CRAIG

JOHNSON

THE WALT LONGMIRE MYSTERY SERIES

The First Four Novels

THE COLD DISH

—

DEATH WITHOUT COMPANY

—

KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED

—

ANOTHER MAN’S MOCCASINS

PENGUIN BOOKS

CONTENTS

About the Author

Praise for Craig Johnson and the Walt Longmire Mystery Series

Also by Craig Johnson

THE WALT LONGMIRE MYSTERY SERIES

The First Four Novels

THE COLD DISH

DEATH WITHOUT COMPANY

KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED

ANOTHER MAN’S MOCCASINS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CRAIG JOHNSON is the author of eight novels in the Walt Longmire mystery series, which has garnered popular and critical acclaim. The Cold Dish was a Dilys Award finalist and the French edition won Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/BibliObs. Death Without Company, the Wyoming State Historical Association’s Book of the Year, won France’s Le Prix 813. Another Man’s Moccasins was the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award winner and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers’ Association Book of the Year, and The Dark Horse, the fifth in the series, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Junkyard Dogs won the Watson Award for a mystery novel with the best sidekick, and Hell Is Empty was a New York Times best seller and was named Library Journal’s Best Mystery of the Year. All are available from Penguin. The eighth novel in the series, As the Crow Flies, was a New York Times best seller as well and an Indie Next List pick and will be available in paperback in May 2013. Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire novels have now been adapted for television in the hit series Longmire on A&E. His next novel, A Serpent’s Tooth, will be available from Viking in May 2013. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.

Praise for Craig Johnson and the Walt Longmire Mystery Series

“Like the greatest crime novelists, Johnson is a student of human nature. Walt Longmire is strong but fallible, a man whose devil-may-care stoicism masks a heightened sensitivity to the horrors he’s witnessed. Unlike traditional genre novelists who obsess mainly over every hairpin plot turn, Johnson’s books are also preoccupied with the mystery of his characters’ psyches.” —Los Angeles Times

“Johnson knows the territory, both fictive and geographical, and tells us about it in prose that crackles.” —Robert B. Parker

“The characters talk straight from the hip and the Wyoming landscape is its own kind of eloquence.” —The New York Times

“[Walt Longmire] is an easy man to like. . . . Johnson evokes the rugged landscape with reverential prose, lending a heady atmosphere to his story.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Stepping into Walt’s world is like slipping on a favorite pair of slippers, and it’s where those slippers lead that provides a thrill. Johnson pens a series that should become a ‘must’ read, so curl up, get comfortable, and enjoy the ride.” —The Denver Post

“A winning piece of work . . . There’s a convincing feel to the whole package: a sense that you’re viewing this territory through the eyes of someone who knows it as adoring lover and skeptical onlooker at the same time.” —The Washington Post

“Johnson’s pacing is tight and his dialogue snaps.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Truly great. Reading Craig Johnson is a treat. . . . [He] tells great stories, casts wonderful characters and writes in a style that compels the reader forward.” —Wyoming Tribune Eagle

Also by

CRAIG JOHNSON

• • • •

The Cold Dish

Death Without Company

Kindness Goes Unpunished

Another Man’s Moccasins

The Dark Horse

Junkyard Dogs

Hell Is Empty

As the Crow Flies

Christmas in Absaroka County:

Walt Longmire Christmas Stories

FORTHCOMING FROM VIKING

A Serpent’s Tooth

CRAIG

JOHNSON

THE COLD DISH

PENGUIN BOOKS

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005

Published in Penguin Books 2006

Copyright © Craig Johnson, 2005

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ISBN 978-1-101-04394-3 (ePub)

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

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

For the dairy princess of Wayne County

and the crack shot of Cabell . . .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A writer, like a sheriff, is the embodiment of a group of people and, without their support, both are in a tight spot. I have been fortunate to be blessed with a close order of friends and associates who have made this book possible. They know who they are and, as the tradition goes, you can never thank a good cast too much.

Thanks to Sheriff Larry Kirkpatrick for a quarter of a century of fighting the good fight, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s Sandy Mays and Harry’s pizza, which isn’t so bad. To Henry Standing Bear for the magic and more, Marcus Red Thunder for the sweat, Charles Little Old Man for the words, Dorothy Caldwell Kisling for the stimulation, Donna Dubrow for the motivation, and Gail Hochman for the belief. To Kathryn Court, Clare Farraro, Sarah Manges, and Ali Bothwell Mancini, my ferocious pride of lionesses at Viking Penguin.

Finally, to my wife and muse Judy all the love in the world for greeting my daily reappearance from Absaroka County with patience and good humor. I would be Walt without you.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

—Pierre Ambroise François

Choderlos de La Clos,

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

1

“Bob Barnes says they got a dead body out on BLM land. He’s on line one.”

She might have knocked, but I didn’t hear it because I was watching the geese. I watch the geese a lot in the fall, when the days get shorter and the ice traces the rocky edges of Clear Creek. The sheriff ’s office in our county is an old Carnegie building that my department inherited when the Absaroka County Library got so many books they had to go live somewhere else. We’ve still got the painting of Andy out in the landing of the entryway. Every time the previous sheriff left the building he used to salute the old robber baron. I’ve got the large office in the south side bay, which allows me an unobstructed view of the Big Horn Mountains to my right and the Powder River Valley to my left. The geese fly down the valley south, with their backs to me, and I usually sit with my back to the window, but occasionally I get caught with my chair turned; this seems to be happening more and more, lately.

I looked at her, looking being one of my better law-enforcement techniques. Ruby’s a tall woman, slim, with a direct manner and clear blue eyes that tend to make people nervous. I like that in a receptionist /dispatcher, keeps the riffraff out of the office. She leaned against the doorjamb and went to shorthand, “Bob Barnes, dead body, line one.”

I looked at the blinking red light on my desk and wondered vaguely if there was a way I could get out of this. “Did he sound drunk?”

“I am not aware that I’ve ever heard him sound sober.”

I flipped the file and pictures that I’d been studying onto my chest and punched line one and the speakerphone button. “Hey, Bob. What’s up?”

“Hey, Walt. You ain’t gonna believe this shit. . . .” He didn’t sound particularly drunk, but Bob’s a professional, so you never can tell. He was silent for a moment. “Hey, no shit, we got us a cool one out here.”

I winked at Ruby. “Just one, huh?”

“Hey, I ain’t shittin’ you. Billy was movin’ some of Tom Chatham’s sheep down off the BLM section to winter pasture, and them little bastards clustered around somethin’ in one of the draws. . . . We got a cool one.”

“You didn’t see it?”

“No. Billy did.”

“Put him on.”

There was a brief jostling of the phone, and a younger version of Bob’s voice answered, “Hey, Shuuriff.”

Slurred speech. Great. “Billy, you say you saw this body?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“What’d it look like?”

Silence for a moment. “Looked like a body.”

I thought about resting my head on my desk. “Anybody we know?”

“Oh, I didn’t get that close.”

Instead, I pushed my hat farther up on my head and sighed. “How close did you get?”

“Couple hundred yards. It gets steep in the draws where the water flow cuts through that little valley. The sheep stayed all clustered around whatever it is. I didn’t want to take my truck up there ’cause I just got it washed.”

I studied the little red light on the phone until I realized he was not going to go on. “No chance of this being a dead ewe or lamb?” Wouldn’t be a coyote, with the other sheep milling around. “Where are you guys?”

“ ’Bout a mile past the old Hudson Bridge on 137.”

“All right, you hang on. I’ll get somebody out there in a half hour or so.”

“Yes sir. . . . Hey, Shuuriff?” I waited. “Dad says for you to bring beer, we’re almost out.”

“You bet.” I punched the button and looked at Ruby. “Where’s Vic?”

“Well, she’s not sitting in her office looking at old reports.”

“Where is she, please?” Her turn to sigh and, never looking at me directly, she walked over, took the worn manila folder from my chest, and returned it to the filing cabinet where she always returns it when she catches me studying it.

“Don’t you think you should get out of the office sometime today?” She continued to look at the windows.

I thought about it. “I am not going out 137 to look at dead sheep.”

“Vic’s down the street, directing traffic.”

“We’ve only got one street. What’s she doing that for?”

“Electricals for the Christmas decorations.”

“It’s not even Thanksgiving.”

“It’s a city council thing.”

I had put her on that yesterday and promptly forgot about it. I had a choice: I could either go out to 137, drink beer, and look at dead sheep with a drunk Bob Barnes and his half-wit son or go direct traffic and let Vic show me how displeased she was with me. “We got any beer in the refrigerator?”

“No.”

I pulled my hat down straight and told Ruby that if anybody else called about dead bodies, we had already filled the quota for a Friday and they should call back next week. She stopped me by mentioning my daughter, who was my singular ray of sunshine. “Tell Cady I said hello and for her to call me.”

This was suspicious. “Why?” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. My finely honed detecting skills told me something was up, but I had neither the time nor the energy to pursue it.

I jumped in the Silver Bullet and rolled through the drive-through at Durant Liquor to pick up a sixer of Rainier. No sense having the county support Bob Barnes’s bad habits with a full six-pack, so I screwed off one of the tops and took a swig. Ah, mountain fresh. I was going to have to drive by Vic and let her let me know how pissed off she was bound to be, so I pulled out onto Main Street, joined the three-car traffic jam, and looked into the outstretched palm of Deputy Victoria Moretti.

* * *

Vic was a career patrol person from an extended family of patrol people back in South Philadelphia. Her father was a cop, her uncles were cops, and her brothers were cops. The problem was that her husband was not a cop. He was a field engineer for Consolidated Coal and had gotten transferred to Wyoming to work at a mine about halfway between here and the Montana border. When he accepted the new position a little less than two years ago, she gave it all up and came out with him. She listened to the wind, played housewife for about two weeks, and then came into the office to apply for a job.

She didn’t look like a cop, least not like the ones we have out here. I figured she was one of those artists who had received a grant from the Crossroads Foundation, the ones that lope up and down the county roads in their $150 running shoes and their New York Yankee ball caps. I’d lost one of my regular deputies, Lenny Rowell, to the Highway Patrol. I could have brought Turk up from Powder Junction but that had appealed to me as much as gargling razor blades. It wasn’t that Turk was a bad deputy; it’s just that all that rodeo-cowboy bullshit wore me out, and I didn’t like his juvenile temper. Nobody else from in county had applied for the job, so I had done her a favor and let her fill out an application.

I read the Durant Courant while she sat out in the reception room scribbling on the front and back of the damn form for half an hour. Her writing fist began to shake and by the time she was done, her face had turned a lively shade of granite. She flipped the page onto Ruby’s desk, hissed “Fuck this shit,” and walked out. We called all her references, from field investigators in ballistics to the Philadelphia Chief of Police. Her credentials were hard to argue with: top 5 percent out of the academy, bachelor’s in law enforcement from Temple University with nineteen credit hours toward her master’s, a specialty in ballistics, two citations, and four years street duty. She was on the fast track, and next year she would’ve made detective. I’d have been pissed, too.

I had driven out to the address that she’d given me, a little house trailer near the intersection of both highways with nothing but bare dirt and scrub sage all around it. There was a Subaru with Pennsylvania plates and a GO OWLS bumper sticker, so I figured I was in the right place. When I got up to the steps, she already had the door open and was looking at me through the screen. “Yeah?”

I was married for a quarter century and I’ve got a lawyer for a daughter, so I knew how to deal with these situations: Stay close to the bone, nothing but the facts, ma’am. I crossed my arms, leaned on her railing, and listened to it squeal as the sheet metal screws tried to pull loose from the doublewide’s aluminum skin. “You want this job?”

“No.” She looked past me toward the highway. She didn’t have any shoes on, and her toes were clutching the threadbare carpet like cat’s claws in an attempt to keep her from spinning off into the ether. She was a little below average height and weight, olive complexion, with short black hair that kind of stood up in pure indignity. She’d been crying, and her eyes were the color of tarnished gold, and the only thing I could think of doing was to open the screen door and hold her. I had had a lot of problems of my own of late, and I figured we could both just stand there and cry for a while.

I looked down at my brown rough-outs and watched the dirt glide across the porch in underlining streaks. “Nice wind we’ve been having.” She didn’t say a word. “Hey, you want my job?”

She laughed. “Maybe.”

We both smiled. “Well, you can have it in about four years, but right now I need a deputy.” She looked out at the highway again. “But I need a deputy who isn’t going to run off to Pittsburgh in two weeks.” That got her attention.

“Philadelphia.”

“Whatever.” With that, I got all the tarnished gold I could handle.

“Do I have to wear one of those goofy cowboy hats like you?”

I glanced up at the brim of my hat and then back down to her for effect. “Not unless you want to.”

She cocked her head past me, nodding to the Bullet. “Do I get a Batmobile like that to drive around in?”

“You bet.”

That had been the first dissemblance of many to come.

* * *

I took a big swig and finished off the first Rainier beer and popped it back in the carton. I could see the muscles in her jaw flex like biceps. I made her knock on the window before I rolled it down. “What’s the problem, officer?”

She looked pointedly at her watch. “It’s 4:37, where the hell are you going?”

I relaxed back into the big bucket seat. “Close enough. I’m going home.” She just stood there, waiting. It was one of her best talents, asking questions and just standing there, waiting for an answer. “Oh, Bob Barnes called, says they got a dead body out between Jim Keller’s place and Bureau of Land Management.”

She yanked her head back and showed me a canine tooth. “They saw a dead body. Yeah, and I’m a fucking Chinese fighter pilot.”

“Uh huh, looks like the big sheepocide we’ve all been waiting for.” It was the shank of the afternoon, and the one beer was already helping to improve my mood. The sky was still a VistaVision blue, but there was a large cloud bank to the northwest that was just beginning to obscure the mountains. The nearer clouds were fluffy and white, but the backdrop was a darker, bruised color that promised scattered snow at high altitudes.

“You look like hammered shit.”

I gave her a look out of the side of my eye. “You wanna go out there?”

“It’s on your way home.”

“No, it’s past there, out on 137.”

“It’s still a lot closer to you, and seeing as you’re going home early . . .”

The wind was beginning to pick up. I was going to have to go long on this one. “Well, if you don’t want to . . .”

She gave me another look. “You have done nothing but sit in your office, on your ass, all day.”

“I’m not feeling real well, think I might be getting the flu or something.”

“Maybe you should go out and get some exercise. How much do you weigh now? Two-sixty?”

“You have a mean streak.” She continued to look at me. “Two-fifty-three.” It sounded better than two-fifty-five.

She stared at my left shoulder in deep concentration, juggling the evening that she must have had planned. “Glen isn’t coming home till late.” She looked at herself in the side-view mirror and instantly looked away. “Where are they?”

“On 137, about a mile past the old Hudson Bridge.” This was working out pretty well. “They’re in Billy’s truck.” She started to push off and walk away. “They wanted you to pick up some beer on your way out.”

She turned and tapped a finger on the passenger door. “If I was going to bring them beer, I would take that depleted six-pack in the seat beside you, mister. You know, we have an open container law in this state.”

I watched her man-walk with the sixteen-shot automatic bouncing on her hip. “Hey, I try and have an open container with me no matter what state I’m in.” She was smiling when she slammed the door of her five-year-old unit. It’s good when you can bring unbridled happiness to your fellow workers. I nosed the three-quarter ton out to the west side of town, and Vic must’ve passed me doing an even eighty, sirens and lights all going full blast. She gave me the finger as she went by.

* * *

I had to smile. It was Friday, I had five beers in attendance, and my daughter was supposed to call this evening. I drove out through Wolf Valley and ignored the scattered, out-of-state vehicles parked illegally along the road. During the latter part of hunting season, my part of the high plains becomes a Disneyland for every overage boy with a high-powered toy. Instead, I watched the clouds slowly eat the Bighorn Mountains. There was a little early snow up there, and the setting sun was fading it from a kind of frozen blue to a subtle glow of purple. I had lived here my entire life, except for college in California and a stint in the marines in Vietnam. I had thought about those mountains the entire time I was gone and swore that a day wouldn’t go by when I got back that I wouldn’t look at them. Most of the time, I remembered.

By the time I got out to Crossroads there was a fine silting of confectionery snow blowing across the road and falling through the sage and range grass. The shadows were long when I stopped at the mailbox. There was nothing but a Doctor Leonard’s Healthcare sale catalog, which scared me it was so interesting. I navigated the irrigation ditch and drove up to the house.

Martha had grown up on her family ranch, some couple thousand-odd acres near Powder Junction, and had always hated being a townie. So, three years ago, we bought a little land off the Foundation, got one of those piles of logs they call a kit, drilled a well, and planted a septic tank. We sold the house in town, because Martha was in such a hurry to get out of it, and lived in a trailer I had borrowed from Henry Standing Bear, owner of the Red Pony and my oldest friend. By the fall, we had her all closed in and the heat on. Then Martha died.

I parked the truck on the gravel, pulled out the beer, and walked on the two-by-twelves over the mud that led up to the door. I’d been meaning to get some grass seed, but the snow kept putting an end to that. I pushed the door open and stepped up from the cinder block onto the plywood floor. The place still needed a little work. There were some interior walls but most were just studs and, when you turned the bare bulbs on, the light slipped through the wooden bars and made patterns on the floor. The electricals weren’t done, so I had two four-ways plugged into the box and everything just ran into them. The plumbing was done, but I used a shower curtain as a bathroom door; consequently, I didn’t get many visitors. There was a prewar, Henry F. Miller baby grand that had belonged to my mother-in-law, on which I had been known to pound out a little boogie-woogie, but I hadn’t played it since Martha had died. I had my books all stacked in beer boxes near the back wall and, the Christmas before last in a fit of holiday optimism, Cady and I had gone out and bought a floor lamp, an easy chair, and a Sony Trinitron color television. The lamp and easy chair worked really well, whereas the TV did not. Without a dish, the only thing you could pick up was Channel 12 with snow for a picture and a soothing hiss for sound. I watched it religiously.

I had the phone set up on a cardboard box next to the chair so I wouldn’t have to get up to answer it, and I had a cooler on the other side for the beer. I threw my coat and hat on the boxes, switched on my lamp, and sat down in my chair with Doctor Leonard in my lap. I flipped the catalog open to page three and pondered a genuine artificial sheepskin cover made for all standard recliners. I glanced up at the stacked log walls and tried to decide between the available ivory and the rich chestnut. Didn’t really matter. After four years, I had yet to make any truly decisive steps in interior decor. Perhaps Doctor Leonard’s machine-washable polyester acrylic fleece was my Iliad. This thought was unsettling enough to motivate the fourth beer, which was only slightly warmer than the first three. I screwed off the top, pinching it between thumb and forefinger, and tossed it into the drywall bucket that served as my only trash can. I thought about calling the Doc’s 1-800 number but was afraid that I might block Cady’s call. She had tried to get me to get call waiting, but I figured I got interrupted enough during the course of a day and didn’t need to pay for the privilege at home. I hit the remote and surfed from automatic four to destination twelve: ghost TV. It was my favorite show, the one where the different-sized blobs moved around in a blizzard and didn’t make too much noise. Gave me plenty of time to think.

* * *

I retraced the well-worn path of my thoughts to the report that had been lying on my chest when Ruby had come into the office. I didn’t really need the actual file. I had every scrap of paper in it memorized. There is a black-and-white photograph that I had cropped down, the kind we use to attach a person to a particular brand of misery. Place photo here. The background is a vacant white, broken only by the shadow of an electric conduit, no proper venue for intimacy such as this. In another setting, the portrait might have been a Curtis or a Remington.

Melissa is Northern Cheyenne. In the photograph, she has dark stalks of healthy hair arching to her shoulders, but there are small discolorations there and at her throat, multiple bruises, and a contusion at the jawline. I hear noises when I summon up these wounds. To the trained eye, her features might appear a touch too small, like the petals on a bud not yet opened. Her almond-shaped eyes are unreadable. I keep remembering those eyes and the epicanthic folds at the inner corners. There are no tears. She could have been some half-Asian model in one of those ridiculously perfumed glamour magazines, but she is that poor Little Bird girl who was led into a basement and gang-raped by four teenage boys who didn’t care that she had fetal alcohol syndrome.

Three years ago. After all the proceedings and counterproceedings, filings and counterfilings, the case went to court in May. I remember because the sage was blooming, and the smell hurt the inside of my nose. The girl in the photo had fidgeted and twisted in her seat, sighed, placed her hands over her eyes, then pulled her fingers through her hair. She crossed her legs and shifted her weight and laid her head, facedown, on the witness stand.

“Confused . . .” That’s all she said, “Confused . . .”

There are other photographs in the file, color ones I’d clipped from the Durant High School yearbook. In a fit of comic relief, I had left the blurbs from their yearbook attached to the pictures: Cody Pritchard, football, track; Jacob and George Esper, fraternal twins in birth as well as football, tie-and-fly club, and Future Farmers of America; and Bryan Keller, football, golf, debate, student council, honor roll.

They had inserted a broomstick into her, a bottle, and a fungo bat.

I was the reluctant investigating officer, and I had known Mary Roebling since we were kids. Mary teaches English at Durant High School and is the girls’ basketball coach. She said she had asked Melissa Little Bird about the marks on her face and arms but couldn’t seem to get a straight answer. Later, Melissa complained about abdominal pains and blood in her urine. When Mary demanded to know what had happened, Melissa said that she had sworn that she wouldn’t tell. She was worried that she might hurt the boys’ feelings.

Ruby says I get the file out about once a week since the trial. She says it’s unhealthy.

At Mary Roebling’s request, I went to the high school in the afternoon during basketball practice. While the girls ran laps, I took off my badge, cuffs, and gun and placed them in my hat behind her desk. I sat in the office and played with the pencils until I became aware of the two of them standing in the doorway. Mary was about six even and had told me quite frankly that the only reason she had gone to the junior prom with me was because I was one of the only boys in class who was taller than she. She towered over the Little Bird girl and kept her from backing though the door by placing her hands on Melissa’s shoulders. The young Indian was coated in a youthful glean of sweat and, if not for the marks on her face and shoulders and the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome, looked like she had just been freshly minted. I held up one of the American Number Two pencils and said, “I can’t figure out how they get the lead on the inside.” To my surprise, her face became suddenly dark as she contemplated the issue. “I figure they got these trees that have the lead already in them.” Her face brightened in the relief of having the riddle solved.

“You’re the sheriff.” Her voice was childlike and carried all the trust in the world. I was back twenty-five years with Cady in front of a Saturday morning Sesame Street, watching “Policemen Are Our Friends.”

“Yep, that’s me.” Her eyes had traveled all the way from the rounded-toe boots to the matted silver hair that I’m sure was sticking out at undefined angles.

“Blue jeans.”

We were the third county in Wyoming to adopt blue jeans as regular duty uniform, but it was one of the downfalls of our particular brand of vehicular law enforcement that the common populace rarely saw us from the waist down. “Yep, big around as they are long.” Mary tried to stifle a laugh, and the girl looked to her, then back to me. Rarely do you get those glimmers of unadulterated love and, if you’re smart, you pack them away for darker days. I started to get up but thought better of it.

“Melissa, is your uncle Henry Standing Bear?” I figured the best way to get started was to establish some kind of personal reference.

“Uncle Bear.” Her smile was enormous. Henry was one of the most understated prophets I knew and one of the most personally interested individuals I had ever met.

I gestured for her to sit across from me and rolled up the left sleeve of my shirt to display the ghostly cross-hatchings that stretched back from my left hand. “I got hurt playing pool with your uncle Bear up in Jimtown, once . . .” The girl’s eyes widened as she sat in the chair opposite me, and she instinctively reached to place a forefinger on the marbled flesh of my forearm. Her fingers were cool, and her palms were strangely devoid of any lines, as if her life was yet to be determined. I reached across the desk slowly, sliding a palm under her chin and lifting to accentuate an angry contusion at the jawline. “That’s a good one, too.” She nodded with a slight movement that freed her face, and she dropped her eyes to the desktop, which informed us of the potential for the president’s physical fitness award. “How’d you get that?” She covered the offending jaw with a quick look to the side and a through-the-eyebrow glance at Mary.

“Melissa, I’m not here to hurt anybody, but I also want to make sure that nobody hurts you.” She nodded and began gently rocking back and forth, hands firmly clasped between her legs. “Has anybody hurt you?” Her attention stayed with the glass-covered surface of Mary’s desk.

“No.”

I studied Melissa’s reflection and tried to imagine her as she should have been. Her people were strong, clear-eyed Cheyenne from the Northern Reservation, with a little Crow from her maternal side. I tried to see a Melissa who hadn’t had the spark of curiosity robbed from her by a mother who had ingested too many I-90 Cocktails—Lysol and rubbing alcohol—when she was pregnant. Melissa should have been a beautiful Indian maiden standing on the rolling, grassy hills of the Little Big Horn, arms outstretched to a future that held promise, security, and freedom. When I looked up, it was as if she had read my mind, that we had shared a vision. She had stopped rocking and was looking at the diamond snaps on my shirt.

“It was romantic.” She said it flat, as if emotion would only rob her statement of its impact. Her eyes returned to the desk.

I leaned back in the office chair, allowing my fingertips to remain on the edge of the beveled glass. “What was romantic, Melissa?”

She spoke to the desk. “The walk.”

* * *

I was out of beer, Cady still hadn’t called, and I had given up on Doctor Leonard’s sheepskin cover as the salvation of a future well-coordinated interior. I needed a Rainier and some company so I cranked my hat down hard, buttoned my sheepskin jacket up tight, and stepped into the horizontal snow flurries that were whipping around the corner of the house. I figured I’d drive the half mile down the paved road to the Red Pony. I stood there on the planks for a moment, listening to something above the wind, wings whirring only thirty feet off the ground as the geese honked their warning cries to each other in an attempt to get south. Maybe they had waited too long to leave. Maybe I had, too.

Off in the distance, I could make out the neon pony cantering in the darkness and a small number of peripheral trucks parked in the adjacent gravel lot. As I got closer, I could see that the inside lights of the bar were not on and felt a surge of panic at the thought of having to drive all the way back into town for a beer. I parked the truck and could make out a few figures moving in the darkened window of the carryout. Couldn’t have been a blackout; the red neon pony shimmered across my hood and up the windshield. I pushed into the wind to open the bar’s glass door and came within inches of running into the owner and operator of the Red Pony, Henry Standing Bear.

Henry and I had known each other since grade school when we had gotten into a fight at the water fountain, and he had loosened two of my teeth with a roundhouse left that had came from the Black Hills. We had played against each other in the trenches of interior linemanship from peewee through high school, whereupon I finished up at USC, lost my deferment, got drafted by the marines, and went to Vietnam. Henry had made a halfhearted attempt at the white man’s educational system at Berkeley and had learned enough to protest against it before being rewarded for his efforts with an all-expense-paid, four-year vacation with the Special Forces SOG group at An Khe. It was here that Henry said he had learned of the white man’s true vision and power, of his ability to kill the largest number of individuals in the most effective manner possible.

Upon his return to the States, Henry had reattempted college life but found that his ability for being lectured to had deteriorated. He returned to political activity in the seventies and had been a seminal member of every Native American movement for the next ten years. Sensing that revolution is the industry of young men, however, he returned to Absaroka County for the funeral of the grandmother who had raised him and somewhere came up with enough cash to finance a deal with the Foundation that would transform an old Sinclair station, the only public building in Crossroads, into a kind of half-assed bar that he called the Red Pony. Henry had been known to read a great deal of Steinbeck. It was in the Foundation’s interest to promote the bar, if for no other purpose than to keep the shit-caked rubber boots of the locals out of their oriental-carpeted meeting rooms.

We looked at each other, his expression carrying the quiet selfdeprecation that usually held some hidden meaning. “Beer, Tonto?” he asked as he handed me an open Rainier and continued past with what appeared to be a tire iron in the other hand. I looked through the poolroom into the bar proper and could make out about eight people seated on stools, outlined by the fluorescent glow of the beer coolers. Big night. I took a sip and followed him to the far end of the room where he seemed to be preparing to tear apart the wall. Leaning against the offending structure he slipped the flat end of the tire iron behind the weenie-wood that made up the interior of the bar.

“You forget to pay your REA bill again?” He paused for a second to give me a dirty look and then put all 220 pounds into the tire iron and propelled the four-foot board from the wall, with nails still attached, to clatter at our feet. I bent from my vantage point to look at the ringshanked holes in the plaster surface that lay underneath the removed board. Henry’s face was, as always, impassive.

“Damn.” Without another word, he slipped the tire iron beneath the next board and popped it to the floor. Same result. “Damn.”

I figured it was time to ask, “Are we redecorating, or are we looking for something specific?” He gestured to the wall with a hand that pleaded and threatened at the same time.

“Fuse box.”

“You covered it up with boards?”

Another sidelong glance. “At least I have walls.”

Henry was one of the chosen few who had been to the cabin. His statement was hard to refute. “I’ve been thinking about getting an imitation sheepskin cover for my recliner.” This got a long look.

“Are you drunk?”

I gave the question thought. “No, but I’m working on it.” He grunted a little laugh and popped off another board, which added to the considerable pile that was collecting at our feet.

“Damn.” He placed the tire iron in the next board. “Cady call you?”

“No, the brat.”

“Huh . . . She called me.” He popped the board loose to reveal the gray cover of an ancient fuse box. “Yes.”

I turned to look at him. “What?”

He tapped the small, metal cover and glanced at me. “Fuse box.”

“Cady called you?” His eyes were dark and clear, the far one split by the strong nose that I knew had been broken at least three times, once by me.

“Yes.”

I tried to contain myself and sound casual, but he had me and he knew it. “When did she call?”

“Oh, a little while ago . . .” His casual was far more convincing than mine.

With a forefinger he pulled open the small metal box to reveal four fuses that looked as if they hadn’t been changed since Edison was a child. The box itself was rusted out in the back, victim of some age-old roof leak. The conduits surrounding it were rotten and peeled back, revealing frayed tendrils of green and black corroded wire. The four fuses were covered in a thick coat of dust and were surrounded by sockets, which held a strange patina of white and green crystals. They looked like two sets of angry eyes embedded in the wall, just waiting to unleash 220 volts into anything that came close.

He placed a hand on the uneven surface of the plaster where he had taken most of the wall apart and leaned all his weight against it. His other hand brushed back the crow-black hair, smattered with touches of silver, in an arch over his shoulder and down the small of his back. “One in four, I like the odds.”

“Did she say anything about calling me?”

“No. Hey . . .” He bristled with mock indignation and gestured to the fuse box. “I have a situation here.”

I tried to be helpful. “They’ve got little windows in them so you can see which one is blown.” He lowered his head and squinted into the box.

“It is not that I do not trust your home-improvement skills, even though I know you do not have any.” He carefully wiped the dust from the surface of the four fuses. “They are all black.”

“Do you have any extras?”

“Of course not.” He held up the roll of pennies that had been hidden in his front shirt pocket. “I have these.” He smiled the coyote smile, the one that had made offensive linemen part their hair in the middle, NVA officers sweat between their shoulder blades, and otherwise intelligent women occupy bar stools in his immediate vicinity. Henry was the dog that wouldn’t stay on the porch.

I watched with great apprehension as his fingers began twisting one of the rusted fuses from its corroded green outlet. The muscles on his forearm writhed like snakes rolling under sun-baked earth. To my knowledge, Henry had never lifted a weight in his life, but he still carried with him the tone of the warrior and was betrayed only by a very small amount of baggage at the middle. As the applied pressure began to take its toll, the glass knob turned and the remainder of the building went black. “Damn.”

Hoots and laughter came from the darkness as we stood there trying to see each other. “I don’t think that was it.” I listened to him sigh and replace the fuse, and the lights from the beer coolers once again lit up the far room. There was a smattering of applause from the patrons.

“She did not say anything about calling you.” He was still staring into the metal box, his odds having improved dramatically.

“So, what’d she have to say?”

“Nothing much. We talked about you.”

“What about me?” Throughout the entire conversation, he studied the fuse box with the half-smile that told me he didn’t take either the electrical crisis or my familial life all that seriously. Cady and Henry had a symbiotic, avuncular relationship that had led her into a quasi-bohemian lifestyle. She was professionally adept at billiards and darts, had majored in Native American Studies at Berkeley, his almost alma mater, had continued on to law school at the University of Washington, and was now an attorney in Philadelphia. When together, they spent the majority of their time whispering to each other, pointing toward me, and giggling. The thought of the two of them conspiring at long distance was enough to worry me but, with Ruby’s involvement, something was definitely up.

Deciding on the fuse diagonally opposite the first, Henry reached in and boldly twisted. The red neon horses that had stampeded across the parked vehicles outside flickered off to more cheers from the peanut gallery. From his lack of response, I wasn’t sure if Henry had noticed. “The pony . . .”

“Damn.”

He screwed the fuse back in. The neon roan paused and then leapt across the hood of the Bullet. The flurries were letting up; the bad weather had decided to whistle on down the Bozeman trail to the rail-heads. The bar held a kind of conspiratorial coziness what with the subdued light of the beer coolers filtering through the cracks in the dividing wall. The soft murmur of small talk provided a buffer against the landscape that was now scrubbed with snowflakes.

“So, what about me?”

He tapped one of the remaining fuses accusingly with an index finger. “She is worried that you are still depressed.”

“About what?” He looked at me, decided better of it, and looked back at the fuse box. I pushed off the wall and stepped carefully over the nail-laden boards that covered the floor. “I need another beer.”

“You know where they are.” I started to turn, but he caught me by tapping on one of the last two fuses. “The suspense is killing you, right?” I made a quick face, placed the empty beer bottle on the edge of the pool table, and bent over to pick up one of the boards. I spread my feet in a good, open stance and held the bark-covered board on my shoulder with both hands. This got a look. “You are going to knock me loose from this if I get electrocuted?”

I shrugged. “It’s what friends are for. Besides, I want to see if anybody in this county has worse luck than me.”

“Not yet.” He twisted the next to last fuse and, to our amazement, absolutely nothing happened. We both looked for any absence of light, strained to listen for any lack of humming from the assorted coolers, heaters, and fans. Henry looked to the ceiling in deep concentration.

“Well, at least I didn’t have to hit you with the board.”

“Yes, but now we have to do the penny part.” He nudged one of the coins from the paper roll and held it up for me to view.

“Where do you get this ‘we’ shit, Kemosabe?”

“Have you not ever done this before?”

I lowered my board, careful to avoid the nails. “No.” We had reached the conceptual stage of the project, so Henry joined me in leaning against the pool table. “Have you?” He crossed his arms and considered the single lowest common denominator of legal tender.

“No, but I have heard that you can.”

“From who?”

“Old people like you.”

“I’m less than a year older than you.”

He shrugged and read the inscription, “IN GOD WE TRUST. I was going to use a buffalo-head nickel, but it has to be copper to conduct, that much I know.”

I dropped my board with a clatter. “Well, all I know about this stuff is enough to be scared shitless of it. Is there any reason why this has to be done tonight?” He made a face. “I mean your beer coolers are running, the heat’s on, even the horse out front is working . . .”

“Pony.”

“Whatever.”

He sighed and looked around the bar. “Only if somebody wants to play pool.”

I nudged him with my shoulder. “Is your life worth a game of pool?” He thought for a moment.

“Seems like it has been.” He placed the penny on his cocked thumbnail. “Heads we go for it, tails we go sit in the dark with everybody else.” I nodded, and he flipped the coin to me, whereupon I promptly dropped it in the pile of boards. We looked at each other.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to catch it.” He peeled another penny from the paper roll.

“Do not worry, I have got forty-nine more. You ought to be able to catch one of them.” He flipped the second penny, and I snatched it from midair and slapped it on the back of my other hand. I left my palm covering the penny for a few moments, building my own little tension.

“Is the suspense killing you?”

“Not really, next we flip to see who puts the penny in the fuse.” I uncovered the coin and thanked the God we trust it was tails.

“C’mon, I’ll buy you a Coke.”

* * *

I ambled along behind Henry as we joined the others at the bar itself. The walls were covered with the works of different artists who had received residencies with the Foundation. It was a mixed lot, but each piece reminded me of the individual who had occupied the adjacent barstool, and artists are always good for conversation, so long as you want to talk about their art.

The small group was clustered in the bar’s corner, only slightly illuminated by the dim glow of available light. There were a couple of stray hunters, still dressed in their camouflage and optical-orange vests; evidently the deer were wearing blue this year. I could make out Buck Morris, one of the local cowboys who took care of the Foundation’s nominal cattle herd. He was easy to spot because of his hat; a weather-worn Resistol that some oil executive had offered to buy for $250. General opinion was that Buck had missed the boat. The young man next to him wore a frayed jean jacket and had strong Cheyenne features. He must’ve been from out of county, because I didn’t know him.

Next was Roger Russell, an electrician out of Powder Junction in the southern part of the county who had come up here to expand his business. Turk said that he was kind of the black sheep of the family and that he had little bastards scattered all up and down the Basin: “Powder River, let’r buck, a mile wide and an inch deep.” I wondered mildly why Henry and I had just been gambling with our lives while an expert nursed a C and C in the next room.

Sitting next to him was probably the reason why Roger happened to be here. Vonnie Hayes was old school Wyoming; her grandfather had had a spread of thirty thousand acres of good land. Vonnie and I had kind of known each other when we were children but, after her father had committed suicide, she was sent to boarding school and her art life had taken her east for a number of years, where she had become an accomplished sculptress. Much later, she returned to take care of her aging mother. Vonnie and Martha had worked together on the library board and a number of other community projects in the county, and my daughter had worked for Vonnie as a housekeeper one summer. After Martha died, Cady tried to fix us up, an endeavor that Vonnie and I both viewed with equal parts humor and open-handed flirtation. Even in the dim light I could make out Vonnie’s features, strong, with a lupine slant to the eyes, sandy hair pulled back in a casual bun.

I leaned against the bar beside her, bumping into Roger and giving him my substantial rear. “Jeez, Rog.” I looked around in the darkness. “Don’t you know we’ve got an electrical emergency on our hands here?”

He carefully placed his drink back and nudged it with his fingers. “I am . . . retired.”

Henry appeared on the other side of the bar, slid a Rainier to me, and leaned into Roger. “What about this penny thing?”

Roger looked at him, attempting to gather himself for an answer. As he did, I looked over to Vonnie. “Boy, the things you find in the dark.”

She took a sip of her chenin blanc. Henry kept a special bottle of the white wine in the cooler for her. I had always wanted to ask her for a sip but had never gotten up the nerve. Her eyes glowed softly, and the corner of her lips curved into a warm, sad smile. “Hello, Walter.”

Undaunted by conversing with drunks, Henry continued. “Those old fuses, the big ones, you put pennies in them to get them to work?”

Roger laughed. “Yes you can, and you can also fuse every bit of the substandard wiring in this shit-hole and burn us all up alive.” I kind of leaned Roger against the bar, stabilizing the listing that had begun as he spoke, and pulled a loose stool from the far side, placing it and myself, between Roger and Vonnie.

“Vonnie . . .” Her eyes had a way of opening a little wider when you spoke to her, then closing a little like they were capturing what you were saying and holding on to it. I was starting to remember why I had had a crush on her and continued. “You see this heathen, devil red man across the bar here?” Her eyes glanced at Henry for a moment, then returned to mine. “He and Cady are plotting some sort of intrigue against me.”

Her eyes widened again, and she returned her gaze to Henry. “Is that true, Bear?” It irritated me that every woman I knew was on a cuddly first-name basis with the man.

Henry nodded toward me. “White man full of shit.”

We were on a Technicolor roll now. I was Randolph Scott to his . . . I don’t know, one of those bigger than life Indians that either got beat up or killed by the end of the third reel. “It’s true, he’s government trained to be involved in these kinds of covert operations.” I pointed to the framed boxes on the wall behind the bar that contained a burnt map of North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. On this map were Henry’s Special Forces pin, Purple Heart, Army Distinguished Service Cross, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and assorted campaign medals. There were also black-and-white photographs of Henry with his infantry platoon leaders, and one with his friend and team member Lo Chi, whom he had brought back and relocated in Los Angeles. There was even a picture of Henry and me, wearing the two ugliest Hawaiian shirts in Saigon, on a three-day leave in 1968. “You see all that stuff on the wall? He was trained in the war to be the gravest irritation to all those around him. There is no way a common soldier, such as myself, could possibly compete with a hand-picked, combat-hardened pain in the ass like him.” Few people knew the shadowy history of the Special Operations Group that had operated out of Laos, but the numbers said it all: For every American Special Forces soldier that was lost, the North Vietnamese lost between 100 and 150 troops. The Bear had been a part of one of the most effective killing machines on either side of the war.

Henry’s face pushed up and curved to the side as the weight of his head held steady in the palm of his supporting hand. “Common soldier? The closest he came to any real fighting was when he agreed to meet me for a three-day in Saigon.” Under his breath he continued, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one that heard it, “Except for Tet . . .”

I left Henry to leverage Roger into doing some free electrical consulting work and turned my attention back to Vonnie. She was staring into the glass eyes of one of the mounted antelope behind the bar. “Pretty animals.” Her eyes remained steady on the pronghorn. “Do you think they feel pain like we do?”

“Nope.”

She turned to look at me, seemingly irritated. “Really?”

“Really.”

She stayed with me for a second, and then, fading into disappointment, glanced at her wine glass. “So, you don’t think they feel pain.”

“No, I said I don’t think they feel pain like us.”

“Oh.” The smile slowly returned. “For a minute there I thought you had become a jerk.”

“No, a blacksmith’s son.”

She continued to smile and then nodded. “You used to come out to our place with your father . . . Lloyd.”

I watched her. “Nobody remembers his name.”

“I think my mother had a little crush on him.”

“Just another Longmire, plying his wiles. When I was real little, I used to make the shoeing rounds with him. It looked painful to me, so I asked him.”

“What did he say?”

“Pop used to speak in biblical terms, but what he said was that the brutes of the field don’t feel pain like humans. That that’s the price we pay for thinking.”

She took another sip of her wine. “Comforting to know that we’re the species that feels the most pain.”

I half-closed an eye and looked at her for a second. “Is that East Coast sarcasm I’m hearing?”

“No, that’s East Coast self-pity.”

“Oh.” I was getting in way over my head. I can do the bull about as well as it can be done, but that edgy buzz-talk makes me weary in a heartbeat. I try and keep up, but after a while I start to drag.

She placed a hand on mine, and I think it was the hottest hand I had ever felt. “Walter, are you all right?”

It always started like this, a touch and a kind word. I used to feel heat behind my eyes and a shortness of breath, but now I just feel the emptiness. The fuses of desire are blown black windows, and I’m gone with no pennies to save me. “Oh, you mean you really want to talk?”

Her eyes were so sad, so honest. “Yeah, I figured since we didn’t have anything else to do.”

So I leaned in and told her the truth. “I just . . . I’m just numb most of the time.”

She blinked. “Me too.”

I felt like one of those guys in the movies, there in the foxhole asking how much ammo your buddy’s got. I got two more clips, how ’bout you? “I know the things I’m supposed to do, but I just don’t seem to have the energy. I mean, I’ve been thinking about turning over my pillow for three weeks.”

“I know . . .” She looked away. “How’s Cady?”

Here I was floating in the white-capped Pacific of self-pity, and Vonnie threw me a lifeline to keep me from embarrassing myself. Three fingers, bartender . . . “She’s great.” I looked at Vonnie to see if she was really interested. She was. “She’s doing so well in Philadelphia.”

“She always has been special.”

“Yes, she is.” We sat there for a moment, allowing the crackle and roar of my parental self-satisfaction to fade into the soft glow of friendly conversation. Her hand was still on my arm when the phone rang.

“Looks like she’s tracked you down.” The hand went away.

I watched as Henry allowed it to ring the second time, his tele-signature, then snatched it from the cradle. “It is another beautiful evening here at the Red Pony bar and continual soirée, how can I help you?” His face pulled up on one side as if the receiver had just smacked him. “Yes, he is here.” He stretched the cord across the expanse of the bar and handed me the phone. His eyes stayed on mine.

I nudged it between my chin and shoulder with one hand, took a sip of beer with the other, and swallowed. “Hello, Sugar Blossom . . .”

“Hello, shithead,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s not a dead sheep.”

I stood there, letting the world shift at quarter points and then got a bearing and dropped my voice. “What’ve we got?” Every eye in the bar was on me.

Vic’s voice held an edge that I had never heard before, approaching an excitement under the grave suppression of businesslike boredom. “Male, Caucasian, approximately twenty-one years of age . . . one entry wound characteristic of, maybe, a .30-06.”

I started to rub my eyes, noticed that my hand was shaking, and put it in my pocket. “All right . . . call the Store and tell them to send the Little Lady.”

There was a brief pause, and I listened to the static from a radio on 137 patched through to a landline in Durant. “You don’t want any Cashiers?”

“No, just the Bag Boys. I’ve got a highly dependable staff.”

She laughed. “Wait till you get out here. These fucking sheep have been marching around on everything; I think the little bastards actually ate some of his clothes. And they shit on him.”

“Great . . . Past the Hudson Bridge; you got your lights on?”

“Yep.” She paused for a moment, and I listened to the static. “Walt?”

I had started to hang up the phone. “Yeah?”

“You better bring some beer to quiet Bob and Billy down.”

This was a first. “You bet.” I started to hang up again.

“Walt?”

“Yep?”

“It’s Cody Pritchard.”

2

There’s nothing like a dead body to make you feel, well, removed. I guess the big city boys, cataloguing forty or fifty homicides a year, get used to it, but I never have. I’ve been around enough wildlife and stock that it’s pretty commonplace, the mechanics of death. There’s a religion worthy of this right of passage, of taking that final step from being a vertical creature to a horizontal one. Yesterday you were just some nobody, today you’re the honored dead with bread bags rubber-banded over your hands. I secure what’s left of my dwindling humanity with the false confidence of the living, the deceitful wit of the eight-foot tall and bulletproof. Yea, verily, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will live forever. If I don’t, I sure as hell won’t become an unattended death in the state of Wyoming with sheep shit all over me.

We had pretty much done our work, secured the area, lit it up, and finished taking pictures. There’s a kind of cocksure attitude that overtakes a man in the presence of the dearly departed, a you’re-dead-and-I’m-not kind of perspective. There’s something about a carcass of an animal like oneself, the post-shuffled, mortal coil that brings out the worst in me, and I start thinking that I’m funny.

“I’ve been thinking about a search-and-rescue sheep squad.” I picked some of the dried shit from my pants and flicked it from my fingernails. “The way I figure it, the sheep would work up a damn storm and never raise any hell about working conditions. Might even get rid of some of this leafy spurge.” I looked around at the frosted milky-yellow plants that had been half eaten by the baahing attending witnesses we had corralled at the base of the hill. I had been here for nine hours, and the sun was beginning to scatter the gray blocks that made up the eastern horizon. The crime scene was a slight depression at the middle of a wreath-shaped ridge. “What do you think?”

T.J. raised an eyebrow from her clipboard. “Cody Allen Pritchard.” She returned the eyebrow to the hunting license and wallet that were clipped to the official forms. “DOB, 8/1/81. Kind of has a ring to it.”

Cody had looked better. Whoever had dispatched the young man had done so with a smooth and consistent pull-off as center shot. From the back, it looked as though someone had drilled a perfectly round hole between Cody’s shoulder blades; from the front, it looked as though someone had driven a stagecoach through him. The body was lying facedown, all the limbs arranged in a normal fashion, arms at the sides with palms turned to the lemon-colored sky. I was tempted to see if Cody’s lifeline was abnormally short, but his hands had already been bagged. A green John Deere hat with an adjustable strap in the back had been carted off with the unfired Model 94 Winchester 30-30 that had been found at his side. His clothes were in bad shape, even for a person who had had more than ten cc’s of lead pushed through him at approximately twenty-five hundred feet per second. The sheep had done a number on him. The orange vest was torn where they had tried to eat it, the sleeves of his flannel shirt were shredded, and even his work boots looked as though they had been nibbled on. They had slept on him, gleaning the last energies of the late Cody Pritchard as his body cooled. Finally, much to the dissatisfaction of the crime lab people, they had shit on him.

I gestured to the sheep down the hill. “I’m assuming that you’re going to want to question all the witnesses.”

T.J. Sherwin had been the director of the Division of Criminal Investigation’s lab unit for seventeen odd years. I had always called her the Little Lady, as opposed to many of the other nicknames that periodically circulated through Wyoming’s law enforcement community: Bitch on Wheels, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Bag Lady. The last referred to the Division of Criminal Investigation’s home away from home, a converted grocery in Cheyenne, commonly tagged as the Store. Hence, DCI lab personnel were routinely called Bag Boys, and criminal investigators were Cashiers.

When I first met T.J., she had informed me that I was just the kind of dinosaur she was going to make a personal career of eradicating. As the years passed and we worked numerous cases together, I remained a dinosaur, but I was her favorite dinosaur. “So, what do you think?” She had finally lowered the clipboard.

“He doesn’t look like a deer.” I gave Cody another study.

“Walt, let’s drop the aw shucks bullshit. This is one of the boys that was involved in that rape case two years ago.” T.J. had held my hand through the Little Bird rape investigation, introducing me to the world of secretors, medical swabs, and gynecological exams.

“Yeah, well, I’ll follow up on the home front; he wasn’t any angel. We’ll go through the licensees, and, hopefully, find some poor, dumb bastard from Minnesota that got a little trigger happy.”

“You don’t think it was an accident?”

I thought about it. “Like I said, he wasn’t an altar boy.”

“You have a feeling about this?”

I started to give her the old Colonel-Mustard-in-the-library-with-the-candlestick routine, but thought better of it. “No, I don’t.”

* * *

When we got back, the Bag Boys had already zipped Cody up and loaded him onto a gurney; some of the others were still processing evidence into freezer bags. One of the boys was dropping a tattered eagle feather into a plastic envelope. He looked up as we approached. “Looks like everything out here’s been making a meal of this poor guy.”

T.J. turned to me. “Walt, are you going to be the primary on this one?”

“Do you mean am I going to be riding in one of those Conestoga wagons of yours for five hours down to Cheyenne?”

“Yes.”

“No.” I pointed to the group of vehicles where Vic was busy putting away the photography equipment. “At the bottom of this hill, you will find my somewhat agitated, but highly skilled, primary investigator.”

T.J. smiled. She liked Vic. “She have any cases pending?”

“Well, she’s been hanging Christmas lights in town, but I figure we can let her go for a few days.”

“It’s not even Thanksgiving.”

“It’s a city council thing.”

We followed the body down to where the rest of our little task force had congregated. Someone had brought a number of Thermoses full of hot coffee and a few boxes of donuts. I got a cup of coffee; I don’t eat donuts. I spotted Jim Ferguson, one of my deputies and head of Search and Rescue, across the bed of the truck and asked him if they had turned anything up on their walk around. His mouth was full of cream-filled, but the gist was no. I told him I was going to replace his staff with the sheep.

“We did a three-hundred-yard perimeter, but the light wasn’t so good. We’ll do another soon as everybody gets a donut and some coffee. You think this guy left brass?”

“I hope.”

I took my coffee and moved over to where T.J. and Vic were seated on a tailgate. They were looking at some of the evidence; hopefully, they were discussing something I could understand.

“Single shot, center, didn’t get too much of the sternum.” Vic held a bag up to the rising sun and looked at the metal fragment inside. “Fuck, I don’t know.” T.J. patted the spot beside her with the palm of her hand, and I sat. Vic continued, “It looks like a slug. I’m thinking 12 gauge or something just a little bigger.”

“Bazooka?”

She lowered the bag, and her eyes met mine. “You’re getting rid of me?”

I nodded my head. “Yep.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a big pain in the butt.”

“Fuck you.”

“And you talk dirty.”

She handed the bagged bullet to T.J. “You’re going to be stuck up here with Turk.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we’ll get the Christmas lights put up together.” Vic snorted and readjusted her gun belt. “Besides, you’ve forgotten more about this space-age stuff than I’ll ever know. You can relay information back to me.” The tarnished gold stared at me, unblinking. “You’ll only be down there for two days. It will take us that long to round up all the usual suspects.” I was the old dog who had learned his fill of new tricks, and it was only logical that I work the county and the people.

She poked me in the belly. Her finger remained in one of my fat rolls, and she poked each word for emphasis, “If Search and Rescue don’t find anything, you gonna call Omar?”

“That’s another reason for you to leave, you don’t like Omar.”

She poked me again. “You be careful, all right?”

This all sounded very strange coming from Vic’s mouth, but I took it as affection and punched her on the shoulder. “I’m always . . .” She knocked my hand away.

“I mean it.” She didn’t have kind eyes, they rarely looked away, and they always told the truth. I could use eyes like that. “I’ve got a funny feeling about all of this.”

I gazed back up to the patch of sage and scrub weed and watched the sun free itself from the red hills. “Yeah, well you got five hours to talk to T.J. about this woman’s intuition thing.” The next poke hurt.

* * *

I hung around the scene until Search and Rescue had finished their second sweep; I sat in the Bullet and filled out the reports. Ferg strolled up with a cup of coffee and another cream-filled. “Anything?” Fortunately, I caught him between bites.

“Nothing. We got a lot of sheep shit and tracks.”

“Any suspicious sheep tracks?”

“Nope, no suspicious sheep shit, either. It’s like the Denver stock-yards up there.”

I thought about how you could kill a victim only once, but how a crime scene could die a thousand deaths. I hoped that whatever useful information could be deducted from this patch of God’s little acre was traveling safely in plastic bags toward Cheyenne. Motives are all fine and good, but if we could find out the how, we’d have a shooting’s match chance of finding out the who. I had the niggling feeling I was going to have to call Omar.

* * *

On the drive over to the Pritchards’ place I thought about the last time I had seen Cody alive. He was a heavyset kid, built like a linebacker, curly blond hair and pale blue eyes. He had his mother’s looks, his father’s temper, and nobody’s brains. I had pulled him out on three occasions, the last being the rape case. Cody had endeared himself to the local Native American community by being quoted in the Sheridan paper as saying, “Yeah, she was a retard redskin, but she was asking for it.”

The Pritchards had a place on the outskirts of Durant and, by the time I got there, there must have been eight or nine cars and trucks in the drive. Word carries fast in open spaces. As I cut off the engine, the full impact of what I was going to have to do hit me like a Burlington Northern. How do you tell parents that their child is dead? Sure, they’d heard it through the grapevine, but I was the official word. I allowed myself a long sigh.

There were field swallows swooping near the Bullet. I was probably disturbing their family, too. Seemed to be my day for it. It had been longer than twenty-four hours since sleep. It’s easy to work all night because the sun doesn’t come up, but when it does, my eyes start to sting and the rest of me gets a little shaky. I’ve always been this way. I was focusing my eyes when I heard the screen door slam and saw John Pritchard walking down the drive. I never cared too much for John; he was one of those guys who always had to be in control. The conversation wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The pertinent information from him was that Cody had left the house twenty-seven hours ago with an extra doe license. The pertinent information from me was that he wasn’t coming home.

* * *

I did the best I could, drove the seven miles back to my place, and sat on the porch—well, the front doorway—but not for very long, because it was cold. I had the presence of mind to fall into the house instead of out of it. I drifted in and out of consciousness until the phone rang, and the answering machine my daughter made me buy picked up. “You’ve reached the Longmire residence. No one is available to answer your call right now, ’cause we’re out chasing bad guys or trying on white hats. If you leave a message after the tone, we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can. Happy trails!” She had taken a great deal of joy in recording the message printed in the instructions, with a few minor alterations. I smiled every time I heard it.

“It’s Pancake Day!” The voice resonated through the lines from fourteen miles away. Jim Ferguson was not only head of Search and Rescue and my longest standing part-time deputy, but he was also the man in charge of driving around Durant once a year at dawn in the fire department’s truck, proclaiming through a bullhorn, “It’s Pancake Day, Pancake Day!”

There are only three major vote-getting days in Absaroka County, and I can’t remember the other two. “Oh God, no. It’s Pancake Day.” I thought about shooting myself. I could see the headline: SHERIFF SHOOTS SELF, UNABLE TO FACE PANCAKES.

“It’s Pancake Day!” Ferg really enjoyed his work. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last hour, just thought somebody ought to call and remind you. But if you really are gonna retire next year, then who gives a shit?”

I stumbled to the phone beside the recliner. “Is it really today?”

“If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’.” There was a pause. “Hey, Walt, if you want, I can just tell ’em we were up all night.” Ferg was slightly in the Turk camp for future sheriff, but I had other plans. If Vic was going to be the first female sheriff in Wyoming, I only had a year to pull in all my political markers. I could last an hour of Pancake Day with the Elks, the Eagles, the Lions, the Jaycees, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and, of course, the AARPs.

“I’ll be there in a half hour.”

“Remember, it’s at the Catholic church this year.”

“You bet.” I plugged in the coffeemaker and dumped enough coffee for eight cups into the filter with only enough water for four. I took a shower while it was perking. The plumbing was somewhat makeshift, but the water that came from above went away below. It went away below through a bathtub that Henry had found for me for twenty dollars. Somebody on the Rez had used it for target practice with a .22 but had only chipped the porcelain. Then there was the shower curtain. I don’t know what the exact physical dynamics are that cause a shower curtain to attach itself to your body when you turn on the water but, since my shower was surrounded on all sides by curtains, I turned on the water and became a vinyl, vacuum-sealed sheriff burrito.

* * *

I slid behind the wheel of the Bullet and started driving the fourteen miles to town. Durant is situated along the Bighorn Mountains and, because there is abundant fish and game, it’s become the retiree capitol of Wyoming. In Absaroka County, to ignore the octogenarian vote is to pump gas at the Sinclair station for a living. Service jobs are about all there are in Durant, somewhat stunting the younger generation and forcing the majority out by age nineteen; but the retirees keep coming from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa, with the odd Texan and Californian thrown in for spice. They come looking for the romance of the west that they had paid shiny quarters to view on Saturday afternoons in flickering black and white. They waited half a century of stamping out automobile bumpers to get their western dream; they paid for it and, by God, they were going to have it. Most ended up picking up and moving out, headed for Florida, Arizona, or wherever the weather was easier. I liked the ones who stayed. You’d see them out after the blizzards, shoveling away, and waving at the Bullet like it was the circus come to town. Hell, I’d stop and talk to them. Sheriffs have to get elected in Wyoming, so we have to be liked. I imagine that, if you had to elect the average police force, the turnover rate would spin your Rolodex.

When I first started out, it was the part of the job that I enjoyed the least, courting the public. But as time wore on, it got to be the part that I enjoyed the most. Martha was right when she said that I needed a bumper sticker that said BORN TO BULLSHIT. The debates were the best part. In ’81, old Sheriff Connally planned a peaceful takeover. He ran against me so no one else could and had lofted softballs to me so that I felt like Harmon Killabrew by the time the debate was over. I was elected. Lucian retired and was now living the high life in room 32 at the Durant Home for Assisted Living. I still went over on Tuesday nights to play chess, and he still kicked my ass, to his unending delight.

* * *

I looked at the inch of snow that dappled the sagebrush. It looked like a Morse code of white dots and dashes leading down the road. If I could read the message, would it tell me the story I wanted to hear? The truth still stood that I was a sheriff who had survived by the cult of personality, and that, if the trend were to continue, my heir-apparent would not be elected. Was I just trying to force Vic down the throats of the county because I could? No, she was the best person for the job and that was the reason I was going to have to keep pushing. Pancake Day, Pancake Day.

I idled down into second gear at the corner of Main and Big Horn and looked down the street to see Turk’s Trans Am parked at the office. Just seeing his car made my ass hurt. I didn’t feel like facing him on an empty stomach. I hoped he would have already contacted Lavanda Running Horse over at Game and Fish for any information we could get about last night’s incident. I circled quickly around the courthouse to avoid being seen and made a beeline for the Catholic church. The place was mobbed, and there was no parking. I wheeled the Bullet onto the concrete pad beside the HVAC unit and cut the engine. I figured the Pope wasn’t coming today.

“Well, if it isn’t the long arm of the law.” It was an old joke, but one I didn’t mind. “Longmire, pull up a chair and sit yourself down.” Steve Brandt was the mayor of Durant and the de facto president of the Business Associates Committee, a loosely affiliated group of warring tribes that made up the commercial facet of the downtown. He also owned the screen-printing place on Main and had done the T-shirts for the annual Sheriff’s Department vs. Fire Department softball game, but the less said about this the better. Next to him was David Fielding of the Sportshop, Elaine Gearey who had the Art Gallery, Joe of Joe Benham’s Hardware and Lumber, Dan Crawford from the IGA, and Ruby.

“What are you doing here?” Ruby’s chin rested on her palm, fingers trailing into the hollow below her cheekbones. I figured cheekbones were one of those things you gained from speed walking five miles a day.

I slipped off my coat and sat on it. “Well, I’m here to support the courageous Durant Volunteer Fire Department’s men in nonflammable nylon . . . Do you think their hats are cooler than ours?”

“Shouldn’t you be home, in bed?”

I took my hat and perched it on her head. It looked jaunty. I turned to the others at the table. “This is the problem I have with all the women I know, they’re always trying to get me into bed.” There was a derisive chuckle around the table, and Ruby took my hat off, sitting it on the table brim up—good Wyoming girl. “It’s ’cause I look so much like Gary Cooper.” General opinion at the table projected their cinematic consensus to more like Hoot Gibson, whereupon I changed the subject. “So, how are the pancakes?”

“We don’t know. We been here for twenty minutes and ain’t seen a damn pancake yet.” Joe Benham was in a lean and hungry mood.

“Might be for the best. They aren’t letting the firemen cook again, are they?”

“You think they’d learn to not trust ’em with fire.” David’s comment referred to the infamous Stove Oil Incident wherein the firemen had set fire to the old wood-burning stove at the Future Farmers of America hall, resulting in that year’s pancakes tasting roughly like roofing shingles.

“The best was when they almost burned their truck up at that grass fire out near you.” Elaine, being a patron of the arts, always appreciated spectacle.

Ruby placed a steaming Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of me. I hadn’t even seen her get up. “Thank you, ma’am.” I took a sip and listened to the rumble as it joined the other four cups in my stomach. I was hungry and that was not a good thing on Pancake Day.

“We were just discussing the city Christmas decorations, Walt. Do you think they’re the ugliest in Wyoming?” Elaine had a twinkle in her eye. As part of the city council, she had been lobbying for new decorations for about six years now. The problem was that Joe’s father had designed and executed the offending artistry of Santa, elves, reindeer, bells, wreaths, candles, trees, mistletoe, holly, stars, and toys twenty-five years ago. Say what you want about three-quarter inch exterior ply, it holds ugly for a long time.

“Gillette’s are uglier,” I ventured.

“We heard you had a busy night.” Dan Crawford picked up his coffee and blew into it, watching the swirls of cream separate at the rip-tide on the other side of his cup. It got quiet.

This was going to be the prime topic of conversation for the morning, so I might as well develop an official line. “Nothing big. We had a hunting accident out near 137 on BLM land.” I tried to make it sound like the end of the story.

“We heard there was a boy dead.” Dan continued to look at his coffee.

“Well, what else have you heard?” It got even quieter. “No offense, Dan, but I’m not gonna sit here and play guessing games with you. Why don’t you just tell me what you know, and I’ll either confirm or deny it or not.” His face reddened, which was not what I was after.

“I didn’t mean anything, Walt. Just curious.”

He meant it. I rubbed my face with my hands and looked at all of them. “I hope you’ll all excuse me, but it’s been a long night.” I sighed. “With all due respect to the ongoing investigation, it would appear that, on the night past, one Cody Pritchard departed for the far country from which no traveler born returns.”

The allusion was not lost on Elaine. “Have you narrowed it down to a couple of hundred thousand suspects, as in something rotten in the state of Denmark or Iowa?”

Joe nodded. “Well, I don’t figure there’ll be any public outcries of mourning . . .” Elaine ventured that there might be a parade, then saved me by asking if I was willing to play the Ghost of Christmas Future in the civic theatre’s upcoming production of A Christmas Carol. I was pretty sure that she wanted me for my height and not my dramatic skills. This was confirmed when she assured me that I wouldn’t have to learn any lines and that all I had to do was point.

* * *

I excused myself to see a man about a horse and made for the boy’s room at the far end of the hall. On the way, I got a peek through the kitchen service opening and was startled to see Vonnie Hayes sliding a stacked platter of pancakes to a waiting fireman. She looked much as she did last evening, which seemed like another life. Her hand came up and swiped back a stray wisp of hair that had escaped from the loose bun. It’s funny how the little movements that a woman makes seem so individualized, like a signature. It was the rotation of the wrist with a two-finger pull. I gave it a ten and was aroused. I waved and thought she had seen me, but maybe I was wrong. She smiled at the young fireman and disappeared into the kitchen. Those firemen, they make out like bandits.

In the boy’s room, I attended to business, washed my hands, hit the button on the hand dryer, and wiped my hands off on my pants to the quiet hum of modern technology. It was then that I realized I was wearing my weapon. I don’t wear my gun to community functions, and I don’t wear it on weekends. I was actually famous for taking it off and leaving it places. Periodically, Vic would bring it back to me from the bathroom in the office or out of the seat of the Bullet. She liked to make fun of my antique armament by calling it the blunderbuss. Heavy, hard to aim, slow rate of fire, it was the weapon I had used in Vietnam for four years, and I’d gotten used to it.

The Colt 1911A1 had a grisly but effective past. During the Philip-pine campaigns, the islanders took to getting doped up and wrapping themselves in sugarcane. United States servicemen had the glorious experience of shooting these natives numerous times with no result before being hacked to death by their machetes. Obviously, something with a little more hitting power than the standard issue .38 was needed. John Browning’s auto-loading, single-action child graduated to .45 caliber, and the Filipinos began flying back out of the trenches they had hurled themselves into. Unaccurized, the weapon was about as precise as a regulation basketball but, if you hit something with it, chances were good the fight was over.

I thumbed the standard duty holster open and took the weapon out to check it; an old habit. The matte finish was rubbed off at the sights and the ridges along the barrel’s slide action. Fully loaded, which it was, it regularly weighed 38.6 ounces, but today it seemed to weigh about three tons. What the hell was it doing on? Was I responding to some unconscious threat? Did I know more than I thought I knew? It was about this time that I became aware of the bathroom door being opened, and a fully dressed fireman looked at me and my gun.

“I didn’t think the pancakes were that bad.”

“Hello, Ray.” He was the young one I had seen talking to Vonnie at the kitchen window. “You need in here?” It took him a moment to respond.

“Ms. Hayes sent me over, you got a phone call in the kitchen.”

It was probably the first time he had ever used the title Ms. in his life. He still didn’t move. “Anything else?”

He smiled, embarrassed. “You gonna shoot somebody?”

I thought for a moment and sighed. “Anybody need shooting?”

“Not that I know of.” He looked away for a second. “Sounds like the only one that needed it got it last night.” He was roughly Cody Pritchard’s age, and they probably had gone to school together. I nodded and started to squeeze by him. “What’s the um . . . story on Cody?”

I stopped, and we were lodged in the doorway. I looked down at him. “Well”—I paused for effect—“he’s dead.” I watched him to see if there was anything else. There wasn’t, so I smiled. “You better get some pancakes over to the mayor at the Business Associates Committee table before you guys are putting out fires with a bucket brigade.”

“You bet.” Always good to know on which side your pancake is buttered.

As I made my way toward the kitchen, I mused on the thought of being caught in the bathroom playing with my gun. Great, as if everybody in the county didn’t already think I was loony as a waltzing pissant. When I got to the kitchen door, Vonnie already had it open.

“No rest for the wicked?”

“I wish.” God, she looked good with that little bit of sweat in the hollow at the base of her throat.

“The phone’s over by the sink, back hallway.”

I breezed by, trying to exude competent professionalism as I picked up the receiver from the drain board. “Longmire.”

“Jesus, are you eating again?” The long distance whine from Cheyenne was no surprise; in my experience most things from Cheyenne whined.

“I am motivating the constituency and have yet to eat any pancakes. What are you still doing awake?”

“The state medical examiner just finished his preliminary.”

“Let me guess. Lead poisoning?”

“Yeah, the rig/liv says it was about six-thirty when he got it. Gives some credibility to the hunting accident scenario, changing light and all, but . . .”

This must be good. “But?”

“Massive cavitations with a lot of radiopague snowstorm.”

My mind immediately summoned up a visual X-ray with the usual fragments of civilian hunting ammunition. Obviously, this was not the case. “Nonmilitary?”

“Maybe semijacketed, maybe not. It’s a really strange caliber, and it’s big.”

“What?”

“We don’t know yet.”

This was something. With Vic’s specialty in ballistics back in Philadelphia, I had assumed her initial assessment that it was a .30-06 was gospel. “What do you think?” There was silence for a moment.

“I don’t think it’s a deer gun.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“I know what a fucking high-powered slug looks like, all right?” I let it set for a moment, and so did she.

“Why don’t you get some sleep?” It was fun saying it to someone else. Silence.

“He had a cheeseburger with jalapeño peppers.”

“I’ll go by the Busy Bee and talk to Dorothy. Anything else?” Silence.

“Go talk to Omar. He’s a crazy motherfucker, but he knows his shit.” Silence. “So, do you miss me?”

I laughed. When I hung up the phone, Vonnie was holding a plate where a steaming stack of pancakes lay waiting. “I figured this was the only way you were going to get to eat.” She relaxed and leaned her back against the wall. With the apron on and her hair up she looked like an Amish centerfold. “You have a lot of women in your life.”

“You think that’s a good thing or a bad thing?” I said between bites.

She peered over her coffee cup. Her eyes were enormous. “Depends on the women.” I nodded and chewed. “It’s just got to be difficult. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Well, it’s not my usual routine, running ten miles at dawn, three hundred sit-ups . . .” She let go with this snorty laugh and apologized, holding her hand to her face.

“How are your pancakes?”

I took a breath. “They’re great, thank you.”

“I heard you used to make animal shapes with pancakes.” She smiled mischievously.

“You’ve been talking to one of the women in my life.”

“I have, it’s true. I learned all kinds of little secrets about you when she was working for me.”

I nodded, thought about little secrets, and took my last bite. “The deal was this, if she went to church on Sunday mornings with her mother, she didn’t have to eat her heathen father’s breakfast. It’s a wonder she didn’t turn into a devout Methodist.”

“That’s not what she told me. She said she liked having you all to herself.”

“And now she does.” It was out before I knew I had said it. I had gotten so used to joking about Martha’s death, but here it just seemed wrong. “Sorry.”

“Do you ever get lonely, Walter?”

“Oh, sure.” I tried to think of something else to say, but nothing seemed honest enough. All I could think of was how soft and inviting she looked. I had this unfocused image of her, my bed back at the ranch, and all my worldly needs being gratified at once. This didn’t seem appropriate either.

“Maybe we should get together sometime.”

Maybe it was appropriate. “Why, Ms. Hayes, are you making a pass at me?” I emphasized the Ms.

Her eyes sparked. “Maybe, Mr. Longmire, though I must admit your indifference and the gauntlet of women I may have to face seem daunting.”

“Well, they’re a pretty tough bunch, so I can understand.”

“The term a pride comes to mind.” She took a sip of coffee. “Maybe we should start with lunch?”

* * *

It was a short drive back to the office where I parked behind the jukebox Turk called his car. It was some kind of Trans Am, at least that’s what it said all over it. That wasn’t all it said, since it looked as if every available surface was covered with some sort of sticker. It had stickers on the bumper to proclaim every ill-considered political opinion that had ever crossed Turk’s apolitical mind. Advice on the ex-president, his family, gun control, ProRodeo, state nativism, and honking if you were horny. On the back window, it had little cartoon characters peeing on each other and on the emblems of other vehicles. It seemed to me that there wasn’t anyone that could look at this car and not be offended. It was a lot like Turk.

When I pushed open the door, no one was in the reception area. I stood there with the doorknob in my hand and listened. There was a shuffling noise in my office, and I heard one of my file cabinets shut. A moment later he turned through the doorway in full saunter. His eyes stayed steady as I shut the door behind me.

“Man, it’s about time. I been sittin’ around here for hours.” I wasn’t sure if he considered being offensive to be the best defense or if it was just his natural state. “Running Horse called. She said they had some hunters that asked about the BLM land out on the Powder River near 137, section 23. They’re still here, stayin’ at the Log Cabin Motel. Wanna go talk to ’em?”

I let it set for a few seconds. “What are you doing in my office?” He was a handsome kid with what the romance novels would call smoldering good looks. Dark coloring with wavy black hair and a Van Dyke goatee accenting the Basque on his mother’s side. Just shy of six and a half feet, most of it shoulder, he was a handy thing to have crossing his arms and looking menacing behind me in a domestic disturbance but, other than that, I had found little use for him. I had taken him on as a favor to Lucian. He didn’t like him either, but Turk was his nephew, and I felt obliged.

“I was just checkin’ things out.”

“In my office?” His face darkened a little past smoldering.

“Hey, might be my office some day.” He looked toward Vic’s windowless little room across the hall from mine. There were no pictures on her walls. There were just books, shelves and shelves of books. You had to reach through the blue binders of Wyoming Criminal Procedure on the third shelf next to the door to turn the light on and off.

“Turk, I’ve been up for two days and I’m getting a little edgy. You get my meaning?”

He straightened. “Yes, sir.”

I was liking him better. “Now there are a few things you can do to endear yourself to me in the next few days. Starting with doing what I tell you to do, keeping your mouth shut as much as possible, and staying out of my office. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now what I want you to do is run over to the Busy Bee and ask Dorothy Caldwell when she saw Cody last.”

“You want me to get a statement from her?”

I lowered my head. “She’s not a suspect, so don’t treat her like one or she’s liable to kick your ass. Just go over and ask her when she last saw Cody Pritchard, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t have to keep calling me sir.”

“Hell, I’ll call you anything you want, ’long as it gets me on your good side for once.” I tried not to, but the smile played on my face for an instant. “You sure you don’t want me to go with you to talk to the hunters?” I sighed as he pulled out a small, black vinyl notebook and a section map of the state. “I went by earlier and got the plate numbers, Michigan, with no wants or warrants. Willis at the office said there were four of ’em.” He paused for a moment. “They’re going to be armed.”

“Well, I’ll put on an orange vest before I go over.” I reached out and tore the page from his notebook and took the map. He didn’t like me taking his evidence but followed me out the door anyway. I pointed over to Vic’s unit. “Take that one.”

“That’s all right, mine’s warmed up.”

We paused beside his car. “I am proud to say that this vehicle does not accurately represent the Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department.” I guess it hurt his feelings.

“This car will do a hundred and sixty.”

“I doubt that and, if it does, it better not do it in this county. Anyway, I don’t think Dorothy’s gonna run for it, so you’re safe.” I nodded toward the office. “Hanging by the door with the Phillies key chain.” Whiz kids.

He slumped and started back, stopping to ask, “We meet back here?”

“Sure, we’ll synchronize watches.”

* * *

It was six blocks to the Log Cabin Motel on 16 leading toward the mountains. It’s an old style place with twelve-by-twelve log structures and faded red neon. I pulled the Bullet up to the office and went in to talk to Willis, who informed me that the Michigan men had been up late celebrating their last night in town. This didn’t sound like men who had shot somebody, but you never knew. Willis asked who whacked Cody Pritchard, and I asked him why it was that when somebody died in town everybody started talking like John Garfield.

They were in cabins 7 and 8, so I walked down the row beside the imprint of Turk’s 50-series tire tracks. Topflight detective work. I’m sure with the glass-pack mufflers he had been as inconspicuous as the Daytona 500. There was a brand new Suburban parked between the two cabins, Michigan plates. I couldn’t believe he had called them in. I knocked at the door of the nearest cabin and heard a muffled groan. I knocked again.

“Oh God . . .”

I knocked again. “Sheriff ’s Department. Could you open the door, please?”

“Randy, this is not funny . . .” I leaned against the glossy, green doorjamb and knocked once again. After a few seconds, a young man in his underwear and a camo T-shirt snatched open the door. “Do you know what time it is?!” He was short and kind of round with light brown hair and a two-week beard. It did not take long for him to figure out I wasn’t Randy.

“Good morning. I’m Sheriff Longmire, and I’d like a word with you.” At first he didn’t move, and I could see the wheels turning as he tried to figure out what it was that he had done to bring himself in contact with me. These few moments in the beginning can often tell me what I need to know. You hear about eye movement, nose touching, all that crap but, when you get right down to it, it’s just a feeling. The little voice in the back of your head just says, “Yeah, this is the guy.” My little voice had taken the fifth, and I figured this was not the guy. Besides, I was probably looking for a perpetrator who had acted alone. I told him he could put his pants on.

I waited out by their SUV and watched the cars go by. The air was brisk, and I was starting to regret not bringing my coat from the Bullet. The aspen trees around the cabins and adjacent campground were a bright butter and shimmered in the light wind. They had been tenacious in the face of the small snowstorm of the evening before, trying to hold onto fall. Only a few loose leaves tumbled across the gravel toward the alley behind the motel. But the sun was shining this morning, and the whole place just seemed to glow.

He remembered his jacket. After he closed the door to the cabin, the curtain flipped back just a touch and then hung slack as it had before. “You want the other guys, too?”

I introduced my most ingratiating smile. “No, I figure you’ll do.” He didn’t seem happy with this turn of events. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, mister?”

“Anderson, Mike Anderson.” He was quick with it, and the name matched the registration of the vehicle.

“Mr. Anderson, do you mind taking a little walk with me here?” I gestured toward the office, where the Bullet was parked and, more importantly, where my jacket lay on the seat. He started, and I figured this guy’s never had any dealings with law enforcement in his life other than traffic violations. I figured to start easy. “Why don’t you tell me about last night?”

He bit his lip, nodding his head in agreement. “I am really sorry about all that noise.”

“Um-hmm.” Um-hmm was one of my secret weapons. I could give out with a noncommittal um-hmm with the best of them.

“We didn’t tear anything up . . . I mean we made a lot of noise?”

