Page 44 of Three-Inch Teeth

“I didn’t know that,” Bottom shouted back. “I just know they’re obnoxious.”

“Individually, I really like them,” Sheridan confessed. “They’re beautiful birds and they’re really smart. But the trouble starts when they mass up by the hundreds, which is the situation you’ve got here.

“Not only that, but they displace native birds and they can carry diseases,” she said. “They can contaminate water and livestock feed, and their excrement is full of bacteria and parasites. They are not good birds to have around in this kind of number.”

“Do you think you can chase them away?” Bottom asked her.

“I’m sure of it,” she said. “But I’ll need all my falcons to do it.”

They stepped outside the barn so they could talk normally.

Bottom said, “I’ve tried everything I can think of to get rid of them. I tried to smoke them out, scare them with fireworks. I’ve shot a hundred of them with a pellet gun. Nothing seems to work. And then I heard about your bird abatement company.”

She said, “I’m glad you did. Starlings are either too stupid or too arrogant to be scared away. But there’s one thing they’re terrified of.”

Sheridan explained that the imprint of a falcon in flight was hardwired into the tiny brains of the species from the moment they hatched. They knew instinctually that falcons could, and would, kill them with ease. Whether in the wild or from the glove of an experienced falconer, starlings knew that their only defense was to flee.

She said, “Once I put my birds up, those starlings might all leave at once in a big black cloud. Or it may take a couple of days.”

“That would be wonderful,” Bottom said. Then, hugging himself, he said, “I knew it would work. I’m so brilliant.”

Which was what a man used to great wealth might say, she thought. He didn’t praise the plumber for unclogging his toilet or the electrician for getting his lights to work again. Instead, he praised himself for calling the plumber or electrician.

She also thought that Liv back at Yarak, Inc. HQ knew what she was doing by sending Sheridan south instead of Nate. Nate might have twisted Bottom’s ears off and fed them to his birds by now.

*

“YOU KNOW YOU can stay with us here on the ranch,” he offered as they walked from the barn toward Sheridan’s SUV. “We have four empty bedrooms in the house and I can deduct the rent from your fee. There’s no need to waste your money with Kolb in town.”

She thanked him for the offer and didn’t say that there was no way she wanted to share a house with Katy, whoever she was. Or Leon Bottom, for that matter.

“I’ll be back tomorrow with the full flight,” she told him.

“This I want to see,” he said enthusiastically. While he said it he actually rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “A black cloud of starlings flying off to Nebraska, or some such place. This I really want to see.”

Then: “I’m glad you said it might take a couple of days to get rid of them all. I have an appointment with my banker in Fort Collins tomorrow that I can’t miss, but I’ll be back tomorrow evening and around the second day.”

Sheridan knew that Fort Collins was a hundred miles to the east over the top of the mountains on Poudre Canyon Road. She was used to people driving distances like that for daily business transactions.

“I can’t trust the local bankers,” he said, as if she’d asked him for his reasoning on why he used an out-of-town bank. “When I get back, I hope you don’t mind if I watch?”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “But give me lots of space. The falcons get jittery if there are people around they don’t know.”

“I’ll be sneaky,” Bottom said, crossing his heart. “I swear it.”

*

THERE WAS A note on Sheridan’s windshield, pinned against the glass by the wiper blade. Scrawled in old-fashioned cursive was:

Go away and never come back.

Sheridan had no doubt who had written it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Little Laramie Valley

IT WAS ON late afternoons like this, when the clouds were low and close and had closed a lid over the Snowy Range and the sun could not yet break through, that former Twelve Sleep County prosecutor Dulcie Schalk hurt the most. She didn’t know if it was low-pressure, atmospheric feelers from a coming snowstorm, a change in the humidity, or a combination of those factors that made her bones and muscles ache and took her back to that incident four years before when her life had changed on the steps of the county courthouse.

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