A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery

10

Before Howard Robard Hughes Jr. became a business magnate, engineer, aviator, film producer, philanthropist, Jane Russell’s bra inventor, and all-around loony, he was the nineteen-year-old inheritor of 75 percent of Howard Robard Hughes Sr.’s empire. Like most billionaires, Howard Hughes was not a self-made man; the backbone of his fortune was built upon the development of the modern oil drilling bit already patented by the family company, Hughes Tool, in 1909. Being a pretty shrewd Texas oilman, H. H. Sr. had made the lucrative decision to lease the bits rather than sell them after he commercialized them.

I’m not sure if Junior ever came to Wyoming, even though Paramount offered to sell him Shane, the film they’d made in Jackson Hole, because it was so far over budget. Hughes turned down the opportunity even though he hadn’t seen it. Rumor had it that Paramount had settled on the loss and was going to turn the movie out to pasture as just another oater when Howard finally viewed the rough cut of the film. He offered to buy it outright, Paramount reconsidered, and the rest, as they say, is cinematic history.

If Hughes never made it to Wyoming, however, his daddy’s invention did; I’d seen it the summer I spent roughnecking after my senior year in high school, which was another part of my father’s campaign to teach me the value of higher education. All the lessons had taken, and I’d spent the next four years as an English major at the University of Southern California in an attempt to never return to the oilfields; so far, it had worked.

The two-cone roller bit—and, more important, its descendant, the three-cone roller bit—looked like the mouth of one of Frank Herbert’s giant sand worms in Dune, and with the addition of diamonds it appeared to have gone gangsta.

Double Tough spelled it out for Vic and me, his Appalachian drawl fitting the description. “One hundred seventy thousand dollars if it’s a penny.”

I studied the toothy-looking piece of heavy equipment that had taken two of us to lift onto the desk of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Office Substation in Powder Junction—our version of the French Foreign Legion and possibly the most depressing place in the world. I glanced up at a massive, yellowed map of the area so old that the interstate highway didn’t even appear on it. I noticed a cot in the back room through the open door and assumed this was where Double Tough was sleeping while Frymire had his fiancée in town. “Do you guys ever think about fixing this place up a little?”

He ignored me, rolled one of the teeth in the device, and picked a thick fingernail at one of the diamonds. “Polycrystalline, but they’re diamonds nonetheless. Hell, I only seen one of these one other time and that was down in Bolivia.”

I sipped coffee from the cracked Hole in the Wall Bar mug. “I’ll kick in some county money if you want to get a rug or something.”

Vic’s voice rose behind me. “Look who’s talking about home décor.”

Double Tough’s shoulder muscles rolled as he took the device and turned it over, looking at the manufacture marks from under the bill of his ball cap. “Hughes Christensen, that’s the real deal.”

“The Cadillac of drill bits?”

He glanced up at Vic, standing by the desk. “More like a damn Lamborghini.”

She smiled. “Did you know they made tractors before they made cars?”

“No shit.” His eyes shone as he visually caressed the bit. “The Chinese are makin’ a bunch of cheap stuff, but that right there is the real deal.” He whistled through his teeth. “Directional drilling and antiwhirl technology; that ol’ boy’ll go just about anywhere you want to point it.”

I set the mug on the corner of his desk. “Water?”

His eyes came up. “Yeah, but it’d be like plowin’ yer field with that Lambo.” He smiled. “The car, not the tractor.” He studied the shaft of the beast. “It’s got a lease mark here. I’ve still got some connections in the biz and I can give ’em a call to try and find out who it was leased to.”

“Why not call Hughes Christensen?”

He shrugged. “Well, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. . . .”

I glanced up at Vic, standing by the desk with her arms folded as she reached over, picked up the receiver, and handed it to him. “Fuck it—get ’em in trouble.”

The ex-roughneck shrugged and began dialing.

I walked over to the window in the door and looked through the sun-faded, peeling decal of our star, past the weather-beaten station wagon at the playground across the street. We hadn’t planned to be looking out the window at a public school from every office we had, but that’s how it had panned out.

Vic joined me at the door as Double Tough spoke on the phone. “Why would they have something like this, and why would it be hidden the way it was?”

“I don’t know.”

She paused to pick up the box that the bit had been in, partially crushed and filled with Mexican newspapers. The side read MISSION TORTILLA ROUNDS, RESTAURANT STYLE, IRVING, TEXAS. “Do you think they had it and forgot about it?”

Tapping the lid of the box with a forefinger, I laughed. “If you had a one-hundred-seventy-thousand-dollar piece of equipment” . . .