“Willis did mention it . . . But that’s not why I’m here.” Now he looked really worried. “I just need to ask you about the areas that you might have hunted in your visit here.” We had arrived at the Bullet, where I opened the door, fished out my coat, and pulled it on. “Sorry, it’s getting a little cool. The areas? Sections for your hunting permits?”

His eyes stayed in the truck, taking in the radio, radar, and especially the Remington 870 that was locked to the dash. After a moment he spoke. “You mean the numbers?”

“Yep, that would be helpful.” I waited. “You’re not sure what the numbers are?”

“No, but they’re in the truck.”

As we started back, the tone became a little more conversational. I commented on the weather, and he related how he and his friends had been surprised by the little storm last night, how the roads had been slick with snow coming off the mountain. “You fellows were hunting on the mountain?”

“Yes, sir.” He unlocked the Chevy and dug into the center console where I caught a glimpse of a red box indicating Federal brand ammunition. After a moment, he produced four bright and shining bow-hunting permits.

Bow hunting permits. I pursed my lips and blew out. “You fellows are bow hunters?

“Yes, sir.” I checked the permits; they were all mountain, 24, 166, 25. “Look, is there something we’re being charged with? Should I be getting a lawyer or something?

“I’m hoping that won’t be necessary, Mr. Anderson. Do you or any of your party have any firearms?”

“No.”

Maybe he was just nervous. “You’re sure?”

“Yes. Well . . .” Moment of truth. “Randy has a .38 in the glove box.”

“Is it loaded?”

“It might be.”

“Are you aware that a loaded, vehicularly concealed weapon constitutes a misdemeanor offense in this state?” Vehicularly—was that a word? Where did I get this stuff? I smiled again to let him know I didn’t think he was Al Capone. “So, let’s say you and I make a deal? I won’t examine the legendary Randy’s pistol to see if it’s loaded and you answer a few more of my questions.” He figured it was a good deal. I pulled the section map out of my coat pocket, spread it out, and, with Mike’s help, held it on their hood. He said they had asked at the Game and Fish about sections 23 and 26 because Anderson’s father had hunted there years ago, claiming the deer on the Powder River draw were much larger than those on the mountain. Anderson’s father was right, but I didn’t share that with Mike; my ranch was in that section. They had driven out there Friday at noon and circled up along the Powder River coming back past Arvada, Clearmont, and Crossroads.

“Did you get off the main road at any point?”

“Um, three times. Once to watch some antelope just at the top of the hill after that little town at the main road?”

“Arvada.”

“Once where there was an old bridge headed south.”

Maybe something. “An old kings-bridge structure?” His face was blank. “A trestle system of steel girders that goes over the road with an old car stuffed into the bank on the far side?”

“Yes, sir. Now that you mention it.”

“Did you see anyone, or anything else, out there?” He paused to think. I was going to have to talk to all of them. Was I ever going to get to sleep?

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did anybody see you?”

“No. I mean there were some cars and trucks that went by . . .” He was thinking hard but wasn’t coming up with anything.

“But you didn’t speak to anyone?”

“No.”

“What about the third stop?” His face brightened. I guess he figured the governor had called with the reprieve.

“We had lunch at a little place about twenty miles out.”

“The Red Pony?”

He pointed a finger at me, and I started figuring that Anderson sold something for a living. “That was it.”

I asked him what they had, and he said cheeseburgers. I asked how they were, and he said they were okay.

“Just okay?”

“Yes, sir. Why? Is that important?”

A gust of wind fluttered the map. “No, I just want to give the chief-cook-and-bottle-washer some flak. You ate at this place on the way back to town? About what time was that?

“Right after noon, maybe one.” I took out my pen and made some notes on the map. “Your picture is on the wall. Out there at the bar with all the medals, maps, and stuff, isn’t it?” I continued to scribble away. “You two were in the war together? You and the Indian guy?”

“Yep, the war to start all wars.” I don’t think he got it.

“I mean the food wasn’t that bad . . .” He started sounding apologetic. I couldn’t wait to give Henry an earful. “It took him a little while to get it out to us, but I think he had just opened. You sure get your money’s worth. He cut the fries out of potatoes right there on the bar, and I got this cheeseburger that had about a half pound of jalapeños on it.”

I stopped scribbling.

3

There was a clattering as someone tried to pull what sounded like pots and pans from one of the many boxes that lined the kitchen wall. My head slumped against my pillow; almost fourteen hours of sleep and I still felt like shit. It looked like a nice day though. From my perspective near the floor, I had a clear view of brilliant blue skies without a cloud in sight. There was more noise from the kitchen, and whistling. Unless I missed my guess, it was Prokofiev’s Symphony Number One, sometimes in D, and it was being butchered. I dragged myself to a sloped sitting position and stretched my back, allowing the little muscle just left of my spine and halfway down to decide how it was going to let me live today. The prognosis was fair.

I looked through the opaque plastic coating that still clung to the glass door between the bedroom and kitchen, pushed to my feet, and stumbled. I turned the glass knob, stolen almost a decade ago from our rented house in town, and confronted the Cheyenne Nation who was resplendent in his old Kansas City Chiefs jersey, complete with YOUR NAME printed on the back. “Hey, people are trying to sleep in here.”

“After fourteen hours you have constituted clinical death.” He was popping open a can of biscuits on the particle board edge of the counter and lining an old pie pan with them.

“Did you wash that?”

He paused. “Should I have?”

“Well, there’s mouse shit on most of that stuff.”

His shoulders sagged as he pulled the biscuits out of the pan and inspected the underside of each one. “How do you live like this?” He turned to look at me. “Will you please go put some clothes on?” I retreated into the bedroom, retrieved my bathrobe from the nail in the stud wall, and ambled back to the kitchen.

I took a seat on the stool by the counter and poured a cup of coffee into a Denver Broncos mug. I figured it was my job to do everything possible to irritate him this afternoon. I was feeling better. “What’s for brunch?”

“You mean besides mouse shit?” He had dropped about two pounds of pork sausage into a frying pan that I couldn’t recall ever having seen before. I took a sip of the French roast; it seemed like all I did was drink the stuff. Cady sent me fancy, whole-bean coffee from Philadelphia in trendy little resealable bags, but I hadn’t gotten around to getting a grinder.

“Game Day.” It was a tradition. Twice a year we found ourselves locked in the death struggle of the AFC Western Division: Broncos vs. Chiefs. Pancake Day and Game Day on the same weekend.

“Yes, I know. You are going to get your ass kicked today.”

“Oh, please . . .” I tried the coffee again; it wasn’t so bad. “Where did you find a grinder?” He ignored me and continued to look through the Folgers can that held my meager selection of utensils, so I asked, “Spatula?”

“Yes.”

I looked at the scattered containers resting haphazardly against the wall, at the strata of Rainier beer crates that were stacked in every available space. It was daunting, but he had found a frying pan. “Box.”

“Jesus.” The pork sausage began to sizzle. He approached the boxes and began going through them in a methodical fashion, top row first, left to right. “Walt, we need to go over a few things.” This had an ominous tone to it. “There was a time when this particular lifestyle had its place, the grieving widower valiantly sallying forth through a sea of depression and cardboard. This gave way to the eccentric lawman era, but now, Walt my friend, you are just a slob.”

I hugged my coffee cup a little closer and straightened my robe. “I’m a lovable slob.”

He had made it through the top row and was now working the collapsed fringe toward the backdoor. “At the risk of sending you into a tailspin, Martha has been dead for four years.”

“Three.” He stopped and leaned against the door facing, the other hand at his side.

The sausage popped, sending a small splatter to the plywood floor. I looked at the splatter mark; it was relatively contained, with a few scalloped edges due to the height of trajectory, ray-emitting tendrils reaching for the center of the room. If the object emitting the splatter is in motion, the drops will be oval and have little tails, which will project in the horizontal direction that the drop was moving. As the top of the teardrop lands last, splatters on a wall can tell you if the assailant is left- or right-handed. I knew a lot about splatters. I wondered how Vic was doing. I looked at the unopened manila envelope sitting in my chair, a priority set of pictures illustrating the next-to-final resting place of Cody Pritchard. I had been so tired by the time I had gotten home that I had thrown them on the recliner, too exhausted to concentrate. Ruby’s handwriting looked personal and out of place: Scene Investigation Photographs, 9/29/2:07 A.M.

“Four.” His eyes were level, and his voice carried a tired resignation to the battle joined. “Walt, it is time to get on with your life . . . I mean college kids live better than this.” I didn’t know what to say; I had had a kid in college and then in law school, and she had lived better than this. “But I have a four-fold plan for your redemption.”

I sipped some more coffee and stared at the floor. “Does this involve getting me a woman?” He pulled the spatula out of the nearest box. I advised him to wash it, which he did after making a face, then set about breaking up the brick of meat in the pan.

“Getting you a woman is the third part.”

“I like this plan, but I think we should move the third part up.”

“We have to get you to the point where you are worthy of a woman.”

“Why do I get the feeling that I’m not going to like the other parts of this plan?”

“Walt, your life is a mess, your house is a mess, and you are a mess. It is about time we did some cleaning up.” He looked around the cabin, I’m sure for dramatic effect. “Let us start with the easy stuff. This was a nice little house when you first got started, but that was five years ago.” I thought it was four. “You have got to get some gutters so the run-off stops cutting a moat around the house. You are going to have to use a bleach solution to cut the gray off the things and then put some UV protection on them. You need a porch, and a deck out back would not be such a horrible thing . . .”

My head hurt. “I don’t have the time for all that, let alone the energy.”

He found the opener on the counter and began opening a number of small cans. “We are not talking time, energy, or money, which will be your next argument. We are talking inclination. Now, I know these two young men . . .”

“Oh, no. I’m not going to have a bunch of thieving redskins roaming around my place while I’m not here.”

He choked laughing, his arms spread wide to encompass the entirety of the room. “What would they steal?” He had a point. “These boys just started up their own contracting firm; they are hungry, cheap, and they are good. I can have them over here tomorrow morning at eight.” I looked around the room at the stud walls, exposed wiring, and dirt-encrusted plywood floors.

I sighed. “Okay, what’s part two?”

“We get you in shape.”

I took another sip of coffee; it was getting cold. “Oh, I’m past that shit.”

“I want you to think about part three.” He smiled. “I want you to think about part three while we’re going through parts one and two.” He bumped me in the shoulder, and I spilled a little coffee. More splatters. He turned and dumped a small can of green chilies into the pan.

“I don’t suppose any of this might stem from conversations you may or may not have had with Cady, Ruby, or Vic.”

He was working the meat around, and the smell of the green peppers was intoxicating. “I talk with a lot of people about a lot of things.”

“How come you didn’t talk to me about Cody Pritchard eating his last meal at the Pony?”

He placed the metal stem of the spatula on the edge of the frying pan so that the plastic handle wouldn’t melt and leaned against the counter. I listened to him breathe and realized how much he had aged in the last twenty years, or the last two seconds. After a moment he reached across the counter with a steady hand and poured me another cup. “I did not think it was that important. You ran out of the place Friday night and did not say a word to anybody, and I knew I was going to see you this morning. I guess I thought I had more important things to talk to you about.” He poured himself a cup and placed the pot back on the burner. He looked me in the eye just to clear the air. “Well, officer . . . It was the night of November second at approximately 6:02 P.M. that the aforementioned, one Pritchard, Cody, entered the establishment known as the Red Pony. Witnesses to this fact are Mssrs. Charlie Small Horse, Clel Phillips, and the attesting Henry Standing Bear. The condition of Mr. Pritchard at that time was one of profound intoxication, whereupon he was refused alcoholic beverage and served one Mexican cheeseburger deluxe, including fries and a Coke. Twenty-five minutes later there was a verbal altercation between Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Small Horse, which resulted in Mr. Pritchard being escorted to the door of the establishment and asked to leave. The last I saw of Cody, he wheeled that piece of shit palomino-primer truck of his around in my parking lot, sprayed gravel, and headed east to a far better place than he had ever been before. So, do you want to book me, or you want to go take a shower?” He sipped his coffee.

“You seem a little defensive.”

“No shit? I just want to keep my proficiency and conduct reports up to snuff.” He smiled a tight little smile. “Anything else?”

“No, you pretty well covered it. I think I’ll go take a shower.” I stood up and walked past him toward the bathroom. I picked up the coffee since it was growing on me. I was hoping he’d say something, anything that would give me the excuse to turn around.

“Do not get me wrong, Walt, I did not like the kid, but then I do not know anybody who did. If you are looking for a suspect, just open the phone book.” He was watching the sausage as it burbled. “Are there any leads?”

I sighed and leaned against the refrigerator. “Toxicology at DCI said a high content of brewed barley malt, cereal grains, hops, and yeast . . .”

“Known in the trade as Busch Lite.”

“Ground beef, jalapeños, and American cheese.”

“Mexican cheeseburger. Anything else?”

“Nothing from toxicology. Ballistics says no lands or grooves, and the deformity of impact with the sternum makes identification that much more difficult.”

His curiosity sharpened. “Smoothbore?”

I shrugged. “Who knows, but if it is, it narrows the search to ten yards or less.”

“Which means it was somebody the little shit knew.” He smiled the tight smile again. “At least well enough to let them get close with a shotgun.” He pushed down on the frying pan handle, allowing the grease to puddle at the end of the skillet closest to him. “That is pretty close.”

“Yep.”

“No companions, no tracks?”

“Nope.”

“Any cover?”

My turn to smile. “That Powder River country, there’s a goodlookin’ woman behind every tree . . .” He joined me for the rest. “There just ain’t any trees.”

“Back to square one. Wadding or contact dispersal?”

“Nope. No powder tattooing, either.”

“Any hope of brass?”

“Ferg and that bunch didn’t come up with anything.”

“Hmmm . . .” He grunted. “I will withhold comment on whether Ferg and his bunch could slap their ass with both hands.” He frowned at the frying pan, spooned the pooled grease into a measuring cup that he must have used to apportion tomato paste, and flipped the majority of the contents. “Meteorite?”

I had to smile. “The more people I talk to, the more I am convinced that this may have been an act of God.”

“Hate to see the Supreme Being take the fall for this one.”

“He sees even the smallest sparrow fall.”

“That would pretty much describe the decedent, but would this not be stretching the jurisdiction thing?”

“Maybe.” The mood had lightened, and it was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. “Hey?”

“Hmm?” He looked at me, and the expression his face carried was one of open concern for a friend who had all but accused him of impeding a murder investigation. My heart wasn’t in the question, but I had to ask. “You know the scuttlebutt on the Rez?”

“What, you worried about the Indian vote?” He smiled to let me in on the joke, but it still hurt. “What?”

“The Little Bird rape case . . .”

“Melissa.”

“Melissa.” I was feeling lower and lower. “What’s the general feeling on the Rez about the job I did?” There was a brief look of irritation as he flipped his hair back and trapped what would have been a fine tail on a good cutting horse in a leather strip he had pulled from the back pocket of his jeans.

“General feeling”—he pointed up the phrase as silly white-man talk—“is that you could have done better.”

“And what is the basis of my failure?”

He turned his head and looked into the distance at the log wall only two feet away. “Two years suspended sentence, two years parole.”

“People don’t think Vern Selby and a jury had something to do with that?”

“These people do not have any bond with that judge or jury, none of whom were . . . Indian, and they do with you.” He paused. “You should take that as a grave compliment.” He opened a ziplocked bag of preshredded cheese and offered me some. I took a pinch and stuffed it in my mouth. Pepper jack. “Anyway, the goodwill of these people is not going to have much effect on your condition. There is only one person who can offer you absolution in this case, and he is a difficult individual with whom to deal . . . he forgives everyone but himself, and he never forgets.” We stood looking at each other, chewing. “You should go take a shower. Part three said she would be here for kickoff at two.” He pulled open the door of the oven and checked on his biscuits. The smell was marvelous.

“Part three?”

“Vonnie Hayes expressed a desire to participate in the bonding ritual this afternoon. I thought it might lead to a more desirable ritual between the two of you later this evening.”

I took a moment to reply. “I just saw her yesterday morning. She didn’t say anything.”

“Women seem to enjoy surprising you, perhaps because it is so easy.”

I looked around the house at the piles of books and accumulated dirt on the floors, the walls, and the ceiling. “Oh, shit . . .”

He followed my eyes and shook his head. “Yes, it is very bad, but we will tell her you are under construction. Red Road Contracting, the young men I told you about, will be here tomorrow morning.” He pulled the biscuits from the oven and placed them on one of the front burners. “Go take a shower.”

I started, but turned. “What’s part four?”

“Spirituality, but that may have to come from somebody else.”

* * *

I turned the water on in the shower and spent the time waiting for it to heat up by inspecting my bullet holes. I had four: one in the left arm, one in the right leg, and two in the chest. I looked at the one in my left arm since it was the closest. It was 357/100ths of an inch with two clean, marbled white dots on either side. The one on the inside had well-defined edges and was about the size of a dime. On the other side it was blurred, had a tail like a tadpole that had drifted back to my elbow, and was about the size of a silver dollar. The water temperature was acceptable, so I stepped in and grabbed a bar of oatmeal soap that Cady had sent me. I liked it because it didn’t smell. I kicked at the slow contraction of the vinyl curtains.

It was a monkey-shit brown Olds Delta 88 with two hubcaps and a peeling, blond vinyl top. I could see they were kids and just flipped the lights on for a second so they would pull over. It took what seemed like a little too long for them to do it. The driver threw open the door and started back toward the car I was using at the time; I figured he was upset because I had pulled him over for what seemed like nothing. I was wrong. He was upset because he and his friend had robbed a liquor store in Casper and had gotten away with $943 when I stopped them en route to Canada.

I lathered up, rinsed off, and felt like I had new skin. I reached for the shampoo and, feeling how light the bottle was, made a mental note to get some more. I had enough unattended mental notes to fill up the Sears wish book.

Near as we could figure, the bullet must have ricocheted off the window facing of the car and passed through my left arm. People always ask what it’s like, and the only answer I can come up with is that it’s like having a red-hot poker shoved into your flesh. It burns, and it hurts like hell, but only after. I wondered mildly if Vonnie would think that bullet holes are sexy. Martha didn’t; she hated them. A beautiful woman in my house; a woman who looked you over from head to toe, was confident and interested. I felt complicated and dreary.

I wiped off the mirror to look into the eyes of Dorian Gray. What I saw did not inspire me with confidence. My hair, wet or dry, has a tendency to stand on end. I fought with it for a while and decided that it was a good thing I was able to wear a hat in my chosen profession. I have large, deep-set gray eyes, a gift from my mother, and a larger than normal chin, a gift from my father. The older I get, the more I think I look like a Muppet. Cady vehemently disagrees with this assessment, but she’s fighting her own battle with this particular gene puddle.

It was with a great deal of panic that I heard a mixture of laughter resonate through the spaces at the top of the bathroom drywall and through the shower-curtained doorway. It was a quick right to the bedroom, maybe four feet, but I didn’t figure I could make it without being seen. I pulled the old black-watch pattern around my waist, slipped on my worn, moose-hide moccasins, and stepped into the cool, fresh dawn of interpersonal abuse.

As usual, she looked magnificent. Long fingers were wrapped around one of my Denver Broncos mugs, the old one with the white horse snorting through the orange D. She wore a plain, khaki ball cap with her ponytail neatly tucked through the adjustable strap in the back, a gray sweatshirt that read VASSAR, blue jeans, and a pair of neon running shoes. She exuded health, sparkling intelligence, and sex, though the last might have just been my read on things. She sat on my foldout step stool and laughed as Henry tried vainly to adjust the reception on my television.

“All right, I give up. What the hell do you have to do to get a decent picture on this thing?”

We had always watched the game at the bar on Henry’s satellite-assisted television but, for today’s game, he had thought it best to view it within the comfortable confines of my house. He was kneeling by the set, adjusting the fine tuning with the same finesse he had shown with the fuse box two nights ago. “That is decent.”

He turned to regard the screen as the usual blobs moved about in indiscriminate patterns. “You have got to be kidding.”

I crossed the room and leaned against a six-by-six. “Vonnie, welcome to Château Tyvek.”

“Is this the uniform of the day?”

Henry was right; I was going to have to make some changes. “Oh, this was just a little something I threw on.” I looked at the Cheyenne Nation. “What’s the score?”

He stood with his hands on his hips as two vague football helmets collided and exploded into a million pieces on the screen amid triumphant musical accompaniment. “It hasn’t started yet. Is it me or has football gotten more and more like wrestling these days?”

She squeezed my hand. “Bear says he doesn’t mind Native American mascots for athletic teams.” I noticed he didn’t correct her use of the term Native American.

“I don’t have a problem with native accoutrements. If they wish to use the tools of our trade to strike fear into their enemies’ hearts, who am I to deny them?”

This from the man who had worn a horse-head amulet around his neck for four years in Southeast Asia. Chinese Nung Recon teams and Montagnards believed it had been carved from the sternum of an unfortunate NVA colonel. Henry had done nothing to dissuade them from this thought, and only he and I knew the bone had come from the leg of his mother’s old, dry dairy cow that they had had to put down. “How’s lunch coming?”

“Who am I, Hop-Sing here?” He opened the oven door and peered in. “Almost there. Plenty of time for you to go put some clothes on.”

Her hand trailed after mine as I started for the bedroom. “Don’t go to any trouble on my part.”

I continued into the bedroom so she wouldn’t see how red my face was growing. I looked around the room and saw my life as it was. The edges of the mattress were threadbare and dirty, the sheets an uninviting gray. A battered gooseneck lamp sat on the floor beside the bed with a copy of Doctor Dogbody’s Leg opened to page seventy-three, where I had left it a while ago. The ever-present beer boxes loomed at the far wall, and the naked light bulbs allowed none of the low-rent squalor to escape. It was like living in an archeological dig. I thought about the woman in the other room and felt like climbing out the window. Instead, I went over to the crate that stood as my bedside table and punched the button just below the flashing red light on the answering machine. Evidently, I hadn’t heard it ring.

“Okay, so, after forty-eight hours of intensive ballistic study, we’re no fucking closer than we were at the beginning of the weekend.” She sounded ragged and edgy, and I was glad I was five hours away. “The cast content on the ballistics is fairly soft; 30 to 1, lead to tin.” She took a breath. “Here’s the kicker. There’s some kind of strange chemical compound . . . You remember those old Glaser Safety Slugs? The GSS’s? If that’s the case, Cody was SOL.”

Shit out of luck.

“So, can you imagine somebody tracking that kid down with Teflon slugs?”

No.

“Yeah, well me neither.” There was a pause. “Anyway, I’ve done all that I can do here, and the pizza at Larry’s sucks. So, I’ll be home tomorrow. Any questions?”

I stared at the phone machine and shook my head side to side.

“Good. I’m taking tomorrow off. Any problem with that?”

I continued to shake my head.

“Good.” Pause. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow anyway.”

* * *

When I entered the kitchen, Henry was holding the photographs that had been in the envelope at arms length.

“You need new reading glasses or longer arms?”

“Both.”

Vonnie was glancing at the television and questioning him. “Twenty-five percent of all domestic murders go unsolved each year?” She shifted on the stool and smiled at me.

I poured myself another cup of coffee and extended the pot toward her. She shook her head and waited to capture my next words with those eyes. “About five thousand cases go unsolved.” Her eyes widened. “About sixty-two percent of homicides in the United States involve firearms, which means me and my compadres have failed to identify some thirty-one hundred killers and their weapons every year.”

“Seems like the guys on TV and in the movies always get their man; you real cops must be falling down on the job.” He lowered the photographs, and I noticed Vonnie made no effort to look at them.

“Personally, I never miss an episode of Dragnet.”

She cocked her head, and the eyes narrowed. “It seems like a lot. It was Sheriff Connally here before you, wasn’t it?” She grinned and looked off toward the front door.

“You know Lucian?”

“Oh, I had a few run-ins with him back in my bad old days.” She laughed, flashing that canine tooth that sparkled like a Pepsodent commercial. “Some of my posse and I had absconded with a fifth of my father’s Irish whiskey and high-tailed it to the Skyline Drive-In in Durant.”

Henry perked up. “I think I heard about that. Didn’t you and Susan Miller dance naked on the hood of that ’65 Mustang during Doctor Zhivago?”

She was turning just a little pink at the throat. “I was of a young and impressionable age.”

“Hell, I would have been impressed too.” He stuffed the photographs back into the envelope and handed them to me. “Good luck.”

Her smile went away. “You don’t think it was an accident?”

“Not really.” Henry crossed behind me and opened the refrigerator door to pull out a pitcher I had never seen before, filled with a murky maroon liquid, ice cubes, and lemon and orange slices. I sat the envelope down on the counter and stared at it. “I’m hoping real hard that it is, but evidence is mounting that such is not the case.”

“Why?”

“Short-range weapon did the deed, no way you could sneak up on somebody out there. I’d hazard to guess that there aren’t many hunters looking to shoot pronghorn or mule deer with a 12 gauge. And there are some things that just don’t make sense.”

He stirred the contents of the pitcher. “Powder burns.”

She was following, but I figured I should explain the details. “When you shoot a shotgun at any range . . .” I paused and weighed the next question. “You know what a shotgun is?”

Her eyes stayed steady to show no offense. “My father used to shoot skeet.”

“Right. Well, this is looking like a rifled slug.”

“Slug. Doesn’t sound pleasant.”

“It’s not. Slugs basically convert shotguns into oversize rifles with enough power to crack automobile engine blocks.”

“Why would somebody want to shoot somebody with something like that?”

“Emphasis.”

It rumbled in his chest, and I wondered about all the people who would consider it a good thing that the world was shed of Cody Pritchard. “Cody wasn’t exactly beloved by the . . .” I gave him a sidelong glance. “Indian community.”

She placed a hand on the counter to get his attention. “It’s not Indian anymore, it’s Native American. Right, Bear?” She nodded for confirmation.

He looked up and pursed his lips sagely. “That is right.” He turned his head toward me ever so slightly. “You must learn to be more responsive to Native American sensibilities.”

Bastard. “The problem is the slug decreases the range of an already relatively short-range weapon.”

“But wasn’t he shot in the back?”

“Yep, but you’d still have to get close.”

“Could he have been drunk or asleep?”

“Drunk, certainly.” Henry wandered over to look at the blobs moving in the television. I had forgotten about the game. “Even with the complications of extensive tissue damage, his posture was likely erect. And since Henry was the last to serve him food and see him alive, I can take his word that Cody was at least capable of driving his truck and walking.”

She turned her stool. “You saw him last?”

He stared at the television screen, his arms crossed. “Do not ask me how I can tell, Walt, but I think your team is winning.”

She turned back to look at me, then back to him again. “Bear, have I said something wrong?”

“No, you did not say anything wrong . . . We will just say that I was the next to last person to see Mr. Pritchard alive.” He smiled to himself and crossed back to the counter. “Sangria, anybody?” He poured the liquid into three tall glasses and handed one to each of us. “How about a toast?” He raised his glass. “Here is to the three thousand one hundred that get away.”

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

I looked into the big, brown eyes with wisps of butterscotch slipping by. “To Doctor Zhivago.”

* * *

The game was uneventful and, as near as we could tell, the Broncos won by two field goals. By six-thirty we had dispatched the casserole, and Henry had made excuses that he had to go check on the bar. At the moment, I was massaging Vonnie’s foot from the opposite stool, with the gentle warmth of what remained of the sangria seeping into every relaxing muscle in my body. It had been one of those spectacular Wyoming sunsets, the ones everybody thinks only happen in an Arizona Highways magazine. Broiling waves of small bonfires leapt on top of one another as far as the horizon with injured purples drifting in multilayered, frozen sheets back to the skyline.

“So, I didn’t hurt his feelings?”

“No, I can guarantee that wasn’t it.” Her toenails were burgundy; the color matched the sangria, and I figured she had them done in Denver on a regular basis.

“You must know him best?”

I thought about what knowing Henry Standing Bear best meant and that that opened up a lot of country. “I don’t know about best.” I paused for a moment, but it wasn’t enough for her. “About ten years ago we were over in Sturgis for that motorcycle fiasco that they have every year. They put out this desperate plea for assistance and, if you’re an off-duty police officer, you can make a lot of money in one weekend. I was saving for Cady, to get her a car, and figured an extra thousand wouldn’t hurt. Henry hadn’t ever been over for the big wingding, so he decided to tag along. So, we’re sitting there at this little greasy spoon near the motorcycle museum the morning after, and I’m telling Henry that if I ever get this bright idea again to just slap me in the back of the head with a stilson wrench. That’s when this Indian fellow . . .”

“Native American.”

“. . . This Native American walks over to our table and just stands there. He’s a big guy like Henry, and I’m quickly running through the faces I’ve locked up for DUI, public indecency, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and jaywalking that weekend alone. I’m not making any connections, but the longer I look at this guy’s face, the more I’m sure that I’ve seen him somewhere before. That’s when Henry stops chewing his bacon, still looking at his plate, and says, ‘How have you been?’ I’m looking at this guy like never before, but damned if I can make the reach. He’s good-looking, maybe thirty, but he’s got a lot of miles on him. The guy says, ‘Good. You?’ I look at Henry and all he says is, ‘Cannot complain.’ You know how he never uses contractions. Well, the fellow just stands there for another minute, pulls out a cigarette, and lights it. Then he says, ‘Who’d listen? ’ And with this he just kind of turns and glides out of the place. I’m watching him walk out, and it hits me. He walks just like Henry. I turn to look at him and start to speak, but he cuts me off. ‘Halfbrother. ’ And that’s all he says. Come to find out, he hasn’t talked to the guy in fifteen years. As far as I know, he hasn’t talked to him since.”

She looked puzzled. “Big falling out?”

“Who the hell knows?” I squeezed her foot and leaned back on my stool. “I don’t think you hurt his feelings. I think it’s just a lack of windmills.” She laughed. “That, and probably there’s a part of Henry that wishes he had done it.”

“You’re joking?”

I wished mildly I hadn’t brought it up, because it was going to be hard to explain. “Nope.”

“You really think he’s capable of something like that?”

“I think under certain circumstances, everybody’s capable of doing something like that.”

She exchanged feet, tucking the other one under her, and thought for a moment. “I guess I don’t, but then I haven’t seen all the things you’ve seen.” Her eyes held steady as they met mine. “Is there part of you that wishes you’d done it?”

I thought for a moment, but she had me. “Yep, I guess there is a vicious little part of me that does.”

I looked out the front window and watched the big cottonwood at the end of my road sway in the breeze that had just come up. It wasn’t bone cold, but it would be by the end of the night. Probably in the teens, and I could see the frost on the windows even though it wasn’t there. Winter was almost here, and I had to start remembering to look for the fall.

She seemed lost in thought too, staring at my hands that were wrapped around her foot; but as long as I didn’t give it back, she had to stay. “Well, since we’re sort of telling our deepest, darkest secrets . . .” She trapped her lower lip in her teeth, let it slide out slowly, and continued, “When Cady was trying to fix us up a few years ago?” I waited. “I think a little part of me really was kind of hoping that it would work out.” She paused. “I’m telling you this because I don’t want to be sending mixed signals.”

I was getting a sinking feeling, but I still held on to the foot.

“I just don’t want to get moving too fast. The last relationship I was in was not a good one, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was in too much of a hurry.” Her eyes dulled and the angles on her face flattened and grew sad. “I think there was an awful lot about him that I thought I knew, but the truth was I was just coloring in the missing parts with colors I liked.” Her eyes sharpened again when she looked at me. “I can’t afford that with you; I like you too much.”

“Thank you.” I still wasn’t giving up the foot. “What if you don’t like the way I look when I sleep with my mouth open?”

We both laughed. “I’m willing to take that chance.”

I sniffed and bit my own lip. “Vonnie . . .”

She did her best Gene Tierney. “Walter?” We laughed again.

“Don’t let this lusty, youthful appearance fool you. I’m not seventeen anymore, and I don’t have the expectations of a seventeen-year-old.” I took the last sip of my sangria. “I, uh . . .” I cleared my throat and forged ahead. “At least you had a last relationship . . .” I cleared my throat again. “I haven’t had any relationships since Martha died. Talk about pushing a virtue to vice . . .”

And to my absolute shock, her eyes welled and a single tear streaked like lightning across her face. I fought back the sudden burning in my own eyes and squeezed her foot. It was a fine foot, long and narrow with toes that looked like fingers. Aristocratic, as feet go. My mother used to say it was a sign of royalty; that, and eating one thing on your plate at a time. I’m not sure how much royalty my mother ever met and whether she ever got to break bread with them or examine their feet, but she felt strongly about things. It’s a family trait.

I took one of my calloused paws and drew the soft part on the back across her cheek, smearing the seawater to her hairline. She sobbed a broken sob and pulled at a loose strand of hair, tucking it behind an ear, and then caught my hand. She placed it on her knee. She wasn’t a small woman, but it took both hands to conceal my one. She pushed my knuckles apart, stretching the fingers around her calf and securing them there. She seemed like a child, satisfied with her work. Pulling back, her fingers spread to examine her creation, she smiled through the contractions of her diaphragm. I wanted her more than anything in the world. I set my jaw and just looked. It was more than enough.

* * *

I drove her home through the fog that crept off Piney Creek, which was desperate to find its way through to the Clear and, in turn, the Powder. One stream started in the high reaches of the Bighorn Wilderness Area, at the very top of Cloud Peak, dropping a couple of thousand feet to shoot past Lake Desmet through the valley of the Lower Piney and making a left at Vonnie’s house. The other flexed its hydraulic muscles from Powder River Pass to the south, widening like a river at the flats through Durant till it met its lover about a half mile from my place. The small patches of snow were melting in the last warmth of the day’s heat before the night could get a firm grasp, and the low-lying fog was like riding on clouds.

I shifted gears, making the turn at Crossroads, and looked down 16 toward the Red Pony. The lights were on, and I thought about my friend, patiently listening to another drunk telling another drunken story about getting drunk. Vonnie moaned a little and then readjusted her head. I put my hand on her shoulder, and she snuggled under my sheepskin coat, her legs curled up in the passenger seat. I listened to the heat blowing through the vents, the hum of the big V-10, and thought back.

She argued at first, but the sangria and the emotional impact had layered her with fatigue. She was surprisingly light, and I was surprisingly smart enough to open the truck door before I carried her out. I figured she could get a ride back over the next day to get her little red Jeep or send somebody over.

It took about ten minutes to get to her place, and I didn’t pass another vehicle the whole way. I had the feeling I was involved in some sort of clandestine operation as I pulled through the wrought-iron gates. Tucked in a hillside in Portugee Gulch, I was impressed by the size of the place. Cady had told me all about Vonnie’s house, about the indoor pool, spiral staircases, massive stone fireplaces, and statuary everywhere you looked. It wasn’t the usual big box log house; instead, it looked like it had started out at a reasonable size and geometrically evolved as Vonnie’s lifestyle had developed. As a reflection, I wondered where her lifestyle was headed.

I pulled the Bullet up to the front door of the largest part. A number of movement-activated halogen lamps came on, but there were no lights in any other part of the house. I climbed out and went to the door; roughly four thousand dollars for a highly intricate, electric home-defense system, and it was unlocked. It was a large Spanish-style one that clicked solidly and opened to reveal an expansive living room with numerous leather sofas. I figured she could sleep on one of them for the night. I went back outside and got her, carefully easing her through the doorway and down the three steps that led to the larger part of the room. The walls were an oversanded plaster that looked like they had been done and redone by numerous old-world crafts-men. Three archways led toward an elevated dining room that overlooked a pool in the back, and the Saltillo tile gleamed with the luster of polished mahogany. There were paintings on all the walls, mostly abstracts, and I felt like I lived in one of my cardboard boxes.

I placed her onto the largest of the sofas and arranged her head on one of the Indian-blanket pillows. I was at a loss as to what to do next, thinking I should leave a note or something, finally deciding that my coat was enough. I pulled the scruffy, sheepskin monstrosity up around her chin and kneeled there, looking at her. She truly was an exquisite female and a remarkable thing to take in, even with the little furrows that now crowded the bridge of her nose; it was probably the smell of the coat. I stood and backed toward the door, sad to see the evening come to a close. I was feeling very tender, and I didn’t know how long it would be before I felt that way again. Then I saw him.

About halfway across the elevated dining room in the archway to the left, he stood looking at me. He hadn’t made a sound as we pulled up, hadn’t made a sound when I opened the door, not even when I brought her in and laid her on the sofa. That’s what worried me. Here, at Portugee Gulch amid the fog of Piney Creek, stood the Hound of the Baskervilles. She hadn’t said anything about having a dog. He must have weighed close to 155 pounds, most of it chest and head. The yellow reflection in his eyes blinked once, and then he slowly walked to the edge of the stairs. The better to see you with, my dear.

There was German shepherd or wolf in there somewhere and certainly some Saint Bernard. The muzzle and ears were dark, dappling into a reddish color, with a white blaze at his chest. His right lip lifted to free a canine tooth out of the Paleozoic period, and he rumbled so low it sounded like thunder rolling down the valley. I glanced over at Vonnie, who was sleeping soundly, and figured she’d wake up when she heard the strangling sound of my last scream. I have to admit that my hand drifted down to where my sidearm usually was and then rested not so casually on my empty leg. He didn’t move any farther, and I heard this strained version of my voice saying, “Good dog, good doggy . . . Easy, boy.”

I fought the urge to run, knowing that such an enticement to wolves and to the Cheyenne was impossible to resist. Backing toward the door, I tripped at the bottom step and his head bobbed at the opportunity. We locked eyes, and I think there was an understanding. He might kill me, he might eat me, but I didn’t have to taste good. There was an umbrella and a loose assemblage of three golf clubs in the umbrella stand at the door. I figured that I could hold him off with the one iron, but then I’d most certainly need divine intervention, because everyone knows that God’s the only one who can hit a one iron. “Easy boy, easy . . .”

He didn’t move, just watched. I backed the rest of the way out the door and slowly shut it in front of me. For a moment, I thought about opening it again and locking it, then figured the hell with it. Whoever went in there next would get what he deserved. I quietly walked across the red-slate gravel as the halogen lights came on again. The place was like a disco. I wheeled the truck around the compound and headed out through the gate from whence I came. Absentmindedly, I turned on the radio, suddenly feeling the urge to hear voices, voices I didn’t necessarily have to respond to. Then I had a rotten thought. I keyed the mic. “Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department, this is Unit One, come in Base.”

His voice was sleepy. I didn’t blame him; I would have been asleep, too. “Jesus, yeah. This is Base, yeah, go ahead.”

I suppressed a laugh. “Are you okay?”

Static. “Yeah, I’m okay, are you okay?”

“Yep . . . I’m okay.” I looked out the windshield and navigated my way through the fog. “I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“Roger that, okay.” And with that, he was gone.

And I really was okay. It wasn’t exactly the evening I had planned. To tell the truth, I was probably relieved. The untold expectations of my first date in four, not three, years had kind of hammered me. When I made the turn at Crossroads, the lights were off at the bar, and I was glad there was nobody there to share war stories with. It was time to go to my little cabin with its stud walls, plywood floors, and UV-unprotected logs. Henry was right. It was time I got around to a few changes.

When I got home, the red light was once again blinking on my phone machine, so I punched the button. “Hi, Pops . . .”

4

“You are not dying.”

“How do you know, you’ve never died.” I pushed my spine into the depression in the mile-marker post and eased my weight against its scaly green-painted surface.

“I have died many times.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Get up.”

I picked a piece of cheat grass from the red shale roadbed, and it came out in one whole stalk, roots and all. It was cold, too. The frost clung to every surface, encasing the poor little fellow like those dragonflies you see trapped in thousand-year-old amber. If I was going to keep doing this every other morning, I had to get a pair of gloves. I raised my head and looked at him as he positioned himself in front of the rising sun like some fighter pilot moving in for the kill. He nudged me with his foot. “Get up.”

I took a large swipe at his legs, but he nimbly jumped back out of the way, gravitating to the balls of his feet and rolling up on another set of wheels. The tendons and veins popped out of his naked ankles like those of some skinned cat, and I looked away, colder than when I hadn’t noticed he wasn’t wearing any socks. He came back and nudged me with the same foot as I resettled against my post. “If you don’t stop kicking me, you really are going to find out about dying.”

“This is something I did not know about you, grumpy in the mornings.” He looked into the little breaths of wind, which clattered the dried leaves that had refused to release their grip on the black cottonwoods along the Piney. Under Tiepolo skies, shrouded with banks of gray, rolled back at the lavender and cream edges like waves receding from a high shore, the sun was just starting to hit the tops of the hills in the Wolf Valley. I wouldn’t die, so I was feeling better.

“What are you smiling at?”

“Leave me alone, I’m having a moment of grace.”

He stared at me. “Well, we would not want to interrupt that.”

I tossed a piece of shale at him, missing by a good two feet. “If you can have multiple lives, I can have moments of grace.”

He grunted. “How was your moment of grace last night?”

“Not bad, as moments of grace go.” I thought for a while. “More like a moment of truth.”

He nodded. “That is good, they are harder to come by.” He winced as he stretched the tendons in his right knee; maybe he wasn’t indestructible. “So, she left the Jeep?”

“Yep.”

“You drive her home?”

“Yep.”

He stretched for a minute more, leaned against the mile-marker post I was sitting against, and sighed. “Okay . . .”

“Okay, what?”

“We do not have to talk about it.”

“We are talking about it.”

“No, I am talking about it, and all you are doing is saying ‘yep.’ ”

I put on my best faraway smile and looked at the glowing hills down the valley. “Yep . . .”

He kicked me again.

A battered black and maroon three-quarter-ton diesel with a roll feeder, signature MCKAY RANCH, was coming down the road; it slowed as it got to the bridge and rolled to a stop beside us. Clel Phillips was the head ramrod for Bill McKay and was probably wondering what the Indian was doing beside the road with the sheriff laying alongside the barrow ditch. He rolled the window down on the feed truck and rested his shoulder against the door. “Hey.”

Clel poured himself coffee from an aged Stanley Thermos and offered Henry a sip, which was gratefully declined, so he motioned toward me, and I left grace behind for a steaming cup full of drip-dry Folgers. My legs were about to kill me. “Hey.”

The coffee tasted good, and I used my other hand to pull the sopping sweatpants from between my legs. Clel filled the cup up again. “What’re you fellas up to?”

“Running.”

He looked up and back down the road. “From what?” He took the insulated cap back and took a sip. “Hey, Sheriff . . .” Business call. I never ceased to be charmed by the cowboy way of priming the pump. They were like cattle, constantly looking into your eyes to see if there was danger or if there needed to be. It was the best part of the cowboys’ character, the animal husbandry part. They stayed up through many nights in frozen calving sheds, running their hands over and into expectant mothers, comforting them, soliciting them. The cows’ lives depended on them, and their lives depended on the cows. It wasn’t an easy way to live, but it had its rewards. “I’m havin’ a little trouble with Jeff Tory.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“You know that stretch of bottom land between his place and McKay’s? Well, he’s been lettin’ bird hunters on his place, and they seem to be havin’ a little trouble figurin’ out where Tory’s place ends and ours begins.”

Escaped pheasant, Hungarian partridges, and chuckers were prevalent up and down the valley as they fled from the two local bird farms and from the eastern Remington Wingmasters that pursued them. We had the best bird hunting in the state, and every once in a while somebody else found out about it. I hadn’t hunted since Vietnam; somehow, it had lost its appeal. Clel was finishing up his saga by the time I got interested in his problem, “. . . and Bill says he’s gonna give ’em a load of rock salt for their trouble.”

“Well . . .” Henry was bobbing up and down, but I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. In sheriffing, shooting people with anything was bad business, and Bill McKay was just the kind of ornery cuss that would go after double-ought buck hunters with rock salt just to call it even. “Does Bill have signs up along that stretch of fence?”

This is not what Clel wanted to hear, another chore to add to his ever-growing list. “No, we ain’t got no signs. You’d think the fence would be enough.”

“Well, I guess it’s not.” The state law was fence to keep out, which meant that if you didn’t want anything on your land, you were responsible for the fences, but evidently it took stronger measures for the two-legged variety. “Why don’t you run into Shipton’s and get some of those yellow metal no hunting signs and just wire ’em to the fence?”

“Then what?”

“Then you call me.”

He mulled that one over. “Sheriff Connally woulda let us shoot ’em.”

I reached over and took his coffee away from him. “Yep, Lucian probably would have done the job himself, but we’re living in more enlightened times.” I drained his cup and handed it back with a smile. “Ain’t it grand?”

I pushed off the truck and casually thundered the entirety of my 255 pounds, shoulder first, into Henry’s chest, emptying his lungs and sending him sliding backwards into the frosty grass below. I turned to smile and wave at Clel as I cut behind his truck and ran for my life. Past the county line, another hundred yards to my driveway, and another hundred to the cabin. I would never make it. I started listening to the rhythm of my breathing as I pushed with every muscle I didn’t have. Maybe this was all I needed every morning, somebody angry to chase after me. I figured it could be easily arranged. This was not the first time a white man in this part of the country had found himself in this particular situation. I must have pushed him farther than I had thought, because I could just make out the scratching of his shoes as they fought the shale bed at the side of the road.

Tell them Standing Bear is coming.

My head started feeling gorged with blood, whereas my legs began feeling as if they’d been left out overnight. To make things worse, my clammy sweatpants were now riding up the crack of my ass. I wondered if the Seventh Cavalry had had this problem as I ran for all I was worth, listening to the growing pat of his cushioned running shoes. I thought about turning to meet him, but the sound seemed to be coming from a distance yet, and I figured I’d play it out till the end.

The sun was shining on the driveway when I got there, and I was careful not to slip on the thawing frost as I cut the corner and headed into the final furlough. The receding wind was enough to flip the dried leaves up in salute as I passed, and I started thinking about making it: mistake. It didn’t take much, just a little nudge that forced my left foot in front of my right just before we got to the Big Bonanza irrigation channel. The results were cataclysmic as my already top-heavy momentum carried me into the only partly empty ditch.

By the time I got to the cabin, Henry was standing with two young men at the southeastern corner about ten feet from the front log wall. One of them was the young man with the strong features I had seen at the bar the other night. I walked past the ’69 half ton sitting in my drive and glanced at the hand-lettered writing on the door. Hopefully, Red Road Contracting’s carpentry skills were better than their sign painting ones.

“Well, if you do the porch at ten feet, then you can use dimensional twelves for the roof overhang.” He turned to look at me. “Run the porch all the way across the front.”

“Porch?” They were looking me over, but I guess they figured I was covered with mud every day.

“Yes, most people have areas outside their houses so that they can keep the majority of the outdoors outside.” Henry folded his arms and looked at me. “Charlie Small Horse, Danny Pretty on Top, this is Sheriff Walter Longmire.”

Pretty on Top was Crow, so it was a two-tribe deal. “How much is this going to cost?” I had to do this quickly; my pants were already starting to harden.

“I am glad you asked that question, because I like to be real up front with people on the cost of things. That way there isn’t any problem later on.” He looked down the front of the house and imagined the porch that would be the first step forward in home improvement I had taken in years. “About fifteen hundred in materials if you use rough-cut, not including the tin. Then labor.” Charlie Small Horse and I were going to get along.

After my shower, using soap as shampoo, I passed them on the way to the Bullet. They had already placed stakes and run string lines to give the general dimensions of the structure, and Charlie Small Horse was using a digging bar to break away the frozen topsoil. He paused to look up and smile as I carefully stepped over the bright green twine.

His head tilted a little as he looked at me. “You really a sheriff?”

I looked down at my uniform shirt and opened my coat to show him the badge. “Duly, at least until the next election.” I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “Mind if I ask you a question?”

He smiled. “Hey, you’re the sheriff.”

“I understand you had a little argument with Cody Pritchard the other day?”

He looked at the digging bar. “Who?”

I waited a second. “Cody Pritchard, the fella we found over near the Hudson Bridge Friday night?”

“Oh, him . . .”

“Yep, him. You had a little argument with him at the bar?”

“Yeah.”

“What was that about?”

He shifted his wide hands on the digging bar. “He didn’t like Indians.”

“How could you tell?”

He poked at the hole. “The usual. He sat there and gave me hard looks till he worked up his nerve.”

“He said something?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“The usual shit.”

“You say something?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

He grinned with bad teeth. “The usual shit.”

It felt strange to have somebody working on my house. It felt strange just to have anybody there. I looked over at the little red Jeep and figured I’d give her a call later.

* * *

It was one of those beautiful, high-plains days, where the sky just blinks blue at the earth and you have to remind yourself to take it in. The second cuttings were all up and tarped, and the perfectly round shadows of the bales looked surreal stretching across the disc-turned fields toward Clear Creek like stubble fields at harvest home. I didn’t pass a single car on the way into Durant. It was a little before eight when I got to the office, and Ruby already had five Post-its plastered on the doorjamb of my office. I spotted them when I came through the front door. “It’s a five Post-it day already?”

“Vic’s been here.”

I sat on the corner of her desk. “I thought she wasn’t coming in today.”

“She’s not, but she dropped some stuff off for you.” She looked up, and her hand went to her mouth. “What happened to your face?”

I didn’t think the scratches were that bad, but there were a lot of tumbleweeds in the ditch. “It’s a long story. Turk head back for Powder Junction?”

“After he decided how he was going to arrange the furniture when he got to be sheriff next year.”

I rolled my eyes as I got off her desk, headed for my office, and snatched all the little yellow Post-its as I went in. This was the system she had devised to get me to do all the things I was supposed to do during the course of my workday. On the top of my desk was a Tyvek envelope from the Federal Bureau of Investigation via FedEx. It still gave me a cheap thrill to get stuff from the Bureau, kind of reassuring me that I was on epistolary terms with the big guys: my pen pal, Elliot Ness. Vic must’ve brought it in. She wasn’t as impressed by the federales; considered them a case of dumb-asses-with-degrees. I broke open the nylon-reinforced filament tape and pulled out the mummy-wrapped container as an envelope fell to my desk. It was from the General Chemical Analysis Division, file number 95 A-HQ 7 777 777. Hell, with all those sevens we were bound to get lucky. And we were. The FBI laboratory said the foreign chemical compound on the ballistics samples had been identified as Lubricant SPG or Lyman’s Black Powder Gold.

Son of a bitch, that narrowed the field. That meant that whoever shot Cody Pritchard had done it with a black-powder shotgun. That didn’t make sense, though. I wasn’t even sure if you could shoot solid slugs out of antique shotguns without having them blow up in your face. And why use an antique shotgun? As the ultimate in nostalgia, at least thirteen American firms produced black-powder muskets, rifles, pistols, and shotguns, including flintlock and percussion designs. Traditional muzzleloaders are occasionally used for hunting, but black-powder arms turn up more frequently at pioneer celebrations, traditional turkey shoots, and in the hands of Civil War reenactment groups. They come with the original drawbacks of slow reloading, inconvenient ammunition, and lots of smoke. On the other hand, as certified antiques, their sale and ownership is generally not regulated under current firearm legislation. Two sides of the coin and neither one any help. Who had antique shotguns in this part of the country? The answer to that came roaring back: everybody. Even I had an old double-barrel Parker that had belonged to my grandfather and an old Ithaca 10 gauge coach gun. Okay, so it didn’t narrow the field. I looked up and found Ruby leaning against the doorjamb. “Yep?”

“I just wanted to see your response.”

I held up the letter. “To this?”

She smiled. “Underneath that.”

I slid the envelopes aside and picked up a pair of what looked like sweatpants. In blue screen printing it said CHUGWATER ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT XXXXL. “Very funny.” Chugwater was a little town about two-thirds of the way down to Cheyenne and is known for its chili mix and Hoover’s Hut, a gas station/gift shop. I held the pants up for inspection. “You could fit three of me in here.”

“Maybe she thinks you’ll grow into them.”

“Everybody’s a wise guy.” I tossed them over my chair. “Do you think you can track down Omar?”

“It’s hunting season.”

“I know.”

Her shoulders slumped a little. “If we had infrared satellite capabilities, I would say yes.”

I eased my sore legs into a sitting position. “I guess what I’m asking is if you could make a few phone calls and see if he’s around and not in Rwanda?”

“Sure, but I’m not making any promises.” She started to leave but not without a parting shot. “Read your Post-its, you have a busy day ahead of you.”

I tossed the letter from the FBI onto my desk and picked up the little pile of notes. The first was a vehicle inspection that needed to be done down on Swayback Road, south of town. No one had done it yet because it was a twenty-mile loop, and there was nothing else down there. How was I supposed to keep Gotham safe when I was out in the hinterlands reading VIN numbers? The next was from Kyle Straub, the prosecuting attorney for the county; he probably wanted to know why it was that I had released a crime scene without consulting with him. Another one was from Vern Selby, the circuit court judge, about my trial date on Wednesday, and Ernie Brown, Man About Town, had called and wanted a statement for the Durant Courant. The final one simply said WE HAVE AN OCCUPANT. Hell. I yelled after her, “Who is it?”

“Jules Belden.”

Shit. “PI or D and D?”

“Both; and assaulting an officer. I’ve got the report in here.”

I got up, walked out, and sat on her desk again. Before I could get settled, the file was under my nose. I flipped through quickly enough to let Turk’s childlike scrawl piss me off and stuck it under my arm. “Anybody feed Jules?”

“Not that I am aware of.”

“Do you want to go down to the Bee and get him something?”

“Do you want to finish these reports?”

I stood up. “I’ll be back.”

“I’ll alert the press.”

As I made my way out the back door, I mused on the little bed and breakfast that we had behind our offices, two holding cells upstairs and the regular jail downstairs. Not too many people understand the differences between jails and prisons. Jails are county or municipal facilities; prisons are state facilities. Jails usually hold two types of lodgers: those awaiting trial for both felonies and misdemeanors and those who have been convicted of misdemeanors punishable by a sentence of one year or less. Prisons, on the other hand, only hold those convicted of felonies punishable by sentences of one year or more. Hence, in my opinion, the major difference between a felony and a misdemeanor was that you either got to stay out back and eat Dorothy’s cooking or share an eight-by-eight room with Bubba the Sheep Squeezer in Rawlins.

The downside of sheriffing a jail was we had to provide three squares a day. The upside was that the Busy Bee Café was only three hundred yards away, past the Owen Wister Hotel and the Uptown Barber Shop, down a pair of crumbling, old steps behind the courthouse. The only time things got lean was on Sundays when Dorothy was closed and we fell back on the varied selection of potpies in the minifreezer in the back.

As I slipped behind the building, I looked up into the windows of the courthouse and hoped that neither Kyle Straub nor Vern Selby would see me. I spotted their cars in the parking lot and made a mental note to deal with the powers that be later in the day, possibly with the charm of a personal visit. By the time I got past the barbershop, the thought of biscuits and sausage gravy quickened my aching step considerably. The Bee was perched next to the bridge alongside Clear Creek and, with its definite slant toward the water, was vintage Alistair MacLean. The little bell on the door announced my entrance, and a couple of hunters looked up; nobody I knew. I sat at one of the end stools by the cash register and picked up the paper. There was a picture of Ferg and the Search and Rescue team standing around eating donuts and drinking coffee near the Hudson Bridge. I was glad to see the Courant had captured the spirit of the thing. Above the picture, in medium print, was the headline LOCAL YOUTH DIES IN SHOOTING INCIDENT. Incident, that was good; at least everybody in town wasn’t referring to it as a gangland-style slaying. I guess I owed Ernie Brown a cup of tea and an interview. I folded the paper back and laid it on the counter for a quick read, as a steaming cup of coffee slid in front of me. “Somebody took the funnies.”

“I usually find the whole paper funny.”

Seemed like this country was loaded with good-looking older females, even if the pioneers deemed it hard on horses and women. Dorothy Caldwell was about sixty-five as near as I could figure and had run the Bee as far back as I could remember. The place had gotten its name from Dorothy’s claimed spiritual attachment to Napoleon and from the impressive bee collection that resulted from this fondness and that rested on the shelves above the cutting board. There were wooden bees, ceramic bees, stuffed bees, glass bees, every kind of bee imaginable. It was a small town crusade to provide Dorothy with bees from every corner of the globe, and I noted with satisfaction the little porcelain one on the end that had come all the way from Tokyo via Vietnam. The name was also due to the fact that Dorothy knew every piece of gossip circulating about the entire county. If I really wanted to know what the hell was going on around here, I would talk to her. Hell, she probably knew who killed Cody Pritchard. So I tossed it out. “Who killed Cody Pritchard?”

Her face was immobile. “As opposed to Cock Robin?”

“He’s missing too?”

She rested her knuckles on the counter and leaned into me. “This is the second time this week you guys have been in here questioning me about this. Should I consider myself a suspect?”

I bit my lip and thought about it. “As much as everybody else.”

“Good. Things were getting boring around here, and I rather like having an air of mystery and danger.” She looked at my armpit; it was not the first file I had brought to the Bee. “Who’s that?”

“Jules Belden.”

She sighed. “Oh, God.” She looked up. “Do you want the usual?”

“I didn’t even know I had a usual.”

“Everybody’s got a usual.”

“I’ll have the usual.”

I took a sip of my coffee, sat the folder on the counter, and began reading the newspaper. “In the cold, gray dawn of September the twenty-eighth . . .” Dickens. “. . . The slippery bank where the life of Cody Pritchard came to an ignominious end . . .” Faulkner. “Questioning society with the simple query, why?” Steinbeck. “Dead.” Hemingway.

Ernie had been an English Literature major at University of Wyoming before landing the job of lone employee and chief editor for the Durant Courant in 1951. I had two favorite parts of the paper: the Man About Town on the editorial page, which was Ernie; and the Roundup, which was Ruby’s contribution to the fourth estate. The dispatcher’s log was transcribed and documented under police reports in a rather surrealistic style. This resulted in profound statements, such as “A pig was reported on Crow Street, officer dispatched. No pig was found.” I considered them my moment of Zen on a daily basis.

A heaping mound of biscuits and spicy gravy slid over top of the paper, quickly followed by a napkin-rolled set of flatware. The usual. She reached over and grabbed the pot of coffee from the burner and poured me a fresh cup. “So, I’m assuming Jules Belden did it.”

“Only if it had been alcohol poisoning.” I cleaved off a section of biscuit dripping with gravy the consistency of wallpaper paste. It was the only place in the state where you could get spicy sausage gravy, and it tasted wonderful.

A lacquered fingernail tapped on the folder. “Do you mind?”

“Go right ahead.” She flipped the file open and began reading Turk’s report.

After a moment, “What does the little pissant mean by . . . ?”

“Please . . . I haven’t read it yet. Don’t ruin the ending.” She propped her elbows on the pebbled Formica and rested her chin on her fists, cool, hazel eyes directly over me. “What . . . I’m chewing too loud? What?”

“I just like watching you eat.”

“Why?”

“You enjoy it so much. You’re very appreciative.”

I rubbed my stomach. “Yeah, a little too appreciative.”

“Oh, Walt. All the women in town chase around after you now. Can you imagine what it would be like if you were good-looking to boot?”

I chewed for a moment. “All right, I’m not sure which part of that statement I’m going to take umbrage with first.”

A modicum of silence passed. “I hear Vonnie Hayes is sparkin’ around after you now.”

I looked up into the twinkling mischief in her eyes. “I’m supposed to be eating my breakfast.”

“Oh, excuse me.” She went off in mock indignation to recoffee the hunters, and I shook my head in amazement at the speed in which information could be transmitted in this damn place. I spun the folder around and started decoding Turk’s scrawl.

The Jules Belden Incident, as it shall hereafter be known, began at the Euskadi Bar in downtown Durant at approximately nine-twenty last night. At least that’s where the altercation took place, in the alley out back. Finding the men’s room occupied, Jules had decided to avail himself of the great outdoors and relieve himself in the fashion most convenient. It must have been a grand relieving, because it lasted long enough for Turk to pull up, get out of the Thunder Chicken, walk around, have a short discussion with Jules, and be irrigated. Damn, I’d have paid money to see Turk assaulted with urine.

* * *

I put down the folder and started thinking about the other boys involved with the Little Bird rape case: Bryan Keller and George and Jacob Esper. I would have to give them a call; see if they’d had any contact with Cody Pritchard. Did I think there was some kind of connection? Did I want there to be? I just had to keep a lid on the situation long enough to find some pieces. I did my best work when I wasn’t thinking, sometimes considering my mind to be a body of water that worked best once things had settled to the bottom. The trick was not getting mired in the mud.

I carried the to-go container of biscuits and gravy back to the holding cells. Jules was getting the usual, too. I walked past the partition wall between the male and female accommodations, a remnant of the unecumenical fifties, and pulled up for a second. Careful not to spill the paper cup of coffee and the usual, I leaned in and gave a hard look to the identification Polaroid that was posted on the bulletin board. It was a standard way of keeping track of people in the cells. Jules stood there smiling, holding up a number with his name scrawled by Turk on the paper below. None of this was what caught my eye.

I took the keys, turned the corner, and flipped the light on in the small hallway. The mound under the blanket on the cot moved. I used the softest voice I could muster, “Hey, Jules. Breakfast time.” The mound moved again and rolled over as I unlocked the door and swung it wide. I went in and sat on the bunk opposite, placing the food on the floor between us. He was lying facing me but still covered over with the blanket. “C’mon, Bud. It’s biscuits and gravy, and it don’t age well.” With an exaggerated groan, he listed to one side, the thin arm barely supporting him. I reached over and set him up straight, as the Property of Absaroka County Jail blanket slid away from his face.

I winced. Dried blood had scabbed over the right eye, and his prominent cheekbone and nose were skinned back, revealing a sickly yellow underneath. His nose had been bleeding, and he had applied some rolled toilet tissue into the left nostril. It had soaked through, hardened, and gave his voice an even higher whine than usual. “Mornin’, Walt.”

“Jules . . .”—about fourteen dozen things were bursting out as I picked up the usual and handed it to him—“eat your breakfast.” I opened his coffee as he cannonballed into the biscuits and gravy. I watched the steam roll off of the fresh cup Dorothy had made for him and handed it over when he looked like he was having trouble swallowing.

“Thank ye . . .” After a few sips and a little wincing on his own part, he cleared his throat. “I guess I look kinda shitty, huh?”

His gums were bleeding as he smiled, but it was difficult to tell if that was from the beating or from alcoholism, which was his chosen profession. Jules Belden had been a hardworking cowboy and a carpenter of considerable repute. I remembered him being around town ever since I was a kid; he used to give me a quarter and candy every time I saw him. The only crime he was guilty of was having too big a heart. He was a small man, wiry, with skin that looked like it had been applied and set on fire. The eye that I could see was a ferocious blue.

“Who did this to you?”

He took another sip of the coffee. “I don’t wanna cause no trouble.”

“You want to press charges?” It rumbled out of my chest like an avalanche, and the force of it pushed Jules back just a little before he shrugged it off and looked at his food.

“Good gravy.” I waited as he handed me the coffee cup and took another bite. “I just don’t want to cause no trouble.”

“We’re talkin’ legal trouble, and that ain’t nothin’ compared to the trouble that piece of shit’s gonna have when I lay hands on him next.”

His eyes stayed steady, and his voice took on a patriarchal tone. “Now, Walt . . . don’t you hurt that boy.” I straightened up in indignation. Here was a battered man lying in my jail who hadn’t even been allowed to clean himself up after having been beaten. I was about as angry as I could remember being. “Hell, I peed all over him . . .” His smile broadened at the thought of it. “Then I peed all over the back of his fancy car.”

I tried to keep a straight face, but the thought of anybody peeing all over the back of the Thunder Chicken brought joy to my heart. I thought of all the decals with little characters pissing on each other in Turk’s back window. It seemed like he should have a better sense of humor about such things. I chuckled along with Jules, in spite of myself.

“I think I got’m again before he put me in here.”

“The floor did seem a little sticky on the way in, Jules.” We laughed some more. “But I think you ought to press charges.” Between bites, he reached for his coffee and replied.

“Stop it, yer ruinin’ my breakfast.”

By the time I got down the hallway from the jail, my anger had subsided into a calculated ember. As I attempted to storm into my office, Ruby called out, “Vern Selby on line one.”

I was at her desk before we both knew it. “What?”

She stiffened a little, and her eyes widened. “Vern Selby . . .”

Before she could say anything else, I slapped the receiver from her phone as she fumbled and punched line one, and I yelled at the circuit court judge on the other end, “What?”

After a pause, “Walt, it’s Vern.”

“Yep?”

“I just called to remind you about the court appearance you’ve got Wednesday and see if you wanted to have lunch?”

“Yep.”

Another pause. “Yep yep or yep no?”

“Yep. I’ll have lunch, goddamn it.”

Yet another pause. “Well, I know Kyle Straub is looking for you. He was wondering if you had come up with anything on that Cody Pritchard thing?”

I vented out a low burst of steam. “No, I haven’t interviewed all the butlers.”

The longest pause yet. “Well, I know Kyle wanted to catch up with you, but I think I’ll tell him to go find something else to do today.”

“That’d be wise.” Ruby was not looking at me as I slammed the phone down on her desk. “Omar?”

“The airport at four o’clock; he’s picking up hunters.” The thank-you was all I could get out. “At the risk of having my head bit off, is there anything I can do?” She was one in a million.

“Get the big first-aid kit and give it to Jules so he can get himself cleaned up. If he wants to sleep, let him. The door’s open back there. If he wants lunch, get it for him. I’ll be back later to give him a ride home . . . Do me a favor?” She smiled, and I was starting to feel better. “Call up the Espers . . .” The smile soured a little.

“As in Jacob and George?”

“Yes, and the Kellers at the 3K.”

“Something I should know about?”

“I hope not. I’m just checking to see if they had any contact with Cody before he bought the proverbial farm.” This thank-you was easier.

* * *

I took the drive down to Swayback Road to cool off. Along with my better judgment, I took the exit and drove up toward Crazy Woman Canyon past the two fishing reservoirs, Muddy Guard One and Muddy Guard Two. Ah, the colorful contrasts of the Wild West. I spent twenty minutes crawling all over a patched-together ’48 Studebaker pickup trying to find a vehicle identification number that matched any of the ones on paper. After the third number, Mr. Fletcher and I were losing interest, and we settled on the first one, as it was the most legible.

When I got back to town, Ruby informed me that Jules had wandered off. She had spoken with Jim Keller and asked him to bring in Bryan. She had left a message on the answering machine at the Espers and, as of yet, had received no reply. “What time do you want them in here?”

I thought about Omar and the airport, Ernie Brown and the newspaper, and Vern Selby and the courthouse. “Oh, how about five? And call the Espers again; I’d just as soon get this all over with in one shot.”

“Bad choice of words.” She reached for the phone and hit redial.

I walked over to the courthouse and in the back door by the public library. Our courthouse was one of the first built in the territory, which gave the exterior a look of steadfast permanence. The inside, on the other hand, was steadfastly seedy after suffering the indignities of numerous remodelings. Cheap interior paneling, acoustic-tile ceilings, and threadbare green carpeting stretched as far as the fluorescent-lit eye could see. I called it the outhouse of sighs. Vern’s office was on the second floor and, as I swung around the missing newel post and trudged up the steps, I waved at the blue-haired ladies in the assessor’s office down the hall.

I sat on one of Vern’s chairs and waited for him to get off the phone. He was a precise older man, about seventy, who had wispy locks of silver hair that looked like Cecil B. DeMille had stirred them. He was just the kind of person you wanted to look up in the courtroom and see: patrician, calm, and even noble. The fact that he made life and death decisions on peoples’ lives was only slightly diminished by the fact that he never knew what day of the week it was. “Isn’t it Tuesday?”

“Monday, Vern.”

“I guess I lost a day in there somewhere.”

I wondered where, between Sunday and Monday, he had lost it.

He rested his elbows on the desk and carefully placed his chin on his clasped fists. “This Pritchard boy . . .”

I leaned back in the chair. “Haven’t you heard? That’s not a problem anymore.”

The Norwegian eyes blinked. “I’m thinking that the problems are just beginning.”

I spread my hands. “You know something I don’t?”

No blink. “I’m simply thinking that this unfortunate occurrence may exacerbate some of the hard feelings that resulted from the Little Bird rape case.”

“Exacerbate. Is that a double-word score?” I yawned and relaxed farther into the chair. “And what would you like me to do about this exacerbation?”

Still steady. “Is there any chance of a quick resolution to this situation?”

“I could plead guilty and arrest myself.”

He leaned back in his own chair, and I listened to the soft hiss as the air escaped from the leather padding. My chair didn’t have any padding. I was exacerbated. “Walter, I am sure I do not have to warn you that this case has all the earmarks of blowing up in our faces.” He rested his fingertips on the edge of the desk and sighed. “It was a high-profile case, and there are still a lot of tender feelings both on and off the reservation.” He paused a moment. “Why are you making this difficult for me?”

I slumped a little farther in my chair. “I’m having a bad day.”

“I gathered as much. Does it have to do with the case?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“Well, perhaps we should tackle one problem at a time. You’ve talked to the girl’s family?”

I leveled a good look at him. “You aren’t telling me how to do my job, are you Vern?” He raised his hands in surrender. We looked at each other for a while. “Lonnie Little Bird is a diabetic and had both legs amputated. I figure that moves him pretty far down the list of suspects.” We looked at each other some more. “He was the one that sat in the aisle in the wheelchair during the rape trial.”

He shook his head slightly and dismissed me with a wave. “We’ll talk on Wednesday.”

As I left, I cleared the air. “That’d be the Wednesday after tomorrow, Vern?”

* * *

It was getting close to four, so I drove up to the airport. I figured Omar would be early; he always was. The local airport was famous for the Jet Festival, which celebrated an event that had taken place back in the early eighties when a Western Airlines 737 had mistaken our airport for Sheridan’s and had slid that big son of a gun to a record-breaking stop in only forty-five hundred feet. The town celebrated the avionic miracle by throwing a big party. They invited the pilot, Edger Lowell, every year. Every year, he declined. We never were made a hub, but we still got our share of polo players, dudes, wealthy executives, and big game hunters. The polo players come because of the Equestrian Center; the dudes come to play cowboy for a couple of thousand a week; the executives, to escape a world they had helped create; and the big game hunters, they come for Omar. So far, none of them had gotten him, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

Omar was a local enigma, the big dog of outfitters along the Bighorns. You could run the entire length of the range along the mountains and ownership would concede seven names, one of which was Omar Rhoades. His ranch followed the north fork of Rock Creek at the top of the county, stretched from I-90 to the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area, and was about half the size of Rhode Island. He was originally from Indiana and had inherited the place from a rich uncle who had despised the rest of the family. Omar knew everything there was to know about hunting and firearms. His personal collection was known worldwide, and the number of international hunters he wooed as a clientele was legion. He had his own airport on the ranch, but after the FAA had curtailed the size of his landing strip, the hunters that arrived in larger aircraft landed here.

I pulled through the chain-link fence and parked alongside the control tower. Old concrete pads patched with asphalt stretched across the flat surface of the bluff, and a frayed windsock popped in the strong breeze. I walked past the white cinder block building, which proclaimed DURANT, WYOMING, ELEVATION 4954; I guess they felt compelled to put the state on there just in case somebody really got lost. I had a great affinity for the few old Lockheed PV-2s parked along the end of the runway that dwarfed the three Cessna 150s chained to the tarmac in front of the building. There were no contracts for the naked aluminum birds, and they sat there with their cowlings and nose cones becoming a flatter and flatter red. The Pratt and Whitney engines slowly seeped aviation grade oil on the concrete, and the Bureau of Forestry decals had begun to peel away. At the end of the building, I looked down the flight way and saw what I was looking for: George Armstrong Custer leaning against a custom crew cab.

To say that he looked like the General was partly slighting to Omar; Omar was better looking and, I’m sure, a head taller than Ol’ Goldilocks. A carefully battered silver-belly Stetson sloped off his head, and his arms were folded into a full-length Hudson blanket coat with a silver-coyote collar. The locals considered him to be quite the dandy, but I figured he just had style. We had gotten to know each other through a lengthy series of domestic disturbances. Omar and his wife Myra had attempted to kill each other in an escalating process of more than eight years that had started out with kitchen utensils and ended, as far as I was concerned, with a matching set of .308s that had been a wedding gift from the uncle. They were both crack shots and incredibly lucky that they had missed; they could live neither with nor without each other. At the moment, they were living without, and things had become considerably quieter on Rock Creek. He always looked like he was asleep, and he never was.

“So, if a man wanted to kill an innocent animal around here, what would he do?”

“Move. There isn’t any such thing as an innocent animal, especially around here.”

I leaned against the shiny surface of the Chevrolet and wondered how he kept all his vehicles so clean. He probably had about twelve guys on the job. “Didn’t you watch the Walt Disney Hour on television?”

“I was more partial to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” He yawned and tipped his hat back. His cobalt eyes squeezed the distance to the mountains, and you could almost hear the clicking of his internal scopes as they measured the yards and calculated the trajectory. “Anyway, the animal you’re looking for is about as far from innocent as you can get.”

I pulled the plastic bag from my coat and held it up in front of him. It looked like a Rorschach test in lead. “Which brings me to the point at hand.” His eyes shifted to the Ziploc, and he looked more like a lion than anything else.

He yawned again. “Somebody meant business.”

He held out a hand, and I dropped into it the most important piece of evidence in our case. He palmed it for a moment, bouncing it between the band of his gold-trimmed Rolex and the three turquoise rings on his right hand. Omar was ambidextrous. Style. “Soft?”

“30 to 1, lead to tin.”

“Anything else?”

“Some sort of foreign substance, SPG or Lyman’s Black Powder Gold.”

“Lubricant made specifically for black-powder cartridge shooting.”

“Black-powder cartridge?”

It was the first time he looked at me. “How many people have seen this?”

“Vic, T. J. Sherwin at DCI, Chemical Analysis at Justice, and Henry.”

He blinked and continued to look at me. “The Bear didn’t know what this was?”

I paused. “We figured it was an antique shotgun slug, black powder?”

“Hmm . . .” He could noncommittal hmm almost as good as me.

“Something?”

He handed me back the baggie and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I could tell you, but I’d rather show you.”

“You’re that sure?”

He looked at the pointed toes of his handmade, belly-cut, alligator-skin Paul Bond boots. “I’m that sure.”

I ran through the rest of my day. “After 5:30?”

He looked again to the sky above Cloud Peak. “Tomorrow morning would be better, Sheriff. I’ve got a business to run.”

“What time?”

“Doesn’t matter, I’m always up.”

* * *

By the time I got back to the office, a green Dodge with a flat bed and fifth wheel was pulled up to the building, and the woman in the front seat made a point of not seeing me as I went in. Barbara Keller did not believe her child was guilty and never would. I went in the office and motioned for the two men to follow me. “Get you fellas some coffee?” Jim Keller shook his head, and Bryan studied his hands. “You sure? It’s been brewing since about eight this morning. Should be about right.”

“How can we help you, Walt?” Of all the young men in the group, I had found it the hardest to believe that Bryan had been involved with the rape. I wasn’t sure if he had always looked so sad or if the look had just intensified since the trial. “Jim, you own that land out next to the BLM where Bob Barnes runs Mike Chatham’s sheep?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where we found Cody Pritchard.” I glanced at Bryan. “You didn’t have any contact with him in the last couple of weeks, did you?”

“He has not.” I turned to look at Jim. Jim in turn looked at Bryan, who in turn looked at his hands. “Have you?”

Bryan found his hands even more interesting. “No, sir.”

“Jim, your wife is looking a little upset out there in your outfit, maybe you ought to go check on her?”

He gave Bryan another look. “You tell this man anything he wants to know, and you better damn well tell him the truth.”

I let the directive settle till the front door quietly shut. Bryan Keller was a handsome kid with wide cheekbones, a strong chin, and a small, hooked scar at the jawline. He had taken life on, and life had kicked his ass. I looked at the young wreck and felt sad too. “Bryan?” The jolt was two staged, and his eyes briefly met with mine. “Did you have any contact with Cody?”

“No, sir.”

“None at all?”

“No, sir.”

I believed him. Shells don’t lie, mostly. I stretched and laced my fingers behind my head. “Have you had anything to do with him since the trial?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you aware of any threats that might have been made toward him? Any enemies he might have had?” This got a brief exhale. “Other than the obvious?”

“I’d liked to have killed the son of a bitch.”

I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows. “Really?”

His eyes darted back to his hands. “Is sayin’ that gonna get me into trouble?”

“No more than the rest of us.” I went out into the reception area and poured myself a cup of coffee. “You sure you won’t have some? It really isn’t that bad.” He said okay, probably because I asked him twice and he had been taught that if somebody asks you something twice you say yes, no matter what it is. It looked like a heated conversation going on in the truck out front, and I thought about my child. I don’t know how you get them to make right choices, how you keep them from ending up like the two-parent pileup that was sitting in my office.

I brought Bryan his coffee and sat down in the chair beside him, taking off my hat and tossing it onto the desk. My gun belt was digging into my side, but I was ignoring it. We were both ignoring it. I sipped my coffee. “Bryan . . . Just for the record, I don’t think you killed Cody Pritchard . . . As I recall, your statements and testimony indicated that you didn’t participate in the rape.”

“I didn’t.” His eyes welled up, and I wished I washed cars for a living.

“You were only convicted as an accessory, with suspended sentence.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, that’s a good thing.”

He took a sip of his coffee and made a face. “There are days when I just can’t stand it.” He was crying openly, and I watched the tears stripe his face and drip onto his shirt.

“Stand what?”

He wiped his face with the sleeve of his Carhartt. “People . . . the way they look at me . . . like I’m not worth shit.”

“Well, at the risk of sounding trite, I guess it’s up to you to prove them wrong.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Stop yes-sirring me.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

I bought shampoo on the way home. When I got there, the substructure of a porch ran the entire distance of the cabin. Six six-by-sixes stood unflinching in the growing wind, and the little red Jeep was gone.

