A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery

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Vic reached over and turned on the heater as I took the exit at Powder Junction and followed 192 southeast across the Powder River, leaving the sun as it lingered along the mountains to the west, and drove on toward Surrey/Short Drop. In the perversity of western geography, the poetic-sounding locale of Surrey had pretty much dropped off the map, but the town of Short Drop had, in a small-town way, thrived.

The rolling hills were a khaki brown even with the wet summer and shimmered bronze against the snowfields at the southern tip of the Bighorn Mountains, but everywhere you looked there were oil derricks rhythmically heaving the crude petroleum from the earth. I’d worked as a roughneck on an oil crew for an entire summer in my youth, part of my father’s plan that I should see what a life without a proper education meant. Though only a half hour from the interstate highway, the suburbs of Short Drop might as well have been on the moon.

“No fucking way.”

I glanced at my undersheriff’s Technicolor eyes and felt another twinge of sympathy. “What?”

She gestured at the surrounding landscape. “Who the hell travels two-thirds of the way across the country and stops here thinking this is it, this is where I want to spend the rest of my life?” She shook her head. “No fucking way.”

I glanced around at the stark shadows being thrown from the sharp angle of the sun, causing everything to suddenly glimmer the way only dying things can. “It’s a lot like Nebraska down here.”

“If that’s supposed to recommend it, it doesn’t.” We drove along, and she remained unimpressed. “So, how come I haven’t ever been down here?”

“Because you didn’t receive the traditional hazing that all the other deputies get when they sign on.”

She smirked. “As it should be.”

The radio crackled, and the voice of one of the said deputies resounded through the tinny speaker. Static. “Sheriff, this is base, come in.”

Vic pulled my mic from the dash and keyed the button. “What do you want?”

Static. “The kid’s back over from working at the Busy Bee, and I was wondering if I had to lock him up or was it okay if I just let him sleep in the cell with the door open?”

“Is Dorothy still trying to get that spot above the garage behind her squared away for him?”

Vic asked the question, and Double Tough took a minute, probably asking the kid.

Static. “Yup, but he says it’s not ready yet.”

“Fine by me if the door is open.”

Static. “And Ruby left Dog here; you want me to feed him?”

Vic spoke into the mic in a pretty good impersonation. “Yup, and when Saizarbitoria gets in you can head back to Powder Junction.”

Static. “Roger that.”

She flipped the mic up onto my dash and propped a boot against the transmission hump again. “He doesn’t sound too happy about coming back down here, does he?”

We drove on, watching the grass sway in the wind like the waves of some lost ocean, the landscape remaining pretty much the same as it had for the last fifteen minutes. I looked at Vic again. “Let me guess. . . .”

“No fucking way.”

I grunted. “My family settled here.”

“No, your family settled about an hour north up against the mountains where it’s pretty.”

“Define pretty.”

“Green with a variation in altitude.”

Victoria Moretti and I had a running argument about what, exactly, constituted aesthetic beauty in the American West, and I couldn’t help but point out that her view always included green grass and trees—or the American East.

I glanced around. “It has a more subtle beauty.”

The response was nothing if not predictable.

• • •

We came over the rolling hills of the Pine Ridge and could see the ancient, still-leafy cottonwood that was supposedly over a hundred years old at the bottom of the valley. “There, a tree. I hope you’re happy.”

We pulled along the turnoff, and I dropped the three-quarter-ton into the town of Short Drop proper, where a wooden sign with burnt-in lettering proclaimed SHORT DROP, THE PLACE WHERE “LAUGHING” SAM CAREY, THE LAST OF BUTCH CASSIDY’S HOLE IN THE WALL, TOOK A SHORT DROP ON A LONG ROPE.

Along one of the gigantic limbs of the old tree hung a noose of thick hemp, swaying in the breeze, monument to a violent act over a century old. Vic slumped back in her seat. “Leave it to you assholes; you finally grow a tree tall enough, and you hang somebody from it.”

