A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery

11

Henry sipped his beer and leaned back in Ruby’s chair. “The woman who owns the mercantile, his wife, Eleanor, says he died in a plane crash in Mexico?”

I glanced back at him. “Yep, but he supposedly died crashing a plane in North Vietnam, too. It seems to me he’s made a habit of crashing and dying all over the globe.”

The Bear, the Basquo, and I had been surprised to find a few Rainiers in the commissary icebox and were sitting in the dispatcher’s area at the front of the office like truants.

Sancho sat on the bench by the steps and turned the copy of Tisdale’s faded, black-and-white head shot in his hands, then stretched an arm out and forced Henry and me to stare it in the eye. “Tell me that’s not him.”

The thing looked like a photo of a ghost. The eyes were the same, but the identifying feature was the ears—ears exactly like his grandson’s. “So what was he doing flying around Mexico?”

“You tell me.”

The Bear added. “And dead, no less.”

I thought about it. “If he’s Sarah Tisdale’s father, then he had to be back here in Wyoming for at least a night.”

Saizarbitoria sipped his Rainier. “Uh-huh.”

“You thinking what I’m thinking?”

He looked at the can. “That this is the shittiest tasting beer ever?”

“That’s not what I’m thinking.” The Cheyenne Nation chuckled, and I took a long swig out of my own can, just to make a point. “That he was still on the Company payroll down in Mexico.”

Sancho belched and made a face. “Lawyers, guns, and money?”

“I guess I need to talk to Eleanor Tisdale, not that I’m looking forward to it.”

The Basquo nodded his head, knocked on the bench as if it were a door, and broke into a faux, flowery announcer voice. “Mrs. Tisdale, we’re sorry to report that we think your daughter’s dead, but guess who we have behind door number two?” I sighed, and he continued. “You guys know anybody at the CIA?”

Henry and I glanced at each other, and then I pulled out my pocket watch. “As a matter of fact, we do.”

• • •

Wally was surprised to see me at eight o’clock at night at the door of the main house at the Lazy D-W but maybe even more surprised to see the Cheyenne Nation. The patrician-looking silver-haired man led us into their den, where Donna sat with a wine glass of sparkling water at her side.

I noticed that she casually flipped the top sheet of a prodigious stack of papers to keep the Bear and me from seeing the title. “Are those your memoirs?”

She laughed. “Something like that.” She and her husband made eye contact for a moment, and then Wally gave us a brief nod and left.

Looking at all the stacks of books, photos, plaques, and awards that the woman had accumulated over the years, my eyes wandered around the crowded room—Donna with presidents Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson; Donna with ex-senators; Donna with movie stars. I pointed toward the one of Donna and LBJ standing together. “Relation?”

She smiled. “Nope, but he gave me the best advice I ever got about public life.”

“And what was that?”

“You know, Walt—never turn down the opportunity of a free meal or a chance to go to the bathroom.”

There was another photograph near where Henry sat of Donna in a parka and a man in army fatigues and an Airborne cap. The Bear reached over and tapped the glass protecting the black-and-white photo of the two, who were seated with a snow-capped mountain in the background. “Is that Larry Thorne?”

“The man who brought modern skiing into the United States Army despite the United States Army. Sure is.” Donna smiled and pulled her chair closer, plucking the frame from the wall, turning it over, and handing it to Henry. “Recovery mission; the bodies from a military transport that crashed on an Iranian glacier in ’63. There was bad weather, and I radioed him to see if he wanted to wait on the operation. The weather got worse and transmission got sketchy, but I finally got through and Larry asked me if we wanted them to put the bodies back—they’d already gone up and gotten them.”

The Bear carefully returned the photo to the wall. “He was the only white man that ever outran me.”

“Fort Bragg?”

Henry nodded. “Twice our age, and he could run all of us into the ground.” The Bear glanced back at the photo, the man’s features looking like they’d been carved from soapstone. “There were rumors that he was a Nazi.”