5

I left the house around 5:30 in the morning and succeeded in avoiding Red Road Contracting and Henry. I wasn’t sure if he was going to make me run two days in a row, but I didn’t want to risk it. It was partly cloudy, but the sun was making a valiant attempt at clearing the sky, and it promised to be warmer than it had been in the last few days. I sometimes thought about moving south, following the geese, shooting through the pass at Raton, and seeing if there were any sheriff openings in New Mexico. Good Mexican food was hard to come by north of Denver. I liked Taos, but Hatch was probably my speed.

I took 14 to Lower Piney and cut across 267 to Rock Creek, slowly tacking my way up the foothills. I thought about Vonnie and missed her a little bit. It was probably way too early for that. I was going through that little bit of worry that I had said or done something wrong and that she might not want to see me again. I saw me every day, and I wasn’t so sure I was that fond of my company. I promised myself that I would call her up and make a real date, maybe a lunch of lessening expectations.

As far as I knew, Ruby hadn’t gotten any response from the Espers. I was going to have to swing out to their place and square things up on the way back from Omar’s unless I radioed in and got Vic to do it. With Turk back in Powder, I was shorthanded. I thought about Turk and forced my train of thought elsewhere. It was a big train. I waited till I got to the top of one of the ridges to tell Ruby to send Ferg out to the Esper place. She reminded me that I hadn’t taken my sweatpants and that Vic’s feelings were probably going to be hurt.

“Is she there?”

“Talking on the phone with Cheyenne.”

“This early? Well, tell her that the evidence stuff is on my desk from . . .”

“She’s already got that.”

“Oh.” I waited for a moment, but she didn’t continue. “Anything you need from me?”

“Like where you are?”

“Yep, like that.”

“No, we don’t care.” I thought I heard someone laughing in the background, but I wasn’t sure.

Palace Omar was made of logs, same as mine, but that was where the likeness ended. Unlike Vonnie’s, you had to park in a circular holding area after being buzzed through the gate, which was about a mile back down the asphalt road. No one said anything, but the gate had slowly risen, and I smiled and waved at the little black video camera. I looked up at the house and wondered how many cameras were on me now. The place was impressive, as multimillion-dollar mansions go. The architects from Montana had used a combination of massive hand-hewn logs and architectural salvage to produce a combination of old and new and all expensive.

I knocked and made faces at the security camera at the door, but no one answered. Entering Omar’s house unannounced was less than appealing, but I could hear a television blaring in the depths of the structure and decided to risk it. I pushed open the doors, listened to the satisfied thump as the metal cores closed, and walked into the two-story atrium that made up the entryway. I counted the mounted heads that were hung down the great hallway to the kitchen in the back. There were twenty-three. I knew the inside of the house pretty well; I had followed Omar and Myra through the majority of it while listening to their running, psychosis-ridden monologues on how they were going to kill each other.

As I made my way toward the kitchen, the sound from the TV became more distinct, and I was pretty sure some pretty dramatic lovemaking was going on. Obviously Omar got a lot better reception than I did. When I got there, Jay Scherle, Omar’s head wrangler, was standing at the counter and watching a watered-down version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I gathered was taking place in a hayloft somewhere. Every time the leading lady became overcome with passion, the camera would drift to the casually billowing curtains at a window. Jay was dressed for work, complete with chaps and spurs. I asked if Omar was up. His eyes didn’t leave the screen. “I’ve worked here for seven years, and I’ve never seen the son of a bitch sleep.”

I nodded and watched Jay watch the flip-down flat screen that was hung under the kitchen cabinets. I wasn’t sure if D. H. Lawrence would have recognized his work, but the plastic surgeon specializing in breast enhancement would have recognized his.

“Where is he?”

“Out back, getting set up.”

I looked at the screen, a curtain again. “Set up for what?”

“Hell if I know . . . took a pumpkin with him.” After a moment, he spoke again. “You ever seen a barn with so many damn curtains?”

I walked through the french doors Jay had indicated with his chin, across an expansive deck, and down a stone walkway to a courtyard walled in by four feet of moss rock topped with Colorado red granite, but I didn’t see Omar. I was about to go back in when I noticed a couple of sand bags, shooter’s glasses, and a spotting scope laying on the picnic table at the other side of the wall. My eyes continued up, and I saw Omar at the foot of a hill about a quarter mile away. He had been watching me and slowly raised his hand. I wasn’t sure if it was an invitation, but I started walking, my breath still blowing clouds of mist into the warming, easterly breeze.

When I got there, he was putting the finishing touches on the vegetable by adjusting it in the lawn chair just so and placing a thick piece of rubber behind it. Beside him on the ground lay a Sioux rifle scabbard, which was completely beaded with eagle feathers leading from the edge all the way to the butt. If the Game and Fish knew Omar had real eagle feathers, they’d come take them away and slap Omar with a $250 fine. I figured Omar probably lost that much in the daily wash. It was brain-tanned leather, as soft as a horse’s nose, and the color of butter melting in the sun. The minute glass trading beads were Maundy yellow, a faded mustard tint I recognized as over a hundred years old. He picked up the scabbard, and we started back for the house.

“How far have we gone?” He was wearing a black, ripstop down jacket and now favored Ted Nugent over Custer.

“I have no idea.”

“Use the range finder.”

I aimed the little scope gadget he had given me at the pumpkin that was sitting in the aged lawn chair. The distance did nothing to diminish the ludicrous image, especially with the little green indicator numbers jumping back and forth in the lower-right-hand corner. I lowered the scope and looked at him. “You tell me, Great White Hunter.”

He looked back across the slight grade at the squash luxuriating at the base of the hillside. “Three hundred and one yards.”

I smiled. “Close. Three hundred.”

“Step back here where I am.” He continued walking as I stood in his spot and looked back. The range finder read 301, and the small hairs on the back of my neck stirred. He stopped and looked back at me and then unbuttoned three Indian-head nickels from the scabbard and slowly slid the rifle from its protective covering. The sheath looked like the skin of a snake coming off and what glistened in the early morning sun looked twice as deadly as any rattler I had ever seen.

The eighth-century pacifist Li Ch’uan branded the use of gunpowder weapons as tools of ill omen. “Eighteen-seventy-four?”

“Yep.”

“.45-70?”

“Yep.” He handed me the rifle and crossed his arms. “You ever seen one up close?”

“Not a real one.”

It was heavy, and it seemed to me that if you missed what you were shooting at, you could simply run it down and beat it to death, whatever it was. The barrel was just shy of three feet long. I gently lowered the lever and dropped the block, looking through thirty-two inches of six groove, one in eighteen-inch, right-hand twist. From this vantage point, the world looked very small indeed. The action was smooth and precise, and I marveled at the workmanship that was more than 125 years old. The design on the aged monster was a falling block, breech-loading single shot. The old-timers used to take a great deal of pride in the fact that a single shot was all it took. The trigger was a double set, and the sights were an aperture rear with a globe-style front. I pulled the weapon from my shoulder and read the top of the barrel: Business Special.

What kind of special business had Christian Sharps intended? In 1874 the rifle had been adopted by the military because it could kill a horse dead as a stone at six hundred yards—six football fields. Congregational minister Henry Ward Beecher pledged his Plymouth church to furnish twenty-five Sharps rifles for use in bloody Kansas. Redoubtably, the preacher may have done more for the cause of abolitionism with his Beecher’s bibles than did his sister Harriet with her Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But it was John Brown who brought the Sharps to a bloody birth at Harpers Ferry, and a nation’s innocence was lost at Gettysburg. After the Civil War, free ammunition had been handed out to privateer hunters to usher the vast, uncontrollable buffalo herds into extinction. Then there were the Indians. Good and bad, these actions had earned the Sharps buffalo rifle the title of one of the most significant weapons in history and in language. Sharps shooter: sharp-shooter. “What makes you think . . . ?”

“The amount of lead, cartridge lubricant, no powder burns . . . A feeling.” He turned and walked toward the house, the rifle scabbard thrown over his shoulder. After a moment, he stopped. “Three hundred and seventy.” Big deal.

I was sitting at the picnic table and contemplated muzzle velocity and trajectory sightings at 440 yards. The Sharps was now wedged between three small sand bags, and a much larger spotting scope sat atop a three-pronged pedestal at my elbow. Omar returned with two cups of coffee, at my request. The cups were thick buffalo china with his brand on them, and it was really good coffee.

“Jay still enjoying the matinee?”

“You know, I’ve seen men ruined by drink, drugs, and Dodge pickup trucks, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen one ruined by soft-core porn.” He nudged his mug a little farther over and leaned his elbows on the table. “You’d think he’d never seen a set of tits before.”

“Amazing what they can do with special effects these days.” I looked down the three-foot barrel. “Trajectory?”

“Like a rainbow, and it hits like a twelve-pound sledgehammer at fourteen hundred feet per second.”

“Sounds slow and painful.”

The noise he made was not kind. “Like my marriage.”

I looked across the range and unbuttoned the top button of my uniform coat. The sun was getting higher, and the warmth felt good on my back. “You think this is what did it, huh?”

“Reasonably sure.”

“We need to broaden our search grid.”

“By a wide margin.” He pushed the mug even farther away; maybe he didn’t drink coffee. “If you want, I’ll go up there and do a walk around. Might be less intrusive than Search and Rescue.”

I wondered why he was being so helpful. “You curious about this case?”

“A little.”

“I’d have to send somebody with you.”

He laughed. “Does this mean I’ve made the list?”

“Don’t feel so honored, everybody with two ears and a trigger finger has made it so far.”

“Maybe I can help you to shorten it.” He looked out at the doomed pumpkin. “Well . . .”

“Well, what?”

He nudged the butt of the rifle toward me with his fingertips. “I’ve shot it before. Your turn.”

* * *

By the time I got back to the paved county road we were in a full-blown Chinook, and the temperature had risen above sixty-five degrees. I regretted not taking off my jacket before I’d gotten in the Bullet and flipped the heater over to vent. The Esper place was out near the junkyard south of town, so I hopped on the interstate and blew by Durant. I was about a mile past the exit when I remembered that I had told Ruby to send Jim. I figured I’d just keep going and radioed in to tell Ruby to tell Ferg I’d just take care of it myself.

“I left a message at his place and on his cell. It’s before noon, so he’s probably out fishing.” Static. “When are you going to get a mobile phone?”

“Then we wouldn’t be able to say cool things like ‘roger that.’ ”

More static. “I’m willing to make the sacrifice.” Static. “You better get back here and let the Ferg go round up the Espers, Vic says she’s got news from DCI.”

I was already looking for a turnaround and spotted one at the top of the next rise. “Nothing she wants to tell me over the radio?”

Silence for a moment. “She says she’d tell you over a mobile phone.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.” I whipped through the official vehicle crossover, checked my speed, and automatically looked around for the HPs; they love to give tickets to sheriffs.

I parked the Bullet and reached over onto the passenger seat to get the small satchel Omar had given me. Vic was seated across from Ruby in one of our plastic civilian chairs with her feet propped up on Ruby’s desk. Her legs were barely long enough to make the reach. It didn’t look comfortable, but it was Vic.

Big smile. “How you doin’, faddass?”

“I’m sorrowed to see the time spent in the echoing halls of criminal investigation have done nothing to curb your native vulgarity.”

They looked at each other, and Vic raised her eyebrow. “He are a college graduate.”

I slapped her small feet and continued on to my office. She followed after me and watched as I eased into my chair. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’ve been running.” I was watching, but her expression didn’t change.

“Bullshit.”

“Honest.” I didn’t have to tell her how far.

“How far?” I smiled at her. “I mean from the Bullet into the office doesn’t really count.”

“Sure it does.”

“Or up to the drive-through to get more beer.”

“It’s a cumulative effect, right?” She tossed another registered packet onto my desk; this one was from the Store. “And this is?”

“You’re king of the big words this morning, you tell me.” She turned and swaggered out of the office. “I’m getting another cup of coffee. Should I get you one, or do you want to run out here and get your own?”

I was reading the cover letter when she put my coffee in front of me. She sat in the chair opposite and now propped her feet up on my desk. I looked at the Browning tactical boots laced up past her ankles. I followed them up to her big, tarnished gold eyes, one of which winked at me over the Philadelphia Police mug. “Glad to have me back, aren’tcha?”

I grunted and turned the letter around for her to see. “We have a state ornithologist?”

She sipped her coffee. “Makes you proud, huh?”

“Haliaeetus leucocephalus?”

“Sounds dirty, doesn’t it?

I shook my head. “Boy, are you in a mood.”

“I actually got some sleep; you ought to try it sometime.” She continued to look at me over the lip of her mug.

“Are you going to help me out with this gobbledygook, or do I really have to read this?”

“Haliaeetus leucocephalus, the national bird of los estados unidos.”

I read a little farther. “Meleagris gallopavo?”

The gold rolled to the ceiling. “Think Thanksgiving.”

“Turkey?”

“The feather they found on scene with Cody Pritchard.”

“So, they’re saying that it wasn’t an eagle feather, that it was a wild turkey?” I let that sit awhile. “I wasn’t aware that eagles or turkeys were suspect; I thought we had all agreed that the gunshot wound might have had something to do with the cause of death.”

She uncrossed her legs, put her feet on the floor, and sat her cup on the edge of my desk. “Wait, it gets better.”

“If you bring Cock Robin into this, I’m going to send you back to Cheyenne.”

“It was a turkey disguised as an eagle.” She reached across the desk and reopened the extended envelope, plucking out the feather, and handing it to me in its cellophane wrapper. “It’s a fake.”

I turned on my desk lamp and examined it under the light. It looked real enough to me.

“They sell ’em all over the place, even got ’em down at the pawn shop with all the shells and beads and shit.” I thought about the eagle feathers hanging from Omar’s rifle sheath. “They use them for crafts and such. You can fit your thumbnail into the spline of a turkey feather, but not a bird of prey like an eagle.”

Sure enough, my thumbnail fit in the spline ridge. “What was Cody Pritchard doing with fake eagle feathers?” She sat back in her chair. “You don’t think . . . ?”

“I do.”

I looked at the feather again; it was about a foot long and the quill was about a quarter inch thick. It was dark about three-quarters of the way up, then solid white where it had been bleached. “A calling card.”

“Knowing Cody’s predilection for all things Native American, I would say that’s a safe bet.”

I continued to look at the faux feather. “Damn, I don’t like the direction this is taking.”

Her eyes dropped; she didn’t like it either. “I confiscated some samples from the pawn shop and FedExed them down to Cheyenne to check the dye lots, but they said not to hold our breath. They said the majority of Native Americans just dip them in Clorox themselves.” She laced her fingers together and leaned forward. “I could get some more samples from over in Sheridan. Bucking Buffalo Supply Company over on Main Street carries them, too. I don’t know about Gillette.”

I held up the feather and looked at it. “Working on the supposition that this is a calling card, who should we say is calling?”

“Good question. I guess this means we can keep our shingle out.”

“Yep, business is good.” I turned the feather in my hand. “All right, bearing this in mind, we’re looking at a murder.”

“Yeah.” She looked resigned.

“But we’re going to have to go back and check the feather thing with Cody’s family, friends, and such.”

“Let me guess who’s gonna have to do that.”

“I can stick the Ferg on it. His fishing career is about to get cramped.” I held the feather up between us. “This immediately points to Indian involvement.” I looked at the feather some more. “Well, on the surface of it.”

“And a fake eagle feather?”

I shrugged. “Fake Indians?”

“I’m getting confused. Running with the supposition that this is real Indian mojo . . .”

“Doesn’t make sense. I don’t know everything about Indian medicine, but I don’t think they tolerate this fake stuff. Not when it’s this big.”

“What is the significance of the feather?”

“Not a clue, but I know this guy . . .” I punched up automatic dial number two, and Henry’s number at the Pony began ringing. “How was Cheyenne?”

She took another sip of her coffee. “The wind blows, along with everything else.” Nobody answered. He was probably waiting at my house to make me run. “Nobody?”

“Otherwise engaged. I’ll get him later.” I handed the feather over to her.

“Fuck.”

“Yep. Looks like we’re gonna have to go talk to some Indians.”

“Fuck.”

“Yep.”

“What’s in the bag?”

I reached over and opened the flap of the canvas bag and tossed her a cartridge. It was as long as her index finger and about as big around. Her eyes shot to mine and then returned to the shell.

“Fuck.”

“Yep.”

I put Vic on tracking down all the Sharps buffalo rifles registered in Wyoming under curio and antique registration. It wasn’t required, but maybe they would be registered for insurance purposes. Then she was going to check all the gun shops in the area and call up the replica companies that might have sold such a weapon or ammo. I thought we might have a better shot at the ammunition but that was balanced out by the possibility that the shells were loaded by the shooter. That meant tracking down reloading dies and paraphernalia for big calibers. It was going to be a lot of work, but she smiled when I gave her the slug shot from Omar’s gun to have compared with the original. The smile faded when I told her she was going to have to go out with him for a quick spiral search of the site this afternoon. “How’s Myra these days?”

“Last word from her was that Paris, half of Omar’s money, and none of him was suiting her just fine.”

She took her empty coffee cup and started for her office. “I wish Glen was rich.”

I thought about Vic being rich. She already had the fuck-you attitude; fuck-you money might be too much. I trailed after her and asked Ruby if she’d heard anything from Ferg. “Nothing; they must still be biting.”

“I’m gonna have to drive down to the Espers.”

She paused to look at me. “Not really. I think Ferg was fishing down on the north fork of Crazy Woman; as soon as he gets on the highway he’ll get the message and head over there. It’s on the way.”

“Any Post-its?”

“Vic got them all.”

I stood there. “Any pencils need sharpening?”

“Why don’t you go talk to Ernie Brown, Man About Town? He’s called here about six times since yesterday.” She went back to her keyboard and began typing. “Maybe he’s afraid of being scooped.” I gave her a hard look as I shambled out of the office with my tail between my legs. “Should I call and tell him the great man is on his way over, seeing as how you have nothing else to do?”

I didn’t slam the door; it would have been undignified. It was still gorgeous outside, so I decided to walk over to the Durant Courant’s office, a block down and over. That would show them.

* * *

Omar and I had had a brief conversation on the more practical aspects of what I had still hoped wasn’t a murder case. Who could do it? What were the logistics of shooting an almost .50 caliber rifle more than five hundred yards? Omar had his own theories. “I can narrow it down to almost a dozen men who could make a shot like that on a consistent basis.”

“In county?”

“In county.” He stroked his goatee and pulled on the long hairs at the end. “Me, you, Roger Russell from down on Powder, Mike Rubin, Carroll Cooper, Dwight Johnston in Durant, Phil La Vante, Stanley Fogel, Artie Small Song out on the Rez, your pal Henry Standing Bear and . . .” He shrugged.

“Let’s go with the ‘and’ first?”

“A sleeper. Somebody who does this stuff, is very good at it, and who nobody knows about.”

“Let’s move on to you.”

He looked back at the pumpkin without smiling. “I’d either be a liar or a fool to tell you anything different. I’ve got the talent and the weapon, just no motive.”

“You mind if I check the ballistics on your rifle?”

“I’d be offended if you didn’t.”

“Me.”

“Yep.”

“Roger Russell’s a shooter?”

“Yes, he is. You know that turkey shoot they have out Tipperary Road, near the Wallows?” I nodded. “He won that three years in a row.”

The last time I’d seen Roger Russell was at the Red Pony the evening of the shooting. I’d have to ask Henry if he was a regular. “Mike Rubin?”

“Best gunsmith in the state; he could do it.”

“Carroll Cooper?”

“Same as Roger, one of those reenactment crazies. Does a lot with the Little Big Horn people.”

“Dwight Johnston?”

“Drinks, but he used to be a damn good shot. He was on the NRA National Shooting Team back in the late seventies.”

“Phil La Vante is seventy-two years old.”

“That old Basquo can still shoot.”

“Stanley Fogel? The dentist?”

“He’s a shooter.”

“Artie Small Song?”

“I don’t know a lot about those guys out on the Rez, but him and Henry immediately come to mind. I like Artie, and I’ve used him to guide for me. He’s good, and the dollar dogs love Indians.”

I set my jaw. “Henry?”

“I knew that was one you didn’t want to hear, but he could most definitely do it. Jesus, Walt, the son of a bitch used to jump behind enemy lines in Laos, air extract NVA officers for interrogation. You ever stop to think how many he didn’t bring back?”

It had crossed my mind about the NVAs. “Out of this list, how many do you figure are capable of killing a man?”

He didn’t pause for a second. “Half.”

“Are we in that half?”

He looked at me. “One of us is.”

* * *

I turned the corner at the bridge, resisted the temptation of an early lunch at the Bee, and crossed the street down the hill to the little red brick building that had served the Courant since before the turn of the last century. The bell tinkled as I pushed open the antique beveled-glass door. “I wanna speak to the editor of this so-called newspaper!” He looked over his trifocals and smiled. I walked over to Ernie’s train set. The train was legendary around these parts in that it passed through an exact replica of our town, proceeded into the mountains, where it disappeared into a maze of tunnels only to reappear on the plains east, followed the flow of the Powder River, and returned to town. I leaned over Durant, past my office with me getting out of the Bullet, and looked at the mountainside to the little logging operation that had begun about a third of the way up. “That’s new.”

He got up and codgered his way over. “I’m not sure about it.”

I looked at the trucks, miniature sawmill, and diminutive little loggers. “Looks like a responsible operator, ‘long as he doesn’t overwork the tree line.”

“I suppose so . . .” He still didn’t sound sure, but his eyes met mine. “I’m sorry to bother you, Walter. I know how busy you must be these days.” He smiled. “Would you like to sit down?”

“Thanks, Ernie, but if it’s not going to take long . . . ?”

He made a gentle waving gesture with his hand. “Just a few statements.” He drifted over to his desk and came back with a small, spiral-ring notebook and a pencil that had probably been sharpened since yesterday morning. I had to smile at the importance of being Ernest. “Just a few general questions.” He pursed his lips and poised the pencil over the pad. “How is the investigation progressing?”

I flipped a switch and went into publicspeak: “We’re very satisfied with the cooperation we’ve received from the Division of Criminal Investigation in Cheyenne and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington.” Where the hell else would it be, Peoria? “We’ve been able to make significant progress on the case with the help of some of the top-flight ballistics labs in the country.”

“That’s wonderful. People will sleep better knowing the scope of response to this incident.”

I looked at him, just to make sure facetious sarcasm hadn’t entered the office when I wasn’t looking. “We’ve put a substantial amount of our force on this case and are making every attempt to bring this particular incident to a quick conclusion.” What else was I going to say? That there were only three and a half of us and that we were going to drag the case out as long as we could, just so we could have something to do? I dreaded the running monologue that accompanied these public statements and lived in fear that my mouth would someday open and I’d accidentally speak the truth. So far, it hadn’t happened; that worried me too. When I looked back up, Ernie had stopped talking. “I’m sorry, Ernie.”

“It’s perfectly all right. I can’t even imagine all the things that must be going on in your head right now.” I was at least glad of that. “Any breakthroughs in the case?”

“Nothing that I can relate, as the investigation is ongoing at the moment.”

“Certainly.”

“Anybody else said anything that might be of any use to me?”

He blinked; it’s possible I derailed him by asking him a question. I watched as he stared at the little train tracks. “There have been a number of unfortunate statements concerning the young man. It is still an accidental situation, isn’t it?”

I thought about it. “Yes. Nothing strong enough to lead me to believe otherwise, at this time.”

It was close enough to publicspeak to get me through. I half turned toward the door. “Anything else?”

“Oh, no.” Lost in thought, he tapped the notebook with the pink, oversized eraser pushed onto the end of his pencil. “Do you ever get the feeling that the world is tired, Walter?” I stood there, not quite sure of what to say next. He looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I sometimes forget myself and wax philosophic in the afternoons.”

I walked over to the door and pushed it open, pausing to lean against the frame. “I don’t know about the world, but I sure as hell get that way.” He smiled, I smiled, and I left. It was only eleven forty-five.

I climbed the hill and turned the corner on Main and became untired. The jaunty, little red Jeep sat at the curb just outside the Crazy Woman Bookstore. I went over and sat against the fender. It was a long walk back to the office, and I needed a rest. After about three minutes, she came out.

“Hey, you.” She was wearing a black cashmere sweater, a fancy western jacket all of fringe, vintage jeans, and a pair of high-heel boots. Her hair was loose and kind of rumpled. She looked great. “What, am I parked illegally?” She opened the door and tossed her paper bag of books onto the front seat. She did not come back around the door.

I continued to smile, but I was worried. “How’s your dog?” That at least got a partial smile.

“He scare you?”

“Yep.”

She smiled at a young couple walking up the street. “He has that effect on people.” She pulled her keys from her purse and then tossed it on the same seat as the books. Her eyes came up, steady. “Do you really want to talk about my dog?” I wanted to talk about anything. I wanted to run for my life. “Look . . .” I dreaded female statements that started with “look.” In my limited experience, there was nowhere to hide after they were made. “You’ve probably been pretty busy lately . . .”

“That seems to be the consensus.”

She flipped the butterscotch hair back and laid those frank, lupine eyes on me again. “I’ve been thinking that this is probably a really bad time for both of us to think of starting a relationship.”

I nodded and pushed off the fender and thought about sweeping her into my arms and giving her a big wet one right on Main Street. Fortunately, I always check my shots, just buried my fists deeper in my jacket pockets, and stood with my legs apart on the other side of the door so that I could absorb the impact. “I thought we already had this conversation.”

It was the wrong thing to say, I could tell that right away. Her eyes sharpened along with her voice. “Maybe we weren’t clear.” I looked around to see if anybody was around to watch the sheriff get gunned down at what I’m sure was approaching high noon. “Walt . . .”

“Before you say anything else, let me get this out, because I might not get a chance later, or I may not want to . . .” I drove ahead, looking for light. “That measly, little, pathetic attempt at the beginnings of a romance, I refuse to use that word relationship, are all I’ve had to go on for the last three years. It may not seem like much to you, but for me it was giant steps, and if you think that you’re going to take it away from me with a few curt words here on the sidewalk, then you’ve got another think coming.” In my limited experience, women dreaded male statements that ended with “then you’ve got another think coming.” It usually meant there was a lot more coming, but in this case there wasn’t. It had taken everything for me to get that out; so, I just stood there, watching the tired world fall apart around me.

I’m not sure what I had hoped to accomplish with this particular outburst. I was just being honest and, to my utter surprise, she placed her hand under my chin, leaned over the door on tiptoes, and kissed me on the mouth, slowly and gently. As our faces parted, and my eyes were once again able to open and focus, she whispered, “You should call me, very soon.” As the little red Jeep skimmed away, I felt the thought of a mobile phone growing on me.

On the way back to the office, I picked up three chicken dinners from the Bee and fended off Dorothy’s questions about what had just taken place on Main Street across from her restaurant. She reminded me that hers was a family establishment and that such overt demonstrations of lust might be better served in a more private setting, by getting a room.

* * *

Ruby took one Styrofoam container and one iced tea out of my hands. “You keep this up and I might vote for you myself.”

I continued on my way to the door of Vic’s office. She was sitting with her feet up on her own desk for a change; folders and clipboards with legal pads ran the distance from her hips to her ankles. She was writing on one of the tablets with the phone cradled between her chin and shoulder. I carefully placed her tea and lunch on the desk. She nodded thanks, and I sat down to open mine. It was when I realized I hadn’t gotten any napkins that Ruby appeared in the doorway and handed me a roll of paper towels from the kitchenette in back: fine dining at its best. The steam rolled out as I opened the container and prepared to eat Dorothy’s famous Brookville, Kansas, recipe chicken. It was a religious experience.

Vic nodded and grunted a few agreements before she hung up. “This is a really fun job you’ve got me doing here.” She looked at me again. “Do you have lipstick on your face?”

I wiped it off with a paper towel and picked up a thigh. “Don’t be silly, what’ve you got?”

She looked at me for a moment longer, then continued. “Guess where the majority of these replicas are made?”

I momentarily paused on the batter-covered thigh. “New Jersey.”

She began placing the folders, clipboards, and paraphernalia on the desk. She fanned the information she’d gathered across the surface and placed her chicken container on her lap, taking the lid off and sipping her iced tea. She never used a straw. “Italy. The damn things are made in northern Italy by some firm called Pedersoli.”

“Sounds dirty.” That got a look. I continued to eat.

She picked up a breast. “What?”

“Only thing I know about Italian war rifles is you can buy ’em cheap, never fired, only dropped once.” She cocked an eyebrow and bit into her own chicken. “Sorry, old World War II joke.” She stuck a hand out, and I tore off a paper towel. “It’s chess night with Lucian; got me thinking about it.” I nodded toward the desk. “What’ve you got, other than a nation of origin?”

She got that predatory look on her face, unimpeded by the way she was dismembering the poor chicken. “There are a few made in this country, the most famous being the Shiloh Sharps made up in Big Timber.”

“New Jersey?”

“Montana.” Her eyes flattened. “Are you going to behave so we can get through this in a reasonable amount of time?”

“What happened to your good mood?”

She wiped her fingers off on her pants and picked up one of the clipboards. “My boss gave me this shitty job to do.” She took another sip of her tea. “The Shiloh version is the top of the line, with a waiting list of about four years. The only one sold in our area as far back as registration goes is one to a Roger Russell, about two years ago.” I stopped chewing. “Bingo?”

“He’s on Omar’s short list, and he was in the bar the night you called.”

“Really? Who else is on the list?”

“I think me, but I’m not sure.”

She looked back at the clipboard. “Well, your name didn’t come up.”

“And Roger Russell?”

“Special ordered his from the Sportshop here in town, .45-70 caliber. Mean anything?”

“I’ll go talk to David Fielding; I was going to anyway.” Dave would be a better source of information concerning a particular caliber in the area than the FBI and ATF combined.

“Then Roger Russell?”

“Among others.”

She turned the plastic spork in her mouth, pulling it out to speak. “Sounds like Omar’s list is bothering you.”

I took a deep breath and was amazed at how quickly the weight of my chest forced the air out. “A little.”

“Who else is on it?” I told her as she worked on another piece of chicken. “Considering our earlier conversation, the Indian suspects worry me the most.” I agreed. “You’re going to have to get a federal search warrant to go out there.”

“You know, Balzac once described bureaucracy as a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”

“What’d your buddy Balzac have to say about inadmissible evidence?”

“Not a lot. I think he considered the subject beneath him.” She shook her head as I continued to smile at her. “What else you got?”

“We’ve got a few registered bona fides.”

“Antiques and curio weapons?”

“Do you believe Omar has his registered?”

“That would be the insurance thing we talked about.”

“Mike Rubin was one.”

“Well that’s two on our list.” I put my chicken down and wiped my hands. “It’s really going to piss me off if Omar turns out to be right.”

“At least you don’t have to go on a fucking picnic with the prick this afternoon. What time am I supposed to be out there?”

I looked at my pocket watch. “Three.”

I didn’t catch the look, because by the time I got back to her she had returned to the clipboard; the coleslaw spork jutted from the corner of her mouth like a fishing lure. “You really did miss me.”

It was true. I had.

* * *

I parked the Bullet in front of the Sportshop. I was damned if I was going to be caught walking on Main Street again, it was too emotionally dangerous. I passed the fishing department, went through the acres of fleece wear, and stopped in front of the center counter. There was a skinny, redheaded kid reading the Courant, and it took a while for him to notice me. I was the only other person in the place. “Can I help you?”

“Dave around?”

“He’s in the back.” I waited. “Do you want me to go get him?”

“If you would.” He looked uncertain. “Don’t worry, I won’t steal anything.” He rounded the corner and hightailed it for the stock room.

I looked over at the gun rack along the right-hand wall and thought about the statement that guns made this country what it is today and wondered if that was good or bad. We were a combative breed. I was not hard on us, though; I didn’t need to be, history was. Ten major wars and countless skirmishes over the last two hundred years pretty much told the tale. But that was political history, not personal. I was brought up on a ranch but, because of my father, the romance of guns had somehow escaped me. In his eyes, a gun was a tool, not some half-assed deity. Guys who named their guns worried him and me.

I walked down the aisle and looked at the shining walnut stocks, the glistening blue barrels. There were beautiful hand-engraved, over-and-under fowling pieces next to ugly Armalite AR-15s that looked and felt like a Mattel toy. Small chains wound their way through the trigger guards with little bronze locks at the end of each row. It was like a chain gang for weapons. Some of them might be good, some of them might be bad, but there was no way to tell until somebody picked them up. By the time I got back to the front of the aisle, Dave was waiting for me.

Dave had a studious quality framed in the metal-edged glasses, which emphasized his pale eyes. He looked like a basketball-playing owl in an unbuttoned shirt. He was originally from Missouri and had a matter-of-fact quality to his speech that I had always found entertaining. He also knew how to keep his mouth shut. “You’re looking for a gun?”

“Naw, I got plenty.” I looked past him to the kid, who was hovering at the counter.

“Matt, why don’t you go help them unload the truck, okay?” He disappeared. “Something important?”

“Maybe.” I explained the situation without giving out any names, motives, or qualified information.

“Sharps?”

“Or anything pertaining to . . . ?”

He held his chin in his hand and looked down the row of rifles and shotguns. “We’ve got a few of the replicas.”

“Italian?”

“Yeah.”

“Pedersoli?” I was showing off.

He released his chin and pushed the glasses farther up on his nose. “As a matter of fact, they are.” We walked down the aisle, and he unlocked the end chain. I expected them all to make a run for it. “These are early Pedersolis, not long after they bought out Garrett.” I nodded sagely. “I don’t believe they changed the production line much.” I nodded sagely some more. It was fun being an expert on Italian buffalo rifles, having a specialty. He handed the rifle to me. It was similar to Omar’s in size and weight, but that was where the similarities ended. The metal on this one had an antiqued, cloudy-blue appearance, and the wood stock seemed hard and plastic. Comparing it to the museum piece I had fired this morning was inevitable but not fair.

I set the hammer to the safety/loading notch before opening the action just as if there were a fired case in the chamber, preventing any unnecessary stress on the firing pin. Amazing the things you learned hanging around with Omar. It was smooth but nothing like the one from this morning.

“What’s the accuracy on these things?”

“Actually, pretty good.”

I placed the narrow butt plate against the deep bruise on my shoulder. It fit my wound perfectly. I raised the barrel toward Main Street and envisioned Italian buffalo sitting at a street-side café, drinking Chianti. “Five hundred yards?”

“Oh, God no.”

I let the buffalo go. “Won’t get there?”

“It’ll get there but not with much accuracy. Not with these repros.”

I handed the rifle back to him. “Sell many of ’em?”

“A few; here and there.”

“Mind telling me who bought them?”

He slowly exhaled, blowing out his lips. “I could go off the top of my head, but I can get it out of the computer and you’d have an exact list.”

“Great.” He locked the guns back, and I followed him to the counter and the computer. “You ever sell any of the real ones?”

“No.”

“How much is one worth, a really good .45-70?”

The exhale again. “As much as a vacation in Tuscany.”

“How about ammunition . . . do you sell much for these?”

“Who knows?”

“Can you get that for me?”

“It’ll take longer.”

I was asking a lot, and I knew it. “It would be a great help.”

“Can I get it to you tomorrow?” He reached over and turned on the printer.

“That’d be fine.” He watched the paper roll through the printer for a moment, and then tore loose the list and handed it to me without looking at it. “You don’t want to see?” I asked him.

“None of my business.”

I folded the sheet in half and stuck out my hand. “Thank you, Dave.”

Ruby had said there was a cold front on the way and, by tomorrow morning, there was supposed to be more than four inches of the white stuff. I tossed my jacket onto the passenger seat. If the warm weather wasn’t going to last long, I was going to enjoy it while it was here. I fired her up, rolling down the window and resting my arm on the door. It felt good to have the extra elbow room.

You couldn’t blame the computer; it probably did the list of three names in alphabetical order. The first name on the list was Brian Connally—Turk.

6

In 1939, Lucian Connally had been told by his mother to sweep the front porch of their dry and dusty ranch house. He had refused and, when asked what it was that he intended to do, he had replied, “Go to China.” Which he did.

Lucian didn’t like family.

After finishing Army Air Corps flight school in California, he immediately joined the American Volunteer Group, a collection of a hundred U.S. military pilots released from enlistment so that they might serve as mercenaries in the lend-lease born, fledgling Chinese Nationalist Air Force. Lucian’s political zeal was reinforced by the $750 a month salary and by the $500 a head bonus promised by the Chinese for every Japanese plane shot down. Lucian found he had a knack for such activities and, by the time he left China on August 6, 1941, he had accumulated quite a little nest egg. A little over a year later he returned to the Pacific on the aircraft carrier Hornet and, in a cumbersome B-25, bombed Tokyo, crashed into the Yellow Sea, and was captured by the Japanese and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Lucian didn’t like Japs.

There was a sun-yellowed, decomposing circular in an intricate gold frame on the wall of private suite number 32 at the Durant Home of Assisted Living. Below the grainy photograph of five men in flight jackets and the exotic print was the translation, “The cruel, inhuman, and beastlike American pilots who, in a bold intrusion of the holy territory of the Empire on April 18, 1942, dropped incendiaries and bombs on nonmilitary hospitals, schools, and private houses, and even dive-strafed playing school children, were captured, courtmartialed, and severely punished according to military law.” Two of the men had been ushered outside immediately following the mock trial and summarily executed; the remaining three survived forty months of torture and starvation. Lucian was the short one in the middle with the cocky look on his face, who was smiling like hell.

After the war, Lucian had drifted back to Wyoming and then back to Absaroka County. He then drifted into being sheriff on the strength of his being the toughest piece of gristle in four states. This had been tested when Lucian had had his right leg almost blown off by Basque bootleggers back in the midfifties.

Lucian didn’t like Basquos.

He had tied the strap from an 03 Springfield he carried in the backseat of his Nash Ambassador around the exploded leg and drove himself back to Durant from Jim Creek Hill, thirty-two miles. They took the leg.

Lucian didn’t like sawbones.

They say the subzero temperatures that night saved his life, but I knew better. His more than a quarter century of sheriffing had been nothing short of epic, and his reputation in the Equality State was ferocious. Simply stated, he was the most highly decorated, retired law enforcement official in the country. “How’s them big titties on that Eye-talian deputy of yours?”

He was also a colossal pervert.

I kept my finger on the bishop and looked up at him. “Lucian . . .”

“Just askin’.” It was one of his favorite tactics, shocking me out of any sense of concentration. This might be why I had not won a chess game since the spring of 1998. I slid the bishop against the border as he looked at me through his bushy eyebrows. “What’s goin’ on?”

I settled back in the horsehide wing chair and took in the site of the losing battle. Lucian had been allowed to bring his own furnishings to the “old folks home” as he called it, and the jarring effect of the genuine western antiques in the sterile environment was unsettling. I had been coming here and playing chess with Lucian since he had moved in eight years ago. I never missed a Tuesday for fear that Lucian might lose some of his faculties and, in the eight years, he had not lost one iota. I, on the other hand, was sinking fast. “Nothing, why do you ask?”

He moved. “You ain’t said shit since you got here.”

I looked at the board. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

“Ain’t gonna do you no good, I’m jus’ gonna spank yer ass again, anyway.” He dug a finger in his ear, examined the wax on his pinkie, and wiped it on the faded blue-jean flap at the end of his stump. “I can’t believe you didn’t bring any beer.”

I couldn’t believe it either. For almost a decade I had been sneaking beer and Bryer’s blackberry brandy in to Lucian on Tuesday nights. “I need to talk to you about some stuff.”

“I figured as much, I’m just waitin’ for you to start.” He moved. “Important stuff ?”

“Sheriff stuff.”

“Oh, that shit.” He watched me move a knight out to the slaughter and slowly shook his head. “Well, let’s talk it out and get it over with so I can get at least one decent game tonight.”

“It’s about your great-nephew.”

He looked up. “What’d he do now?”

“Beat on Jules Belden.”

His hands stayed still. “How bad?”

“Bad enough.”

He leaned back in his own chair, readjusting his weight and looking at his reflection in the dark surface of the sliding glass door behind me. He was a handsome old booger, movie starish like the judge, but in a more rugged way. The spiderweb wrinkles spread out from the corners of his eyes to his unreceding hairline and the trim landing strip of platinum white hair. He lacked the aesthetic of the judge; everything on him was square, even his flattop haircut, which I’m sure hadn’t changed since Roosevelt had been in office. His eyes were the darkest brown I had ever seen, the black of the pupils seemed to blend into the mahogany surrounding them. I’m sure they were swallowing the darkness outside and in. Lucian didn’t have any children of his own, and the responsibility of carrying the line into perpetuity rested solely with Turk. He was not completely satisfied with this turn of events, and the set of his jaw made that fact clear. “You wanna drink?”

“In case you’ve forgotten, after reminding me all these times, I didn’t bring anything.”

He scratched the slight stubble on his jaw with fingernails that had been cut down to the cuticles. “Well, thank Christ I don’t depend on you for much.” He pointed to the corner cupboard. “There’s a bottle of bourbon behind the star quilt on the bottom shelf.”

I got up and retrieved the bottle, Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve, nothing but the finest at the Durant Home of Assisted Living. I brought the three-quarters of a bottle over. “You got any glasses?”

“What, you too good to drink out ’a the bottle?” I handed it to him and watched as he took a slug and then with a great deal of animation wiped off the mouth of the bottle with a flannel shirtsleeve I was sure hadn’t been changed in a week.

“Thanks.” I didn’t like bourbon, as a general rule, but I sure liked this. I couldn’t even describe the number of smooth buttery tastes in my mouth, but I felt like I should chew. The fire in my throat felt cleansing, like part of a scorched-earth policy.

“Jules in custody at the time?”

“Yep.”

“Gonna press charges?” I took another sip and handed the bottle back to him, unwiped.

“Mighty damn liberal with my bourbon, for a man that didn’t bring me a thing to drink this week.” I sat, and he returned to looking out the glass doors. I wondered at the vitality of the man. Aristotle said that some minds are not vases to be filled, but fires to be lit. Excluding the bourbon, Lucian had been lit for a long time, and the flying tiger’s eyes still burned very bright. “If I had two good legs, I’d go out and kick that little son of a bitch’s ass myself.” The finger pointed at me this time. “You gonna handle this yourself?”

“I suppose so.”

He settled farther back in his chair. It was starting to sound like a contract hit. He sniffed, worked his jaw a little, and took another slug. “What you want from me?”

“Formal absolution.”

He took another slug and handed the bottle back. “Damn, that stuff’s addicting. Better have another pull and put it back in there where it came from.” He burped. “Fore we get drunk as a couple ’a hooty-owls. Bastards around here’ll steal anything that ain’t nailed down . . . What?”

“Sheriff stuff.”

“More?”

He watched me look out the glass doors for a change. “I don’t know how much of this you want to hear about . . .”

“Oh, hell, I got important crafts to make out ’a tongue depressors tomorrow morning. I’m not sure if I wanna cloud my mind with a murder case.”

I turned around. “What makes you think it’s a murder case?”

“What makes you think it’s not?” I stood there looking at him. “Sit down, you’re puttin’ a crick in my neck.” I did as ordered. “Don’t look so surprised, I read the damn newspaper.”

“It could be a hunting accident, Lucian.”

He crossed his arms, concentrating. “Bullshit. Near as I can figure, there’s an awful lot of folks out there that would just as soon see that kid dead, one of ’em just decided to take the law into his own hands.” I told him about the ballistics. “Goddamn, was there anything left of the little bastard?”

“Extremities.”

“Where’d it hit him?”

“Center shot.”

“Front or back?”

“Back.”

“Not much of the front left, I suppose?”

“Nope.”

“Lead?”

“Yep. It’s pretty scattered, but everything seems to support the theory that it’s a big caliber breechloader.”

“Sharps.”

“Well, there are others . . .”

“Sharps.” He rested his chin in the palm of his hand, the stubby fingers wrapped around his jaw like a knuckleball. The gnarled old fingers looked like they could crack walnuts. Lucian’s grip was legendary and, if you were ever unfortunate enough to have him lay hands on you, you suddenly paid very close attention. It was fun to watch the mechanisms start up, to see Lucian’s eyes flying over Absaroka County, sweeping down from the mountains, through the gulleys, over the foothills, and into every attic, cedar chest, closet, and gun case in a hundred square miles. He added five more names to the list, none of which were Indians. I told him about the feather. “Shit. Anything else?”

“Nope.” He chewed on the inside of his mouth but, other than that, he was still. After a while, I asked, “What are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinkin’ about gettin’ that bottle ’a bourbon back out.” I carefully put the little kingdoms back into their storage place in the compartment within the board. I figured we were done with chess for the night. “You still runnin’ with that Indian buddy of yours, Ladies Wear?”

“Standing Bear.”

“Yeah, him.” Lucian did things to Indian names that were nothing short of criminal. He called the Big Crows the Big Blows, and the Red Arrows were Dead Sparrows. The list was endless and, no matter how many times you corrected him, he would just smile a little smile and keep on talking. Even with all this, the Indians loved him. They respected him for his toughness and his sense of fair play. On the bridge where I had recuperated yesterday, Lucian had waged a campaign against public intoxication when he stopped his overturned bathtub of a Nash and demanded the bottle from which two middle-aged braves were drinking. They took one last sip and then tossed the container into Piney Creek. “What bottle?”

Lucian unstrapped his wooden leg at the bank, took off his hat, jumped into the creek, and a minute later came up. “This goddamned bottle.” They helped him with his leg and his hat and then cheerfully jumped in the back of the squad car for the ride into town. The Cheyenne elders were careful when they spoke his name, Nedon Nes Stigo, He Who Sheds His Leg.

Lucian knew who Henry was, and he knew his name. “He can probably help you figure out who did the feather and where on the Rez it came from. Gawd, all my contacts out there are dried up dead and traveling on the wings of the wind. But you gotta start with that girl’s family.”

“Henry is her family.”

He shook his head. “How’s Ladies Wear tied into the Thunderbirds?”

“Little Birds. Melissa’s father is Henry’s cousin.”

“So, the daughter’d be his second cousin.”

“Yep, but with the age discrepancy they just call her his niece.”

“Her father the one that lost his legs, Lonnie?”

“Diabetes.”

“Damn, that’s rough.” I looked at the one-legged man before me. “The mother was a drunk, and the kid turning out feebleminded the way she did . . .” The hand went back to his face, and the air that came from his lungs rattled like a snake. “Well, go talk to ol’ Ladies Wear.”

“You don’t think he’s a suspect?”

His eyes quickly looked like the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun. “Do you?”

“No.”

He continued to look at me. “He’s your best friend, seems like it’s something you’d know.”

“Yep.”

He leaned his head to one side and half-closed the nearest eye, sighting me in. “You don’t sound so sure.”

“I am.” He watched me as I reached over to the sofa and got my coat. “Anybody else I should put on the list?”

He shrugged. “How the hell should I know. I’m retired.”

* * *

It was still nice when I got outside. I always used the emergency exit by the commissary at the end of the hallway. I never looked down into the sliding glass windows as I crossed the parking lot; it seemed demeaning to Lucian. In my peripheral view, I could see the lights were still on, and I was sure he still sat there watching me, waiting for next Tuesday. I turned around.

“What the hell do you want now?”

It hadn’t taken long to get back to his room. I leaned on the doorway, pretty much filling the opening and pushed the brim of my hat back. “Have you thought about that dispatcher’s job we talked about a while ago?”

He had unbuttoned his shirt and hopped to the dividing wall, his hand steadying him. “Two years ago?”

“Yep.” He stared at me through the eyebrows. “Things are awful busy, and I could use some help.”

“Two days a week?”

“Weekends, yeah.”

“I’ll have to think about it.” He didn’t move, embarrassed at being caught hopping through his suite and heading for bed.

“You were going after that bourbon, weren’t you?” He didn’t smile very often but, when he did, he had great teeth. I wondered idly if they were his.

* * *

I started back to the office with the windows down. If it was going to snow, it wasn’t giving any indication of it. The moon glowed a clear white, slipping through the slender arms of the willows along Clear Creek. Late at night you could hear the water, and most of the summer I would leave the windows in my office open so I could listen. It was only about eight-thirty, but the town had already put itself to bed.

There was a note from Ruby saying that Ferg had swung by the Espers but that nobody had been home. He would telephone them himself and stop by again tomorrow. There was an addendum Post-it, in which she related that she had informed him that he was being drafted to full time. She said his response hadn’t been enthusiastic, but he hadn’t been spiteful enough not to leave four dressed brown trout in the refrigerator for me. I wandered past Vic’s office and looked in at the explosion of legal pads. The display was daunting, and I would be cursed at if I messed up any of what I’m sure was a carefully detailed arrangement. We were little but we were mighty. I thought of Don Quixote, being far too powerful to war with mere mortals and pleading for giants.

I sat at my desk and looked at the phone as the windmills loomed overhead. Vonnie would still be up, but my courage had curdled. There was a sheet of paper from one of Vic’s legal pads with her angry scrawl spreading across the top quarter. I picked it up, turned on my desk lamp, and read . . . “Where the hell are you? Spiral searched the site with a fine-tooth comb. Full six hundred yards, and do you have any idea how fucking long that took? Numb-nuts thought there might have been some grass blowdown on one of the rises about five hundred yards away, so we had to stake and cover it. Guess how fucking long that took? He’s an expert with a camera, too. Go figure. Asked me out for a drink. Guess how fucking long that took?” It was signed, VIC. With an addendum, “PS: More grist for the investigative ballistics’ mill tomorrow, nothing worth hampering your extensive social life with.” And another. “PPS: I took the film over to the drugstore, and they said they would drop it off tomorrow morning, first thing. Read: noon.”

I had never received a note from Vic that had less than two PSs. I continued to hold up the yellow legal sheet and noticed the little pinholes of light shining through everywhere she had made a period. I laid the sheet of paper down and looked at the phone again. The feather caught my attention, and I picked it up, turning it in my fingers as it had turned in my mind all day. I picked up the phone, but it just hovered in my hand, a foot away. I could hear the dial tone, so it was working. I gently sat it back on the cradle and looked out the windows; as I suspected, the clouds were starting to haze out the mountains. I hoped that whatever Vic had found with Omar this afternoon was safely tucked away or covered with a staked plastic drop cloth.

I picked up the phone again, dialed, and listened to it ring. On the fourth ring there was the mechanical fumbling of the answering machine, and I left the daily message I had been leaving since last week, “This is your father, I just want to know if you’ve escaped, or do we have to pay the ransom?” Nothing, so I hung up.

My attempts at reviving my mood were failing, so I went back to the refrigerator in the jail to retrieve my trout dinner, and there, proudly standing at the front of the top shelf among the potpies and Reynolds-wrapped fish, was a mountain fresh, twelve-ounce bottle of Rainier beer. There was a yellow Post-it stuck to the bottleneck with Ruby’s careful handwriting, “In honor of your getting in shape.” That Ruby.

I twisted off the top and tossed it into the trash can, headed back into my office, and sat back down. I took a swig of the beer and felt a lot better. I picked up the phone yet again, and then remembered I was going to have to look up her number. I finally found my battered phonebook in the bottom drawer of my desk and sat about working my way through the Hs. Michael Hayes. I dialed, and she picked it up on the second ring. “Yes?”

The yes surprised me, but I got back on my feet quick. “Hey, I haven’t even asked you yet.”

The response was soft. “Hello, Walter.”

I could see her curled up on one of those leather couches by the fire with the phone pulled in close. It had been so long and I was so out of my depths, I was always feeling dizzy when I spoke with her. “I can take that yes as a blanket response?”

“Is a sheriff supposed to be making these kinds of phone calls?”

I sat the bottle down and began working on the label with my thumbnail. “Sheriff who?”

“I was thinking about inviting you over for dinner.” There was a pause. “How about tomorrow night?”

“Perfect. What can I bring?”

“How about a bottle of fine wine and your fine self.”

“I can do that. Tomorrow’s a court day, but then I’ll just be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, standard operating procedure.” She laughed, and it was warm and melodic. I should have pushed for tonight. She advised me to take care of my head till then and bid me farewell till light through yonder window break. It was hard to describe, but courting Vonnie seemed to elevate me onto another plane. Without trying to sound like some lovesick teenager, the world just seemed better, like the air I was breathing had a little something extra.

I finished off the beer, gathered up the feather and fish, and headed for the Bullet. I looked at the smear of clouds reflected by the moon. It looked cold on the mountain. We were in the fifth year of a drought cycle, and the ranchers would be glad of the moisture collecting up there. In the spring, the life-giving water would trickle down from the precipices, growing the grass, feeding the cows, making the hamburgers, and paying the sheriff’s wages. It was all in the natural order of things, or so the ranchers told me . . . and told me.

I fired the truck up and let her run, rolling up the windows and looking at my right eye in the rearview mirror. It was a handsome right eye, roguish yet debonair. The right ear was also evident, a handsome ear as ears go, well formed with a disattached lobe. A sideburn had a little gray, just enough for seasoning, and it blended well with the silver-belly hat. A damn fine figure of a man or a man’s eye and ear. I avoided the temptation of ruining the effect by readjusting the mirror for a fuller view.

I had a date. My first date in . . . since before I was married. Wine, I had to remember wine. The only place that would be open was the Sinclair station’s liquor annex. Somehow, I didn’t think they would have the vintage I was looking for. If I could catch Henry at the bar, he could supply me. I backed out and headed for the Wolf Valley.

* * *

When I got to the bar my mood deflated a little; the lights were all off, and there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. Henry often closed up if no one was around. I suppose he figured that nursing the drunks through the nights when they were there was one thing, but anticipating them was another. I swung around and headed back home. I thought about continuing on out to his place but figured I would just call him at the Pony tomorrow. I looked over at the lovely fish resting on the passenger-side floor mat and tried to think of how to cook them without messing them up. I relaxed a little when I caught a flash of reflected taillight as I pulled up the drive to my little cabin. I looked in at the powder blue Thunderbird convertible with its top down and at the pristine white interior as I gathered my assortment of things.

Henry’s father had bought the car new in Rapid City back in 1959, about three months before he was diagnosed with “the” cancer. That’s what they called it back then, “the” cancer, like “the” winter, or “the” Black Death. I leaned over the door and read the odometer: 33,432 miles. When the old man passed over, there had been a great deal of controversy in the family as to who would get the T-bird. Henry ended the debate by fishing the keys out of the old man’s last pair of pants that lay crumpled beside his deathbed. Henry started the Thunderbird, drove the old girl forty miles, and parked her in an undisclosed garage somewhere in Sheridan. None of them ever asked him about it again, ever. He called the car Lola.

“Hey, get away from that car.” The deep voice had come from the darkness, somewhere under the new porch roof. I walked up the slight grade to the front of my newly transformed log cabin. The porch ran the entire length of the house, and the smell of the freshly cut redwood was enchanting. The roof consisted of two-by-six tongue and groove; the green tin surrounded the edges and joined seamlessly with the already existing roof. It was a really good job, even I could see that. The rough-cut six-by-sixes gave the place a look of permanence, the look of a home. There were a couple of concrete blocks stacked on the ground at the center, which allowed access between the railings.

I stood beside the blocks and leaned against one of the upright timbers. “Damn.”

“Not bad, huh?” He sat by the front door and leaned against the wall with his legs crossed and stretched out in front of him. His worn moccasins translated the print of his feet through the moosehide. He reached down and plucked out a bottle of beer from the holder and tossed it to me; it almost slipped, but I caught it. “You were going to be able to have three, but then it got late. Now, you only get two.”

I opened the beer and took a sip. “They do good work.”

“They are going to be back tomorrow to finish the railings and put some steps in.”

“They know it’s going to snow tonight?”

He shrugged and straightened his shoulders against the log wall. “Not until after midnight.” I looked out at the convertible and hoped he was right.

I took another sip, wandered down the porch, and nodded toward the car. “Special occasion?”

“Last hurrah. I do not suppose I will get a chance to drive her anymore this year.” His eyes stayed on the car and, in the flat moonlight, it looked very pale; another ghost pony for Henry.

“Slow night at the bar?”

“Yes. What is in the tinfoil?”

“Couple ’a browns.” I stuck out a hand and pulled him up. “You want help putting her top up?”

He looked past me to the hills across the valley. “I told you, it is not going to snow until after midnight.” I laid the fish on the counter by the sink and tossed the feather packet over toward the edge. He went to the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of milk and eggs he must have brought Sunday. He opened the carton and sniffed. “Do you still have the cornmeal?”

I went over to the lower cabinet by the door and retrieved the cardboard container; the corner was already eaten through. I shrugged as I handed it to him. “Sorry.” He shook his head and cracked two eggs in a bowl, whisking them with a fork and adding some milk. He retrieved the frying pan from earlier in the week, checked it for mouse shit, turned on a front burner, and dropped a dollop of butter onto the slowly warming iron. He was fun to watch in the kitchen, his movements easy and smooth. It dawned on me that I should ask, “Anything I can do?”

“No, I prefer my trout meuniere sans poopi.” He opened the tinfoil and admired the fish. “Beautiful. Where did you get them?”

“What makes you think I didn’t catch them?”

He didn’t honor this statement with a response but dumped out a bed of cornmeal in a dish and whisked the batter some more. Finishing this, he picked up his beer and started to take a sip. “I don’t suppose you have any peanut oil, parsley, or white wine?”

“No, but I have a date tomorrow night.”

He nodded, extended his arm, and poured part of his beer in the batter. He coated the fish, layered them in the cornmeal, then took a dish towel hanging from the drawer pull under the sink and tilted the handle of the frying pan. “Good.”

“I need some help.”

He watched the butter slide down the inside of the pan, added a little more, and rested it back on the burner. “Yes?”

“Wine?”

“Yes, wine is a good thing.”

He didn’t see the sarcastic look I was giving him. “I need help picking one out.”

He stared at the fish. “Dinner is in her home?”

“Yes.”

“What is she serving?”

“I don’t know.” He slowly shook his head and took a sip of his beer; I was driving him to drink. I took a swig of my own and smiled, putting a good face on things. “She didn’t say.”

He nodded, spreading his hands over the repast. “Red with beef, white with fish, or cheap beer with everything.” He leaned against the counter and braced his weight on one arm. “Is this to be a gift or to accompany dinner?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes. If it is to accompany dinner and it is white, then it must arrive chilled. If it is a gift, then it should not.”

“What if I just don’t let her touch the bottle?”

He nodded sagely. “Are you going to let her drink any?”

“Oh, there is that.” He finished off the abbreviated beer and pulled the last one from the cardboard carrier. “I thought that was mine?”

“You do not deserve it.” He opened it and took a swig before I could grab it away. “Then there is chicken.”

“What about chicken?”

“It can go either way.”

“I’ve heard that about chickens.”

He shook his head some more. “According to how it is prepared, it can go with either red or white. The whole idea of wine is to complement the meal. There are dry wines, moderately dry wines, dessert wines, aperitifs, sparkling wines, fortified wines, sherries, and ports . . .”

“Mad Dog 20-20?” I was trying to be helpful.

“There are an infinite number of both white and red wines: sauternes, chardonnays, pinot grigios, sauvignon blancs on the white side; bordeaux, burgundy, beaujolais, pinot noir, zinfandel, shiraz, merlot, syrah on the red side; never mind the vineyards themselves and the vintners. The wine of the year is a cabernet blend from the coastal region of Bolgheri. Antinori planted sixty percent to cabernet sauvignon, thirty-five percent to merlot, and five percent to cabernet franc. Then there are the appellations—St. Emilion, Margaux, Barolo, Barbera, and Chianti . . .”

“Which ones come in cartons?”

He nudged the empty carrier with the punt of his bottle. “How about a nice six-pack?”

“I’m trying to change my image.”

“Yes, I am trying to change it, too, but it does not seem to be working.” He took two of the fish and plopped them in their reflective image in melted butter; they sizzled and settled in as he returned the skillet to the stovetop. There was only room for two of the fillets at a time.

“What about the chenin blanc she drinks at the bar?”

“That is a good choice, along with a merlot. Just in case.”

“You can hook me up?” A term I had picked up from Vic.

“Yes.”

I went ahead and ate while thinking about which subject I wanted to raise first as he prepared the next brace of trout. “Things really that slow at the bar?”

He flipped his own dinner onto a plate and joined me at the counter. “Slow enough that I could get out of there this evening.”

“Ever get tired of it?”

“Every day, but then I look at my bank account and get over it.” He started on his dinner, and I let him eat for a while before I disturbed him with another question. I knew why he owned the bar, why he had gravitated to it. A sense of community. In a way, it was why we both did what we did. It was a way of looking after things, making sure everything was all right. “How is your fish?”

I guess that meant he was ready to talk. “Great, thanks.”

“Hey, they were your fish.”

“Jim Ferguson’s, to be exact.” He was like that, always making an attempt to put everyone at ease. “Roger Russell come out to the bar a lot?”

He thought about it. “No.”

“That time the other night, the only time he’s been in?”

“Yes.” His head rolled to one side, and he leaned back a little to keep his hair out of his food.

“He’s on Omar’s short list of shooters.”

He continued eating. “Who else is on the list?”

I told him, and his face carried nothing. “Comment?”

He grunted. “I am not sayin’ nothin’, shamus, till I talk to my mouthpiece.” We talked about the list for a while, his assumptions riding alongside mine. He didn’t spend enough time in town to make any real connections to the group. The only one he was interested in, for obvious reasons, was Artie Small Song. “He has worked for Omar.”

“Yep, Omar said.”

I watched the air fill his lungs and admired the way the weight of his chest didn’t force it out. I would never be built like Henry, capable of fight or flee. I was stuck with fight, but maybe I could be a little better at it. I could still feel the dull ache in my legs, and somewhere, down deep, I could feel a slight twinge at my stomach where most people had abdominal muscles. I readjusted my weight on the stool, and his eyes came up. “Artie was in the bar the day Cody Pritchard was shot.”

Shit. “At the same time, before, after?”

He nodded his head ever so slightly. “Before.”

“How much before?”

“About an hour before, left when Cody came in.”

I sat my fork and knife down, as I rapidly lost my appetite. “You see which way he went?”

“No.”

We sat for a few moments more. “I need you to tell me what you’re thinking.” He got up and walked over to the window with his hands on his hips and looked out at the wind picking up and at his car with the top down. “You want me to help you put the top up on the T-bird?”

He didn’t turn, and his voice sounded far away. “I told you, it is not going to snow until after midnight.” I waited for what seemed like a very long time. “You must understand that this puts me in a very uncomfortable position.”

“How about I just call Billings or Hardin?”

“How about you just put your questions in a bottle and float them up the Powder River? Same result.” I waited some more, watching him breathe.

“I’m perfectly willing to be turned down.”

“Yes, you are, and that is one of many reasons I would do it.”

“Think he’ll be cooperative?”

“No. Not if he has any suspicions.” I didn’t like using Henry like this, but I convinced myself it was for a greater good. I was sure that the same thought was going through the back of the head at which I was looking.

“Know him very well?”

“Well enough.”

I changed the subject in my usual subtle fashion. “Know of any Sharps out on the Rez?”

There was no pause. “Lonnie Little Bird has one.”

“What?”

He half turned and smiled. “Lonnie has one.”

I leaned back on my stool and crossed my arms. “You know, for a relatively rare firearm, the damn things are popping up all over the place.”

His hands gravitated forward and into his pockets. “It was given to him by my great uncle, many years ago.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“From his father, who got it from a white man.”

“Dead white man?”

“Eventually.” He was still looking at me from the side of his face.

“.45-70?”

“Yes.” He looked back out the window, and I turned back to the counter. He could see me plain as day in the reflection of the glass. I was getting tired of looking at people’s reflections, and I was damn sure I was tired of them looking at me. “You are going to have to talk to Melissa Little Bird’s family. I will go with you.”

“I’ve got something else to show you.” I picked up the envelope from DCI, tossing it to his side of the counter. He turned and looked at me. “Yet another reason I have to go onto the reservation.” He came back and sat down, opened the cardboard envelope, and pulled out the cellophane-wrapped feather. His eyes narrowed a little, but that was all.

“Turkey.”

“How the hell could you tell that so fast?”

He laughed and looked down the length of the feather like the sight on a gun. “Bend.” He held it up straight between us. “Turkey feathers have a wicked bend to them, this one has been straightened, over-bent, then flipped over, and bent again.”

“How?”

“Household iron, light bulb, or steam, but steam is more difficult.”

“Why bother?”

“Eagle feathers are straight.” I thought about the feathers on Omar’s rifle scabbard; they were straight. “There’s also a deeper ridge on the spline. Can I open the plastic?”

“Sure, there are no fingerprints.”

He smiled again. “You are not going to use this against me later, are you?”

“Nah, I was going to get your prints off the beer bottle.”

He opened the cellophane by loosening the Scotch tape at one side. He was one of those guys who saved Christmas wrapping. He held the feather by the stem and ran his fingers up the side, the delicate quills tracing the movement between his index finger and thumb. He was looking at something, but I didn’t know what it was. “Some artisans use Minwax to get the right color. It is a much richer tint than the turkey’s. Mahogany furniture stain, with a sponge. Do you mind if I ask where it came from?”

“Cody Pritchard.”

His eyes stayed with mine. “On the body?”

“Yep, we thought it was just a leftover from one of the local critters, but . . .”

“Yes.” He reconsidered the feather. “Yes . . .”

“He didn’t have anything like this on him at the bar, did he?”

“No.” He turned the feather in his fingers, much like I had all day. “This is a good one. There are only a few individuals who could have made this.”

I nodded. “Can you get me a list?”

“I can check them myself.” He sighed and sat the feather down between us.

“You think someone is counting coup?”

He shrugged. “I am not sure if you understand the spirit of the thing. When we used to fight battles against other tribes and the army, no deed was more honored than counting coup. It means to touch an armed enemy who is still in full possession of his powers. The touch is not a blow and only serves to show the enemy your prowess—an act considered greater than any other, a display of absolute courage, conveying a sense of playfulness.”

“Well, that lets this out.” I watched him. He studied the feather again, his eyes running the length, back and forth. “For many reasons, this does not make sense.”

I took the last swig of my beer and sat the bottle aside. “Like?”

“It is the owl feathers that are the sign of death, the messengers from the other world. The eagle feather is a sign of life, attached to all the activities of the living: making rain, planting and harvesting crops, success in fishing, protecting homes, and curing illness. The feather is considered the breath of life, processing the power and spirit of the bird of which it was once a living part.”

I sometimes forgot about how spiritual Henry was. I had been raised as a Methodist where the highest sacrament was the bake sale. “The eagle is big medicine. It symbolizes life, boldness, freedom, and the unity of all. In the Nations, the eagle feather must be blessed. The eagle feather must be pure, so that the recipient does not catch the evil that might be in the unblessed feather. A medicine man must bless the feather, and then it can be passed on to someone else.”

It didn’t seem like we were getting anywhere. “That doesn’t make sense in our particular situation.”

He took the plates away and sat them in the sink, then leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. “That is not a real eagle feather.”

“So, what does that mean?”

“I am not sure. It could be an Indian sending mixed signals, or . . . ?”

“Or what?”

“A white attempting to make it look like an Indian.” I thought of that. “Or back to square one; not all Indians would be able to tell the difference between this feather and a real one.” He shrugged.

“You’re a lot of help.”

“This is going to be tougher than the wine. It means we have to go ask some questions.” He looked around at the makings of dinner. “Do you want me to clean up?”

“I think I can handle it. You’re leaving?”

“I have an early morning tomorrow.”

A slow but steady panic was starting to set in, and the pain in my legs began to grow. “We’re not going running again, are we?”

He didn’t say anything, just turned and walked out the door.

I went over to the window and watched him start up the Thunderbird and carefully back it around my truck. The two taillights bobbed and weaved down the gravel driveway and faded into the night like red turbines. It still looked nice out, so I took the remainder of his beer onto the new porch and leaned against one of the supporting timbers. They were rough-cuts, and the splinters felt like fur being brushed the wrong way. I lifted up the bottle and took a swig. It was almost full, and I smiled. Small gifts.

I looked up at all the little pinpricks in the heavens and thought about Vic’s handwriting, the tiny holes in the paper. I thought about my daughter for a while and Vonnie, but then my mind settled on Melissa Little Bird. I was going to have to see Melissa again. I hadn’t really had any interaction with the young woman since the trial, only seeing her once at the reenactment at Little Big Horn and that was more than a year ago.

* * *

She had been sitting in her aunt Arbutus’s car and was waiting to leave one of the roped-off grass parking lots that caught the overflow of the yearly event. It was the end of June, and the waves of heat and the reflection of the afternoon sun made it hard to see, but I saw her. I had raised my head and laughed at something Henry had said, trudging along in the late-afternoon sun, thinking about the individuals who had died there, wondering if their ghosts hovered near. They must have because, when we came up over the rise, my eyes came to rest on Melissa Little Bird, and everything happened in slow motion.

She was wearing the Cheyenne jingle-bob dance headgear, with a band of beaded sunbursts and feathers. It was different than any I had ever seen before; it had three loops of beads that draped below Melissa’s eyes. Trade beads flowed down past her ears to the mussel-shell choker at her throat and onto the elk-bone breastplate. There was also a cardboard number, printed in red, hanging from around her neck, and it read 383. Instantly, I wondered at the number of hours that her family must have taken to prepare her for the dance competitions. I hoped she had won. Her head turned from the direction in which the car was then slowly traveling. Her eyes were soft, yet animated, but they froze when they saw me. Her hand crept up against the glass, flattening against the surface with the pressure she applied. Her lips parted, just enough for me to glimpse the perfect white of her teeth, and she was gone.

* * *

Somewhere in all this musing, I noticed a fat little snowflake drift across my field of vision and settle against one of the concrete blocks and disappear. There were others, now that I noticed, gently floating through the cooling night air. Scientists say there is a noise that snowflakes make when they land on water, like the wail of a coyote; the sound reaches a climax and then fades away, all in about one ten-thousandth of a second. They noticed it when they were using sonar to track migrating salmon in Alaska. The snowflakes made so much noise that it masked the signals of the fish, and the experiment had to be aborted. The flake floats on the water, and there is little sound below; but, as soon as it starts to melt, water is sucked up by capillary action. They figure that air bubbles are released from the snowflake or are trapped by the rising water. Each of these bubbles vibrates as it struggles to reach equilibrium with its surroundings and sends out sound waves, a cry so small and so high that it’s undetectable by the human ear.

I looked up at the few remaining stars. It seemed that an awful lot of the voices in my life were so small and high as to be undetectable by the human ear.

I pulled out my pocket watch and read, 12:01.

7

We all have a list of the vehicles we forever despise. Mine began with the dull yellow ’50 Studebaker in which I learned to drive. It had the finely honed suspension and thrilling acceleration of a large rock. Another on the list was the M-151A1 Willys Jeep that the Corps made me drive in Vietnam, which flipped over a lot and which had the torturous habit of kneecapping me every time I went for third. But the one that has been the continual thorn in my vehicular side has always been Henry’s ’63 three-quarter-ton pickup truck. I was with him the day he bought it. We were in Denver for Game Day, sitting in a small Mexican restaurant behind old Mile High, the football stadium that didn’t look like a shopping mall. I read the Post’s sports section, and he read the classifieds.

Three-quarter ton, V-8, four-speed, Warn lock-in/lock-out hubs, grill guard, headache rack, saddle tanks, and the heaviest suspension ever forged by man. The thousand-dollar price tag seemed too good to believe, and it was. They said it had been used to get Christmas trees from a farm they had over in Grand Junction; they didn’t say it had also been used to harvest them. It looked like it had come out of the ugly forest and had hit every one of the ugly trees. If there was a straight piece of metal on it, I was unaware of where it might be. It looked like it had been painted with crayons and poorly. The truck was mostly green, while the grill guard and headache bar were phosphorescent orange. He called it Rezdawg, and I called it misery. We had never taken a trip in it where it had not either broken down, run out, gone flat, overheated, or spontaneously burst into flames. “Get in.”

“No.” Henry had made me run, in the snow.

“Get in.”

“No.” He wanted to go to the Rez early, so I had to get a continuance on court day and cancel lunch with the judge.

“Get in.”

“No.” He had made me change my clothes, twice.

“Look . . .” His hands were wrapped around the steering wheel, and the majority of his face was hidden behind the hair. “We are undercover here.” I looked longingly at my comparatively brand-new truck, with a motor, suspension, and heater that worked; but my truck also had very large golden stars on the doors. They were handsome stars with the snow-capped Bighorn Mountains rising from an open book in their center, but incognito they weren’t.

He had opened the passenger-side door, and I was looking through the holes in the floorboards at the melting snow. Part of the dashboard was turquoise, part of it was white, and the large mic of an antiquated citizens’ band radio was bolted to the front edge over the shift lever. There was a shifter; a transfer-case lever; a worn, white steering wheel; and an unending number of chrome handles and knobs guaranteed to dislocate, jab, or stove anything that might come in contact. Most of the windows were cracked, and there were no seat belts. At the top of the antenna, even though there was no radio, perched a little, dirty-white Styrofoam ball that read CAPTAIN AMERICA. “It’s gonna break down.”

“It is not going to break down. Get in, I am getting cold.”

His breath was clouding the inside of the glass, and I looked down at the heater box, which was taped together with duct tape. “As I recall, the heater in this thing, among other things, doesn’t work.”

“I fixed it.” He really was undercover, dressed in a gray hooded sweatshirt, army field jacket, and a khaki ball cap that read FORT SMITH, MONTANA, BIG LIP INVITATIONAL CARP TOURNAMENT. “Come on, get in.” I gave up and crawled onto the multilayered seat, repaired most recently with small bungee cords and a used Pamida shower curtain.

The truck had always been an enigma in Henry’s carefully ordered life, but it was something primal and important to him. He could have had it fixed, I mean really fixed, but he didn’t. Somehow, in all its ugly glory, it signified something about the thin-chested kid whose glittering eyes knew something I didn’t and never would. No matter how far he went, no matter what he did, he would always be from what we were going to today.

The truck wasn’t turning over. I saw his hand in his fingerless gloves holding the key to the right and two urgent red lights in the instrument panel that said GEN and OIL. He nodded knowingly like he knew what it was saying. “Do you have any jumper cables?”

After we pulled my truck over and got the Rezdawg started, we headed out slowly, because that was as fast as Rezdawg would go. We rolled like a Conestoga wagon across the bridge that divided the county from the reservation, and in a blink of an eye we were in a foreign country, a sovereign nation unto itself. The topography didn’t change all that much. The sun was up, and the light glowed from right angles highlighting the ridges and peaks in greeting-card warmth. The sharp edges of the turned pastureland pointed out the work ethic of the passing owners, some prepared for the arriving winter, some not.

Numbers always come to mind when I’m on the Rez, social numbers, government numbers, and life expectancy numbers: The average Indian dies eleven years before his white brother. I spent a lot of time ignoring these numbers when I was with Henry; they got in the way of seeing the people, and I had learned a long time ago that seeing these people was important.

“Are you armed?”

I felt a little guilt along with the pressure of the pancake holster at the small of my back. “Yep, why?”

He shrugged. “I just like to know.” We drove on for a while. “Do not shoot anybody, okay?”

“Okay.”

I watched the passing cottonwoods and scrub sage. “Where to first?” he asked.

“You tell me.”

“Oh, no. I am just the scout on this expedition.”

“I thought you guys left that stuff to the Crow.” He hunched over the wheel a little more and grunted. This was the response to the Crow in general; most of the Cheyenne I knew still hadn’t forgiven Kick in the Belly for scouting for Custer; most of the Indian Nations I knew about hadn’t forgiven each other much of anything. This had not been lost on the federal government, since they had put reservations of warring tribes alongside each other with regularity. “Where can we get some coffee?”

“White Buffalo.”

I nodded and listened to the heater motor begin to squeal as a few drops of antifreeze dripped from the core onto the brittle, rubber floor mat and trickled a sickly green toward my boot. “Is the heat on?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t want to start with the Little Birds. You wanna try and dig up Artie Small Song first?”

The White Buffalo Sinclair station was located diagonally across from the Lame Deer Community Center and next to it was Baker’s IGA. I wondered if we were taking our chances by going by the Community Center, since it was an outpost for Indian Affairs, a thought that was solidified by the green Jeep Cherokee that sat parked diagonally at the corner of the building. The IA is really into gadgets, and the sleek little Jeep conveyed that in spades. Their units bristled with antennae, roll cages, push bars, divider screens, radar, laser, radios, and an assortment of firearms that were locked in place all over the inside of the vehicle. There were eagles on the side, with feather tips at the quarter panels that seemed to swirl in the wind even though the thing was parked. No stars, though. I didn’t question as Henry carefully guided his rattletrap of a truck past the Center and pulled up alongside the White Buffalo Sinclair, but then couldn’t resist the temptation. “Problem?”

He threw open the door and slid out. “No, I just do not like cops.”

When I looked behind the counter at Brandon White Buffalo, I started feeling good about my own cholesterol intake. I never worked at the carnival, but I’m guessing he was about 375 pounds if he was an ounce. He was a lot taller than either of us, and he seemed twice as wide and thick. His head was as big as the pumpkin I had been shooting at yesterday, and he even looked like a jack-o’-lantern. It was the smile. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile that big in my life, with or without the gold. Like the rest of him, the smile seemed to fill the room; against it, the fluorescent lighting of the White Buffalo’s world didn’t stand much of a chance. The hairnet that held copious amounts of the blue-black hair in place as he came around the counter in his bright green apron didn’t diminish his image. I noticed the clear plastic gloves on his massive hands, and forearms as big as Easter hams. Brandon White Buffalo had been making breakfast sandwiches, and he carried two with him as he came. Standing there, as he walked by, was like watching a passing train. His voice was like Henry’s, halting in a charming way, but as deep as the bass in a three-piece combo.

“Little Brother, where have you been?” I watched as the Buffalo wrapped up the Bear and easily lifted him from his feet. Henry didn’t squirm or make noise; it would have been useless against such overwhelming warmth. He just hung there, his feet dangling about six inches from the ground. “You have been up to no good?”