She finished the statement for me as she looked at the vehicle belonging to the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God. “. . . in the spare-tire well of that piece-of-shit Brady Bunch station wagon, no, I wouldn’t forget about it. I’m betting that’s why they are more interested in the car than in Big Wanda.” She pulled one of the wadded newspapers from the box and stretched it flat. “Ciudad Juárez, they’ve got a sale on tire-tread sandals.” She glanced around and when it became apparent that I wasn’t paying any attention to her, she nudged me with an elbow. “Hey.”

“Yep?”

“Thanks for not sending me down here—I think I might’ve slit my wrists.”

I looked through the dirt on the window and realized the majority was on the inside. “I liked it when Lucian sent me down here, but you’re welcome.”

“What’re you thinking about?”

“I’m wondering how the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God is all of a sudden paying off hundreds of thousands of back taxes up and down the Great Plains.” I let out a long, slow exhale. “Something is going on with these people.”

“Ya think?”

I did think and turned and looked at Double Tough as he hung up the phone.

“They’re going to call me back, and I have to admit that it was fun telling them this had to do with a criminal investigation and they better do it pronto.”

I nodded. “They say they’re drilling a new water well over at East Spring Ranch—is there any reason why they would use a bit like this for that kind of application?”

He considered. “Well, it’s a rock bit; I guess if you were bound and determined to drill a water well in one spot you might use it if you ran into a lot of rock.”

“Like down here in the southern part of the county?”

“I guess.”

I studied him. “You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’m not; why not just move the well? Anyway . . .” He gestured toward the Diamond Jim Brady of bits. “It’d be overkill to use a piece of equipment like this.”

“So what would you use it for?”

“I told you: oil, gas, something worth big money.”

I thought back to the detailed description I’d given him at the beginning of the conversation. “Could you drill oil or gas with the kind of rig I described seeing down at East Spring, the one on the back of the Peterbilt?”

“Not here, no way.” He shook his head, and I watched as his mind sank into the ground, plummeting through the strata he knew so well. “It’s all tapped out, at least the stuff that’s easy to get to. You’d have to drill almost twelve thousand feet before you got to the Niobrara shale, Shannon and Sussex formation above that; you’re talking about a ten-thousand-foot vertical well with possibly a five-thousand-foot lateral section, and setting up the equipment to sell the oil, you’re looking at a good ten million dollars just to get started.” He sat on the corner of the desk and placed a hand lovingly on the bit. “Do your friends over in East Spring Ranch have that kind of money?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anyway, they’d have to permit that kind of activity through the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, especially if they were God-fearing and law-abiding.”

“Well, the jury is still out on at least one of those.”

Vic joined us in staring at the bit. “What would you do with the oil?”

Double Tough laughed. “Tanker trucks or, better yet, a pipeline.”

“Have you seen any activity like that down here?”

“No, but I haven’t been looking.”

“But you say there isn’t enough oil to bother with?”

He shook his head. “Not on an industrial scale.”

I glanced back out the window—a familiar pickup filled to the gills with men had pulled in behind the station wagon. “Right now I have to go return some rightful belongings.”

I started toward the door but watched as he rolled the bit over on the table with a loud thunk. “That include this?”

“Not unless they ask for it.”

The phone rang, and he reached for the receiver. “What’re you gonna do?”

Vic tossed the box to the floor and followed as I turned the knob and pushed open the door. “Go fishing.”

• • •

Roy Lynear was seated on his throne atop the Super Duty and was holding a somber sort of court. “Hello, Sheriff.”

“Mr. Lynear.”

He leaned forward, and I watched as Lockhart, the guy with the crew cut, got out of the driver’s side and stood by the door. Another man stood at the front corner of the bed and looked at Vic and me; it was only after a moment that I noticed the swollen eye and recognized him as the guy I’d punched in South Dakota. “My driver is Mr. Tom Lockhart, and I believe you’re acquainted with Mr. Earl Gloss?”

I studied him for a moment and then looked back at the driver, the grip of a semiautomatic just visible under a navy Windbreaker. I returned my eyes to Lynear. “I was hoping to see Mr. Bidarte; I was hoping he was doing better.”

The big man glanced back at Gloss, who immediately started for the station wagon. “I think he’s thrown himself into his work at the ranch; some men respond that way.” He tried to keep my attention, but I watched as the man with the swollen face walked to the back of the car and tried the rear door, which was locked.