Donna laughed. “He was from Finland.” Johnson settled back into her chair and stared at her lap. “Lauri Torni. He fought against the Soviets when they invaded Finland; then when the Germans invaded Russia, the Finns went after what they’d lost to the Russians.” She looked up at us. “The friend of a friend is a friend, the friend of an enemy . . .” She didn’t have to finish the proverb. “Anyway, after the war, ‘Wild Bill’ Donavan, who knew what Torni was worth, got him and shipped him off to North Carolina as a citizen and second lieutenant with a new name, Larry Thorne.” She smiled at the Cheyenne Nation. “And that’s probably where you met him.”

Henry grinned at the thought of the man and then stiffened. “He was the first Study and Observations Group personnel to be listed as MIA.”

It was the first time I’d heard the Bear use the proper name of his old outfit, SOG; evidently he was feeling comfortable with the reclusive ranch woman.

“Hey, Donna?”

She turned to look at me.

“I’ve never asked you what it was you did with the government, and to be honest, I really don’t want to know—but it’s getting late, I don’t want to keep you till tomorrow, and I’ve got a situation on my hands that I need some help with.”

She adjusted her glasses, looking for the entire world like some Harvard don. “Does this concern the My Friend Flicka boy and that man?”

“As a matter of fact, it does.”

She nodded, and I could see her weighing the options. “How can I help?”

I explained the situation, indicating that my only interest was in finding out what was going on in my county concerning the boy, a missing woman, and a bad feeling I had about the whole Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God.

She glanced at a fancy computer monitor and the stacks of papers she’d casually covered up, and all I could think was that these might not be the first things Donna Johnson had been responsible for covering up. “Why don’t you show me what you’ve got?”

I reached in my jacket and pulled out the folded papers that Saizarbitoria had given me—the Basquo had pleaded with us to take him, but I’d told him that if Donna had to kill us after giving us the information we’d requested, it might be better if he went home to his wife and child.

Johnson took them, stared at the photo first, and then flipped through the pages. “Who collated this information?”

“My deputy, Saizarbitoria.”

Donna studied the papers, her eyes sliding over them like fingers sweeping keys on a piano. “He’s very capable, this young man.”

I nodded and compressed my lips. “Does that mean you have to kill us?”

Donna smiled. “Not yet.” She looked at me. “If I do this for you, you mustn’t let anyone know that I’ve done it—anyone at all. I’m very serious.”

I kept my eyes locked on hers, just to demonstrate the severity of the promise. “Agreed.”

She glanced at the Bear, who crossed his heart. “Honest Injun.”

She smiled and gave a definitive nod of her head. “Well, it will take a little time, so why don’t you gentlemen adjourn to the kitchen for a few moments—have you eaten?”

• • •

“Antelope ravioli; I made it myself.”

Sitting around the counter in the kitchen of the Lazy D-W, I had to admit that the impromptu meal was one of the finest I’d ever eaten. “Wally, thanks. You really didn’t have to feed us.”

“Oh, I don’t mind; it gives me something to do. Gardening is over, and things get a little boring this far out from town.”

I studied him, enjoying the camaraderie of being in his kitchen. Donna’s family had had the ranch for as long as there had been a county, and as near as I could remember, they had both known my late wife. A lot of men would’ve had a problem being Donna’s husband on a lot of counts, but Wally seemed to wear the mantle easily. “Nonetheless, it’s kind of you to take us in on such short notice.”

Henry scraped the remains of the ravioli from his plate and licked his fork clean. “This was delicious. I could not have done better myself—antelope is tricky.”

I sipped the fancy beer that Wally had poured out of a growler and smiled at him. “That was a supreme compliment.”

He sipped his wine and studied the Bear and then me. “I assume that all this has to do with that young man Cord?”

I was surprised he remembered his name, but then they probably didn’t get that many horse thieves around these parts. “Tucked in and sleeping at the jail.”

“Is he still fixated on My Friend Flicka?”

“He and his friend were watching it again when we left.”

He nodded. “The crazy one that thinks he’s Orrin Porter Rockwell?”

“Yep.”

“It’s an interesting life you lead, Walt.”

