has everyone on it even more paranoid than usual. Especially if it’s the feds who penetrated it and are sending the Giantess out on their behalf to entrap guys.”

“Does Reese trust you enough to talk?”

“I’m not so sure,” Geronimo said. “That’s why we’re going to Gardiner. I contacted Reese, and he’ll only talk in person. I think he trusts me, but he wants to look me in the eye.”

Nate squinted. “So you think that if we find out the actual identity of the Giantess, it could help lead us to Soledad?”

“I hope so,” Geronimo said. “And this time when we find him, we finish the job. We don’t leave him in some alley bleeding out. We finish him with a kill shot.”

Nate didn’t need to agree in words. He hoped he’d be the one to perform the act.

—

C. W. Reese lived in a tiny tree-shrouded house on Vista Street in Gardiner, Montana. The back of his home looked out over Yellowstone River Canyon, and the river, even in October, emitted a hushed roar as it flowed north.

Geronimo passed the house and pointed out the yellow Don’t Tread on Me Gadsden flag hanging limp from a pole and the corner of a falcon mews jutting out from around the back corner of the building.

“That looks like him,” he said as he proceeded along Vista and parked on the next block, out of sight of Reese’s home.

“No need to spook him,” he said as he climbed out.

“We probably already have,” Nate said. “Not much gets by the residents here. Especially when we show up in the tank we’re driving in.”

Gardiner was a small ramshackle unincorporated community of less than nine hundred residents. It was located hard against the North Entrance to Yellowstone. The Roosevelt Arch, which was constructed in 1903, bore a plaque that read For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People . Most of the full-time residents worked for concessionaires and contractors within the park, or were hunting, fishing, or whitewater-rafting businesses. Or, in the case of C. W. Reese, a small-time bird abatement specialist who bought and sold guns and gold on the side.

Nate and Geronimo noted the No Solicitors and No Trespassing signs near the gate of the white picket fence and they walked up the cracked sidewalk to the front door and knocked on it. When several dogs barked inside but no one came to the door, they walked around the house into the backyard, where the mews was located.

As Nate came around the corner, he turned his head and looked straight into the gaping black O of a large handgun muzzle. An arms-length behind it was a gaunt, bearded man in a torn green army parka standing close to the exterior wall of the home. At the gunman’s feet was an open paper sack filled with frozen dead pigeons. He’d obviously been out feeding his falcons in the mews in the backyard when they’d arrived.

“C. W. Reese?” Nate asked softly. “I’d suggest you put that down.”

“Who are you and how do you know my name?”

As Reese asked it, Geronimo came around the corner and quickly stopped.

“Nate Romanowski,” Nate said. “And this is Geronimo Jones.”

Reese’s mouth dropped open and his eyes got wide.

“Seriously?” he asked.

“We’re not armed at the moment,” Nate said. “We left our weapons in the car. So, if you don’t holster that handgun, I’ll take it off you and pound your head with it.”

“Do what he says,” Geronimo said to Reese. “If you’ve heard of Nate Romanowski, you know what he’s capable of.”

Reese slowly opened his army jacket with his left hand and slid the .50 Desert Eagle into a long black holster. “I like powerful handguns, too,” he said to Nate. To Geronimo, Reese said, “Welcome to my humble home.”

“Can we sit down inside?” Geronimo asked him.

“Absolutely,” Reese said. His demeanor had completely changed. “Let me kennel my dogs and then you can come on in. I can make another pot of coffee.”

“That would be nice,” Geronimo said.

Reese paused at the back door before going in. “I never thought Geronimo Jones and Nate Romanowski would show up here.”

After Reese went inside, Geronimo leaned into Nate and said, “You’re quite the celebrity, it seems.”

“You too.”

“Did you really leave your weapon inside the truck?”

“Of course not,” Nate said.

—

Reese’s kitchen was unkempt, with dishes piled high in the sink and unopened mail and flyers covering the countertops. While a pot of coffee brewed, Reese opened his refrigerator door and showed them a display of two dozen handguns and compact submachine pistols sitting next to each other on the racks. The only non-gun item inside was a six-pack of Moose Drool beer. He explained that his basement had recently flooded, so he had to relocate his inventory to the top floor.

“I don’t have a proper gun safe,” Reese said. “But if you’re interested in any of these pieces, I’ll make you a hell of a deal.”

“We’re not here to buy guns,” Nate said.

“What’s in the freezer?” Geronimo asked.