I thought about tossing the keys to Vic, but she’d stepped to my left to keep an eye on Lockhart. I started toward the station wagon and watched as Gloss’s eyes widened and he glanced at his boss, then to me again, before reaching toward the small of his back. “Just so you know; I won’t have hands laid on me again.”

I paid no attention and kept coming, watching out of the corner of my eye as Vic countered to face the other man. “Really.”

I was putting my hand in my jacket pocket when Gloss slipped a late-model, expensive-looking .45 from his waistband and pointed it toward me. “Don’t come any closer.”

I wasn’t too concerned, seeing as how I could tell it wasn’t cocked. Granted, any capable marksman could pull the hammer back if there was a round in the chamber, but I got the feeling from Gloss that he was not a member of that group, at least not with a uniformed, armed officer bearing down on him.

He raised the pistol a little higher, directing it toward my face. “I’m not telling you again.”

Sometimes, you can slap a sidearm out of a shooter’s hand; it’s a roll of the dice because sometimes you can’t and then they shoot you. But I was feeling full of piss and vinegar and took the chance. Gloss’s pistol flew through the air and into the soft dirt on the far bank of the barrow ditch between the road and the school parking lot.

Standing close to him, I dangled the keys between us and then bent over to unlock the tailgate of the old station wagon.

Gloss glanced at his gun, a good twenty feet away. “You had no right to do that.”

I turned the key, the rear window whirring down with a herniated whine, and then lowered the door. “Just for the record, I had every right. Just because you can carry a sidearm, doesn’t mean you can brandish and threaten a sworn officer.” I tossed him the keys and then stepped back.

He glanced at Lynear for a moment and then reached in, immediately opening the spare well where the drill bit had been. He pulled out of the station wagon and quickly shook his head.

“Lose something?”

“I just don’t like driving without a spare.”

I addressed Lynear, coolly watching from the mountaintop of his mobile throne. It was easy to see who was the brains of the outfit: “Did you ever get your drill rig running?”

His head canted to one side. “Unfortunately, we’re still working on it.”

“I received a call from the county assessor’s office about the logistics of your water well, and they wanted someone to run down with a GPS and get the exact location of the drill site.”

He didn’t smile. “Is that so?”

I went ahead and smiled—I’m friendly that way. “I volunteered for the job.”

“I’m sure you did.”

I gestured toward Vic, still facing the driver. “We’ll be there tomorrow—if you can make arrangements for someone to meet us at the gate around noon.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“If not, I’ll just run through it.”

Lynear nodded, and I got the feeling we’d made progress in clarifying our relationship, but our stare-down was interrupted by Gloss having moved from the station wagon and going for his pistol at the far side of the ditch. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

He stopped at the sound of my voice. “That’s my gun.”

“Yep, it is, and we have another law here in Wyoming concerning unauthorized firearms brought onto school property—it comes with a mandatory sentence—and that weapon, now, is most certainly on school property.”

He glanced at the autoloader, gleaming in the dirt like an unobtainable treasure. “Well, what am I supposed to do?”

“I guess decide if that pistol is worth five to seven years in Rawlins—it’s a nice enough town, but I’m not sure if the accommodations at the maximum security prison are all that great.”

Vic, still standing off the driver, volunteered in a loud voice, “Fish sticks and Tater Tots on Fridays.” I think she even winked at Lockhart.

Lynear’s voice intoned from the truck, “Earl, I think it’s time we were going.”

Gloss circled around, careful to go to the front of the wagon in order to avoid me, then threw open the door of the Plymouth and climbed in. “I want my gun back.”

“Just as soon as I check the serial numbers and you show me a Wyoming or Texas permit for carrying it.”

He slammed the door and probably would’ve headed out in a tire-squealing, fishtailing, thunder-roading display if the tired Satellite’s ignition hadn’t given out with a terminal and diminutive click.

I glanced at Lynear. “You guys have any jumper cables?”

• • •

Back in my office, Vic examined Gloss’s Wilson Combat Supergrade Classic, jacking the slide mechanism over and over and spitting shiny .45 dumdum rounds onto my desk with a determined ferocity. “It would’ve hurt if he’d shot you, you know?”

“Right.”

She held up one of the pursed, open-tip rounds. “These hurt worse than normal, you know that, right?”

“Right.”

She was pissed, but she kept her voice low so that no one else in the outside office could hear her. “You’re a moron; you know that too, right?”

“Right.”

“If that shitbird had shot you then I would’ve had to shoot everybody, which doesn’t really concern me, but after that I would’ve had to lift your two-hundred-and-sixty-pound—”

“I’m down to two-forty-five.”