“I meet a lot of people.” I set my stylish Royal Pint glass down. “So is your wife . . .” I glanced around, just to impress on him and the Cheyenne Nation that I could be covert, too. “Is she really writing a book?”

“God help us.” He rested an elbow on the cherry counter. “For the last ten years.”

The Bear interrupted. “Tell her not to feel bad. I cannot type either.”

He laughed. “It’s the Company censors; the last time she turned in six hundred and five pages, they returned two hundred and two.”

“Ouch.”

“But she’s decided to attack the problem from a different angle.”

“How so?”

“She’s writing it as a spy thriller.”

“Fiction?”

“Yes. She’s just changing all the names to protect the not-so-innocent. Most of the fact-checkers at Quantico are so young they won’t have any idea what Donna’s writing about, but it should send a shiver through the intelligence community.”

A voice sounded from behind us. “Are you telling all my secrets, hon?”

He tipped the bottle of Domaine de la Solitude and poured her a glass. “Just the ones I know, dear.”

Donna sat on the stool beside him—the file on Dale “Airdale” Tisdale that she put on the counter had grown. “I have no secrets from you.”

“Of course not, dear.” He turned to look at me. “The benefits of marrying a spy are that you always know that they’re not telling the truth.”

Donna made pointed eye contact with Henry and me. “I was not a spy, I was an administrator, a facilitator who made phone calls and got things done.”

I sipped my fancy beer. “Donna, as long as you don’t break the speed limit too much or write bad checks here in the county, I don’t care what you did—and I hope your book is a best seller.” I pointed at the stack of papers. “Is that the international man of mystery?”

She placed a steady hand on the pile and looked at me. “Are you sure you really want to see this?”

I waited a second before replying. “Why do you say that?”

She looked pained. “Walt, there are things that are better not known—I mean, isn’t it enough that you know who he is and that he’s just a crazy old guy now?”

I glanced around as if the answer was obvious. “No.”

She nodded. “Whenever a field agent is involved with an operation, he’s given a new name, history, everything. These cover stories are called Legends, and the problem is that after an extended period of activity and a bunch of Legends, some individuals exhibit marked psychological aberrations—they become the Legend so well that they forget who they are, like an actor who becomes the role forever. Robert Littell wrote a really good book about one of them—fiction, of course.” She smiled.

“And that’s what happened to Tisdale?”

Donna picked up the papers and handed them to me. “One of the things.”

I took them, folded them, and placed them in the inside pocket of my jacket, which was hanging on the back of my stool. “He thinks he’s Orrin Porter Rockwell; what were you guys trying to do, infiltrate the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?”

She laughed. “Dale Tisdale really was CIA, unlike all these jaybirds around here who say they were—just once, I’d like to get one of the fake ones crossways with me so I could show them what the real CIA is capable of.”

• • •

Henry read by the overhead map light as I drove. “So, he hadn’t lost his mind when he was in Mexico, which is a shame because I think I lost mine in Cabo one time.” The Cheyenne Nation studied the papers. “Sometimes it is a gradual process; I think that is what Donna was trying to intimate to us.”

I steered the Bullet south on I-25 through the chilling night and glanced past Henry toward the invisible mountains, taking comfort in knowing they were there and that I was not climbing them. “Why would the CIA send someone like that back into duty?”

“Possibly because they did not know how much of a psychological break he had sustained in Southeast Asia?”

I gave the Bear the horse eye. “Kind of hard to miss a guy with a beard and hair down to his ass who claims to be a historical Western figure.”

He sighed. “As I said, it would appear that the Orrin Porter Rockwell manifestation of his character is relatively recent—say, when he was arrested by the federal authorities in Mexico. It would appear that the CIA claimed that the entire operation was rogue and they hung Tisdale out to dry.”

“For the second time at least.” I shook my head. “Remind me to never work for the CIA.”

“It is possible that some of it was a rogue undertaking; Tisdale conceived the idea and named it Operation Milkshake. Evidently, because of his specific skill set, he was put in charge of this operation in Mexico that involved the appropriation of crude oil.” He stopped reading and gazed through the dark windshield. “I recall a while back the Justice Department found out American refineries had been buying massive quantities of stolen oil from the Mexican government.” He turned to look at me. “The bandits and drug gangs tap into pipelines out in these remote areas and some of them were even building their own pipelines to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of oil a year.”