Henry started to respond, but it was halfhearted. I watched as the Buffalo’s arms began to close, the plastic-covered hands crossed at the small of Henry’s back still gently holding the sandwiches. I watched as Brandon’s tendons and muscles slowly became more pronounced, but how his eyes remained flat and mischievous. The Bear’s face was just starting to show tinges of red, but he dare not let any of the saved air in his lungs escape. If he exhaled, his ribs would collapse like a fragile structure of wooden dowels. Henry’s face was slightly higher than Brandon’s, his chin about two inches from the Buffalo’s forehead. Henry could easily head-butt him, but I guess that wasn’t the point. I wondered if this was an everyday thing, if Henry had to run this gauntlet every time he came into the White Buffalo Sinclair. I would get my gas somewhere else.

* * *

I knew a story about Brandon White Buffalo; it happened a number of years ago and had to do with his mother’s house up near the Montana border. It was a dry camp, and the old girl didn’t have the money to drill a well, so Brandon dutifully made the trek into Durant’s public park every Saturday morning to the municipal water station where they had a machine that dispensed public water. A teenaged Turk had been there with a couple of his buddies when Brandon had rolled the fifty-five gallon drum off the back of his truck and began filling the barrel with the hose. They were boys and nudged each other and began giggling as the steel barrel grew fuller and fuller. Brandon heard the giggling and looked up with that beatific smile of his. The hose got loose and sprayed the crotch of his pants, and Turk and his friends laughed even louder. Brandon joined them, shaking his head. Calmly, Brandon White Buffalo squatted, grabbed the barrel, and lifted it onto the tailgate of the crouching pickup. In one swift push, the barrel slid into the back of the truck, and Brandon closed the tailgate. He smiled, danced a little dance to help dry off his pants, and waved at the townies as he drove away. At this point, Turk told me, no one was laughing.

* * *

There really wasn’t much I could do for Henry, other than pull out my gun and shoot Brandon. I figured the Buffalo would just eat the bullet like he ate life. “Brandon, do you think you might be hurting him?”

The Buffalo glanced at me and then looked back at the Bear. “No, he is very tough. He deflowered my sister, and you have to be tough for that.”

“You . . . should . . . know . . .” It was a tortured reply through gritted teeth, shot out in bursts, but it was enough. I watched the seismic tremors begin at the base of Brandon’s huge back, building and filling his lungs, exploding in short blasts that blew Henry’s hair back until they overtook the Buffalo and he dropped the Bear, laughing with a joy that shook the racks. When he regained his breath, he stood over Henry with his arms apart. “Little Brother, I have lovely sandwiches!”

We sat on the plastic window seat, Henry and I on one side, Brandon taking up the entire bench seat on the other. We ate our sandwiches and drank our coffee from hot cups that read ALWAYS FRESH. I watched Henry catch up on the last month. “Anything new with Lonnie?”

The Buffalo shifted his weight and laid an arm along the seatback. “It is a sad story of the Little Birds, with Margie drinking as much as she did an awful lot of the life went out of the family, but perhaps it is better that she passed?” His eyes turned to me. “You lost a wife too, Lawman?”

I was surprised. “Yes, I did.”

“It is a horrible thing to lose, a wife?”

His conversation was made up of questions, giving it a philosophical bent; I wasn’t sure which ones I should answer, so I just answered them all, “Yep.”

“They say it’s like losing part of yourself, but it’s worse than that?”

“How so?” Two could play this game.

“When they are gone, we are left with who we are after we were with them, and sometimes we don’t recognize that person?” He patted the table between us to show that no harm had been meant. “You will be all right, Lawman. He’s a good man, this man you are left with?” He turned back to Henry before I could reply. “You should go see Lonnie, he asks about you. You are bad about your family?”

The Bear ignored the chastisement and smiled into his coffee. “I will. Is he home today?”

“He has no legs, so where would he go? He’s home everyday; he watches television? He watches everything. It is as if he thinks the things on the television aren’t happening if he’s not there to watch?”

“He might be right.”

“Mm-hmm, yes. It is so . . .” At which they both began snickering slyly and not looking at each other. I waited for a moment, then the Buffalo turned to me. “Have you met Lonnie?” I admitted I had. Years before the trial, I had been forced to convince Lonnie that just because a vehicle in town had been left running didn’t mean that you could take it for a little spin. “Mm-hmm, yes, it is so.” They burst out laughing again. If Lonnie had been there, he would have been laughing, too.

The conversation switched to Cheyenne and, through Henry, I discerned that Melissa was not living with her father and had been spirited off by one of the many aunts that lived closer to town. In a while, they switched back to English. “So, he might be living with his mother?” They were talking about Artie Small Song now.

“Yes, that girl he was going out with from Crow Agency? She decided she did not like his drinking?”

“He is drinking again?”

The big, netted head bobbed slightly. “Yes.” He glanced at me and nodded some more, ever smiling. “You like your sandwich, Lawman?”

I took another bite and chewed; it really was good. “Best on the Rez.”

His fists bounced off the surface of the table and our coffee cups hopped with little ringlets emanating from the centers of the dark liquid. “Best in the world!” I nodded my head in agreement and smiled back as Henry’s attention was drawn out the window.

“Does his mother still live out near Rabbit Town?”

The big arms crossed over the green apron, but the smile held. “Little Brother, I’m beginning to think that you didn’t come here today because of my beautiful sandwiches or because you love me?”

Henry’s eyes rolled to the ceiling but then quickly rested on the Buffalo. I had seen that look before. It wasn’t a look you could stand for long; it burned. It burned because he cared. I watched the Buffalo to see what kind of effect it had on him, but the only thing that happened was that I heard drums, far in the distance. I’m sure they were just in my head but, as I thought this, I could see the Buffalo’s head nod ever so slightly keeping time with my drums. His eyes stayed locked with Henry’s, and I’m sure he heard them, too.

When we got outside, one of the tires was flat, so I loaned Henry a quarter and we pumped it back up. He said it would hold, and I cursed the day the truck was built. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I noticed that the Cherokee was gone. We couldn’t afford tricked-out Jeeps with the measly budget we had. I had a truck that was two years old, but the rest of the force either had five-year-old vehicles or, like Jim Ferguson, drove their own and got reimbursed for mileage. I had meant to call in to the office while at the Buffalo’s place, but it had slipped my mind; some way to run a murder investigation.

* * *

The Little Bird case had gone to the jury at 2:50 on the afternoon of September 16, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the county who noticed it on the calendar that hung on the bulletin board behind the witness stand. The trial and all its paraphernalia seemed to take on the lessening expectations of some television movie of the week. I had to remind myself that it was real.

The jury was charged with reaching a decision on nine counts: one charge of conspiracy; four counts of aggravated assault, involving the use of the broom and bat and the act of oral sex; and four counts of sexual contact, in which the defendants were charged with fondling Melissa’s breasts and forcing her to masturbate them. They were also given a list of fifteen lesser charges. I remembered Vern Selby leaning over his desk and clasping his hands into a joined fist. He instructed the jury to ponder two main questions: Was force or coercion used against Melissa Little Bird; and was the Cheyenne girl mentally defective; and, as an auxiliary, did Cody, George, Jacob, and Bryan know that, or should they have known that?

The judge had explained that coercion was not simply the use of brute force but that it could be a subtler process; that the jury would have to decide if Melissa had been conned into going into the basement; whether she had been vulnerable because of her psychological condition; whether the size and configuration of the basement intimidated her; or whether the number of boys and what they had told her before she left had pressured her into submitting.

Vern didn’t look up when he changed gears; he just kept looking at his collective fist and talking like one of those auctioneers at an auction where nobody’s buying anything. He told them that the legal term mentally defective did not mean that someone was slow or retarded. It meant that a person did not understand that she had a right to refuse sex or was incapable of refusing; and, that to convict on this charge, the jury would have to agree that the defendants knew or should have known that Melissa Little Bird was defective.

Lucian and I had had a long conversation about it after the trial; he said you had to do what you could do, and you did it the best you could; that if things turned or didn’t turn out the way you wanted, you let it go. If you did anything else, you were opening yourself up to very bad things. I hadn’t let it go, so was that where I was now, in the land of very bad things? Was I there alone, or was Melissa there with me, dragging our red rowboat across the teepee rings of the high plains? And who else was there with us, under those black and blue skies, carrying a very large caliber buffalo rifle?

* * *

“What are you thinking about, badass?” I didn’t respond, just sat there looking out the windshield at things to come. “You know, I think I will start calling that the Little Bird Look.”

I stared at the decrepit chrome antenna shivering in the velocity of roughly forty-five miles an hour. Captain America was hanging in there. Yea, verily, though I walked through the valley of very bad things . . . I was going to have to bring Turk back up from Powder Junction, and there was a dark little part of my soul that was looking forward to it. I told that dark little part to shut up and go curl up in a corner, and it did, but not completely. It never did, not completely.

“It is the one where the eyes bug out a little, and those two little lines dig in at the corners of your mouth.” He turned back to the road. “It is very manly.” I continued to look through the glass and attempted to un-bug my eyes. “I wish I had a look like that . . .”

I needed a change of subject. “You still have your horses?”

A little breath of air came out as he responded, “My uncle’s horses, yes.” Henry never claimed the horses, even though they had been his for more than ten years. It was because they were Appaloosas. He felt about Appaloosas the way I felt about his truck; they were here just to piss him off. Henry figured that the reason the Cheyenne had always ridden Appaloosas into battle was because by the time the men got there, they were so angry with the horses they were ready to kill everything.

“We should go out and ride sometime.”

He turned to look at me again, his eyes bugged a little this time. “You hate horses.”

I didn’t hate horses, I just didn’t like them. I didn’t really want to go riding; I was just hoping the shock value of the statement would change the subject. “The founding fathers used to say that riding was good for the digestion.”

“Whose founding fathers?”

“Mine. Your guys didn’t even have horses until you stole them from the Spanish . . . We headed over to the Mission?”

He smiled and nodded. “Yes.”

Like most of the houses on the reservation, the St. Labre Mission had a basketball court out back. It was a rough looking place, with large chunks of the asphalt crumbling off at the edges in pieces as big as softballs. What little paint there had been to signify the out-of-bounds, foul, and three-point areas had long since faded into the dark gray of the asphalt’s aggregate. It had a steel backboard painted to depict a war shield in faded and chipped reds, blacks, yellows, and whites. There was a hoop with no net, and despite the cold there were four young men playing a game of pickup in their shirtsleeves; one of the T-shirts read MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COWBOYS and another read FIGHTIN’ WHITIES in fifties script. The boys were classic Cheyenne, tall and lean, with a touch of casualness that betrayed their age. I wondered why they were here and not in school, but I figured I had enough on my plate without being a truant officer. He cut the motor and started to get out. “Do me a favor and stay in the truck.”

I looked back at him, concern in my eyes. “Even if they don’t hit the open man on the give and go?”

He closed the door, and I watched him saunter toward the court. The word insouciance was invented for Henry and, against it, the teenage version suffered. The Bear was doing vintage James Dean, and it made the boys look like a bunch of basketball-playing Pat Boones. I wondered if they knew Henry. Everybody out here was related in a complex order of extended family. I wondered how many the Bear helped. I had been with him when he made the numerous deposits into the various accounts, a hundred dollars here and a hundred dollars there. I also knew that all the groceries he bought in town didn’t end up at the bar. All of these actions made up an intricate network that provided for the individual without exacting the cost of self-respect.

Henry stopped at the edge of the pavement and leaned against the opening in the sagging chain-link fence, his thumbs hooked in his jeans. They looked at him, sneaking glances, figuring that whatever he wanted was his problem. It would be interesting to see how quickly he could make his problem theirs; it didn’t take long. After a fade away from the far corner, the ball deflected off the hoop and bounced right over to him. He didn’t move, just lodged the ball to a stop with his boot.

They fanned out as they came, like coyotes approaching their first wolf. One of them, the tallest one, said something, and Henry nodded by throwing his head back a bit and inviting them closer. The tall one started to stoop for the ball but pulled up short. The Bear must have said something. Nobody moved, then I saw the back of Henry’s head shift slightly, and the teenagers started laughing, all of them except the tall one. He cocked his head to one side and said something back, and I would bet it wasn’t pleasant. A brief moment passed, and Henry bent over and came up with the ball, spinning it in both hands. From the movement of his head, I could tell he was talking trash. The tall kid nodded, turned, and started walking back toward the court as Henry took one step after him, lined up, and shot. It wasn’t anything all that miraculous, about a twenty-five foot jumper that bounced off the rim twice and fell through, but for a guy who hadn’t held one of the things in ten years, it wasn’t bad. The tall kid turned and looked at him. Henry spread his hands out in an apologetic gesture and walked over to the young man. Throwing a paw around his shoulders, he steered him back over to the group. They were all talking and laughing now, with a few gestures from the boys indicating the road behind the Mission’s Indian School and beyond. They tossed Henry the ball again as he turned and started back for the truck. I saw him stop, look at the much greater distance to the basket, then shrug and throw the ball back to the tall one. It would have been showing off. The boys helped push start the Rezdawg, and we got going again. “You know, I remember a time when you would have made that shot, nothing but net.”

* * *

Artie Small Song’s mother lived up a dirt road off 566 going toward Custer National Forest. It looked like a cliff dwelling with the parted-out vehicles and abandoned, lesser trailer homes wedged into the rock walls of the little canyon. It was a grand location, if a little cluttered, and the farther you went back into the place, the older the vehicles got. By the time we climbed our way to the trailer that had a little stovepipe with a trail of smoke coming out, I was looking for the original wheel. I asked him to park the truck headed down the hill, which he did after a little grumbling. Once again, I waited and wondered why it was I was even here.

I rolled down the window as far as it would go, about halfway, and breathed. The sharp contrast of the canyon air mingled with the musty warmth of the truck. There was one thing I liked about Henry’s truck, even if I never told him: its comfortable smell of old steel, earth, and leather. I had grown up in old trucks like these, and there was a security there, a sense memory that transcended brand names and badge loyalties. I looked around at the assembled vehicular dreams and thought about the mobility of western longings. None of the wheels around me would likely ever roll again, but were there any deep-seeded passions still harbored in the sun-dried interiors and slowly rusting bodies? It was doubtful, but hope does tend to roll eternal.

He was on the makeshift porch, talking to an older woman through a closed screen door. His hands hung loose to his sides; after a while the inside door closed, and he returned. He grinded the starter a few times, then quietly turned the wheel and coasted down the hill, hopes dashed.

“Well?”

Once the truck lurched to a start, he mumbled, “A different girl-friend.”

We followed 566 to 39, took a right, and headed north. “Would the gun be there or with his mother?”

The response was a little ominous. “Artie always keeps his guns with him.”

Artie Small Song’s latest hit didn’t live too far from the cutoff that headed back to Lame Deer. Alice Shoulder Blade was a dental hygiene student at the college in Sheridan but spent her weekends back on the Rez with Artie. Henry said that chances were she wasn’t there, it being a Wednesday, but you never knew when Artie might pop up. It was a smallish, white house with wooden clapboard sides and a bare dirt yard that had a number of dogs asleep alongside the foundation and under the porch. When we drove up they roiled out at us from all directions and made a great show of attacking the truck and raising a general Cain. There was one blue-heeler/border collie mix; the rest were anybody’s guess. Henry rolled down his own window as he parked and growled very loudly, “Wahampi!” The dogs slid to a stop, yelped, and ran back under the porch, so far back I couldn’t see them. As he opened his door, he paused and looked at me. “Lakota for stew. Those dogs are Sioux from Pine Ridge.”

“How can you tell?”

Henry knocked. “Cheyenne dogs would wait quietly, till you got out of the truck.” Nobody answered, so he knocked again. This time, the force of his knocking jarred the door open about two inches, and we looked at each other. “On the reservation, this constitutes an invitation.”

I thought about the numerous laws, both federal and local, that I was breaking as I crept in after him. There wasn’t a whole lot there, only a few pieces of furniture and a framed picture of Alice at what I’m sure was her senior prom. There were lots of boxes scattered around the living room, filled with hunting clothes, old lace-up boots, videotapes, and reloading equipment. It was difficult to discern whether Artie was moving in or out. “Maybe Alice doesn’t live here anymore.” This to the roll of the eyes and a turn of the back as he checked the small kitchen.

I kneeled by the box containing the reloading equipment and took a look at the dies; the ones that were in the machine read .223. Henry came back through and wandered farther down a short hallway, checking each room as he went. I carefully rummaged through the loading box and came up with a small wooden container of dies in separate cardboard; the third one I pulled out was old and didn’t have any markings. Automatically, I reached to the pancake holster at the small of my back. By the time I had popped the safety strap and pulled the .45 out, Henry had returned from the hallway. When he saw the gun, he stopped and quickly looked around the little house, finally returning his look to me. “What?”

“What?”

“The gun?”

“Checking the caliber on his dies.”

He stretched his shoulder muscles. “Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.”

I smiled and unlocked the safety, pressing the side of my thumb against the button, allowing the magazine to slide into my other hand. I rested the die on the closed wooden box and thumbed a shell from the Colt, setting the bullet next to the die. The circumference was identical. Artie Small Song could reload Sharps .45-70s. “Okay, if I were a gun in this house, where would I be?”

We both said it at the same time, “Closet.”

I carefully repacked the dies, placing everything back in the box as it had been. Then I popped the bullet back in the magazine, reloaded my weapon, and replaced it in the holster. I followed Henry down the hallway to the only bedroom at the end, turned the corner, and saw him standing with his hands on his hips. “You better come look at this.”

I walked over to the open door of the closet and looked in. There were enough weapons in there to arm a small platoon. There were FAL .308s, AK-47s, MAC-10s, and the M-16s leaned against the inside wall. There was even an Armalite M-50 and a collection of Mossberg 12 gauge, short barrel, and tactical shotguns. Even sitting on the wooden cases of ammunition, in a dental hygienist’s closet, they looked deadly. Some of the guns were civilian versions, but others were fully automatic and fully functional. I leaned against the doorjamb and crossed my arms. “Wow.”

“Yes.” He looked sad. “I am guessing Artie does not have a federal license for all this automatic stuff.”

“Maybe he’s gonna open a store?”

“Yes. Guns-R-Us.” He leaned in for a closer look. “Is that an M-50?”

“Looks like to me.” I poked my head in and looked in the other corners. “I bet if we dig in those crates down there we’ll find ourselves a couple of .45 ACPs that match the dies in the other room.” I looked around. “Maybe this is a conversation we should have in the truck?”

He followed me out after closing the closet door, and I felt a lot better when we were standing on the porch. I think I heard a few low growls as we walked off the steps, but the mad rush for our heels didn’t come. We leaned against the front of the truck’s grill guard and talked. It had turned out to be a beautiful day, and the temperature was rapidly approaching forty-five. I unbuttoned my jacket and put an arm up. “Well, I’ll tell you what I didn’t see in there . . .”

“Yes. Artie’s taste in weapons seems to run au courant.”

I turned to look at him. “I’m pleased to see that some of that high school French took.”

He continued to look at the house. “Oui.”

“What do you know about Artie, other than his momma don’t love him no more?”

I waited while he composed himself. I don’t know if not knowing Artie was a full-fledged militia-ist or if weighing the odds on his being guilty of murdering Cody Pritchard embarrassed him, but his jaw set and the eyes hardened.

“Artie is an angry young man.” He paused. “What do you know about him?”

I had looked Artie up and came clean. “He’s got two cases of aggravated assault, one pending. He did a domestic for spousal abuse over in South Dakota and has two unpaid speeding tickets here in Wyoming.” I waited a moment. “You seem to be taking this personally.”

He shook his head. “I am reacting to the lost potential.”

“Yep, I know you wouldn’t know anything about that angry young man stuff.”

We both shook our heads. “No.”

I had to push the truck this time, twice. The first time, it jumped when he let out the clutch and barked all the skin off my right shin. The second time, with my arm locked straight with the effort of moving the two-ton beast, it stoved my shoulder and blew a sooty cloud of smoke and unburnt gas in my face. I climbed in and shut the door. “I hate this truck.” We drove back toward Lame Deer on 39, and I peeled off my jacket and laid it on the seat between us. I thought about where we were headed, about Lonnie.

I wondered how long it would take for the Little Bird look to come back.

* * *

Jim Ferguson wore a gun at the trial; that alone was enough to make me laugh, but the context robbed me of my sense of humor. It was before Vic, so my two deputies were Lenny Rowell and Jim. Jim kept fussing with his belt, and Lenny was trying to catch a nap as he leaned against the bookcases of burgundy leather-covered Shepard’s Wyoming Citations. I told Jim to get his belt adjusted because fidgeting deputies with guns made the common populace nervous and excused myself to go to the bathroom. When I got there, Lonnie Little Bird was trying to get his wheelchair into one of the stalls. The county hadn’t gotten around to putting in handicapped facilities, and Lonnie wasn’t fitting. He looked up through his coke-bottle glasses and smiled. “Mm, hmm. Yes, I am having troubles. It is so.”

I looked around. I hadn’t noticed anybody on the way in. “Lonnie, is there anybody to help you?”

“Mm, hmm . . . Mm, hmm.” He continued to smile. “You.”

He was a small man, even counting the two missing legs, and it was relatively easy to lift him up and hold him as he unbuttoned his pants. I sat him on the toilet. The grin never left his face. He had a large head with prominent ears. The nose was flat and looked like it had been broken numerous times. There was a rumor that the old guy had played professional baseball for one of the teams in the Midwest but, as far as I knew, it was only a rumor. He spoke as I started to close the stall door. “Mm, Sheriff?”

I paused. “Yep, Lonnie?”

“You know how old I am, Sheriff ?”

I figured about sixty-five. “No, Lonnie. I can’t say that I do.”

“Mm, fifty-three years old. Yes, it is so.”

Jesus. “Lonnie, that’s pretty young.” There was silence for a while, and I was afraid I had said something wrong. “Lonnie?”

“Mm, sometimes I think it’s very old.” Another pause, and I zipped up and moved over to the sink to wash my hands. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been here a very long time.”

I pulled out a paper towel and dried my hands. “Yep, I feel like that sometimes too, Lonnie.”

“These boys, the ones that have done this thing to my daughter?” My breath caught in my throat. “It’s a bad thing they’ve done, yes?”

I leaned against the counter and looked at the stall door. “Yes, it is a bad thing that they have done.” There was a long silence, and I was glad no one could see my eyes well in anger and frustration. “Very bad.”

The voice that came back was soft. “Mm, I get confused sometimes, and I just wanted to ask you.”

When I got back to the courtroom, the jury light was glowing red.

* * *

There was a small dish attached to Lonnie’s house that brought in the world, and I’m pretty sure who had ordered and paid for it. Henry’s eyes were beginning to glaze over as Lonnie gave us his version of what was happening on this particular daytime drama, but I did my best to pay attention. “The problems started at the health clinic, that’s where Dirk begged Catalina to not go through with the abortion. Cat agreed and said she was looking forward to having a family, mm-hmmm, mm-hmmm . . . But I’m not so sure. After they left the clinic, there were complications, but the doctors said she would be all right, so Dirk dropped her off at the mansion and went over to see Latisha. But when he got there, Latisha told him that he needed to be with Catalina now that she is pregnant, so he left, but that’s okay ’cause now Latisha is with Ben, and he seems to be a good fellow. Mm, hmm. Yes, it is so.”

Lonnie watched soap operas because there was no baseball in November. The rumors of Lonnie’s playing pro ball turned out to be true. There was baseball paraphernalia scattered in a few spots around the place, baseball bats tucked into corners, old gloves stacked up on shelves. There were pictures of Lonnie standing around with Cubs, Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins; Cardinals, Lou Brock and Joe Torre; Reds, Tony Perez and Johnny Bench, whom he blamed for ending his career. “After I saw him coming up, I just didn’t see any reason to go on playing. He’s part Indian too, you know. Choctaw. Mm, hmm . . . Yes, it is so.”

The only thing that outnumbered the baseball pictures were photographs of Melissa. The only photographs I had of Melissa were not good ones. I stopped before an especially wonderful one of her in full dancing regalia, seated on a Palomino in front of a painted teepee. Its frame had started out as gold but was now rusted and tarnished at the edges. It was likely it was taken down and handled a great deal. I thought about defects, about the rape, the trial, and the Little Big Horn reenactment where I had seen her last. Lonnie probably thought about those things a lot, too.

It was nearing one o’clock, and Lonnie had wheeled himself into the kitchen to instruct Henry how to make the pickle-loaf, yellow American sliced cheese, and Kraft-spread sandwiches on Wonder Bread that would be our lunch. This was my kind of food, but Henry’s gourmet sensibilities were having a hard time of it. “Lonnie, I buy you good food, why don’t you eat it?”

“Your good food is complicated and takes too long to make. Mm . . . There are Vlassic pickle stackers in the door there.”

With a sigh, Henry returned to the refrigerator, retrieved the jar of sliced pickles, and got ice from the freezer side of the appliance. “Lonnie, are you buying all that frozen food off the Schwan’s truck again?”

He looked over at me through those thick, metal-frame glasses, needing an ally. And if Lonnie had said that little green men had deposited the eight boxes of Hot Pockets in his freezer, I was going to agree. “I feel sorry for him when he drives all the way up the driveway.” I nodded as he continued. “We have good talks; he is from Kentucky.” I nodded some more.

It was a little single-level ranch house that must have been built in the fifties, and the only things that kept me from thinking I was on one of those family sitcoms from the period was the amount of Indian art and craft that decorated it and the concrete ramps that led up to the doors of the spotless house. Lonnie Little Bird was on a campaign to get his daughter back from that gaggle of aunts in closer to town. This campaign meant Lonnie didn’t drink, Lonnie didn’t smoke, and Lonnie didn’t use the Lord’s name in vain, at least when any of the aunts were in earshot. There was Barq’s root beer in the refrigerator beside the pickled pig’s feet, and that’s what we were drinking. I finished off the end of my two sandwiches. “When did Artie sell that rifle, Lonnie?”

“Mm, hmm. About a year ago. He sold that gun to that Buffalo Bill Museum over in Cody. Yes. It was winter, and he needed the money.” He took a swig of his root beer and studied the Formica for a moment. “Not everybody has a nice house like mine . . .” His eyes glanced furtively at Henry. I got the feeling Lonnie liked secrets. A moment passed. “Sheriff?”

“Yep, Lonnie.”

“Do you think that Artie did this thing to this boy?”

I picked up the root beer can and looked at it; as near as I could figure it had been about twenty years since I had tasted the stuff. “Well, I’m just checking everything out, everything and everybody.”

He smiled. “Mm, hmm. Am I being checked out also?”

I looked at the little spark behind the glasses and wasn’t going to be the one to tell him that without any legs he was kind of low on our list of suspects. “Just following up on all the leads, Lonnie.”

He continued to smile but looked over to Henry and said a few short words in Cheyenne. Henry glanced at me, then back to his cousin, and then got up and walked out, turning the corner at the hallway. My eyes returned to Lonnie with a question, but he only sat there looking back through glasses so thick you could see little rainbows at the edges. After a moment or two I heard Henry returning down the hallway, his boots padding softly on the wall-to-wall carpeting. When he turned the corner again, he was carrying an old leather rifle scabbard with the straps you attach to a saddle hanging down, unbuckled. Due to my recent course of study, I recognized the Sharps butt plate that stuck out the end. When he got to the counter, he handed the weapon to me. I looked up at Lonnie, who gestured for me to take out the buffalo gun.

I carefully slid the rifle from its wool-lined sheath and rested the butt on my knee, and it was the most beautiful gun I had ever seen. It wasn’t in as good shape as Omar’s, there were scratches along the stock and the part of the foregrip that was wood, but each scar had been lovingly poulticed with oil and polished to a gleaming sheen. The metal had not been so lucky. Someone had taken steel wool to it at some point, and the ruddy sepia tone of its original color only showed in small creases; the rest was ghostly silver. There was a simple cross of brass tacks in the stock, the pattern a great deal like the one on the side of Red Road Contracting’s truck, and ten distinct notches along the top ridge of the stock. The foregrip had three red-wool trading-cloth wraps ornamented with quillwork and with smaller feathers than I had seen on the scabbard of Omar’s gun or, lately, in plastic bags. I touched the feathers and looked at Henry. “Owl.” Messenger from the world of the dead indeed.

I turned the rifle around and looked at the magnificent pattern beaded underneath. Lonnie looked at me through the magnifying glasses. “Mm, hmm. The pattern is called Dead Man’s Body. Yes, it is so.”

8

On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, as the heat waves rolled from the buffalo grass, giving the impression of a breeze that did not exist, Colonel George Armstrong Custer and five companies of the Seventh Cavalry rode into the valley of the Little Big Horn. Also that afternoon, Davey Force, a pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics, went six for six against Chicago, who scored four runs in the ninth to pull out a 14 to 13 victory. Custer was not so lucky.

The report of the Secretary of War states that the five companies had 405 Springfield carbines caliber .45, along with their single action 396 Colt revolvers caliber .45. What the Seventh Cavalry contingency did not carry were any Sharps. When the fight began, only about half the Indians had guns, and they were a varied sort: muzzleloaders, Spencer carbines, old-fashioned Henry rifles, and an unspecified number of Sharps. The army didn’t stand much of a chance, trapped on that beautiful hillside, with no reinforcements coming. I thought about how those gentle slopes smelled and sounded on a glorious summer day, about how they might have smelled and sounded that June day in 1876. I also thought about the pumpkin that had exploded from a very long distance in Omar’s back pasture.

When Little Wolf led a straggling band of thirty-three Northern Cheyenne warriors into surrender two and a half years later on March 25, 1879, they handed in twenty assorted rifles and carbines, of which the majority were Sharps, numbering nine. I held in my hands the tenth. “So, your great-great-grandfather didn’t surrender his?”

He continued to look out the windshield as he drove. “I guess he did not completely trust the white man. Go figure.”

I looked down at the rifle, the butt resting on the toe of my boot; I didn’t want the truck to touch it. “Do these ten little notches along the ridge here mean what I think they mean?”

“Another potato digger bites the dust.” He slowed as a mule deer darted across the road a couple of hundred yards ahead and, sure as anything, another followed. “No, it stands for the tenth rifle. It was so they could tell them apart.” He saw me looking at all the beads, feathers, and silver tacks. “All that was put on later.”

The Cheyenne got their weapons by trading or capture; I didn’t ask how they got this lot of ten. “Okay, so your great great grandfather surrenders in 1879 but hides this ol’ boy out on the range?”

“Wrapped up in two inches of bear grease.”

“When did they get out?”

“As near as I can tell, we never have.”

I raised an eyebrow. “When did the soldiers let him go?”

“About six months later; winter was coming on, and they did not want to have to feed them.”

“He went back and got it six months later?”

“Yes.” He smiled to himself. “We were tough, in the day.”

I looked at the gun again. “Any idea when it was last shot?”

The smile played out thinly on his lips. “Friday of last week?”

“Very funny. How come your cousin has it?”

“It is in the family; that is all that matters. No one in the family has personal ownership, but I doubt anybody would argue if I claimed it.”

I thought of the T-bird. “Like Lola?”

“Like Lola.” He smiled to himself some more. “Anyway, it is haunted.”

As it grew darker, the soft Wyoming sky drifted into night. I pulled out my watch to see what time it was: 5:30. I still had time to go home and take a shower and get the truck off of me. I was looking forward to being with Vonnie, with somebody who didn’t have any connection with the case.

* * *

When we picked up the wine at the Pony, he left the truck running. Dena Many Camps came out to talk with me while Henry rummaged through the wine coolers. She tended bar for Henry when he wasn’t there, was one of Henry’s protégés in billiards, and was a good friend of Cady’s, although she was about four years older. You would be hard pressed to find a better-looking woman. She walked with a wicked grace, like a panther with a pool cue. “What’re you doing, Trouble?” She always called me Trouble, even though I’m sure she had caused more than I ever would.

“Well, if it isn’t what makes the Badlands look good.” She wrote poetry and had been offered a scholarship to Dartmouth but had decided to pursue billiards instead. She probably made more money at pool, but I wondered if she ever regretted not going to college. “What’re you up to other than luring men to their financial doom a quarter at a time?”

She rested her arms on the scaly sill of the truck, fingers drumming lightly on her exposed elbows. “I like torturing them slowly. Anyway, a girl’s gotta make a living, and I can’t do it on what this guy pays me.” She pulled her lips back into a broad smile, just to show me there was no malice. “There’s a pool tournament down in Vegas, and I’m leaving next week.”

I looked at the white fringe on the silk yoke of the western shirt-dress she wore. She always had on flamboyant western clothes when she competed in the tournaments. Somehow, it didn’t seem fair. She looked back toward the bar. “What’s he doing in there?”

“Getting some wine for me.”

“Wine . . . for you?”

“What, I don’t look like a wine guy to you?”

She reached in and felt the feathers on the rifle with her fingertips. “Owl.” She looked closer and her hand froze. “Ohohyaa . . .”

“That mean owl?”

“No.” She shook her head. “No, it means . . . terrible. Sehan . . .” Her eyes narrowed, and her hand came away from the gun as though the rifle might bite. “This is a weapon from the Camp of the Dead.”

“Actually, it’s from Lonnie Little Bird.” Her hands went to her hair, and I could tell she was unbraiding it for a reason. “It’s for a ballistics test.”

Her eyes met mine, and she continued to undo her long braid. “This is a ghost weapon, a weapon sent from the dead to retrieve.”

“Retrieve what?”

“Not what . . . who.”

“What, they need a fourth for bridge?”

Her eyes sharpened to slits of flint. “This is not funny. It’s big medicine.”

“Big medicine.” I started to make another smart-aleck remark but thought better of it. “I was just . . .”

“Lonnie Little Bird gave this to you?”

“For ballistics, we’ve got to check it against the one that killed Cody Pritchard.”

She finished unbraiding and shook her head, the dark hair falling loose over her shoulders. “Give it back to him.”

“I will, after we shoot it.” I reached out to touch her arm, but she shifted away. “What’s the story with the hair?”

“It is a sign of respect and protection. There are spirits that linger near that weapon, and they can easily take away the soul of someone still living for the enjoyment of their society.”

The hand that held the rifle suddenly felt cold, so I shifted to the other one. “I’ll get it right back to him, just as soon as we get a test fire.” Henry had exited the bar with the two bottles of wine and opened the door of the truck, his eyes meeting Dena’s.

“What is up, Toots?” He climbed in, but her eyes stayed on him as he concerned himself with the shifter and with shutting the door. Finally, he cocked his head and looked at her again. “What?”

“You let Lonnie give him this?”

His voice growled, low and steady. “It is his job.” A full fifteen seconds passed before she exhaled, turned, and walked into the Red Pony without looking back; the fringe on her dress matched the sway of her hair. I turned to look at him. “Women.” He put the truck in gear and backed away from the bar, hitting the tired brakes, shifting into first, and pulling out toward my place. I continued to look at him. “What?”

“What? I’ve got ‘the’ Cheyenne death rifle here?”

He shook his head. “So to speak.” He glanced over. “Bother you?”

“Only if ghosts are going to fly out of the barrel and carry me off to the Camp of the Dead.” He laughed a hearty, honest laugh. “What?”

He laughed some more. “Your company is not that good.”

The rifle, Henry, the ghosts, and me drove up the road and deposited me at my cabin. The rifle and I went in, Henry went back down the road, and where the ghosts went was anybody’s guess. I carefully sat the rifle on the arms of my easy chair and looked at it.

* * *

Retriever of the Dead. The thing was worth a million dollars—was priceless probably—and leaving it lying around my little house that had no locks didn’t seem like a good idea. I was going to have to take it with me over to Vonnie’s, but I could always leave it in the Bullet. I wrestled a shower out of the bathroom and put on clean clothes. The phone machine in my bedroom was blinking, but I ignored it. The rifle was still there when I got back to the living room, so I looked around the place for any apparitions and was a little disappointed when none appeared. Maybe Henry was right; maybe I was lousy company, even at a dead man’s party. I walked back into my bedroom and stared at the answering machine. I hoped that Cady had called, but the little blinking red light was looking angry. Maybe the ghosts had left a message, so I pushed the button.

“Okay, we had three mailboxes at Rock Creek reportedly hit, got a call on some kid chasing horses with his snow machine, turns out the kid owned the horses and there’s no law saying you can’t herd livestock with a snow machine . . . that from the eleven-year-old perpetrator. Earl Walters slid off the road at Klondike and Upper Clear Creek and took out a yield sign; I always knew the ancient fucker couldn’t read. And our crime of the day, Old Lady Grossman reported somebody stealing the snowman out of her yard and driving off with it. Ferg stopped the suspect, who turned out to be her nephew who had taken it as a joke.”

We weren’t likely to make America’s Most Wanted with a selection of crimes such as these, but it was premium Roundup material.

“So, out of our list, the only ones that have reloading equipment are Mike Rubin and Stanley Fogel.”

The dentist.

“The dentist.” There was a pause, as the machine recorded her thinking. “Wouldn’t it be a pisser if it turned out to be the dentist? I know it doesn’t have the ring that the butler does, but wouldn’t people be surprised?”

I nodded my head in agreement.

“Anyway, I went over and checked on him. He’s cute. I think I’m going to change dentists.”

Jesus. There was a rustling of papers, and she continued.

“I also went out to Mike Rubin’s shop while you were out joyriding on the Rez. Is that fucker goofy or what?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know if he was more rattled by having a sheriff’s deputy there or a woman. He doesn’t get out much, does he?”

I shook my head this time.

“I got samples from both, and neither match up with what we think we’ve got. The Ferg finally got around to checking on the Esper place, and he says that there weren’t any tracks in the snow leading up to the house. I called the post office and, sure enough, they put a hold on their mail that goes off tomorrow. I called the mine and asked them. They said he was down in Colorado, visiting his sister, no number left. The sister is married, and nobody here seems to know the name or where in Colorado they live, so here we are at the beginning. I’ll swing around there tonight and see if they’ve gotten back from the other square state.”

There was a pause, then the machine beeped, and she spoke again, “Okay, so I swung by the Espers and left a note behind the storm door telling them to contact us as soon as they get in. Ferg’s right, there hasn’t been anybody there for days. If they call, I’ll call you. I’ll be here tonight, if you need me. All night. Glen and I are fighting, so I’m sleeping here.”

I stared at the machine.

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing big, just the usual shit. Don’t call to check on me and don’t come in here. I’m fine. Oh, and by the way, Phil La Vante died about three months ago, so should I take him off our short list?”

I nodded, and the machine clicked off. I hated marital discord; I hated it when I was married. I often wondered about Vic’s marriage. There were times when she and Glen appeared to get along, but most of the time it seemed like they led separate but unequal lives. This wasn’t the first night she’d spent at the jail. She wasn’t the frequent lodger I was but, only a month ago, I’d been in my office one night catching up on paperwork when I heard somebody open the front door. As she walked into her office opposite mine, all she said was “Don’t ask” and slammed her door behind her. After a few moments though, she reappeared with her Philadelphia Police mug and a bottle of tequila, had sat down in the chair by my door, threw her feet up on my desk, poured herself a drink and hissed, “All men are assholes, right?” I nodded vigorously, quietly finished my reports as she drank, and then crept out, my back to the wall.

I fought the urge to call her and went back to the front of the house to collect the two bottles of wine and the rifle; it weighed enough to be haunted. The emotional toll of the day was having an effect on me, and I wondered if I wasn’t already in the Camp of the Dead. I wondered if I hadn’t been for the last four years. I sat the bottles down and pulled the old girl from the scabbard, looking at the rubbed spots. The barrel was round, the heavy military model rather than the expected octagonal like Omar’s. I looked at the beads attached to the hide covering on the foregrip.

Dead Man’s Body was an intricate design of triangles, points, and geometric figures showing not only the body itself, but the wounds and the spears that had done the deed. Henry had explained that it was more of a Sioux pattern, but that that might have been the reason for using it, to warn the Lakota that they should not take their alliance with the Cheyenne lightly. They were the small Venetian seed beads that had become more predominant around 1840 and had a richer color than the earlier pony style. The stitching was overlay, not the usual lazy stitch you saw nowadays, and when you held the rifle up to the light there was no space between the rows. I thought about all those little strings of beads sailing across the Atlantic from Italy. Maybe Vic’s ancestors had supplied the ornamentation for Henry’s in six degrees of beaded separation.

I smiled and made a conscious effort to be better company for the Old Cheyenne and, to prove it, I raised the rifle high over my head and gave out with the most blood-curdling war cry I could manage. I’m pretty sure I could do it better when I was seven, but the shout rattled around my little house and made me feel better, so I did it four or five more times. The last one hurt but was the best. I felt like an extra in a fifties B movie, so I put the rifle back in its scabbard, picked up my wine, and headed for the truck.

* * *

The temperature was dropping, and it was starting to look like we might get more snow. I hit the NOAA band on my radio and listened to the little computer-generated Norwegian tell me that two to four inches was expected on the mountain but only an inch down here. So far, not a flake had fallen, but I figured I could always call Henry; he could tell me exactly when it was going to begin.

I started digesting Vic’s oral report; the Espers worried me. If Reggie Esper and his wife had taken off for Colorado, and I believe his sister lived in Longmont, had the two boys gone with them? It didn’t seem likely that two college-aged boys would go with their parents to visit an aunt for a week. I had honestly believed that Cody’s death had been an accident, at least mostly, until the feather. I was getting that fretful, nagging feeling that this case might end with all the loose strands that I had picked free. The old police adage says, when you’re done and there’s nothing there, go back to the beginning and start over. So, here I was, staring at the beginning and trying to figure out what it was I’d missed the first time.

* * *

I turned into Vonnie’s drive, pulled through the opening gate, and parked in front of the house. All the motion-detecting lights came on again, and I gathered up the stuff and started for the house. By the time I got to the porch, she had the door open. “You still look tired.”

“That bad, huh?” The light from the entryway was warm and tawny, reflecting the reddish highlights of her hair as she stood in the doorway.

“Your voice is hoarse. Are you all right?”

“Yep, I just had to do some shouting today. Sorry.”

She took my arm as I got there. “No, I like it. It’s sexy.”

I was feeling better and gave her the two bottles of wine after she shut the door. “Here, I brought wine. I picked it out myself.”

She looked at me for a moment, then her eyes dropped to the scabbard. “What’s that?”

I raised the rifle and shrugged. “This is a very long story . . .”

“Is it a gun?”

“Yep . . .”

“Not in my house.”

I looked at her face for the contention I expected to find, but there wasn’t any. It was a simple statement of fact, and her eyes still held the warmth that had invited me in. I felt the need to explain. “It’s an expensive piece, it doesn’t belong to me, and I thought it would be safer in here.” She looked down at the rifle again but didn’t say anything. “I’ll put it back in the truck.” I started to turn, but she caught my arm.

“No.”

There was a moment as she tried to weigh the options open to both of us. “It’s okay, I’ll just lock it up in the truck.”

“No. I’m sorry.” Her face came up, and the smile was a little sad, but generous. “Is it okay here, by the door?”

I smiled too. “Yep, that’ll be fine.” I propped the rifle in the corner and for the first time noticed my sheepskin coat draped across the chair that was also there. I turned and looked at her. “You gonna send me packing?”

She cocked her head and was instantly delicious. “No, I like the way it smells, and if you don’t take it with you tonight you’re not likely to get it back.” With this, she turned and started down the hallway and through the living room where I had left her the last time I was here. She was wearing low-heeled ropers, buckskin leather-laced pants, and an off-white silk blouse with western accents. The effect from the rear was breathtaking. I left the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead to commune with the smell of my coat and pursued some preferred company myself.

The elevated area between the arches was a dining room and on the other side of it was the kitchen. The smell of something wonderful was drifting through the doorway, a delicate smell, tangy, but with an underlying sea scent that spoke softly to the base of my stomach. The olive loaf sandwiches had worn thin.

The kitchen was a study in contrasts. The floors were Mexican tile, and the walls were the same reworked plaster as in the other parts of the house, only these were differing shades of red. Massive hand-hewn beams straddled the room overhead, and the cabinets looked like they had been salvaged from somebody’s line shack. The actual appliances were huge stainless-steel brutes that reminded me of the DCI coroner’s lab in Cheyenne. A number of things seemed to be simmering on the eight-burner stove, but my attention was drawn to the center island where a small glass vase of tulips sat between festively painted plates and silverware that looked stately enough to have been used at the Queen’s coronation. There were linen napkins in brass-and-silver rings, and I was getting that diminishing feeling that I was there to read the meter.

“I hope you don’t mind if we eat in the kitchen?” She went to the stove, lifted the lid on something, and stirred it with a long wooden spoon that came from a crock full of implements that was tucked into the corner of the counter. The steam rose and separated as it drifted past the shining adzed surface of the beams. I was willing to bet she didn’t have to worry about mouse poop. She had turned and was looking at me. “It just seemed cozier. If we eat in the dining room with just the two of us, it will be like that scene from Citizen Kane.” I nodded, trying to think of the scene from Citizen Kane, only able to come up with the one with the screaming cockatoo. “In anticipation of the snow, I’ve made hot buttered rum, or would you rather we start with some of this wonderful wine you’ve brought?”

“I think it’s only supposed to snow an inch.” Henry had his magic; I had the little computerized Norwegian. “But the hot buttered rum sounds great.”

She sprinkled sugar, cloves, and nutmeg into two thick-faceted glass tumblers, poured rum on top, added a couple of sticks of cinnamon and hot water, and finished it off with a large dollop of what read on the wrapper as IRISH COUNTRY BUTTER.

“We’ll save the wine for later. This’ll do your throat some good.” She leaned on the counter and raised her own glass. “Here’s to our first official date.” We touched glasses, and I felt the warmth in my chest before I even took a sip.

* * *

“So, he was clinically depressed?”

“Undiagnosed.”

Dinner was everything my stomach had hoped it would be: pasta with a cioppino of spinach, tomato, clams and mussels, and homemade country bread with which we both sopped up the leftover sauce. She followed this up with a homemade apple pie, topped with vanilla bean ice cream, and continued with the hot buttered rum, in spite of the wine. My mood was so warm and tranquil that I was beginning to fear that I might fall right off the little Italian stools and onto the floor. “I remember coming out here with Dad when I was a kid. He shod your father’s horses, and I tagged along.”

“Yes. I was trying to remember if I was here.”

“Yep, you were.”

She looked into her glass. “Was I a little snot?”

“Yep, you were.”

She laughed a soft laugh. “One chance and I blew it, huh?”

“It was summer, and you were gone all the other times. Didn’t you used to go somewhere?”

“Maine.”

“Maine. Doesn’t seem fair; summer is the payoff in Wyoming.” She stirred her drink with one of the thin sticks of cinnamon.

“I didn’t get much of a choice at the time.”

I tried to steer the conversation without appearing boorish. “Richest man in three counties, what’d he have to be depressed about?” She smiled, allowing the tiny bit of boorishness to pass.

“I don’t think he cared for himself too much.”

“How about you?”

“Did I care for him?” She paused, genuinely considering the question. “I suppose not, but the further down the road I go, the more I see my relationship with him having had an effect on every single choice in my life . . . in a negative or positive way.” She stared at the candles that had melted into the holders and blew them out. “That would have made him happy.” She stretched a hand across the table, and I stuck a paw out to meet her. She took my hand and turned it over, examining the creases on the sides of my fingers. I could feel an electric charge racing up my forearms as she traced the folds with a fingernail. “I like your hands, big and powerful, but they move very carefully, like an artist.”

“Piano lessons.”

“Really?”

“Very early on, I developed a love for boogie-woogie.”

“Oh my. I guess that’s what they call full-octave hands.” A moment went by. “That explains the piano at your house. You’ll have to play for me.”

“I’m kinda out of practice, which is kind of the theme for my life as of late.”

There was a long pause. “One of the cowboys found him in the tack shed. I guess he didn’t want to make a mess in the house.” She continued looking at my hand, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry, but instead she laughed a short laugh and smiled as she looked up at me. “Daddy’s little girl; not exactly the most compelling of psychological profiles, huh?”

“How could he leave something like you?” It was out before I could analyze how corny it was going to sound, but she didn’t laugh. Instead, it was a short, broken sob that forced her to wipe her nose and run the side of her thumb past the corner of her eye in an attempt to keep her mascara from running. I handed her my napkin but held on to the other hand. She laughed this time and straightened slightly. “Where’s your dog?”

She sniffed and then laughed again. “He’s in the mudroom out back, sulking.”

“Maybe I should meet him?”

She straightened an imagined run at the corner of her eye with the napkin. “I didn’t think you liked dogs.”

“I like dogs fine. Does he like people?”

She wiped her nose. “He hasn’t met that many.”

“Great, let me go get the rifle.” This time the laugh was wholehearted. “Your father is why you don’t allow guns in the house?”

“I just don’t like them. It seems to me that no matter what they always lead to bad things. My opinion is that produced for their specific purpose, they are inherently bad.” We stared at each other for a moment, then she continued, “I know that they are a necessary evil in your line of work, but I don’t allow necessary evils in my home.”

I cleared my throat and nodded. “How about your life?” Her eyes stayed with mine.

“I’ll have to think about that.”

“Okay.” I released her hand. “Speaking of necessary evils, where’s the mudroom?”

She stood and patted the table the same way Brandon White Buffalo had earlier in the day. “Maybe I better introduce the two of you.”

I waited with my hot buttered rum and killed off the last bit of crust. For pies like this, a man could hang up the old star and gun and slowly become as large as a minivan in stretch jeans. I sat the fork down and listened to the clatter as very large claws attempted to gain purchase on the Mexican tiles. I heard mild protests and a few thumps, and I would have been alarmed but for the continued giggling that accompanied the general commotion.

He was bigger than I remembered, and I remembered him being very big. He was caught by surprise at seeing somebody besides her in the house, and the disconcerted quality was evident in the head that was as big as a five-gallon gas can and quizzically turned to the side. She still had a hold on the leather collar; if she hadn’t, I’m sure he would have gone straight for me. I heard the throaty warning start deep in his chest as I desperately tried to remember the word for stew and hoped he understood Lakota.

She slapped him on the head and growled herself. “Stop that. Now!” The change was instantaneous; the eyebrows shifted, and his head dropped. He looked like a scolded Kodiak. He began panting and looked at me with his head rising to a comfortable interest, ears forward, and with the inquisitive slant once again visible. She shook his head a little with the collar but didn’t release it. “There, you can come over and say hi.”

I stood, and his eyes traveled up with me, but he still seemed calm. I thought about what Henry had said about dogs and hoped this one wasn’t Cheyenne. As I came around the center island his tail began to wag. I knew the drill and approached, standing with my hand out, palm down and fingers in. His big head stretched forward, sniffing, then a tongue as wide as my hand lapped my knuckles. I stroked the big, furry head and scratched behind his ears as a hind paw as big as my foot thumped on the ceramic surface. “He’s a big baby.”

We took our drinks into the living room, and she brought the phone from the kitchen; she said she was expecting a call from Scottsdale. She waited on the sofa as I began making a fire in the moss-rock fireplace. The dog dutifully groaned and stretched out on the Navajo rug in front of the hearth. Periodically, his eyes would glance toward the rifle tucked into the corner by the door. He did it more than once, and I was sure he was seeing something over there that I couldn’t.

I was thinking about the Espers and Artie Small Song when I noticed her looking at me. “How’s it going?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The case. I’m betting that’s what you’re thinking about.” She took a sip of her drink and continued as I tried to think up a harmless subject to distract her with. “It’s okay. If I were you, it’s all I would think about.”

I smiled, nodded, and looked at my lap. “On the way over here, I was looking forward to spending the evening with someone who had no connection with it.”

She looked over the rim of her glass. “Great expectations.”

I took a sip of my own drink and reassessed. “I spent the day out on the reservation with Henry.”

The phone rang, and she picked it up and talked to some real estate broker in Arizona about some property she wanted to buy in the White Mountains. I listened to the one-sided conversation as they discussed an investment property that was going to cost more than our county’s yearly fiscal budget. When she hung up, I asked, “Get it?”

“She’s going to call me back. They’re being cranky about the mineral rights.” She paused for a moment. “I’m sorry, it’s incredibly rude, but if I don’t act on this now, I’m not likely to get it.”

“It’s okay.” I smiled. “You’re quite the wheeler dealer?”

“I keep my hand in. I’m acquiring a lot of property on the southern portion of the Powder River right now. I even bought some land from the family of one of those boys.”

“The Espers?”

“There’s talk of a power plant out there . . .” I smiled some more. “What?”

“You’re just not what I picture as a robber baron.”

“Robber baroness.” She looked at the fire.

“Something wrong?”

She took a moment to answer. “No, I was just thinking about that girl.”

“Melissa?”

“Yes.” She turned back to me. “She cleaned out here for a summer with her aunt, but it just didn’t work out.” She looked sad and changed the subject. “Walter, how in the world did you ever end up in law enforcement?”

“In the marines, during Vietnam.” I looked at her for a good while, taking in all the details. Her hair was down, and I noticed how thick and luxurious it was, held back from her face on one side by a single etched silver barrette that draped the reddish curtain behind one ear. It was like a box seat to a command performance. The earring that showed was a roweled spur studded with little turquoise and coral stones and dangling jingle bobs. She had great ears, even better than mine. Up close, I could see the wrinkles around her eyes, and it was nice. They softened the lupine slant, and the soft brown in her eyes looked inviting, like the mud on the banks of streams that beg you to take off your shoes and wade through them.

I squirmed a little and started in. “I graduated in ’66, lost my deferment and got drafted by the marines. I got the letter, and it scared the shit out of me. Hell, I didn’t even know the marines could draft you. I got through Paris Island, officer’s training, and because I was big got shuffled into the marine military police, which meant that I got to do exciting things like man checkpoints at traffic control areas, provide convoy security, investigate motor vehicle accidents, and patrol off-limit areas. And then there was the traditional task of maintaining good order and discipline within the battalion.” I turned to look at her, stiffening my back for effect.

“I guess you don’t forget that stuff.”

I laughed and looked over at the fire. “No, you don’t. Now, granted, I was just some dumb kid from Wyoming, but it was all pretty confusing.”

“The war?”

“The war, the military, a foreign country; hell, I was just getting used to California. So, I decided to devote myself to the police side of my job. It was the only part that seemed to make sense. It wasn’t easy, because the marine police were not a formalized occupational specialty. We were only cops on a rotational basis, operating under a skeleton force of navy officers. I was lucky, and after a while I gained some experience and credibility as an investigator.”

“How did you do that?”

“A couple of cases.”

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

I went back to looking at the fire. “They’re not good stories.”

“Good?”

“Happy.”

“Oh.” She shifted and warmed up both of our drinks with straight rum. “Do I seem like the kind of person who only wants to hear happy stories?”

“Maybe not, but I’m not sure I want to be the one to tell you the sad ones.” She held on to my glass and wouldn’t let me have it. I laughed. “All right, you’ve broken me.” I took a sip of the almost straight rum and thought back, remembering the heat. “In January of ’68, I was assigned as a liaison to the 379th Air Police Squadron, 379th Combat Support Group, NCOIC Air Police Investigations. A number of Corps personnel were shuttled in and out of Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base, and a lot of them were turning up self-medicated.”

“So the air force called in the marines?”

“Oh, no, not at all. They didn’t want me there, but the Marine Corps Provost Marshall’s office did. They saw it as a wonderful opportunity for me to get some on-the-job training from the investigative operations officer there who was career air force and who consequently hated my guts because I was a marine.”

“Nobody told him we were fighting the North Vietnamese?”

“Only as a secondary front.” I laughed a little at the absurdity of the situation long passed. “I was assigned to him, but I wasn’t particularly one of his. I broke up a lot of fights, patrolled a lot of outlying areas, like Laos and Cambodia . . .”

“You’re joking?”

“Yep, but I did get to meet Martha Raye.” This time she laughed, hard. “Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the air police I worked with were the best, but they were overworked, and sometimes it helps to have a new set of eyes come in from outside. The Vietnamese were selling it right on the base in exchange for black market items from the PX. There were an awful lot of Vietnamese military police involved as ring leaders. I tracked the problem back to air force personnel.”

“They must have really loved you for that.”

“Semper Fi.”

“What else? You said there were a couple of cases?”

“Yep, I did.” I took another hit from my drink and rested it on my knee; the plain rum with the sugar remnants and cinnamon sticks was surprisingly good. “There was this prostitute that was killed off base. We really didn’t have any jurisdiction, but I made a personal campaign out of it.”

She put her hand out and rested it along the back of the sofa near my shoulder. “How have you survived, doing this for so long? I mean, you still care.” Her eyes closed a little like they did. “Do most guys still care after thirty years in this line of work?”

I thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think they can afford it. Nobody makes an emotional bulletproof vest, so you just have to carry the shrapnel around with you.”

It took her a long time to respond. “You must be tough.”

I turned and looked at her. “No, I’m not. It’s one of my secret weapons.” She smiled. “There was this prostitute in the village up near Hotel California, this old French fort where they housed an RVAN company at the northernmost tip of Tan Son Nhut Air Base. It looked like something out of Beau Geste. It had twenty-foot walls that were three-feet thick, whitewashed concrete that formed a perfect rectangle. It had solid iron gates that shut the arched doorways into this huge courtyard with all these smaller cubicles. There was a small village out past the fence line, a civilian mortuary, and a cemetery with thousands of little white headstones . . .”

I thought back as I told the story, and it was amazing how all the details were still there, like some carefully packed footlocker that had withstood the consistent inspection of time. “Her name was Mai-Kim, and I met her over Tiger beers in the village at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge. They told us not to drink the water, so I didn’t . . . habitually.”

“Were you a customer?”

“No, they told us not to do that either, and I was a young marine and did what I was told.” She laughed some more. “She was cute, though. Had good teeth, a rarity in that place. She was tiny, and she loved to talk about America. She took a great deal of pride in the fact that she had lots of American friends.”

“As many as money could buy?”

“Yep, but she was better than that.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”

“No, I know that.” I rushed ahead, so she would know that no feelings were hurt. “They had an old upright piano in the bar, and I know I single-handedly overdosed all of Vietnam with Fats Waller and Pete Johnson.” I thought for a moment. “She would read Stars and Stripes at the bar between clients, and I would help her with the pronunciations and meanings of words she didn’t understand. After the drug thing, none of the air force guys would talk to me and neither would the Vietnamese police, so I talked to her.” I paused a moment, remembering. “She had a great voice, husky like yours. Like she had just gotten out of bed.” I nodded. “In retrospect, she probably had.” Another laugh.

“She died?”

“Yes. Badly.”

I looked back at the fire and listened to the dog breathe. “Her body was found in one of our abandoned forward bunkers. She’d been raped and strangled. I still remember the crime scene. The killer had pulled down a number of the sandbags to make a bed, and it all looked so normal, until you saw her eyes or the marks on her neck.” I started to take another sip of my rum but stopped a little ways away from my mouth to just smell it. “Nobody was talking, nobody. So there I was, at the last outpost of the last war, investigating a murder that nobody cared about.” I exhaled a short breath, laughing at myself. “It was my way of introducing a little order into the chaos.”

She waited a moment, but she had to ask, “Did you get him?”

The dog yawned loudly and rolled over on his back. I watched as his huge fan of a tail slowly dropped. “War stories; I’m even boring the dog to death.”

“Who did it?”

I took another sip of my rum and got cagey. “Can’t tell you all my stories, then you wouldn’t have a second date with me.” She punched my shoulder, and I continued to lighten my tone. “She wanted to live in Tennessee. One of her customers must have sold her on it, telling her how it was the greatest place in the world. The Volunteer State, where Elvis was from; she knew everything there was to know about Tennessee.” I looked at the pineapple upside-down dog and waited, but she didn’t say anything. “Okay, let’s talk about you.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yep, fair’s fair; it’s your turn.”

“I don’t have interesting stories like you.”

I gave her my most disbelieving look. “Tell me about New York. Isn’t that where you were for all those years?”

She laughed. “I had a gallery on the Upper East Side, near Eighty-sixth Street.”

“What’d you sell?”

“Really shitty expensive art.”

“You seem defensive.”

“I’m an artist.” She swirled the sugar from the bottom of her glass. “We’re always defensive about shitty art; afraid we might be producing it.”

“Are you still sculpting?”

She was talking into her glass, her eyes avoiding mine, so I placed my arm across the back of the sofa and gently touched her hair when the phone rang again. She looked at me with a sad smile and brushed her cheek against my hand before leaning over and answering it.

I listened for a while, then got up and went over to the fire. The dog’s eye opened, and his head looked even bigger with the ears trailing up, but he didn’t move. I reached down, patted his stomach, and the eye closed. I guess he liked me, or at least he trusted me. I sat on the elevated hearth, pulled the poker from the stand at the right, and jostled the logs into a more active position. The glowing red embers made a checkerboard across the burning wood, and small sparks disappeared up into the darkness of the chimney.

The wind continued to howl in the flume, and I thought about getting home. Tomorrow was the back-to-zero day. I figured I’d start with the Cody scene; if it was a murder, that was where the killer had started. I would reexamine all the evidence: the feather, the guns, and the ballistics sample. Then I would start reinterviewing. I was going to have to circle the wagons and bring Turk back. I looked at the dog, and he was looking at the rifle beside the door again.

* * *

A little over two years, two years since the suspended sentences for all four boys. Why now? It just didn’t make sense. Why single out Cody Pritchard? He had been the most repugnant during the trial, but why kill him now? The feather was a real twist, and somehow I had to get some answers from it.

I looked back at the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead. Was it speaking in tongues? Could the dog hear it? I was dealing in a subject matter in which it was expert. I wished I had a war party of Old Cheyenne to follow me around and whisper things in my ear about life and death. Would old Little Bird or Standing Bear help me find the killer of the boy that had raped their great-great-great-granddaughter? I don’t know precisely why, but I believed they would. Lucian had told me stories about them, about their honor, their grace, and their pursuit of the Cheyenne virtues.

There was this incident back in ’49 where Lucian did this routine pullover of an older Indian couple who were driving just outside of Durant and were headed for the reservation. He said it was one of those wonderful winter nights when the wind had died down and the snow looked like scalloped icing on a vanilla cake. The moon was full and bright, bright enough for him to spot this old Dodge slide through a stop sign, make a right, and head for the Rez with no taillights. Lucian wheeled the old Nash around and pulled in behind their car to just give them a warning about the lack of illumination aft. He said it took two miles for them to pull over, and they were only doing about twenty miles an hour.

I could just see that little bandy rooster straightening his belt and buttoning up his old Eisenhower jacket as he got out and walked on two then solid legs up to the ancient, black-primer Dodge. I could see him pushing his old campaign hat back with a thumb, like he used to do, and leaning on the back of the Dodge’s windowsill as the window rolled down. “Hey, Chief.” He wasn’t joking; Frank Red Shield was a chief of the Northern Cheyenne. “I pulled you over ’cause you’ve got a couple ’a taillights out back here.”

He said the old chief ’s eyes twinkled, and he patted Lucian’s arm that rested on the car. “Oh, that’s okay. I thought you were pulling me over ’cause I didn’t have no license.”

Lucian said he nearly bit his lip to bleeding trying to not laugh until Mrs. Red Shield slapped her husband across the chest and said, “Don’t pay no attention to him, Sheriff. He don’t know what he’s sayin’ when he’s been drinkin’.”

* * *

I smiled and laughed to myself. Maybe the old guys in the rifle were already helping me. I was aware of some movement from the sofa and looked up to find Vonnie holding the phone out to me. I had been so wrapped up in my musings that I hadn’t even heard it ring again. Her face was immobile, and her shoulders shook like she was cold. “It’s for you.”

I looked at the phone, back to her, and then reached over and took it from her. She looked scared, and I suddenly felt very tired. I heard my voice say, “Sheriff.”

I listened to the static of the mobile phone and the pitched battle the wind was having with her, wherever she was. Her voice was tight, and she was straining to be heard over the howl that seemed to match its brother in the fireplace perfectly. “Well . . . we found one of the Espers.”

9

“Welcome to Hooverville.” It was creeping up on midnight, and she was trying not to look like a turtle with her head ducked down in the artificial brown fur of her duty jacket.

“Where is he?” She turned into the steady wind, with her hands buried in the depths of her coat pockets, and led me over to where all the headlights were shining. The pulse of the blue and red lights reflected off the frozen gravel of the impromptu parking lot that had been set up along the barbed-wire fence.

Hooverville referred to the assortment of little shacks that surrounded Dull Knife Lake at the southern part of the Bighorn Mountains and was known by the locals as the South End. Outside the jurisdiction of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area and the federal government, numerous lots had been bought and sold and built upon until the surrounding shoreline resembled a collection of chicken coops. Some of the little cabins weren’t bad, but the majority were hunting trailers with little annexes attached that had been towed in a long time ago. The fishing was good all around the lake, but the view was better at the northern part where the shore got steeper and the water disappeared into the thick forest. I thought about the original Hooverville in Washington, D.C., where WWI veterans had been chased out of town and figured it would take a young Patton and MacArthur to clean this one out, too.

I shined the beam of my flashlight in the path and saw that the single set of tracks leading to the body were slowly filling in. I gave Vic my keys and asked her to repark my truck so that it would form a snow fence that would knock down the wayward flakes that were impeding the crime scene investigation.

It was Jacob Esper all right, sitting with one foot folded underneath him and the other sticking straight out. He was leaning against the rear wheel of his truck and had a quizzical look on his face. There was a small torn spot at the center of his Carhartt jacket, and he was surrounded by a frozen liquid with brown shading. Dried blood, discounting the temperature, thirty minutes to two hours. I didn’t have to worry about his back, since most of it was a frozen smear on the side of the dirty truck. It started with the explosion behind the door and trailed to where he now sat. His eyes were open, but tache noire had already set in. Three hours. I reached out and tugged at his boot; the body was stiff with fully developed rigor. Six to twenty-four hours. We needed a body core temperature, and we weren’t going to get it for another seven hours.

One of the footprints behind Vic’s yellow nylon barrier was close to me, so I blew into it and examined the impression: about a size nine, medium width. At the arch was a registered trademark, SKYWALK, with a medallion print of some kind with words around the edges and a diminutive mountain range. The headlights subsided in shadow for a moment. “Where are they?”

“Over there in the Hummer. They’re about to run out of gas from operating the heater, so they’re in a hurry.”

“Oh, really?”

“I told them you’d be real concerned.” She stamped her feet, trying to get some feeling back in them. “I wasn’t sure about how to secure the sight, but Ferg and I thought we could zip-tie the tarp to the top of the truck and then tie it off to another vehicle. It’s probably going to flap like a Windjammer cruise, but . . .”

“Yep.” I looked around me, trying to absorb it all because in another hour it might look like Stalingrad. There were trailing wisps of snow dunes arching away from the higher points of Jacob’s body already. “Tire tracks?”

She kneeled down beside me. “Only those guys, pulling in once, circling back out, and then pulling in again.”

“How did they call?”

“Cell phone.”

“Why did they pull out?”

“Bad reception.”

“You look at the boot prints?”

“Yeah, Vasques. So’s the dearly departed and one of the execs.”

“Popular boot.”

“Popular size.”

We both shrugged and looked at Jacob. “No sheep?”

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “No sheep. Preliminary triangulation indicates an area across the lake, maybe even over where those really shitty-looking cabins are.”

I turned in the opposite direction from the truck and peered through the darkness and the snow. The headlights of Vic’s unit weren’t helping. We stood up to escape them and strained our eyes into the darkness. “Where would you shoot from?”

“Top of that ridge, along the tree line.”

I turned to look at her. “Any local activity?”

“They say they heard somebody shouting over on the other side about the time they pulled in, around nine.”

“What’re they doing pulling in here at nine o’clock at night?”

“Supposed to borrow a cabin from Dave McClure; drove up from Casper after work. Now they’re not sure if they have the right day.”

“It’s Tuesday.”

She nodded. “That fact’s been established and corroborated. Ferg is checking with Dave about their plans.”

I thought about the next move. “Get the tarp tied down as soon as Ferg gets off the radio.”

She stomped her feet again. “DCI in Wheatland by now?”

“Weather permitting.”

She was looking at the side of my face as I looked at Jacob. “We’re not going to be able to keep them out.” I continued to look at Jacob. “Walt?”

“Get Ferg to help you get the tarp done. Then tell him to get that metal detector he has at home and check that hillside over there when he gets back . . .”

“Gets back?”

“Then get in your truck, put on your winter gear, and warm up.” She stopped stomping, looked at me for a while longer, and then went off to check on Ferg.

She was right. We had gone from a sleepy little death by misadventure to a multiple homicide, and the Division of Criminal Investigation was going to want their pound of postmortem flesh. The nagging voice of reason kept reminding me that their experience and technical capabilities gave them a much better chance of breaking the case, but then a stronger voice came in and stated flatly that this was my case and my county. Along the way, it had gotten personal. The first thing I had to do was get the two remaining boys out of county, out of state, out of the country if I had to. Lucian would say there was a fox in the henhouse, and I would say it was time to get the chickens on down the road. I turned back to Jacob. He hadn’t changed much. Dead men don’t tell tales, but I always expect them to pop up and tell me it had all been a big joke. In thirty years of law enforcement, I had been deeply disappointed.

The interior light of Jacob’s truck was on, but very dimly. The door was ajar, key chain hanging from the ignition. I looked under the truck at the exhaust where a few drips of condensate were frozen at the bottom of the tailpipe. There was a shallower impression in the snow where the exhaust would have blown out and a large slick of ice under the engine. I glanced down the fender for insignia and, sure enough, it said diesel. Jacob had started his truck to let it warm up, and whatever had happened had happened when he was exiting or reentering the vehicle. With the orientation of the body, I would think that he was getting out. I’m pretty sure he had been sitting here, like this, and the truck had run out of fuel.

There were no fishing rods lying about, and he wasn’t wearing a vest, waders, or any of the other accoutrement that fisherman usually wore. I stood up and walked around the truck to get a look inside. The passenger-side door was locked; hardly anybody ever does that in Wyoming. There was frost on the inside of the windows, but I could still make out a couple of aluminum fly-rod cases lying along the seat, two vests, and a small cooler. The cooler was a battered old thing with a bumper sticker on it that read CHARLTON HESTON IS MY PRESIDENT.

Working with the preliminary observations, without checking for discoloration of the right and left sides of the abdomen, the victim had been dead approximately, and I was guessing, fourteen to sixteen hours, which placed the TOD at the earliest at five o’clock this morning. If there were trout in the cooler, I could reasonably assume that Jacob had been fishing early. Before dawn? I looked around the rest of the truck for a tent, sleeping bag, or any other evidence that he might have spent more than one day. There were the cabins, but we were going to have to do a sweep of them anyway.

I walked back around the truck and looked at the spot where the gore of his heart and part of a lung had sprayed against the edge of the bed. That meant there was lead in the hillside adjacent to the gravel lot, or in the truck, or in Jacob. Maybe. Something moved under the truck, and I lowered my perspective to see what it was. Jacob’s black cowboy hat had blown under the transfer case and had lodged against one of the front wheels. There was a small collection of feathers stuck in the side of the headband. I looked back at the boy’s dull eyes, shining my flashlight along his body, and got to wondering. I stood, leaning over the body, and extended the flashlight to the open section of his jacket and pushed it back, just enough to reveal the pristine tip of a bleached, straightened, Minwaxed turkey feather.

“What the hell is going on over here!”

I’m pretty sure I stood up and turned around faster than I ever had before. He was a little older than me, well below medium height but nowhere near medium build. He had a face like an old prizefighter, bulbed and knobby wherever it protruded. It was like life was bound to come out even if circumstance was bound to pound it in, and circumstance was standing over him at the moment. Circumstance also noted the broken blood vessels and the flaccidness of the rest of his face; this was not an amateur drinker but a full-blown alcoholic. As my eyes traveled down the open, olive drab parka, past the polyester fur around the hood and the red-and-white-striped tank shirt to the bulging stomach, I noticed the floral print swimming trunks and the thin, birdlike legs that extended into a pair of unlaced arctic boots. I also noticed the drink in his hand, in a martini glass, complete with a sour apple slice and a little green paper parasol. “Who are you?”

He wasn’t paying any attention to me but had leaned to one side to get a better look at the crime scene. “Holy shit!”

I moved over a little, blocking his view. “Excuse me?”

He looked back at me and actually saluted. “Sorry, General. What’s up?” I sighed and repeated the question. “Al Monroe, I got one of them cabins over by the lake.” He listed farther to the side. “Jesus, he’s deader than hell.”

“Mr. Monroe, have you been up here long?”

“Last three days, had a hell of a drunk goin’ till I saw all these damn lights over here; thought somebody’d died.” He took a sip of his martini and looked at me thoughtfully. “Looks like somebody fuckin’ did.”

As I stared at the spectacle of Al Monroe, a thought occurred to me. “Al, can you make coffee over at your cabin?”

“Oh, hell yeah. Best coffee on the mountain.”

“Would you mind going over and making us a big pot? It looks like we’re going to be here for a while.”

“You damn well bet!” He saluted again and traipsed off toward the lake.

“Al”—he turned as Vic came up beside me—“which one of the cabins is yours?” He pointed in the vague direction of one of the dilapidated shacks across the water. He saluted again before he climbed onto an enormous mule with only a rope lead and disappeared into the darkness without spilling a drop of his martini.

Vic looked after the departing vision. “Who the fuck was that?”

I looked sidelong at her. “You two are going to get along.”

* * *

The two execs in the Hummer calmed down when I explained that they wouldn’t have to worry about a place to stay and that the Sheriff of Absaroka County always had a few extra beds he could share with the primary witnesses to a homicide. I told them that I would be happy to put them up for three to six weeks, meals included. They said no thanks. Maybe they’d heard about the potpies on weekends but, either way, they got a lot more cooperative and that was all I was really after.

They had arrived from Casper after dark and had seen the truck when they drove by the first time. They were supposed to meet Dave McClure but weren’t sure which cabin was his; they had seen the truck and circled around to ask directions. By the time they had, the truck had stopped running. They pulled into the parking lot, and one of them got out to check on the guy who looked like he was resting on the ground. They hadn’t touched anything and said the only reason they had driven halfway back to Muddy Guard Ranger Station was so that they could get reasonable reception on their cell phone. 911 had routed them through to us, Vic had responded, and here we were standing in the wind and snow.

I asked them about the yelling, and they said that someone had hollered at them from across the lake when they first pulled up to the scene. From the direction and colorful and varied usage of language, it could only have been the now infamous Al Monroe. He had wanted to know if he could interest them in a sour apple martini or twelve.

Ferg had gotten through to a sleepy Dave McClure, who not only backed up the men’s story but also told us the location of his place and about the key that was hidden on the top shelf of his grill. I released them to go warm up in Dave’s cabin and joined Vic and Ferg as they set up work lights and began taking photographs of the scene. Vic lowered the camera and set her shoulders. “Is that what I think it is, sticking out of the deceased’s jacket?”

“Yep.” I folded my arms and started in. “Ferg?” He joined me after adjusting the work lights, and the warmth of the halogen felt good along my shoulders. “You’re going to have to make the run.” He said he didn’t mind. Ferg was my mule, and I wouldn’t trade him for all the thoroughbreds in the world. “Get Ruby to throw us together some supplies, sandwiches, and coffee. Tell her to arrange with Lucian to pull an early watch on dispatch and to bring Turk up from Powder.”

“Lucian?”

I nodded. “Yes, Lucian. Also, bring Bryan Keller and George Esper in under protective custody.”

“To the jail?”

Vic half snarled, “No, the fucking Motel 6.”

We were all under a lot of pressure and, having maximized our manpower to burgeoning, I ushered Ferg to his truck. “Call the Espers and then go by there if you have to. If they’re still not there, Reggie Esper’s sister lives in Longmont, Colorado. Call the Longmont city police and tell them that we’re looking for whatever it is that the Espers have registered with the DMV other than this maroon diesel.”

“Then what?”

“Get back up here.” I watched as he jumped in his little navy Toyota. I knocked on the window. “Ferg?” He rolled it down and leaned out. “Do you have one of those little digital Breathalyzers?” He handed it to me with a questioning look. “Don’t forget that metal detector. And, thanks.” I stuffed the device in my pocket and walked back to where Vic was still taking photographs. “When you get through, get in your truck and warm up some more. It’s going to be a long night. I’m going to walk over and get a statement from Al Monroe.”

She nodded, lining up for the next shot. “Good luck.”

It turned out to be a half mile around the east bank of the lake. No wonder Al had ridden his mule. Al’s cabin was homemade; it didn’t have the singularity of purpose of those that had started out as campers. The original structure was a sixteen-by-sixteen shack, complete with T-111 siding and a multicolored tin roof. The rest of the cabin was made of lean-tos, which leaned to with such ambition that the outer perimeter of the cabin lay on the ground. I wasn’t sure what Al did for a living, but it was a safe bet it wasn’t carpentry. The mule was in one of the upright lean-tos directly beside the cabin, and I had to take care not to step into her leavings. There were a good three cords of wood stacked alongside the door. The harsh glow of propane lighting illuminated the windows and the two-inch crack under the door on which I had just knocked. After a moment, I knocked again.

“Hold yer goddamned horses!” I listened to more stumbling, crashing, and profanity. He yanked open the door and waves of heat rolled from the interior of the cabin, along with the smell. “C’mon in, General. Coffee’s ready.”

The interior of Al’s cabin was far worse than the outside, kind of like Fibber McGee’s closet gone bad. There was a dilapidated sofa of indiscriminate color and shape along the wall, a La-Z-Boy of approximately the same vintage, and a gray Formica kitchen table surrounded by three folding chairs—two brown, one off-brown. At the center of the room was one of those homemade stoves that you put together with two 55-gallon drums; the underside of the bottom drum glowed orange, and I was sure it was close to a hundred and ten degrees in there. There was a halfhearted attempt at a Tiki theme, with native paintings of naked women and carved wooden sculptures as decoration. The most amazing stacks of magazines and catalogs towered against the walls; National Geographic and American Rifleman made up the visible majority. It was like being in the dead letter office on Fiji.