I followed Main Street’s dirt road and took a right onto Jackson as Vic gazed at Short Drop’s country school whose teams had the likely nickname, “The Hangmen.” “Why do they bother?”

I misunderstood. “Go to school?”

She pointed. “With signs—there are only four streets.”

I nudged my truck across the red-dirt roadway and parked in front of one of the commercial buildings, the Short Drop Mercantile, and killed the engine. “This is it.”

She leaned forward and craned her neck, looking back and forth at the Merc, a bar, and a trailer with a sign out front. “The library is a singlewide?”

“At least they’ve got one.” I unbuckled my seat belt and cracked the door open. With the fading sun, the air was growing sharp, and I was glad that I’d brought my leather jacket. “C’mon.”

There was a wooden walkway that connected the four buildings that made up downtown Short Drop, but the overhead porch reached only across the front of the mercantile and the bar, the only buildings of any historical repute. They were the old types with the false fronts, and the color scheme appeared to be shades of gray with white trim. The paint was peeling a little, but they were both in pretty good shape, and I have to admit that my trajectory swayed just a touch when I saw the RAINIER BEER sign in the next-door watering hole—again aptly named The Noose.

Vic joined me on the walkway, our boots ringing in the silence of the town like some Anthony Mann Western. She lingered for a moment, and as if on cue, a slight wind came up and powdered its way through town. Her voice was low, but I could still hear it: “No fucking way.”

Old-fashioned lettering spiraled across the bottom of the windows, offering up quilting supplies, books, ammunition, and gunsmithing. I ignored the hand-scripted CLOSED HAPPY TRAILS sign, pushed open the door, and walked onto swaled and cupped pine flooring with no board less than a foot wide. The ceilings were high, at least twenty feet, tiled with pressed tin. Black fans with wooden propellers spun idly and track lighting spotted us as we entered the establishment.

Rows of bookshelves staggered against the wall to my right, sagging with the weight of antiquarian tomes and thumbed paperbacks that appeared to be organized in no particular order. There was a counter to my right with an old cash register and a few glass cases that held groceries—bread, canned goods, boxes of cereal, and stick candy that I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. There was a long counter at a forty-five-degree angle with a few rifles on stands, some pistols in a case, and above that the better part of a wall full of ammunition. Myriad taxidermy heads were on the wall, some from far-flung reaches like Africa and South America; they would’ve made my big-game hunter friend Omar Rhoades proud.

My eyes focused on a massive water buffalo whose head was slightly turned and who looked out into the street as if he might pull the rest of himself from the wall and make a break for it.

“Sheriff?”

I turned to see a woman coming down from a mezzanine at the back of the main room. She was in her sixties and holding in her hands what appeared to be a Crock-Pot, using a set of dish towels as oven mitts as she came. Handsome with a good spread to her shoulders, light brown hair streaked with gray, and, partially hidden behind a pair of cat’s-eye glasses, direct, blue eyes—almost cobalt. She glanced at my deputy, who had stalled out by the case of books to the right, and then at me.

“Expected you earlier.”

I tipped my hat. “We got here as quick as we could.” With a curt nod, she walked past me around the center counter, where she used a hip to try and slide open a large, iron-trimmed door. “Can I help you with that?”

Without waiting, I gripped the steel handle and pulled the door open, revealing a short hallway between the Merc and the bar next door.

Her voice echoed after her as she walked through. “Come along, and I’ll buy you a beer.”

Seeing no reason to loiter, I glanced at Vic, who shelved her book and followed with an eyebrow arched, as usual, like a cat’s back.

The doorway from the Merc opened up to the left of the bar, and it appeared as if I was going to get my Rainier. I ducked under a large rattlesnake skin tacked to a board and continued around the coolers on one end of a bar made from old barn siding. The surface had been sealed with polyurethane, entombing what looked to be close to fifty more snake skins. “Lot of rattlers around this place?”

