A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery

7

“You wouldn’t think that a manhunt for a gimpy two-hundred-year-old would be this difficult.” We stood there on the street behind the sheriff’s office and looked past Meadowlark Elementary toward the trees along Clear Creek that came from the Bighorn Mountains. Vic followed my gaze. “Maybe he’ll meet up with Virgil White Buffalo and solve both of our problems.”

“At least he’s unarmed.”

She snorted. “As far as we know.”

It was the middle of the day, and it was unlikely that Rockwell, or whoever he was, had gotten far. “Any ideas?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I spend my days trying not to think like a nut job.”

“Where is our Indian tracker when we need him?”

“I’m betting The Red Pony and then home.” She paused. “Drats, huh?”

I thought about the situation and what the old man’s intentions and motivations might be. “Where is Cord?”

“I assume still gainfully employed at the Busy Bee.” She turned and looked at me. “Surely you don’t think . . .”

I started across the courthouse parking lot toward the stairs leading down to Main Street. “It’s why he’s here.”

She followed, quick-walking alongside me in an attempt to make up for her shorter stride. “So, we know why he’s here?”

Staying to one side, I navigated the stairs. “Cord says he’s his bodyguard. I just wish I knew who sent him.”

My undersheriff jumped a few steps to confront me. “But this Rockwell character tried to kidnap him.”

I barely stopped before bowling the two of us down the stairs. “True.”

“And he was headed south, which kind of indicates Orson Welles in the three-quarter-ton.”

“Roy Lynear, the father.”

“Looking out for the son while we search for the Holy Ghost.”

“I suppose, but his father is the one who kicked him out.”

“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t want somebody to keep an eye on him.”

“Well, Rockwell hasn’t shown any interest in kidnapping Cord since being in contact with us. I guess he figures Cord is about as safe as he can be without being locked up.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “Then why are we sprinting to the Busy Bee?”

“Because you never can tell.” I moved past. “Let’s get off these stairs; I’m having way too many serious conversations here.”

When we got to the sidewalk, Saizarbitoria pulled up in his unit and reached across the bench seat to manually roll down the passenger-side window. “I want a new car.”

Vic laughed. “Get in line.”

“I’m not joking; there’s a guy over in Story that’s got a four-wheel-drive with cruise control and electric windows—I’ll pay half.” He lowered his head so that he could look up at me. “It’s even white. Please?”

“Put in a requisition, and I’ll see what I can do.” I rested my forearms on the sill of his door. “Anything on the fugitive?”

“I put an APB out on him and figured I’d make the loop down by the church just in case he decided to go there.”

“Good thinking.”

“Ruby called the Ferg in, and he’s on Route 16, started for the mountains to make sure he didn’t head up that way.” He threw a wrist over the steering wheel and glanced down through the heart of town. “He’s ancient. Where the hell could he have gone off to?” He pulled the car from the curb, flipped on the lights and siren, and the few cars in the main drag cleared to allow him to pass.

“Way to sneak up on ’em, Sancho.” She turned to look at me, the tarnished gold pupils dialed up to high, and planted a Browning tactical boot forward in a provocative manner. “Hey, Walt?”

“No, you can’t have a new vehicle.”

She started to punch my chest with the index finger that sometimes felt like a truncheon but then slowed the velocity until I could barely feel the tip of her finger as it rested there. “You know she’s dead, right?”

I stared at her.

“The mother, Sarah Tisdale, the one you’re hanging this whole investigation on. You know she’s dead.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Missing persons after the first twenty-four—you know the percentages.” She squared off in front of me, folded her arms, and looked at the sidewalk, which gave me a little relief from the metallurgy. “Three weeks and nobody’s heard from her? I don’t know who killed her, Walt, but she’s dead as Kelsey’s nuts.”

“She could . . .”

“No, she couldn’t.” She stepped in close and looked up at me. “Stop it.” She ran her fingers along the edges of my jacket lapels. “I know how you are and don’t think I don’t appreciate it.” Her hand rested over my heart. “I sometimes think that’s where your true strength lies, in that bullshit hope of yours, but I’ve also seen the aftermath when it doesn’t work out and we all get to watch you crawl from the wreckage.” She patted my heart and let her hand drop. “I’m just warning you that this is going to be one of those times.”