I followed him in and reluctantly closed the door behind me as he threaded his way back to the kitchen area. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his entire upper body was covered in tattoos. When he returned with a steaming cup of coffee, I expected to see an albatross hanging from his neck. He seated himself on the La-Z-Boy and gestured for me to sit on the sofa. I pushed back my hat and looked at him. “Merchant marine?”

He scooped up his martini from a convenient stack. “Goddamned Eleventh Engineers, you?”

“First Division.”

“I’ll be damned.” He leaned forward and extended his hand, and we shook like old friends. “Semper Fi. I bet you seen some shit.”

“Al, I need you to do something for me.”

He did his best to look serious. “Name it.”

I pulled the digital Breathalyzer out of my jacket pocket and handed it to him as I took off my coat and laid it beside me. “Need you to blow into this.”

His eyes looked at the device and then back at me; then he shrugged. “No law against driving a mule drunk.”

“Only way you’d catch me on one.”

He blew into the device and handed it back to me. “How’d I do, General?”

I tapped the Breathalyzer, but it remained at 4.2. “Rapidly approaching alcoholic coma.” He toasted with his martini glass and added to the percentage of complex sugars already racing through his bloodstream. “Al, how come I don’t know you?”

He shrugged again; it seemed to be his favorite form of communication. “I don’t know. Hell, how come I don’t know you?”

I looked down at my civilian clothes, my sheepskin coat, and the brim of my unadorned silver-belly hat. “Al, I’m the sheriff of Absaroka County.”

“Really?” He processed the information for a moment. “Where’s that?”

“You’re in it.”

He looked around as if there might be a sign. “I thought we were in Big Horn County.”

I studied him for a moment. “You a bartender, Al?”

“Thirty-two fuckin’ years.”

“How’d you get here?”

“Buddy’n me partnered up and bought it off some asshole in Kemmerer.”

“That where you live the rest of the year?”

“Lander.” He took another sip of his martini, and I took the first sip of my coffee; it wasn’t bad, and it was hot. “I need to ask you some questions.” I tried not to concentrate on the fact that my primary witness had been drunk for the last three days. “Hear any loud noises early this morning?”

“Like that goddamned howitzer that went off just before dawn?”

Our eyes met. “Hear that, did you?”

“Well, hell, it’s hunting season, so it’s been soundin’ like a small arms war ever since I got here. Had to tie ribbons all over Sally, so the simple-minded bastards wouldn’t shoot her.” He paused for a second, remembering. “But this was different, closer; and it was early, real early.”

“I don’t suppose you noticed what time it was?”

He sniffed. “Oh-five-twelve.”

My eyes widened after making the translation. “You’re sure of that?”

“Oh, hell yeah.” He gestured to the large windup alarm clock that sat on the table. “Looked at my clock.”

“Then what?”

He gestured. “Went over here to the door and shouted for ’em to knock that shit off.”

“Why did you go to this door?”

“S’where the shot came from.”

“East or west?”

He shook his head. “Directly up the hill.” I nodded as he sipped his martini. “That what killed that boy?”

“Maybe.” I leaned forward and rested the coffee cup on my knee; it was still very hot. “When you went over to the door, did you open it and look out?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Saw somebody walkin’ back up through the tree line with their back to me.” My expression was probably easy to misinterpret. “This any help?”

“I never had it so good. What’d they look like?”

“Pretty big, near as I could tell. It was early, and there wasn’t much light.”

“Any distinguishing features? Hair?”

He shook his head no. “Wait.” I could feel my heart beating. “It was long.”

I’m pretty sure I skipped a beat. “Long hair . . .”

“Yeah, now that I think about it. Yeah.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yeah, long hair.”

“How long?”

“To the shoulders, at least.”

“Color?”

“Dark?” But then he shook his head. “Not enough light to tell, but dark, I think.”

“Hat?”

“Nope.”

“Could you tell what kind of clothing?”

He nodded slowly. “Overalls, one of those insulated jobs.” He waited for a minute. “You okay?”

It took me a moment to think of a word and get some moisture in my mouth. “Yep. This individual was carrying a weapon?”

“Yeah, a big one.”

“Type?”

“Couldn’t tell you. I mean, I could see ’im carryin’ something, and from the way he carried it . . .”

“Both hands?”

“Nope, one. Hanging down to the side.”

“Why do you say big?”

He sat his martini glass down and spread his hands apart by more than four feet. “Long.”

“Anything else? Wooden stock?” He shook his head and shrugged. “Anything hanging off the rifle?”

He continued to shake his head. “Sorry.”

“Anything else? Anything at all?” He stared at the arm of his chair and shook his head. “You want to revise or amplify anything in these statements?”

He looked confused. “Wha’? I’m under arrest or somethin’?”

I shook my head and smiled. “No, you just made a very important statement in a homicide investigation. I want to make sure there isn’t anything you might have left out.”

He looked around for the invisible signs that were supposed to tell him where he was, what he was doing, and when he should do it. I was starting to understand Al’s relationship with the clock. “Something might come to me?”

“That’s fine. When did you notice the truck over there that was running?”

“Didn’t.”

“You didn’t. All day?”

“Nope, went back over to the sofa there and went back to sleep.” He stopped and then looked around at the painted concrete floor for the thought he had lost. “Did notice it around lunchtime. Got up and heated some stew.” He started to get up now. “You want some?”

I stopped him with a hand. “Maybe later. What time was that?” “Twelve hundred forty-seven.”

I glanced over at the kitchen table at the two-handed face that told me it was now one. “You look at the clock a lot, Al.”

“Thirty-two fuckin’ years of waitin’ for closin’ time.”

He confirmed the fact that he had yelled at the two guys in the Hummer at exactly twenty-one hundred twelve. As I went off to check the ridge, I asked Al if he would hitch up the one-mule team and take my ardent deputy a cup of coffee and some stew. He said he would be fucking happy to.

* * *

The hill was steep, and the fact that I was wearing cowboy boots didn’t help. The snow had tapered off, but the wind remained persistent, and by the time I got to the top I had worked up a decent sweat. I stood there, catching my breath and looking down at the lights of Al’s cabin and at the red-and-blue emergency lights revolving from our vehicles in the parking lot. The only consistent sounds were the wind, Sally munching, and the revolving click of our lights. It was a beautiful place, peaceful, terminally peaceful for Jacob Esper.

It was a four-hundred-yard shot if it was an inch. It was colder this morning, probably with a slight to negligible headwind and an approximate scale of elevation would be eighty at four hundred yards. I sighed a full breath and watched the steam blow back in my face. It was quite a shot, even with a scope.

I started at the first few trees at the ridge’s edge, shining my flashlight down along the partially covered ground. Al had said that the shooter was big, but Al is short, so I was beginning to wonder how big big meant. There were no telltale signs in the stiffening grass, so I began using this trail as my pathway as I searched the surrounding area on both sides. If I were shooting someone, would I use the trail? Probably not. I kneeled by the end of the opening that faced the lake and went over each blade of grass. If I were shooting someone from four hundred yards, would I lie down? Probably. There was something funny about the slight depression in the grass to my right, so I walked out of my safe area and looked back where the grass seemed to lay in an odd pattern. I kneeled down and looked back into the hypotenuse of a thin triangle: All the blades bowed in my direction.

Blowdown. This is where it had all started, all .45 caliber seventy grains of it. There was a weak swipe where someone had scuffed a foot across the area in an attempt to hide the marks, but Al Monroe’s appearance must have curtailed such activity. I extended my view and looked straight back through the trees. I suppose somebody my size could make it through, but their ability to limbo would have to be considerably better than mine. I went back to my path and began working my way deeper into the woods, searching the narrow area for footprints but finding none. If they were big, they were light on their feet. I transferred my search to above ground, looking for any disturbance in the thick foliage of the pines. Nothing.

I thought about Henry and took my first full breath since Al had made his partial identification. I stood there with my hands in my pockets and tried to convince myself that a man with 4.2 blood alcohol content would be lucky if he could properly identify his own mule. It wouldn’t wash; he had been too precise about all the other points. Al might be a professional alcoholic, but he was an observant one.

Why would Henry do it? There was the immediate connection with the family; the oldest of motivations, revenge. If somebody had done this to my niece, how would I react? I kept thinking about Omar’s remarks about Henry; was it productive to look at those who had killed when looking for a killer? It wasn’t easy to do, take a life. Henry had killed men, but so had I. Try as I might, I couldn’t develop Omar’s line of thought and went back to the one I liked best, the rationalization of why it didn’t have to be Henry.

With Al’s partial physical description, we were looking for a largish person, probably male and possibly Indian. Sticking with motivation, it had to be someone connected to the victims’ victim, Melissa Little Bird. And that meant Artie Small Song or Henry Standing Bear. I was going to have to have a conversation with Artie Small Song.

Did long hair necessarily mean Indian? Omar had long hair and half my staff had longish hair. Vic and Turk both had hair at least to their shoulders. Vic had been growing hers for the last two years, and Turk’s hockey hair was perennial. I always tried to keep an open mind when lining up the suspects. Law enforcement personnel were people, too, which meant they could commit murder just like the rest of us. If I was going to play the game, everybody got a piece.

Why would Vic do it? She was a pretty militant female, a master in ballistics, and she was also the first on both crime scenes. I had talked her into joining up about two years ago, when these boys had been handed down their suspended sentences. I looked down at the revolving lights, at the flickering shadows cast on the sides of the vehicles, and at Jacob’s shadow-smear that didn’t move. Her sense of justice just didn’t seem to fit. She didn’t have any reason to do it, and she wasn’t big, even if she had the hair.

Why would Turk do it? Just being a prick wasn’t enough, and the fact that I was looking forward to our next meeting like Grant did Gettysburg shouldn’t interfere with my abilities to investigate. Did he want my job bad enough to try and make me look this bad? None of it seemed likely, but he was big, his name was on Dave’s list, and he had the hair.

Why would Omar do it? Omar could make this shot, but what could his motivations be? I started thinking about which grade B actor would play Omar in the television movie of the week and quickly dropped it. But he was big enough, had the hair, had a Sharps, and knew how to shoot.

Why would Artie Small Song do it? And why wouldn’t he have used a rocket launcher or a bazooka? This spoke to the violent-death side of the case, and his family connections loomed large. Basic investigative technique was jumping up and down and screaming it was Artie. He was large, might have the weapon, and he had the hair.

Why would Henry do it? I didn’t believe he did, and that was all there was to it. But . . . he had been late running yesterday morning; he hadn’t gotten to my house until after eight. I thought back and tried to think of what time it had been when he arrived, but I didn’t have Al’s gift for chronographic pinpointing. If the Cheyenne Death Rifle was the one he used, how did he get it back to Lonnie in time? Two men could keep a secret if one of them is dead, or so the old saying goes, but I didn’t think it was possible to get from here to the Rez and back to my place in three hours.

I took one last look around, satisfied that I had done as much as I could, and started down the hill. By the time I got to the path, Al was making the return journey to his cabin. “Al, how long are you going to be here?” He truly was a vision atop his mule with his floral print trunks in full display.

“I was thinkin’ about getting the hell outta here tomorrow, but with all this stuff happenin’ I might just stick around.”

“Well, if you do decide to head back, would you mind checking in at my office? It’s down in Durant, behind the courthouse, or you can just give me a call.” I handed him a card. “This’s got my home phone on it, along with all the office numbers. If you think of anything else, anything at all, be sure to call me. There’ll probably be somebody over later to ask you the same questions and get your personal information. Do you want me to tell them to wait till the morning?”

“What time is it?”

I started to laugh, then pulled out my pocket watch. “Oh-two-hundred.”

“Aw, hell, it’s the shank of the evenin’. Send ’em on over.”

I got out of the mule’s way and started the long slog around the lake. When I got to the scene, Vic was warming up in her unit. I walked over and kneeled beside Jacob Esper. Something was bothering me, something had been niggling at me for the last few hours. I looked at the body and back over my shoulder. It was a clear shot and had planted the young man squarely against the side of the truck. How did the perpetrator get the feather onto the body? Granted, there seemed to have been long periods of Al’s drunkenness where somebody could’ve planted an entire aviary on Jacob, but it did add to the time that it would’ve taken Henry to complete the journey to my place. It was another reason my buddy couldn’t have done it, and I was feeling a little better. Even if I was feeling better, the niggling thought remained like an itch at the middle of my back. There was something here, something I’d seen that was out of my reach. I stared at Jacob Esper, just like I’d stared at Cody Pritchard, and I hoped like hell that I came up with better answers.

* * *

“Unlock the door.” She reached across with a yawn and flipped the small knob up. I must have woken her. It was like a nest, with little pieces of paper and equipment scattered and stuffed into every available spot. I pulled a collection of duty notebooks from under my ass, sat them on the floor beside my wet boots, and thought how much her truck reminded me of Al’s oasis across the lake. Two Thermoses rested against the four-wheel-drive shifter; evidently she hadn’t saved me any coffee. I got settled and looked over at my deputy, whose face was resting against her door. She appeared to have fallen back to sleep.

Vic didn’t look like a killer. Her fine Italian skin contrasted with the dark luster of her hair and, even in sleep, an eyebrow was arched in disbelief. At this angle, you could just make out the little upturned point at the end of her nose that always made me want to pick her up and squeeze her. I hadn’t ever done it, figuring she’d likely kick me in crucial areas. Not for the first time did I notice my deputy was a very good-looking woman. “So, you get to home plate or what?”

Just as I’d suspected, everything else could stop moving, but not the mouth. “Sorry?”

“Oh, you’re one of those kiss-but-don’t-tell guys. Fine, I’ll just go back to sleep.” I looked at the clouds of vapor on the window beside where she had spoken.

“Home plate?”

“Yeah, I was trying to cater to your delicate sensibilities. Did you fuck her?”

“I don’t think this was the conversation I had in mind when I climbed in here.”

“Too bad . . . put out or get out.” She repositioned herself and smiled, satisfied with her wit.

“The truth would be pretty boring.”

“I was afraid of that.” I watched as the condensation on the side window grew and subsided with her breath. “I suspect that nobody’s having sex in this county.”

I waited a moment for her to continue, but she didn’t. “That the problem with you and Glen?”

“What, the fact that we haven’t had sex for three months? What would make you think that?” She still hadn’t moved, and I was considering getting out and going for a walk. “Do you find me unattractive?”

“You?” That got an eye. It wouldn’t hurt anything to level with her, and she was being vulnerable, which only happened on leap years. “I was just sitting here, a moment ago, thinking what a handsome woman you are.”

“Handsome?”

I caught my breath. “Wrong word choice?”

“Sounds masculine.” The eye again. “You think I’m too butch?”

“No, I don’t, and I really was thinking what a good-looking woman you are.”

The eye closed, but the smile returned. “Good.”

“Then you opened your mouth . . .”

She tried to kick me but only glanced off the accelerator and gunned the motor. She glared at the dash. “Shut up.” Her eyes shifted to me. “How often did you have sex when you were married?”

“In the beginning or the end?”

“Forget I asked that question.” She settled back against the door and fluffed the rolled-up blanket she was using as a pillow. “How come you have never made a play for me?”

I couldn’t help but laugh; life in general was just so much more interesting with women around. “I um . . . considered it a dereliction of the sheriff-deputy relationship.”

“No, dereliction would be what Glen is doing to me.”

“Well, that’s another issue. You’re married, and I’m not into hypotheticals at three in the morning.”

“In six weeks it’s not going to be a hypothetical.” I sat there, letting that one settle in. “He got some bullshit job up in Alaska, and I’m not going. I did this drill once, and I’m not doing it again.” She lay there, not moving. “You still going to want me around as a deputy if I’m single?”

“I’m not sure the county can take it.” I reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “Hey, you don’t know you’re my heir-apparent?”

She snuggled a little more, and the smile broadened. “Yeah, I just like to hear you say it.” The smile held, but her eyes remained shut. “So, you wanna fuck, or do I owe you an apology?”

I laughed what seemed like the first good laugh I’d had in a very long time and leaned against my own door, covered my face with my hat, and quickly fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

* * *

Ferg showed back up at six-thirty with his metal detector. He liked gadgets, which was good, because I didn’t. The wind had died down some, and what snow had fallen last night was piled up against the east side of everything, trailing away in long tails of white with edges as crisp as the blade on a knife. It was still relatively cold, but the promise of warmth had started and, if you weren’t careful, you always found your face directed east.

As Ferg unloaded the equipment and supplies, I took the opportunity to get out of my dating clothes and put on the winter gear I always kept behind the seat of my truck. Mine were the same as Al had described as having been on the shooter last night: arctic weight coveralls and a hooded jacket that matched. The medium brown had faded to a light khaki and the seams were starting to look a little threadbare, but the little star was still holding fast, and it had my name on it. Everybody else in the department had these clothes, too; theirs just looked better. I was sitting on the tailgate of my unit, changing into my Sorels, when he came over with the metal detector. “Espers?”

He had the metal detector taken apart and was checking the charger pack on the thing. “I called DMV and got the registration numbers and descriptions of all their vehicles and put out an APB with the Longmont police, letting them know this was somethin’ to do with a homicide case.”

“That get their attention?”

“Oh, yeah.”

I propped a boot against the side of the truck and started lacing; my foot felt immediately warmer. I should have done this last night, but I suppose I had been caught up in the moment. I dropped my foot off the tailgate and turned to face him. “Nothing at the house?”

“No.”

“The 3K?”

“I got Bryan and brought him in.” His face looked like he didn’t want to talk about it.

“Rest of the family?”

“Mrs. Keller was there, but not Jim.”

“I bet that was a warm welcome.” I searched for my gloves in the pockets of my jacket and pulled the stiff leather onto my fingers, flexing them. “Where is he at four o’clock in the morning?”

“Hunting.”

Jim Keller hunting, that was interesting. “Where?”

“She didn’t say.”

I let it go. “You bring supplies?”

“In the cooler. I also made arrangements with South Pass Lodge to bring in warm food.”

“What about Turk?”

“Didn’t talk to him, but I left a message.”

“And where is he at five o’clock in the morning?”

“Some buckle bunny’s bed, I suppose.” He closed the little plastic door, turned the device over, and flipped a switch. The little LED display lit up.

I smiled, which was hard when it came to Turk. “Jealous?”

His eyes came up and met mine. “Yeah, a little.”

“Me, too.” I slid off the back of the Bullet and stood, stretching the stiff muscles that had bunched at my shoulders and neck. It felt good, and my feet were warm for the first time in twelve hours. I indicated the metal detector. “That thing going to work, or am I going to be forced to make a highly dramatic and emotional display by throwing it in the lake?”

“I think it’ll work.”

Vic joined us as I peered over the edge of Jacob’s truck bed and turned to look at the snow-covered hillside behind us. “Well, it’s not in the truck and from the looks of Jacob, I’d say it’s not in him.” I extended a finger in the direction a straight trajectory would have taken. “Detect.”

I wandered over toward the lake to get out of the way and didn’t see any lights on in Al’s cabin; I figured he was still asleep. I was wrong. After a moment, I could hear the door open, and the familiar figure stepped around one of the lean-tos and hollered across the lake, “Hey, you want any goddamned coffee?!”

I laughed. “Love some!” The echo of my response sounded around the little bowl of the lake, and my voice sounded good, like I was capable. The niggling thought hadn’t gone away though, and a little less than four hours of sleep hadn’t been enough to make it surface. I comforted myself with the thought that I was doing what it took to solve cases like these: knocking on one more door, looking at the crime scene photographs one more time, making one more phone call, making one last try. I went back over to Jacob’s body and ducked under the tarp for another look-see. Obviously, something had been bothering Vic, too. A small Tupperware stepstool was there, so I pulled it over and sat down facing Jacob again. I sat on the top, pulled a foot up on the first step, and rested my elbow on my knee, placing my chin in the palm of my hand. I was finally comfortable, which was more than could be said for Jacob. Here we were, Jacob and I, staring at each other, only one of us seeing. Something wasn’t right, and I’d be damned if I could figure out what it was.

I listened as Vic and Ferg conferred on the other side of the truck. “I think we’ve got something.”

He didn’t sound sure. “In the trajectory of the reference points?”

“We’re getting a strong reading off to the right.”

“Dig there.”

A moment passed. “Don’t you want to wait for DCI?”

“They might be in a motel in Casper, for all we know.” I sounded angrier than I was, taking the frustration of the unknown out on my deputies. I made a conscious effort to be nicer. “We’ll go ahead and dig it out.”

Jim Keller hunting, why was that bothering me? Because, as near as I could remember, he didn’t hunt. I started thinking back to that day he had brought in Bryan, how he seemed so hard on the boy. I remembered thinking what a mess this was for the young man and how it was strange that they hadn’t just moved away. As far as I knew, they had no family here in the county, with no reason to stay other than to torture that boy. It was a pretty horrible thing to do to your child, and a pretty horrible thing to do to Cody and Jacob. Somebody ruins your life, your child’s life, and his future . . . These were pretty powerful motives.

“I think we’ve got something here.” Her voice was flat and emotionless.

I looked at Jacob for another moment, then got up and walked around the truck. Ferg stood to the far side, leaning against the truck bed and balancing the metal detector on his foot. I took up a position just in front of the passenger window and watched Vic work. I looked over at Ferg. “We get about four or five of those DCI guys to stand around here with us, and we’ll have a real state job underway.” He smiled, and my eyes fell back across the seat of Jacob’s truck. I looked at the jumbled mess; was I the only one that actually put things away in my vehicle? I looked past Ferg at his little Toyota and the number of PVC containers he had strapped to the underside of his topper. “Ferg, how many rods do you take with you when you’re fishing?”

He thought for a moment. “Seven, maybe eight.”

“How many vests?”

“Just one.”

I looked into Jacob’s truck at the two vests that lay there, and that niggling feeling stopped.

10

“You blow one homicide, it looks like a mistake. You blow two, it starts looking like negligence. Or worse yet, stupidity.” T.J. hadn’t brought any investigators with her from Cheyenne, she knew me that well, but she had brought everything else in their mobile crime unit, including the kitchen sink, which was to my right.

“I thought I’d use that on the bumper stickers in the next election, VOTE LONGMIRE, HE’S STUPID.”

“Well, don’t worry about it. You blow this case, and you won’t have to bother about the next election; they’ll just run you out of town on a rail.”

I took a sip of her coffee and tried not to make a face. “No hard feelings?”

“Hey.” She smiled with the little wrinkle at the corner of her mouth. “It’s your county.”

Vic’s rolls of film and DCI’s digital camera sat on a table in the trailer next to the ballistic sample that Ferg had dug out of the hillside. It had flattened on impact to a mushroom-shaped disc about the size of the palm of my hand. I have a big hand. The feather was also there. I reached over and took the plastic-wrapped package from the table. “You mind?” She shook her head no, and I stuffed the piece of evidence in my jacket.

“You might get a phone call, later in the week.”

“I get lots of phone calls. I’m popular.”

The sun had overtaken a large breech in the storm, with blue skies and the odd snowflake that filtered down from high altitude. Digi-Sven, the computerized voice of NOAA, was warning that a real storm was on the way and would probably be here this evening. High wind and heavy snow. I was glad T. J. Sherwin had brought DCI’s mobile unit. I was going to go back down, but at least Vic would be comfortable here.

“So, what’s the story on George Esper?” she asked.

“There were two sets of fishing gear in Jacob’s truck.”

“Any possibility that he just hauls all that stuff around with him?”

“It’s possible, but fly fishermen are pretty careful about their vests, with the flies and all. I just don’t know if George would leave his vest in his brother’s truck.”

“Possibility they were together?”

“Contents of the cooler: two cleaned fish, one partially eaten cheese sandwich, and two empty cans of Busch Lite.”

“Not enough for two.”

“Not enough beer and probably not enough food. Besides, the passenger door was locked. It’s my experience that people in this county only lock their doors when they visit Cheyenne.” This got a sidelong glance. “Nobody was riding on the passenger side.”

“What’s your theory then?”

“I think that Jacob and George Esper were supposed to meet somewhere. That Jacob came up and spent the night, started his truck yesterday morning to go and meet his brother, and instead incurred a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

“Romeo and Juliet?”

“Hamlet. All the death ones are Hamlet, at least the contemplative death ones.” I unbuttoned my jacket a little; the propane heater in the camper continued to raise the temperature. “I suppose George could be with his parents, but we won’t know anything about that till we hear something from them. We’ve got an APB out on their vehicle in both Colorado and Wyoming. I’d call Trinidad and Tobago if I thought it would do any good.” We sat there, surrounded by all our technological wonders, hoping that some patrolman in Longmont would happen to drive by the right driveway. No matter how far you went into the modern age, it always seemed to come down to the guy on the beat. “I’ve also got the Forest Rangers, Smokey the Bear, and all God’s little animals out looking for a black Mazda Navajo with the plates, Tuff 1.”

She was watching me like a science experiment. “You look tired.” I sighed. “Yep, well . . . it’s truly all my worst nightmares come to life.” We sat there for a moment; “I’m 0 for 2.” I looked at her for a while and then got up, trying not to tread on her feet, and sidestepped to the door. “You don’t need me; Vic can be the primary again. You got ballistics stuff here in the Mystery Machine?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got a rifle out in my truck that needs to be tested; I’ll leave it with Vic.”

“Where did this one come from?”

I paused, with my hand on the door handle. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Walt?”

I waited. “Yep?”

“You’re not being punished for your sins.”

* * *

The air outside felt good, and I started getting just a breath of my second wind. I could smell the lodgepole pines above everything else, a sharp smell that really doesn’t translate to air fresheners and cleaning products. It was also the altitude; the air just seemed to pull in a little more freely above ten thousand feet. I took a quick scope around, using the steps as a lookout, and called Vic over. “I’ve got another rifle in my truck that needs to be tested, and they’ve got facilities in the trailer.”

She caught up, and we walked along. “Where are you going?”

“I’m headed down. I’ll get things set up at the office, then I’ll be back.” I opened the door and took the Cheyenne Death Rifle from the seat of my truck and handed it to her.

She held it, carefully studying the sheath, then tightened her lips and looked up at me. “Henry?”

“Lonnie, by way of Henry.”

She slowly exhaled and then pulled the rifle out, holding it up in the morning light. “Fuck me running through the forest.”

“We already discussed that.”

She ignored me and continued. “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.”

“That seems to be the general response to this particular weapon.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s haunted. There are supposed to be Old Cheyenne hanging around the thing looking for people to abduct and take back to the Camp of the Dead.”

She studied it some more. “Cool.”

She went off to my truck, and I walked over to the back of one of the DCI Suburbans, where Ferg and Al Monroe were having an animated conversation concerning the relative advantages of the Bitch Creek Nymph over the Number Sixteen Elk Hair Cadis. I always wondered about men who spent their time trying to anticipate and know a fish in a world where man’s knowledge of each other could only be called scarce. It just seemed to be gratuitously ignorant for any man to think that he could think like a fish. Then there was the high deceit of the artificial fly; subtlety, guile, and sly deception created and instilled only to lure a cautious and tentative fish to its death. They were as bad as drug fiends, living in their shadowy world of aquatic intrigue.

I sometimes fly-fished, but it was catch and release, and I always brought a book. “Ferg, have you looked at the equipment he was carrying?”

“Yep.” He looked at Al for confirmation, and they nodded somberly to each other. “Yellow and Royal Humpies, Parachute Adams, Light Cahills, and a couple of wet flies, mostly Montana Stones.”

“Nothing like a Royal Humpie. Any ideas on where George might have gone?”

“Some.” I waited. “Meadowlark, West Tensleep Creek, Medicine Lodge, Crazy Woman, head of the Clear, maybe even north fork of the Powder.”

“Well, that should narrow it down to about 189,000 acres. How long do you think it’ll take you?”

Dejectedly, he looked at the skies west of us. “A little while . . .”

I followed his gaze to the dark lines of clouds converging across the Big Horn basin and the Wind River Range. This was the one that was going to signify that autumn was over. If you lived here long enough, you could sense them coming. The few leaves left on the aspens quaked, and you could almost feel the barometric undertow as the storm gathered momentum. The clouds looked flat and mean, and they stretched into the distance; it made my eyes hurt. I was having enough trouble operating a homicide investigation without a raging blizzard at ten thousand feet. As he started to go, I leaned over to him. “You got a rifle in your truck?”

He stopped dead and looked at me. “What?”

I glanced over at Al as he suddenly found DCI’s proceedings of great interest. “Do you have a rifle in your truck?”

“Um, no.”

“Get Vic’s .243. Just because we don’t know where George Esper is, doesn’t mean somebody else doesn’t.”

The drive down the mountain wasn’t too bad; the only place where there was ice was on the flats, where the wind had continually applied a fresh coat of melting snow. Any other time, swooping over the gentle hills of the high meadow was a mind-freeing experience, but my mind snagged on the teepee signs for the campgrounds in the Bighorn National Forest. Henry was right, there had been no Indians on the jury.

* * *

On Wednesday, the jury had come in dressed up and, in the back hallways, we all thought that after eight days of deliberation we were close to a verdict. I still remember the look on all of our faces when the red light went on. The family members took their seats in the first three rows, quietly, like it was church, as if how little noise they made would have an affect on their loved ones’ fate: the Espers, the Pritchards, and Mrs. Keller in the front row, Jim Keller never attending; Lonnie Little Bird in the aisle with his trusting smile, the chrome on his wheelchair seeming shiny and out of place. Then there were the defendants, three of them smirking and Bryan Keller looking sad.

“Please rise.” Vern’s voice was steady and carried the patrician quality that resonated that fervent prayer, that desperate plea for justice. Whose justice we were about to find out. Bryan closed his eyes, Jacob and George remained emotionless, and Cody glared. Cody Pritchard was found guilty of two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault; one count was for assaulting a mentally defective woman, and the other was for using force or coercion in that assault. He was also found guilty of conspiracy in the second degree. Jacob Esper, same verdict. George Esper was found guilty of one count of aggravated sexual assault in the second degree and was guilty of second-degree conspiracy. Bryan Keller was acquitted of the more serious charges but was found guilty of second-degree conspiracy.

After Vern was through reading the verdict, Cody leaned over to Jacob and whispered something; they both laughed. I felt like going over there. I made a mental note to keep a closer eye on them from then on and, if possible, to take a personal interest in their miseries. Sentencing was set for three weeks. All four were released with nominal bail and, after two years of freedom following their crime, they were set free again.

When I made the final sweep of the now closed courtroom, there was only one person left. “Quite a show. Mm, hmm, yes. It is so.”

I stood there in my cotton-poly-blend uniform, looked past him at the cheap paneling on the walls, and felt the fraud of human institutions. His eyes wouldn’t let me go, wouldn’t let me usher him out and get it all over with, so I went and sat on the armrest of the chair in front of him. He smiled, looking through the thick lenses in his glasses, and patted my leg. “Long day?”

I smiled back. “Yep.”

He looked around, his hand remaining on my leg. “Doesn’t take long for everybody to get out of here, huh?”

“No.”

“Mm. Not like on the television.”

“Is there somebody here to help you, Lonnie?”

“Oh, yes. Arbutus has gone to get the car.”

“Do you need help getting down?”

“Oh, no. I use the elevator.” We sat there in silence, as the radiators ticked and groaned. His eyes drifted down to the gun that also rested on my leg. “Those boys?” I waited. “They went home?”

I cleared my throat. “Yep, Lonnie. They did.”

His eyes remained on my gun. “You will go and get them?”

I paused. “They’ll be right back here in three weeks to be sentenced. That’s when Vern decides what will happen to them now that they are guilty.”

His eyes came up, and he looked profound. “That judge, yes, he looks like Ronald Colman. Mm, hmm. It is so.”

* * *

By the time I reached the office, I had worked myself into a righteous rage, and I wheeled into the parking lot, the Bullet sliding to a stop. My emotional state was not improved when I saw Turk’s car sitting next to the door. He came out of the office as I got out of the truck, his thumbs hitched in his gun belt as he came down the steps. I noticed how big he was, how young. “Damn, you keep drivin’ like that, and I’m gonna have to . . .”

He didn’t see it coming, nobody would have. He was used to my irascible moods and just thought he had caught the sheriff at a bad time. He had. I brought my hand up in a full-reach swipe that caught the side of his head and propelled it face first into the quarter panel of the Thunder Chicken, as my right boot scooped his feet out from under him. The impact was thunderous on the hollow flank of the car, and the dent it left was substantial. He didn’t get up but lay there beside the rear wheel, a small pool of blood spreading from the side of his downturned face.

I stepped over his legs and rolled him to one side, brushing away his hat and grabbing his shirtfront, pulling his face up close to mine. “If you ever harm a prisoner in my jail again . . .” But he wasn’t listening, he was out. I held his head there for a moment and then gently laid it down on the concrete. I felt sick. It was from the adrenaline, or at least I blamed it on that. It always hit me afterwards. I would have to walk it off. I became aware of some movement behind me as I stood and stepped away and continued up the steps and into my office. Whoever it was that had walked up had evidently decided that whatever they had to do with me wasn’t that important.

The door to the office was open when I got there. Ruby held the knob with her other hand over her heart, her eyes wider than I had ever seen them. “Oh, my Lord . . .”

I breezed past her into the reception area and almost collided with Lucian. He teetered back and nearly fell as I caught him and stood him upright. I figured a good offense was the best defense. “You got something to say?”

His face broke into a broad grin. “Damn, what a lick!”

I left him there and continued down the hallway, through the door, and into the jail’s holding cells. I slammed the door back, stormed through the open cubicle, and sat myself on one of the bunks, my back thumping against the wall as I clutched my shaking hands together and set my jaw. I concentrated on my hands, willing them to stop; it took a while. My breathing was returning to normal, and the flushed feeling was starting to fade. I licked my lips and exhaled, trying to push the rest of the adrenaline through my flooded blood stream. I hated it, I hated seeing it, I hated hearing about it, and I hated doing it. I brought my head up to find a terrified Bryan Keller looking at me from the other bunk. I wasn’t quite sure what to say. He was crouched in the corner with his legs pulled up and his arms wrapped around them; only his eyes were visible over the kneecaps.

We listened as the commotion from the reception area carried down the hallway and bounced off the masonry walls. I had no idea you could hear everything so well from the cells. The front door was closed, but there was a scooting of chairs and a murmuring of voices. You could hear Lucian’s voice above the others, “Bring ’im on in here, Ladies Wear . . .” More murmuring and voices, “How you like them apples, you little son of a bitch? You try and get up, and I’ll kick your ass so far . . .” It trailed off with the roaring in my ears. It was like being underwater and, for a few moments, I floated there, letting the sinking feeling in the middle of my shoulders wash over me. I was tired.

A while later, Henry peered around the divider. His hair hung down, and his face looked at me sideways.

I took off my hat and placed it on the bunk beside me, running my hands over my face. “What?” It would appear that not all the adrenaline was gone.

“Nothing.”

I sat there for a moment. “He all right?”

He stepped around the divider and ducked his head to look through the bars. “He will never play the violin with his nose again, if that is what you mean.”

“Better call the EMTs.”

“He is already gone; Ruby has taken him to the hospital. It seemed to be the best thing, since his uncle would not stop kicking him.”

I waited. “You think I overreacted?”

He shook his head in mock earnest. “Oh, no. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable response to someone parking in your spot.” He wandered over to the doorway of the cell. “How about we have breakfast?” He glanced down at Bryan. “How about you?” To my relief, Bryan declined, and we slipped out the back way. “Interesting office management skills, kind of a ‘violence is not the answer so I’m going to beat the shit out of you’ philosophy.”

I was looking at the sky; still nothing, but I could feel the coming storm. My eyes continued up the South Pass to the snow above the tree line; I was looking for George Esper.

“Kind of like Indian foreplay.”

He had to be up there, somewhere.

“What do ten Indian women with black eyes have in common?”

The fishing flies were the key and, if Ferg could connect the very specific lures to very specific areas, we might have a chance.

“They just won’t listen.”

If George knew about the weather, would he come down? Would he go looking for his brother?

“How was your date last night?”

The more time went by without finding him, the more likely it was that he was dead. I would have to deputize one of Ferg’s buddies and send him out to sit at the Esper place to see if anybody was going to show up.

“You did not let her touch the wine, did you?”

And what the hell was going on in Longmont? I could have driven down there and looked for them myself by now. At least Bryan was safe, but I needed to talk with his father. There was something there, maybe.

“By the way, I got word on Artie Small Song.”

I stopped. “What?”

“I thought that might get your attention.” He was smiling and shaking his head. “I got a call from his mother, and she thought that we might want to know that Artie has been in Yellowstone County Jail, up in Billings, since Saturday.”

That narrowed the field. “Charge?”

“Carrying an unregistered concealed weapon without a permit.”

I nodded to Dorothy when we threaded our way through the three or four locals sitting at the counter, and we took seats on the end stools toward the back. They had looked up, and I didn’t smile. “So, what’re you doing following me around?”

“I thought you would be interested in Artie, and I have information about the feather.” He propped his elbows on the counter and leaned in. “Something has happened?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Your manner is curt and slightly agitated.”

“Jacob Esper is dead.” I watched him very carefully, but there was no visible response.

“That answers some of your questions.”

“You don’t seem very upset.”

“I am not. Should I be?”

I looked at him for a moment. “No, I suppose not.” Dorothy brought over some coffee and a couple of menus.

She was looking at my winter gear, and she smiled. “The game’s afoot?”

I tossed the menu back to her. “The usual.” She raised an eyebrow and looked at Henry.

“I will have what he is having.”

The other eyebrow rose. “He doesn’t know what he’s having.”

“I will have it anyway.”

She looked at the both of us, shrugged, and headed back to the grill.

“Tell me about the feather.”

He sat back up straight, took a sip of his coffee, and made me wait, finally turning back and looking me in the eye. “Wanda Real Wolf. She used to head up the Cheyenne Artist’s Co-Op.”

“The one that went out of business?”

“Yes. It is much easier to get Indians to work together than artists.”

“They’re her feathers?”

“Feathers, plural?” I set my jaw and nodded, and he looked at me for a while. “Interesting. You have it with you?” I took the feather from my jacket and handed it to him. He turned the plastic bag over in the light from the windows and studied the contents. “It too could be Wanda’s.”

“I don’t suppose Wanda keeps detailed records of her feather sales?”

He sat it down between us and took another sip of his coffee. “Worse than that, she does not sell them separately, only on objects she and her immediate family make.”

“Like?”

“Dream catchers, flutes, pipes, dance headdresses, items like that.”

“I don’t suppose she has a limited clientele?”

“High-end tourist shops, all over the country.”

“Great. So these things could be pulled off anything?”

“Yes. I asked her if there was any way of finding the location or age of the pieces, but she said no.”

I started to take another sip of my coffee, but the smell informed me that I had had enough. “Any way to tell what pieces the feathers could have come off of ?”

“She said that small pinholes at the base of the quill probably meant that they came off dream catchers or pipes, nontraditional usage.” He caught me looking at the feather between us. “Both have such holes. I am afraid that does not narrow the field much.”

“No.” I took the feather and stuffed it back in my jacket.

He waited quietly. “There is more?”

I weighed my options and decided to clear the air. “How come you were late going running yesterday?”

He sat his coffee cup down, and a mischievous glint shaded his eyes. “I was out shooting white boys.”

“I’m serious.”

He turned and looked at me, square. “I know, and it is starting to piss me off.”

Moment of truth. “Where were you?”

He turned on his stool, straightening his body and trailing a hand down to rest lightly on his leg. The smile was gone, and his eyes had flattened. “Are you going to hit me?”

My voice sounded mechanical. “I’m through hitting people today. Where were you?” It was a long pause.

“Sleeping with Dena Many Camps.”

Two steaming plates of Canadian bacon and eggs, sunny side up, with grits, were slid under our noses. I glanced over and then looked again. “That’s the usual?”

She looked at Henry. “Told you.” With this, she freshened our coffee and moved down the counter to take care of the other customers. You had to hand it to her, she could tell when her clients wanted peace, if not quiet.

I started to work on my usual, but he was still watching me, and I was starting to feel ashamed of myself. “She’s half your age.”

He laughed. “Are you going to jail me for that now?” He turned and began eating.

“You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“It is only premarital sex if you are planning on getting married.”

I spoke out of the corner of my full mouth. “You should be even more ashamed.”

He kept eating, finally replying between bites, “You are such a prude.”

“Pervert.”

“Jealous.”

I told him about Al’s description of the shooter, and we were through it, but he remained quiet for a while. I continued with the story of the two fishing vests, the flies, and Al Monroe. He agreed with the theory that George was probably up there somewhere. He asked if I’d checked the Forest Service sign-in sheets. I told him we had. He was thinking, “Largish with long maybe dark hair?”

“Um-hmm.”

“Interesting.” He ate some more of his breakfast. “Were they hand-tied or store bought?”

“What?”

“The flies. If they were new and store bought, then maybe they mentioned to someone where they were going?”

“I’ll radio up and ask Ferg.”

We finished breakfast, and I asked Dorothy to fix up a usual for an occupant. She put it in one of the Styrofoam containers and handed it to me with a worn smile but with no questions. I tried to mend some fences. “I’ll probably be back for dinner.”

“I’ll set the name cards.”

* * *

We climbed the stairs behind the courthouse; the weather hadn’t changed, and I was beginning to think we’d gotten a reprieve. When we got back to the office, Lucian was gone, but Ruby was waiting for me. I handed her Bryan’s breakfast.

“His nose is shattered.”

“I’m feeling bad enough, you don’t have to add to it.”

“You’re not feeling anywhere near as bad as he is. They patched him up, but they say he’s going to have to go up to Billings to get it properly set.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I waited for more, but there wasn’t any. “Could you see if you can raise Ferg on the radio?”

She flipped the toggle switches on the console and reached for her headphones, holding one side up to her ear. “Why, you want to beat on him, too?”

I continued into my office with Henry close behind. He occupied the seat in front of my desk and was smiling. I sat in my chair. “So, you wanna be a deputy?”

He looked at the accumulated clutter on my desk and the general disorder of the place. I had to admit, it didn’t look all that inviting. “I think I might work better outside the framework.”

“Well, we do have a moral turpitude clause.”

The little red light on my phone began blinking, and I was starting to get an idea of how angry Ruby was with me; she never used the intercom, she always came to the door. I picked up the receiver and spoke cautiously, “Yep?”

“Ferg, line one.” And she was gone.

I hit it. “Ferg?” The connection wasn’t great, but I could hear him. “Where have you covered?”

Static for a while. “I started with Crazy Woman, middle fork of Clear Creek, and I’m headed up to Seven Brothers.”

“I’ve got a question for you. Were those flies hand-tied or store bought?”

“Store bought, definitely.” He paused. “I think they’re from the Sportshop.”

“That is good news. Thanks.” I hung up the phone and looked at Henry.

“Do you want me to go out to the Espers and see who shows?”

“They also serve who stand and wait.”

“Yes, but the pay is shit.” He looked around the office. “Have you got any books around here?”

“I think I’ve got a paperback copy of Crime and Punishment”—I scouted out the bookshelves—“and I’ve got Lolita around here somewhere.”

“I will pick something up.”

As he left, Ruby appeared at the door, and I noticed he gave her a wide berth. “I need to talk to you.”

I did my best to look repentant, but I had the feeling contrition wasn’t suiting me. “Yes?”

“You need to talk to Bryan. I don’t think he fully understands why it is he’s here.”

I thought of all the things I had to do. “Okay.” She stayed there, leaning against the doorway and looking at me. “What?”

“You’re a sheriff. You’re supposed to stand against such things, not for them.” I made the mistake of smiling. “It’s not funny.” She was really angry now, the blue in her eyes was neon. “You could have called him in and talked to him, you could have fired him . . . There’s no end to the options that were open to you, but no, you waited, you planned, and you executed. Your actions were deliberate and with forethought.”

I waited, then sighed, and continued on toward my doom. “Are you through?”

“No, I’m not.” She was off the doorway in an instant and stood directly in front of my desk. She looked like she was about ten feet tall. “I’m thinking I should hand in my resignation.”

“Ruby, I’m sorry.” She glared at me, still not giving an inch. “I was sorry when I did it.” I leaned back in my chair, just trying to get a little distance between us. “I’m mortified. It makes me sick.” I sighed again, looking out my window to avoid those eyes. “How is he?”

“He looks horrible, both his eyes are black and his nose is . . . He has tubes in his nose.”

“Ruby, please . . .” I got up and went around the desk, but she backed away, and the response was ferocious.

“Don’t touch me.”

I went ahead and stepped forward, opening my arms and pulling her in. She didn’t struggle, and I wrapped her up. “I’m sorry. I really am sorry.” I could feel how thin and fragile she was; her shoulder blades stuck out like sparrow wings.

“I am so ashamed of you.”

“I know, I know.” I held her there for a while, just listening to her breathe.

“You know this could be misconstrued as sexual harassment?”

“I hope so . . . How’s Lucian doing?”

I felt her stiffen a little. “Don’t make your problems worse by asking.”

I let her go and held her out to look at her. “Yes, ma’am.” The bell on the front door sounded as somebody pushed it open; we both looked toward the doorway. “You see to that, I’ll go talk to Bryan.” I gave her a quick kiss on the forehead and headed for the holding cells. When I got there, he was lying on his bunk, the remains of breakfast sat on the floor beside him, and the door still hung open. I went in and sat on the opposite bunk again. “Didn’t like your breakfast?”

His arms were folded behind his head, but his face turned to me as I propped my Sorels up on the edge of his bed. “I’m just not hungry.”

“I’d take advantage of the good stuff, we switch over to potpies on the weekend.”

His attention returned to the ceiling. “I’m still going to be here over the weekend?”

“Unless I can find who’s killing your friends.” I waited for a moment, watching him. “Jacob Esper’s dead.” He didn’t move at first, but then his arms came up and covered his face. I officially took him off the list. “I guess Mr. Ferguson didn’t tell you.” I looked at him. “You and George ever go fishing?”

He thought. “Yeah, I mean we have.”

“Where?” He was aware of how important the answer might be, so he removed his arm and looked at me. “Anyplace special? A lake on the mountain he likes best?”

His eyes escaped mine and went to the floor. “Lost Twin, that’s his favorite.”

I was up and out of the cell before I remembered. “Bryan?”

He was already sitting up and looking at me. “Yes, sir?”

“You’re not in here because you did something wrong, you’re here because somebody is out there trying to do something to you, and I’m not going to let that happen.”

I blew through the cell door and rushed down the hall but pulled up short when I got to the front. He did look like hell, with the rolled-up cotton and tubes sticking out of his nostrils and the gauze bandage plastered across the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones underneath both black eyes. He was sitting on the edge of Ruby’s desk when I came in, and he started to get up, but I stopped him. “What’re you doing here?”

“I’m here to work, unless you fired me.”

His voice was thick and nasal; you could tell he was having trouble breathing. “Shouldn’t you be at the hospital or on your way to Billings?”

He stood, even though I put out a hand to stop him. “I’m here to work.”

“You think you can?”

He tried to stand up straighter. “I ain’t hurt that bad.”

I kept trying to see Lucian in him, that little glimmer of the old goat that would make him salvageable. Maybe he was what Lucian would have turned out to be if the old sheriff hadn’t lived in such interesting times. A couple of years in a Japanese prison camp might be just what Turk needed, but I didn’t have a bridge over the river Kwai for him to build, so we had to settle for Powder Junction. “Go out to the Esper place and relieve Henry Standing Bear. Tell him to come back to the office.” He didn’t say anything, just gingerly made his way out the door.

When I turned around, Ruby had her arms folded. “I suppose that’s as close as we’re going to get to an apology?”

“I didn’t fire him.” She rolled her eyes. “Can you get me the Ferg, please?” I gave her a dirty look of my own. “Then if you would be so kind as to try and get Jim Keller on the phone?” This got another questioning look. “Oh, and could you call the Yellowstone County Jail and see if they have frequent lodger Artie Small Song?”

While she attempted to raise Unit Three, I walked over to the window and looked back up the valley. The clouds were just beginning to creep over the lower peaks, and it didn’t look good. We had an opening in the weather but, by my calculations, it was only good for about the next five hours. I needed help—as near as I could figure, about seven million dollars’ worth.

“I’ve got him.”

I turned back and took the mic. “Ferg, where are you?”

Static. “Up from the Hunter Corrals.”

“Turn around.”

There was a long pause. “What?”

“I think he’s at Lost Twin.” I shrugged for my own amusement and Ruby’s. “Appropriately enough.”

A much longer pause. “We’ll never make it in there before dark, and with this weather coming in . . .”

I keyed the mic and held it. “Yep, I know.” I looked over at Ruby. “I’m gonna get us some help. I’ll call you back. All I need you to do is get to the parking lot at West Tensleep.”

Static. “Just the parking lot?”

Static again. “Hey, Ferg?”

“Yeah?”

“Anybody who’s there . . . hold ’em.” I handed the mic back to Ruby, loving it when she didn’t know what I was up to. “Would you add Omar to the phone list?”

“What in heaven’s name for?”

I waited a moment, then batted my eyelashes and stated the obvious, “I need to talk to him.” I crossed the room and took out my keys and hung them on the rack, just in case anybody needed to move the truck. She shook her head and dialed as I made my way back to my office. I sat at my desk and made mental preparations for the coming conversations and for the plan that was just starting to fully develop in my mind. I glanced over at the doorway and around the corner to the safe where we kept the guns. I knew what was in there and made a few calculations on what we would need—all long-range weapons. There were a couple of battered old Remington 700s and a Winchester Model 70 and, as near as I could remember, the Remingtons were .30- 06s and the Winchester was a .270. All good rifles, but I was thinking of the Weatherby Mark V .308 that was lurking in the back. Omar donated it to the library raffle about five years ago, and I had embarrassingly won it, and it had rested in the back of the safe ever since. I wasn’t even sure if I had ammunition for the thing. I remembered the sign at the Marine Corps Scout Sniper School at Quantico that read THE AVERAGE ROUNDS EXPENDED PER KILL WITH THE M16 IS FIFTY THOUSAND. THE MARINE SNIPER AVERAGES 1.3 ROUNDS PER KILL. THE COST DIFFERENCE IS $2,300 VS. 27 CENTS. Shave and a haircut, two bits.

On a whim, I punched up Vonnie’s number and listened to her machine tell me she was unavailable at this time but to leave a message and she’d get back to me as soon as possible. When I hung up the phone, Ruby was at the door; it appeared I was on the road to being forgiven. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Mrs. Keller says Jim’s gone hunting with a friend in Nebraska. She also says that she’s bringing Bryan his lunch and a few things and wants to know how long we are intending on keeping him.”

“Oh, brother . . .” I placed my elbows on the desk and rested my chin on my combined fist.

“You’re going to wish you hadn’t stuck your hand in that hornet’s nest.”

I looked at the blinking red lights on my phone. “Do you think she was lying?”

She crossed her arms and covered her mouth, deep in thought. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Yep, it does.” She glanced down the hall toward the jail in an unconscious effort to conceal her thoughts. “When Henry gets here, tell him to go down to Dave’s and get some real winter gear, altitude stuff, and some Winchester .308s.” She nodded absentmindedly and disappeared back toward her desk. “Is this Omar on line one?”

She called back down the hallway, “Line one,” then reappeared in the doorway. “By the way, Artie Small Song is in the Yellowstone County Jail and has been there since Saturday. They want to know if you want him; they say he eats like a horse.”

“Tell them it’s a wonderful offer, but no thanks.” She nodded and disappeared as I picked up the receiver and punched line one. “Omar?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t a happy yes.

I thought for a moment. “Are you aware of the term posse comitatus?”

“Yes.”

I listened to the silence on the line and then settled into the plan. “Do you still have that Neiman Marcus helicopter?”

11

“I do not think the last one of these I was in was like this.”

I looked around at the embossed, luxurious, Italian leather interior, but once again my attention was drawn to the swirling countryside as we ascended the east slope at over 160 miles an hour, a fact of which my stomach was acutely aware. “Don’t talk to me, I’m concentrating on not throwing up.”

“I did not know that they come with doors, and the little bud vases are a nice touch.”

“I’m going to make a point of puking on you first and into them second.”

Henry smiled and looked out the other window while balancing the Weatherby Mark V lightly between his powerful hands, completely oblivious to the speed and altitude. He had raided the small area of army surplus in Dave’s sale department near the back door of the sporting goods store and was wearing fingerless wool gloves; one of the old, reflective-green, M1-style jackets with the genuine acrylic fur lining; a pair of Carhartt overalls; and a new pair of Sorels. He looked like a disco Eskimo. “Did Omar really buy this helicopter at Neiman Marcus?”

I sighed and attempted to put a good seat on my internal organs. “It was in the divorce settlement with Myra.”

“So, she bought the helicopter at Neiman Marcus?”

I belched and placed a hand over my stomach. “He bought it for her when they were getting along. When they got divorced, he took it back.” He was silent for a few moments, but I knew it was too good to last.

“Where exactly is the helicopter department in Neiman Marcus?”

I dipped my head and rested it against the barrel of the Remington pump I carried. “Please shut up.”

He considered the rifle between his knees. “Did the Weatherby come from Nordstrom’s?”

The metal felt cool against my forehead as I listened to the whine of the superchargers on the big Bell engine as it fought to carry us through the thermals the cragged peaks below were creating. I thought about my plan. I had to keep reminding myself that nobody else had thought up this harebrained stuff and that I was responsible for my own misery, but we couldn’t have covered this amount of ground on foot. If we saw anything, if we saw George Esper, we would go down and snatch him up, dead or alive, and get out of there like a Neidless Markup bat out of hell. Just the thought of up and down made my stomach flip again.

He must have noticed me closing my eyes. “You want me to tell you about my first time?”

“Don’t tell me it’s Dena Many Camps.”

He smiled, playing with the adjustments on the rifle’s scope and then readjusting them back. “I remember the first time I rode in one of these things. We were doing a hot extraction out of Laos in ’68 with this NVA colonel we were taking down to the magic fishing village on the coast. We had lost about half our patrol and were flying really low, under radar, maybe a hundred feet off the water. He was pretty sure we were going to throw him out, so sure that he decided to take things into his own hands. He must have tried to hurl himself out of that helicopter half a dozen times. On the sixth attempt, he kicked me in the chin. So, I just folded my arms and figured the next time he goes for the door, this fella better learn how to fly.”

I opened my eyes and looked up at him. “And?”

He continued looking out the window. “He did not.”

“What?”

“Fly.”

I thought about it. “Is that story supposed to make me feel better?”

I looked up at the back of Omar’s head. He wasn’t happy about the current situation either. We were just cresting the meadows at the head of the valley, and the treetops swayed as the big rotors batted them away. I looked past the trees to the sky and made a few more calculations on the weather. I picked up the headset from the console beside me, held one of the cups to my ear, and adjusted the microphone. “Omar?”

He turned a little in his seat, and I could see him speaking. “Yes?”

“I figure about two hours before it hits?”

He studied the horizon ahead. “Maybe three, you never know.”

“Let’s make it two; I want to know.”

He nodded his head, and my stomach did a half gainer with a full twist. I thought about all the light aircraft crashes I had investigated in my tenure as sheriff; it seemed like there was one every couple of years. Good pilots, good aircraft, but the mountain weather was always unpredictable. Between the thermals, downdrafts, and quirky winds, I wasn’t sure how anybody kept the things aloft except with a liberal application of positive thought. “Doesn’t this stuff bother you? Just a little bit?”

He looked at me, slightly swaying back and forth with the movements of the helicopter. “No, it does not.” He watched me for a while longer.

“What does bother you?”

“You, thinking I might be capable of murder.”

I looked at him, with the shotgun’s barrel between my eyes, and tried to figure if this was really something he wanted to talk about or if it was just another distraction. In the end, I decided that it didn’t matter. “You are capable of doing it.”

He nodded. “Physically, technically, I suppose so.” He leaned forward a little. “But do you think I would?”

“Do you think you’d be here if I did?”

He considered this. “There is the old saying ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’ ”

“You think you’re an enemy?”

“I am trying to find out if you think I am.” He leaned back in the cream-colored leather and looked up at the monitors on the ceiling. “Sourdough Creek.”

We were more than halfway there. “Try to look at it from my point of view.”

He closed his eyes. Henry could surrender himself to a hypothetical, even if it included making himself the suspect in an ongoing murder investigation. He never worked on a single level. “MMO?”

“Motive.”

“One through three?”

We had played this game numerous times, but never with Henry as the perpetrator. “One?”

He was talking fast with his eyes still closed. “It cannot be conclusively shown that I have ever met Cody Pritchard or Jacob Esper or had reason to have feelings of ill will toward either of them.”

Impossible. “Two.”

“Not only have I met Cody Pritchard and Jacob Esper, but there are hard feelings between us since they took my niece into a basement and raped her repeatedly with their tiny, little, circumcised dicks, with bottles, and with baseball bats.”

A chill was starting at the base of my spine. “Three.”

“I was seen stalking through the courthouse after the trial with a Sharps .45-70 under my arm and muttering something about Cody Pritchard and Jacob Esper canceling their subscriptions to Indian Country Today.” He opened his eyes. “I give motive a two.”

“Two and a half.”

He genuinely looked hurt. “Why?”

“Al Monroe’s description of the perp, large with long, darkish hair.”

He sighed and pulled the Weatherby back against his chest and folded his arms around it. “All right, two and a half, but I’m not going to be as easy on the next two.”

“Means?”

He thought. “One: I have been stricken by a strange, tropical disease, which has paralyzed both of my trigger fingers.”

“Uh, huh. Two.”

“Both of these boys have been killed by a caliber of weapon of which I am in possession.”

“Three.”

“Ballistics matches this weapon with the slugs that killed both of these boys.” He shrugged and looked out the window. “Two.”

“Means, two.” I studied the lines on his face, and it seemed as if some of the joy had receded from the game. “Opportunity?”

“One: I was in Vatican City with the pope at the time.”

“Two.”

“I was seen in the area of both murders, but no one can place me at the scene of either.”

“Three.”

“I am found standing over both bodies with aforementioned .45-70 in my hands as both Cody and Jacob respectively gasp out their dying breaths.” He looked back at me. “Opportunity knocks twice?”

I shook my head. “One and a half. You had the argument with Cody at the bar, not too distant from the Hudson Bridge, but nobody saw you on the mountain.”

“Al Monroe’s description?”

“Not a positive identification; anyway, we already used it on motive.”

“What about the feathers?”

“Circumstantial; fake feathers indicate a fake Indian to me.”

He smiled. “I was late running yesterday.” I stared at him for a moment. “No sense playing the game if you can’t play it honestly. A two.”

We sat there looking at each other. The theory was that three out of nine meant you should be looking for another suspect, and nine out of nine meant you started having the suspect’s mail forwarded to Rawlins. Prosecutors usually liked higher than a six before going to trial, so Henry’s six barely let him off the hook. “Looks like you’re innocent, of the murders at least.” I paused. “Honestly, who do you think is doing it?”

“Honestly?” He sniffed and dropped his chin on his chest. “I think it is somebody we do not know. I think it is somebody we have not thought of.”

“A sleeper?”

“Yes. Somebody that is doing this for very strong reasons, something we do not yet understand.”

I nodded. “Do you know Jim Keller very well?”

He looked up, very slowly. “No.”

“Which of the four boys do you consider the most innocent, and whose life’s been messed up by this the most for the least cause?”

“Bryan.” His eyes stayed steady. “The clever thing gets in the way in your line of work, does it not?”

“Sometimes.”

“Is Jim Keller a shooter?”

“He’s supposedly in Nebraska hunting with some friends.”

I watched him turn the wheels. “Would you run off and leave your son here with all these things going on?”

“He never came to the trial.”

The eyes didn’t move. “Neither did I.”

“She wasn’t on trial.”

“The hell she was not.”

I didn’t feel like pursuing that line of answering. “I guess we are back to you. Know your rights?”

“Yes, but it is the wrongs that keep getting me into trouble, Officer.”

* * *

We watched the trees swing below as Omar and the department-store helicopter used a variation on the IFR, or I Follow Road, method of navigation to get us to Lost Twin. I thought for a moment and became aware that my stomach had settled. West Tensleep Lake lay at the base of the high valley that continued up the ridge until you got to Cloud Peak, the crowning jewel of the Bighorns. The Indians had named it Cloud Peak because, like most accentuated landmasses, it developed its own weather patterns. It hid from the plains below most of the time, peeking out at us from behind a haze of high-altitude cumulus.

Omar was rounding off the edges to get the most out of his three-hundred-mile travel range. We had been up for the better part of an hour and, through the front glass of the passenger side of the cockpit, I could make out a few cabins that had been built before the government had acquisitioned the land. We were now technically in Big Horn County, but the less said about that the better. By the time we followed Middle Tensleep Creek below Mather Peak we would be back in Absaroka County and my proper jurisdiction. You could feel the lift and roll as the chopper followed the creek toward Mirror Lake and continued up the small valley to our final destination, the Lost Twin. They were both sizable. I noticed Omar’s hand waving in the cockpit. I picked up the headset and adjusted the microphone. “Yep?”

“You’ve got a call on the single band; I’ll patch it through.”

A moment of static, and Ruby’s voice was there in my ear. “Walt, the Game and Fish called. They said there wasn’t anyone signed in at the trailhead to go to Lost Twin, but they said they’ve got a black Mazda Navajo with the plates Tuff-1 at the Tensleep parking lot.”

“That part’s good news. Anything else?”

“Affirmative.”

“Affirmative? Hey, you really are getting the hang of this.”

“Walt, I was going back over the duty roster so that I could write the Roundup for the week. There was a complaint phoned in yesterday morning that sounds suspicious.”

“What’s that?”

“Tracy Roberts, Kent’s sister called; they’ve got that place down on Mesa road, on 115? Well, she and her dad were out feeding cows yesterday morning when the old man saw a porcupine that’d been doing some damage, so he makes her stop so he can shoot it.”

“On the county road?”

“I know, she wasn’t sure if she should call in, but she was angry. She says that somebody came roaring down the road and almost hit the old man.” I waited. “She said it was a green pickup, an old one.” I looked over at Henry, who continued to look out the window at the rushing scenery.

“What time?”

“A little after dawn.” I continued to look at my friend who had just moved above a six. “Walt, do you copy that?”

“Yep, they get a look at the driver?”

“No.”

Radio silence for a few moments. “Roger that. Over and out.”

I pulled the headphone and rested it on my lap and studied him. After a moment he turned. “Something?”

I nodded slowly. “Yep.” I explained about the black Mazda and the lack of sign-in sheet but neglected to mention the sighting of a green truck very much like his.

He smiled. “Lost Twin, how could it be anything else?”

We continued on as I tried to harness the thoughts that made the helicopter seem as if it were standing still. I looked out the side window and watched. I felt the blood in my body shift forward as Omar slowed the helicopter from 160 to nothing and poised over the small ridge that separated the two lakes. I could easily make out the pattern the rotors made on the surface of the water, spiraling dimples that rotated outward to feathering waves that agitated the surrounding shores. Without my asking, Omar began a slow, clockwise rotation to give us the maximum view. Henry went to the door on the other side as I hunched against the Plexiglas window and searched the area for any signs of human activity below.

The lakes are situated at the bottom of the Mather Peak Ridge that touches just over twelve thousand feet. Only through the valley in which we had made our approach could you make any kind of retreat and that was due northwest, the exact direction from which the storm was approaching. So far there were no real signs of the front, and I was beginning to think that the skin-of-our-teeth thing wasn’t going to be an issue when my attention was drawn to the higher peaks to the west. It was still coming; it had just paused for a moment to gather its breath to make the run up the west slope of the Bighorns. The surrounding area was going to be swept into a frozen maelstrom a little before dark. I had every intention of being out of there by then but, just in case, there were two six-thousand-cubic-inch packs lying on the floor between Henry and me. They had extra clothes, food, a tent, two sleeping bags, and enough emergency supplies to keep us going for a little less than a week. Every time I looked at the oncoming clouds, I nudged my boot up against the packs and felt better.

“Hey.” It figured Henry would spot something first. I turned and looked into the cockpit; Omar had seen something too and pointed to an area in a small gully hidden among the trees directly beside the farthest lake. His arm was decorated with three turquoise bracelets. Style. The nose of the helicopter dipped as we accelerated to the area and hovered just above the treetops. There was a small, green tent there, a little two-person job, with a rain fly staked to the ground. It was holding its own against the pounding of the Bell.

I reached up and tapped Omar on the shoulder. He nudged one of the ear cups forward and inclined his head toward me. “This thing got a PA?” He nodded and flipped the appropriate switches on the overhead console and motioned for me to pick up my headset and use the microphone. The helicopter had little bud vases, how could it not have an announcing system? I cleared my throat and listened to it echo from the surrounding mountainsides. I glanced up, as both Omar and Henry looked at me. “Shit.” This too echoed across the peaks.

Henry shook his head. “You think he cannot hear the helicopter?”

I frowned at him and continued. “George Esper?” The volume gave me more of a sense of authority, so I continued. “This is Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County. If you are down there, would you please reveal yourself to us?” We watched closely as nothing happened, and the only thing I could think of was how difficult it was going to be to find his body in a snowstorm. We continued to scan the area, but nothing was moving down there except with the insistence of the helicopter’s downdraft. I tapped Omar on the shoulder again, but he pointed to the headset and flipped the switches on the overhead. “You see any place you could set down?”

His head swiveled and the helicopter turned to the left. It was like being in Omar’s head, and I wasn’t so sure that was such a great place to be. His arm came up again, indicating a small meadow clearing to the north side of the lakes where the trail swerved and ran along the shore. “There.”

The nose dipped again, and we sideslipped to a very small rock outcropping where the buffalo grass and the small alpine plants were plastered against the hard ground. There wasn’t much room, and the tips of the rotors clipped the large pines that surrounded the area on the north side. I looked back at Omar, but he remained concentrated on the skids as they settled on the bald cap of rock perhaps two feet from a sharp ledge that sloped to the lakeshore below. It was good I didn’t have to pay him, because I couldn’t afford him or his helicopter. He took off his headset and turned in the seat to look at us; there was a large thumping noise as he unlocked the doors of the aircraft. “I want to be clear about this. We have consumed exactly one half of our fuel and, with current conditions, I can say that you have only about forty-five minutes to find George Esper and then have the ride of your life getting out of here.” I scrambled out of the helicopter on the uphill side and waited as Henry tossed me the Weatherby and slid out after me. Omar was pointing at the bags. “Get rid of those; either you use them or we leave them here. When I get ready to head out, I want the least amount of weight possible.”

Henry reached into the luxurious cargo section and pulled the packs across the contoured carpet out after us. As he dropped them on the moss-covered granite he took the .308 back and saluted Omar through the pilot door. “Sir, yes sir.”

Omar ignored him and looked at me. “Forty-five minutes. You go check on the kid, and I’ll do a run-through on this beast.”

We threw the packs on our shoulders and headed off in a crouch toward the nearest lake. After a few steps, when we were assured we were beyond the slow deceleration of the rotors, Henry leaned toward me. “I do not think he likes me.”

“You’re an acquired taste.”

* * *

The patchworks of snow led from all the high areas north, so we abandoned the covered trail for the banks of the lake and quick-stepped it toward the ridge. Once we got there, it was a short traverse to the other side where we had seen the tent. I looked back as we climbed. Somehow, I had gotten ahead of Henry. I stopped and waited as he made his way up in my footprints; if you were tracking him, it would have been as if he had disappeared. He held out his hand, and I pulled him up; to my surprise, he was breathing heavier than I thought he should, so I caught him as he shifted the Weatherby to his other hand. “You all right?”

He looked around at the collection of peaks that ringed the area; there was hardly any lower ground than where we now stood. “I do not wish to dampen your spirits, but this is a wonderful place to be shot.”

“Kind of like being in a toilet bowl.” We were in the open, with the deep cover of pines darkening into the surrounding area. I was having one of those creeping, grave-step feelings. “Let’s go.”

At the end of the ridge, the trail deflected into two paths that circled a large boulder and separated as one continued the high road around the far lake and the other dropped into the depression where the tent was pitched. It was a good spot, dry, but close to water. It didn’t have too much of a view, but it was well protected from the wind. I looked back up the valley to the northwest and could more clearly see the dark line of clouds that continued to eat up the western sky. It was calm at the moment, but the intersecting triangles of black granite and fresh snow seemed to be holding their breath in preparation for what was coming. They looked like long teeth.

Henry put out a hand to stop me and looked down at the path. “Tracks.” He lowered to one knee, shifting his shoulders back so that the weight of the pack wouldn’t propel him down the hill. “How big is George Esper?”

I blew out a breath and thought. “Under six feet, maybe a hundred and seventy pounds.”

“Size nine, Vasque hiking boots?”

I froze. “What?”

He looked up, his eyes very sharp. “Vasque hiking boots, looks like a size nine. Mean something?”

“Is there a little pattern on the arch, like a little mountain range?”

He didn’t look. “Yes.” His neck strained as he scoped the surrounding area. I leaned over his shoulder and looked at the print. “Is there something you would like to tell me?”

I was looking around now, too. “We had prints like these at the scene where Jacob was killed.”

He stood. “So, George was there?”

“We checked them, and one of the guys that reported the incident wore size nine Vasques.”

“What was Jacob wearing?”

I thought back. “The same.”

“Size nine?”

“They are twins.”

“Well, one set of prints is better than two, not that I’d be able to tell the difference.” We continued down the trail to the tent. The rain fly was zipped, and there was a backpack leaned against a tree with the rain cover placed over it. The small ring of a campfire lay cold in the circle of rocks about ten feet from the tent; there was an aluminum frying pan and a plastic bag of corn flour resting on one of the flatter rocks. The heads of a few trout lay in the ashes, along with the strips of bone with connected tails. Henry kneeled by the fire and placed the palm of his hand in the ashes, gently pressing down. After a moment, his eyes came up. “It is old, but there is a little warmth here. Maybe this morning.”

“Any more tracks?”

He nodded. “Vasques, size nine.”

We looked at each other for a moment. “I don’t like this, do you?”

“No.”

He pulled his hand up and dusted it off as I continued over to the tent and slipped the pack to the ground, then crouched and unzipped the rain fly and the screen on the tent. I pulled back and turned to look at Henry. “Well, he spent the night here.”

“But no fishing equipment?”

“No.”

He looked around. “I will take one lake, and you take the other. Here.” He tossed the Weatherby to me and extended his hand for the shotgun. He smiled as he took the Remington. “You are a better shot than I am.” He scanned the surrounding hills. “Just in case there is somebody up there.”

I nodded. “You got the rest of the ammunition?”

He patted his pockets and shrugged. “You only need one, right?” Henry turned and disappeared into the pines toward the eastern lake.

* * *

I looked at the rifle and considered whether it was loaded or not. For all I knew the Bear was standing just out of sight, listening to see if I would open the bolt action. I shook my head at the ridiculousness of the situation and pulled the .308 up onto my shoulder. If he was standing out there, I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of hearing me check. Instead, I readjusted the forgotten .45 on my hip and made a face at a man I was sure had already begun the search around his own lake. I started off around mine thinking about what Ruby had said. Just because someone had sighted an old, green pickup didn’t mean Henry was a killer. In my experience, smoke usually indicated smoke and nothing more.

There were coal-bed methane operations in the vicinity of the Robertses’ place. To these men, time meant money and time in our part of the high plains meant driving, which to them meant speeding. From economic necessity, a lot of them drive older outfits, and any one of them could have been speeding to or from one of the many rigs in the area at that hour of the morning. I knew I was working up a grand rationalization but just because a truck was green and old didn’t mean that it was Henry’s. Even so, I once again had the urge to pull the bolt and see if the rifle was loaded. I looked back at the other Twin but kept the rifle on my shoulder, considering it a triumph of righteous logic, and wondered how many poor dumb bastards had died in the name of that particular line of thought. I stayed on the path that circled the lake, careful to avoid the wetter sections where the snowmelt had gathered and saturated the ground, but I didn’t see any more footprints. I bolstered my spirits by reminding myself that I’d also not found any bodies.

Vasques, size nine. Had George been with Jacob? If he had, then why? And why would he be at the scene of his brother’s death and then go fishing? Maybe Cody Pritchard did know his killer. My head was starting to swim with all the options, but one thing was starting to come clear: Just because you were a victim didn’t mean you couldn’t be a perpetrator.

I thought about Jim Keller. Mrs. Keller had come into the jail to check on her baby boy and had been somewhat disarmed at finding him in my office with his feet propped up on my desk. He was drinking a ginger ale and leafing through a stack of police supply catalogs. I guess she figured we’d have him chained up in the basement. I asked her about Jim, and she said that he was hunting down in Nebraska with some friends; geese, she said. There was a hesitancy in the way she said it that led me to believe there was something more there. So I used one of my age-old cop tricks and asked her if there was anything else she wanted to tell me. She used one of the age-old mother tricks and just said no. Cop tricks pale in comparison with mother tricks.

I looked back around the crescent ring of mountains and thought about what I would do if I wanted to kill someone here. I thought about how I might lure him into a remote area and then splatter him like a ripe pumpkin. It was about then that I decided to concentrate on taking in more of the scenery. Lost Twin is a lot like the other hundreds of pristine, alpine lakes in the Bighorns that seem to be sitting and waiting for calendar photographers. It lies in one of the mountain’s few hanging valleys, and you could easily envision the tributary glacier that had gently cut this hidden one. With their beds of stone, the Lost Twins had given up little to the forces of erosion. It was as if their hearts had been broken by the retreating glacier, and they were not likely to allow such liberties again. These glaciers formed steps and benches, each successive one at a higher altitude. I had seen pictures of the Coliseum in Rome, and the similarity did nothing to ease my mind. I felt the wind and automatically looked back down the valley. The clouds were starting to move at a surreal pace; evidently, they had caught their breath. Maybe it was the altitude, but the weather always seemed to change more quickly on the mountains.

My attention was brought back to the trees, where I had seen movement. It wasn’t a singular movement, but rather a collection of movements that I quickly dismissed as the wind.

* * *

Omar was still fiddling with the helicopter when I reached the hill leading up to the ridge. I stood there, and the air tasted good. I took a little bit of time to breathe in the smells of the pines, the rocks, and the water. There was a large patch of delicate, freeze-dried yellow flowers that lined the south side of the small ridge. Henry would know what they were. He was making his way around the scree-lined bank of the other lake, probably doing a much more thorough job than I had done with mine. I watched as he crouched down and studied a shallow area between the rocks. The acrylic fur wreathed his neck, and the scattergun was resting lightly on his shoulder as he held the pistol grip. He stayed that way, and I had the feeling I was getting a select view of the Athapascan race that had braved the Bering Strait in search of two bigger and better mastodons in each garage. Sometimes I didn’t think his DNA thought things had worked out so well. I wasn’t quite sure why I had decided on the shotgun, other than it balanced out the .308’s long-range capacities; and, like a good scout, I was always attempting to be prepared, or reverent, or something like that. I continued to watch him as he studied a shallow area between the rocks and peered across the lake toward the area of the tent. As Henry made it to the top of the ridge, I asked, “Anything?”

He shook his head and looked back in the direction from which he had come, as if whatever he might have missed would be more visible from half a mile away. The wind was picking up, and the gusts were becoming more consistent. “Boot prints, same as before, but nothing fresh.”

“What do you think?”

He stretched his legs and tucked the shotgun under one arm; I noticed the safety was on. “Difficult to say with all the scree; he could have gone off anywhere.”

“Alien abduction?”

“Possible, but unlikely. They are usually looking for intelligent life.”

I exhaled a lung full of the good smells, and we both looked down the valley to the trail out. “He’s fishing.”

“Yes, that, or a lyin’ and a molderin’ in the grave.”

I looked back at him. “Let’s concentrate on the fishing, okay?”

“Yes.” He continued looking down the trail. “You need water for that.” He finally looked back at me. “You thinking what I am thinking?”

“Three hours in good weather?”

His eyes watched the clouds; they were even closer than before. “I do not think that is going to be the case. Anyway, four, with the packs.”

I tried not to put too much bass in my voice, “I wasn’t planning on taking them.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Do you mind jumping up and down so I can hear your big brass balls clank?”

“It’s only three hours . . .”

“In good weather, which we are not going to have.” He looked at his wristwatch as a particularly strong gust caused both of us to shift our shoulders. “Even then, it will be after dark.” I continued to look at him. “We get caught in here without any supplies, we are the honored dead.”

“Yep, but what a blaze of glory.” I was enjoying being the tough guy for a change.

“I am more concerned with the freeze of agony.”

“I have to find that kid, dead or alive.”

I watched as he stretched his back and looked toward Omar, who stood at the nose of the helicopter with his arms folded. My forty-five minute window of opportunity already had the storm shutters closed and was prepared to depart at roughly twice the national speed limit. I briefly thought about telling Henry to go on back without me, but it would have been an insult. So I just stood there, waiting. “We find him dead, we leave him.”

I lied. “Agreed.”

“I will get some supplies from the packs. I refuse to leave here without water and some food.”

“We could always eat George, if we find him.” I watched after Henry as he crossed the ridge toward the tent where we had left the packs. His step seemed to have lost some of its natural spring. I called after him, “How long till snow?”

He called back without turning, “How the hell should I know?”

Maybe we were going to die. I trudged up the hill toward the helicopter and Omar. “You need to get out of here.”

He pushed the Ray-Bans further up on his nose. “What’re you gonna do?”

“We’re going to trail out back to West Tensleep. That kid’s here, somewhere, and I figure the only thing to do is follow the water out.”

“You and the Indian?”

I looked at my reflection in his polarized sunglasses. “Yep.” I didn’t mean for it to have as much warning as it did, but that’s the way it shook out. He didn’t say anything, just opened the cockpit door and reached in to retrieve a handheld that he gave to me. The rotors pitched slightly as another gust rushed up the valley.

“It’s already set at your frequency, so if you need to talk to anybody you should get through, as long as you’ve got reception.”

“Thanks.”

He looked at me for a moment as if memorizing me, and I can’t say it was comfortable. “I notice you’re carrying the .308.”

“We traded.”