“So Operation Milkshake was not a penny-ante operation.”

“No, and it would appear that a portion of the American government wanted to get in on the action.” His eyes dropped. “There were a number of subsequent investigations, indictments, and arrests—one of whom was Tisdale.” He shifted in his seat. “Operation Milkshake . . . That sounds strangely familiar; where does that come from?”

“Albert Fall, the secretary of the Interior under Harding, was convicted of taking bribes for oil rights on public lands, namely from the Teapot Dome Naval Oil Reserves just a little south of here. In a congressional hearing, the senator from New Mexico was famous for having made a statement about the process of directional oil drilling—‘If you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I’ll end up drinking your milkshake.’”

“What a typically white venture.”

I ignored the remark and continued. “Tisdale appears to be something of an expert in history and would know that statement.”

“Whatever happened to Fall?”

“Died penniless in El Paso.” I took the off-ramp at Powder Junction. “Do the papers indicate where all this Mormon stuff comes from?”

The Bear synopsized. “After an unfortunate incident with a Cessna Bonanza, the U.S. government denied his existence and reported him dead. The Mexican government, left with an unidentified prisoner, dumped him in Penal del Altiplano where he shared a cell with newfound Mormon Tomás Bidarte.”

I turned and looked at him. “You’re kidding.”

Henry shrugged. “Evidently, Dale Tisdale converted to the point where he actually thought of himself as Orrin Porter Rockwell; as a Caucasian finding himself in the environs of a maximum security prison in Mexico, it might have been a survival instinct and the only way he made it through.”

“So he and Bidarte were locked up together; I thought there was something that passed between them when they shook hands down at East Spring.” I stopped at the sign at the bottom of the interstate ramp alongside the rest stop. “How did he get out?”

The Cheyenne Nation nodded. “As you have surmised, with Bidarte’s help, they bribed their way to freedom by selling Tisdale’s land holdings in East Spring Ranch to Roy Lynear.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” I made the left through the underpass and stopped at the next sign where the Short Drop road crossed Old Highway 87. A Powder River Fire District truck approached from the south with its siren and lights going but made a left before getting to us.

“He was picked up in Utah by the Highway Patrol while kneeling by a roadside cross; he was then incarcerated in a psychiatric ward for observation, but once he admitted to having lived in Wyoming, they shipped him off to Evanston.”

“Why didn’t they contact his family?”

“At that point he claimed to have no living relatives and asserted to be the Orrin Porter Rockwell, and before anyone could ascertain just who he was, he escaped.”

“So he lived the Legend.”

“It would appear so.”

We sat there in the darkness at the four-way stop in Powder Junction, Wyoming, the caution light intermittently flashing and giving me the feeling it was a metaphor. I listened as the siren from the volunteer fire truck stopped—it didn’t sound all that far away. “Then why is he here now, protecting his grandson? Who contacted him? Who knew he was still alive? Bidarte?”

“The answer to that question does not appear to be in the file.” The big Cheyenne Indian looked at me with a sad smile. “What about the daughter?”

I sat there, idling. “Unavailable for comment, and not very popular with her parents.”

He nodded, the yellow light flickering its warmth on the reflective surface of his dark eyes. “Now everything leads to Mexico, Operation Milkshake, and the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God.”

“Agreed.”

Another truck pulled up across the road and sat there, obviously waiting for me to go first, so I reached down and flicked the lever, throwing my brights at him so that he’d know it was okay to proceed. “Double Tough says the Teapot Dome Reserves are tapped out and that the federal government tried to sell the place off to private developers but nobody bit.”

“Then why are they here?”

I blinked my lights at the truck again; obviously he’d noticed the stars and bars on my vehicle and figured it was a trick. “According to Vic this is the end of the world, and maybe they’re what they say they are, religious zealots looking for a place to be left alone; wouldn’t be the first time that type has turned up on the high plains.”

