Page 5 of Magnum, Volume 1

“The hawks mostly stay to the northeast,” I told them, “and the eagles to the southwest. They only occasionally have arguments over territory. The crows bug the shit out of both, and the ospreys ignore all of them so long as no one swoops in and grabs what they’re about to catch in the water. There’s a heron who occasionally does that, and it pisses the ospreys off big time.”

“Who needs TikTok when you have this in your backyard?” Storm asked, and my opinion of her rose a half degree.

I couldn’t help but argue with her, though. “I consider this the front yard, and the street-facing side the backyard.”

She glanced up at me with her brow furrowed, but then nodded and looked back into the binoculars. “Yeah, okay. That makes sense. It’s all semantics anyway, so you get to define it however you want. Man, what I wouldn’t give to have my super-duper telephoto lens with me. One of the eagles just brought a fish back to the nest, and I think it’s possible he or she is feeding it to juveniles.”

“Yes, second brood of the season. The fledglings aren’t usually this small, this late in the year, but they lost the first babies. I have a feeling it was the owls, but I didn’t see what happened to them.”

Bud looked toward the back wall, and then got up and left. When he opened the door, I heard Mad Dog’s bike in the distance. I’d have probably heard it before him if we were outside — I tend to hear low-pitched sounds over treble ones better than the wolves, but not from inside.

“I know Bud wants me to wait to talk about why we’re here,” she said, “but since this is your house, I’d like to thank you for… I dunno, considering helping me, I guess.”

“Haven’t done anything yet, other than let you hang out in my boathouse a little while,” I pointed out.

“Right. Well, thanks for the hospitality. If you help me, I’ll do what I can to thank you for it, whether that’s money, or helping out around the place, or a combination. I’m a decent cook and kind of an obsessive cleaner. There are worse people to have around.”

He didn’t say anything, and it was awkward, so I asked, “What kind of owls?”

“Great Horned in the middle of the lake, barred at the northernmost end. We don’t usually see the barred owls from here, but I often see the big guys.”

“Probably hear them, too. Super-noisy during mating season. The barred ones are too, come to think of it, but not quite as bad.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about birds,” I noted, hoping for an explanation.

“My grandmother was a birdwatcher, and I guess I picked up a lot from listening to her, but I enjoyed going out with her. It’s peaceful, just sitting in nature without talking or doing anything.”

And that gave her a few more points in her favor. Turtles like nothing more than to sit on a log and just be. Humans are rarely good at that in the modern day.

Chapter 3

Storm

Magnum showed me where the osprey nest is and then pointed out a heron sitting in plain sight that I’d totally missed.

We were deep in conversation about the wildlife around the lake when Bud returned with two men, one of them bigger than a house, aptly named Squatch if it was short for Sasquatch.

Mad Dog was closer to Bud’s size, meaning still larger than most men, but small compared to Squatch and Magnum.

Bud made introductions, everyone took a seat. I put the chair I was in back into the little kitchen area and chose a comfy armchair in the seating area.

It was clear Mad Dog was the leader and Squatch the muscle, but I had a feeling he was more than just muscle.

I still didn’t have a handle on where Magnum fell in the hierarchy, other than having a huge house in the middle of nowhere to hide me.

Bud told me to talk, and I decided to start with the backstory, since the present-day stuff wouldn’t make sense without it.

“I’ve been tracking missing people for years,” I told them. “The ones nobody looks for when they go missing — homeless, kids aging out of foster care, or older teens still in the system who’ve either already run away and been brought back, or are on the record as threatening to. Men and women, but it’s like there are different criteria. The women tend to be either small and pretty or built like they could fight, with not much in between. The men come in all sizes, though. Pattern’s been the same for years. A cluster in one big city, then nothing for two months, then a cluster in another city. They’ve repeated in the biggest cities — San Francisco, Manhattan, Chicago. But mostly, they don’t repeat.”

The three Birmingham men clearly became more interested when I mentioned homeless going missing. There was something there, but no one interrupted or asked questions, so I dove into the current investigation.

“Six months ago, I received a Securedrop message from a whistleblower about a fight ring. High-end. Invitation only. Crypto payments. I followed the crypto thread he gave me and discovered it’s a shitload of money — 100K to attend, and then more on what I figure are bets on the fights, with a 25K minimum, from what I can see, with some people betting way more. Also, the fights happen every other month, on the second full weekend of every odd-numbered month.”

It was like talking to three emotionless walls, listening without responding, so I took a breath and kept going. “I saw it almost right away and didn’t want to put it together, because what are the odds, right? But it lines up with the missing people I’ve been chasing. I went back years and looked, and every month, the fight weekend happens and people go missing the following Tuesday night to Saturday night, and it even correlates to location, because if they’re taking people from California, it takes them an extra day or two to get there, while they land in New York pretty much right away.”

Did they get the connection? Bud had, but I wasn’t sure about these men, so I spelled it out. “This means they’re going out and collecting new people after a fight, and that gives them two months to train them and get them ready for the next big fight weekend.”

I’d helped myself to a bottle of Coke earlier, and I took a swig before continuing. “But I’m getting ahead of myself with location. I started looking at airport activity during those weekends and found one in bumfuck Virginia that’s way nicer than it needs to be for the kind of activity it usually has. It’s always super-busy on the second full weekend of every month. There’s a nearby place with organized private hunts, so I figure there’s a hunt on even-numbered months, and the fight thing the other months.”