He considered it for a moment. “Make sure he stays ahead of you.” His face was stiff. “I’m not joking.”

I looked at him and thought about saying a number of things. “We’ll be all right.” I waited a moment. “Get in touch with Ferg and Vic and tell them to meet us at West Tensleep parking lot, if you would?” We both looked back at the weather. “Tell them to bring hot coffee.”

Omar sighed a deep sigh, climbed into the helicopter, and held the door open with a foot. He began flipping switches and from the center of the machine a high whine began slowly setting the rotors in motion. He started to place the headphones over his ears but stopped, leaned sideways through the still open door, and shouted to be heard over the increasing roar of the big engine, “You tell that Indian, if he comes out of here alone?”

I waited.

“I will see him dead.”

* * *

I lowered my head, held the Weatherby in both hands, and quickly dropped over the ridge. The deep hues of the helicopter’s exterior reflected the lakes; it quickly rose from the rocks and veered toward the center of the valley as a few pieces of the trimmed lodgepole pines scattered and dropped to the ground. A strong blast of the oncoming storm caught the chopper broadside, sending it in a cascading pitch that threatened to drop it in the lake below. Omar deflected the wind pattern and converted the stall into a rolling turn that carried it across the valley. I continued to watch for the next minute as he made the grade and slipped through the pass and down the mountainside toward the safety of Durant International far below. I walked the rest of the way down the hill and met Henry at the ridge. “Neiman Marcus decided not to honor our frequent flier miles.”

“That is what we get for flying coach.” He handed me an abbreviated version of my pack. “The tops disconnect from the rest to make a fanny pack. We both have two bottles of water and a little food, but that is all.”

“A jug of wine and thou . . .” He didn’t say anything but turned and started off down the banks of the western lake toward the trail that would eventually lead us out. A haze had begun enveloping the hills where the trail disappeared. The fog of low-flying clouds had begun eating the mountains, and we were headed down its throat. I wasn’t quite sure why I was feeling as good as I was. Maybe it was because I had perceived a challenge and had accepted it, or maybe it was because I didn’t see any other options. But I felt good and decided not to ruin it with too much recrimination. I caught up and pulled alongside of him. “He can’t be too far, since he left all his stuff at the lake.”

“Or he is dead.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that.”

He turned his head slightly toward me as he walked. “Would you go out this way fishing and leave all your supplies at the lake?”

“He’s not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.”

“Maybe.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I notice that he had tied some tubular webbing from the packs to the shotgun, making a sling, which he now pulled up higher on his shoulder. “Do you remember what George Esper looks like?”

I thought for a moment. “Yep.”

“I remember what Cody Pritchard looked like, I remember what Bryan Keller looks like, and I have a pretty good image of what Jacob Esper looked like, but whenever I think of George, I cannot seem to bring the image into focus.”

I thought about the pictures, the ones I kept in the Little Bird file, the ones I had cut from the Durant High School yearbook. I had studied them enough over the past few years that I should have been able to tell you every significant feature of George Esper’s face, but I couldn’t. I shook my head. “Look, maybe we’re getting worked up about nothing. Maybe he’s just waiting for his brother.”

He started down the trail and called over his shoulder, “He will be waiting for a long time.”

We climbed the hillside in the Forest Service’s zigzag pattern that led to a granite outcropping where the run-off from the lakes escaped to the rocks below. The wind picked up again, and the cold air found every inch of uncovered skin on my hands, ears, and neck. I looked down the valley and at the trail we would be using as the snow began overtaking everything within a quarter mile. In two minutes, it would be to us. Henry had stopped too, to pull up the government-issue parka hood and to look back at the lakes. I pushed his shoulder. “Considering the situation, why don’t you talk about something happy?”

I watched as he tied the drawstring at his neck. “I thought I was.” He shifted the shotgun from his shoulder and cradled it in his arms, first looking down the trail at the approaching wall of snow, then off to the distant lakes. His eyes softened at the view, and he seemed sad. “These . . . young men, when they did what they did to my niece? For me, they no longer existed. For good or bad, they were gone.” His eyes returned to mine. “Do you understand?” His eyes stayed with mine. “It is the best I can afford them.”

I waited a moment, but it seemed as if he wanted me to say something. “All right.”

He smiled and once again threw the makeshift strap of the shotgun over his shoulder. “It is far from that, but it will have to do.” He continued to smile, then flipped the flaps down on his fingerless gloves and twisted his fingers into the mitts. The smile warmed me even as the flakes began stinging my face. He threw a paw up and thumped my shoulder twice. “Anyway . . . Revenge is a dish best served cold.” With this, he turned and walked into the low-flying clouds and the maelstrom of snow that had reached us.

I listened as the drums began a low rhythm and watched as the broad shoulders picked their way carefully down the trail. The world began to turn white, and the Bear disappeared.

12

Even in the snow-muffled air and the distance between us, I heard the gunshot.

We had been battling our way through the wind and the snow; it was an early storm, so the flakes were as big as silver dollars and, with the force of the wind, hit with the same impact. Henry and I had worked our way over the slight rise and outcropping, staying to the right as the trail followed the general path of the stream, and had moved past Mirror Lake with no results. The water continued to run fast from the hanging valley and you could hear it when the wind died down, which it did but with lessening regularity. The blizzard had arrived, visibility had dropped to about twenty feet, and you couldn’t see much of anything except the creek.

The Forest Service path remained visible as it wound its way along the stream basin but, in another hour, the depression that made up the trail would be filled with the fast accumulating snow. I took a small measure of solace in the fact that the part that led to the West Tensleep parking lot was not only tree covered but downhill, and we didn’t have that far to go before we would get to that section. But the farther we got, the farther my heart sank with the thought that George Esper was not going to be found. I had already summoned up the image of George’s bones, scattered by all the little animals by springtime, their bleached white contrasting sharply with the green of the fresh, high-meadow grass. I watched as Henry’s image faded in and out of the white swarm of the blowing snow. Every time he disappeared, I quickened my step a bit, wanting comfort from the dark shape that stayed just ahead of me.

Was the killer here? The last two murders had been within easy reach of roads, of quick access and egress, so I didn’t think so. But what about the boot prints? It was a popular boot in a very popular size, and the possibility that George, Jacob, and some guy from Casper wore the same shoe wasn’t out of the question. I had just about convinced myself that it was coincidence when I heard the shot. It was not the report of the Remington I knew Henry was carrying.

It was close, close enough that I thought I might have seen the muzzle flash. Hearing the sound of a gunshot when you’re not expecting it is like sticking your finger in a light socket, but hearing this gunshot was more like sticking that finger into a fuse box. I know I jumped, because I had to catch myself from slipping on the freezing ground and falling into the icy water.

I wasn’t aware that I had started running or how fast I covered the distance between us, but the next thing I saw were two distinct figures in the swirling haze of snow. One was seated in the path with his feet before him and was slouched forward, and the other was standing over the first and held something in his hands. With the keening of the wind, they didn’t hear me coming even though I’m sure that the pounding of my feet and my ragged breathing alone was enough to get the dead to roll over. For some reason, I hadn’t unslung the rifle during my run but was just now slipping it from my shoulder and gripping it with both hands.

It was like falling into an impressionist painting with the snowflake pointillism giving the image a surreal quality. As I surged forward I knew it was Henry on the ground. It wasn’t a big person that I hit, and I didn’t recognize a single aspect of his appearance as we collided. I know he didn’t expect me, because there wasn’t any resistance when I got there. I was carrying the rifle forward, but I didn’t swing it, instead I used it as a battering ram. In hindsight, I suppose I could have used the thing with a little more strategy, but calculation didn’t play much of a part in my reaction.

When he went, I went over with him into the cloud of snow and down the bank leading to the creek. When we hit the ground the first time, the rifle came up and caught me at the bridge of my nose, but the majority of the impact went directly into his head, which snapped back as the stock of the big Weatherby slammed into the side of his jaw. I’m pretty sure I heard the crack of bone as he went down with me smothering him as we went. The second time we hit the ground was the last, and the roll converted into a slow slide on the bank of the stream in axle-grease mud. I felt a sharp pain in my lower lefthand side; something dug into my short ribs and felt as though it had suddenly yanked on my insulated coat as I heard a muffled report. Even in the windstorm, the smell of spent gunpowder and quartzite stung the air. I slapped a hand down to the area where the gun must have been, and I could feel the small revolver that was wedged between our mutual diaphragms. The grip that held it was limp. There was accumulated moisture between us, and I couldn’t tell if it was from the fall or if either of us had been shot. I stripped the revolver from the open hand of whomever it was that had held it and lay there for a moment to make sure he really was out and to catch my breath. After a moment, the bass of Henry’s voice strained into the wind. “Are you hit?”

His voice was thick, and I could tell he was hurt. I grunted, rolled off the inert figure, and felt my side. I looked back up the hill. “No, I don’t think so. I’m just trying to get my heart out of my throat. You?”

“Who is it?”

I pulled myself up on one elbow and looked down at my victim; his face was turned and buried in the hood of a Gore-tex jacket. I used the stock of the rifle to leverage myself up into a position more suited to looking and reached out to turn the face toward me. His chin grinded a little as I pulled the face around, indicating that some damage had been done but, aside from the askew jawline, it was the mostly intact face of a watered-down Jacob Esper. “George Esper.”

Henry’s voice was still thick, but there was a little more animation. “Is he hit?”

“I don’t know.”

“Check him. I can wait.”

I sat up completely and looked in the general vicinity of where I thought George might have been shot and found nothing. The words were just coming out of my mouth when I noticed a small tear in his full-zip pants. “Shit . . .” I pulled off my glove and ran it over the black fabric; it was coated with his blood. “Shit.”

“He is hit?”

“Yep.” I tore the pants open to reveal an entry and exit wound at the front of his thigh. “Subcutaneous damage, possibly the thigh muscles. Missed the bone and major arteries though.”

“Can you stop the bleeding?”

I sighed. “Maybe, but he’s not gonna to be able to walk.” I took one of my gloves, turned it inside out, placed the fleece-covered leather over both holes, and looked around for something with which to tie the glove in place. The small pack was still attached to my middle, so I stripped the water bottles off and emptied it out, wrapping it around his leg. I raised his head up and peeled back an eyelid. What showed was mostly white; he gave no sign of coming to. I had seen his chest rise and fall, but I felt his wrist just to make sure I hadn’t killed him. The pulse was strong, but he remained still. I checked George’s leg again and then scooped up a small .38 caliber Smith and Wesson Detectives’ Special. I thumbed open the cylinders and looked at the two spent cartridges and at the two that remained. I removed the two empties, readjusted the wheel forward of an empty chamber, and snapped the cylinder back with the firing pin resting on the hollow chamber. I pushed it into my pocket, picked up the water, and climbed the hill to my friend who still sat on the trail.

As I got to the path, I had a clearer picture of him and saw that drifts of snow had begun building up against his outstretched legs. The Bear’s arms were wrapped around his middle, and the hood on his jacket dipped low as if he were trying to sleep. The Remington 870 lay across his lap. I knelt down and looked up into his eyes; they were pinched. “Let me see.” He slowly dropped his hands to the edges of his jacket, and it was only then that I noticed the dark red stains that had soaked through his woolen gloves. The jacket slowly opened to reveal a bloody mess at his abdomen, just above the navel and slightly to the right. The blood had saturated the lower part of his shirt and thermal underwear and was now leaking into his lap. I swallowed, and the word was out before I could stop it. “Shit.”

He laughed but quickly stopped as the movement in the trunk of his body caused him who knew how much pain. “Please, you are overwhelming me with your optimism.”

We had no idea where the bullet was or what damage it might have done on its merry little way. With abdominal injuries, there’s always the possibility of traumatic tear in one of the vascular organs, which could easily lead to massive hemorrhaging into the abdomen. Percentages for gunshot mortality rates flashed through my head: liver, 30 percent; kidney, 22 percent; stomach, 18 percent; and bowels, 12 percent. These numbers geometrically progressed the more I concentrated on how far we were from a formal paracentesis, or peritoneal lavage, and computerized tomography, or CT scan. I also thought about how much time I had spent standing in emergency rooms developing an unwanted education, and how badly I wished my friend and I were in one of those very rooms right now. “We have to stop the bleeding.”

He continued to smile. “Yes, we do.”

I turned my other glove inside out and placed it over the wound. “Is the pain high or low?”

He grunted as I held the glove in place. “In the sense of tolerance or location?”

My eyes met his. “Where does it hurt?”

He chuckled very lightly. “No higher than the wound.”

“Right, left?”

He thought, concentrating on the pain. “It appears to have stayed to the right.”

I sighed and looked at his torn pack. I started unbuckling my belt, trying to remember if Henry still had his appendix. “You know, if one thing would go right in this case . . .”

I pulled my belt around him and cinched the notches through; there were, of course, no holes where I needed them. “You got a pocket knife?” He began fumbling at one of his pant pockets, but I carefully took his hands away and placed them over the now saturated glove. “Hold this.” I fished the knife from his pocket and pulled out a bone-handled stiletto with a five-inch switchblade. I shook my head as I flipped it open and gauged a hole in the spot I had indented with the belt’s tang. He grunted when I finally buckled it over the glove. “Too tight?”

“No.”

I pulled the radio from the clip at the small of my back, amazed that it was still there after all the acrobatics. I rolled the small dial on the side, listened to the static, and keyed the handheld. “Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department, this is Unit One, come in Base? Unit Two?” I released the button and listened to the static some more. “Come in. Anybody out there?” Nothing. I looked around at the mountains that surrounded us and were covered in the visual static that was also taking its toll on our reception. I thought I heard a ghosting of some voice in the cover of radio frequency. “Come in anybody? I’ve got an emergency here. Anybody?” I listened, but the ghosting didn’t repeat itself. “I’ve got two men down in the draw of Lost Twin, just past Mirror Lake?” Still nothing. I turned and looked at Henry. “What happened? The abridged version.”

He cleared his throat. “He was standing on the trail when I looked up, so I stopped, and he fired.”

“He say anything?”

“No.”

“You?”

“I believe I may have gasped before clutching my stomach and falling to the ground, but that is all.”

I punched the button on the radio. “Come in, this is Unit One of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department, anybody out there?” I waited again. “If anybody can hear me, I’ve got two men down and need assistance on the trail of Lost Twin. I need backup and medical. If anybody can hear me, your assistance would be greatly appreciated.”

“That would be an understatement.”

I sighed. “Think you surprised him?”

“Yes, but all things considered I think he surprised me more.” He glanced past me to George who was starting to gather his commensurate amount of snow. “He is out?”

I looked back over my shoulder. “Yep.”

He raised a bloodstained hand to my arm. “You better get going.”

I turned and knelt down to check George’s pupils for any dilation or constriction; they appeared normal for now. I was concentrating, so it took a moment for me to process what he had said. “What?”

He gestured toward the prone George Esper. “You have to get him out of here.”

It hit me all at once what it was he was saying. “I’m not leaving you.”

He continued to slowly shake his head. “You do not have any choice. He is smaller, and you can make it out with him.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

He smiled. “Do not be mistaken, I have no intentions of dying. I will wait for you, here.”

“It’ll be after dark, in a blizzard. We won’t find you.”

“Then I will have to find you.”

My shoulders sagged a little, but I kept my eyes on him. “All right, knock it off with the mystical horseshit. You are gut shot, and the chances of your surviving are narrow enough without you crawling around out here.” His smile saddened a little. “What?”

“It is the mystical horseshit that is going to save my life.”

I looked away and sighed. “Sorry.”

“Do me a favor?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I’m not putting you out of your misery.”

“I have a small bag in my front pocket. If you would please get it out for me?” I reached for the front pocket of his coat, unbuttoned the flap, and pulled out a small, green velvet satchel with a ledger horse and warrior stitched across the front. There were beads and feathers attached to the opening at the top, and there were a number of items under the soft fabric, some discernible, some a mystery. I handed the medicine bag to him, and we didn’t mention it again. “You have to take him.” His smile brightened again. “Who knows, perhaps the weather will cooperate.” He grimaced and shifted his weight.

“Pain?”

“No, I have plenty, thank you.”

I wanted to punch him.

In spite of our hopes, the wind had increased and, with an introduction of ground fog, visibility had dropped to within ten feet. I once again glanced back at George and considered the 170-odd pounds I was going to be carrying for roughly the next three-quarters of an hour. At least it was downhill. My attention was drawn to the foot that stuck up just above the drop off, and I wondered if it might be a Vasque, size nine. When I turned back around, Henry had pulled the hood back a little, and his eyes had sharpened. “You must go, now.”

The longer I waited, the less chance he had. “You want me to move you up against one of the trees for a little shelter?”

“No, I am not moving until you get back.” His jaw clamped shut, the muscles bunched like fists on both sides of his face, and I wished like hell that I were the one who had been shot. I slipped off my jacket, careful to take out the bottle of water, and placed another layer over his front. “What are you doing?”

“If I’m carrying him out, I’ll be sweating like a pig once I get there. You’ll need this more than me.” I opened the water bottle and drained it in one continuous chug.

“Go.”

I bent down to scoop up the water bottles that had fallen on the trail. He watched as I vented a lot of frustration by throwing each of them as far as they would travel. We listened as they glanced off the tree branches in the distance and landed with satisfying thumps. I turned and looked down at him and tossed the empty over the hill. “Promise you won’t eat the snow.”

“I promise.”

I gave him a quick smile of my own. “I just thought I’d tell you, I’m taking you off the official suspect list.”

“I am comforted.” He didn’t look it, but I placed my hand lightly on his shoulder, and we understood what it was that we didn’t have to say.

I stood and trudged the small distance down the hill and paused at George’s boots: Vasques, size nine. I brushed the snow away and tried to gently shake the still unconscious George Esper into some semblance of awake. If he came to, it was possible that I could assist Henry and we could all get out; but there was no response, so I reached into his pockets, found his keys, and stuffed them into my Carhartts. If nobody was there to meet us, at least I would have a place to put George. But if nobody was there, how was I going to get a gut-shot, 220-pound man out of the woods? I decided to tackle one problem at a time. Grasping George by one arm and drawing him over my shoulder, I leveraged him up. He didn’t weigh 170, probably closer to a buck and a half, which reassured me a small amount. I stood with him over my shoulders and straightened my back, even though the majority of his weight seemed to remain on my right side. It wasn’t going to be easy but leaving him in an unconscious state and making a mad dash for the trailhead didn’t seem to be an option. He might die of hypothermia, even though I wasn’t so sure that Henry wouldn’t. But if I was betting on who could withstand the rigors of staying alive, my money was on the Bear. I was careful as I made my way up the small grade to the general flat of the trail and stopped to look down at my friend. “Couldn’t you have shot him first?”

He didn’t raise his head, but his voice rumbled, “What do you think?”

I thought about kicking his foot in response but was afraid that any unnecessary movement should be avoided, even a sign of affection. So I turned into the wind, shrugged George a little higher onto my shoulders, and kicked off the first steps of many to come.

* * *

Just a little away from all the action, I came across a nice fly rod and a creel resting beside the trail. I kicked the creel over, but it was empty. George’s luck was holding. I was frustrated and getting angry, so I used that as fuel to get me going. The problem with anger is that once it burns out, you’re left with empty tanks. I stopped and caught my breath. I thought about shrugging George off and taking a rest, but I didn’t do it for fear that putting him back on might be more than I could manage. There was that, and then there was Henry.

As I had been making my way, I had heard him begin singing. It was a low voice that found a way to cut through the noise of the wind and join with it to carry its ghostly sound across the valley. I had heard Henry sing a number of times at religious ceremonies on the reservation and at powwows that he had dragged me to. I was always surprised by the tonal quality of his voice. The power and strength were a given, but the intricate patterns that it expressed, the infinite ability instantly to change tone, always made me smile. Good friends are the ones who can remain close without losing their ability to surprise. I listened as the driving rhythm of his song carried me farther, and his voice remained with me down the long descent into West Tensleep Valley.

I didn’t know what kind of song it was, I didn’t know what the words were, and I didn’t want to know. I only listened to the complex melodies and carried them in my heart and mind, as other footprints seemed to join in with mine and share the load of George Esper. Old footfalls, old as the mountains and just as enduring. I listened as other voices joined in Henry’s song, strong voices, voices that carried not only over the valley but through it. The Old Cheyenne were with me, and I could feel their strength as I continued along the trail, my heavy boots forming the snow as I went. The drums were there too, matching my progress in perfect fashion, providing an easy rhythm and keeping my legs moving. I felt strong, like I hadn’t in many years, perhaps like I never had. I watched as my breath began blowing out ahead of me, and it was as if the wind did not affect it. The searing air felt good in my lungs, and I almost felt as if I could run; but the steady beat of the drums held, and so did I.

I felt as though the Old Cheyenne were challenging me for my friend, were attempting to take him with them back to the Camp of the Dead. It was a good, spirited challenge, one that pulled at my heartstrings, but one that I would not allow. I looked at their shadows as they walked along with me. Darting between the trees with closed-mouth smiles on their faces, nodding to me when I caught their eyes, they carried their coup sticks but kept them far out of my reach. Their steps were steady, like my own, and it was only after a while that I became aware that they were matching them precisely. I smiled back in the friendly assurance that their company was appreciated but their mission was not. They could see it as a smile, or they could see it as a showing of teeth. It didn’t matter; I would pass this way again very soon, and they were welcome to join me, but they should not get in my way. They were dressed in their summer loincloths with only low moccasins on their feet, but the cold didn’t seem to affect them any more than it was affecting me. One of them nodded in a knowing fashion and dipped his shoulders sideways to slip between the close-knit lodgepole pines only to disappear on the other side.

There was a small rise ahead, and it was only when I realized that my gums were freezing that I knew I was smiling in full anticipation of it. My stride lengthened, and the songs kept step. I had slept little in the last twenty-four hours, I was over five decades old, and yet none of it mattered. The young man on my shoulders felt like an oversized bag of baking potatoes as I kept the pace and continued on.

Even with the cloud cover, I could tell the sun was setting; there was the slightest darkening of the valley. I concentrated on my feet, leaving the Old Cheyenne to their devices, and tried not to slip into the icier areas of the trail. I had been right about the heat I would manufacture, and my clothes began attaching themselves to every outline of my body, causing an impediment to my speed as they started to harden. My muscles felt just the slightest twinge of ache and fatigue as I stayed on the high side of a sweeping turn that opened into a small meadow that I remembered from years ago. The wind hit me like a swinging door, knocking me back a half step before I caught myself and surged forward, still concentrating on my feet.

The weight of my burden was just beginning to take a toll when I noticed something else besides my boots in my line of vision. It was a hide-wrapped knob with pony beads and what I now knew to be owl feathers. I raised my head as the little rivulets of sweat raced down the middle of my back and from my face. Someone was there, in the trail before me, walking backwards with every step I took. It was a large man with hair like Henry’s and, when I squinted my eyes through the stinging snow, I could see even more of a resemblance. The face was harder and leaner, and there were scars where Henry had none, but I had no doubt it was family. His eyes were sharpened to slits of chipped obsidian that shifted to the left and then to the right. He had the same look as dogs have when they stand over a bone.

I shrugged George farther up on my shoulders and kept my pace as the warrior continued to back away, keeping the end of a stick only inches from my stomach. Every time I surged ahead in an attempt to run into the staff, he would back away at exactly the same speed. The clouds of his breath seemed to pour forth only to be caught in the suction of my own breathing, and it was as if we were sampling the same air. It agreed with both of us as we picked up the pace again, and I moved forward, stepping like some strange four-legged animal.

He smiled a tight-lipped smile, and the light that reflected from his eyes brightened the trail ahead. He caught me looking at something large and square that loomed in the distance over his right shoulder. He motioned with the staff, only missing my stomach by a hair’s width, and I could smell sweetgrass and cedar. I looked back as he smiled, and his words were the whisper of many voices, “Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.”

* * *

I nodded my head and laughed so hard that the weight of George Esper pressed on the back of my neck and forced my head down. When I resettled the young man and raised my eyes, the brave who had been in the path was gone. I looked around; the only thing I saw was the back of the trailhead map that indicated the path leading to Lost Twin. I laughed some more as I trudged around the two poles that supported the eight-foot sign, leaned against it, and looked at the snow that had plastered the north-facing side. I lunged on as the pressure of two men ground the gravel of the parking lot under the surface of snow.

There are two levels to the gravel lot, and I was hoping that the lower one, which also happened to be the closest, was where he had parked. There was a rise where the Forest Service had used railroad ties as bumpers, and I walked alongside of them until I literally ran into the fender of a snow-covered vehicle, almost dropping George onto the rear deck in the process. I caught my balance and turned toward the back of the small SUV, fished for George’s keys in my pocket, and prayed the car was his. When I got to the back of the vehicle, I wiped a hand across the deck and looked in satisfaction at the partially exposed chrome letters, MAZDA. Just for the heck of it, I tried the handle, and sure enough the tailgate let go with a small click. I raised the lid and gently slumped George in like so many groceries. There was a travel blanket that I wrapped around him and, after checking his leg, I closed the back, staggered around, and opened the driver’s side door. I slid into the seat. The steering wheel pressed against my stomach so I released the catch, allowing the seat to slide back with a thump. I took the keys in my hand and, as quickly as my frozen fingers would allow, separated the Mazda key from the rest and slid it in the ignition with a determined warning. “You better start.”

I turned the switch, and the engine roared to life along with some indiscernible heavy metal band that had been lurking in the CD player at full volume. I slammed my hand against the dash, splitting all the knobs from the deck, and they fell to the floorboards. I sat there for a moment in the relative quiet, then reached down and turned the heat on full, adjusting all of the louvers toward the back.

His gas gauge was at three-quarters; I figured I could leave the truck running, get back with Henry, and still have plenty of gas to get us all out of here. Where was my backup is what I wanted to know. I would have thought that once everybody had gotten the details of the plan somebody would have been here. I rolled down both front windows about an inch just in case George’s luck stretched to carbon monoxide poisoning. I heard a low moan come from the back. I threw my arm over the passenger seat and stared at the lump under the blanket.

He began rubbing a hand over his jaw while simultaneously holding his leg with his other hand. “Ohl, gawhd . . .” It was garbled, but you could still make it out.

“George?”

One of the eyes opened a little, then rapidly closed. “Pwhlat?”

“Do you know who I am?” The eye partially opened again, and he strained to remember my face. “I’m Sheriff Longmire, remember me?” He nodded, slightly. “George, we’re in a really bad situation here, so I need you to understand what I’m saying.”

He grimaced and raised his head a little. “Whmy laghwurts . . .”

“Yep, I know your leg hurts, and I’d imagine your jaw doesn’t feel too good right now, either. But I need you to listen to me. You’re hurt, but I’ve got you stabilized. There’s not a lot more I can do until we get you out of here. The problem is, I’ve got another man injured, back on the trail, and I need to go get him.”

“Thehindiyan?”

“You remember him, huh? Do you remember shooting him?” He remained silent and didn’t move. “Well, you did, and now I’ve got to go back and get him.”

His eyes widened a little, and he blinked. “Whtryed tookill me . . .”

“No, he didn’t. It’s Henry Standing Bear, and he came up here with me to try and get you out safely.” I sighed and tried to wrap it up. “George, we’re stuck in a snowstorm, and I’ve got to go back and get Henry before it gets so I can’t find him . . .”

“Whtryed tookill me . . .”

“No, George, he didn’t try and kill you because, if he had tried, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Swhotme?”

“No, you shot yourself while you were trying to shoot me.”

“Whtryed to . . .”

I leaned forward and glared at him for emphasis. “George? I need you to shut up.” It must have worked because his eyes widened, but that was the only part of him that moved. “Here’s what I need you to do; I need you to stay here and try and stay awake. Do you understand?”

He nodded his head.

“Good. I’ve got your truck going and the heater is on so it’s going to warm up in here pretty quick. Now, here’s the important part.” I leaned in even farther. “No matter how long it takes me, you wait here. Got it?” I kept my eyes steady on him for a moment. “Good. Now just stay here and get warm. I’ll be back, okay?”

I pulled the seat cover off from the passenger side and dragged it after me as I slid out into the snow and wind. I shut the door and wrapped myself up in the cover, pulling it high and making a hood. I pulled the radio from the small of my back and shook the condensation from it before it could freeze. “This is Walt Longmire, sheriff of Absaroka County, I’ve got an emergency with men down. Is there anybody out there? Over.” I waited, but the static seemed fainter than it had before.

I looked back across the lot in the general direction of the trailhead, but the only thing visible over the top of the truck was my rapidly filling footprints that led into oblivion. I drove the radio back in the clip at the small of my back and started off. I clutched the seat cover tighter around me and discovered a series of vinyl pockets that ran along the front. I tucked my stiffening hands into two of the pockets and silently thanked George for spending the extra twenty on the luxury model. I felt around and found what felt like a church key and a large shop rag, which I pulled out and wrapped around my face. I’m sure I looked like a Bedouin: Ben el Napa. I chuckled to myself at the thought of Henry seeing me like this; he could just laugh himself to death.

There was a sudden grade as the parking lot ended and I thought the trailhead began. I peered through the snow as it dove around my makeshift hood, but I couldn’t see the sign. The fact that it was eight feet high and at least six feet wide was less than encouraging. I tucked my head back into the nylon tweed cover and continued to trudge ahead. I was thinking that this was a poor excuse for a search if I couldn’t even find the sign, when I ran my head into one of the telephone poles that supported the damn thing. My head really hurt, but at least I’d found the first indication that I was going in the right direction. The gusts pressed against my back and slapped the ends of my autoponcho around me.

What was I doing, what had I done? It was hard to think. It was darker now, and the snow had gotten worse. The flakes were smaller than the silver dollar ones of before, and they became tiny flat discs that hovered in the air, moving with its currents. They swirled, paused, and then dove into the distance, making me feel that I was falling backward no matter how hard I lumbered forward. I closed my eyes to clear my head, but the disorientation continued. It was definitely darker now; the depression of the path continued up the hill, and the shadows of the trees remained consistent on both sides. As long as I stayed between them and continued uphill, I would eventually get to him.

* * *

Henry hadn’t been at the sentencing, but this hadn’t been a surprise since he hadn’t been at the trial at all. We hadn’t been in touch during the case and, even though I was continually busy, I had gotten the distinct feeling that he was distancing himself from me. I don’t know if I would have done anything different if I had spoken with Henry, and it was like he had said on the trail, in what seemed like another epoch, ignoring them was the best he could do. I wasn’t sure if I could have shown that much restraint, given the circumstances.

Vern said that he had received about seventy-five letters about the sentencing, that they were split fifty-fifty on whether the boys should be granted some semblance of leniency or whether they should be horsewhipped all the way to Kemmerer. After he had taken his place on the bench, the defense pled for a sentence that would “reflect the homegrown values and sense of forgiveness that were a hallmark of frontier civilization.” Even Ferg had to glance up at Steve Miller as he delivered that one, but his righteous tone and openly displayed conviction kept anyone from laughing out loud.

Each of the boys was allowed to stand and make a statement; it was the first time Bryan Keller had spoken in public about the rape. He stood and fanned his fingertips across the table before him. The whitening at his knuckles betrayed the fact that he needed assistance to stand, and we all waited. After a few moments, Vern spoke to him. “You wish to make a statement, Mr. Keller?”

“Yes . . .”—he cleared his throat—“I do, your honor.” His head dropped as he studied the dull oak finish of the table. He took a deep breath and raised his head. “Your honor, my lawyer has advised me to remain silent, but to be honest with you I feel that I may have said nothing for too long.” It had taken all the air out of him to get that far, and I wondered how much more he could get out before he hyper-ventilated. “I’ve thought a lot about all the things I’ve wanted to say, and I’ve had a long time to think about all of them. I’ve thought about the poor judgment I used that day, and how I’m older and that I hope you’ll let me learn from this horrible mistake that I’ve made . . . But none of that seems important now. There’s only one thing that’s important for me to say now, and that is that I am sorry.” He tilted his head back, and you could just see the beginnings of a shine to his eyes. “I want to tell Melissa that I am sorry; I want to tell her family that I am sorry for what I’ve put them through, to the people on the reservation for the things that have been said, to my family . . .” He stopped for a moment, then stood up straighter and allowed his hands to fall to his sides. “But the most important one is Melissa. I just want to tell her how sorry I am for what I’ve done to her and her life.” He stood for a moment longer, then sat, with a hand shielding his eyes.

“George Esper?”

George stood and placed his hands in his pockets but quickly extracted them and allowed them to drop. His voice was soft and faded out at the ends of his sentences like someone unaccustomed to public speaking. “Your honor, you can’t go back and change things that happened . . .” The majority of his apology was to the parents that sat behind him and tapered off from there.

“Jacob Esper?”

Jacob stood with fists at his sides. “Your honor, I’d like to say that I can’t express the sorrow I feel.” So he didn’t. Instead, he made a general appeal at how sorry he was for everything and left it at that. I wondered mildly what everything entailed.

“Cody Pritchard, do you have anything you would like to say?”

He didn’t move and remained seated with his hands in his pockets. After a moment, he smirked and said, “No.” And I thought about how far I could get him through one of the second-story windows on one try.

Then Kyle Straub, the prosecuting attorney, stood and began the statement he hoped would assure that the defendants would serve significant jail time. He argued like a man on fire that these young men must not go free and that anything less than strong sentencing for all four would be the final punch line in the unending joke that this trial had become. Vern looked up at that one, too.

Because of their ages when they had raped Melissa Little Bird, Kyle anticipated that Vern might sentence the three young men convicted of rape to a youth facility rather than to a prison. Offenders sent to youth facilities were usually not given a minimum sentence, which placed the duration of imprisonment squarely on the shoulders of prison officials. All of which meant that the prosecution needed a five-year minimum sentence or the convicted would be available for parole in a much shorter period of time. The judge must set a minimum; even I got that.

* * *

I tripped but caught my balance before I buried myself in the snow. It was getting deeper, about at midcalf, and my plodding was becoming more forced. Other than my feet, the only part of me that consistently felt warm was my chin and nose. The smell of gasoline and used motor oil from the shop rag was beginning to get to me. My legs were tired, my back ached, and the seat cover was doing little as protection. With my hands embedded into the nylon pockets, I had been unable to keep the wind from periodically lifting up the rear of the poncho and sending a brisk nor’wester up my back, so my fingers became victims to my attempts at keeping the seat cover wrapped around me. They caused me the most pain, until they lost all feeling. The problem with stepping in the rut of the path was that my boots kept slipping on the angle, sometimes causing me to slide on the frozen, uneven ground. When this happened, I was forced to throw out my arms in an attempt to maintain my balance. It was in one of these equilibrium episodes that I lost it.

I hit the ground face first because my hands were tangled in the seat cover. It didn’t hurt as badly as I thought it would, so I lay there for a moment as the snow next to my face began to melt. The stinging in my eyes bothered me, but it felt like a good place to rest. Somehow, it didn’t feel as cold there on the ground, and a comfortable, dreamy quality began seeping in with the melting snow. I exhaled a breath to clear the snow away from my shop-rag veil, but it didn’t clear very well. It should have bothered me, but it didn’t. It felt like I was getting enough air, and enough was all I needed. I became aware of a weight that pressed down on every part of my body, like a warm blanket. I struggled a little to clear my hip from a rock that was pressing up from underneath the snow pack and felt a burning sensation in my right ear. Somehow it had gotten uncovered, so I jostled my right arm loose from the nylon and started working my hand up to the exposed flesh.

I listened to the wind and was thinking about just taking a short nap when I heard them. Their voices were high, shifting in and out of the wind along with the sound of chimes or maybe very small bells. It was bells, the sound of thousands of miniature bells, not finely tuned ones, but lesser bells, handmade bells. I listened as they swirled and rounded with the wind and snow. It was as if the bells were not ringing unto themselves but were brushing against something as they continued on their way, turning and stepping with the wind, starting a rhythm that overtook their circular motion. They had started in the distance, but it now seemed as if they were all around me, and they were insistent.

There were shadows too, but these were different from the ones I had seen before. These shadows moved in and out of the snow-covered trees with a different purpose, one that seemed more complicated than that of the ones before. Where the others had moved in a single line along with me, these seemed to enjoy the infinite patterns of the wind, the snow, the trees, and maybe other things that I could not see.

I lay there with my loose hand ready to close the small aperture of the seat-cover hood like a small child afraid to look yet afraid to look away. It was hard to see because my eyelids were trying to freeze shut; my fingers no longer moved individually so I rubbed the butt of my hand across my eyes and blinked to clear my sight. The swirling was right in front of my face now, and it carried the rhythm of many. The patterns swooped in close to the ground and then snapped back quickly as if teasing the ground to follow. I reached my hand out to touch one of the strands, but it slipped through my fingers with the snowflakes. I reached out farther but, every time I got close, the white tendrils whirled away. I placed my arm under me, pushed myself up on one elbow, and looked through my tunnel of snow-coated cloth. They were small, cone-shaped bells that chimed lightly as they moved in tiny rows across well-rounded cloth, which draped from opulent forms. The bells continued to ring even when the wind-fringe swept them away.

I pulled myself over to one side of the walking trench and sat there for a moment, listening to the voices, to the bells as they ascended into the treetops. These voices were in a higher register than the ones that had accompanied me on my way down, and they comforted and stimulated at the same time. I pulled the makeshift hood back and felt my head loll sideways onto my left shoulder. The long fringed fingers traced fire trails across the length of my shoulders, but when I turned they snapped into the retreating snow. I felt another set cross the small of my back, but when I straightened, they too continued up the trail. I pulled a leg under me, toppled into a crouch, and then stood. It was difficult to walk at first, but the rhythm of the tiny bells and the way the tassels and cloth stretched across languid muscles drew me forward.

Voices were speaking into my exposed ear, whispering in tongues that I didn’t understand. I could never hear the beginnings or the ends of the sentences, only the smoldering playfulness that fueled them. The words simultaneously tickled and burned. Some were lugubrious and extended; others were short and sharp like surprised snatches of breath. I listened to the words and the melody and staggered upward, the hillside rising to meet my feet as they sank into the receptive snow. It was much deeper now, and the wind flattened the hanging cloth of the seat cover to the back of my legs and froze it there, pulling at the top of my head whenever a hind step lingered an instant too long.

I didn’t pay any attention to the path any longer. I just followed the tinkling silver bells and the swirling deerskin as they continued in their circular pattern up the hill. Their mouths didn’t smile, but their eyes did. The same glittering obsidian as before, but with a great deal more promise, with promises of everything under arched eyebrows and thick lashes.

The ground grew flatter for a while and then steepened in the opposite direction as my heels began striking the muffling snow before my toes. The momentum carried me forward, and I only slowed as the other voices joined in, the voices from before. They provided a strong bass counterpoint to the ascension of the bells and harmonized with the wavering beauty of the voices that had gone before me up the hill. Then, on the path ahead, I could see them standing in a group, looking down at something on the ground. They all smiled the close-mouthed smile and looked back to me. I trudged on and stood there among them, looking around and smiling, too. But there was something at the middle of the group, something that didn’t move, and I rested my chin on my chest to look at it. It was large and it looked heavy, but they seemed to prize it in some way, so I leaned down and brushed some of the snow away. When I finished brushing the majority of the snow off it, I stood back with the others and listened to a new song, one that sounded much closer, with words that I remembered. I could hear all of this song, the beginning, middle, and end. It was a very forceful melody, and it was coming from the thing in the path.

We listened to it for a while, all of us smiling, and then they began breaking away. But before each one of them began their swirling and swooping and snapping, they motioned for me to take the thing in the trail as a gift. I stepped back as they offered it to me. Two of them each took one of my hands and placed them on the object before us. It sang louder as I touched it, and I reached around and pulled it from the ground, as the remaining snow sloughed off. It was heavy and cumbersome to carry, but it seemed ungracious not to take it. Its song became strained as I loaded it onto my back.

The snow seemed to part as I moved forward in time with the bodies in the shadows to my left and right. There were small flashes in the darkness ahead, as if they were clearing a path for me, muted flashes of crimson and cobalt within the smothering white. My legs began to shake with the weight of the gift, but dropping it in the face of such hospitality would be unendurable, so I kept walking. Soon the flat gave way to a gentle downward slope, and the images tilted the world in my favor, allowing me longer strides and easier breathing through the cotton cloth that was now frozen to my face. I didn’t feel the cold anymore and noticed a jaunty quality accompanied my step as I matched it with the music of the small jingle bells and with the pace of the darting figures all around me.

The best part of the song emanated from the gift I carried. It caught all the complex rhythms and melodies of the group and conveyed it in a singular fashion so that it was easier to understand. Its voice was right behind my head, and its strength reverberated through me and into the ground with each step. But, after a while, the song changed and became more maudlin and extended. I shook the weight on my back to get it to switch back to the melody from before, but that didn’t work. It was harder to get my stride back with the new song since the patterns were not even and my steps wouldn’t match. I was beginning to wonder what was so great about the gift they had given me when I passed the spot where I had taken the little nap on the way up.

I was thinking about taking another one, but others had joined in with the song on my back, and the whole thing took on the feeling of a processional. I didn’t want to be the first to break step, so I just kept going. After a while, I became aware of a large shape up and off to my right. I remembered it as being something important, but I couldn’t remember why or what it was. There was a sharper drop off as I made my way around that shape, and I almost lost my footing as I skirted it. I had a vague recollection of it having hurt me in the past, but it seemed benign enough now. I stood at a flat spot and struggled to stay upright. I remembered that there was something waiting for me just a little ways ahead, so I started off once more, but the voices lingered in the shadows behind me. They had elected to stay in the forest, and I would have turned to look back at them, but it would have taken more energy than I had. I felt bad about not saying good-bye. The song on my back continued, although the quality of its tone had weakened. I had to get where I was going before the song on my back stopped. I wasn’t sure how I knew this, but I did.

I started forward again and, as I came across an area where the snow was shallower, I remembered a promise that had been made to me. It was something important, too. It was a promise about leaving. All the important promises are about leaving or not leaving. I thought about turning around to see what it was that I was leaving, but if you did that enough, you didn’t leave, and then what were all the promises about? I kept walking. I could barely hear the song on my back now, so I shook it to try and get it going. It stopped. I shook it some more, trying to get it going again, but it still wouldn’t start. I thought about dropping it since it didn’t work anymore, but they might be watching from the trees.

I guess they figured I needed some help, because the flashes were back, crimson and cobalt flares that lit up the snow in a rhythm of their own, but the spirits must have been getting tired too, because the lights seemed to have lost their individuality and were blinking in a monotonous and irritating fashion. The music was gone, the bells and the drums and the voices had drifted off with the wind. I listened, but there was only an ugly squawking. I shook the song on my back, but it remained obstinate. I figured it was probably the cold, that some part of it must have frozen. I would have to see if I could fix it once I got to where I was going. I tried to remember where it was I was going, but all I could think of was that it was warmer there. I was about ready to set the song down and take a rest, but the shadows were there again. Some of them stepped out from the snow clouds to my right, and I was just starting to see the ones to my left when I noticed that, unlike the others, they were coming straight at me. The only thing I could figure was that they wanted the song back.

Indian givers.

I stopped and stood up straight. I was a lot bigger than they were, now that we were on level ground. They stopped as well, but their arms reached out to the song; I whirled around a half step to let them know that they couldn’t have it. I tried to speak, but it was as if my vocal chords were frozen, so I just roared and took a few quick breaths to get ready for the fight.

The smallest one was directly ahead of me; it was the one that had backed off the least. I focused on that shadow and leaned in to smash it. It still didn’t move, but just stood there, hipshot and kind of crooked, like most of its weight was resting on one side with a hand on its hip. You had to be careful, because the little ones might be just as powerful as the big ones. It didn’t really matter how big they were, or how many of them there were though, I wasn’t giving up the song. The little one still didn’t move, and I was just getting ready to crush it when it spoke in a sharp and unpleasant yet strangely familiar voice. “Nice fuckin’ outfit.”

Later, when I rolled my head over and found Henry looking at me through barely open eyes, as the EMT van slowly made its way through the drifts that had accumulated throughout the evening and on into the night, I asked him if he thought it had been wise to be singing all that time with the internal injuries he’d sustained.

Groggily, all he said was, “What singing?”

13

“What do you mean, you released yourself on your own recognizance?”

“I rang the bell a bunch of times, but nobody came around.” I was trying to look reputable, but it was difficult with the clothes I was wearing.

“So you just left?” We stood there for a moment, looking at each other. “They’re on the phone, and they want to know where you are!”

Ruby had a point, and in hindsight it did seem a little irresponsible. I straightened some of my papers and tried to look busy. “Well, tell them I’m here.”

“You tell them. Explain to the doctor why it is he can’t find you anywhere in his hospital.”

I stared down at the blinking red light; I had to get a different color. It was still early, and the sky was getting a little bruised yellow to the east. The tail end of the storm was tapering off to the Powder River country, but the skies still stayed mostly gray. They said it was over, but I felt like it might be stalking me. I remained there for a while, not allowing the pain in my fingers and ear to get the best of me. I could hear Lucian chuckling to himself in the hallway. Changing of the guard. I had timed it poorly; if I had arrived earlier, I could have gotten things going and hit the road before Ruby had shown up for duty.

* * *

I woke up very early and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I lay there and thought about Henry. I rang the little bell for the night nurse and waited about five minutes. Then I rang it again and again. A half an hour went by, and I decided to go look for the Bear myself. The IVs were the biggest pain in the ass, but they came out pretty easily, and the tape covered the holes so that the bleeding stopped. I had dismissed the idea of dragging them along with me, as they would cut down on this particular mission’s stealthy quality. The nurse had hidden my personal belongings, but I found them in a locker near her station, which was, I had learned, the safest place to avoid her. There was a little cardboard sign on the desk that said, IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, CONTINUE TO THE CLINIC OR RING BELL. I’m cagey that way, so I didn’t ring the bell or go to the clinic.

There was a guy who might have been part Crow mopping the hallway when I came back to my room to change into my clothes. He had the sickly look that everybody adopts after working nights for a while; I had had that look before. “How you doin’?” He stared at my gown and the clothes I clutched to my chest but didn’t say anything. He leaned on his mop and stared at me some more. “You know where they stuck Henry Standing Bear?” He motioned the mop handle toward the room across from mine: 62. We stood there for a moment longer. “Thanks.”

He continued mopping, and I ducked into my room to get dressed. My hands were swollen and starting to blister, and it was only with a great deal of difficulty that I snapped my shirt. The rubber boots were the hardest part so I finally left them unlaced. My hat hadn’t been with the rest, and I paused for a moment to think about when I had seen it last. I thought it was on the mountain, but I couldn’t be sure. I fingered the glob of tape attached to the side of my head and felt the tenderness that must have been my ear. It hurt worse than anything else, but at least they hadn’t cut it off.

By the time I opened the door and looked around, the guy with the mop had moved on to another hallway or had gone to fetch the elusive nurse. I quickly moved across the hall and into the room opposite, hoping it was the right one. I stood there in the dark, letting my eyes adjust. It was a mirror image of mine, with the exception that it did not look out on the parking lot. The breathing was heavy, regular, and familiar. I moved carefully to the bed and looked down. He seemed to be all there and, short of pulling down the sheet and examining the wound myself, I would have to go on the assumption that he was doing all right. He had a couple of IVs stuck in him too, but there weren’t any monitors attached and that gave me hope. I looked around for a clipboard at the foot of his bed that would tell me how he was, but there wasn’t one. Durant Memorial Hospital was doing little to live up to the expectations I had developed as a teenager watching Ben Casey.

I wasn’t sure what else to do, and I wasn’t certain why I was here, other than to just make sure he was alive and well. They lie a lot in hospitals; it’s their job, to supercede the power of the Almighty with half-truths. Better to check things out for yourself. I was about halfway to the door when he spoke. “Thank you for the visit.”

I stopped and crept back. “I left the Whitman Sampler on the nightstand.”

“Very thoughtful.”

I took a breath. “How do you feel?”

“Doped.”

“Must be nice; all I got was some Tylenol.”

He rolled his head toward me a little, looking at my clothes. “Where are you going?”

“To look for George Esper.”

“You want to kill him before somebody else does?”

I continued to look at him. “You aren’t that doped up.”

“I was just thinking of calling and asking for some more.”

“Good luck.” I patted his arm and started to back toward the door. “Get some rest.”

“Walt?” I stopped. “Thanks.”

When I got into the hallway there was still nobody there, so I quickly made my way around the corner. To my utter surprise, a nurse sat at the nurse’s station. She was looking at me so I marched straight over to her, crossed my arms, leaned on the chest-high partition, and draped my hands by my side where she couldn’t see them. There was nothing I could do about the ear. “Hi. I was just checking on a patient here, Henry Standing Bear. You’ve got him in room 62.” She had sandy hair, china-blue eyes, and looked like she was about fourteen.

“Yes?”

“He was complaining about some pain, and I was wondering if somebody could get him more medication?”

She seemed a little distracted as she picked up a phone. “Certainly.” She looked at me a little more closely. “Aren’t you in room 61, Uncle Walter?”

I glanced around as if it were obvious. “No, I’m not.” I looked at her more carefully. “Do I know you?”

“I’m Janine Reynolds. I’m Ruby’s granddaughter.”

The eyes started to look more familiar, so I smiled. “How you doin’, Janine?”

She didn’t smile back. “What are you doing out of room 61?”

I thought for a moment. “Official business.”

* * *

The brat, she had called her grandmother and told her everything, especially the part where I didn’t know her from Adam. Maybe they had given me more than Tylenol; at least that’s what I told Ruby. I sat at my desk and watched as Lucian ambled in on his man-made leg and occupied the chair opposite mine. He was studying me with more scrutiny than I was comfortable with. “What?”

“I bet’cha they take that ear.”

I sighed. “Just because they’re always taking parts off of you . . .”

“ ’At’s what they do best, take parts off.”

“I’m pretty fond of this ear.”

He scratched his stump. “Yeah, well I was pretty damn fond of my leg.”

I waited. “Anybody got any idea where George might’ve gone?”

He leaned back in the chair, hands spread onto his thighs with the fingers stretched. “Got an APB out, but them HPs are about as useless as tits on a boar hog.”

“How did he get out before Vic and Ferg got in?”

He shrugged. “Must ’a left right after you left him, in that little Jap piece of crap.” His head leaned to one side, and he was the perfect picture of disgruntled as he gazed at the floor. “Little shit bird.” He looked back up. “Stop playing with your ear.” I had been. “Yer gonna do more damage playin’ with it than you did freezin’ it.”

I decided to change the subject. “Where is everybody?”

“Turk’s still out at the Esper place. Guess he’s tryin’ to work his way back into your good graces. Ferg was running some food out to ’im, but that was an hour ago.” He grunted. “Ferg’s got your hat.”

“I was wondering where it had gone off to.”

“You’re gonna need it to hide that half ear you’re gonna have.”

I sighed some more. “Vic?”

“Up at the DCI compound.” He said it with the same derisive conviction he had for the highway patrol. He looked out the window at the frozen sky. “What’d the little pissant get shot with?” I felt around in the jacket I still had on and tossed the gun onto the desk with a satisfying clatter. I was showing Lucian that I could be tough, too. Next thing you knew, we’d be breaking out the bourbon and calling Ruby a twist; then the real fun would start. He looked at the little revolver. “That ought’a do it.” His eyes came up to mine. “How bad?”

“Not bad enough to keep him from jumping in the driver’s seat and leaving us in the lurch.”

I leaned forward on the desk and told Lucian about the Vasques, size nines, and about the conversation I had had with George before I had gone back for Henry. He neither responded nor remarked until I was through; just sat there looking at me. I was remembering what a good lawman he was when he finally spoke. “Well, he’s gotta get doctored somewhere.” He cleared his throat. “Seems to me you just left the place where you should ’a started looking for him.”

“You don’t think he’s stupid enough to go to the hospital?”

“He was stupid enough to be up there fishing in a blizzard, stupid enough to try and shoot you and Ladies Wear, stupid enough to try and make a run for it.” He stopped, shook his head, and folded his arms over his chest to signify the particular gaps in my line of thinking. “I’d say the depths of his stupidity have yet to be plumbed, and yours is comin’ up fast on the inside turn.”

I had gotten a lot of tirades like this when I was a deputy under Lucian, but I didn’t take them personally, much. “So, we’ve got the hospitals and doctors’ offices, but they have to report any kind of gunshot wounds.”

“You couldn’t get ’em to answer a bell, how long you think it’ll take ’em to file a report?”

He had a point. “You want to take a ride?”

“I’m saddled and, if you’re waitin’ for me, yer backin’ up.”

It was like working with Louis L’Amour.

Ruby stopped me as we tried to make our way out of the office. “Do you think you should make an attempt at cleaning up?”

I looked down at the stains and rumples that made up today’s and yesterday’s ensemble. “Lets the citizens know they’re getting their money’s worth.”

“You have dried blood all down your back.”

* * *

I dodged out the door before she could say anything else, with Lucian cadging along after me. I gave the old sheriff a hand as he pulled himself up into the truck. He took out his pipe and a small, beaded leather pouch of tobacco and began filling the cherry-wood bowl. I noticed the pattern on the small bag and recognized it as the same as the Dead Man’s Body on the Cheyenne Rifle. I informed Lucian of this. He looked at the pouch anew as the smoke drifted around his head and his dark eyes and out the window he had just cracked. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Going back to the hospital was risky business, but it was a chance I was going to have to take. Lucian waited patiently as Isaac Bloomfield looked over my hands and examined my ear while I questioned him about any other gunshot wounds that might have popped up last evening. He said there had been nothing suspicious to report, but that if anything came up he’d be sure to get a hold of me as quickly as possible. I asked about Henry, but all he did was kind of chuckle and said the nurses were taking very good care of him. I feared for Janine Reynolds’s virginity. Much to Lucian’s dismay, he, my entire ear, and myself left shortly thereafter. We continued our search to the drugstore downtown where they reported that they had not sold a single Band-Aid since yesterday afternoon. It was a tough economy on the high plains. I turned and looked at him as I started the truck. “Veterinarians?”

“Taxidermists.”

I’m not sure why, but it made sense. “Which one?”

He pulled on his pipe and studied the problem; one thing we had no shortage of in Wyoming is taxidermists. “How ’bout that outfit of Pat Hampton’s down on Swayback Road?”

I wheeled the Bullet into a U-turn and headed south; a few vehicles slowed and the drivers gave me irritated looks. Lucian shot them the bird, and I slapped his hand down as he snickered and told me to turn on the lights and siren to show them we meant business. I figured he just wanted to run them again, so I did. I navigated the entrance ramp of the highway at the south side and, since there wasn’t any snow on the road, took the truck up to about eighty-five. He didn’t say anything, just looked ahead, and I figured I was going to hear about it. I was right, but it wasn’t what I thought it would be. “What you did up there?”

“Yep?”

“That was a hell of a thing.” I nodded and looked ahead too. I didn’t tell him about the Old Cheyenne.

* * *

Pat Hampton’s was an odd mixture of taxidermy and game processing. It was said that no matter what you wanted to do with an animal, Pat could assist you. When we pulled up to the ramshackle complex of dilapidated buildings, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Pulled around to the far side of one of the buildings, covered with mud and with the side caved in, was a black Mazda Navajo with the plates, Tuff-1.

“Bonzai.” The old sheriff smiled and pulled the pipe from his mouth as I eased the Bullet up to the other side of the building. “You got a gun I can borrow?”

I unlocked the 870 Wingmaster from the dash. “This kid is a victim.”

He looked at the shotgun. “Fugitive from justice.”

“Lucian, do me a favor and don’t shoot anybody.”

He jacked the pump action and fed a shell of double-ought buck into the breech. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with shootin’ folks, long as the right ones get shot.” The next five minutes promised an inordinate variety of excitements. I pulled out my .45 and checked it, like I always did, then reholstered it, snapping the leather strap over the hammer. The old outlaw smiled. “Front or back?”

I looked at the accumulation of buildings, trying to figure out which was which. “I’ll take the front.” The Remington waved in my direction as he navigated the door, and I was acutely aware that he had not put on the safety. I walked across the muddy slush of the lot to what looked like it might be the front as Lucian swung-stepped his way around the corner of the ratty, brown-painted building. There were boot prints leading up to the aluminum screen door that had only some battered strips of screening still attached. There was a plastic sign in the window, flyspecked and bleached by the sun. In swirling letters it read, SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED.

There were ancient blinds in the windows, but there was a small, diamond-shaped pane in the door that was unshaded. I poked my head through the empty frame of the screen and looked through the dirty glass. I could see an odd combination of living room and reception area with sofas, a console television, and some sort of strange reception desk. I noted the hallway leading to the right, after you got past the desk, and figured that was where I should go once I’d gotten through the door.

“Sheriff ’s Department!” I pounded on the door with the flat of my hand. “George, if you’re in there? Let’s not make things worse!” I listened as a shuffling noise came from the center of the building. I took a deep breath and checked the knob. It was locked. I banged on the door again. “Sheriff’s Department, I’m coming in!” I took another couple of breaths and unsnapped the strap from the top of my holster. I only had a certain amount of time before Lucian came in the rear, but I figured having only one leg would slow him up in kicking his own door down. I carefully swung back the screen-door frame so as to not get caught in it and pulled the Colt from my holster, clicking the safety off and holding it in the air. I leaned back and put everything into a fourteen E width.

I guess I was expecting a little more resistance from the rotting, hollow-core door, because I followed it rather rapidly as it folded up into two main pieces and blew us into the room and onto the sofa at the opposite wall. I heard a loud thumping at my right and pushed off the couch, cleared the doorway at the hall, and ran toward the noise. When I got to the entryway at the opposite end, somebody was coming the other way but didn’t see me until it was too late. I just kept running and carried him back into the room as I led with the point of my unarmed shoulder. I heard the air leave his body as we went back through the doorway, and he felt familiar. Hello, George.

We bounced off a large table at the center and slid to the cool, tile surface of the floor. I steadied myself against the countertop with one hand and stood. It was George all right, and he was out again. He was only partially dressed and still held his pants in his hands. There was a large wrapping of bandages at the middle of his right thigh and another set around his head that was holding his jaw secure.

I stood the rest of the way up, pulled out my handcuffs, and secured George to the table. As I finished this, there was noise down the hallway, and an explosion that was unmistakable as the sound of a 12 gauge shotgun being discharged filled the air. I started to head down the corridor when another young man with a pale face came bursting through the doorway with what looked like a rifle in his hands. When he saw the barrel of the .45 about a foot from his nose, he pulled up short and froze. “Sheriff’s Department, you don’t move.”

His hands went straight up, along with the rifle. “I won’t.”

“You just did.” He looked confused for a moment. “Drop the rifle.” He hesitated for a second. “You got a problem?”

He was still frozen. “It might go off.”

“All right, you keep it pointed away from me and set it down on the table.” He did as requested, and I told him to stretch forward and place his hands on the counter, palms down. He did this, and it seemed like he was going to cry. I had a moment to look at him; he was just about George’s age. It all figured.

“Lucian! You all right?” There was a little more clatter, and he answered from the distance, “Yes, goddamn it!”

I went around the corner of the table and looked at the kid’s rifle and propped the butt against my hip. “A pellet gun?”

His face turned toward mine. “It’s all I had, and I didn’t want to hurt anybody . . .”

Lucian appeared in the doorway, shotgun at the ready. “Damn door was locked.”

I sat on the edge of the table and stuck the pellet rifle under an arm as I put my sidearm back in the holster and looked at the kid, trying to place him. “Well, where’s Pat? He away?”

Lucian planted one of his formidable claws at he back of the kid’s neck. “Yeah.” I watched as Lucian’s grip tightened. “Hey!” His voice strained.

“You say ‘sir’ . . .” Lucian leaned in over the boy’s head. “Yes, sir.”

The voice was even more strained. “Yes, sir.”

“Lucian?”

He let up a little bit and looked at me questioningly. “What? I ain’t hurtin’ the little pissant.” He rolled his eyes, stepped back to the doorway, and poked the kid with the barrel of the Remington before resting a shoulder against the facing. “Don’t you forget that I’m here, son.” Even from my perspective, I could see that the safety was still not on.

“He’s down in Casper, buying a truck.”

“Are you Petie Hampton, Bruce’s boy?”

He smiled at being recognized. “Yes, sir.”

“I thought you were in school down in Colorado?”

The smile hung there. “I’m home to hunt for the weekend.”

“How did George know you were coming up?”

“I called him last week; he was going to go with me.”

I pulled the pellet gun from my underarm and broke the barrel down, used a fingernail to pull the pellet in the tiny gun out, and let the small, mushroom-shaped projectile fall to the floor. I tossed the rifle onto a desk filled with taxidermy supplies, which made a tremendous noise. “Okay, Petie. We’ve got two options here. Number one is me reading you your rights and taking you up to town and booking you on at least resisting arrest and with a criminal conspiracy charge that’s gonna look really good on your transcript, or you and I just have a little chat and we don’t tell your school or your daddy and uncle what you’ve been up to.”

It didn’t take him long to answer; maybe the college thing was working out. “What do you want to know?”

It was about that time that there was a clamoring at the other end of the table; George Esper must have awakened, heard a little bit of what was being said, and decided once again to make a break for it. The table moved about six inches, even with my weight on it, when George reached the end of his stainless-steel tether. A low moan emanated from below the other end of the table as Lucian walked around and looked down at him. “Son, I have met some sorry little bastards in my life . . .”

“Lucian, don’t abuse the prisoner.”

He looked up with his mouth pulled to one side. “Hell, I ain’t the one that shot ’im and broke his jaw.”

“He shot himself.”

“Yeah, that’s your story . . .”

I turned back to Petie, who had not moved, but whose eyes seemed a little wider. “What’s the story on Houdini down here?” He looked confused, so I nodded toward the moaning. “George.”

He cleared his throat. “He called me this morning, real early. He said he had a hunting accident and that he didn’t want to go to the hospital because it was going to cost a lot.” I nodded. “He showed up, with his jaw and all? I started thinking that there might be something else going on.”

“You doctored him up?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He got here when?”

“About an hour ago.”

“What all did he have to say?” Petie looked at the ceiling, and I sighed. “Petie, I think you are considering lying to me, and I would advise you against it.”

“He said he ran his car off the road.”

“Anything about his parents?”

“He said they were in Deadwood.” Well, that answered a few questions.

Outside, I placed George in the passenger seat of the Bullet and found his keys in the bunched pants he still had on his lap. I tossed the keys to Lucian. “What am I supposed to do with these?”

“He drove the thing with one leg, I figure you can too. Go get Turk out at the Espers. I’m headed to the hospital to get George here looked at.”

“You ought to kick his skinny little ass, but you do as you see fit.”

When I got in, George was looking at the steering column for the keys to my truck. When he caught my eye, he leaned against the door and began moaning, with his eyes partially closed. “George, so far your situation is not irretrievable. Henry Standing Bear is unlikely to press charges, and I’ll do what I can about the mandatories if you tell me everything I want to know.” One eye opened a little more. “Where are your parents?”

He started to speak, then put a hand to his mouth in an attempt to still the pain. “Dehdwoo.”

I keyed the mic on my radio. “Come in Base, this is Unit One.” I waited as Lucian backed the Mazda out and pulled up beside me with a questioning look. I held up the mic to show him what was up; he nodded and headed off for the Espers. The entire side of the little truck was dented from one end to the other. “Come in, Base.”

Static. “What do you want now?”

“Ruby, the Espers are in Deadwood, South Dakota. Can you make the appropriate inquiries?”

Static. “How did you find that out?”

“I am sitting here with the elusive George Esper.”

Static. “Does he know where they’re staying?”

I looked over at George, who was now watching me with both eyes. “Lowsla.”

“Loadstar?” He nodded. I keyed the mic. “The Loadstar. Any word from up on the mountain?”

Static. “They’re on their way down.”

“Roger that. I’ll be over at the hospital.”

Static. “Ten-four.”

I stared at the radio. “What’d you just say?”

Static for a moment, then a sharp response. “I wouldn’t press my luck, if I were you.”

I started the truck, wheeled around, and headed back for the highway. The gravel road wasn’t too bad, but George moaned with a little more persistence every time the truck bounced. He was back in full victim mode. “Your parents gambling in Deadwood?” I glanced over at him. “Just nod your head yes or no.” He nodded yes and looked out the windshield. “Your brother with ’em?” He shook his head. “Was he supposed to meet you fishing up on the mountain?” He nodded, then, after a second, turned to look at me. I looked back at the road and nodded a little myself. “We’ll talk some more about that at the hospital.”

His eyes stayed on me, and I was convinced he wasn’t the Vasques, size nines we were looking for. “Eesurt?”

“No, he’s not hurt.” It wasn’t a complete lie. “We just need to get you repaired.” I changed the subject. “Sorry about the jaw.”

He nodded and slouched farther against the door. He really was a mess. I don’t think the second altercation had done him much good, and the symptoms of the first were plainly evident. The discoloration from his jaw had spread to his eyes, and the swelling had puffed his face so that he was almost unrecognizable. There was that, and the fact that being confused with his brother wouldn’t be an issue anymore. The radio interrupted my thoughts. “Come in Unit One?” Static. “I’ve got the Espers on line one. You want me to patch them through?”

I glanced over at George, who was studying me very closely. “No, just get the number, and I’ll call them back in about five minutes.”

Static. “Roger that.” I looked at the radio and smiled.

* * *

By the time we got to the hospital, it was looking like a cop convention; both Vic’s and Ferg’s vehicles were parked in the official spots at the emergency room entrance. I pulled up to the door and walked around to get George. There was a small crowd at the desk when I made my way in. “You know, just because you’re as big as a bus, doesn’t mean you have to provide service like one.” I casually bumped past her and sat George in the wheelchair that Janine had pulled from the wall.

“He’s got a gunshot wound in his left thigh, and I think his jaw’s busted. You better check his ribs. Thanks, Janine.” She rolled George away, and I nodded for Ferg to follow them. As he passed, he patted my shoulder and smiled. I called after him, “Hey, you got my hat?”

He smiled some more. “It’s on the desk.”

I watched them go down the hallway, then walked over and picked up the now disreputable piece of 10X beaver felt. It needed a little work. I was dusting it off as a sharp index finger punched my stomach. It didn’t go in as far as it used to. I turned to look at her. “Yes, ma’am?”

“What are you doing out of here?”

“I released myself.”

She shook her head, but the poking stopped. “You looked like you were going to die last night.”

“They gave me Tylenol. I’m feeling much better.” I gave her a thumb’s up. “What’s the story on DCI?”

She looked at me for a moment longer. “Headed for Cheyenne with Jacob.” She looked down the hallway after George and his entourage. “What’s the word on him?”

I walked past the glass partition at the reception area, over to the waiting room, and sat back in one of the chairs; she followed along and did likewise. I looked at the soothing gray that must have been chosen, along with the muted mauve of the walls, to calm upset relatives and loved ones. It made me want to take a nap. “I honestly don’t think he knows anything.”

“What about the size nine Vasques?”

I studied my coveralls and thought about a shower and a change of clothes. “I don’t think it was him. It could be the guy from Casper, or Jacob, or it could be somebody else . . .”

Vic studied the side of my face in the humming fluorescence. “You make it sound like somebody else.”

I turned to look at her. “I want to talk to Jim Keller.”

She raised an eyebrow. “About?”

“Things in general, nothing specific.” She looked tired too, but I decided to keep that to myself. “You get a ballistics check on the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead?”

“Yes, I did.”

I had started to turn and study my dirty pants, but the tone of her voice pulled me right back around. “Oh, now, why do I not like the sound of that?”

“No match, but it’s been fired.”

I was glad I was sitting down. “How long ago?”

She inclined her head. “Difficult to say, anywhere from three days to three weeks.”

“Did DCI take the rifle?”

“No.” She smiled. “Everybody’s real nervous about handling that thing.”

“Because it’s haunted?”

“Because it’s probably worth millions”—I hadn’t told her about the Old Cheyenne and their assistance on the mountain—“And it’s fucking haunted.” She was looking at my hands. “I put it in your truck and locked the doors.”

“Thanks a lot.” I smiled at her because I liked her. Vic was like some exotic eastern bird that had accidentally landed in our high desert and had taken it upon herself to stay, and I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t. It was a profane little song she sang, but I had grown fond of it, like the first cries of the meadowlarks in the early spring. She had a quirky perspective on things and a foul mouth, but she would make a fine sheriff, no matter what anybody said or what words they used to say it. “How’s your love life?” That caught her off guard.

“Shitty, how’s yours?”

I shrugged and looked at the carpet. “How should I know?”

“She was here.” I turned and looked at her with a questioning expression. “Vonnie.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah.” She crossed her arms and looked at her legs stretched out before her. “She brought flowers, but I told her you weren’t dead. I don’t think she thought I was funny.”

“Most people don’t.”

“Most people around here got no fucking sense of humor.” She didn’t move for a while. “Can I ask you a question, without you getting all pissed off ?”

“I’ll try.”

She pursed her lips. “What is it you see in her? I mean, other than she’s beautiful, intelligent, and rich? I just don’t get it.” I pounded the crown back into my hat and made an attempt at straightening the brim. Relatively satisfied with the results, I placed it on my head and pulled it down. She finally spoke again. “I always wanted to be a woman like her. I think it’s because she’s tall.” She turned and looked at me. “It doesn’t seem fair that somebody should be beautiful, intelligent, rich, and tall. That’s bullshit.”

I waited. “How’s my hat look?”

She considered. “Like Gabby Hayes.”

I tried for another subject, the third being a charm. “You been in to see Henry?”

“I was, but then Dena Many Camps showed up, and I started feeling like a third wheel.”

I moved my head back and forth like a disco dancer. “He gettin’ some sweet medicine?” I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her in. It was a risky move, but she didn’t resist, and I rested my chin on the top of her head. “Thanks for coming up after me.”

Her voice was muffled and sounded strained. “You’re the only friend I’ve got.”

“I bet you say that to all the sheriffs.” I held her there for a while. Her husband was an idiot. We stayed that way until I became aware of somebody looking at us through the glass partition. It was Vonnie. She didn’t say anything, just nodded and disappeared around the desk and down the hall where everybody else had disappeared. She was carrying a shopping bag and the aforementioned bouquet of flowers. I pulled Vic back up and looked at her. “You okay?”

She smiled, but it seemed as if there was a little more ocean at the corners of her eyes. “Yeah, I’m good.”

I leaned her back and kissed her forehead. “Yep, you are.” I staggered up and steadied myself on my increasingly sore legs. “Vonnie just walked by.”

She nodded. “I get you into trouble?”

“I don’t think we’re to a place where I can get into trouble.”

She stood. “That’s what most guys think when they’re in trouble.” She turned the corner and walked toward the automatic doors. As they opened, she paused, making them wait. “I’ll be at the office. It’s getting crowded in here.”

* * *

I followed Vonnie’s trail and found her leaning against the wall outside room 62; she was holding the flowers with the shopping bag at her feet. Her long hair was pulled back in the single ponytail that she had worn to watch football with Henry and me, only a few days ago. The lines in her face were more evident today, in the harsh lighting, but they gave her a delicate appearance like some fragile and beautiful tapestry. Seeing her again was like unearthing an emotional library card with a lot of overdues. I slowed as I got nearer, a little worried about what might be coming. She looked up as I approached. “Thank God you’re all right.”

It was good that I stopped, because those eyes were just a little bit hard. “How did you find out?”

Her jaw set, and an awful lot of the wrinkles disappeared. “I bought a police scanner at Radio Shack, thinking it would be nice to hear your voice once in a while.”

We stood there for a moment and listened as a female giggled through the walls of the Bear’s room. “I didn’t call.”

“No, you didn’t.”

I nodded and looked at my boots. “I’ve been kind of busy.”

She stood away from the wall, the flowers clutched in her hand like a Louisville Slugger. “Did you know that they could hear you? That I could hear you? We heard every word you said, and you couldn’t hear anything when they answered?”

“No.”

“I could hear it all.” Her head nodded in a tense fashion. “I could hear everything. Do you know what that’s like, hearing those words and not being able to do anything?” She threw the flowers, and they hit me in the chest. “I have spent my whole life getting to a place where I don’t have to put up with things like this.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I will not let you do this to me; I will not.” She stormed past, and I raised a feeble hand to stop her. She yanked her arm away and pointed to the shopping bag on the floor. “I thought you could use a change of clothes.” She stood there for a moment, and I thought there might be some kind of opening, but there wasn’t, and she continued down the hallway as I turned and watched her go.

I sighed and stooped down to pick up the flowers. As tired as I had been before, I was twice that now. I figured there were better places to take a nap, but fatigue set in and I sat down with my legs stretched out in front of me. It felt good to stretch them, and my back was starting to hurt, so I just laid back and sprawled out on the tile floor of the hallway. I placed the flowers on my chest in a fit of symbolism and closed my eyes.

More giggling slipped from under the door of the Bear’s room.

I lay there for a while, thinking that what I ought to do was get up, find a shower, and change into the clothes Vonnie had so thoughtfully provided. I wondered how she knew my size and thought about what she had said. I was feeling sorry for myself, and it felt pretty good; so, I just lay there musing in self-pity, thinking about life, death, and a shower, in that order.

More giggling.

I had to eat something. I had to talk to the Espers and tell them about Jacob and try to confirm all of the suppositions as to what Jacob and George’s plans had been, where they had been, and what had happened. My five minutes had run out a half an hour ago. I had to speak with Jim Keller, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a word with Lonnie Little Bird about the last time the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead had been fired.

Even more giggling.

I could also talk to the Little Wolf woman to see if there were any more clues as to where the feathers might have gone to and come from. I needed to follow up on the Vasques, size nines, and get a better idea on who might have been leaving tracks all over God’s little acre in them. I didn’t think it was George, but there was the disturbing habit he had of running off every time he got the chance. He had been so sure that Henry had tried to kill him on the trail that I began wondering if that might have been one of the motivations behind his constant state of flight. I also wanted to check on Henry and get a more thorough diagnosis on how he was doing. The first part was in getting my eyes to open and, when I did, an upside down Janine Reynolds’s blues were there to meet me. “Hi, Janine.”

She looked a little worried. “I thought you might want something to eat?”

“Bless you.”

She looked around and then back down to me. “Are you okay?”

“Just thinking.” I reached over and picked up my hat where it had fallen during my dramatic interpretation. I looked at the flowers, still clutched in my other hand. “You want some flowers?”

“No, thanks.”

I pushed up and slid over to the wall as she handed a tray down to me. It was some sort of supposed egg matter that I’m sure had never seen the rear end of a chicken and two grayish meat patties that had never oinked. I placed my hat beside me with the brim up and placed the flowers in it. I rested the tray on my lap and picked up a piece of dry toast and began chewing. No wonder so many people died here, they starved to death. Whatever this was, it was not the usual. “Janine, is there a shower around here?”

She blinked. I guess it was a strange request. “There’s the one in the staff locker room.”

“Would anybody mind if I used it?”

“I don’t think so; you’re kind of a local hero.”

I continued chewing my toast and began wondering if it was real bread. “Why’s that?”

“Because of what you did up there.”

Everybody talked about the mountains as if they were on the second floor. I was uncomfortable with flattery, so I asked her how the Cheyenne Nation was doing. She said that he had turned out to be remarkably resilient and was lucky in that the bullet hadn’t done any serious damage to any of his solid organs. While the doctors were in there, they had taken his appendix. I asked about his index but didn’t get a laugh, at least not from Janine, as a sultry giggling erupted again from room 62. We looked at each other as I continued chewing my toast, and her face reddened. “Well, it’s good to know all his solid organs are functioning properly.”

Janine made a hasty retreat down the hallway. A few moments later, Dena Many Camps came through Henry’s door. She straightened the same fringed dress I had seen her in a few days earlier and fine-tuned the lipstick at the corner of her open mouth with the tip of a middle finger. She froze for an instant when she saw me. I pulled a beaten tiger lily from my hat and held it up to her. She smiled and took it, bestowing a ravishing wink back over her shoulder as she sashayed down the hall and turned the corner.

I figured that about a dime’s worth of Dena Many Camps and a Fresca would kill my ass.

14

“What do you mean he’s gone?” George Esper was, once again, at large. I dried off my damp hair, made sure the towel around my middle was secure, and sat beside my set of new clothes that were still in the green paper shopping bag from the Sportshop.

Ferg looked like he was going to die. “He said he wanted something to eat, so I went to get a nurse . . .”

I draped the towel from my head to over my shoulders and examined my fingers. The first layer of skin was pretty well shot, and the next was pink and sensitive. My ear hurt, and I hadn’t taken the bandage off for fear of disturbing it, but mostly I felt good, being clean for the first time in a couple of days. “Why didn’t you just ring for a nurse?”

“I tried.”

I thought about going back in the shower and drowning myself. “Where did you see him last?”

“In his room, about five minutes ago.”

I handed him the portable radio, still amazingly clipped to the back of my mud-encrusted Carhartts. “This building is not that big. Have somebody go stand at the northeast corner of the hospital, and you stand at the southwest; either of you spots him leaving, call in. You use your truck radio.” I looked up at Ferg and thought about how he had worked through the better part of the night, probably hadn’t had anything decent to eat in days, and more than likely needed to phone his wife and let her know he was still alive. Donna worked at an insurance firm in town and, after thirty years of marriage, they were still madly in love. On Sunday afternoons, you could see them walking, holding hands, along Clear Creek in the park. “He got away from me, too, don’t feel bad.” I picked up my hat to keep him from feeling self-conscious. “I think I need a new hat. What do you think?”

He looked at me with hazel eyes not too disturbed by self-analysis and struck out for the southwest corner of the building. “Definitely.”

I sat the hat back down on the polished surface of the wooden bench, which was anchored to the floor with three-inch pipe. I guess the administrators figured the doctors and nurses weren’t making enough money and might try to run off with the furnishings. I looked in the bag at my new clothes with a sense of trepidation. If she was angry when she bought them for me, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see what size they were, but the jeans were an exact fit, as were the jacket, shirt, socks, underwear, and undershirt.