I nodded and raised my head to find the boy standing on the sidewalk only about ten feet away. “Hi, Cord.”

Vic turned and looked at him. “Jesus.”

He dropped his head, and we watched as a brief exhale wracked his narrow chest. None of us moved, and then his face rose and he smiled the crooked smile. “Hi.”

Vic traded the hand from me to him and held it there between them. “Kid, I’m sorry.”

He nodded. “It’s okay.”

The skinny youth started to walk past us toward the steps as Vic glanced up at me in appeal. I cleared my throat and called out to him. “Hey, Cord, how would you like to go meet your grandmother?”

He stopped and glanced back with a confused look on his face. “Huh?”

“Your father is Roy Lynear, and your mother is Sarah Tisdale?” He looked at me blankly. “That’s your mother’s maiden name, the name she had before she married your father—Tisdale. Did she ever mention any relatives you might’ve had here in Absaroka County?”

His head dropped, and he nodded. “Yeah, but she never told me any names.”

“But that’s why you really came here, to look for them, right?” He stared at me for a moment and then nodded again. “Would you like to meet your grandmother?”

His eyes escaped for an instant but then came back to mine, and the color there was like fear. “Would she like to meet me?”

• • •

We weren’t having much luck in locating Rockwell, so I took the opportunity of a trip south in hope of possibly finding him on the roadside as we had before. Figuring the kid could probably use some company in the backseat, I stole Dog back from Ruby; the only thing I was worried about now was that he was going to wear the brute’s hair off petting him.

“So, do you have any idea where Mr. Rockwell might’ve gone?”

He shook his head at me in the rearview mirror.

“We don’t want to hurt him; we may not even arrest him, but it would probably be a good idea if we knew where he was.”

He looked at Dog, who looked back at him.

Vic, still evidently feeling a little embarrassed at having Cord overhear our conversation, was now half-turned in the seat in order to attempt to engage the youth in conversation. “So, what are you doing with all the money you’re making washing dishes, Cord?”

I glanced at him in the rearview as he continued to pet Dog.

“Saving it.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know.”

My undersheriff pulled a leg up and tucked it under her. “A car?”

“I don’t drive.”

“How are you ever going to get a girl if you don’t have a car?”

He shrugged. “You have to have a car to have a girl?”

She smiled, exposing the lengthy canine tooth. “Doesn’t hurt.”

I interjected, “Especially if you’ve got a mustache and your name is Rudy.”

She reached over and slapped my shoulder without looking. “You ever had a girlfriend?”

“One time, kinda.”

“What’s kinda mean?”

He looked embarrassed. “I made a necklace for this girl I knew, but she’d been promised to her uncle, who was one of the elders.” He plucked a tuft of dog hair from the seat and let it float. “He was an old guy.”

Vic glanced at me and then back to Cord. “That’s fucked up, just so you know.”

I thought the kid’s head was going to explode. “You know you’re going to hell, right? I mean it’s okay—I’m going to hell, too.”

Vic’s voice took on a different tone as she continued to study him. “What makes you say that?”

“All my family is on the inside and they’re going to heaven, so where does that leave me?”

“What if they’re wrong?”

“I don’t think that they can be wrong.”

“Kid.” She gestured between the two of us. “Our very livelihood depends on everybody being wrong sometimes, trust me.” She leveled the eyes on him again. “So, what are you saving up for?”

He squirmed a little, obviously taken aback by Vic’s unadulterated attention—I knew how he felt.

“I don’t know; maybe a gun.”

I thought about the magazine the kid had buried in the pump house and unconsciously let off the accelerator. I put my foot down again when Vic glanced at me. There was an uncomfortable silence as I drove south on the two-lane blacktop. “What do you need with a gun—you’ve got us.”

He stopped petting Dog and glanced at me. “I won’t always have you, so I’ll need a gun.”

My undersheriff readjusted herself, the irony of her squeaking gunbelt underlying her next statement. “Who you wanna shoot?”

He sat there under her interrogation. “Nobody in particular; I just want to be left alone.”

“I get like that sometimes.”

I laughed.

She ignored me. “Cord, there are people out there who are good at believing things and following orders, and then there’s the rest of us, the ones who have urges and get mad about shit; the ones who ask questions. I’m one of those people, and I think I turned out all right.” She pointed a loaded finger at me. “Shut the fuck up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“. . . Anyway.” Her eyes softened as she studied him. “Just so you know; there’s room for all of us.”