She set the Crock-Pot onto the flat surface, reached into the cooler, and placed two ice-cold, longneck bottles of Rainier beer in front of us. “Not anymore.”

I glanced at the labels. “You know my flavor.”

“Everybody in this county knows your flavor, Walt Longmire.” She stuck a hand across the bar and winked. “Eleanor Tisdale. I used to be on the library board with your wife. Sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.” I shook her hand and nudged one of the wooden stools out with my boot for my undersheriff. “My deputy, Victoria Moretti.” They shook, and I asked, “You own both places?”

She nodded and adjusted her glasses that trailed a set of pearls around the back of her neck. “Run the library, too, but people also borrow books from the Mercantile.” She was classic Wyoming, that indiscriminate age between thirty and a hundred where the women find a comfort for themselves and just settle in. “I keep the door closed to discourage drunken shopping.” She reached up with hands that had seen hard labor and effortlessly twisted the caps off, sliding the pair of Rainiers further our way. “You found my daughter?”

Vic sat beside me, and I turned my eyes to the bartender. “Well . . .”

“She’s in trouble?”

I paused for a moment, took a sip, and tried to decide how I was going to play this. “Possibly.”

“That would follow. It was always her signature.” She leaned her elbows on the business side of the bar and sighed. “My husband was in the oil business.”

“Was?”

“Dale died about three years ago. Light-plane crash down in Mexico.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

She gestured away my condolences with a wave. “Not as much as I was. Sold the majority of the family ranch to those yahoos over at East Spring before he died.” She thought about it. “Sarah was a lot like him. Headstrong to the point of idiocy. He once told her that he wasn’t going to save the ranch for her if she left, so in predictable Tisdale manner, she did and he didn’t.”

I nodded, not quite sure what to say to that. “When was the last time you had contact with her?”

She stared at me as if I’d just joined hands with the point-of-idiocy group myself and then laughed. “Seventeen years ago, come August 6th.” She crossed her arms and settled the cat’s-eye glasses on Vic and then back to me. “Sheriff, maybe you better tell me what you are wanting.”

“Um . . . Eleanor, how about you take a seat?” She looked concerned but remained standing. “We had a young man show up in Durant this weekend; looked like a runaway, about fifteen years old. I tracked him back to Butte County, South Dakota, where the sheriff there informed me that a woman approximately the age of your daughter, who identified herself as Sarah Tisdale, had come into his office and reported that her son was missing.”

The tension in the woman’s back pulled her up a little straighter. “Son?”

“When I called him and told him I had custody of the boy, he drove up to where it is your daughter was supposedly living, but the people there said they’d never heard of her or the boy. Interestingly enough, the map she left with the sheriff had a phone number scribbled at the bottom—your phone number.”

Eleanor Tisdale groped for a stool and pulled it underneath herself. “Do you have any photographs, anything that might . . . ?”

I fingered the Polaroid that we always take to keep track of lodgers from my shirt pocket and held it out to her. “This is the boy.”

She read the single word written in red Magic Marker at the bottom border. “Cord?”

“That’s his name.” She took it gently and held it as if it might vanish. “We don’t have any photographs of your daughter, and to be honest we don’t know where she might be.”

“Oh, my.”

I lowered my head to get in her line of sight. “I take it he looks familiar?”

“The spitting image.” She got up and punched NO SALE on the cash register at the end of the bar and walked back to us with a school photo of a pretty young girl with long, blond hair and deep, sapphire eyes. “Where is he now?”

I took the photo and studied it; the resemblance was, as they say, uncanny. “He’s safe in Durant at a friend’s. I didn’t see any reason for him to be shuttled off to a foster home since he has a mother looking for him and relatives in-county.”

“Have you heard any more from Sarah?”

“Unfortunately, no. I was kind of hoping you had.”