The Bear completed my thought. “The drill bit, the weapons, and . . .”

“And what?”

“One of these things is not like the others. Tom Lockhart, Tomás Bidarte, the man Gloss—some of these individuals do not seem to fit the religious modus operandi.”

I flipped on my light bar for an instant, just to give the guy in the truck an official assurance he could go ahead. “Anyway, I just want to know what’s happened to Sarah Tisdale.”

“So, when we get through at the substation, we are continuing on to Short Drop?”

“You read my mind.” I watched as the truck lurched from across the road and pulled alongside us. The driver rolled his window down, and I recognized him—Powder Junction’s mayor. “Brian, what’s the matter with you. Are you drunk?”

Kinnison, who was usually smiling, looked very serious for a change and perplexed. “What?”

“Why were you just sitting there?”

“I thought you might want to get by—Walt, the sheriff’s substation is on fire.”

• • •

The Powder River Fire District truck was pouring water onto the Quonset hut with four different high-powered hoses, but with the flames rippling through the broken windows, it looked to me as if the building was well on its way to melting.

I forced my way through the volunteer firemen—Double Tough’s Suburban was parked a little ways away in the lot, and I remembered how he had said he was sleeping in the back of the office to give Frymire and his fiancée a little privacy. I turned back to the inferno. “I’ve got a man in there.”

The fire chief, a fellow by the name of Gilbert, wearing full gear with the rubber coat and leather helmet with face shield, threw a hand on my chest. “We checked; there’s nobody in there, Sheriff.”

“How about the back room?” The look on his face told me he wasn’t sure, and I started pushing past him, the cool coming over my face along with the stillness in my hands. “One of my deputies—he was sleeping in the back.”

He grabbed hold of me. “Walt, you can’t go in there.” Another man joined him, but my momentum carried all of us forward through the pools of water reflecting fire at our feet; it was like the world was in flames, but I’d seen fire up on the mountain and was unafraid. “Walt, if he’s in there, he’s dead.”

I shrugged them off and continued toward the closed front door. “Not this guy.”

Gilbert made a last grab, dragging my jacket down my arm. “Walt, there are chemicals from the bus barn that this building lodges up against—that whole back area is going to go up any minute.” His last grasp had turned me just a little. “You can’t go in there!”

I stared at him for an instant and then yanked my arm completely free, sending him falling backward toward a group of men holding one of the hoses.

My boots slipped on the puddled asphalt, but I got my footing back and, feeling the intensity of the heat on my face, lurched toward the door and pulled my gloves out of my coat pockets. Holding one of my gloved hands up to protect my face as I planted a staggering shoulder into the door, I exploded it inward, the glass with the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department seal shattering as my hand struck the middle of the pane, the shards cascading out like a broken spider’s web.

The flames rushed toward me as I tripped, like something alive in pursuit of the fresh, cool oxygen of the night. It was lucky that I’d fallen, because there was a ceiling of black smoke about waist high with flames licking at the corrugated steel of the perimeter, all of them making for the door I just came through. The desk and chairs to my left were on fire, along with the stacks of newspapers that had concerned me earlier. To my right, the decrepit sofa burned, the smoldering edges of the carpet remnant were curling upward into flames, and the paint was peeling off the walls in burning strips that slid toward the floor,

Suddenly, something with the force of a buffalo pushed me forward, smashing my face against the glass and flattening me against the door on the floor. Whatever it was it stayed there, and it took every measure of strength I had to press up onto my hands and knees. It was only when my hat skidded forward toward the inner doorway and I felt the rivulets of water falling down the sides of my face that I realized the pressure was from the hoses Gilbert and the volunteer firemen were directing on me to keep me from becoming barbeque.

It shot around me, making a prismatic outline of my bulk in a mist that evaporated instantaneously. I staggered up only to be knocked down again by the hundreds of gallons that were propelling me forward. My hand hit the soaked surface of the sodden carpet, and I crouched, deciding that, between the fire and the high-pressure water, I damn well better stay low.