Reese opened the door and stepped aside to reveal hundreds of small paper bags crammed into it that fit into the space like a puzzle. Both Nate and Geronimo knew instantly that the bags were filled with frozen roadkill, pigeons, and rodents to feed his falcons.

“Pickings are slim here in the winter,” Reese said. “Sometimes we can grab up a few ducks on the river, but I have to stockpile falcon food.”

“Understood,” Geronimo said.

The place reminded Nate of a half dozen homes of falconers that he’d either lived in or visited over the years. Serious falconers didn’t care about entertaining guests or the overall decor. Houses were simply places to store gear, food, and weapons between trips out into the field with their birds.

“So tell me about Axel Soledad and the Giantess,” Geronimo said.

—

An hour later, after recounting the approach by Axel Soledad and the follow-up from the woman Reese referred to as the Giantess, he said, “I’d like to come with you guys if you’re going after him. That guy not only stiffed me on twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of rifles and shotguns, he’s a dangerous liar who is misrepresenting the cause. He needs to be dealt with.”

Nate and Geronimo exchanged a glance. “What guns?” Geronimo asked.

“Oh—I didn’t tell you how I met Soledad in the first place.”

“No, you didn’t,” Geronimo said with a scowl. “You seemed to have left that part out.”

Reese ignored the dig. “He showed up here last October driving a 2012 Honda Civic with Colorado plates. He parked right out front on the street and came to the front door on crutches. He said he’d heard about me through some friends and he wanted to do business. Did you know Soledad has to use crutches to get around?”

“Yes,” Geronimo said. “He got his legs blown out in Portland a few years back. Now, go on.”

“Yeah, well,” Reese said. “He didn’t identify himself as Axel Soledad. He gave me a fake name, Dallas Cates, or something like that. It was only later that I put two and two together.”

Nate didn’t react, even though Cates, an ex-con with a bottomless grudge against Nate and Joe, and who had allied himself with Soledad, had been directly responsible for Liv’s murder. And Nate had dealt with him the best way he knew how.

“Anyway, he seemed like a good guy,” Reese said. “Friendly, capable. One of us, you know? He asked me about my military service, and he did it in a way that suggested he was a vet. I told him about feeling completely betrayed by the U.S. government, and especially by the higher-ups. About how they sent us into harm’s way in Afghanistan and then betrayed us. He said he had a similar story—”

“You don’t need to go into all of that,” Geronimo said. “I’ve read the threads. Tell us what Soledad did when he was here in this house.”

“He was casing me out, is what he did,” Reese said. “The whole time, he was probing me to see where I stood. He got me to like and trust him, and I’m not an easy mark. I showed him my inventory and then I helped load up that Civic with seven semiauto long guns and six combat shotguns. It was my biggest sales to a single individual ever. Then he gave me a check inside an envelope and said he’d be in touch.”

Reese paused and spat out a series of curses before continuing: “Only after he left did I open the envelope and look at the check to see it belonged to someone named Katy Cotton of Walden, Colorado. And when I tried to cash it I found out the account had all of two hundred and twenty-five dollars in it. That son of a bitch stole somebody’s checkbook and screwed me.”

“Katy Cotton?” Geronimo asked Nate.

“Joe Pickett’s birth mother,” Nate said. “It’s a long story, but he hadn’t seen her for years until her body was found less than a mile from his house a year ago. She’d been murdered by a carjacker who disappeared. Now we know it was Axel and he drove straight up here to arm up.”

“He’s a son of a bitch,” Reese said. “He got me to trust him and then he screwed me.”

“When did he contact you again?” Geronimo asked.

“End of summer,” Reese said. “He sent me an encrypted message on Bal-Chatri. He said he liked my posts and he said he was assembling some guys to get revenge on people who betrayed us overseas. At that point, I didn’t realize that Soledad and the guy who screwed me out of my inventory were one and the same.”

Geronimo moaned. “Axel must have figured out how to get back on the site after we locked him out. I don’t know how he did it.”

“He’s diabolical, is what he is,” Reese said, his eyes bulging. “And he strung me along and said all the right things about reclaiming our country from those bastards. I was ready to sign up with him and join him, if you want to know the truth.”

“Why didn’t you?” Nate asked.

“Because he tripped up,” Reese said with a satisfied leer. “He mentioned that he could send a couple of his guys to Gardiner to pick me up. But I had never revealed on the site where I lived. Not even the state. My profile on the site is anonymous, like most of the members. I’ve never mentioned it in my profile or on the threads, have I, Geronimo?”

Geronimo agreed. “No. It wasn’t until I spoke to you directly that you told me where you lived.”