She shook her head. “No. Nothing in seventeen years. Dale, when he was around, wouldn’t even say her name; he used to refer to her as ‘that ungrateful child.’” Her eyes unfocused for a moment and she began a familiar verse. “‘Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits . . .’”

She faltered, and I continued the Shakespeare for her. “‘To laughter and contempt, that she may feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.’”

The cobalt eyes stayed distant and then focused on the photo in her trembling hands. “He’s fifteen?”

“Yep.” I watched as she continued to finger the photograph like a holy relic. “The math works out, doesn’t it? How about we trade photos, and I’ll get this one back to you after we find her?”

I was about to add more when the bar door swung open to the accompaniment of an attached jangling bell. The middle-aged man in the doorway was pale and painfully lean, with red hair and a sharp face half-hidden under the bill of a black John Deere ball cap. His clothes, an off-white nylon dress shirt and a powder blue blazer, were rumpled and hung off him like a bad hanger. Slung over his shoulder was an expensive, spacey-looking tactical shotgun with a small flashlight mounted underneath the barrel.

Eleanor’s voice sounded behind me. “Can I help you?”

I leaned to my right to see around Vic, who gave him a quick look and immediately dismissed the odd character as Ichabod Double-Ought Buck. She sipped her beer. “What, were you born in a barn?” She placed the bottle back on the bar and murmured to herself. “Yeah, you probably were.”

He didn’t move for a moment, then half turned as if to leave—evidently he wasn’t happy to see the greater portion of the off-duty Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department seated at the bar. He stood there in profile and then cleared his throat as if he was about to make a speech, but it was a short one: “Mr. Lynear would like to talk to you.”

Eleanor looked puzzled. “Who?”

He looked even more surprised at her response and took a step into the bar with a vexed look on his face, as if he shouldn’t have to be bothered with repeating, let alone explaining, himself. “Mr. Roy Lynear, owner/operator of the East Spring Ranch, would like to talk to you.”

I stood, tucked the photo of Sarah Tisdale into my shirt pocket, and took a step toward him. “And who are you?”

Perhaps hoping for a prompter, he looked back out the door again. “George.”

“Are you quail hunting at this time of night?” He glanced at me, but his eyes returned to Eleanor; evidently his one-track mind was always in danger of derailment. I pointed at the shotgun on his back. “It’s against the law to bring a gun into an establishment that serves liquor.”

The eyes switched to Vic and then back to me, and his voice and manner changed, telling me a great deal about him. “She’s wearing one in this Godless establishment and so are you.”

I took another step, bringing myself within arm’s reach of him. “She’s my deputy, and maybe I should introduce myself. I’m Sheriff Walt Longmire—and your full name is?”

“George Joseph Lynear.”

He stood there looking back and forth between us again with a kind of wildness in his eyes. I thought for a moment that he was going to do something stupid, but he didn’t; instead, he took a step back onto the boardwalk. “There, are ya happy now?”

I reached over and closed the door in his face.

Vic barked a laugh as I spoke to him through the glass pane. “Go tell your family you can come back in here when you learn some manners.” He stood there looking at me with a blistering hatred, then turned and walked off the boardwalk toward a large, decked-out one-ton dually parked perpendicular to mine.

I turned back to the proprietor. “Who’s Roy Lynear?”

She shook her head. “I guess he’s the one everybody’s been having trouble with the last few weeks. Some of his men . . .”

She was interrupted again by the sound of the door behind me, and this time I turned with my hand resting on my Colt, just in case. The sack-of-bones trapshooter wasn’t there, but in his place was another odd-looking individual who was a hell of a lot more impressive in both stature and dress. He was a tall, well-toned Hispanic man in black jeans and a dark suit jacket, his pork-chop sideburns sticking out almost as far as the brim of his black cattleman’s hat.

He quickly slipped it off to reveal full locks of curling, dark hair. “Hola.”

I stood there looking down at him. “Hey.”