After I finished dressing, I put my gun belt on, carefully adjusting the jacket so that it covered the majority of it. Then I stuffed my dirty clothes into the bag for later washing or burning, placed my hat on top, and carried it with me into the hallway. Friday, midmorning, and there still wasn’t much traffic at the hospital, which meant that George would have less cover. But, even though the building was small and the staff sparse, there were probably hundreds of places where he could be. I decided to drop my clothes off in Henry’s room, if he was between female visitations, and use it as a base of operations for the hunt for George Esper, take two.

When I got to Henry’s door, I paused to listen and hear if anybody else was in there. I heard voices but, whatever they were saying, it wasn’t postcoital, so I pushed open the door and found George Esper seated in a chair beside Henry. I walked up to the bed opposite George and noticed that he had been crying. “Did it occur to you to say something to my deputy before you went wandering off, George?” He looked sufficiently sheepish and wiped the tears on his bare arm. “I mean, before I put out an all-points bulletin and file a missing persons with the FBI?”

“Thsorry . . .”

“George, here’s the way it works from now on. When I put you someplace, anyplace? I want you to stay there until I come and get you. Do you understand that?” He nodded. “Good, now go back to your room.” He got up and limped toward the door, but before he could get it open I called out, “And stay there.” I listened as the door closed behind him.

“I think George might be a little confused.”

I looked down at him. “Really. I think George is a lot confused.”

“I am serious. I think something might be wrong with him.”

“Other than continual flight syndrome?”

Henry paused for a moment, then folded the sheet down and smoothed the edge. His hands looked strange in this setting, like wild birds accidentally indoors. “Does the family have any history of mental illness?”

“Not that I know of.”

He shook his head. “He seems scattered, and he has no attention span.”

“Concussed?”

“Possibly.” He looked at the empty chair where George had sat. “He wanted to know what he had to do if he wanted to live on the reservation. He thought he might be safer there.”

“That’s confused. He wasn’t that bad on the mountain.” We thought that one over for a moment.

His eyes stayed steady on mine. “He knows about his brother.”

I felt like sitting down. “What did he say? How does he know?”

He shrugged. “It was not anything he said, it was just a feeling. But he knows.”

I studied the polished railing at the side of the bed. “Do you think he was with Jacob when he was killed?”

“I do not know that.” Henry smiled. “I am sorry to be so little help to you, but it is just a feeling. They are twins.”

I leaned against the foot rail and peeled a small piece of the skin from the side of my hand. “How are you feeling?”

“Very well, and yourself ?”

“My hands are falling off and my ear hurts.”

He nodded. “Things could be worse, your ear could fall off.”

“There’s an intraoffice pool; odds are the doctor is going to cut it off.”

“That would be a shame. Your ears are one of your finest features.”

I looked out the window with him. “My thought exactly. They’re gonna get a fight when they come for it.”

He smiled and nodded. “Put me down a fifty on keeping the ear.”

“You’re up against Lucian.”

He continued to look out the window. “He is still calling me Ladies Wear?”

“Yep.”

“Make it a hundred.”

I laughed. “Well, I better call off the manhunt and go talk to George.” I looked down at him again. He really was recuperating quite well and looked as though he could get up and follow me out. “How’s Dena Many Camps doing these days?”

“She is a wonderful and caring young woman.”

I paused at the door. “I don’t suppose George mentioned what room he was in?”

“No.” He still looked out the window, and I wondered how long they would be able to keep him. “He was probably afraid I would come looking for him.”

* * *

I watched him for a moment longer and then went out into the hall. Doctors and nurses are human, and humans are creatures of habit, so I walked across the hallway and pushed open the door of my old room. George was sitting at the side of his bed, looking out the window at the parking lot. “Hey, George. Mind if I come in?” He didn’t say anything but kept staring out the window. The snow swept across the asphalt surface, piling up wherever the concrete partitions divided the lot. Nobody wanted to be here, and everybody was looking out the windows. I pulled a chair from the wall and sat down in his line of sight. I turned my head and also looked out the window. “Well, I’m glad to be inside, how about you?” He nodded but continued to look at the lot. I could see the Bullet from here; he was probably trying to figure out how to hot-wire it. “I’d say winter is here . . . George?” He finally turned his face toward me. I studied him carefully and noticed he was shaking. “George, are you all right?”

“Chjakeb’s ded.”

I could feel my eyes sharpen as I looked at the young man. “What makes you think that, George?”

“Thsaw himb.” His lips moved, but no more words came out.

“You saw him?” He nodded his head. “Saw him where, George?”

“Othwe montan . . .”

“You saw him up at Dull Knife Lake?” He shook his head as violently as his bandaged jaw would allow. “Where then?” The tremors continued to wrack his body as his naked legs hung from the bed and shook, the nearest thigh wrapped up in a winding layer of gauze. I wasn’t sure if they had him on anything, but with the head injury it was unlikely. “George, if you know anything? I need you to tell me about it. I’m trying to stop who’s doing this, but I have to figure out who it is before I can do anything.”

“Yhew kan’tsopthm.”

I nodded. “Stop who, George?”

I watched as a finger crept from his hand and pointed toward the window. “Tthemb.”

I felt a continuous charge run up my spine as I turned my head and looked out the window again, my reflected image only inches from my eyes. There was a minivan parked a little farther out, but I could almost swear that George Esper was pointing at my truck. “George, there’s nothing out there but my truck.” He continued to look, but the finger disappeared into his fist. I checked again and looked out to the municipal golf course. Maybe Arnie’s Army was after George. “George, who did you see up there?”

The only thing he said was, “Yhew kan’tsopthm.”

I stood up slowly and gently lowered the Venetian blinds with the cord that had been at my back. George still didn’t move, so I pushed him back in the bed with a hand on his shoulder and pulled the blanket and sheet up to his chin. He still shook as if he were freezing. “Why don’t you try and get some sleep?”

“Yhew kan’tsopthm.”

I looked down at another human wreck and patted his chest. “Well . . . I might just surprise you.”

I made my way through the automatic doors of the emergency room and waved at Ferg, who joined me. We used one of the blond brick walls as a wind block and stood against the building’s entrance. “He’s back in his room. I found him in Henry’s, but he’s back in his.” The air was more than a little brisk, so I flipped the collar up on my new jacket and pushed my hands farther into the pockets. “He’s acting a little strange, so you might want to keep an even closer eye on him. I don’t think he’s dangerous, but he might wander off again.”

“You bet.”

“I notified them at the desk. I’m going to head back over to the office and get things sorted out.”

“You bet.”

I was also willing to bet that Ferg would be sitting on George within the moment. I pulled my keys out, headed over to the Bullet, and looked through the window. I’m not sure what it was I expected to see, an entire Old Cheyenne war party riding shotgun or what. I stood there in the wind, the blowing snow peppering the side of my face with its sting, as I looked into my truck. The rifle was there, a palpable reminder of things I could not see and, beside it, sat a black-and-white box of ammunition for things I could. Vic must have left the box after the tests, a little joke, or maybe she thought I might need it. I wondered mildly what had happened to the Weatherby I had on the mountain or to the Remington that Henry had been carrying.

Was anybody in there? Ever since the mountain, I was careful to look for them out of the corners of my eyes. It seemed as though, if I stood there long enough, they would begin to appear, sitting easily on the leather seats and looking back at me with their hair-bone chokers, their trade cloth tied in their hair, and their closed-mouth smiles. They held the rifle in their laps, waiting for me to get in so they could hand it to me. I leaned against the door and closed my eyes; the glass was cold, but I could think again. I opened my eyes, and they were gone. I stood there for another moment, and I’m not sure if I was making sure they were gone or hoping they would reappear. I turned the key, opened the door, and slid in next to the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead. My hand shook a little as I slid the rifle over and placed the box of ammunition on the seat next to me. The box looked old, as if the edges had been roughed off and the printing had been done by an antiquainted press. The date on the box even read 1876. It felt heavy, and I thought about pumpkins.

* * *

By the time I got over to my desk, the Espers were waiting on line two. I had told Ruby I would get it in my office and passed by Vic’s open door. She was on the phone, and it looked like she was enjoying her call far more than I would mine. It was probably her friends at the Department of Justice, and I had a brief twinge of panicked jealousy. If Vic weren’t married to Wyoming anymore, she’d be a fool not to go back east and get a job with a large, urban department or with the Feds. As I sat there in my office, my plans for the first female Wyoming sheriff evaporated into thin, high plains air.

I picked up the receiver and punched line two. “Longmire.” I sounded busy and possibly a little angry.

“Sheriff?”

It was Reggie Esper. “Yep, Reggie. Are you still in Deadwood?”

There was a pause. “We are. I told the mine I’d be back yesterday, but we had a lucky streak and decided to stay on ’til Monday. Then this South Dakota Highway Patrolman came to the casino and got us.” Another pause. “Walt, if this is about that damned Pritchard kid, I haven’t let the boys have anything to do with him . . .”

“It’s not about Cody Pritchard.”

Yet another pause. “Well, is it important? I mean I don’t want to cut a weekend short if I . . .”

“It’s important.” I stared at the blotter on my desk and picked up a pen. I looked up at the old Seth Thomas clock on my wall, a plugged-in leftover from Lucian and Red Angus before him. I adjusted it twice a year, and it never lost or gained a second. “It’s a little after eleven, and you could be here by three or so?”

There was a discussion going on in the background. “We’ll leave right after lunch.”

He started to hang up. “Reggie? Make sure you come straight to the sheriff’s office.” He said he would.

I put the phone back, leaned an elbow on my desk, and accidentally hit my ear. I swore and readjusted my hand to my cheek. It hurt to hold the pen, and I clutched my tender fingers in a half claw. I put the Espers down for four o’clock and wrote a note to ask Vic about ballistics. I had to talk to the Curator of Firearms at the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, talk to Jim Keller, and call Dave at the Sportshop about Vasques, size nines. I was also beginning to wonder about Lucian and Turk. I started to punch the intercom on my phone, but all the lines were busy. Probably Vic, faxing her resume. I got up and walked out to Ruby’s desk.

She was on the phone too, but she hung up. “Lonnie Little Bird was here looking for you.” She laced her fingers together and rested her chin on them. “He’s sweet.”

“Yes, he is.” I paused for a second. “I’ve got the Espers coming in this afternoon. If they’re running late, can you stick around?”

“Yes.”

“Anything on Jim Keller?”

“Not back from Nebraska yet. But Mrs. Keller has been here twice already today.”

“How’s the kid doing?”

“He’s in the back, asleep. I gave him the old sheriff report books to look at, which would put anybody to sleep. By the way, you have the worst penmanship of any sheriff we’ve ever had since 1881. I thought you’d be glad to know.”

“Who was before 1881?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Nobody; that’s when we first became a county in the territory, about nine years before we became a state. You did hear about that?”

I scratched at my ear and immediately regretted it. “Yep, I remember reading about it in the papers.”

“Stop picking at your ear.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I slouched a little bit. “Do you know what’s happened to Lucian and Turk?”

“They are having lunch down the hill at the Busy Bee. Lucian mentioned something about having a Come-to-Jesus meeting with his nephew.”

“Oh, boy. Anything from Vic on the ballistics at DCI?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“She’s on the phone.” I looked down at all the blinking lights on Ruby’s console. “She’s on all of them.”

“Then she hasn’t, or she is now.” She stayed looking at me.

“We’re not going to be able to keep her, are we?” It was out before I knew I had said it and, when I looked up, Ruby’s electric blues steadfastly joined with mine.

“Why don’t you go have lunch; she’ll be off the phones by the time you get back. Besides, you could use a little religion.”

In its usual perverse manner, the sun had decided to come out and cast a glare without providing any heat. It might get warmer by the end of the afternoon but, for now, it was just plain cold. As I navigated the courthouse steps, I looked up at Vern’s window. He was probably up there still waiting for our lunch, but I could bet that he wouldn’t want anything to do with Lucian’s type of revival meeting, even though I was sure it would carry its own unique version of fire and brimstone.

* * *

Cody and Jacob, convicted of two counts of first degree sexual assault, could have been sentenced to as much as forty years. The sentencing date hung over all of us for two solid weeks, but over nobody as much as Vern Selby. The jury had lived with deciding, and now they had passed it on to Vern like some communicable disease, and the fever of justice ate away at him.

He had taken it upon himself to merge the two counts into one, which was his judicial latitude, and sentenced Cody and Jacob to a maximum of fifteen years in prison, far to the low side of the five- to fifty-year sentencing guideline. George had gotten the minimum of ten, but it all became academic when the judge had pronounced that the offenders would be incarcerated in a young adult institution in Casper and would therefore receive indeterminate terms. I guess Vern had decided that since they were all first offenders, the rape shouldn’t cost them the rest of their lives; never mind what it had cost Melissa.

Cody Pritchard had turned to his friends in the back of the courtroom and playfully tossed his hat in the air and smiled. With time off for good behavior, Cody, Jacob, and George could see less than two years of soft prison time. Bryan Keller would receive two years of probation and one hundred hours of community service. The young men were once again released without bail, and Vern had nodded quietly in his chambers when I personally volunteered to drive the three of them down to Casper.

* * *

When I got to the Busy Bee, I glanced through the window. Turk was slouched on his stool and was against the wall about as far as he could be. Lucian, with his lips barely moving, was leaning in and glared at the side of Turk’s face. Any thoughts of hunger passed, and I continued along the sidewalk to the Sportshop. When I went in, David was punching something into his computer behind the counter, and his wife, Sue, was waiting on an overweight middle-aged woman in the shoe department. I strolled up to the counter and leaned a hip against it.

He looked up through the top of his bifocals. “Hi, Walt.”

“What’s the number one selling hiking boot?”

“Here?” He thought. “Vasque, maybe Asolo.”

“Most popular size?”

“Nine, maybe ten.”

“Any way to track how many Vasques, size nines you’ve sold in the last year or so?”

He looked at me and sighed. “You’re lucky Sue’s here today. I don’t have time for . . .”

“Make time.” I looked at him for a moment to reinforce it.

“I can ask Sue to go back through the special orders and check the stock, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on names if I were you. If they paid cash . . .”

“I need you to do it now.”

He pulled a pen from behind his ear and tossed it on the counter in defeat. “All right.”

“One other question. Do you remember Jacob or George coming in to buy flies?”

He crossed his arms and exhaled a long, slow hiss. “Maybe a week and a half, two weeks ago?”

“Anybody else here when they were talking about where they were going?” It was a long shot, but I had to play it out.

He shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“Will you think about it?”

“Sure.”

“I mean really think about it.”

“Sure.” Before I could get too far from the counter he said, “Nice clothes.”

I stopped and looked down at my fancy duds. “You help her with the sizes?”

“Did it all on her own.” He smiled. “Somethin’, huh?”

“Yep.” I continued to the door and rested my hand on the brass handle.

“You should be proud of yourself, she’s quite a catch.”

“Yep.” I pulled open the door and started out. “Call me.”

* * *

By the time I got back to the Bee, Lucian and Turk had vacated the place and nobody was visible, not even Dorothy. I went in and sat at the corner stool, next to the cash register. After a moment, a shadow cast across my plastic-covered, vinyl menu. “What are you having?”

“Anything but the usual.” I closed the menu in one hand and reached it over to her. “I want to apologize for being sharp with you yesterday.”

She took the menu and looked at my fingers. She had been talking to somebody because her next glance was up to my ear. “Feeling experimental, are we?” She reached down and threw two meat patties from a small Tupperware container onto the grill, then dropped a basket of hand-cut potatoes into the fryer. It appeared that hamburgers and french fries were not today’s usual. I asked her about Lucian and Turk. She raised an eyebrow. “I think you’re due a formal, verbal apology. Then I think the former, yet attending, sheriff intends to take a nap in the jail.” Her voice softened. “How’s the Bear?”

I looked up. “I bet he’s out of there by this afternoon.”

“Hard to keep a good man down.”

I reached up to feel my ear. “You have no idea . . .”

She slapped my hand away. “Stop that.” She turned back around and flipped the sizzling patties. “So, where are we on the case?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Inspector Lastrade . . .” And I did. I left out any suspicions I had about Jim Keller, but that was about all. I was looking defeat squarely in the face, and pretty soon the county would be crawling with DCI investigators and Feds. I honestly didn’t think they were going to get any further than I had. Nonetheless, I told her I was considering a career in telemarketing.

She filled a glass with ice and then with tea from a pitcher that sat on the cutting board. “You can make a lot of money.” She flipped a couple of slices of cheese onto the burgers, prepared the buns for reception on an oval-shaped plate, and pulled the fresh basket of fries from the deep fryer, hooking them on the rack to drip dry. My stomach gurgled in response to all the activity, and I was glad she had put on two cheeseburgers. “Okay, unlucky at cards . . .”

I took a long sip of the tea. “Don’t even ask.”

She scooped up the patties, scooting them expertly onto the bun beds, and covered the rest of the plate with french fries. “That bad?” She slid the dish in front of me. “Careful, hot.”

“You know, I used to think I was pretty good at this relationship stuff . . .”

She wiped her hands on her apron. “Oh, Walter.” She shook her head. “You know she’s had a rough life.”

“Yep, I know. She’s having a rough time buying the White Mountains in Arizona right now.” The food, as always, tasted marvelous. Maybe when I was unemployed, I could work part time for Dorothy. She was still looking at me, and I had the feeling I was going to have to go seek employment elsewhere. “What?”

“When her father killed himself ”—she had placed the pitcher on the counter, anticipating another fill—“there were some things going on out there.” The hazel eyes stayed steady under a salt-and-pepper lock.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged. “Just talk. I don’t think her marriage was very happy, either.” She looked down at my rapidly vanishing meal. “How’s the food?”

I stopped chewing long enough to reply, “Marry me?”

“That good, huh?”

* * *

I looked up to check, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The wind was still kicking up, so I figured the snowflakes that kept waltzing around my head must have just hitched a ride; their changing patterns reminded me of the mountain in an unsettling fashion. I thought about the visions I had been having and chalked them up to strain and just plain fatigue.

Turk was sitting in one of the reception chairs and stood when I came in. Ruby was seated at her desk with her lunch of a watercress sandwich on low-fat seven-grain bread, carrots, and a sliced apple unfolded before her, which looked fresh, healthy, and completely unappetizing. “What’s up?”

He glanced over at Ruby, who was watching him. “Could I speak with you, Sheriff ?” His voice was still nasal with the muffling of the packing and bandages.

“Yeah, sure. You wanna talk in my office?” He nodded and followed me in. I sat at my desk and gestured for him to have a seat. He shook his head and continued standing. He looked like nine kinds of hell; the bruising around his eyes had spread as far back as his side-burns, and it hurt to look at him. “What can I do for you?”

“Uncle Lucian says this is a bad time to have this conversation with you, but I thought you ought to know about my intentions? I put my application in with the Highway Patrol.”

I had to laugh; I couldn’t even keep a hold of Turk. “Really?”

“Yes, sir.” He twitched his face to stop an itch I was sure he was going to have for a while. “Uncle Lucian said it might be for the best.”

I nodded and crossed my arms. “He’s a smart fella, that one-legged bandit uncle of yours.”

“Yes, sir.” He looked back up at me. “He also said that if I ever ran for sheriff, you’d just run against me, win and serve a half a term, and then step down, giving her two years to prove herself.”

“He’s right, I would.” Pretty soon I’d be running the place by myself. “He say anything else?”

I thought I saw just a glimmer of a smile at the corner of his mouth from underneath the droop of his mustache but, with the bandages, it was hard to tell. “He said that masturbation is a wonderful form of stress relief in the workplace and that the wildflowers are beautiful along I-80 in the spring.”

I stuck a peeling hand out to him. He looked at it, then to me. I’m sure we were a handsome pair, him with his nose and me with my hands and ear. “I won’t give you a bad letter of recommendation.”

He took my hand, hesitantly. “Thanks.”

I knew the colonel down in Cheyenne, and he owed me a few favors. “I’ll make some phone calls.”

He shook my hand a little more and then released it. “You really do want to get rid of me.”

“Let’s just say I think it might be a better fit.” I really did. The narrower limitations of vehicular law enforcement along with a more regimented style of department could be just what Turk needed. That or the colonel would never owe me another favor for as long as the state had paved roads.

I looked past him and saw Vic appear in the doorway. She glanced at Turk when he turned to see what I was looking at. “Jesus, you look like shit.”

He turned back to me before he left. “Good luck.” I had no idea he had a sense of humor. I could have asked him about his .45-70, but it didn’t seem pertinent. It wasn’t him, and it wasn’t going to be.

Vic sat in the chair opposite me, propping her feet onto my desk as usual, and arranging a sheath of papers in her lap. I sat back down. “Don’t play with your ear.”

“Sorry.” I returned my hand to my lap. “Henry and Lucian are going even money on whether I’ll lose it. Ballistics?”

She shuffled the papers. “Both leads match, which does not come as a great surprise, both contain the same chemical compound, and both are from the same slug batch, 30 to 1 ratio . . . Same shooter.”

“How are your friends back in Washington?”

She looked at me for a moment. “Quantico.”

“Whatever.” I pulled out a pen, uncapped it, and underlined Jim Keller’s name. “I’ve always wondered why they haven’t tried to lure you back.”

“There’s an opening with the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes Services in the Criminal Investigative Analysis Unit.”

I nodded. “Do you have to say all that every time you answer the phone?”

“There’s also an opening in West Virginia at the FBI Fingerprint Analysis Lab, and there’s always Philadelphia.”

I exhaled slowly. “Well, I didn’t think we were going to be able to keep you forever.”

She looked up from the papers then returned to them, and it was very quiet for a while. “We ran a check on Roger Russell’s gun . . .”

“I didn’t even know you had it.”

She looked back up, allowing her head to drop to one side in dismissal. “Somebody’s gotta run the place while you’re out traipsing around in the woods.”

“And . . . ?”

“Doesn’t match. And we got a call back from the Buffalo Bill Museum. They did acquire a Sharps .45-70 from Artie Small Song more than a year ago.”

I shrugged. “Artie has also been locked up in the Yellowstone County jail since Saturday.”

She made a big show of pulling a pencil from behind her ear and scratching through his name on her papers. “Jim Keller?”

“Nothing.” I put the cap back on the pen and tossed it onto the blotter. “Which brings us to the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead.”

She looked at her notes. “No match, but it’s been fired numerous times. Like a box of shells.”

“Twenty rounds?” She nodded her head. “When?”

“Just over a week ago.”

“Right before the murders?”

“Have you ever looked down the barrel of one of those things after they’ve been shot?”

I thought back to Omar’s. “Yep, once.”

“They lead up real bad. You throw twenty rounds through one of those things without cleaning it, you’re looking to get it blown up in your face.” Her hands rested on her lap. “I looked down the barrel, and you could hardly see daylight.”

My ear itched, but I figured it was a good sign. “So why would somebody do that?”

“Practice?” We looked at each other.

“That lets your friend Henry off. He doesn’t need practice.”

I leaned back in my chair. “When we were up on the mountain, he took the shotgun and gave me the rifle. He said something about not being as good a shot as me.” I stood up. “I better go get that damn thing out of my truck and bring it in here. It turns up missing, I’m gonna be even more cursed than I am now.”

“It’s still in your truck?”

I started around the desk and looked down at the top of her head as she studied her notes. “I forgot about it.” She shook her head, and I reached over and touched her shoulder. “By the way, thanks for the shells.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“That old box of shells in my truck, the ones that look about a hundred and fifty years old?” She didn’t move, but the tarnished gold came up slow. “Please tell me you left an aged box of .45-70 ammunition on the seat of my truck?” I waited. “Next to the rifle?”

She didn’t say anything, just sat there looking at me. I think she was checking to see if I was really there. I wasn’t sure myself.

15

When we got to the truck, I was relieved to look through the passenger side window and see the cartridge box there. I was beginning to think that I was having some sort of mental breakdown and that the box lying beside the rifle on my seat was another phantom apparition. “Do you see that box on the seat?”

She peeked past my shoulder and turned her face to look at me. “What box?”

I nodded my head, ever so slightly. “Very funny.” I unlocked the door and opened it; the barrel of the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead was pointed directly at us. The box was on the seat in the exact spot where I had placed it after my brief examination. Using the inside liner of the pocket of my jacket, I reached in and showed it to Vic. “Was this in here when you put the rifle on the seat and locked the truck?”

“No.”

I looked at the box. “Anybody drive my truck while I was gone?”

“Nobody. Did you leave your keys?”

“On the rack, in case somebody had to move it.”

“This is getting exciting.”

I placed the small cardboard container on my desk along with the rifle and sat in my chair as Vic leaned against the desk with her thighs flattened on the edge and her arms crossed. We were both looking at the damn thing like it might jump up, do back flips, and run away. It was a battered little box with the corners dented in and the edges fuzzy. The black printing was faded and scuffed, but you could still make it out. The print was in assorted fonts and at least as ornate as the handwritten addition. There was a floral pattern and a series of lines on each side that encapsulated the words “This Box Contains 20 Metallic Cartridges, Manufactured by Sharps’ Rifle Mf ’g Co., Hart-ford, Conn.” There was a large hole, exactly the size of a .45 caliber slightly low and left of center with “400 yards” scribbled in pencil beside it. The writing was old, with a flourishing hand and detailed penmanship. It looked like the writing in the old sheriff’s logbook. There was something familiar about it and, if the distance was true, it was scary shooting.

When I looked up again, Vic was staring at me. “Well, are we waiting till Christmas?”

I took two pens from my broken Denver Broncos mug and carefully held the box down with one and worked the flap open with the other. No sense in getting even more fingerprints on the thing. I slumped a little and rested my chin on my arm as I continued to look in the box. “If you were cartridges over a hundred years old, wouldn’t you be tarnished?”

“Yes.”

“They’re not.”

She leaned around the corner and peered into the box like something might come out. “Look like they were loaded yesterday.”

I flattened one of the pens on the cardboard divider and slowly coaxed the box back, allowing two of the cartridges to roll out onto the blotter; they were both empties that had been fired. I spun one of the cartridges around with the pen so I could see the indentation at the primer. I turned the other one, and it was identical. “Two down.” I pinned the divider to the blotter again and nudged the box back, allowing two more shells to roll out. These were live, with lead and primers intact, as were those in the rest of the box. “Does it worry you that there are two of these shells spent?”

“You mean how it matches up with our current body count?”

“Something like that.” I looked along the shiny lines of reflection on the surface of the casing nearest me and clearly made out discolored spots whirling in the pattern of fingerprints. Whoever had handled these cartridges had not done it with any great care and, as I glanced at the other shells, I began to see more prints. With my luck, the individual who made them had been dead for seventy years. “Do you still have that shell of Omar’s that I gave you?”

“Yeah.” She retreated into her office and returned with the cartridge. While she was gone, I flipped the box over. On the other side was another hole where the shot had passed through: impressive to the point of being mythic. I looked at the handwriting and was sure I had seen it before. When she returned and handed Omar’s bullet to me, she leaned over to peruse the shells on the blotter. “These are different.”

His shell had a rounded line at the butt end that ended with two small stars and writing on the other side of the primer that read .45-70 GOVT.; on the mystery shells, there was nothing. The edges at the butt plate weren’t as sharp either, as if the machining had been done in a hurry with devices under pressure to produce in difficult times. I scooped up one of the spent shells at the open end with the tip of the pen and held it up to my nose and sniffed. There was no quartzite, but traces of black powder were evident.

“They are originals.” I wasn’t surprised when the baritone rumble of his voice interrupted our conversation. I had seen Henry walk up and lean against the doorway, but Vic hadn’t, and it was just a tiny bit amusing when her back stiffened.

“What’re you doing out of the hospital?”

He crossed over and eased himself into the chair opposite my desk. “I see you still have your ear.”

I laid the cartridge down on the blotter and tossed the pen back in the mug. “Yep, I’ve removed all the scissors from the office, and I’m just not going to take any naps when Lucian’s around.” I nodded toward the scattered shells on my desk. “What do you know about these?”

Vic refolded her arms and looked at him, and her glance seemed to carry a little more professional interest than I would have found comforting. Henry simply smiled at her. “Hi.”

She smiled back. “Hi.”

I looked at the two of them for a moment. “Okay, before the two of you get into a pissing contest, how about you tell me what you know about these?”

His eyes continued smiling at Vic for longer than they should have, then he turned to me. “Where did you get them?”

“They were on the seat of my locked truck this morning, alongside the rifle.”

“Interesting.” He waited a moment. “They are originals.”

“How do you know that?”

“I am the one who polished and reloaded them, but I did not reload them for myself.” He took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly as he turned his head toward the window. “Lonnie.” After looking up at Vic, I turned back to him and waited. “Lonnie said that he wanted to shoot the rifle, and I was concerned that he might run some of those hot, modern cowboy loads through it. I took forty of the original cartridges he had and hand loaded them so they wouldn’t damage the rifle.”

I sighed and raised my eyes up to Vic. “Get a preliminary on these shells, then ship samples down to DCI.” She nodded, and I stood. “How far do you think you can get, within our obvious technical limitations?”

“Pretty damn far.” She looked at me as I scooped up the rifle. “Where are you going?”

I glanced over at Henry who was studying me. “I’m going out to talk with Lonnie Little Bird and get some fingerprints.”

“You sure you don’t want somebody to go with you?”

I looked back at him. “I got somebody.”

* * *

The heat of the day had begun to melt away what remained of the snow, and the clouds were just beginning to break up in the face of a mild, Wyoming autumn afternoon. As we drove out of town, I looked in the rearview mirror at the Bighorns. The fresh coat of snow had done them some good, even if it hadn’t done either of us any. We rode along in silence. My sheepskin jacket was draped over Henry’s shoulders; Dena Many Camps had forgotten to bring him a coat along with his fresh clothes. He didn’t particularly look irritated, just preoccupied, so I left him alone with his thoughts. I had picked up a fingerprint kit from our minilab and informed Ruby where we were going, asking her to relay any information gotten from Dave at the Sportshop, from the Espers, or Jim Keller. Lucian was still in the back asleep, and I told her to wake him up if anything happened. She had looked at me and withheld comment.

There was one question on my mind, and it concerned a box of aged .45-70 shells that had been left on my truck seat. I broke the silence by asking, “Why did he leave them?”

“I do not know.” He didn’t turn but slouched a little against the door, the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead leaning gently against the inside of one of his knees. “Unless it was good fortune.”

“For whom?”

“You.” He still looked out the windshield at the sunny afternoon. “Lonnie has grown very fond of you over the last few years. The last time we were there? He asked me if it would be all right if he gave this rifle to you.”

“The Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead? Thanks a lot, but no thanks.” He rode along quietly, and I was pretty sure I had hurt his feelings. “If it’s all the same with you and Lonnie, I think I’ll just hang around here in the camp of the living for a while.”

“That is not why he wanted to give it to you.” He turned and looked at me for the first time. “He wanted to give it to you to shield you.”

“From what?”

He shrugged and looked back out the windshield. “He said that you need protection from something very powerful and very bad.” The rest he spoke in a monotone. “He said that you are a good man and that there are those who would assist you if they could. That they had spoken with him, and that if you would allow them, they would help you.”

“Help me what?”

He sat there for a while, and I was getting worried that he might have left the hospital a little prematurely when he spoke. “Live.”

As we passed the cutoff to the Powder River Road, I thought about what Vonnie had said, that she had assembled herself so that she didn’t have to deal with all the things I had suddenly reintroduced into her life. I thought about caring about somebody more than life itself. As I looked back, I was pretty sure that Martha hadn’t loved me that much. She had been fond of me but had settled for me and had made the best of her situation. She had stayed because of Cady, and I had stayed because I loved Cady that much. I simply couldn’t conceive of doing anything else. I figured what I’d do was go over to Vonnie’s tonight and have a long talk with her. Maybe we could put things off until this case was over. The time when I had held her long toes, fitting the high arches of her feet in the palms of my hands, and had driven her home in the dark of the night seemed very far away and receding.

Henry dozed as I drove away from the sun, and the ruffling of his breath became steadier as we took the cutoff to the reservation. I saw Brandon White Buffalo looking after us as we went through the intersection. He stood behind his counter. It was hard to miss him as he looked through the clinging soda, chips, and candy advertisements. I extended a hand across the cab toward him, and he watched as we passed without slowing. He raised his hand also and pressed it against the heavy double glass of the convenience store window. Brandon White Buffalo stood there in the maelstrom of modern consumerism like a sentinel, like a warning in a mystical undertow. I looked back through the rear window of the truck to catch a last glance; he still stood there palm out and fingers spread like an orchard basket against the glass. He looked after us until we were gone, and I thought of Melissa at the Little Big Horn.

I reset my shoulders, concentrated on the road, and considered my dwindling staff. Turk would be out by January, Vic could possibly be gone before that, and the chances of me getting Ferg to return to full duty were slim. He would probably just retire. I was thinking about it myself. I picked the mic off the dash. “Base, this is Unit One, come in?”

After a moment there was static, then Ruby’s voice. “Leave me alone, I’m busy.”

“Any word from Dave at the Sportshop?”

Static. “His wife called. She’s about halfway through and will fax the stuff over when she gets done. Stop bothering me.”

I hung the mic back up and watched the trees pass by along the irrigation ditch. I expected to see the Old Cheyenne again, standing among the cottonwoods. But there was nothing there and that worried me a little more; maybe even they had abandoned me. I thought about where we were going, about Lonnie. Yes, it is so . . . I didn’t think that Lonnie had killed Cody and Jacob, but I wanted to talk to him directly and find out if there was anything more to his story than Henry had been able to tell me. I looked over at my friend. It seemed that his breathing had gotten a little rougher, but he still slept, his body attempting to repair itself while he wasn’t looking.

* * *

There was a maroon minivan with a bumper sticker that read FRY BREAD POWER in Lonnie’s driveway, and there was someone sitting on the passenger side. Even from the distance and angle, I knew it was Melissa. I brought the Bullet to a stop alongside the van. Henry woke and placed a hand on the dash to steady himself. “You all right?”

“Yes.” He blinked. “Just sleepy.” He looked out the passenger side of the Bullet, and I saw the muscles at the side of his face bunch as he smiled at her. His hand came up to the glass, and I knew hers was extended toward him. He handed me the rifle. I took a moment to collect myself, giving them enough time to be together before I opened my own door and came around the back of the truck. It was a moment I had avoided, this personal contact, but here she was, and here I was with her.

She was holding him, and I was amazed at how she had grown. Melissa was taller, still lean but muscled now and, even though she hadn’t lost all of the stunting qualities of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, the graceful quality that was indicative of the Cheyenne and their personal beauty was there. Her face turned to me. I hadn’t seen that face, with the exception of that fleeting glance at the powwow, for more than three years. Her eyebrows still arched in a questioning fragility, and the folds at the insides of her eyes still attempted to betray her. In honor of the golden fall afternoon and despite the oncoming winter, she was dressed in a pair of gray flannel athletic shorts and a T-shirt that read SWEET MEDICINE TREATMENT CENTER, SOBRIETY RETREAT. I stood there for a moment with the rifle in my hand, unable to move, as she loosened herself from Henry only long enough to attach herself to me. I held the rifle out so that it could not touch her and looped my other arm around her shoulders. Henry quietly took the gun. After a moment, she pulled back to look up at me. “You are sad?”

I laughed as a tear threatened to escape the corner of my eye. “I guess I’m just happy to see you.”

She smiled back, and it was like sunshine through a church window. “I am happy to see you, too.”

Henry retreated and headed up to the house with the Sharps as Melissa and I talked. She kept a hand on my arm as we spoke, as if the connection might be fleeting and neither of us could take the chance. She had received a partial basketball scholarship to a community college in South Dakota and was only back from her special classes for a tournament. She wanted to know if I could come home with her in a week and a half and spend Thanksgiving with her and her aunts. She assured me that Lonnie would be there, too. I asked her where Lonnie was now. “He is inside, arguing with my aunt Arbutus. She said that I should come out and sit in the car. I’m glad you are here. I was bored.”

As she spoke, I became aware of a commotion. The screen slapped open and the most formidable of the aunts made her way from the porch and headed toward us. Henry was wheeling Lonnie out the door after her with the buffalo rifle in Lonnie’s lap along with a small, black plastic box. Melissa’s aunt pulled up short when she saw me. I hadn’t formally met Arbutus Little Bird and had previously withstood her cast-iron gaze from afar. She didn’t like me, but I think it was less because I was a white man with a badge and more because I associated with Henry. “Hi, Arbutus.”

She redirected her gaze at Melissa. “Get in the car.”

I took a deep breath and took Melissa’s hand in mine. She was trembling. “Arbutus, do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

She didn’t respond but stood there with her hands at her sides as Henry wheeled Lonnie up behind her. She turned slightly and spat out the words, “I hope you’re happy, now that the sheriff ’s here.”

Lonnie’s eyes did light up when he saw me. “Hello, Sheriff.”

“Hey, Lonnie. What’s going on?”

“Oh, my sister isn’t going to let me have my daughter for the holidays. Yes, it is so.”

I glanced up at Henry, who shrugged. I looked back at the galvanized aunt. “What’s the story?”

“I’m taking her home.”

“Well, do you mind telling me why it is you’re not going to let her have Thanksgiving with her father?”

A moment passed. “I don’t have to talk to you.”

“No, you don’t, but I can get on the radio and get one of the IPs over here and you can talk to him.” I was playing an angle, but most inhabitants of the reservation hated Indian Police even more than us. We were just whites. They were apples, red on the outside, white on the inside. She didn’t say anything. “Whatever it is? I’m sure we can work it out.”

“I found a beer in his refrigerator.”

I turned and looked at Lonnie. “Is that true, Lonnie?” God, like I didn’t know the response.

“Yes, it is true. Yes, it is so.” He continued to smile. “I keep it there as a reminder and to keep temptation at hand. Temptation out of reach does you no good.”

“How long’s the beer been in there?”

“About a year and a half.”

She crossed her arms, but she turned to look down at him. We were making progress. “How come I haven’t seen it in there before?”

He blinked his eyes through the thick glasses. “It was behind the pickled pigs’ feet. You don’t ever move them. Um-hmm, yes it is so.”

The look on her face told me he was telling the truth. “Arbutus, do you think it would be all right if Lonnie came over for Thanksgiving dinner at your place?” I waited a moment myself, for the next one. “And do you think it would be all right if Melissa came over here and spent the night with Lonnie, maybe on the Friday after Thanksgiving?” She didn’t say anything but turned to look at me. “Friday night, then?”

“Get in the car, Melissa.”

She started to open the door, but Melissa’s voice stopped her. “Would it be okay if the sheriff came over for Thanksgiving dinner, too?”

Arbutus stopped and turned to look at her, then at me. She was a hard old gunboat, but I saw the steely eyes soften a little. “Walter is always welcome at our table.” She started to open the door, but her eyes steered clear of mine. “You know where I live. Melissa, will you get in the car?”

The hand loosened in mine, and she leaned in to give a slight peck on my lowered cheek. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”

“I’ll do my best.” She stopped. “I’ll be there.” The smile returned, and I watched as she turned the corner and got into the van, or almost did, before she jumped out, ran around the front, and gave her father and uncle a good-bye hug.

* * *

I leaned against the bed of my truck, crossed my arms, and looked down. “How you doin’, Lonnie?”

“I’m good, and how are you?”

“I’m all right. Did you leave me a little present?”

He looked up at Henry through the split lenses, and the mid-afternoon sun glinted off his metal-framed glasses. Then he turned back to me and smiled. “Um-hmm, yes, I did.”

I nodded. “How did you get in my truck?”

“Oh, those new ones are easy to break into, that and the keys by the door of your office. Yes, it is so.”

I had to relocate the key rack. “Why did you leave the ammo for me?”

“You’re gonna think I’m crazy if I tell you.” The smile was a little weak when he looked up.

“Lonnie, I’ve seen an awful lot of crazy stuff lately, so why don’t you try me?”

“The Old Ones told me you would need them.” He nodded. “Yes. When I lost my legs, they began talking to me. I think it is because my legs are with them, now. They tell me half things.”

“Half things?”

“Yes, because I am only half with them. Someday, all of me will be with them, and they will tell me everything.”

I smiled. “I hope you don’t get the whole story too soon, Lonnie.” I looked down at the rifle in his lap. “Lonnie, did you take the gun out and shoot it a bunch of times?”

He looked genuinely ashamed. “I was angry, so I shot one of the fence posts out back.”

I thought of the things I might shoot if somebody had done to my daughter what had been done to his. The image of Lonnie out on his back porch late one night shooting at a singular fence post hung there just out of range. I’m pretty sure I jumped a little when the radio crackled in the truck. I could hear Ruby’s voice through the glass and the transceived miles. “Come in, Unit One.”

It was probably word from the Sportshop or on the Espers but, when I looked up at the clock on the dash, it was only two-thirty; maybe it was Jim Keller. I opened the door and keyed the mic. “Base, this is Unit One. Go ahead?”

Static. “Walt, George Esper is gone again.”

I slumped against the doorjamb of the truck and rested my head on the mic in my hand. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Static. “He stole Ferg’s truck. Vic’s in pursuit.”

“Where?”

Static. “Out 16, probably on the highway. He already ran into somebody near the co-op. Turk’s out there now.”

“Did anybody notify the HPs?”

Static. “Yes.”

I waited a moment; chances are Vic was still in range. Static, then a fainter signal broke through. “I’m at Mile Marker 113, and if the little fucker was up here, I would have caught him by now.”

“Vic, leave the highway to the HPs, I got a sneaking suspicion that he’s headed out this way.”

Static, and I listened as she slowed the five-year-old unit down to under a hundred, negotiating the divider with one hand. “I’m on my way back, but if that’s the case he’s got a hell of a lead on me.”

“We’ll get him from the other direction. Unit One, out.” I hung the mic back up and leaned out to look at Henry. “You coming?”

He nodded and started pulling Lonnie back up to the house. Lonnie grabbed the wheel rails of his chair and slid himself to a stop. “You go ahead, I can get back in the house myself. Yes, it is so.” Then he reached down and handed the rifle up to me. “Take this.” I took the rifle as he handed the black plastic box to Henry.

Henry looked at him, nodded, and came around to the passenger door. As I crossed in front of the truck, I stopped. “Lonnie, you know that cartridge box?”

He continued to smile. “Yes?”

“It has writing on it, next to the bullet hole?” He nodded and smiled. “Whose handwriting is that?”

“You should know that handwriting.”

“Lonnie, I don’t have a lot of time . . .”

“Nedon Nes Stigo, He Who Sheds His Leg.”

Lucian.

“He used to shoot with us out at the Buffalo Wallows, back in the day. One time, my father challenged him to try to hit a target as small as the cartridge box at four hundred yards, and he did it. Yes, it is so.”

It took me a minute to get myself going. “Thanks, Lonnie.”

* * *

I climbed in the truck and, reaching for my seat belt, motioned Henry to do the same. He placed the small, black plastic case at his feet and held the rifle as easily in his hands as he had held the one in Omar’s helicopter. By the time we got to the end of the state route that joined with the main drag, we were doing about a hundred with the sirens and lights at full tilt. It was still going to take us more than twenty minutes to get back to the other side of the reservation, and my knuckles tightened around the wheel. I concentrated on the road as we passed the cutoff down to the Powder River. “I think he’s headed toward us.”

“Because of what he said at the hospital, about living on the Rez.”

“It’s as good a guess as any.”

He braced a hand against the dash as the gravitational pull of a sweeping turn almost slid us into the barrow ditch. “What did Lonnie say about the writing on the box?”

“He said it was Lucian’s . . . You never heard that?”

“I never asked.”

“I guess it was done a long time ago, when Lucian was shooting with Lonnie’s father.” At the next straightaway he opened what looked like a cleaning kit and pulled out two long stems and began threading them together. “What’re you doing?”

“I am cleaning this rifle.”

“That’s evidence.”

“No, it is a weapon.”

It took awhile, even at our speed, but we finally made it to the northern end of the Powder when another vehicle popped over the horizon that was traveling at a pretty good speed of its own. From the distance, it was hard to tell who it was but, after a moment, I could see the lights. I grabbed the mic. “Vic, is that you?”

Static. “Fuck yes, it’s me. Where in the hell did that little shit go?” I slowed and stopped. By the time I had, she was pulling up alongside us and was rolling down her window; she had to crank. I cut the siren, and she leaned an elbow on the sill. “What now?”

I thought. “Well, if he didn’t take 14 back toward Sheridan, the only other main road is Powder River back here.”

“North or south?”

“We’ll take south, you take north.” She was gone in a billowing cloud of blue burned oil and tire smoke before I could finish my sentence. Maybe, if I bought her a new unit . . . I turned the Bullet around and laid a little strip of my own, accelerating back to the Powder. When we got to the cutoff, the only thing headed north was a drifting cloud of dirt that hazed the gravel road into the distance. We made the turn and headed south as the back end of the Bullet attempted to get ahead of us. I countersteered and hit the gas again as we slid around the first turn just about sideways and clipped a few mailboxes. I noticed Henry struggling to hold onto the Sharps and find his seat belt with one hand. “What’s the matter?”

“Just buckling up. It is the law.” This was the first time I had taken the big beast up to speed for any length of time; there hadn’t been any reason before. It was heavy, but I was surprised by the agility it had. “All right, you can crash now.” He had gotten his seat belt on and was studying the road farther ahead as I dealt with the ground at hand. “I see dust.”

If it was George, he had just jumped off the highway. A thought snagged in my mind. “Do you think he’s got the radio on in that thing?”

Henry turned to look at me as I negotiated another turn and another quickly afterward. “That would explain why he got off the state routes.”

“There’s something else.”

“What?”

“The old Esper place is out here somewhere, the one that Reggie’s great-great-grandfather settled. I remember Vonnie telling me about it. She bought a bunch of property on a speculation that they were going to put that power plant out there someday.”

“How does romance bloom?”

“Don’t ask.” I could feel his disapproving glance as we crossed a cattle guard and momentarily became airborne. We made for the washboard curve that lay ahead, and he braced himself. “Hey, I thought you guys always thought it was a good day to die.”

“Attributed to Crazy Horse who was often misquoted.”

* * *

The road straightened after the washboard, and I was able to bring all ten cylinders on line. The speedometer was creeping back up on eighty, and we were starting to get that light, floating feeling on the ball bearings of loosely packed dirt. My testicles felt as if they were somewhere in my chest cavity, and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. If we missed one of the curves at this speed, we were most assuredly dead. All Henry said was “Ooh, shit.”

We hit the next turn at just about a hundred, and the sickening feeling in my stomach magnified as the laws of geometry exerted themselves on the velocity of all that Dearborn steel. At any reasonable speed it wasn’t much of a turn, certainly nothing worthy of a Jan and Dean ballad, but it was enough to slam the side of the truck into the red clay embankment. When we bounced off the wall, I overcorrected, and the Bullet shot for the river. I turned ever so slightly, trying to urge our velocity forward, and only the left rear wheel slipped off the road. The truck tipped slightly back to center where we gained purchase and shot into the next straightaway. He looked over at me, the passenger-side mirror beating against his door. “You want to wreck? Do your side, okay?”

George had obviously had a little trouble getting around that one, too; his side-view mirror bounced and clattered under the Bullet. We had gained a good amount on him. When we saw him next, he had topped a hill and was bouncing immediately through another cattle guard that was on his right. The road continued a steady climb until we got to where he had been, and I slowed just a little because there might be a slope on the other side. It was a good thing I had, because the road did make a sharp cut to the right and there was a reasonable drop-off. George had not made it.

You could see where the Toyota had gone through the fence sideways, taking the majority of the barbed wire and aged posts with it. The little truck had most certainly gone over, but it had landed on its wheels, and George was still bumping his way across the bottomland where the pasture ended in a gate only about a quarter of a mile ahead. If we kept our speed up, we would get there before him and arrive in a large wash that opened to the east with a rise of about eight feet in more than a mile. This was the part of the river that admitted honestly to the moniker “a mile wide and an inch deep.” There wasn’t much in that direction other than the access road to the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe tracks. There wasn’t anywhere else for him to go. He couldn’t turn back and try to climb the hill he had just slid down, and the river blocked him to the left where the water might only be an inch deep but the mud was bottomless. He had to go for the gate, and we were going to be there before him.

I slowed just a little, since time and topography were now on our side. The Toyota leapt in and out of the hillocks and sagebrush. You could see him in there, sawing at the wheel in an attempt to keep the pickup on a relatively straight line, his head beating against the headliner as he topped each rise. I cringed a little at the thought of what he was doing to his leg, his jaw, and other assorted and sundry injuries.

We made the last turn before the gate, and I accelerated briefly before sliding to a stop and blocking his path. I figured the faster I got there, the sooner he might pull the battered little Toyota to a stop, but he kept coming and I was beginning to wonder if he could see us or if he had beaten himself senseless. I waited as he approached, and it was only when he was about seventy feet from the gate that I saw the wheels turn and the vehicle lurch down the hill. George had decided to test the waters.

“Jesus H. Christ . . .” I gunned the Bullet farther down the fence line till I found a likely spot and cut the wheel myself, this time pulling a couple of yards of barbed wire and stapled posts after me. We followed him to the cut bank of the river and watched as the underside of his truck suddenly became visible. The jump didn’t get very far and, as anticipated, the wheels and most of the front of the Toyota sank into the soft mud of the Powder River, effectively ending the vehicular portion of George’s getaway.

I pulled up sideways and watched in absolute exhaustion as George climbed out of the window of his truck, fell into the water, rose up, and began quick-slogging away from us as fast as his bandaged leg would carry him. I looked past Henry in disbelief as he turned to hand me the rifle. “If you do not shoot him, I will.”

“We don’t have any bullets, or I would seriously consider it.” He laughed and pulled a gleaming .45-70 from his shirt pocket and held it up. “Where did you get that?”

“Off your desk, where do you think?”

I pulled the handle and opened my door. “We’re trying to keep somebody from shooting him.”

He started out on the other side. “I am beginning to question the logic in that.”

George had gotten a good start, but his injury and the mud were slowing him quite a bit, and I could see the gray slime of the riverbed clinging to his pants well above his knees. I stopped at the cut and stood at the edge; he was about fifty yards out. I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled, “George, where do you think you’re going?!”

Henry joined me at the dark crust edge of the bank. He was still carrying the rifle. “If you shoot him now, we do not have to bury him.”

I cupped my hands around my mouth again. “George, that’s enough, get back over here!”

George continued on. I started down the bank and slipped, barely catching myself before I fell into the river. I looked down into water that I was sure was just above freezing and tried to figure out what the best approach might be. I was never an all at once guy, preferring to ease myself into things, but I was about ready to throw prudence to the wind when Henry spoke. The tone of his voice ran a chill colder than the Powder had ever run. “Walt, there is somebody over there.”

I raised my head and searched the opposite bank, but all I could see was George slowly making his way across. “Where?”

“Long way out. See that pointed clump of sage to George’s right? Just to the right of that, all the way out at the horizon.”

I stopped breathing, strained my eyes, and there it was. A small vertical figure in a horizontal landscape. “You sure that’s not a pronghorn or a mule deer?”

“No, it is a man, and he is armed.”

As Henry spoke, a small burst of smoke erupted from the figure. Just over two seconds later, George was cartwheeled backward into the frigid water. I took an involuntary step forward and splashed into the river water as George hit the mud. He struggled to get up, rolling himself sideways as he attempted to sit. It was a slow, grinding motion before things slipped into the adrenalin-induced rate where the real world cannot keep pace. I yelled with everything I had, “Stay down!” He couldn’t hear, or it didn’t matter. I had seen it in Vietnam, and I had seen it here. When you are a standing animal and you suddenly discover that you are not, there is an overriding need to rise and prove to yourself that you are intact.

“Reloading.”

When I turned, he had already thrown me the rifle. I caught it and quickly jacked the lever down and extended a hand up for the shell as he fished in his shirt pocket. At that point, all I could think of was the penny he had tossed to me at the bar that night. He threw me the round; it hit the side of my palm and started to ricochet off, but I caught it against my chest and quickly inserted it past the dropped block and brought the lever up. I squared myself for the shot, and my shoulder jarred as the stock came up and slammed against it. I had to calm down and bring it all together in a fluid motion; that’s when it occurred to me to breathe. I filled my chest cavity and felt the burn of flooding oxygen as I flipped up the Vernier sight . . . “Six seventy-five . . .”

“Seven hundred if it’s an inch.”

“Damn it.” I readjusted as quickly as I could. “Where’s Omar when you need him?”

Henry laughed as I brought the rifle up again, and it was just what I needed. All the tension faded from me. I pulled the set trigger and paused for a moment to check my target. Even at this distance, there was something familiar, something I knew, someone I knew. I adjusted my figures to encompass the season, general elevation of the shooter, and mean temperature. An approximation of one twenty-one-hundredths of an inch was the starting point, but I would have to go higher with current conditions. I peered through the pinhole of the Vernier’s tiny disc, which was capable of measurements as small as one one-thousandth of an inch, and through the knife-shaped, German-silver blade sight.

He was waiting for me there, whoever he was, a mirror image at seven hundred yards with the same off-hand positioning. It occurred to me that the first one of us to find something to rest against might be the one who would still be standing, but there was no time. I had an ace in the hole because I wasn’t the one he was shooting at, at least as far as I knew. I considered how many unfortunate individuals had held that as a last thought. George was clearly in my peripheral vision as I closed my left eye and blocked out the sight of the suffering youth. He had struggled up into a sitting position and now cradled his right arm in his left. It was difficult to tell what was blood and what was darkened from the water. I could hear him sobbing and only hoped it would continue.

I allowed my breath to slowly drift out with the faint breeze and it blended with the rounded river stones, the rustling of the dying buffalo grass, and with the faint wisps of high-altitude clouds. I could hear the song I had heard before on the mountain, the one that had shaken the trees and resonated through rock. The Old Cheyenne were there now with me, and I could hear their voices ascending as I held their rifle. I pulled the trigger of the big Sharps, and they whistled across the Powder River and beyond with a deadly accuracy that begged forgiveness as they went. They imparted death as a release and an involuntary shudder in the ongoing action of things. I hardly felt the kick and lowered the rifle in acceptance of a forgone conclusion. The figure dropped, and I listened as his wayward shot passed just above our heads. It screamed like misplaced vengeance and slapped through both sides of the Bullet’s double-sided bed.

George continued to sob, and I was glad that he was alive. After a few moments, I became vaguely aware of Henry as he took the rifle away from me and leaned it against the bank. He stood there for a moment, and I think he touched my arm. He continued on into the river. The voices of the Powder would continue to tell the stories they had told before I was born and would tell long after I was gone. Henry carefully picked his way on the large, flat rocks that George had had no time to look for. I watched him for a moment and then looked back in the direction of the shot. My jaw set, and sadness overwhelmed me.

I knew who it was.

16

The bullet had shattered the clavicle, passed through the muscle and tendons of the shoulder, and had exited through the blade, taking most of it as it went. The tissue damage was tremendous, and it was unlikely that George’s arm would ever operate properly again. His pulse was weak and rapid, his breathing was shallow, and it seemed as if he was doing everything possible to lower my odds below fifty-fifty.

We had wrapped him in the wool blanket that I kept behind the seat of my truck and had carried him back to the tailgate. He lay there, trembling from the cold of the water and the loss of blood. Shock had dulled his eyes, and the pupils were dilated as he stared into the late afternoon sky. He had lost a lot of blood in the river and continued to ooze his life out onto the scratchy surface of the gray blanket. I folded my fleece jacket around his shoulder in an attempt to compress the wound and quell the blood flow. I leaned over him and smiled with my mouth, even though my eyes refused to join in. “You’re going to be okay, George.”

Along with the difficulty in thinking clearly that accompanies shock, his jaw was still wired shut, and his lips shuddered along with the rest of him, so that it was doubly difficult to understand what he was saying. “Shoshmeee . . .”

“Yep, somebody shot you, but I shot them. You just relax, everything’s going to be okay.” I pressed on the jacket at his shoulder and calculated the miles back to Durant. If you continued down the Powder River Road to Tipperary, you could cut back up 201 and get to town faster than doubling back to 16 and the paved roads. I couldn’t help but think that time was more important than macadam. Henry returned from the front of the truck where he had gone to raise Vic on the radio. “Henry’s here. He was with me in the truck when we were trying to find you.”

“Ya te he, George.” He put his hand down on the dying boy’s chest and smiled with his whole face. “You really had us scared there for a moment.” George was bleeding and would continue to bleed until he got to an emergency room. The important thing now was to keep his mind working in a positive direction, to speak calmly, and to reassure him, so that he could counter the effects of the shock. We had to get him thinking about other things, and I truly believe I could have searched the world over and never found someone better at diversion than the man who now stood beside me. George’s life hung on Henry’s every word, and I watched as the dark eyes peered into the dilated pupils and scooped up a subject that would carry the young man to safety. “George, I need to talk to you about being an Indian . . .” He glanced toward me and whispered, “She will be here any minute.” He looked back down. “George, if you are going to live on the reservation with us I have to teach you some things . . .” We transferred hands, and he held the makeshift bandage against George’s crushed shoulder. He continued to talk to him in a hypnotic rumble. “We need to talk about finding a harmony and a wholeness within yourself that you can share with all your relations, but I need you to listen carefully because the things I am going to say to you are very important. You need to hear every word, yes?” The trembling subsided, and George actually nodded his head. “Good.” Henry continued to smile. “You are going to make a good Indian.”

I tried not to think of the rest of that old statement and pulled away to look back up the road in time to see Vic’s unit come over the hill. She barely made it through the curve where George had gone off the road, cut her truck through the opening, and pulled up alongside the Bullet. With her sunglasses, she looked like a fighter pilot; she drove like one, too. “You shoot him?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“I’ll tell you later. We need to get him into Durant. Now.” She followed me around her truck and opened the passenger-side door, and we laid George across the backseat and trussed him up carefully with the seat belts. I looked at Henry as she rounded the truck and got in. I noticed he was holding something out to me. It was another .45-70. I stared at it for a moment, then back up to his face. His eyes were grim. We both knew the ending, and it was a bad one. “This land used to belong to the Espers . . .”

He didn’t move. “Yes.”

“You know who it is.”

He nodded and then looked off into the distance of the shot. “Yes.”

I took the bullet and stuffed it in the pocket of my jeans. “Get him in there alive, would you?”

“Do not worry about him.” He climbed in and sat on the floor beside George. He continued to apply pressure to the wound. I closed the door as he turned back to me and looked through the open window. His eyes were a warning. “Be careful.”

Vic looked at me questioningly, but I only nodded to her and slapped the side of the door in dismissal. I turned and walked back to the river and the rifle as she backed around the corner of my truck and rushed away to Durant. She took a left and continued down Powder River Road without my even telling her. I watched as the dust receded into the distance, and then the only sound was the water and a wandering band of Canada geese staging a late season getaway south. I watched them for a moment as they made their way along the water, keeping a steady pace between the darker hills on both sides of the storied river. The hills were contusion purple, and there were lengthy wounds of burnt-red scoria. It seemed like the whole valley was bleeding.

I picked up the Sharps at the cut bank and noticed a slight discoloration around the breech as I held it. It was still warm. I looked into the distance of the shot but could see nothing but rough terrain. I pulled the lever down, plucked the spent shell from the receiver, and replaced it with the live round Henry had given me. I tossed the empty into the river so that it would never be reloaded again. I crouched over the three inches of rushing water, cradled the rifle on my legs, and took a moment to wash George’s blood from my hands. The blood mixed quickly with the clear, cold water and disappeared north toward Montana.

I crossed the river and kept a straight path, even as the current attempted to drift me northward in its direction. When I got to the other side, I paused to steady myself and to breathe away the nausea that had overtaken me. I looked back at the Bullet to triangulate my shot’s trajectory, took a reading on the horizon, and began walking. I could feel the warmth of the setting sun on my back as I negotiated the clumps of sage, buffalo grass, and cactus, and I scared up a few western cottontails as I went. Just at the foothills, there was a small band of pronghorn antelope.

It didn’t take as long as I had hoped. I stood there with the rifle in both hands and looked at the elevated section of tracks marking the coal freight line’s direct path farther on east toward Gillette. It was lonely country and was a good spot, no matter what your intent, with a clear line through the wash that made for a perfect view of the river.

I kneeled down by the dark stains in the dirt and pressed my hand against the coarse texture of the land. It was sticky where blood had already begun drying into the earth. The Powder River country would accept moisture from any source, no matter what the cost. There wasn’t a lot, but there was enough. I stood up and took another look around before checking the road. There was a depression on the ground where the shooter had fallen, and I could tell from the pattern of the blood that the shot had hit left. Vasque, size nine tracks were all over the place, and as I knelt to examine one I saw the faintest glint of brass underneath a patch of sage. I went over and picked up the empty casing. There was no need for gloves or pens, so I held the spent shell up to the fading sun and looked at the dented primer and the base, which read .45-70 GOVT. I was feeling a little sick again, so I stood and deposited the shell in my shirt pocket.

I followed the blood trail back to the access road and knelt by the last splatter. In the dry dust it looked black, just like the ones at the center of the road. A vehicle had been parked here long enough to leave traces of motor oil and transmission fluid; a vehicle with a pretty wide axle spread and, from the spin, it wasn’t positraction. The tires were a narrow ranch ply, and the depressions told me it was heavy, approaching a ton at least. There was a single exhaust blow where it had been started: carbon and condensate, with a little oil mixed in. I was willing to bet it was an older truck, and I was also willing to bet that it was green.

The shadows were lengthening, and I had someplace to go. I worked my way back across the Powder and to my truck, leaned against the bed, and thought about what was going to happen in the next few hours. My stupor was broken by the radio.

Static. “Come in, Unit One.” Static and a worried, “Walter, are you there?”

I swallowed, reached in, and grabbed the mic. “Yep. What’s the word on George?”

Static. “They made it in; he’s at the hospital right now.”

“Alive?”

Static. “Yes. Ferg took the Espers over there just a few minutes ago. Turk is getting ready to leave now, on his way out to you.”

“Don’t send anybody out. I’m on my way in, but I’ve got to take care of a few things.” I waited for a moment. “Is Lucian there?”

Static. “I think he’s still in the back with Bryan.”

“Will you get him for me?”

As I waited, I thought about how personal and ugly things had gotten over the last forty minutes. A breeze picked up a little in an attempt to scour the countryside. I wished it all the luck in the world. Static. “What the hell do you mean don’t send anybody?”

I smiled. “Good to hear your voice, old man. How’re you doin’?”

Static. “You woke me up to ask me that?”

I took a deep breath and laid the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead on the seat. “Lucian, do you remember back when Michael Hayes killed himself?” A long pause.

Static. “What the hell does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”

“What kind of gun did he use?” There was another long pause.

Static. “Son of a bitch.”

* * *

There were clouds at the mountains, and the snow pack reflected the sour-lemon sun into one of the most beautiful and perverse sunsets I had ever seen. The clouds were dappled like the hindquarters of an Appaloosa colt, and the beauty kicked just as hard. The head wind rattled the bare limbs of the cottonwoods as the longer branches swayed, and the remnants of grass and sage shuddered close to the ground. The buffeting of the wind against the truck reminded me that I had lost both of my jackets.

I started at the beginning, working with the most innocent facts and making my way toward the most damning. I thought about the history first. No one knew exactly why Michael Hayes had killed himself. I was just a teenager when it happened, but I remember her saying that he had killed himself in the tack shed. Someone at the time had said he had done it with a large-caliber rifle, and anyone who knew Mr. Hayes would be happy to tell you he was not the type to take half measures. I remember someone making the statement that his brains had been scattered all over the walls.

I thought about the night I had gone to her house for dinner, and how she had made me leave the rifle by the door. Could she have been responding to the weapon itself? I remembered how the dog had continually looked at the door that evening. Could he have seen the Old Cheyenne?

I thought about the Vasques, size nines, and about holding those lengthy, supple feet in my hands. I thought about how she was only a head shorter than me, and how that sandy hair hung past her shoulders. It could have easily been she in the early morning light at Dull Knife Lake, and it would have been easy for her to carefully wind her way through the twisted branches at the second crime scene.

I looked longingly at the bar as I passed. The lights were on, and there were a few aged pickups parked in equal distance around the building; in Wyoming, even trucks have personal space. Dena was in there, fleecing the local cowboys out of their $163 a week. I guess with the current events, she had decided to bag the Las Vegas tournament and take care of some of the local talent. It was well past the end of the working season; for some of the cowboys it would be the last check they would see until things picked back up in the spring. It would be a hard winter for them too, but for now, they were having fun losing their money to Dena Many Camps. I envied them the privilege.

* * *

When I got to Portugee Gulch at the Lower Piney, the gate to the house was open. I picked up the rifle and listened for drums, bells, or voices of any kind, but the only sound was the wind as it swept down, undulating along the foothills of the mountains. I stepped out of the truck, and the halogen spotlights of the courtyard tripped on. It took me a second to remember how they had done the same thing when I had brought her home a couple of nights ago. The red shale crunched under my feet as I approached the house. When I got to the door, it was unlocked. I pushed it all the way open and looked in at the empty living room. Things were a great deal as they were when I had made my hasty departure the other night. The blanket was still crumpled on the sofa, but the fire was dead and cold. I thought about the dog and looked behind me. I listened very carefully as I glanced across the openings of the archways to the dining room and looked down the hallway that led to the kitchen. This was where I had seen him the first time, but the only sound was the wind in the courtyard and a soft whistling coming from the still open flue of the fireplace.

I closed the door softly behind me and looked down at the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead; it had taken on a much more articulate quality with the amount of handling it had endured in the last week. The oils from many hands had given its ghostly finish a peculiar gleam, and the wood and Italian beads shone with a warning that it had come to life once again. The small, gray feathers looked soft and invited my touch. I jacked the lever down and checked the round just above the sliding block and then pulled the lever back up. I leaned the rifle against the wall and slid the action back on the Colt, releasing a live round into the chamber of the .45. The hammer kicked back like a hitchhiker’s thumb. The sound of the thing was enough to wake the dead. I looked back at the Sharps; I didn’t want to take it, but I couldn’t leave it behind.

I moved across the room and went up the couple of stairs into the dining room, still listening and looking for any signs of blood. I paused at the opening to the kitchen and raised the sidearm up into a ready position, holding the rifle behind me. The kitchen was empty, but I thought I heard a slight noise and looked around the room again. The copper pots and stainless steel appliances remained mute until the refrigerator kicked on with a low hum. I heard the noise again. It was like the shifting of weight against something solid. I glanced toward the mudroom, where the dog had been kept before. Something very large moved, and a second later he crashed into the door. He barked and snapped over and over again at the other side as he leaped and the center panel pressed out toward me. I raised the pistol, holding the rifle in reserve, but the latch held.

I waited a moment for my heart to return to its regular pattern. It was going to be tougher from here on; I didn’t know the layout of the rest of the house. I went back out the opening to the kitchen, and there were four different hallways and two separate sets of stairs where I could continue my search. I had to think about where it was she might be, where it was that I would go if I were in her condition. I knew she was hurt and losing blood. Where would she go to doctor herself? There was no blood trail on the slick surface of the clay tile. She had not come this way, nor had she gone the other way into the living room or to the bedrooms beyond. She didn’t appear to have come into this part of the house at all.

I went down the back hallway that led farther into the compound. It was lined with bookcases and opened into an atrium with hanging baskets and large pots filled with plants I didn’t recognize. There were Turkish rugs and wicker furniture, and the air felt moist. Here was the pool, about fifteen feet long and seven feet wide, with a motorized unit that must have created an artificial current to swim against. I looked around at the lead framework that was filled with the panels of glass that made up the majority of the back side of the house. I moved toward the end of the right side of the room to an exterior door, put the Sharps under my arm, opened the door carefully, and looked around. The yard was filled with the same red shale as the front, and there was an opening that lead into an indoor riding arena that was about forty feet across the courtyard. There were depressions at the center where a truck had been driven. It was getting late, and the skies above had dimmed to where the strong angles of the sun set everything on dramatic edge. It would be dark very soon, and I had to find her before then.

* * *

I walked down from the slate steps and started to cross, keeping an eye on the surrounding windows and doors. When I got to the side of the large open doorway, I stopped and placed my back against the tin surface of the wall and propped the butt of the buffalo rifle carefully on the ground. The owl feathers moved very slightly, and I had a feeling the messengers were calling. It was the stable section of the arena, with horse stalls on both sides. There were opaque skylights that allowed a certain amount of the failing sunlight to spill through so I could see red shale tracks where a truck had crossed the concrete floor to the right. It was a large building, one of those prefabs at least fifty yards long and about twenty yards wide. Two horses came over to the gates to see if I had treats. One was a grade bay with Chinese eyes, and the other was a big thoroughbred, at least seventeen hands. The big one stuck his head through the stall door and reached his soft nose out to me. I reached up and petted him but continued to keep an eye on the opening ahead. When I got past him, he whiffled at me, and I turned to give him a dirty look.

Inside the large sanded space of the arena itself, there was a green Willys pickup, circa 1950, with the driver’s-side door hanging open. It wasn’t a ’63 Ford, but it was close enough. They were Arizona plates, antique. It was parked in front of another opening, and I could see lights on in the hallway beyond. I stayed along the plywood partitions that kept a rider from getting brushed off as he circled the arena on horseback and worked my way around to the truck. There was dried blood everywhere, and a small cotton bag of .45-70s had spilled onto the floor. Wedged in the crease of the bench seat was a bloodstained, fake eagle feather. The ignition had been left on, although the motor was not running, and the dash bulbs had grown dimly yellow like the bug lights on an old-time porch. I turned back toward the opening and noticed that the architecture had changed in the hallway beyond.

This stable way was different from the others; it was assembled with rough-cut lumber and river stone. The corners of the wood were hand-worn, and the surface of the planks was weather-stained as if they had originally been outdoors. There was a row of dirty windows to the right. The dying light made angular, sharp-edged patterns down the walkway and reflected small seas of floating dust motes. Everything here was old, even the tools on the walls, and it looked like a small rural museum that had gone to seed. There were cobwebs in the overhanging rafters, and ring shank nails punched through the stained plywood where someone had not bothered to check their length when nailing down the tarpaper above. A fine patina of dirt had settled over everything and, except for the tang of blood, it smelled moldy, old, and mousy.

There were dark stains in the sand and a few on the stones that made up the walkway leading down the forty-foot hall. A Dutch door was open at the far end, and there was a light on. I stopped and listened; there was a brief crackle of what sounded like a radio frequency, but then it was gone. You could see a row of old saddles in there, but that was about all. I moved carefully past the abandoned stalls. Nothing had been in any of them for a long time, and I could just make out the scurrying movement of field mice as they busied themselves. I paused a little away from the door and noticed the blood on the galvanized handle. I started to speak. If I was going to be shot, it wasn’t going to be by mistake. There wasn’t any sound, so I inclined my head a little bit to see more of the room. “Avon calling . . .”

She laughed, a wispy, hollow laugh like air escaping from a tire, and the sound went through me. I turned slightly to the right and leaned in a little more and, through the dim light of the dusty, forty-watt bulb, I could see her. She was sitting on a series of wooden steps, the kind that grooms use to assist foxhunters in mounting their horses. They were a dark, hunter green with gold trim and looked as if they hadn’t been used in a while. I couldn’t remember the last foxhunt in the county, but I remembered the white-painted fences, and I remembered the glasses of pulpy lemonade that Vonnie’s mother had brought out to us when my father had shod their horses. She had put Maraschino cherries in the bottom of each glass, and I remembered how her hand had lingered on my father’s arm as he had taken his.

Vonnie was wearing a pair of dark coveralls that had been unzipped and peeled down to her waist and tied with the sleeves there. She had on a pair of Vasque hiking boots, and the blood had dribbled on them too. I wondered how she was still conscious. Then I noticed the Sharps buffalo rifle that was propped up between her knees with the butt resting on the floor. It was angled slightly in my direction. I knew how heavy the things were, but those fingers still wrapped around foregrip and trigger with a terrible determination. I could see that the massive hammer was pulled back and the rifle was ready to fire.

I eased the rest of the way into the room. She was against the wall, and there was a counter to her left where her shoulder was. The surface was strewn with medical supplies, most of them for horses. There were blood-saturated gauze pads, plastic bottles of topical antibiotics, and even a couple of syringes. They looked as if they had been pushed aside with a sweeping gesture when she had lost interest in the procedure. There was also a police scanner sitting on the table and, from the illuminated dial, I could see that it was set to our frequency of 155.070.

More saddles rested on log racks to her right, and the layers of grime made it clear that they hadn’t been disturbed in years. The ceiling was low, and I had to lean to one side to see around the naked light bulb that hung there. The glare from the proximity of the bulb was irritating. I was standing in the only door in the room, and there were no windows. There wasn’t anywhere to go, for either of us. I looked down and studied her face and could feel the sympathy twinge in my own. The damage to the left side of her head was only slightly evident in the tangle of blood-matted hair that stuck to the side of her face and strung down past her shoulder where the blood continued to drip. I was pretty sure her ear was gone and could only guess as to the extent of the rest of the damage.

“Hello, Walter.” She stared at the automatic in my hand that pointed down at the wooden plank floor and then to the Sharps that hung loosely in my other hand. “Are you going to shoot me again?”

I glanced down at the hammer of the Sharps she held but quickly looked back up at her eyes. With the dim light, I could barely make them out and wasn’t sure if they were dilated or constricted. “No.” I slowly lowered the hammer, placed the .45 back in my holster, and pulled the snap over and clicked it shut. I raised the Cheyenne rifle muzzle up and leaned it against the wall beside the door. “It’s department policy to only shoot people once a day; it’s a budgetary thing.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” She laughed. “At least what I can hear . . .”

“Got your ear?”

Her blood-covered hand started to come up but then rested back on the rifle beside the set trigger; if it had already been pulled, it wasn’t going to take much to set the thing off. “Yes.”

I watched her hands for a moment. She was hurt and the effect was gruesome, but her movements were still sharp and, so far, the loss of blood hadn’t robbed her of any of her mechanical skills. “Pretty impressive. Getting hit like that would knock most people down and out.”

“It did.” Her eyes twitched in response to the wound, but she rolled her head back a little so that I could see more of her eyes. “I was out for a minute or two . . .”

“Pretty tough.” I waited for a moment, but she didn’t say anything. “We’re a pair, aren’t we? You with your ear and me with mine?”

She nodded slightly, smiled, and the effect of the bright white teeth against the blooded gore made my heart trip. “I don’t think this relationship is going to work out.” The smile broadened and then relaxed, as the muscles in her face must have disturbed the ear. “You play too rough.”

“Vonnie . . .”

“I’m glad you’re here, though. It wouldn’t have been right if you hadn’t been.”

I nodded and stepped to the side just enough to get the light bulb out of my face. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

She nodded slightly and glanced at the medical supplies scattered on the counter. “Not much of a Florence Nightingale, am I?” A moment passed. “I suppose my talents lie elsewhere.”

As I started to move again, the muzzle of the Sharps leveled up between us and hung there. “No.” I stopped, still too far away to grab the gun. She leaned a little, the slope of her back resting against the wall. “We could just . . . talk.”

“Well, we’ve got an awful lot to talk about.”

I waited, and after a while her face shifted a little, saving me the view. “Why couldn’t I have met you a day earlier?” She readjusted her weight against the wall and turned a little farther. Almost none of the damage showed now, except that the blood continued to saturate her thermal top. “Maybe none of this would have happened.”

“Vonnie . . .”

“One day earlier, that’s all we would have needed.”

“I don’t . . .”

“Twenty-four hours, and maybe I wouldn’t have made all this mess.” She glanced over at the medical supplies. “Why you? Why did all this have to do with you?”

“It’s my job.”

She looked back at me. “Yes.” Her attention dropped to the barrel of the buffalo rifle. “We all have our jobs, don’t we?”

I tried changing the subject. “What’s the story on the feathers?”

“Oh . . .” She blinked and refocused. “A bit of dramatic effect, symbolic really . . . life and death . . . I had hoped that the eagle feather would heal Melissa, the breath of life to make her better.”

“You took a lot of chances placing them.”

She didn’t move. “That was the hard part, seeing them up close . . .”

I thought about not telling her, but we were telling the truth and maybe it would keep her going. “They aren’t real. The eagle feathers, they’re fake.”

Her eyes glazed over, and the stillness of her was betrayed only by a sharp nod. “Well, doesn’t that fit . . .”

I glanced down at her feet. “The boots?”

“I was in the store when George was buying his. We have the same shoe size and I thought it might be handy later.”

“You knew where he was going?”

“I told him and his brother that they were welcome to fish at the old family place on the Powder if they wanted to.” She glanced at the scanner. “I also knew it was where you thought he was going.” Her eyes returned to the rifle. “Is he going to live?”

“Probably.” I waited what seemed like a long, long while. “We need to get you into town . . .”

“Walter, don’t.”

I waited. “Okay.” I looked around and gave it a resigned quality. “Why are we in here?”

“Why not here? This is where everything happens.” I looked at her, hoping that if I kept my eyes on her, she wouldn’t drift. She smiled just a little, started to laugh, and then stopped herself. She kept her eyes away from me. “He built it himself. He never built anything else in his life; he just wasn’t good at it. But we had this older cowboy who was working for us at the time who helped him . . .”

I smiled. “Jules Belden?”

Her eyes returned to me, but her head didn’t move. “Yes.” She stayed like that. “He’s still around?”

“Yep, he’s still around.” I started formulating a plan to keep her talking. If I could get her to go long enough, then maybe I had a chance.

She was looking into my eyes when I focused on her again. “He gave me quarters.”

“Me too.”

She laughed the wispy laugh. “He used to drink when he was here, and that’s why Father finally fired him, but he was a good carpenter.”

I looked around. “So he and your dad built this?”

“Yes.” She glanced at the tack. “When I decided to have the arena built, I just didn’t have the nerve to tear it all down, so I left this part.” I waited. “I still see him, sometimes . . .”

