Looking for Godfrey (Noble Dimensions 3)

By Erin O'Quinn

Shawn Murphy, a Nevada game warden, is a different kind of cop. With more than 10,000 miles of wilderness to serve and protect, he’s put a lot of miles on his F250 truck in the pursuit of poachers, arsonists, freewheeling miscreants and others. But when he meets a falconer named Dylan Morgan, he discovers how hard it can be to enforce the law.

Dylan’s a poacher, a wild-eyed falconer who’s lost his bird to the scorching blue skies of the Paiute Range. It should be easy for Shawn to fine the man and let him go...but he’s wounded and needs his help. To make the situation a little more complicated, Dylan’s also a gay man needing more than a bandage on his foot.

Hours after meeting Dylan, Shawn encounters a different kind of poacher—a violent man with murder on his mind who leaves him to the mercy of the parched wilderness.

After leaving the ICU and in spite of the odds, he goes in search of a man who’s already tried to kill him, one who’s slaughtering bighorn sheep to sell their horns. Dylan, pining for his trained bird Godfrey, joins the hunt, hoping for a sign of his vanished falcon. On a quest into Nevada’s harsh wilderness, both men find something else—something without a name they’ve both been looking for all their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erin O'Quinn
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005202767

Erin O'Quinn

Erin O’Quinn sprang from the high desert hills of Nevada, from a tiny town which no longer exists. A truant officer dragged her kicking and screaming to grade school, too late to attend kindergarten; and since that time her best education has come from the ground she’s walked and the people she's met.Erin has her own publishing venue, New Dawn Press. Her works cover the genres of M/M and M/F romance and also historical fantasy for all ages.

Book preview

Looking for Godfrey

Noble Dimensions 3

by

Erin O’Quinn

Looking for Godfrey

Copyright © 2022 by Erin O’Quinn

New Dawn Press

ISBN 9781005202767

Cover Art © 2022 Erin O’Quinn (Bonita Franks)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author ’ s imagination or are used fictitiously; and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

WARNING: This writing contains explicit sexual descriptions and is intended for a mature audience over the age of 18.

If a quest was easy, they wouldn’t write books about it.

~Dylan Morgan, Looking for Godfrey

~~ o ~~

Dedication and Foreword

In fond memory of Nevada—its deserts, waterways, and mountains—and towering above all, its rugged, unique people.

The town of Noble and all named areas and landmarks are entirely fictional, as anyone who knows Nevada will quickly figure out. The reader will find instead a kind of patchwork of places I’ve known since childhood, of scenery I’ve long held in memory, and of landscapes created in dreams.

Introduction

About six years ago, I wrote a short piece whose title is now deleted. I’ve decided to re-write the story, turning it into a novel-length work with a different emphasis. The characters’ story takes place mainly in the mountains fifty miles from the fictional small town of Noble, Nevada.

The former work just kind of…ended…half-way through, with no resolution, nothing for the men to hang onto. This time around, I hope Shawn and Dylan find more to deal with and to learn from, somewhere in the vast dry realm of Nevada’s high desert wilderness.

Looking for Godfrey

If a quest was easy, they wouldn’t write books about it.

Shawn Murphy, a Nevada game warden, is a different kind of cop. With more than 10,000 miles of wilderness to serve and protect, he’s put a lot of wear on his F-250 truck in the pursuit of poachers, arsonists, freewheeling miscreants, and others. But when he meets a falconer named Dylan Morgan, he discovers how hard it can be to enforce the law.

Dylan’s a poacher, a wild-eyed falconer who’s lost his bird to the scorching blue skies of the Paiute Range. It should be easy for Shawn to issue the man a fine and let him go…but he’s wounded and needs his help. To make the situation a little more complicated, Dylan’s also a gay man needing more than a bandage on his foot.

Hours after meeting Dylan, Shawn encounters a different kind of poacher—a violent man with murder on his mind who leaves him to the mercy of the parched wilderness.

After leaving the ICU and in spite of the odds, he goes in search of a man who’s already tried to kill him, one who’s slaughtering bighorn sheep to sell their horns. Dylan, pining for his trained bird, joins the hunt, hoping for a sign of his vanished falcon Godfrey.

On a quest into Nevada’s harsh wildlands, both men discover something else—something without a name they’ve both been looking for all their lives.

Chapter 1

The Falconer

Shawn Murphy woke early to a cloudless spring day somewhere near the river on the Paiute Range of Nevada’s Bristlecone Basin. Part of his six-foot-three lay in the rear cab of his F-250, with his bare feet jutting out the window. As small as it was, this bedroom felt like the Hilton freaking Hotel. He was free—last night and today anyway.

He straightened and stretched, then unwound his body to take a piss, sweeping a large hand through his tangled hair, then his close-trimmed beard.