I wanted to kiss her but just kept driving as the afternoon sun cast rays across the rolling hills in that horizontal light like clean windows.

• • •

Cord was leaning forward when we got to Short Drop, his eyes staying on the cottonwood from which the noose twisted in the breeze. “Did they hang somebody here?”

“A long time ago, or at least they think they did.”

“They’re not sure?”

I pulled the truck down the embankment and into the town proper. “Back in the day, saying you’d hung somebody was almost as good a reputation as actually having done it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This is cow country, and back in the late nineteenth century there was a lot of rustling, so if a town had a reputation of being hard on criminal activity, fewer operators were likely to go freelance and rustle cattle.”

His eyes were still on the noose as we drove by. “So they didn’t really hang anybody.”

I parked the truck in front of the Short Drop Mercantile. “I didn’t say that.”

Eleanor was standing on the boardwalk as we climbed out of my truck, and as tough as she was, I saw her sway just a tiny bit and then rest a hand on one of the support beams of the porch when she saw the boy.

I let Dog out, and he baptized a tumbleweed that had lodged itself against the steps. “Hey.”

Vic brought Cord around the side of the truck with a hand on the young man’s shoulder, and I watched as the breath caught in Eleanor Tisdale’s throat. “Um . . . Howdy.”

Cord glanced at me and then returned his eyes to her for only a second before dropping them to the gravel at his feet. “Hello, ma’am.”

Gathering herself, she pushed off the post and stepped toward the edge of the porch. “How would you folks like to come up and have a soda to wash the dust out of your mouths?” She started in but then added, “You can bring that grizzly bear, if you want.”

The beast and I followed Vic and Cord as they mounted the steps, and we followed the little troupe into the Merc, where, strangely enough, stacks of books stood all over the wide-planked oak floor in piles about three feet high. Eleanor tracked her way through the maze and stood amid the piles like some acolyte of literature. “I have a problem.”

I nodded as I reached down and plucked a particularly vintage tome from the nearest stack. “I know—it’s hard to borrow shelves.”

“I go to these auctions and estate sales and the one thing I cannot resist is the books, so I’m thinning the herd and taking the excess over to the library.”

I opened the volume to the title page and read: “The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXV, History of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming 1890.” I gently closed the heavy, leather-bound hardback and rested it against my chest. “Is this book for sale?”

She smiled at me with all the warmth of a Moroccan rug salesman. “Do you know what it’s worth?”

“I do.”

“Twenty-five dollars.”

I studied the marbled edges of the pages. “That’s not what it’s worth.”

“I wasn’t negotiating a price; I was simply trying to see if you knew the value.” She sighed deeply and picked up another from one of the towers near her. “I’m past the point of caring what things cost; I just want to know that beautiful and important objects are in the hands of people who will appreciate them.” She thumbed open the book in her hands. “Tensleep and No Rest, Jack R. Gage, first printing and it’s signed; do you know he was the governor of Wyoming for two years?”

“I do.”

She thumbed the binding. “I guess he wasn’t much of a governor, but he was a hell of a writer.” She tossed the book to me, and I caught it. “Twelve dollars.”

I stood there holding the two books and looking at the piles around us—they were like literary land mines just waiting to explode minds. “Um, is there any way I could get you to lock the front door and not sell any more books until I’ve had a chance to go through all of them?”

“I’m going to have the books out of here by Sunday afternoon. I’m closing the place and selling the merchandise—other than what goes to the library, of course.” She glanced at Cord, who stood holding his own selection. “Did you find something of interest there, young man?”

His eyes came up slowly from the open pages. “There’s a book?”

The proprietor’s eyes shone. “Well, I’m not sure which book it is you’re talking about.”

He tipped the cover up so that we could see the familiar green hills, a boy, and a horse.

“Oh, My Friend Flicka. Is that a book you’d be interested in?”

He looked embarrassed. “I, um . . . I don’t read that well.”

Vic took the book from him and flipped a few pages back. “First edition, first printing, signed and dated.”

The owner/operator turned back to look at me. “My mother was a friend of Mrs. O’Hara down in Laramie.”