“I would like to apologize.” He gestured with the hat. “My compadre learned his social graces from cows.”

I nodded. “So, are you Roy Lynear?”

He laughed, obviously much amused by the thought. “Oh no, I simply work for Mr. Lynear.” He extended his hand toward me. “I’m Tomás Bidarte. I am the poet lariat of Nuevo Leon.”

“Lariat, not laureate?”

He smiled, and it was a dazzling display, revealing some creative dentistry with more than twenty-four karats. “My poetry is more for the cantina than the parlor.”

I took the hand. “What do you do when you’re not rhyming?”

We shook, and his grip was like cast iron. “Work for Mr. Lynear.”

I looked around the vaquero toward the truck with its running lights on, sitting in the half-light of the approaching night. “Well, it’s an odd time to come visiting, especially armed. Is Roy out there, because I’m dying to meet him.”

He continued smiling, studying me. “And I’m sure he’s going to want to meet you too, Sheriff.”

“Send him in.”

Bidarte turned his matinee-idol profile toward the door and then back to me. “That, señor, might be a little easier said than done.”

• • •

The man in the back of the brand-new King Ranch one-ton diesel was testing its rear suspension—he must’ve tipped the scales at an easy four hundred pounds. He was comfortably seated in what must’ve been a custom-built La-Z-Boy throne, complete with his sheepskin slippers prominently displayed on the foot extension. He wore an oversized, expensive-looking bathrobe draped over a snap-button shirt with a large turquoise bolo tie and a pair of TCU purple sweatpants. On his head was an honest-to-God sombrero.

“‘The harvest has passed and the summer has ended, and we are not saved.’”

Vic and Eleanor had joined me at the edge of the wooden walkway, an advantage that made us the same height as Roy Lynear.

“Jeremiah, chapter eight, verse two.”

He turned his head and looked at me. “You know the word of God, Sheriff?”

“I know entire sentences.”

He continued to study me, unsure if I was the real deal or if I’d only stumbled upon a line of scripture, then gestured toward one of his massive legs. “Inconvenient gout; I apologize for having you come out here into the night like this, but my joints are hurting so bad I’m afraid I wouldn’t make it up those steps.”

I watched as John Deere in a ball cap stayed on the other side of the truck bed with the shotgun in his hands.

The massive man in the chair settled his eyes on me. “I suppose I should introduce myself—I’m Roy Lynear.”

Vic was quick to respond. “We’ve heard a lot about you lately.”

He studied my deputy, and I was pretty sure he was both attracted and annoyed. “Have you, now?” He glanced at the sullen one behind him and to the caballero who had propped an ornately inlaid, pointy-toed boot on the rear bumper of the chariot near the Texas plate. “From these two?”

To my surprise, the Hispanic fellow spoke freely. “You are the company you keep.”

The giant man laughed until he wheezed. “Tomás Bidarte here is one of the great vaquero poets. He’s in all the anthologies, aren’t you, Tom?”

He tipped his hat. “There’s no accounting for taste.”

Lynear issued a command. “Give us one, Tom.”

Bidarte slipped an elongated knife from the back pocket of his jeans and pushed a button, the stiletto blade leaping out into the running lights a good eight inches. He cleaned his fingernails as he spoke.

“Have more than you show,

Talk less than you know.

Lend less than you owe,

Ride more than you go.”

The older man shook his head and kicked a slipper at the poet. “That wasn’t one of your best.”

“Well, Patrón, you get what you pay for.”

Lynear gestured quickly and nodded at the man behind him. “One of my dim-witted sons, George.” He hunched himself a little forward and looked past me. “Excuse me, Sheriff. Mrs. Tisdale?”

She took a step forward and crossed her arms. “That’s me.”

“We haven’t met formally, but I understand there was an altercation about the exact location of some fence?”

She glanced at George, the one who had just been dismissed. “My men said that they were restringing barbed wire near Frenchy Basin when a group of yours came up and threatened them.”