She shot an index finger at me. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Right.”

“—ass off the roadway and load you into your unit, drive at the speed of light in hopes that you would not leak all your precious bodily fluids out onto the floor mats and die.” She leaned back in my guest chair, her eyes like twin black holes with surrounding solar flares, swallowing everything, and all I could think was how ferociously gorgeous she looked—thoughts that if were voiced would, most likely, put my life in jeopardy again.

I eased back in my chair. “Can I talk now?”

“No, you cannot talk until you show some semblance of being able to behave like a rational, reasonable law-enforcement professional.”

I considered. “I’m not going to be able to talk for the rest of my life?”

“No.”

I glanced out my window and honestly reflected on my actions earlier. “I’m sorry.”

She yanked herself forward and hissed. “Don’t say that, don’t even say that, because all that’s gonna do is piss me off even more. And you wanna know why? Because you don’t mean it. You walk around with this ten-foot-tall and bulletproof attitude, which, I might add, you should’ve gotten over during that last little jaunt in the mountains.”

“That’s how I lost the fifteen pounds.”

“Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” She was really angry now and stood, still holding the confiscated .45. “There are a lot of people around here who kind of depend on you, you know.” She paced and then stopped, taking a deep breath and running her fingers through her hair. “A lot of people, and if you’re not going to think of yourself then maybe you should think about them.” She scratched the end of her nose with the barrel of the semiauto.

Being a fast learner, I said nothing.

With very little warning, she tossed the Wilson onto my desk, where it struck my leather blotter with a resounding thud and slid toward me. “That is a five-thousand-dollar sidearm—what the hell is Farmer Green Jeans doing with a gun like that?”

I raised my hand.

She dismissed me with a flapping of her own. “Talk.”

“I don’t know.”

She turned to look down at me. “You used your opportunity to talk for that?”

I shrugged and studied her and gestured toward the pistol on my desk. “At the risk of you loading the aforementioned weapon and shooting me—are you all right?”

She turned very slowly. “What is that supposed to mean?”

I put my hand on the .45 and slid it out of her reach.

“I just want to be clear about this.” She thumped a forefinger at her chest. “I’m dressing you down and you’re asking what’s wrong with me?”

“You just . . . You just seem a little on edge.”

She walked over and closed my office door the rest of the way and then came back and sat in front of me on my desk, near me and the pistol. “Fuck. You. Again. I am trying to have a serious conversation about your recent juvenile actions and you’re trying to use that hackneyed old chauvinistic tactic of blaming all this on my emotions?”

I raised my hand again.

She raised a tactical boot and planted it firmly between my legs, grabbed the front of my shirt, and pulled me in close, forcing me to grab the arms of my chair for balance. “I am in complete control of my emotions.”

As they go, it was the Mount Vesuvius of kisses—shocking, overpowering, molten, and leaving nothing but paralyzed ash in its wake. I thought for a moment I was going to suffocate when she released the fistful of my shirt like the ripcord on a parachute.

Her face hovered there, and I continued to breathe her breath, feeling the warmth of it on my jaw and neck. “Any more questions about my emotions?”

“Nope.”

She pushed with the foot, and I felt my boot dislodge; it was only then that I realized that my chair was flipping backward. I scrambled to grab the edge of my desk, Vic, or anything, but she’d already stood and stepped away and I crashed backward onto the carpet-covered but still unforgiving hardwood floor.

I lay there, attempting to focus my eyes and get the air back in my lungs as she walked over and stood above me, her hair framing her face like anything but a halo. The back of my head hurt, and I squeezed my eyelids together in an attempt to purge the ache that was starting at the back of my head.

She leaned over at the waist to inspect me crawling from the wreckage and whispered in a sultry voice, “I didn’t call on you, teacher’s pet.”

Boy howdy.

Reaching a hand up, I was able to graze my fingers across her muscular calf as she turned and marched away. My eyes closed again for what I thought was only a moment and when I opened them she was gone and a different head, panting with a different sort of breath and with a worried look on his long face, was hanging over me. Unsure, he slathered a lick on the side of my head with a tongue as wide as a paperback, correct in the belief that a good kiss made everything better—well, almost everything.

I reached up and grabbed his ruff and massaged his ear. “How you doin’, rascal?”

He wagged and disappeared as I noticed someone standing in my doorway.

“Walt?”

I tried my best to sound casual. “Yep.”

“I heard a crash.”

“That would’ve been me.” Ruby walked in, and I noticed she was wearing a pair of her sporty, reflective running shoes; funny the things you noticed from this perspective. “What’s up?”