I watched as my hat hit the door where I had seen Double Tough’s cot and I felt the heat just above the top of my head even as the water attempted to beat back the carnivorous flames, and heaving my shoulders forward, I drove with my knees, which made me feel like I was back at USC pushing blocking sleds; I tried to breathe through the fingers of my glove, but the water poured off me like a forking river and I felt like I might drown before I got there.

Widening my eyes and trying to keep my bearings along with my balance, I stared ahead. The door was closed and the brim of my hat, lodged under its edge, was slapping up and down like some seabird attempting to take flight. I reached out and pulled it back toward me, figuring a little dripping beaver-fur protection was better than no protection at all.

There was a whooshing sound above me to my right and the quad sheet map came floating through the smoke to land on top of me. I could see the ink on the thing blackened from the heat tracing a straight line toward the door.

Using both hands, I pushed myself up from the carpet and the inch-deep puddle and skimmed forward into the wall beside the back door; the plywood the map had been mounted on was on my back, deflecting the two blasting jets of water up into the rounded top of the corrugated ceiling, driving the smoke long enough for me to partially stand.

Some idiot voice in the back of my head told me to feel the door before opening it, but I barked back at it, fully tasting the smoke, ash, and moisture in my spoken words. “I know there’s a fire behind the damn thing—there’s fire everywhere.”

I reached down with my saturated gloved hand and watched the water drain from my grip, the knob not turning. Who knew why—possibly because the boards were warped from the heat, possibly because Double Tough was afraid of monsters; it didn’t matter, nothing mattered except getting through the door and getting him out of there.

I knew what was going to happen when I shouldered the thing open, so I bumped the cheap, two-panel door, just to get prepared, figuring I’d blow through and fall onto the concrete floor as the flames came out.

I put everything I had into the crouching bull rush and felt my feet come right off the ground as the pressure from inside the superheated room escaped, carrying the two neatly halved portions of the door and my hunched body backward into the main office. The sound stuffed my ears and stayed there as I lay on the soaked rug for a moment trying to clear my head.

My hat was bumping against my face, and I caught it with one hand before it could attempt a repeat performance and run away with the force of the water. I jammed it on again, dumping a good gallon onto my face in the process, and then half-crawled, half-slithered toward the door, the pressurized jet stream still hitting me as I hand and kneed it across the floor.

The doorway was glowing, and I was sure the flames were ingesting the old wood and then vomiting the coats of leaded paint that made up the lean-to, not to mention the unknown horrors in the fifty-five-gallon drums in the bus barn at the other side of the exterior wall.

No one could be alive in there.

No one. Not even Double Tough.

I pitched forward again, but the smoke was like a shroud and hung even lower than before, instantly gritting my eyes, nose, and mouth. I shifted the wet glove in front of my face again and breathed as shallowly as I could, coughed, and tried to get the stuff out of some passage or another but only succeeded in clearing my ears, the only sensory organ I didn’t particularly need.

I remembered that the cot was against the center of the back wall, and I started crawling in that direction. The blasts of water were still prodding me forward, now hitting me in the ass, and all I could think of was how I was going to knock the damn hoses out of the volunteer firemen’s hands when and if I got out of there.

I could feel the leg of the low-slung cot and was amazed the aluminum hadn’t melted in the heat. I felt for the mattress and found the sopping blankets, my hand bumping against something that felt like a shoulder. I grabbed hold of it but couldn’t get a grip, so I gathered all the covers, yanked them toward me, and felt the fabric tear.

Going for broke, I shot both arms over the top and clamped them down like hooks. The cot collapsed, and a two-hundred-pound man slapped against my chest, and I fell backward. “Damn it to hell.”

I closed my mouth and just pulled his lifeless body along with me back toward the door. We were only a few leg-drags in that direction when I heard a cracking noise and saw part of the shed roof disengage and fall, taking a third of the joists with it, the sudden rush of air momentarily pulling the flames and smoke toward the other side, at which point I could see that the rafters on my side were in no better shape.