I looked around the stacks on the floor, estimating that there must’ve been close to two thousand volumes. “I repeat my request.”

She spread her hands. “All gone come this weekend.” She turned and walked toward the heavy door leading to the bar. “C’mon, the refreshments are this way.”

We followed her into The Noose, and Eleanor scooped a few pops from the cooler at the bar-back and placed them on the counter.

“Mrs. Tisdale, we were thinking of making the run out toward the East Spring Ranch and taking a look around, and I was wondering if it would be possible for us to leave Cord and Dog here with you?”

She studied the young man now seated on the end barstool, his nose buried in the book, his finger tracing the lines as he read very slowly with his lips moving. “Hey, youngster.”

His head swiveled, and he looked at her, smiling.

“You think you can tote books?”

He nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, ma’am.”

I gestured to Vic, and we started toward the front door of the bar, but only after I paused at Eleanor Tisdale’s side. “You do know what that book is worth, right?”

She smiled as she watched her grandson, his lips moving in time to the words. “I know what it’s worth to him.”

• • •

“You told her about My Friend Flicka?”

I drove south and east of the little hamlet, the road undulating with the rolling breaks of the Powder River country. “It might’ve come up.”

She studied the stack that reposed on the seat between us, then picked up the heavier of the books and began studying the Bancroft. “It’s like a history of the state?”

“The history of the state.”

She leafed through the pages, marveling at the imprinted words on them, her fingers touching them like braille. “‘Even the serpent, emblem at once of eternal life and voluntary evil, was not absent, taking up his residence in the underground inhabitation of the prairie dog, to escape the blistering heat of the sands, where he sometimes met that strange inmate, the owl, also hiding from the intense sunshine of the plains. So did this region abound with life in ages when the white man, to the knowledge of the red man, was not.’”

“Pretty good for a historian, huh?”

She silently watched the scenery, or, in her opinion, the lack thereof, pass by. “Why do you suppose she didn’t mention closing the Merc when we were here before?”

“Seems sudden, doesn’t it?” I admired the profile of her features at once refined and dangerously focused. “Maybe something to do with news of the daughter and the grandson.”

“In what way?”

“Sometimes we spend our lives thinking we’re doing something, when in reality all we’re doing is waiting; maybe what Eleanor’s been waiting for has arrived.”

“Yeah, well . . . I wouldn’t know anything about that mother/daughter relationship thing.”

“Uh-huh.”

She closed the book in her hands carefully and looked at the Roman numerals on the binding. “Twenty-five of them?”

“Yep.”

“Think the ol’ broad’s got all of them?”

“Looks like.”

“So, what are they worth?”

“Thousands.”

“Let’s go back and rob the place.”

I smiled. “That would be against the law.”

She settled in the seat and propped her boots onto the dash. “We’ve done enough for the law—look where that’s got us.”

“Where’s that?”

She opened her arms and gestured to the landscape with dramatic flair. “Nowhere.”

• • •

We’d taken a left just after another of the roadside fatality markers onto a gravel road with a ranch gate hewn from strapped-together logs with an archway that read EAST SPRING RANCH. It wasn’t exactly the end of the earth, but you could send it a telegram from here, not that you’d get an answer.

I ignored the signs warning us that the land was posted and didn’t welcome trespassers and continued down the road toward what looked like one of the towers we’d seen in South Dakota. Once we got to the structure, I could see that the distance in both directions was strung with a ten-foot chain-link fence with three strands of diagonal barbed wire on top.

We stepped out of the Bullet and, looking at the desolate landscape, I got the odd sensation that I was back in the military. A breeze was coming off the mountains, cool and putting a rub in the air that I could feel between my teeth. I sighed the way I always did when I got that feeling, walked over to the large gate seated on a pair of rolling casters, and noticed a small intercom with a plastic shield to protect it from the weather.

On closer inspection of the greenish wooden tower, I could make out a small security camera under the eaves. “We may or may not be on Candid Camera.”

Vic walked to the fence and then across the dirt road. “Not motion activated, and it may not even be hooked up.”

“How can you tell?”

