I expected to find my hawk gone, fled with her pigeon, awayfrom that meddlesome human. She didn’t have any reason to stay. I sniffed at mydoor on the offhand chance Sandy had come calling, but only found my ownsignature there. The alarms, electronic and magical, still waited, quiet. Idisarmed them, unlocked, slipped inside, left the lights off, and reset thelocks behind me. I did not want awalk-in client just then.
My answering machine blinked and beeped. I checked it — maybeNef’s colonel had broken secrecy for a status report. Nope. Some salesman forYellow Pages ads. Despite the letdown, I felt relieved that it wasn’t Nef’s boss. Yes, I did want to know if she was alive ordead, but opening that box could kill Schrödinger’s Cat. I’d better leave itclosed until I’d found and defused Sandy.
So I labored on, over to the window, nerves on edge. I lookedand found her, still perched on that parapet, surrounded by bloody feathers anddiscarded pigeon bones, looking right back at me. I could feel her through theshielding in the glass, just as I could reach out and annoy the pigeons throughit, but I needed clearer contact, clearer “sight.” I lifted the sash. She didn’tfly.
Okay, like I’ve told you, I still don’t understand how thesethings work. The best I can describe it, she felt curious. Cats do that. That falconer, that partner she remembered, he’d never hurt her. Hooded her and kepther in darkness, kept her on jesses, hadn’t fed her as much as she wanted, buthe’d been gentle. She’d felt kindness and kinship in him. And now she lived ina city, nested almost within arm’s reach of a window. So she didn’t fear humans.She didn’t fear me.
Cats will hunt, will prowl, will explore even when they havefull bellies. They wonder what’s behind that bush, under that car, around thatnext corner. My hawk would fly just for the fun of flying, would search evenwhen she wasn’t hungry. She was curious.
She seemed to wonder what I hunted.
Maybe it’s rank anthropomorphism, laying the burden of humanfeelings on an animal, but I think she was bored. I’ve read that crows andravens get bored and go out to play, wolves and foxes and coyotes play. Why can’thawks?
Whatever the reason, she’d fed on her pigeon and then justwaited. She could have left at any time. I remembered that she could have lefther falconer. The first domesticated wolf could have left his human, left thatwarm fire and that discarded bone to chew, whenever he wanted.
I drew a deep breath and let it out, wondering if I should begrateful that she stayed. I remembered that empty man lying in somenursing-home bed, nothing wrong with him except that nobody lived there anymore.
Like I told you, I was desperate. I had to find Sandy before she made another try at killing Cash. Andthen, separate, there was the thing she’d taken from John Doe. Whatever it was,Sandy had thought it was worth murder in cold blood. I hoped I could find her before she passed it on to whoever hiredher, or before she could use it herself. In either case, I was pretty sure theresult would be bad, bad, bad.
All the clues pointed to something religious, somethingpowerful. Too many cases in history, mixing religion and power caused a lot ofpain. A lot of blood and fire and death. I knew it could be too easy for thatto happen here, in the good old USA.
I set an alarm clock I keep in the office for when I want totake a little nap, hoping that would pull me back before I got sucked in toodeep. Then I settled my ass into my chair, closed my eyes, and reached out toher again. I intended to go along for the ride this time, instead of justsending her out and asking for a report. Risky as hell.
This time, with no distractions from two sets of eyes, twovantage points, two moving bodies moving at far different speeds and grace, theworld snapped into clarity. Even sated with pigeon-meat, she felt eager for ourhunt. I thought about that falconer casting his wrist upward, loosing her intothe sky.
She rose. I felt her wing-beats, I felt her feathers, I feltthe turbulence of air twisted and buffeted by the walls and corners of the cityand the thermals rising from black tarred roofs. Above all, I felt the freedom.She found one of those thermals and rose on it with wings held still andcircled at the edge of it, higher, higher, the city spreading under us.
I made a search-image for her, not careless squirrels orcrippled pigeons, but Sandy’s old Mercedes seen from the air, I’d looked downon it from our windows often enough, Sandy’s witch-glow with her distinctivesignature, Sandy’s face and bulky body and the kind of clothes she often wore.I circled the hawk looking for those things and one thing more, the feedingtray Sandy kept outside her apartment window.
I counted on that. I knew Sandy well enough — not as well as Ishould have, that’s obvious, but well enough. She wouldn’t vanish underground,into the abandoned subway stations or steam tunnels of the homeless in ourcity, into the cellars. She hated closed spaces like those. Like the birds sheloved, she couldn’t stand dirt over her head and windowless walls around her.She needed sky and sun.
And she loved birds. Wherever she hid, wherever she’d fled,she would want a clear view of sky, of trees, of grass, of bushes. If sheremained in the city, she’d be somewhere near a park or marsh or stream or theun-mowed margins of highway or railroad,