We all stood there listening to the crickets rubbing their legs together as Eleanor’s words hung in the crisp night. I was having one of those this-could-be-happening-a-hundred-years-ago moments when Lynear turned his shoulders and glanced at his son. “That won’t happen again.” He returned his gaze on all of us. “That, I can promise you.”

I looked back at him, his eyes sunk into the fat of his face. “You travel well armed.”

“Oh . . .” He reached up and shifted back the brim of his enormous hat. “As you can see, we’ve spent a lot of time down on the border; Hudspeth County to be exact. Do you know the area, Sheriff?”

“Not particularly.”

“‘Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness.’” He shook his head. “It’s a war zone down on the border—Godforsaken country—and we’ve just gotten in the habit of being prepared.” He pointed at my sidearm. “As are you.”

I put a hand up on one of the building’s support poles and thumbed the grain of the wood. “There’s a difference between preparing and provoking, Mr. Lynear.”

He smiled. “Are we provoking you, Sheriff?”

“It sounds like your men might’ve been provoking Mrs. Tisdale’s men, and I’d just as soon not have a range war in the southern part of my county.”

His eyes remained immobile as he continued to smile, and it wasn’t an attractive expression on his wide face. “Your county.”

“Till the next general election, the people of this county have elected me to uphold the laws they deem fit to enforce.”

“What about the law of God, Sheriff?”

“Not particularly my jurisdiction, Mr. Lynear.”

He actually chuckled. “Oh, that’s all part of our jurisdiction, and beside that fact, I happen to own a portion of your county, Sheriff. Almost twelve thousand acres, and as far as I know this is still a free country.”

I sighed, suddenly tired of the man and his jingo philosophies. “Abide by the laws of the county, state, and federal government, and we won’t have any trouble, Mr. Lynear, but if you start anything down here with your neighbors you’re going to see me again.”

He raised a hand. “I’m a God-fearing man in search of peaceful solitude in which to raise my family—I want nothing of the world, and the world wants nothing of me.” He nodded as if giving a benediction. “There is a day of reckoning coming, though, a day when all men must take a side and the freedoms of some may impinge on the heresy and Godlessness of others.”

I let George come around the truck before I spoke, specifically to him. “You need to register this vehicle in Wyoming.”

He looked at his father, back to me, and then gave the slightest of nods before yanking open the driver’s-side door; Tomás Bidarte folded his knife and climbed in the bed with his benefactor.

Just before George had time to preheat the coil and fire up the diesel, Vic waved and delivered one of my lines: “Happy motoring.”

Roy Lynear looked thoughtfully at us from the bed of the truck as they backed up and pulled away in a cloud of smoke, sans a hardy Hi-yo, Silver. We watched as the big Ford skimmed out of the town proper and then took to the county road, its taillights looking like afterburners headed south.

“That was one fucker from strange.”

Eleanor Tisdale sighed. “Which one?”

“Pick.”

• • •

It was close to midnight when we got back to Durant, and once again all the traffic lights were blinking. Across Main Street there was a newly hung large banner, orange with black trim, that advertised Friday’s big game between the Durant Dogies, whom Vic continually referred to as Doggies, and the Worland Warriors in their epic tiff—and the retiring of one Walt Longmire’s jersey and that of Henry Standing Bear, both dutifully displayed on either side of the banner.

“Sixty-nine—really?”

I shrugged and thought about how I hadn’t promised Nancy that I would be there. “I’d forgotten my number.”

“Gives me ideas.” I didn’t rise to the bait, so she continued. “I bet you were popular.”

I shrugged again. “I did all right.”

She smiled, reading the banner as we drove underneath. “I bet ol’ number thirty-two did better.”

I thought about the Bear and how I’d better make a call out to The Red Pony Bar and Grill if I didn’t want to face this ignominy alone. “Henry did better than everybody. He still does.”