Grabbing the wet bundle that was Double Tough, I prepared for a mad dash through the doorway, into the hose streams and the parking lot. This hope was hammered as I watched the top beam disconnect from the back of the Quonset hut and slam down diagonally in front of me in a cascade of sparks, flame, burning wood, and tar paper.

I scrambled backward until my shoulders lodged against the skillet-hot ridged surface of one corner; I was trapped like a rat and yelling like a madman.

Double Tough was lying across my legs. The side of his head was badly burned, and I wasn’t even sure that the eye was still there. He wasn’t breathing, and all I could do was pull his body next to me and try to think fast.

I wasn’t sure what was still on the other side, but it had to be better than this.

I hoisted the two of us, shrugging Double Tough’s body against my chest again in a modified fireman’s carry, and prepared for the hunched dash to freedom. All I could think was that I couldn’t stop—no matter what happened, keep going.

I had pulled some of the soaked blankets over me for a little protection, but I couldn’t see because they covered my head. Suddenly it felt like the wall behind me was giving way. I half-expected the remainder of the ceiling to come crashing down and tottered forward still in hopes of finding a way out. About then two great weights slammed onto my shoulders, and the only thing I could think was that the roof had finally let go and the sixteen-inch centered rafters had landed on either side of my neck.

I struggled to pull free, but I could feel myself losing my balance and I fell backward, crashing into the exterior wall. The grip on my shoulders didn’t let up—something was dragging me. I held on to Double Tough’s body as I shot backward, but the smoke was invading the blankets at this height, my brain started to fog, and the grip on my shoulders felt like talons digging into my flesh.

This must have been what it was like to die—a giant messenger of the dead swooping down and carrying me along that hanging road to the camp beyond. The talons had to be from some giant owl, the only bird that eagles steered clear of.

His claws sunk deeper, and I felt the circulation cut off from my arms. I hit the hard ground and just lay there with the weight of the wet bedding and Double Tough’s body on top of me, trying to summon enough energy for another go. Not dead yet.

Suddenly, his body disappeared. I lifted my arms and tried to get hold of him, but there was nothing there. I flopped to my side and tried to pull the blankets off of me, but it was as if I were glued to them. Slowly I backpedaled out from under and finally slid my head clear.

I rolled over on my back and breathed, staring at the star-filled night and feeling the cold just starting to sink its teeth in. I felt around, but still couldn’t find his body anywhere nearby. It would appear that the giant owl, having given up on taking both of us, had dropped me and continued onto the camp of the dead with him alone. The hanging road was there, the thick strip of the Milky Way draped like a hammock from horizon to horizon in icy clarity.

I allowed my head to drop back onto the parking lot pavement and then rolled it the other way, finally seeing what had plucked my deputy and me from the burning building.

The giant owl was beating on Double Tough’s chest. I watched as my deputy’s head bounced against the asphalt. I reached out but couldn’t get to him. I yelled and shouted for the thing to go away, slapped my hand on the ground in an attempt to get his attention, but it ignored me and went back to tearing at Double Tough’s chest in some sort of ceremonial rite.

I raised my voice but could only croak out a warning that if I got my hands around the big owl’s neck he was going to rue the day he had decided to make birdseed out of us.

Finally the owl swiveled its head, shuddered, and took notice of me. I tried to sit up, but it pinned me to the ground. I coughed and choked up some of the soot from my throat and spat it to the side, then turned to grab hold of him in return.

The big bird fell to the side, seemingly as exhausted as I was. I still held on to the legs of the thing but then slowly realized that they were arms. It shook me loose and reached up to pull away its own wet, protective blanket that hung over its head, revealing Henry’s smudged and dirty face.

He sat there looking at me as I sank back to the pavement, but only for a moment, then turned and looked toward the fire, the wetness in his eyes reflecting the flames as they consumed the rest of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Substation.

I said something, but he wouldn’t look at me.

Feeling the weight of my head as it slipped sideways, I could see another set of eyes looking at me from a short distance away.

Double Tough.

I dragged myself across the asphalt through a couple of puddles and began to shake from the cold. My hand reached his face, the scorched glove touching his chin, but he didn’t blink.