“Saizarbitoria wants to talk to you, and Double Tough is on line one—something about a leased piece of drilling equipment?”

“Could you hand me my phone and tell the Basquo where I am?”

“Sure.”

She rested the whole thing on my chest, picked up the receiver, and handed it to me, a finger poised to punch the button. “Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing?”

“Nope, I don’t mind at all.”

We both waited.

Finally, she pushed the button and then smeared a thumb over my lips. “You might want to get rid of the lipstick—it doesn’t become you.”

I watched as she stood and disappeared out my door. “Do we have any aspirin?” Readjusting the receiver in the crook of my neck, I thought about getting up, but I wasn’t really that uncomfortable, so I just spoke. “What’ve you got for me, Tough?”

“Hey, Chief. Hughes Christensen got back to me, and let me tell you that’s the fastest that’s ever happened.”

“What’d they say?”

“It’s stolen.”

“Well, fancy that.”

There was a rustling of paper as he read from his notes. “The original leasing was through PEMEX, the Mexican government-owned petroleum company?”

“The big dog, huh?”

“Big to the tune of four hundred and fifteen billion in assets.”

I whistled. “How did they even notice it was missing?”

“They didn’t; it was subleased to a private contractor.” I noticed a few cracks as I stared at the ceiling in my office and listened to him. “That’s the way these big operations work; they order up a bunch of this stuff if they get even an inkling that they might need it, because, unlike the rest of us, they don’t wait on anything.”

“I see.”

“But then they got all this equipment lying around that they’re not using and start thinking about recouping their losses. Well, the small operators are desperately in need of the equipment, but the big companies have it all tied up, so they have to go to ’em with their hats in their hands and then the big boys overcharge ’em to get back some of the lease money they lost.”

“Who was the subcontractor?”

“An even bigger Brazilian company called Petrobras, but then they subleased the bit to a company called . . .”

“No offense, Tough, and I really appreciate your efforts, but—”

He laughed. “Seventeen more leases.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I want a raise.”

“I offered you a rug.”

“The final operator was a . . .” He read from the paper. “DT Enterprises.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Me neither, but there are a ton of these little wildcat operations down there; it’s like the Wild West.”

“And you are telling me this because?”

“These operators are not the best bookkeepers, because it is sometimes not beneficial to these operators to have the best books kept.”

“I’ll buy you a lamp to go with the rug.”

“You’re going to have to do better than that; you’re gonna have to find somebody else to work down here.”

I was mildly shocked. “Are you quitting on me?”

“Nope, but Frymire is; he dropped off a letter for you this afternoon. I guess him and the fiancée are movin’ down to Colorado. He says he can stick around for another week if you need ’im.”

“Do we need him?”

“Well, things are heatin’ up around here, but I figure I can handle it.”

“Any more contact with the East Spring bunch?”

“Nope, after you helped ’em get that piece-of-shit Plymouth goin’ they just headed on down the road.”

“What did you do with the bit?”

“I got it locked up in the back of the Suburban with my dirty laundry on top of it.”

“Sounds safe.”

“I wouldn’t touch it, unless I had to.”

As I thought about some of the things Sheriff Crutchley had said, I spotted one of the .45 dumdum rounds that must’ve rolled off the top of my desk. I picked it up and held it in front of my face. Neville Bertie-Clay, the British army officer who had worked at the Dum Dum Arsenal near Calcutta, had developed the hollow or soft point bullet that to this day carried the arsenal’s name. The things should’ve been called Bertie-Berties.

“Walt?”

“Yep?”

“Anything else?”

The British had used the ammunition in the venerable .303 against Asians and Africans because it had sufficient enough stopping power to deter a determined charge. The Hague Convention of 1899 had found the dumdum too cruel for use against fellow European countries, but some police departments still authorize them because they mostly do not pass through intended targets and continue on into innocent bystanders.

“Sheriff?”

I’d seen what they could do in Vietnam, and the fistfuls of flesh they removed. “Yep. Hey, where is DT Enterprises licensed?”

There was a pause. “Mexico.”

“Where in Mexico?”

There was more paper rustling on his end. “Chihuahua.”

“Where the dogs come from.”

“I guess.”

“See what you can dig up on them.”

“Roger that. Anything else?”

“Start taking applications down there, would you?”

He laughed. “Yeah, okay. Why don’t you just send Vic? I’ve got my cot set up in the back.”

“I don’t think that would work out, but don’t worry, I’m going to call in some reinforcements.”