“I still want a corsage in the orange and black of the Durant Doggies.”

“Dogies.”

“What the hell is a doggie, anyway?”

“A dogie is a motherless calf.”

She studied the storefronts as we drove through town, her thoughts darkening like the windows. “How appropriate. Do you find it worrisome that Cord escaped from or was expulsed by a religious cult and now we have one setting up camp in our own county?”

I glanced at her. “Our county?”

“Yeah, well . . . I wasn’t elected, but I’m de facto.”

“I thought you were a Moretti.”

“Ha ha.” She poked my shoulder with an index finger. “Answer the question.”

“Yes, I do.” I watched the buildings go by and had to admit that I liked the county seat quiet like this. “And it’s even more worrisome since Tim Berg says the head honcho up at that place in his county also goes by the name of Lynear.”

She turned to look at me. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope, but we also don’t know for sure that our Lynear’s place is a cult.”

“Uh-huh—that conversation had more Bible quotes than a revival meeting.” She thought about it. “You think Cord’s mother might be mixed up with this bunch rather than the one in South Dakota?”

“Not with Sarah coming into the Butte County Sheriff’s Office and the pants Cord had on from Belle Fourche, but there has to be a connection explaining why Cord showed up here.”

“Other than a grandmother in Short Drop who obviously didn’t know that he exists?”

“Yep.”

“Considering the newfound information, I think it was very politic of you to not bring up the familial connection between the interstate Lynears with Eleanor Tisdale.” She readjusted, tucking one boot under the other leg. “So, it sounds like you’re getting ready to have a wide-reaching conversation with young Cord.”

“I am now that the county psychologist says I can.”

“What are you going to do about Roy Lynear and his bunch?”

I sighed. “Not a lot I can do until they do something against the law.”

“Like walking around shoving their guns in people’s faces and cleaning their fingernails with illegal knives?” She mused on the supposed compound to the south. “Your worst nightmare come true.”

“And Eleanor Tisdale’s, since apparently her husband sold the place to them.”

She nodded to herself and smiled. “So, when are we going to go poke around the East Spring Ranch?”

I really didn’t have the right, but I was curious, especially with the probable connection with the compound in South Dakota. It was also possible that I just didn’t like Roy Lynear and his gun-toting son; either way, it was important to know what was going on down there in one of the neglected corners of my county. “First thing in the morning.”

“What do you make of the Spanish blade?”

I thought about the man. “Doesn’t fit, does he?”

“One severe case of badass, if you ask me.”

“Why is that?”

“He wasn’t scared, Walt. Considerate, yes, but not scared at all. Anybody else in that situation would’ve been just a little bit intimidated, but he wasn’t.” She waited to make the next statement after I passed the sheriff’s office and took a left on Fort. “You’re taking me home?”

“I figured that’s where you’d want to go.”

“Where are you sleeping?”

“The amazingly affordable and surprisingly comfortable Absaroka County Jail.” I glanced at her. “I figure I better spell Double Tough since he’s been babysitting Cord all evening.”

“Then what’s he supposed to do?”

It was true that my deputy’s house was in Powder Junction, a forty-five-minute drive south. “Don’t you think he’d like to go home?”

“Not particularly, considering that Frymire’s girlfriend is visiting.”

I thought about it as I took a right onto Desmet. “Yeah, I guess they share a house.”

She nodded. “A run-down, two-bedroom rental by the creek, from what I hear. What, you think we can all afford houses on what the county pays us?” We drove along in one of those silences only women can produce, a ponderous, heavy quiet. “For your information, I’m aware that you arranged the financing for my house behind my back.”

I pulled up in front of the little gray craftsman with the red door. “I have no idea what it is you are talking about.”

“I saw the papers.”

I sat there for a moment and then tried a reverse in the backfield. “I may have signed something that said you were an employee in good standing with the sheriff’s department—in short, I lied.”