“The unconnected wires hanging off the back.” She returned to the gate and the intercom, flipping up the plastic cover and pushing one of the buttons. “Hello, have you found Jesus Christ as your personal savior? We’re on a mission, and we hear you fuckers are up to some really heinous shit in His name.” After a moment she turned to look at me with an eyebrow raised like a question mark. “I don’t think it’s working.”

“Are there wires hanging out of the back of it, too?”

“No, but it doesn’t make any noise, static, nothing—smart-ass.”

I came over and looked at the intercom and then the three massive padlocks on the gate. “I guess they’re serious about not wanting visitors.”

“You bring your bolt cutters?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

She looked past my shoulder toward the road, where a two-tone brown ’71 Plymouth Satellite station wagon with its leaf springs resting on its axles slowed at the turnoff. “Company.” The car stopped as the dust behind overtook it and blew our way, partially concealing us. “Is that color scours?”

“No, more of an Autumn Bronze Poly, as I recall.”

She glanced at me.

“I had one.”

She continued to stare at me and then muttered to herself, “Family man.”

The driver, an aged, extremely heavyset, Hispanic-looking woman in a powder blue prairie dress got out of the station wagon, went over to the roadside grave marker, and straightened the plastic, floral wreath attached to a makeshift wooden cross. Her hands were clasped at her waist and her head lowered.

Her ministrations continued for quite some time, and Vic finally spoke. “She praying her way to heaven or what?”

I stepped past her toward the newcomer on the dirt road. “Some people need it more than others.”

Probably hearing our voices, the woman’s head rose, and she looked at us through the thin veil of dust. Maybe it was the dress, maybe it was the surroundings, but I had the feeling that it was an old stare—one from a different era, a different time.

I waited as she slowly made her way back to the vehicle and climbed in, shifting the still-running car into gear and turning where we were parked, effectively blocking the road. I raised a hand and motioned for her to move. She paused, even going so far as to look back up the road for traffic, which was absurd considering our environs, but then turned, looked at me, and finally drove forward.

I walked over to her and strung a hand on the fender as I stooped to look inside, Vic walking past me, taking a textbook stance behind the woman’s left shoulder.

Her bloated face was surrounded by straggles of dark hair, gray at the roots, that had escaped from the bun high at the back of her head, and I could barely see her dark eyes. Her voice was surprisingly high and decidedly Spanish. “Sí?”

I looked into the station wagon, the backseat covered with an abundance of bulk-food containers, drinks, and home supplies in franchise plastic bags, and finally allowed my eyes to rest on what looked to be two dozen bricks of 12-gauge, .30-06, .357 Mag, and .50 BMG ammunition on the seat beside her. “I didn’t know Sam’s Club in Casper sold ammo, especially .50.”

Her hand dropped down and pulled the plastic back over the ammunition as if that might make it disappear. “No hablo Inglés.”

The blue-black smoke of the aged engine bellied out from under the rocker panels, and I just hoped we could get a few answers before dying of asphyxiation. “Well, señora, that’s going to make it hard for you to have a legal driver’s license.”

“Oh, I has license, Officer.”

My undersheriff chimed in. “And evidently more English than at first supposed.”

I smiled. “I’m a sheriff.”

She repeated, “Sheriff.”

I extended my hand, and she shook it with one that was swollen and moist. “I’m Walt Longmire.” I gestured toward my partner in noncrime. “This is my undersheriff, Victoria Moretti. And you are?”

“Big Wanda.”

“Wanda, do you mind if I have a look at that driver’s license?”

She hesitated for a second, then reached down again, dragging a sizable purse onto the transmission hump, and snuck a hand in to pull out a turquoise wallet stuffed with bills. She thumbed through a number of cards, then pulled out a Texas license and handed it to me.

I studied it and then handed it back to her. “Ms. Bidarte.” I thought about the tall, lean man I’d met at the bar and continued to smile, just so she’d know I wasn’t rousting her. “Are you by any chance related to the poet Tomás Bidarte?”

She nodded with enthusiasm. “Sí, he my son.”

“Well, you must be proud.” I also remembered Sheriff Berg’s remarks about the two women who had been married to the space jockey, Vann Ross—one of them having been named Big Wanda. “Well, I’m looking for Roy Lynear, and I understand he lives at this address?”

Her eyes, or what I could make of them, stayed steady. “He be my husband, but he not here.”

That’s one way of keeping it in the family. “Roy Lynear is your husband?”