He chuckled on the other end. “Smoke signals or war drums?”

Double Tough knew my methods. “I’ll let you know.” I hung up the phone and moved it off my chest, crossed my arms, and tried to think, once again, about my dwindling staff, but DT Enterprises kept getting in the way. Why did that sound familiar? Was it something somebody with Lynear had said? I didn’t think so—maybe it wasn’t the Enterprises part.

DT.

Sancho came in and sat on the corner of my desk with a sheaf of papers under his arm, one hand cupped around some aspirin, and a glass of water in the other. “You sleeping down there tonight?”

Dog followed him in and sat by my desk. “Just me and my faithful companion.”

“Sit up and take your medicine. Ruby’s orders.”

I took the four aspirin and the glass from him and leaned against the bookcase where I’d started the day. “Thanks.” I swallowed. “Everybody gone?”

“Cord is still working over at the Busy Bee, and Mr. Rockwell is reading about himself in his cell.” He studied my quizzical look. “Ruby went over to the library and picked up all the books they had on Orrin Porter Rockwell and gave them to him.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s been awfully depressed since Vic arrested him, but I think he appreciated the books.” He smiled, and I couldn’t help but think how handsome that face would be on a sheriff’s election poster. “Bishop Goodman came by, and they talked for about four hours.”

I laughed. “Our bishop may be fianchettoed.”

“Huh?”

“A chess move where the bishop can form a long, diagonal defense of a castled king. Anyway, I think the good bishop wants to write a book about Orrin Porter Rockwell, and the prisoner in question might be a shortcut in the research department.”

“He seems to know an awful lot about him.”

“That he does. Any word on who he really is?”

“I tried to get his fingerprints, but he resisted, so I took them off of a glass of water.”

I glanced at the one in my hand. “Remind me to never get on your bad side.”

He pulled the papers from his underarm and looked at them. “It makes for some interesting reading.”

I studied the Basquo’s face. “Oh, now, why don’t I like the sound of that?”

“Well, you know we’re limited to service personnel and criminals on the fingerprint bank. . . .”

“Right.”

“Well, I got nothing.”

“So he’s clean?”

“Not exactly.” He flipped one of the pages over and handed it down to me as Dog settled in and stretched out, figuring we were here for the long haul.

There was an enlarged, washed-out, mimeographed two-by-two photo, not unlike the one that had accompanied Saizarbitoria’s résumé from the Wyoming State Prison in Rawlins back when he’d been attempting to flee working in corrections. The man in the photo was trim, young, and straining with wiry muscle. There was an intensity in the light, opal-like eyes that was hard to miss and still in evidence. His hair was so close-cropped to the side of his head that his ears looked like he was cleared for takeoff—ears I thought I’d seen somewhere before on someone else.

The official form from Ellsworth Air Force Base was a military identification for the year 1957 but stated that all information was classified.

“Intelligence.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” He tapped the papers in his hand. “I had a friend at the National Personnel Records Center who found this in the files that said he was on loan to Civil Air Transport, under the auspices of the American Airdale Corporation. . . . Get it? Air, Dale . . . ?”

“No.”

“You will. Two years later Civil Air Transport and American Airdale changed their name to the much storied Air America.”

I knocked the receiver off the phone. “CIA?”

“Spooky as the night is long.” He laughed. “Up to ’62 he flew direct and indirect support for CIA Ops Ambidextrous, Hotfoot, and White Star, and then trained the Royal Laotian armed forces. After that he was involved with something called Project 404 as an air attaché to the U.S. embassy in Vientiane, and then he provided logistical support to the Royal Lao and Hmong armies under the command of General Vang Pao.”

I’m sure what the Basquo had discovered was pretty important, but I was getting a little tired of all the dramatics. “C’mon, CIA?”

“Wait, there’s more.” His eyes returned to the paper. “He was shot down in ’64 while making what they called a hard rice support run in the mountains dropping off weapons to tribal leaders who were opposed to the North Vietnamese. He was listed MIA, but by the end of the war in ’73 he was listed as a war casualty. Okay, so jump-cut to this VISTA volunteer working in Vietnam who happens to see this white guy with a beard and long hair working on a prison road crew in ’75 and goes over to him and asks him his name.”

“Yep?”

“The guy looks up slow and has some trouble getting his voice and remembering how to speak English before telling the kid his nickname, Airdale.”

“I don’t get it.”

“From Short Drop, Wyoming.”

I stared at him.

“Dale Airdale Tisdale.”

DT Enterprises.