“But Axel knew, that bastard,” Reese said. “Because he’d been to my house and had stolen twenty-five thousand dollars of my inventory. Now he wanted me to join up with him. He must have thought I was really stupid not to figure out that this Dallas Cates, whoever he is, and Axel Soledad were the same guy. That’s when I bolted and refused to respond to any of his messages. He must have known he fucked up.”

“That’s where the Giantess comes in,” Geronimo prompted.

“Yes. She contacted me through BC as well.”

“Damn it,” Geronimo spat. “How many impostors do we have on my site?”

“She wanted to meet me and hear all about Axel,” Reese said. “She wanted to come here, but I didn’t want anyone else knowing where I lived. Finally, we agreed to meet in Billings at a little restaurant there. I hoped she’d help me find Axel, and she seemed to know a lot about him.”

“What is she like?” Geronimo asked.

Reese’s eyes widened again and he stood up and reached high above his head. “She’s really tall,” he said, indicating with his hand her height of about seven feet. “Really tall, and blond. But proportional, you know? She made me feel like some kind of midget. To be honest, I was kind of scared of her.”

“What kinds of questions did she ask you?” Geronimo said.

“It was mainly about what Axel was up to. I had to tell her I didn’t know any specifics, because I don’t. I only know the general outline, you know? She kept pressing, but I held firm. She said she was following up with people across the country who had been contacted by Soledad, trying to put some kind of lawsuit or case together. She was vague about that.”

“Who does she represent?” Nate asked.

Reese shrugged. “Not me. I asked her to go after him to get my inventory back at least, but she said she didn’t want to get involved with a large weapons transaction.”

As he said it, Reese looked away and Nate noticed.

“You sold him the guns without a background check, didn’t you? The sale is technically illegal.”

“This is Gardiner,” Reese said sheepishly. “We kind of do our own thing here.”

Nate narrowed his eyes. “How many of the guns you sold were left with you on consignment?”

Reese’s face turned red. “Most of them,” he said in a near-whisper. “The guys who consigned them to me are really putting the pressure on. They want their guns back or they want the money that was paid for them. Obviously, I don’t have either, so I’m really in a jam.”

Geronimo said with scorn, “You sound like a hell of a businessman.”

“I’m not a businessman,” Reese said. “I’m a falconer. You know how it is. We do what we can so we can take our birds out.”

“Back to something you said,” Nate pressed. “You said you wanted to go after Soledad because he is misrepresenting the cause. What do you mean by that?”

Reese became solemn. “There are a lot of us disaffected military veterans out here. We feel like we got played and that the people in charge used us to advance their own careers or because they had their own agendas. They sold us a line of bullshit about serving our country and then threw us under the bus. None of them have been accountable for it. I thought Axel understood. But I think he’s using some of us, just like we got used before.

“I don’t know what his game is, or what his target is. I just know he needs to be stopped. So can I come with you boys?”

Geronimo and Nate again exchanged a look. Then Nate said, “No.”

“Come on,” Reese pleaded. “I can hold my own.”

“You’re a loose cannon,” Nate said. “You don’t deserve to be a master falconer and you hurt the reputation of falconers in general. You defrauded your business partners, you’re impulsive, and you talk too much.”

“I have to agree,” Geronimo said, standing up. “Thank you for the coffee.”

“Oh, come on,” Reese said. “I can follow orders. You’ll see.”

“We can’t take that chance,” Nate said, turning his back on the man. Then: “Get some help. You need it.”

As Nate and Geronimo were leaving the house through the front door, Reese followed a few steps behind. He seemed desperate.

He said, “Did I mention I have the business card the Giantess gave me?”

Nate paused on the pathway and turned around. “You do?”

“I’ll share it with you if you’ll take me along,” Reese said. “Here, let me go get it.”

While he disappeared into his back bedroom or office, Nate said. “I don’t trust him.”

“We might need some bodies to take on Axel,” Geronimo said. “But this guy seems like trouble.”

“He just wants his money or his guns back,” Nate said. “I don’t blame him, but that’s not a good reason to bring him in. And I don’t think he’s mentally stable.”

“You mean like you?” Geronimo said with a grin.

Reese returned and handed Nate a semi-battered gold card inscribed with black lettering. The card read:

Cheryl Tuck-Smith

Attorney-at-Law

314 N. Reed Ave.

Cheyenne, WY 82001

To Reese, Nate said, “We’ll call you if we need you.”

They left him disappointed, but hopeful.