The hawk soared and circled and glided and then soaredcircling again, thermal to thermal, picking out details with the crystalsharpness of her hunter’s eyes. I rode with her, adding buildings that Irecognized, street names, details that would help me follow her flight toplaces on the ground.
I saw things that weren’t Sandy, people that weren’t Sandy,reasons why people feared this magic and outlawed it. I saw planters in a roofgarden, suspicious foliage scattered among innocent, “pot” in pots, they’dbetter harvest it soon because hard frost lurked on our northern horizon. I sawa couple naked in the afternoon sun, sex on the balcony if anyone out ofhundreds had looked up from the streets and sidewalks below, looked out fromwindows around. I call it sex rather than love, because I saw a man on arooftop nearby, he would have been clearly visible from the balcony, with whatlooked like a video camera with telephoto lens on a tripod, recording thatscene. Staged “peeping Tom” porn, coming to a neighborhood near you.
Seeing through hawk’s eyes, able to pick out a mouse in thegrass hundreds of yards away, I saw tiny bags of white powder exchanged forgreen paper on street corners, I saw other bits of green paper pass between manand woman before they vanished indoors, I saw still more bits of paper passfrom sidewalk through the open window of a police cruiser. The cruiser pulledaway, leaving those other transactions unmolested.
I should have written down the car number and the time andplace, more stains on the badge of every honest cop, stains like those twoslimeballs up in Podunk Hollow. But I’d never used this trick before, and Icouldn’t be sure of the number when I switched back to my own brain. Like crowsand ravens, hawks can count, but they don’t use written numerals.
People feared this magic. They should.
More of this, and then the alarm went off, and I pulled thehawk back to our parapet, and I opened my eyes. We hadn’t found Sandy. My headhurt, and this time it had nothing to do with the lump and scab she’d leftthere. Sweat pooled under my ass and slicked my back. Magic burns calories.
I asked the hawk, friend to friend, if she’d meet me hereagain next morning. I promised her another pigeon. She cocked her head to oneside and then the other, staring at me, as if judging distance to her prey byparallax, and then took off again. I wasn’t sure if that meant “yes” or “no” or“you look tasty” in red-tailed hawk body-language.
That would be as it would be. I hoisted myself out of thechair, closed the window, left my answering machine blinking to itself, andlocked the office. I crutched to the stairs and stopped and studied them for aminute or two, dreading, and then headed down my halting timorous way, one stepat a time, one landing at a time, like the aging cripple I was.
Folks, don’t sneer at handicap access the next time someoneasks you to “waste” a hundred grand on an elevator retrofit in a publicbuilding. Sooner or later, you’regoing to be looking at those stairs and dreading them. Age, sickness, injury,they get us all.
I made it to the bottom alive. I made it back to my apartmentalive, and blessed that creaking groaning glacial-slow elevator for surcease,and found Sandy’s apartment exactly as I’d left it, and the same for mine. Ishowered off my sweat, changed, cooked up dinner — lamb chops with mint jellyand garlic-parsley potatoes and frozen Lincoln peas from the spring farmer’smarket — and went to bed.
I actually slept. Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe theresolution of some of those problems I’d had hanging over my head like thesword of Damocles. I had a target. I had a weapon and a course laid out. I’dmade choices, for good or ill.
Next morning, I crutched back to the office building and intothe alley and the courtyard. I wasn’t going to hump my ass up those stairs fornothing, then back down again and over to the park if I had to go catch my hawkagain. But I found her waiting, perched on that parapet like a gilded MalteseFalcon in the yellow dawn. No, I don’t know why she came. Bored maybe, like Isaid. And she felt comfortable bonding with a human.
Pigeons circled overhead, no way they’d land next to a knownterrorist. I picked out one flying, felt the hawk join me, and threw a crampinto one breast muscle that lamed the pigeon’s flight into a flutteringdownward spiral. The hawk snatched her breakfast and settled down to feed. Istood, letting the thrill of hunt and kill wash out of me, letting my poundingheart and lungs quiet before I chanced the stairs.
We didn’t find Sandy that day, or the next, and I sweated moreeach day, dreading news, knowing that the clock was ticking. I needed to find Sandy, and this was thefastest way I knew. Anything else, anything legal and mundane like watching herbank accounts, could take months or years or never work at all. Sandy had beena cop. She knew how to dodge that stuff.
And then one fine late November morning, frost in the air anda stiff breeze blowing, the red-tail spotted Sandy’s old Mercedes parked in acul-de-sac of five-story brick apartment buildings. I asked the hawk to circle.She couldn’t find thermals for soaring but she seemed to feel a challenge andjoy in the currents and turbulence, a test of skill for a superb pilot. Myavian partner didn’t catch any sign of Sandy’s aura from that distance, but onthe rear of the building, third floor corner near a rusty iron fire escape, wefound a feeder tray set outside one window.
I couldn’t gauge different sight-lines and angles from thesky, but I guessed that tray would hide from any eyes on the ground. Sandywould have checked. The hawk tipped and swooped, lower, lower, riding troubledair and mastering it as she dropped between the buildings, and