He could have slept in town, spent two hours on the road getting here when his boss at the Department expected him to show up. Instead, he’d decided to arrive in the twilight yesterday and bring his dog Sherwood, squat at a grill, spend some time by himself.

He tried not to think of the real reasons for shunning his small apartment in Noble—the two or three days’ matted beard on the man he lived with, the smell of beer in his hair and vomit on his clothes. When had a handsome man become a bleary-eyed bum? He tried to remember when he and Lane Anderson had laughed and fucked all night long, then got up and somehow made it through a workday, then come home to do it again.

When had the lovemaking turned to arguing and shouting? A year ago or more? When did Lane start bringing home a bottle every night, or a six-pack? Funny how life is…while shit’s happening, a person doesn’t really see it happening. Only when looking back.

Shawn knew one of them—hell, both of them—had changed. He could not, for the life of him, put a finger on when it started. But he knew it had to end. He started ticking off in his mind the reasons he needed to tell the man to pack up and get out, forget the thirty days’ notice. Just get out.

One, you’re an alkie, pal. Face it…you need help. I can’t stick around to babysit your habit.

Two, you’ve started to open your ass to any drunk that stumbles into the Red Rooster, anyone with extra bucks in his pockets. And guess what? I don’t give a rat’s behind.

Because three, I have no feeling left for you. Anywhere. Not in my heart, not in my cock. Not in the heart of my cockles even.

He stood pissing against a small side hill, watching the dazzling sky. He’d take this sky, these rocks, this high desert over any place he’d ever been. If Lane wouldn’t get out, he’d rather leave him where he was and live out of his Ford right here on the pebbled edges of the Paiute River. Yet he knew that was a damn cop-out. The apartment was leased in his name. He’d better grow a set, and soon. Funny, he usually had no problem wielding the whip hand. But Lane was so fucking dependent on him…

Trying not to think about his former lover, he found himself scowling and muttering. He wondered how many bartenders were alcoholics, how many of them brought home their wares, and their clientele, too.

Shawn bent and picked up a stray mesquite branch and threw it for the dog. At least one of them felt exuberant. Hell, Sherwood knew himself as Woody for a reason. Watching his furry friend streak after the quarry, he tried to think about the current assignment that had brought him to the river.

Jeff Courtney had sent him to check on reports of someone shooting birds here and there along the old road leading to the Paiute River. Firing a pellet rifle from the driver’s side of a fifth wheel truck meant to him that some falconer was probably shoring up small birds to feed his trained raptor. He’d met a few of them, vagabonds at heart—men who loved their birds more than their own well-being. He’d had to chase off a few in the past, and he’d never felt right doing it. But it was his job.

He reckoned he’d spend most of today tracking the river, listening for vehicles, watching the sky and running with the dog. Then he’d sleep again in the cab of his F-250 while Woody, a terrier-retriever mix, could spend another night in doggie heaven, curled in the bed of the truck.

Even while he planned his day, he set his jaw, knowing he was avoiding the inevitable—dumping a man he’d once thought he couldn’t live without. Now he had no idea how to do it, not without abandoning someone who could hardly pull on his own cowboy boots.

He walked back to the Ford, keeping his eyes on the ground and sky both, listening for any sounds alien to this familiar landscape.

Since he’d arrived around six last night, he’d heard nothing, seen no one. There was no other vehicle out here on a goddamn gravel road climbing the Paiute Range, winding its way from the vast Bristlecone Basin. In his opinion, whoever had reported the shootings could have been driving miles from this spot and was using guesswork to pinpoint this area along the river. Either that, or the shooter had gone somewhere else.

Still, he was an agent of NDOW—the Nevada Department of Wildlife—and it was his solemn damn duty to find the perp, if any, issue a citation, and send him on his way. But today, for some reason, he was more like a renegade than a game warden.

Shawn felt a little guilty turning his back on the gray shirt with its proud logo, buttoned neatly on a hanger behind the front passenger seat. But no one in his right mind would drop by just to check whether he was wearing his uniform today, well past any hunting season. Hell, you’d need four-wheel drive just to enter this neck of the river basin. Here, the ground was mainly loose river rock, narrow washes and crumbling shale. The only real growth more than fifty feet from the river were the tenacious stands of mesquites, their roots joined in a tangle of deep fingers searching for ground water. The bristlecones, his favorites, were scarce, and much farther up-range with the bighorns and the mule deer.

Shawn set up his hibachi and waited about twenty minutes for the charcoal to reach the right heat, shaving and trimming his close beard by feel as he crouched in the truck bed at his makeshift basin. Then he went about making a pot of strong black joe. He threw a few pieces of thick-cut bread on the tiny grill and stirred water into a metal cup of powdered