She didn’t laugh but sat there studying her hands. After a moment she unsnapped her safety belt, nudged her knees up onto the seat, and, slapping my hat into the back, she slid herself across my lap. She grabbed the back of my hair and yanked it, locking her mouth over mine, and I could feel the waves of heat from her body pounding me like surf on a coastal rock.

• • •

I snuck in the front door of the sheriff’s office like a teenager getting in after curfew and could hear Double Tough snoring on the bench in the reception area. I gave a salute to the painting of Andrew Carnegie, a relic from when our building had been the town library, and quietly climbed the stairs past the 8×10s of all the sheriffs in our county’s history, sure their eyes were watching me as I passed.

My deputy had dragged out a few pillows and a blanket from the supplies. The noise that he made was horrific, and I figured it was probably for the best that he wasn’t sleeping in the holding cells with Cord—the poor kid would be deaf by morning.

I also reminded myself that tomorrow was Tuesday and that I would need to call my old boss, Lucian Connally, at the Durant Home for Assisted Living and cancel chess night if I was going to the southern part of the county to loiter with intent.

All of these things were roiling in my mind as I kicked an empty Mountain Dew can that Double Tough had left on the floor.

I stood there quietly as his snoring stopped, and he spoke. “You’re grounded.”

I turned and looked at him, or rather at the lump of gray wool blanket that passed for him. “How’s our charge?”

“Asleep.” He shucked the blanket and blinked at me. “Chief, you’re not going to believe what we did tonight.”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“You know the old TV and VCR down in the jail?”

“Yep.”

He smiled. “I was walking by and saw a box of tapes in that stuff that Ruby’s sending off to the church. I was feeling bad because the kid is just sitting in the cell reading his Bible like he’s in solitary confinement, so I thought, What the heck, I’ll make popcorn in the microwave and we’ll watch a movie.”

“What did you watch?”

“Well, it’s not like we had a lot to choose from; I mean it was church lady movies. . . .”

I leaned against the dispatcher’s counter. “Maybe that was for the best.”

“My Friend Flicka, the one from a million years ago.”

“Set in Wyoming—Mary O’Hara wrote the book.”

“Yeah, well they filmed it in Utah. . . . But that’s not the point.” He swung his legs down and gathered the covers over his shoulders like a serape. “Chief, I don’t think that kid has ever watched TV or a movie before, I mean ever.” He stood and leaned an elbow on the counter with me. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I about fell asleep every ten minutes, but that kid was glued to the screen; he laughed and cried like the stuff was happening to him right there in the chair.”

“I guess it’s possible that . . .”

“He watched it three times.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay; after the first time I just started watching him.” He leaned down and picked up the can I’d kicked, crushing it effortlessly in his hand and tossing it into Ruby’s wire trash can. “I hope Ruby don’t mind, but I gave the kid the tape. I tried to explain that they had these new things, DVDs, but he didn’t care. . . . You’da thought I gave him the friggin’ horse.”

“Where is he now?”

“Back in holding.”

I yawned. “I’ll check on him, and then I’m going to hit the hay in the other holding cell.” I pushed off. “Seeing as there’s no room at the inn.”

I checked my office on the pass by but didn’t see Dog and assumed that he must’ve been in the back keeping an eye on the young man. I tried to remember what the first movie was that I might’ve seen but could come up with nothing. I’d grown up on a northern Wyoming ranch about as far from everything as was possible in what seemed like a different century, but I watched TV and couldn’t imagine the kind of lifestyle where young Cord had never seen one.

I turned the corner in the dark room, quietly slipped along the wall to where I could see into the holding cell, and was immediately greeted with a rumbling half bark.

“Shhh . . .” I moved over to the bars and noticed that Double Tough must’ve changed his mind and decided to close the door. I pulled on it gently but discovered that it was locked. I glanced around and then reached over and flipped on the light; the only occupant in the cell was Dog.