“Sí.”

“I gather you were married before, then.”

“Sí.”

I nodded as I thought about what Tim had said concerning how the women in polygamy cults would file for abandonment to receive social services funding. “This license is almost four years old, ma’am. If you are residing in Wyoming, you’ll have to get a new one.”

She said nothing but tucked the license back into the billfold and rested it in her lap.

“Your husband—he’s not at the ranch?”

“No.”

I glanced around as if I might spot the man. “Then where is he?”

“Sur Dakota.”

I nodded. “Visiting family?”

“Sí. His father not good.” She shifted her bulk and glanced at the clock in the dash of the old car for a long moment, and I would’ve bet that it wasn’t working. “I got food in the car and need to go.”

“Would you mind if we followed you in?”

She stared at the dash, and I could see the agitation in her growing. “You cannot. No.”

“Then you won’t mind answering a few more questions here, will you?” Her eyes roamed the interior of the car but could find no easy avenue of escape. “Do you mind turning your motor off?”

She shook her head with a quick motion, still trying to avoid my eyes. “If I kill motor, it no start again.”

I glanced up at Vic, who had taken a step back to avoid the fumes. “Well, I’ll try and be brief. Wanda, we’re looking for a woman by the name of Sarah Tisdale. Do you know her?”

Her eyes shifted toward Vic and then refocused on the dash. “No.”

“No, you don’t know her or no, you’d rather not say?”

Her breath picked up. “No heard of her.”

“How about Sarah Lynear?”

She paused for a second and then glanced back at Vic again, and I was beginning to wonder what the attraction was. “No.”

“Well, that’s odd, seeing as how she was also married to your husband.” I kneeled down and rested my arm on the sill, pulled the photograph from my shirt pocket, and held it out to her. “You’re both married to the same man and you’ve never heard of her?”

Wanda glanced at the photo for only an instant and then patted the steering wheel as if urging it to go. “She no married to my husband.”

I continued to hold the photograph of the blonde woman out to her. “Maybe you should take a closer look.”

Instead, she moved to tuck the wallet back into her purse, accidentally opening it more than she’d wanted, exposing the Pachmayr grip of an S&W revolver where her hand lingered.

Still holding the photo in front of her, I gently slipped my hand down on the elk grips of my Colt, unsnapping the safety strap, a motion that did not go unseen by Vic. As I spoke, my undersheriff slipped the Glock from her holster but let it hang at her side, unnoticeable to the woman unless she looked specifically backward. “Mrs. Lynear, I need you to remove your hand from your purse very slowly and place both of them on the steering wheel.”

She didn’t move.

“Mrs. Lynear, I need you to do that right now.”

The beauty and the horror of a life in law enforcement is that you will, in your time, be stupefied at what people will do. I watched in that adrenaline rush of slow motion as Wanda withdrew her hand from the purse and reached up like a foregone conclusion. She threw the Satellite wagon into reverse and floored it.

I stumbled backward and Vic scrambled to the side, raising her 9mm and leveling it at the Plymouth as it tore backward down the dirt road toward the intersection. “Wait!”

She held the Glock steady but turned her head slightly to bark at me. “I’m shooting the radiator and/or the wheezing motor.”

I stood and joined her, watching the retreating car. “I don’t think that’s going to be necessary.” We watched as the majestic beast, still hanging low on its springs, rocketed backward across the macadam and slid off the other side with its prow in the air like an Autumn Bronze whale. “Thar-she-blows.”

Vic kept her weapon out and followed me as the tires ground on the side of the roadway in an attempt to find traction, the front wheels of the wagon sawing left and right like an upended tortoise.

After a moment the motor groaned, and the rear tires caught traction, lumbering the Plymouth up onto the road as Vic and I scattered like chickens in an attempt to get out of the way.

We watched as the car wheezed up to a good forty miles an hour and headed for the horizon. Vic joined me at the centerline and reholstered her weapon. “Are we about to engage in the slowest car chase in cinematic history?”

I sighed. “I believe so.”

• • •

We caught up with the station wagon in about three minutes. I had my light bar on but had left the sirens silent so as not to scare the woman any more than she was already.

Vic adjusted her seat back and put my hat over her face. “How long before she runs out of gas?”

“Nebraska.”

“Don’t bother waking me up.”

I tooled along behind the Plymouth, a confused rancher pulling his pickup to the side of the road and looking at me with a puzzled expression on his face as we passed him. From underneath my hat, Vic’s voice rose. “So, this would be classified as a low-speed chase?”

“Any slower and we’re walking.” I studied the road ahead and figured the station wagon would be crossing over into Campbell County before too long. I could call Sandy Sandberg and get him or the Highway Patrol to set up a roadblock and become the laughing stock of the entire Wyoming law enforcement community, or we could go to Nebraska.

There was a smallish knoll on a dividing ridge where the road took a slight S-curve, which was possibly the only creative feature between here and Scottsbluff. Periodically, Big Wanda would look into her rearview mirror and stare at me. What was she thinking I was going to do, shoot her? Granted, she had a weapon, but I doubted she’d intended to use it.

I kept my eyes in her rearview mirror, I was that close, and could see her still looking at me as we approached the curve—the only one, I was certain, between here and the Great Plains. I honked my horn and pointed ahead, in an attempt to get her to stop; Vic pushed my hat away and sat up.

“Did she break down?”

I honked again, but Big Wanda wasn’t watching the road; instead, paying no attention to what was coming up, her head leaning to the side, she continued to look at me through the rearview mirror as her right front wheel went off the road. I watched as she snapped around and yanked the steering wheel to the left, which would’ve been fine on any other portion of these hundred miles of road, but not this one.

The left front of the vehicle dipped into the gravel, and she sawed the thing to the right again, but the powder was thick and the slope at the side of the road steep and we watched as the big Plymouth rose up on two wheels. There was that second when I thought she was going to make it, but then the thing started over like a lazy dog into the slowest roll I’ve ever seen. It only went over onto its top, and then slid the rest of the way down the hillside into a slight depression at the bottom of the barrow ditch.

I pulled my truck over and parked it above the station wagon. Vic was already out of the other side and joined me as we picked our way down the clumps of dry grass and withered sagebrush on the hillside. The Plymouth sputtered a few more times as the carburetor attempted to pump gas skyward, and then miraculously smoothed out and continued to idle. “She’s going to need some help getting out of there.”

Vic still held her sidearm at the ready. “You do it.”

I gestured for her to take the passenger side as I took a few steps around the back, looking at all the groceries that were now lying on the headliner. “Mrs. Lynear?”

There was no answer over the sound of the motor.

Vic had made pretty good progress on the far side, crouching so as to not reveal too much of herself but getting close enough to see the woman. She paused and aimed the 9mm toward the car, taking a moment to raise her other hand and mimic an outstretched thumb and forefinger gesture that could only mean gun.

With a sigh, I pulled the .45 from my holster and called out again, raising my voice so she would be sure to hear me over the idling car—evidently the vehicle preferred upside down. “Wanda, you’re not in any real trouble yet. If you’ll just toss that pistol out the window, I’m sure we’d all feel a lot better!”

No response, but Vic continued forward.

It was about that time that the snub-nosed revolver fell from the driver’s-side window.

When I rushed forward, I could see Big Wanda clearly choking to death hanging from the seat of the Plymouth, her face purple and even more bloated. I grabbed the door handle, but the window rail was lodged in the dirt. Her hand reached out to me, and she grabbed my arm as I drove a hand in my back pocket to yank out my old Case knife. I reached up past her shoulder to get at the belt, but she must’ve misinterpreted my intentions and evidently thought I was trying to cut her throat because she began slapping at my hands. I forced myself in the window in an attempt to get a better angle on the webbing but still avoid her neck. She continued to choke and beat at me as I pushed her arms aside, reached past her head, and slit the belt, her entire three hundred pounds falling—on me.

She coughed, choked, and gasped a few breaths, and it was all I could do to catch mine in that a particularly large breast covered half my face. Her eyes turned to mine and she whispered, “Lo lamento . . . Lo siento, por favor.”

Vic had opened the other door and some of the groceries slid out onto the ground. She reached across the car with a smile on her face, shoved the gear selector into park, and switched off the ignition, the big Satellite giving up the ghost with a shudder, an elongated wheeze, and finally a hiss. Pulling the keys from the ignition, Vic tossed them near my face. “I guess she really didn’t want to kill the motor.”