I watched as her eyes dulled a little. “Your father?”

“Yes, I sometimes see him. I’ll be out riding in the arena and I’ll look over and there he stands by the door, waiting for me.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’ve been having a little problem along those lines myself lately.”

The eyes narrowed. “I’m not being funny.”

“Neither am I.”

She continued to look at me but then broke it off to glance around. “You see him too?”

I shrugged. “No, I’ve been seeing Indians.” I placed my hands in my pants’ pockets, so she could see that I wasn’t going to try anything. Yet.

She gestured toward the buffalo rifle. “Is that their gun you’ve been carrying around?” She continued to study it. “The one you shot me with?” She didn’t show any signs of weakening, and I was beginning to think this was going to take awhile. “It’s beautiful. What was it you called it?”

“What?”

She continued to look at it. “The rifle?”

“Oh.” The barrel of her Sharps had shifted a little. “The Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead.” She nodded, and I smiled back. “It’s haunted.”

“By the Indians?”

“The Old Cheyenne.”

“Why?”

I studied her and tried to think if this was a good line for our conversation to take. “The Old Cheyenne stay near the rifle, and every once in a while they get the urge to take somebody back to the Camp of the Dead with them.”

“The Camp of the Dead.” It gave me time to look into her eyes. The pupils were dilated, but it was difficult to tell if it was from trauma or from the darkness of the room, or both. I watched her very carefully as I spoke and noted the continuing tremors in her long fingers. “So, the Old Cheyenne have come to get me, huh?”

“I started to leave the Old Cheyenne inside your door, but you said you didn’t allow guns in the house.”

I wondered how long it would take for her to get to the fact that her father had killed himself, probably in here. I looked at the wood behind her head, but the planks had been replaced. It had to be here, but I didn’t want to discuss her father’s suicide with her as she sat there with the loaded and cocked buffalo rifle in her hands. I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t move. She gestured gently with the Sharps. “This is the one he did it with.” I still remained silent. “They really are exquisite guns, aren’t they?”

It seemed safe enough. “Well made.”

“Yes, well made.” She looked back up from the barrel. “I was thirteen.” She puzzled for a moment, nodded, and then stared off into space as more blood dripped from the side of her face. “Did you ever wonder why it was he did it?”

I lied. “No.”

She was looking at me again. “You’re lying. You’re afraid I’m going to shoot myself.”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“You ever wonder why he did it here?”

It seemed like an odd question, but as long as she was talking. “I think you said it was because he didn’t want to make a mess in the house?”

She looked around. “He didn’t, but this place had special meaning for him.”

“Because he built it . . .”

She was perfectly still. “More than that.”

I looked at her, and the pieces started to fall into place. “What happened, Vonnie?”

“You’re a smart guy, Walter. I bet you can figure it out without all the horrid details.” She took a deep breath. “Daddy’s little girl . . . I was nine years old, I mean for the physical act. It started a long time before, though.” She looked back to me. “Can you imagine?” Her eyes welled. “No, I don’t suppose you can.” I towered there like a stacked-up wreck and watched as tears fell from her dull eyes, diluting the blood on her face. I could feel their heat from where I stood. “I hated him. How could you not hate somebody that would do that to you? Somebody you trusted, somebody who was supposed to protect you? Someone who was supposed to love you.” She paused, and some of the heat died. “I tried. I really tried to have a life with a husband, family, children, and dogs even . . . I tried, but no matter how long or how hard . . . No matter how much therapy . . . I couldn’t get past it. No matter how strong I’d be, I’d remember him. I’d remember this place and what he did.” She had run out of air with a hissing finality, and I listened as she breathed. I waited as she continued to look at the rifle that leaned against the wall. “He didn’t kill himself because of me . . . I didn’t even get that satisfaction.” She sniffed and winced in pain. “He did it because my mother was going to tell . . . I moved back after a lot of years to take care of her and to try and get my life back from him, from here . . .” Something struck her as humorous. “I came back so I could hate him with her.”

“Vonnie . . .”

“And then, when Melissa . . . When it happened to her? She’s a child, Walt, just like I was . . . I thought surely now, now there’d be some kind of punishment, some kind of justice. Something for her, something for me. But they got off. Hardly any time served.” Her eyes turned toward me. “I didn’t let him off . . . I couldn’t let them.” I started to move but the barrel of the rifle was still there, and I had to wait and make it count. After a moment, she spoke again. “So, do you think the Old Cheyenne can get me in here?”

I cleared my throat. “I don’t think they’re out to get you.”

She half-nodded. “That’s too bad, I rather hoped they would be. But maybe I just don’t make the cut, huh?”

I took a deep breath. I thought about how it is a woman’s lot to be dismissed by men. “I think they could hardly do better.”

Her voice was small and distant. “Thank you.” The little corner of her mouth kicked up again, and the barrel of the Sharps shifted a little and came back closer to her chin. I took my hands from my pockets and gauged the distance to be about eight feet. We looked at each other for a while, and it’s possible she was reading my intent. “I don’t think anything will ever get me here again.” She was learning to smile with the undamaged side of her face. “But I suppose they can get you anywhere.” She paused for a moment, and I thought I might have a chance. “You understand, don’t you? I mean, you said that a part of you wished you had done it?”

“I think that a lot of people feel that way.”

“You know, I have a hard time telling which part of you I like most: your smile, your sense of humor, or the fact that you lie so poorly.”

“What do you want me to say, Vonnie? I don’t think the county’s going to have a parade for you . . .” Her eyes stayed steady. “There’s a difference between talking about it and doing it.”

She looked sad. “I was hoping we were past the moral portion of the conversation.” I wanted to hold her, to patch the ear up, and to make it all better. “Please, let’s not talk about what people deserve.”

“I guess it doesn’t make much difference, does it?”

“Not now.” Her finger twitched on the trigger. “Walter, I need you to not look at me . . .”

“Vonnie, don’t do it.” There was a long pause.

I froze the image of her then, with her head turned just slightly in the light of the dim, forty-watt bulb, the angle of her head accenting the fine bone structure of her jaw and the strong muscle tone of her throat. It might have been the night I saw her at the bar, the morning with the pancakes, our one date, on the street that day, angry at the hospital, or now.

She said it like it was a statement about the weather. “I love you.”

It was my turn to look away, just as she knew I would. My breath was short, and my voice refused to cooperate and burned in my throat. For a split second I studied one of the saddles, the worn appearance of the horns and curled surfaces of the rosettes where the touch of human and horse had at first softened the leather but where the man had left it to stiffen and dry. The dust on this particular saddle had been brushed as she had passed, probably by one of the sleeves that were tied at her waist. The leather surface underneath had held a warm glow that promised romance and freedom, and you could almost feel the gathering of equine muscles as they reached out and grasped the rotation of the earth.

I looked closer at a small spot on the cantle and at a singular drop of blood that had landed there. Blood drops at a uniform volume of .05 milliliters and in a tiny ball. Upon striking a surface, the blood leaves a pattern that will be dependant on the type of surface it falls upon. Splatters. On the smooth leather of the saddle, the drop had remained relatively intact with only one scalloped droplet having escaped at eighty degrees and perpendicular in direction.

I’m sure the blast in the little room was deafening, but I didn’t hear it.

EPILOGUE

I didn’t go into work the next day, or the day after that, or even the week after that. I’ve been drinking a lot, not with a conscious effort but more as a pastime. It’s a nicer place to drink, since Red Road Contracting finished up. I don’t think I drove them off, but maybe I did. There’s still a lot to do in the cabin; I think I was making them nervous.

The new deck is my favorite part. It’s about as big as the house and goes out the back door toward the hills. There’s an opening in the middle where they said I could plant a tree in the spring, but for now it’s where I toss the empty beer cans. It’s an easy shot from the lawn chair, which I placed against the log wall of the house, and my sheepskin coat keeps me warm enough. The cooler is right beside the chair, so I don’t have to get up much. Sometimes, at night, the beer freezes, but I just wait for it to thaw the next morning.

Periodically, vehicles come up the driveway; some of them are official and some of them aren’t. The DCI Suburban was one of the official ones, and they brought the Bullet back sans bullet holes. They left the keys on the counter, and she sits out there pawing the ground, waiting. I guess Ferg got a new truck. Vic came by once, but now she just calls and talks to the phone machine. I’ve developed a tactic for dealing with these drive-by visits. No matter what time of day it is or what I might be doing, whenever I hear somebody coming up the driveway, I just step off the deck and start walking toward the hills. In a couple of minutes, I can be in those hills. Sometimes I walk; sometimes I just pick out a rock and sit. Nobody stays very long, but I lose track of time out there, and sometimes I remember coming out when it’s still light, only to look around and find that it’s dark. Sometimes, it’s the other way around, and I get to watch the sun come up.

People leave food, but nobody ever leaves beer so, every once in a while, I have to make the run into the outskirts of Durant to buy it at the Texaco station near the highway. I haven’t shaved in a while, so the kid that works there doesn’t know me, or pretends that he doesn’t.

I have a friend that showed up after a few days. One morning when I woke up in the lawn chair, he was lying out at the end of the back pasture, just at the sage. He didn’t make any move to come in closer but just sat out there all day watching me. He would circle around the house, only to return to the sage after a while. I didn’t think he meant any harm; like me he just didn’t choose to go anywhere else. The next trip into the Texaco station, I bought dog food and left it in a bowl at the edge of the deck, along with water. Every morning it was gone and, after a few days, he slept there, as long as I didn’t move much, which was okay, because I wasn’t moving much these days. He had lost a little weight since escaping from Vonnie’s mudroom, and Vic mentioned in one of her telephone reports that the Game and Fish guys had had quite a rodeo when he ran off.

One day, Henry’s truck came up the drive and, as I started my usual retreat to the back forty, the dog ambled along after me. When I sat on one of my favorite rocks, he came over and sat down not too far away, and we waited for Henry to leave the house together. I reached over and rubbed my hand across the dog’s big head, and he looked up at me. He had sad eyes, and it was as if he had had enough, too. As I petted him, he leaned on my leg. He really was a big brute, with a shoulder spread as wide as the trunk of my body. The hair was curly on his back with all kinds of reddish swirls and swoops. It looked like a bad toupee.

Cady called, but I knew her schedule and would call back and leave vague messages with her secretary while she was either in the law library, taking depositions, or doing whatever lawyers do when their secretaries answer the phone. It was odd to think of my daughter with a secretary, so I just kind of thought of Patti with an i as a babysitter who talked with a funny, South Philadelphia accent.

Vic called at about five-thirty at the end of each day with a report of ongoing concerns. “Hello, shithead. This is the person who’s doing your job for you as you lay out there and grow increasingly fat and stupid in your nest of depression and self-pity . . .” The messages always started that way.

“We had a drive-by egging on the middle school, which leads me to believe there may have been an accomplice . . .” I nodded. Sound detective work.

“Vandalism was reported at the old stockyard. Reporting person said someone had moved his irrigation system twice in the last month, and this time the irrigation wheel-line assembly was broken. The attending officer questioned reporting person as to what the fuck he was doing irrigating in November? Answer, came there none . . .” I nodded some more.

“There was an official protest made as to the language used by said attending officer that was deemed profane and inconsiderate of the station and age of the reporting person, shortly after the irrigation incident . . .” I shrugged. It was to be expected.

“The officer is currently available for any and all comment . . .” I bet.

“Caller requested an officer to go tell her neighbor to turn his radio down. Caller would not give her name, and said she did not know her neighbor’s name. The attending officer did find a handsome, young dentist working on a car stereo in his Land Rover. It was NPR out of Montana, and the attending officer informed the dentist that he could go ahead and listen to whatever he damn well pleased as loud as he damn well pleased and to not pay any attention to the witch next door . . .” I knew Bessie Peterson, and this was far from over.

“Further complaints of noise were duly noted . . .” Um-hmm . . .

“Jim Keller returned from his hunting trip, and rumor has it he and the Mrs. are going to be going their separate ways. Personally, I think it’s the best thing that could happen to Bryan.”

I nodded.

“Department received a memo faxed over from the hospital asking for the formal release of Mr. George Malcolm Esper. Jesus . . . Malcolm . . . I’d try and run away, too. I signed it and got Ruby to fax it back over before the little fucker escaped again . . .”

There was a long pause before the next one and with a soft and melancholy quality that I had never heard from her before. “Attending officer thought about filing a missing persons bulletin for a sad, overweight, self-deprecating, yet strangely charming sheriff today. The officer thought it might be of interest to the missing person that said officer had turned down not one, but two high-paying, high-profile jobs because she guessed she’d just lost interest in being anywhere else . . .” My eyes welled up a bit, and I waited.

“Walt, you need to come back to work, you’re not fit for anything else . . .” Another pause. “Ruby misses you, Ferg’s bored, Lucian is about to irritate the shit out of all of us because I don’t think he sees his position as being temporary, and Dorothy says she’s ready to come out there and kick your ass but doesn’t know if she should bring coleslaw?” There was another long pause.

“It’s been almost two weeks, and that’s long enough. I just thought that I should tell you that this is my last call because I’m starting to feel like an enabler . . . If you want to know what’s going on in the kingdom, you’re going to have to come out and fight a few dragons.” Another pause. “Anyway . . . the attending officer misses you.” She hung up, and my last contact with the outside world went dead.

Along with one of his food drops, Henry had left a message on the back of the manila envelope that contained the last photographs of Cody Pritchard. “There is lasagna in the refrigerator along with supplies to make sandwiches and a six-pack of canned iced tea.” Fingered in the dust on the smooth surface of the piano lid were the words, PLAY ME. I ate the lasagna.

This morning a maroon van bounced up the driveway, and it was only when I got back and discovered there was a frozen box of turkey Hot Pockets, one ceremonial beer, and the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead, that I remembered it was Thanksgiving. The rifle was lying across my recliner, looking much as it had when I had left it in the tack shed. I spent the rest of the morning trying not to look at it; but, by lunchtime, when I had come in from the deck to eat a Hot Pocket with the beer of temptation, I leaned against the counter and looked at the .45-70. A thought occurred to me, and I fished around in the pocket of my coat and pulled out one of Omar’s cartridges. I walked over and picked up the rifle and lowered the falling block with the lever. Empty. I guess Lonnie didn’t trust me, either. I placed the round in the breech and then pulled the lever back up. I know it was my imagination, but the rifle felt much heavier.

I took a moment to think about the Old Cheyenne and how revenge doesn’t ever fit when there aren’t any bad guys. It wasn’t that revenge was a dish best served cold, it was that it was a dish best not served at all. I thought about what it was the Old Cheyenne really wanted; it wasn’t hard to figure out. The dead just want the same thing as the living: understanding.

I thought about how the two women’s situations were alike, and how different the two cultures’ reactions were. When Melissa had met this crisis in her life, her family and friends had restored her, but when Vonnie had faced abuse, she had met silence and recrimination, and the violation done to her child’s soul had been swept under the Turkish rugs. Granted, it could be said that it was the times and not the culture that had dictated these reactions, and I hoped that was true. I really did.

I walked through the open door and onto the deck with the rifle in my hands. The sun was headed off to the west, and I could barely make out its faint glow through the heavy, ironclad bottoms of the clouds. I watched as the first flakes began drifting down; they would pile up against the hills, and the familiar landmarks of the ranch would gently disappear.

The dog turned to look at me from the far side of the deck but, when he saw the rifle, he began to rise and growl. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, so I just stood there. He moved off and settled over the edge, periodically raising his head to look at me again, register a disapproving growl, and disappear.

I crossed to the lawn chair and sat down with the buffalo rifle across my lap. I reached over and flipped open the top of the cooler to find nothing. I was out and, if I wanted another beer, I was going to have to make the run. I sat there and looked at the hills and the increasingly gloomy world. I looked down at the Sharps.

I thought about what Dena Many Camps had said when she had run her fingers over the owl feathers and had quickly unbraided her hair; that there are spirits that linger near this ghost weapon and that they can easily take away the souls of those still living for the enjoyment of their society. I hoped the Old Cheyenne had come and gotten Vonnie, taking her to the Camp of the Dead. She was damn fine company, and she deserved better than she had gotten in this world. I strained my eyes into the distance and saw her there with them, and she was laughing and pulling a wayward slip of butterscotch back with two fingers. I saw her there along with Lonnie’s legs. Maybe half truths were all you got in this life.

When I looked back down, I saw that the dog was looking into the snow where I had been staring, and the wind narrowed his eyes until he looked back at me. Just as I had thought all along, he could see them too.

I listened to the Canada geese as they honked their way south. They only flew about thirty feet off the ground, and I could hear the whir of their wings as they passed overhead. Then the ceremonial Rainier I had drunk earlier overtook me, and I fell asleep.

* * *

I awoke to the rattling sound of somebody slamming a hated yet familiar vehicle door, and he entered through the open front one of the cabin. It sounded like he was setting things on the counter and in the refrigerator. He made a number of trips and, through the open kitchen window, the smell of turkey and dressing joined with the cold air of the late afternoon.

There was a minuscule break in the clouds, and the thin sliver became a deep red as the sun started to drop over the mountains. I pulled my hat even farther down as the dog looked over the scattering angels of snow that had collected on the deck and on me. He rested his head on the edge and looked at me with the expectation of retreat glowing in his dark eyes, but I wasn’t moving. I was too tired. Chances were Henry would leave the food and go, but I have to say that I was growing irritated as he lingered in my kitchen and arranged things in preparation for the movable feast. I waited, but he didn’t go away.

After a while, he stepped onto the deck from the back of the cabin, and the beast growled a low and resonant warning. “Wahampi . . .” Things got quiet again; evidently, the dog had a strong Sioux streak. I didn’t move, in hopes that he would leave, but that hope faded and the lid on the cooler squealed as over 220 pounds sat on it. Damn Indians, you never could get rid of them on Thanksgiving.

I could hear more geese flying over as he popped the tops on two of the canned iced teas and handed me one. I didn’t take it at first, but he just held it there against my hand until I did. The honking continued and, with the beat of their downdraft, it sounded like every goose in the high plains was leaving. “You know, Lonnie told me something about those geese . . .”

I waited awhile, but finally responded. “Yep?”

“You know how they always fly in that V?”

“Yeah?”

“And one side of the V is always longer?”

He waited forever, and there was nothing else I could do. “Why is that?”

“Because . . . there are more geese on one side than the other. Um-hmm, yes it is so . . .”

CRAIG

JOHNSON

DEATH WITHOUT COMPANY

PENGUIN BOOKS

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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New York, New York 10014, USA

USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006

Published in Penguin Books 2007

Copyright © Craig Johnson, 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ISBN 978-1-4406-2197-0 (ePub)

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

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

For Dorothy Caldwell Kisling (1930–2005)

for whom I still look when I laugh

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A writer, like a sheriff, is the embodiment of a group of people and, without their support, both are in a tight spot. I have been blessed with a close order of family, friends, and associates who have made this book possible. They know who they are and, as the tradition goes, you can never thank a good cast too much. Thanks particularly to Lilly and Glenn, the dairy princess and the crack shot.

Many thanks to Susan Fain for the philosophic and legal counsel and for the weekly Fain File and to Ana Echavarri-Daily for the clarification of Euskara, the Basque language. Donna Dubrow for a lot more than just the use of the Presence Suite and Ned Tanen for the Sunday drives in the desert and the prune milkshakes. Susan Miller for reading half-written novels and saying she fully likes them. Marcus Red Thunder and Charles Little Old Man for circling the wagons, because I only feel safe when I’m surrounded by Indians and books. Sheriff Larry Kirkpatrick for not making fun of me when I didn’t recognize a 10-54 (livestock in the road) and Richard Rhoades for the intensive ballistic testing on gallon water jugs. Erin Guy for the Web site and phone messages and Joel Katz for the Absaroka Sheriff Department logo and for watching the detectives.

To Gail Hochman, superagent, who always has the correct word and is the fastest talker in New York and that’s saying a lot. Ali Both-well Mancini, my editor in arms, who always has a sharp sense of humor and fresh ammo. To Kathryn Court, whose steady hand charms me, and to Clare Ferraro, who hides when I come to Manhattan and probably for good reason. Sonya Cheuse for finding lodging for Lucy and knowing that three fingers in Wyoming is a long way.

Eric Boss, Viking Penguin sales rep of the year for the mountain and plains region, who taught me how to say things like It’s a character-driven piece with a straight face. Scott Montgomery, the only one brave enough to swim when we could have just had Jim walk across the Tongue River Reservoir. To Sharon Dynak and the Ucross Foundation for not taking what I wrote about the foundation seriously and Bonita Schwann for not putting a yellow-truck hit out on me.

Thanks to Robert B. Parker, Bob Shacochis, Dan O’Brien, and Buck Brannaman for the kindness of words; you’ve always got a tumbler of Pappy Van Winkles in Ucross. To the Independent Booksellers Association for making The Cold Dish a Booksense pick and to the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association for making it a Killer pick.

For Judy who, like the stars, wonders if she shines brightly enough and always does.

A life without friends means death without company.

(Adiskidegabeko bizita, auzogabeko heriotza.)

—BASQUE PROVERB

1

“They used fire, back in the day.”

What the old cowboy meant was that folks who were inconsiderate enough to die in the Wyoming winter faced four feet of frozen ground between them and their final resting place.

“They used to build a bonfire an’ allow it to burn a couple of hours, melt through the frost, and then dig the grave.”

Jules unscrewed the top from a flask he had pulled from the breast pocket of his tattered jean jacket and leaned on his worn shovel. It was 28 degrees outside, the jean jacket was all he wore, and he wasn’t shivering; the flask probably had something to do with that.

“Now we only use the shovels when dirt clods roll into the grave from the backhoe.” The tiny man took a sip from the flask and continued the throes of philosophic debate. “The traditional Chinese coffin is rectangular with three humps, and they won’t bury you wearing red ’cause you’ll turn into a ghost.”

I nodded and did my best to stand still in the wind. He took another sip and didn’t offer me any.

“The ancient Egyptians had their essential organs removed and put in jars.”

I nodded some more.

“The Hindus burn the body, a practice I admire, but we cremated my uncle Milo and ended up losing him when his top came loose and he fell through the holes in the rusted floorboard of a Willy’s Jeepster on the Upper Powder River Road.” He thought about it, shaking his head at the ignominious end. “That ain’t where I wanna spend eternity.”

I nodded again and looked off toward the Big Horn Mountains, where it continued to snow. Somehow bonfires seemed more romantic than construction equipment or Willy’s Jeepsters, for that matter.

“The Vikings used to stick ’em afire on a boat with all their stuff and shove out to sea, but that seems like an awful waste of stuff, not to mention a perfectly good boat.” He paused, but continued. “Vikings considered death to be just another voyage and you never knew what you could end up needing, so you might as well take it all with you.” The jackleg carpenter turned his ferocious blue eyes toward me and took another sip in honor of his ancestors, still not offering me any.

I buried my hands in my duty jacket, straining the embroidered star of the Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Office, and dropped my head a little as he kept on talking. I had seen Jules on a professional basis as a lodger at the jail when the nephew of the previous sheriff, and deputy of mine at the time, had picked him up for public intoxication and had beaten him. I had in turn beaten Turk, much to the dismay of my receptionist /dispatcher Ruby, and then turned him over to the highway patrol in hopes that a more structured environment might do him some good.

“The Mongols used to ride the body on a horse till it fell off.”

I sighed deeply, but Jules didn’t seem to notice.

“The Plains Indians probably had it right with the burial scaffolding; if you aren’t up to anything else, you might as well feed the buzzards.”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Jules?”

“Yep?”

I turned and looked down at him. “Do you ever shut up?”

He tipped his battered cowboy hat back on his head and took the final swig, still smiling. “Nope.”

I nodded my final nod, turned, and tramped my way down the hill away from the aged cottonwood at the fence line, where I had already worn a path in the snow. Jules had been there on my three previous visits, and he knew my pattern.

I guess gravedigging got lonely.

You can tell the new graves by the pristine markers and the mounds of earth. From my numerous and one-sided conversations, I had learned that there were water lines running a patchwork under the graveyard with faucets that would be used in the spring to help soak the dirt and tamp the new ones flat but, for now, it was as if the ground had refused to accept Vonnie Hayes. It had been almost a month since her death, and I found myself up here once a week.

When somebody like Vonnie dies you expect the world to stop, and maybe for one brief second the world does take notice. Maybe it’s not the world outside, but the world inside that’s still.

* * *

It took about ten minutes to get back to the IGA in the center of Durant where I had left my erstwhile deputy to shanghai prospective jurors for the local judicial system. I rolled into the parking lot, scratched my beard as I parked, and looked at the plastic-wrapped bundles of wood priced at two for seven bucks that were stacked at the entrance of the grocery store. We had been forced to act as the Absaroka County press gang about eight times during my tenure as sheriff, which itself had taken up almost a quarter of a century. The jury wheels used by the county were chocked so full of outdated records that a large percentage of the summonses were returned undeliverable, and the ones that did get where they were supposed to go many times got ignored. My advice that we simply put occupant on the things was dismissed out of hand.

I looked at the handsome woman at the entrance of the grocery store with the clipboard in her hands. Victoria Moretti didn’t like being called handsome, but that’s how I thought of her. Her features were a little too pronounced to be dismissed as pretty. The jaw was just a little too strong, the tarnished gold eyes just a little too sharp. She was like one of those beautiful saltwater fish in one of those tanks you knew better than to stick your hand into; you didn’t even tap on the glass.

“Of all the shitty things you make me do, I think I hate this the most. I have an undergraduate degree in law enforcement, I’ve forgotten how many hours toward a masters, graduated from the Philadelphia Police Academy in the top five percent. I had four years street duty, two field commendations . . . I am your most senior officer.” I felt a sharp jab at my midriff. “Are you fucking listening to me?”

I watched as my highly capable and awarded deputy accosted a middle-aged man in a barn coat, copied down information from his driver’s license, and informed him that he needed to get over to the courthouse pronto or be faced with contempt of court. “Well, there’s another notch on my Glock.”

I watched as the hapless shopper balanced his purchases and wandered off to his car. “Hey, there are worse places for a stakeout, at least we’ve got plenty of supplies.”

“It’s supposed to snow another eight inches tonight.”

I looked over at the neatly shoveled driveways. “Don’t worry. You can go in and flush them out, and you can do some last minute shopping.” I was tapping on the glass and getting my tarnished gold’s worth. “How many more talis jurors do we need?”

“Two.” She searched the automatic glass doors behind us. Dan Crawford stood at the far register, registering his annoyance at our official abuse of his customer base. She looked back at me. “Talis jurors?”

“The process started in this country with the Boston Massacre. They pulled spectators out of the courtroom gallery to serve as jurors during the trial of a British soldier. It’s from the Latin, meaning by-stander. You’re Italian, you should understand these things.”

“I’m from Philadelphia, where we vote early and often, and everybody on the jury has a vowel on the end of his name.”

I looked off toward the mountains west of town and at the broiling darkness that seemed to be waiting behind the range. I couldn’t help but think that it would be a nice evening to sit by the fire. Red Road Contracting had promised to have my triple-walled flume put in by last weekend, but so far all they had done was cut an opening in my roof the size of a large porthole. They said the firebox that mounted to the ceiling would cover the hole, but for now the only thing between the inside of my snug little log cabin and the impending great outdoors was ten millimeters of plastic and some duct tape. It wasn’t really their fault. The coal-bed methane outfits were paying close to twenty dollars an hour, roughly twice what general contracting paid anywhere on the high plains, so Danny Pretty On Top had signed on with Powder River Energy Exploration and had left Charlie Small Horse to pick up the slack.

“How about I go in and flush ’em out?” she said. I looked down at her. “I just want to get back and shoot your dog if he’s shit in my office again.”

I had suspected an underlying motive. The beast did; it was true. I hadn’t had him all that long, and he had decided that rather than go to the trouble of going all the way to the door and having Ruby let him out, he would just wander across the hall and unload in Vic’s office. “He likes you.”

“I like him, too. But I’m going to shoot him in the ass if he leaves another little package for me.”

I sighed and thought about how nice it would be to go back to the warmth of my office. “Okay, go ahead.” It was like turning loose the dogs of war; her eyes grew cold, the mouth curved lupine, and she turned and disappeared.

If it did snow tonight, the whole county would be thrown into a frozen panic, court would be canceled anyway, and my little department would likely be stretched to the limit. Jim Ferguson was only a part-time deputy and Turk was already gone to the highway patrol, so Vic pretty much made up the staff; but we had a potential candidate for Turk’s job. He was a Mexican kid who had finished up at the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy, had elected to begin his career in Kemmerer, and then had moved to the state’s maximum-security prison. After two years there, it would appear that he had changed his mind and was looking for rosier pastures. He was supposed to drive up from Rawlins in the morning for an interview, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. He would have to gun it over Muddy Gap at 6,250 feet through the Rattlesnake range and then up the basin to the foot of the Big Horns and Durant. It was a five-hour trip on dry roads and, looking at the mountains, that didn’t seem possible. It appeared as though we were going to get our third heavy snowstorm since fall: the first had tried to kill me on the mountain, and the other I had enjoyed from a stool at my friend Henry Standing Bear’s bar, the Red Pony.

* * *

It was just after Thanksgiving, and we had consumed the better part of a bottle of single malt scotch. When I woke up the next morning, Henry had already pulled a couple of leatherette chairs in front of a double fifty-gallon drum stove. I slipped off the sleeping bag and swung my legs over the side of the pool table on which I had fallen asleep and tried to feel the muscles in my face. He had hauled his bag with him and sat hunched over the stove. I watched as steam blew out with my breath, and I scrambled to get the down-filled bag back around me. “Heat’s off.”

He turned his head, and the dark eyes looked through the silver strands in the black curtain of his hair. “Yes.” I joined him at the stove in my socks. The floor was cold, and I regretted not slipping on my boots. “Do you want some coffee?”

“Yep.”

“Then go and make some. I am the one who built the fire.”

I found the filters and the tin of already ground coffee on the second shelf of the bar. I had lots of little bags of expensive beans that my daughter had sent me when she was a law student in Seattle. Cady was now a lawyer in Philadelphia, and I still hadn’t gotten around to getting a grinder. Henry Standing Bear had a grinder. The Bear had a vegetable mandoline, and I didn’t know anybody else who had one of those.

I started the coffee, hopped back over to the fire, and grabbed my boots along the way. The windows had begun to freeze on the inside. “How come the water hasn’t frozen?”

“Heat tape.”

I pulled my boots on and gathered the sleeping bag back around me. “You out of propane?”

“The heater never works when it is really cold.”

“That’s convenient.”

“Yes, in the summer it works perfectly.”

We sat there for a while, the homemade stove just beginning to warm the northeast corner of the little building or at least the sixteen inches between it and us. I yawned and watched as he yawned, too. He was studying me again. We hadn’t talked in the last few days; there had been too much to say. We watched as the bottom barrel began to tic and grow red.

“Dena go to that pool tournament in Vegas?”

“Yes.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“I have not yet decided.”

It felt good there with that strange feeling of being in a public place without the public. I was going to have to call and check in, but it was still early on a Sunday, our slowest day of the week. I was avoiding it, mostly because I would get caught talking to Lucian. He had a few strange ideas about some goings on out at the Durant Home for Assisted Living and had become a kind of Absaroka County Agatha Christie. I told him that if anybody shortened the span of any of the occupants they wouldn’t be robbing them of all that much, and he reminded me that he would be happy to take me by my mutilated, half-century old ear and march me around the block. Ever since I had hired the retired sheriff as a part-time dispatcher on weekends, he had been gathering his salt.

I looked out through the haloed light of a high-plains winter at the falling snow with flakes the size of poker chips. I had had inclinations that it was going to be a winter to remember, and so far I had been right. The day before Thanksgiving, Cady had been trapped at the Philadelphia airport; she had been trying to get back to Wyoming for a surprise visit. I hadn’t been feeling well and, after getting through one of the toughest cases of my life, she could tell. Cady had called, filled with tears and frustrated fury at a two-fold snowstorm that had grounded planes on both the eastern seaboard and in Denver, the hub to our part of the world. They had assured her that even if she did make it there, she would be spending the holiday at DIA. We talked for an hour and forty-two minutes. She was laughing that heartfelt laugh of hers by the time we were done, the one that matched her deep rustic voice, and I felt better.

“Dena says she is moving to Las Vegas.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

The coffee was done, so I pulled the sleeping bag up a little higher on my shoulders and towed it over to the bar with me; I must have looked like a giant praying mantis. I poured myself a cup and got the heavy cream the Bear kept in the bar refrigerator. I added the cream to his and dumped in what I considered a reasonable amount of sugar, dropped a spoon in, and carried it over to him; I figured the least he could do was stir the thing himself. I handed him the Sturgis mug and sat back down. “Things could be worse.”

“And how is that?”

I took a sip of my coffee for dramatic effect. “You could have been dating a murderer.” I watched as the big shoulders shifted, and he stared at me. It felt wrong, saying it like that. It was disrespectful of somebody I still cared a great deal about. “I guess everybody’s a little nervous about talking to me, huh?”

His eyes were steady. “Yes.”

“I’m okay.” He didn’t say anything. “I am.”

“Yes.”

I shook my head and looked at the stove. It was warming up a little in our corner of the world, so I shrugged the bag down off my shoulders. “Are you going to say anything in this conversation besides yes?” I quickly added. “Don’t answer that.”

The wind pushed against the wooden sides of the old Sinclair station that Henry Standing Bear had converted into the Red Pony bar. We were on the border of the Rez, and the wind was older here. I listened to the voices of the Old Cheyenne as they screamed from the northwest and disappeared toward the Black Hills. I had had some delusionary episodes during the first really big snowstorm of the season, at least that’s what I had decided to label them, but I kind of missed the Old Cheyenne. They weren’t all I missed. I let the bitter taste of the coffee hold there in my mouth for a second. It wasn’t anybody’s fault; I was running under radio silence. My friends had spared me the crippling depth charges of understanding and, worse yet, advice, but I was going to have to come up for air; Henry was a good place to start.

“I don’t think I’m going to date anymore.”

“Yes.” He took a sip of his coffee and nodded along with me. “It is not like women are any fun to be around, that they are soft, that they smell good, or that they . . .”

“Shut up.”

He nodded some more. “Yes.”

We had a wide-ranging conversation about Vonnie; we talked about love, fate, and everybody’s inability to truly leave the past behind. It had been an ugly little case with two young men and one beautiful woman dead and, after four years of self-pronounced isolation, I had gotten my head and heart handed to me.

All Henry had said was yes. I guess that’s when the valves opened, all the used air expended into the atmosphere, and all the fresh poured in. He made me run in the snow later that afternoon, and I have to admit that it felt pretty good.

* * *

Vic got two more and added Dan Crawford to the list for good measure. She handed me the clipboard after she had climbed in and shut the truck door. “Here, His Majesty’s dutiful servants for the day.” She leaned forward, and I watched as her slender neck tilted to look through the top of the windshield at the stony clouds that were bricking away the sky.

“What’re your plans for tonight?”

She looked at me, and I noticed the small, etched, smile lines at the corners of her mouth. “Why?”

“You wanna go over and visit Lucian with me?”

The little lines quickly disappeared. “I’m washing my hair.”

“He always asks about you.”

“He always asks about my tits.”

I did have ulterior motives. With her along the previous Tuesday, Lucian had been so distracted that I had won every game. “Maybe you should look at it as a visit to Pappy Van Winkle?” The only thing I really had going for me in persuading her to come was her taste in expensive bourbon, which was in ready supply in Room 32 at the Durant Home for Assisted Living.

“I can buy my own bourbon and not have to be ogled by that fucking old pervert.” She shifted her weight and fastened her seatbelt. “I’ve got to tell you, as nights on the town go? That one was pretty lame. I haven’t had a time like that since my grandfather took me to a vacant lot on South Street to drink wine and play bocce ball with his cronies.” She looked at me. “I was six and a shrewd judge of a good time.”

The little lines reappeared as she laid an arm along the door and looked out across the hood of the Bullet. I glanced down at the hand resting on her leg and noticed that she wasn’t wearing her wedding band anymore. She and Glen had come to a parting of the ways back in November; he had gone to Alaska, and Vic was still here, thank God. She had turned down respective offers to flaunt her honor, service, and integrity with the Philadelphia Police Department, where she had worked before, and the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. She was that good. Instead, she was the under-sheriff of the least populated county in the least populated state in the union, with an option to have my job come November.

I blinked, refocused, and became aware that she was looking at me. “What?”

“I asked how you were doing these days.”

“Good.”

She waited. “You know I am available on a professional consulting basis for fucked-up relationships, right?”

“I’ve got your card.”

* * *

By the time we got to the office behind the courthouse, the smallest traces of snow had begun drifting down in a nonchalant manner. This one thought it could fool us by starting out slowly. There were times in Wyoming when you needed to know where to park your car so you could find it in the morning.

I followed Vic and paused to scan my doorway for Post-its as she stopped and gathered her mail from Ruby’s desk. The dog raised his eyes, looked between the two of us, and then settled the five-gallon bucket-head back on his paws.

Vic nodded as she shuffled through her mail. “Yeah, I’d keep a low profile if I was you too, shit head.”

I had inherited Ruby from Lucian. Fierce as a bobcat and as loyal as the Swiss, she kept a neon blue eye toward my moral development. She was sixty-five, going on thirty. I cut in quickly, before the real fighting started. “Post-its?”

Ruby continued to pet Dog. “Somebody dumped a bunch of garbage and an old refrigerator out at Healey Reservoir.”

“Let me guess who found that.” Our resident fisherman and part-time deputy, the Ferg, kept us up to date on all the fishing holes in the vicinity.

“He says they left some of their mail in the garbage bags, so he’s gone over to the trailer park near the bypass to have a little chat with the suspected offenders. Oh, Rawlins called to confirm his interview tomorrow.”

“The Mexican kid?”

She turned. “He doesn’t sound Mexican.”

“What does he sound like?”

“Just different.” She went back to her screen. “Lucian called to make sure you were going to be there tonight. Are you being mean to him? He usually doesn’t call to confirm chess night.”

I picked up some of the general delivery stuff, flipped through the latest police garment catalog, and thought about replacing my duty coveralls. “He’s been weird lately.”

“How?”

I decided to keep my old pair and closed the catalog. “Just odd, like he’s got something on his mind.” I tossed it into the wire wastebasket and started toward my office. “Does that kid know that it’s going to snow ass deep to a nine-foot Indian tonight?”

Her eyes drifted up to look at me over the computer screen. “Does your Native American friend know you use such descriptive terms?”

I paused at my doorway. “Where do you think I get ’em?”

“Where is the Bear these days?”

The women in my life always asked about Henry; it was irritating. “He’s up on the Rez in the basement of some defunct Mennonite church.” I leaned against the doorjamb and thought about what I would do if Ruby ever retired; I would have to retire, too. “They found a couple of old hatboxes full of photographs that the Mennonites must have taken a long time back.”

“Mennonites on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation?”

I shrugged with one shoulder. “It didn’t take.”

“Sounds like a treasure trove.”

“He’s cataloguing and annotating something like six hundred photographs.

Her eyes returned to the screen, and the soft tap of the keyboard resumed. “That should keep him out of trouble for a while.”

I missed Henry but figured he’d get back in touch when he got the chance. He was like a warm Chinook that blew in when you least expected it. I scratched my beard. “Anything else?”

Her eyes returned to the screen. “We’re putting together a petition to get you to shave.”

* * *

My desk was relatively clear for a Tuesday, and Santiago Saizarbitoria’s file was on the top of the nearest pile. Santiago Saizarbitoria. What did she think, he was Norwegian? I didn’t think the kid was going to make it, but I had ten minutes of the taxpayer’s time to kill, so I flipped the manila file open and looked down at the cover sheet. I hadn’t ever spoken to him. Ruby had gotten the application via priority mail with a letter of introduction and a résumé. All of the contact since then had been done by e-mail on Ruby’s computer. I didn’t have a computer; they wouldn’t let me have one.

Vic would be responsible for half of the interview, which would probably resemble revenge for the Inquisition. If the kid was lucky tomorrow, he’d spend the day at the Flying J truck stop in Casper, go home to Rawlins, and continue his career in corrections.

He was married, and his wife’s name was Maria. They had no children, and his starting salary had been $17,000, 18 percent less than the nationwide average. He was twenty-eight, five feet nine inches, weighed 183 pounds, and had dark hair and eyes. He obviously had a facility with languages; he spoke Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German. I would have to check on his Cheyenne and Crow.

I flipped to the back page and locked eyes with the two-by-two photo. Swashbuckling. I guess that was the first strong impression that I had of the young man Vic had already tagged as Sancho. He was a handsome kid with a Vandyke that gave him a rakish and mischievous musketeer quality. He was thick and looked strong, although his features were fine. I always concentrate on the eyes, and these were sharp with just a little bit of wayward electricity in them. I had the suspicion that not much got by Sancho and what did was viewed with quiet irony.

If we were serious about him, we’d have to call Archie, the chief of police in Kemmerer, and then the man who was his supervisor in Rawlins. He had lasted two years in the extreme risk unit in the high security ward at the state’s penitentiary. That told me something. We are for the dark, indeed.

Whenever I read an application, I always found myself wondering what my answers to the questions would be. What impression would I have of myself, and would I hire me? I hadn’t had to fill out a form when I had gone to work for Lucian: he hadn’t had one.

* * *

We had been sitting at the bar in the lobby of the Euskadi Hotel on Main Street. It was late on a Friday night and Montana Slim sang “Roundup in the Fall” through his nose on the jukebox, and we were the only ones there. Lucian preferred the Euskadi, because the bar didn’t have any video pong games or customers, in that order. It was late October, and I had a new wife and thirty-seven dollars in a checking account.

“So, you were a cop over there in Vietnam?”

“Yes, sir.”

I had caught him in midsip. “Don’t call me sir. I ain’t yer daddy, far as we know.” I watched him hold the glass tumbler and look at me from the corner of a webbed apex of sundried wrinkles and the blackest pupils I’d ever seen. He was about the age I am now; I thought he was ancient. “Is it as big a mess over there as I think it is?”

I thought about it. “Yep, it is.”

He sipped his bourbon and carefully avoided the wad of chew packed between his lower lip and gum. “Well, ours was probably just as bad. We just didn’t have enough sense to know it.” I nodded, since I didn’t know what else to do. “Seems to me with this Vietnam thing, you get yourself into trouble fifteen thousand miles from home, you’ve got to have been lookin’ for it.” I nodded some more. “Drafted?”

“Lost my deferment.”

“What the hell’d you do that for?”

“Graduated.”

He placed the cut-glass tumbler back in the small ring of the paper cocktail napkin and nudged it toward Jerry Aranzadi, the bartender, whom I did not know at the time.

“Where from?”

I took a sip of my Rainier and hoped my bank account would last through the interview. “University of Southern California.” He didn’t say anything. “It’s in Los Angeles.”

He nodded silently as Jerry refilled his glass with at least four fingers. “Two things you gotta remember, Troop.” He called me Troop for the next eight years. “A short pencil is better than a long memory, and you get to buy me my chew ’cause I’m a cripple.” The last part of the statement referred to his missing leg, which had been blown off by some Basque bootleggers back in the fifties.

“What brand?”

* * *

I closed Santiago Saizarbitoria, placed him carefully on the surface of my desk, and made myself the promise to remember the rube kid with the funny haircut who had sat in the Euskadi Hotel bar and wondered what the hell he was going to do if the old man sitting next to him said no.

“I’m going home.”

I looked up from the surface of my desk to my deputy. “What’s it doing outside?”

“Snowing like a bastard.” Despite the fact that she was leaving, she came in, sat down, and folded her jacket on her lap. She nodded toward the file. “Is that Sancho?”

“Yep. What do you think?”

She shrugged, “I think that if he’s got a pulse and a pecker, we put him on patrol.” She continued to look at me. “What are you going to do about dinner?”

“I don’t know, maybe go down to the Bee.” The Busy Bee was in a small concrete-block building that clung to the banks of Clear Creek through the tenacity of its owner and the strength of its biscuits and spiced gravy. Dorothy Caldwell had owned and operated the Bee since Christ had been a cowboy. I ate there frequently and, due to its proximity to the jail, so had our infrequent lodgers.

“I bet she’s gone home.”

“I’ll take my chances. If worse comes to worse, I can always catch the pepper steak over at the Home for Assisted Living.”

She made a face. “That sounds appealing.”

“Better than a plastic-wrapped burrito from the Kum and Go.”

“Boy, you know all the hot spots, don’t you?”

“I have been known to show a girl a good time, yes.”

* * *

After Vic and Ruby had gone, the beast ambled in and sat on my foot. I was second string, but it was still good to be on the team. She was probably right; with the impending storm, Dorothy had most likely headed home for the night. I weighed my options and settled on a chicken potpie from the jail’s resources. Dog followed me as I rummaged through the minirefrigerator and pulled out the freeze de jour. We didn’t have any occupants, so I took my steaming little tin into holding cell 1 and sat down on the bunk with a can of iced tea. Dog curled up at the door and looked at me. I had taught him that begging was all right if it was done from at least six feet away.

There were no windows so I could ignore the mounting snow outside, but the phone that began ringing, I could not. I sat my half-eaten chicken potpie tin on the bunk and answered the extension on the wall of our kitchenette. “Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department.”

“Is this the goddamned sheriff?”

I recognized the voice. “Maybe.”

“Well, if you ain’t him then somebody better go out and find the simple-minded son of a bitch and tell him to get his ass over here. I ain’t got all night!” The phone went dead with a loud crack as the cradle on the other end absorbed the impact, and I stood there listening as my potpie was devoured.

I had talked Lucian into coming on as a part-time dispatcher on weekends, and I think he enjoyed it, but I would be the last one he would tell. He drove the rest of the staff crazy, but Dog liked him and so did I. I took the pie tin and threw it into the trash along with the plastic spork and my empty tea. I headed for the office to grab my coat; Dog followed.

Vic was right. By the time we got outside, it was snowing so hard that you couldn’t see across the street to the courthouse. I squinted against the sting, tugged at my hat, and took in the vague halos of the arch lights that ran the distance of Main Street. There was only one car, and it was parked about halfway between the Busy Bee and the Sportshop. The dog halted beside the truck and turned his nose into the wind with me. I opened the door and watched as he climbed across and onto the passenger seat. He turned and looked at me, waiting for me to climb in, but I looked back at the parked car. He stretched across the seat and settled in for a short nap, knowing full well what I was going to do before I did.

I walked down the slight grade to the parked vehicle, careful not to slip, stooped down, and wiped the snow from the front plate of the maroon Oldsmobuick: state plates, county 2, Cheyenne. I looked around at the storefronts, but the only one that showed any signs of retail life was the Euskadi Hotel bar where the Rainier and Grain Belt beer signs softly glowed in the two tiny windows.

Except for the Christmas decorations, the bar at the Euskadi hadn’t changed much since Lucian had hired me there all those years ago. The jukebox was still there, playing an unintentionally ironic version of Sinatra’s “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.” There was an ornate burl wood bar and bar back along the right side, whose ancient mercury mirror was tarnished and faded in its attempt to hold on to the glory of the age and it reflected the blonde at the bar.

I pushed my hat back to its best Dashiell Hammett advantage and felt the slick of melted snow slide down between my shoulder blades and my sheepskin coat. As entrances, I’d made better.

“Hello, Sheriff.” Jerry Aranzadi was still the full-time bartender. A small man with a stooped back and black-rimmed glasses, his narrow shoulders hunched as he scooped into the cooler and popped the cap on a Reindeer beer before I could stop him. It was at times like this that I wished my habits were a little more exotic. “What brings you out on a night like tonight?”

I sat a few stools down as Jerry placed a paper napkin on the bar along with the bottle of beer. He knew all my patterns, even the one about sparing the glassware. “It’s chess night.”

I took a sip of my beer. She didn’t look at me but seemed absorbed in what looked to be an Irish coffee. He gently patted a hand in front of her cup to get her attention. “Miss Watson, this is our sheriff, Walter Longmire.”

I always try to hold on to the first impression I get of a person; usually it’s a feature, but with her it was the energy that was there, an animation that couldn’t be concealed by age, fatigue, or alcohol. Afterward, I noticed that she was just plain beautiful, with large, frank blue eyes and well-defined lips. “Sheriff, this is Maggie Watson, and I bet you can’t guess what she does for a living.”

“Ms. Watson works for the state.” I took a sip and looked back at both of them. I really enjoyed watching those big blue eyes widen as they looked at Jerry and then back to me. I guessed mid to late forties; outdoorsy, and always had been from the face, nicely weathered to perfection. She had an athletic build, probably a skier. “The plates on the car outside. ‘Elementary, my dear . . .’ ” The eyes narrowed. “Bet you wish you had a nickel for every time somebody said that.”

“You have no idea.” She had a nice voice, too. It was soft, but also strong and with just a touch of a southern accent. “State Treasury Department.” She smiled a sly smile and took an elegant sip of her coffee. “Unclaimed property project manager.”

It was her turn to look self-satisfied. “We don’t see many of those up in these parts.” I nodded and looked over at Jerry. “Can’t say we’ve seen any at all.”

It got a laugh that was melodic but short. “I restore the contents of abandoned safe-deposit boxes to the owners or rightful heirs.” She sat her mug down and gave me a sharp look. “At least I was, till I got stranded.”

I thought about it for a moment, then felt duty call and sat the almost full beer back on the bar. “Gimme your keys, and I’ll start it for you. I think we can get you a room, if we move quickly. Motels get to be at a premium when the weather gets like this.” I tried to pay Jerry, but he just waved me off.

Back at my truck, Dog greeted me with a terrific yawn and confirmed my thoughts about his concern for my welfare while I was gone. I cleared the accumulated snow with the windshield wipers and turned on the cautions on the Bullet’s light bar. A vague feeling of sadness always came over me in the presence of the lights: too many seat-belts that were unfastened, too many bald tires. I pulled in front of her car, snagged the long-handled scraper from under the seat, and pushed the majority of the snow off her vehicle onto the covered street. An hour from now, the car would have been a permanent addition to Main. She came running out and jumped in. She was taller than I thought, or else she just didn’t sink into the snow like I did. “Follow me and drive in my tracks, okay?”

She nodded, and I closed the door.

She dutifully made the illegal U-turn and followed me back up the hill and around the courthouse as we slowly made our way toward the mountains. The red glow of the Log Cabin Motel’s neon wasn’t far and, if worse came to worse, she could walk to all the banks in town from there. I pulled up to the office and got out, ignoring the NO VACANCY sign.

I ushered her to the porch and rang the buzzer on the intercom, pulled her in a little closer to the building, and blocked the majority of the wind with my back. She smelled really good. There was no response to the buzzer, so I pressed my thumb against the button and held it there. After a moment, an angry voice screeched at us through the yellowed plastic intercom. “No vacancy, can’t ya read?” There was no more talk but presently a gaunt individual in a threadbare plaid bathrobe appeared around the counter in the tiny lobby and unlocked the door. “Jesus, Walt, what are you doing out in this?”

I ushered Maggie in before me. “This lady needs a room.”

I took the key from Willis’s wife, Erma, and trudged off into the snow to turn the lights and heat on in one of the cabins at the end of the short lane. It would be a cozy little place but, as I told her, the temperature wouldn’t get above forty for about twenty minutes.

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Well, if you come up with any Declarations of Independence in any of those boxes . . .”

“It’s doubtful, but I could buy you lunch.”

* * *

The trip over to the Durant Home for Assisted Living didn’t take all that long, just a couple of blocks of backtracking. When I got there, there was an EMT van waiting at the main entrance, not a completely novel experience at the place but still a little unsettling. The doors were closed, but it was still running and the amber lights made racing, yellow ghost-wolves that darted across the brick surface. I pushed the doors of the building open, only to be audibly driven back by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians singing “Ring Those Christmas Bells” at an ear-piercing volume; most of the residents at the home were deaf as fence posts. Dog followed me in. As we went past the Christmas tree behind the abandoned front desk and rounded the hallway leading to Room 32, a slight sense of panic began to set in. The door was ajar as we approached, and I quickened my step, but the place was empty. The chess set was out on the folding table, and it looked as though Lucian had already consumed the better part of a tumbler full of bourbon. Dog looked around with me and followed as we quickly made our way out of the room, back down the hallway, and again toward the front desk.

The Pennsylvanians were still singing as we turned the corner. I caught a glance of the EMT van pulling away, but my attention was drawn to a white-clad attendant. He was being held against the far wall by what I knew to be the strongest grip in the county.

I took the direct route behind the counter, which turned out to be something of a mistake in that my legs got tangled with Dog and the hammer of my .45 snagged the lights on the fully decorated tree, lurching it from the wall in a short spark of holiday exuberance.

It took both hands and all the weight I could leverage to tug Lucian’s hand free from the choking assistant whom I recognized as Joe Lesky. “Well, it’s about goddamned time.” He rolled off me against the far wall and pushed himself up with his arms; he glared at Joe who was massaging his throat and coughing as Dog, who had escaped unscathed, continued to bark.

“Shut up!” Dog stopped and went over and sat beside Lucian as if nothing had happened. I was not so forgiving. I pushed the tree off me. “What the hell is going on around here?”

It was mostly directed at Lucian but, after a coughing fit, Joe was the first to respond. “Mr. Connally was interfering with the transport of a departed client.” He coughed some more and leaned against the opposite wall.

“I want the room behind me sealed up as a crime scene, and I want a full autopsy arranged immediately.”

I stared at him as he looked at the battle-weary tree that lay between us. “Lucian, have you lost your mind?”

It was a bad time for Joe to talk, but he didn’t know that. “Sheriff, I was explaining to Mr. Connally that we couldn’t hold the body of the deceased without the permission of next of kin.”

He wouldn’t look up from the tree. “You got it.”

I disconnected the electric light string from my holster and gave the tree one last kick for holly-jolly good measure. “Lucian, you can’t.”

The dark eyes came up slowly, and the world was swallowed. “Hold your peace.” He looked old just then; small, old, and tired, as I had never seen him before. His eyes returned to the dead lights of the tree. “She was my wife.”

2

Room 42 at the Durant Home for Assisted Living had been locked off, and the body of Mari Baroja was now waiting for the medical examiner from the division of criminal investigation.

In Room 32, two old widowers were sitting over a forgotten chessboard and were looking off into the distance in so much of a Dickensian fashion that it could have been an illustration by Phiz. The exposed punt in the twenty-year-old bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey sat in the middle of the contained golden sea: tempest in a teapot, lightning in a bottle, or the muse contained.

Dog was already asleep on the only sofa he was allowed to sleep on.

I kept expecting the thick glass to loosen itself from the bottom of the bottle and float to the surface. Maybe I expected it to sail up through the extended neck and dance about the room; it was, after all, the season for miracles. Maybe that was what I was waiting for, something to jog us loose like the punt in the bottle, something that would allow me to approach the black king sitting across the battlefield, a man up until tonight I thought I knew.

“You have to talk or move or I’m going to fall asleep.”

He didn’t move. “Fall asleep, then.”

I had opened with the Queen’s Indian Defense, Petrosian Variation, a move I had neither the skill nor the determination to prolong, but Lucian liked to ponder it when I tried.

I didn’t consciously fall asleep; it’s just that the chair was soft and comfortable, the room was dark and warm, and maybe it was the protection of those black eyes that reflected the blinking of the silly lights. Those eyes were not looking into the small darkness outside the double-paned windows; they were looking farther and to a place about which I did not know. There was nothing that would overtake us tonight that those eyes would not see, nothing that would not deal plainly with a king not in his perfect mind.

I must have slept longer than I thought. I didn’t remember waking up, and maybe that’s what he had intended by starting to tell me the story while I was asleep. I remember hearing his voice, low and steady, coming from some place far away, “After the war. Her family were Basquos from out on Swayback, Four Brothers.” He paused to take another sip of his bourbon. “My gawd, you should have seen her. I remember lookin’ over the top of Charlie Floyde’s ’39 Dodge when she came out on the porch. Her hair was black and thick like a horse’s mane.” He stopped with the memory; the only other sound in Lucian’s apartment was the scorched-air heating. His two rooms weren’t any different from any of the others in general design, but they had all the style and mass of the Connally ancestral furnishings. I shifted my weight in the overstuffed horsehair chair and waited.

“It was summertime, and she had on this little navy blue dress with all the little polka dots. The wind held it against her body.” It took him awhile to get going again. “She was the wildest, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my entire life. Hair, teeth . . . We sparked that whole summer before her father tried to break it up in the fall. They wanted to send her away to family, keep us from each other, but it was too late.”

I looked at him, and the night in my head seemed darker. “We used to tremble when we touched each other. She had the most beautiful skin I’d ever seen. I would forget from night to night. She wasn’t like American girls; she was quiet. She’d speak if spoken to but only then. Short, soft replies . . . Basque. There was a part of her that I knew I couldn’t get at, ever. It wasn’t hostile or intentional, but it was there, like this life apart from us. Maybe she just knew.” He stared at the chessboard. “The Basquos have an old proverb, ‘a life without friends means death without company.’ ” He sighed. “We ran off together, got as far as Miles City and snagged a justice of the peace off his hay field to come in and marry us.” He snorted a short laugh. “His wife played the foot-pump organ, and he stood there in his rubber, shit-caked boots readin’ the words.” He took another sip, and I listened to the ice in his glass. “They caught us a little north of there. It was her father and three Basquo uncles.” He paused again, and I became aware that my eyes were open and he was looking at me. “Hell of a rumpus.” He reached across and took my hand, rubbing it under his hat along an ancient ridge that ran from the crown of his head to behind his left ear. He let go and resettled his hat. “One of the uncles finally went back and got a tire iron.”

That was two run-ins with Basques that I knew about, this one and the other with some bootleggers where he’d lost his leg. “They sent her away?”

He worked at something caught in his teeth, or maybe his jaw still wasn’t ready to call that one even. “Annulled us and married her off.” He placed an elbow on the arm of his tooled leather chair and cupped his chin in his palm. “I’d see her father and them uncles every once in a while in town, even after I was sheriff. They didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything right back.”

“When did you see her again?” It took awhile for him to reply, and I had the feeling I was getting in further than he wanted. It didn’t matter; when I had sealed Room 42 and had the EMTs stow her at Durant Memorial, it had gotten official.

He was staring back into the dark reflection of the glass. “About a year ago, a friend of mine said there was a woman over in the far wing who asked about me, new woman. I went over, and it was her.”

“Must’ve been quite a shock.”

“Humph. She had a little house down in Powder Junction. I guess that’s where she’d been livin’.”

I edged up in my chair a little. “Lucian, why is it I’ve got her room sealed up and her waiting on a table over at the hospital?” His eyes swiveled to mine and stayed there. “All I’m saying is that an absentee husband of a three-hour marriage that was annulled more than fifty years ago is going to be a hard press as next of kin.” I rubbed my hand across my face, tried to straighten my beard, and continued to look at him. “Lucian, you have to give me something to go on before the children and grandchildren show up and start making my life miserable.” I waited. “You’ve got to give me something more to work with here.”

“You don’t trust me?”

I let it sit there for a while. He wasn’t being rational, and it might take a few moments for him to recognize it. I went through the file cards on Lucian’s outburst and came up with fear of the unknown and frustration with society and the system, mixed with an ingredient I’d never seen in him before, love. Lucian in love; it was hard to summon up.

His eyes shifted back outside, and I could tell a little shame was lurking there. “You have the ME down at DCI do a general, then you come back here and we’ll talk some more.”

* * *

When I got back to the front desk, the tree had been placed back in its original spot; it was minus a few ornaments, and I noticed the lights weren’t working. Nat King Cole was now singing in German, giving the place an international flavor it sorely needed.

I figured Joe Lesky was one of those people that fill the gap of human misery, doing their best to make everybody’s lives a little better; about my age, with dark hair and dark eyes, he looked like he might have a touch of Indian, but all the time spent inside must have taken a lot of it out of him.

I leaned against the counter, and Dog sat on my foot. I glanced back over at the tree. “How’s the patient?”

He leaned back in his chair and looked over his shoulder at the abused conifer. Some of the arms looked as if they were signaling aircraft. “I don’t think there were any family heirlooms lost, but I still can’t get the lights to work.”

“You don’t happen to have the file on Mrs. Baroja?” He slid the folder on the counter toward me. “I had it out for the EMTs.”

“No arguments?”

“You’re the sheriff.”

“That’s usually why people argue with me.”

With the advent of modern CPR techniques, organ transplants, and life-support systems, home field advantage was shifted from the heart and lungs to the brain. In an unprecedented agreement between both lawyers and doctors, the terminal indicator of the grim reaper’s touch is now the point when all cerebral function has ceased and is deemed irreversible. Brain dead.

For Mari Baroja, the bell tolled at exactly 10:43:12 P.M. Chris Wyatt and Cathi Kindt were the attending EMTs. Six attempts at resuscitation were made, standard for this kind of incident, and a code 99 was radioed to the hospital. Wyatt went for the electric defibrillator paddles, and the woman’s body arched five more times like a head of rough stock on rodeo weekend. They canceled the code, and they canceled Mari Baroja.

“I’m sorry, Sheriff.”

I looked past the file and down at Joe. “Hmm?”

“Did you know Mrs. Baroja?”

“No.” I rubbed my dry eyes. “No, I didn’t.”

“She’s gone on to a far better place.”

I nodded. “Did you?”

“Did I . . . ?”

“Did you know Mrs. Baroja?”

He thought for a moment. “Not really. I think she was very quiet. Most of the clients are asleep during this shift.”

I smiled a little smile, far better places withstanding. “You know Lucian, don’t you?”

He rubbed his throat and shrugged. “Everybody knows Mr. Connally. He’s a legend.”

I looked back at the file. “I think Mrs. Baroja just might have been a legend, too.” I closed the folder and handed it back to him. “Can you make some copies of this for me? It’ll save me the official harassment later today.”

“Sure.”

“Who found her?”

“Jennifer Felson. Mrs. Baroja must’ve hit the nurse’s button in her room.”

“Anybody else visit her last night?”

He was starting off with the folder but stopped to point. “I’m not sure, but you can check the guest register.”

I flipped the handcrafted quilted book to where I could read it, scanned the names, and looked for any more Barojas. There was only one: Lana Baroja had signed in at 7:10 and left about an hour later. There were also a couple of Loftons who had gone to Room 42 less than twenty minutes before Lana. I could go there and do a little poking around. I looked at Dog, and Dog wagged.

I laughed. “Let’s go get the butler that did this.”

It honestly didn’t look like a murder case. It looked like a lonely room where a vibrant and beautiful woman had been warehoused to finish up her days. There is no allowance for murder, no curve in which we judge the value of human life on a chronological sliding scale no matter how I had teased Lucian. I owed Mari Baroja. I’d never met the woman, but she was from Absaroka County, and she was mine.

There was a crucifix above the bed, which was the only decoration on the walls. There were a few personal items, and a quilt, a Bible, and a few letters from some law firm in Miami. I figured I’d get to the letters later.

There were seven photographs, all in antique silver frames. Some of the pictures were so aged that their emulsion had adhered to the inside surface of the glass. The oldest looked to be one of what I was willing to bet were the four short brothers, all on short horses. They were thin and hard-looking men, and I’m sure the wind whistled when it cut around them; they appeared as if they were carved out of ironwood. I thought about that fight north of Miles City and was glad I wasn’t there for that particular apocalypse.

The next was of a man, I believe the fourth horseman on the end, along with a woman whom I assumed was his wife. They looked dour and righteous, so I moved on. The next photo was that strange color that only seemed to exist in the fifties, like real color wasn’t good enough. There were two small girls in summer dresses and barrettes, seated on a doorstep. They looked happy but like they had to be. They both had long dark hair, and the one on the right was looking off to the right.

The next was a young air force officer circa mid-sixties who looked vaguely familiar. He was a lieutenant and battle-awarded, with a green and yellow ribbon bar that told me it was Vietnam. There was a sad quality to the photo, and he didn’t seem to fit with all the others; he was blonder, and the eyes just looked different. The next set of photos was lying on the floor amid a pile of prescription medicines and a hardbound copy of Pride and Prejudice. I opened a reader-worn Bible and found a handwritten note in Basque that read, “A ver nire aitaren etxea defendituko dut, otsoen kontra.”

I kneeled by a partially wrapped dish of what looked and smelled like almond cookies. I was hungry and was tempted to tamper with the evidence but instead picked up the next framed photograph. It was a group shot of the Baroja family. The vantage point of the camera and the distance made it hard to pick out the individuals, but the brothers were there with their wives and a priest. I thought I could make out the two little girls having grown and acquired husbands, but the lieutenant wasn’t there.

The last was the most recent and was of a woman in maybe her late twenties who looked embarrassed in a chef’s jacket and hat. It was the only one that had official printing along the bottom, which read CULINARY INSTITUTE DU BASQUE, BAYONNE, FRANCE. She had short wisps of jet-black hair that were pulled back and behind the ears, revealing wide-set dark eyes steeped in facetious sarcasm. I liked her already, which was good, because when I turned she was standing by the door.

It was a simple statement. “She’s dead.”

I stood and looked at Dog, who was looking at her. Some guard dog. When I looked at her again, she was looking at the carpeted floor down and to the left. I took a step toward her, but her eyes didn’t move. I went ahead with my educated guess. “Ms. Baroja, Lana Baroja?”

She hadn’t changed much since the cooking school photo, thinner, maybe a little more tired looking. She had on a full-length quilted coat that was just shy of purple and a red stocking cap that matched neither the scarf at her neck nor the gloves on her hands. She wore high-top waterproof boots, and I was thinking it was a good thing she could cook, because the career in high fashion wasn’t working out. I looked at her again and felt bad about the judgments I was levying on someone who had lost someone very dear. “I’m Sheriff Walt Longmire, and I’m very sorry. I’ve got Mrs. Baroja over at Memorial.”

“You’ve got her?”

It was just a turn of phrase unless you were listening for it. “Yes.”

“Can I see her?”

Here we go. “There are just a few formalities we need to take care of concerning the late Mrs. Baroja.”

“Formalities?”

“I’m afraid that your grandmother’s death was specifically unattended with a declaration of death registered by the emergency medical technician, but we’re going to need a formal certificate from the attending physician indicating that the death was due to natural causes secondary to old age.” I thought it sounded like I knew what I was talking about.

“Or?”

She had spotted the flaw. “Or, if circumstances are complicated, a coroner will be asked to rule on the cause of death.”

“Complicated?”

“Mitigating circumstance that might lead us to believe that an autopsy may have to be performed.” I watched her for a moment, but she didn’t flinch. “Right now, we’re talking hypothetical formalities, but I’m sure you would want to know why it is your grandmother died.” She was silent. “Could you tell me who your grandmother’s doctor was?”

“Bloomfield.”

Isaac. “I’ll get in touch with him.” I had pulled my trump card and gotten some interesting responses. I took another step toward her. “Why don’t you go home, and I’ll give you a call later?”

“All right.” She started to leave.

“Ms. Baroja?”

“Yes?”

”You could give me your phone number. It would save me having to look it up.”

She came back and gave it to me, smiling a sad and covered smile. “I’m sorry.”

I reached out and lightly touched her shoulder. “No, I’m sorry. This has been a clumsy conversation at a very inopportune time. I understand your grandmother was a wonderful woman.”

“Really?” I had been waiting for the facetious sarcasm, and here it was in spades. “And where did you hear that?”

* * *

The early morning sun was still a thought as I crunched across the parking lot. Dog snapped at the falling flakes and crow-hopped in a wide sweep toward the truck. When I stopped to stare at him, he barked at me. I continued to stare, and he continued to bark, ready to play. His eyes were all wild from the exertion, and his tongue unrolled from the side of his mouth. I really had to give him a formal name some day.

After a little frozen difficulty, I jarred the door open and watched as Dog left snow-dappled tracks across my seat on the way to his usual spot. I had to get some seat covers. I climbed in and pulled the door shut, fired her up, and looked down at the manila folder in my lap, at the stuff of which legends were made. I flipped the defroster to high and watched as my breath spun across my chest and scattered as it hit the paperwork that Joe had given me. The blowers on the heater started leaching warmth from the engine, and the windshield slowly began to clear.

As I pulled onto route 16 and took a left, I could see Lana Baroja walking along the sidewalk like a mobile quilted teepee. I wondered mildly where she lived, then wondered where she worked this early in the morning. She had scribbled two numbers on the back of the folder at my side. I could have offered her a ride, but it seemed like she was anxious to be away from me. You get used to that kind of response from people when you’re in this line of work.

It looked like the plows had already made a pass or two, which meant that the little apex of downtown Durant was clear. I pulled off behind the courthouse and parked in my spot. Dog followed me into the office. I tossed the file onto my desk so that I wouldn’t be tempted to read it and continued into the holding area and cell 1. We only had two, but I tried not to use cell 2 or the jail downstairs because it wasn’t my pattern and, if something happened, no one would know where to find me. Dog jumped up and stretched out on the other bunk, and very soon we were both asleep. I don’t know if it was the quick once-over I had given Mari Baroja’s room or Lucian’s words, but it was dream filled and didn’t leave me particularly rested.

* * *

There was a house, just a little saltbox out along one of the spurs and ridges of the Powder River. There were arroyos that cut back along the foothills that headed for the Big Horns, and there were owls in the stunted black oaks and cottonwoods. It looked like the place I’d been to about a month ago, a place I didn’t want to go back to again. The house stood empty and deserted, desolate against a dark purpled sky. A screen door on rusted hinges slapped shut in the framework, and the windows were missing or broken; barren, empty eyes that stared out blindly. There was an old barn and a warped calving shed that leaned away from the wind. The missing slats looked like piano keys set on edge and, having grown tired of playing the same old song, had decided to quit.

It was a place of tangible dreams that could be touched like fingerprints and felt through the raised and weathered grain of the wood; whorls and swoops of passion and loss, of qualified success and absolute defeat. I was not alone in this place. There was a woman there with her face turned toward the mountains, the northwest breeze pulling at her dark hair like long fingers and pressing a threadbare, polka dot dress against her loins. She had strong calves planted a shoulder’s width apart, and she wore no shoes. Her hands held a silk scarf around her shoulders that was fringed and of an old world print, like nothing I’d ever seen before.

After a moment, she raised the scarf above her head. She held it there for an instant and then released it. I watched as it raced across the buffalo grass, where it snagged on a gnarled stub of sage and then disappeared. When I turned back to her, she was looking at me. Her eyes were like the black glass of last night and, as she moved past me toward the little house, she did not pause. I could see the delicate quality of her features, the careful shape of her lips. “A ver nire aitaren etxea defendituko, otsoen kontra.”

* * *

I tipped my hat up. Ruby was standing at the open cell door, Dog already having left his bunk to stand beside her. “Rough night at the Home for Assisted Living?”

I let the hat fall back over my eyes. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” As she turned, I called after her. “I might need DCI on the horn; it’s possible I’m going to need an ME for a general autopsy toot sweet.”

She was back with the coffee, toot sweeter. “It really must have been a rough night.”

I sat up, pushed my hat back on my head, and took my old Denver Broncos mug. “Thanks.”

“Sooooo?” She was petting Dog’s head, which rested on her knee, and was carefully sipping hers from her own Wall Drug mug, which proclaimed 5-cent coffee.

“Ever heard of any Barojas?”

I watched the binary computer in her eyes calculate an area the size of Vermont, divide it in a swift grid pattern, and locate the appropriate square. “Basque, down on Swayback, Four Brothers.”

“That’s them. Ever heard of Mari Baroja?”

She paused for a moment too long, and her eyes avoided me. “No.”

I sipped my coffee and let it go. “Then you missed your chance.”

“Does she have a granddaughter who just opened a bakery here in town?”

I yawned and covered my mouth with the cup. “We have a bakery in town?”

She continued to stroke Dog’s broad head. “What do you mean by might need a coroner?”

“Lucian thinks there might be some funny business going on.” I took a sip and looked at the snorting pony sticking out of the orange D. “Ruby, what do you know about Lucian?”

She thought for a moment. “I think he is a good man. I think he gets too caught up in the romance of things.” She raised an eyebrow. “You want to know about the romances of older men, ask a younger woman.” Her eyes stayed steady but then broke back to Dog. She crossed her legs and patted the bunk beside her. Dog was curled there in an instant. It took a while for her to gather her thoughts or decide to share them. “I was twenty-eight years old and between marriages when I came to work for Lucian.” I watched as she smiled, and the years unwrapped. She was like that; age would not pause for Ruby, since she would not pause for it. “I was quite a hottie back then.” I laughed, and she started to rise.

I reached out and took her hand. “I was laughing at the word choice. Where did you get the term hottie?”

The neon blue lie detector was scanning me for signs of falsehood. “Your daughter.”

“I thought so.” I held on to the thin hand and ran my thumb over the web between her thumb and forefinger. “I’ve got news for you, you’re still a hottie.” She actually blushed and pulled her hand away. “So, old Lucian cut quite a wide swath around these parts, huh?”

“Yes, he was very dashing for a man with one leg.”

“Did you know he had been married?” Big blue. It was the second time today I’d used surprise to get a look at the woman I was talking to. “I’ll take that for a no.” Ruby was the poster child for unflappable, so it was fun to watch her take flight for a change. “He was married to Mari Baroja.”

“When?”

“For about three hours back in the late forties. Or about as long as it took for her daddy and three uncles to catch them, take her, beat the hell out of Lucian, and annul the whole thing.”

“Well, I’ll be.” I waited for her to make the connection, and it didn’t take long. In the meantime, I listened to the soft ticking of the radiators outside the cell. Our jail had originally been one of the tiny Carnegie libraries. It had been erected behind the courthouse at the turn of the century, the last one. Red Angus, the sheriff before Lucian, had shrewdly appropriated the red granite building and had converted it. “She’s the one that Lucian wants the autopsy done on?”

“Yep.” We sat there looking at each other.

“Did you tell him you’d do it?”

I had been hoping that the conversation wasn’t going to go in this direction; the last thing I needed was Ruby’s help in backing myself into an ethically nonneutral corner. “Maybe.”

“Are you absolutely sure there is no reason for an autopsy?”

I groaned and leaned back against the wall with a thump, a few dribbles of coffee sloshing up and running down the side of my mug. I wiped the bottom on my pants. “Of course not, but I am also not absolutely sure that there is a reason for one.”

She took my coffee cup and started out of the cell. “Then you’ll know after you have one.”

“Is it still snowing?”

She looked down the hallway to the windows out front. “Yes.”

“Then the whole thing is academic, because no one from DCI is going to make it up here in this snowstorm.”

She wasn’t looking at me, and she wasn’t going to. It was one of her techniques for getting me to do what she considered to be the right thing. “You can get a medical examiner from Billings.” She disappeared around the corner, and the dog followed her.

I thought about the old sheriff. I thought about how Ruby had just lied about Mari Baroja. I thought about what I didn’t know, about how I knew the anecdotes but, perhaps, not the story.

* * *

When I got to my office, my steaming cup was full and resting at the center of my blotter, and the red light on line one was blinking from Cheyenne. I picked up the receiver and punched the angry little button. There was the commensurate pause after I explained the situation. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Things must be really slow up there in the hinterlands.”

I leaned back in my chair and tossed my hat onto my desk. It landed beside the mug. “I guess I’m going to need a general autopsy.”

“Do you want us to call Billings?”

I noticed Ruby standing in the doorway. “Well, it’s a blizzard, and we’re kind of short on personnel.” I nodded, and she brought the note over.

“I’ll see what I can do, but I bet they’re going to want you to transport.” I hung up. The note said we had an accident near the highway at the access road. It was a bad spot where the curve of the road and a stand of cottonwoods concealed the approach from the I-25 off-ramp. “I’m going to go out there and cut that stand of trees down myself.”

I reached out, picked up my hat, and twisted it down on my head. I looked up at the old Seth Thomas clock that had served the last four sheriffs of Absaroka County, a sum of almost a hundred years. It was just mornings like this that it felt like all hundred were mine. It was 7:47 A.M., and I guessed the citizenry wasn’t staying home after all.

Ruby was on the phone but cupped her hand over the receiver and looked up. “Another one at Fetterman and 16; I’ll call Vic and tell her to go directly out there.”

“Does it sound serious?”

“Fender bender.” The phone rang again, and she frowned at it.

“Call the Ferg and tell him he’s full time until further notice.”

* * *

It was like walking into a snow globe and, since I had parked the truck, it had gained another inch. Dawn was lingering, but there was a faint blush back toward the hills and, with the glow of the streetlights, the whole place was starting to look like Bedford Falls.

It didn’t take long to get to county road 196, and it didn’t take long to figure out what had happened. The best news was that all the participants in the vehicular altercation were alive, well, and arguing on the side of the road. I flipped on the light bar and pulled the Bullet over to the opposite side so that it would be visible from both directions. There was an older Chevy Blazer that I knew belonged to Ray Thompson, and a newer little Japanese SUV that had number 6 plates, Carbon County. There was one of those new-fangled racks on the top of the Nissan, and it had a bumper sticker that read, IF YOU DIE, WE SPLIT YOUR GEAR. Hello Santiago Saizarbitoria. He looked just like his photograph, only now he looked irritated. “Hey, Ray. This guy run into you?”

“Yer damn right.”

Ray’s wife was next, and I figured they must have been on the way to dropping her off at the school cafeteria where she worked. “Came out of nowhere, flew around that corner and ran right into us.”

Saizarbitoria was about to explode when I put a gloved hand up to his face. “Just a minute.” I took Ray by the shoulder and steered him away from the vehicles and over to my side of the road. I checked in both directions, but there hadn’t been any traffic since the wreck. “Ray, I wanna show you something.” I walked him behind my truck and over to the stop sign where the two roads converged. “Ray, these are your tracks, the ones that slide all the way through the intersection.”

“That’s not . . .”

“You can see from the tire marks that your vehicle didn’t stop at the sign, and you can also see from the point of impact on both vehicles that you went through just as he passed. Maybe in all the excitement you just didn’t notice.” He didn’t say anything else, just looked at the tracks and fumed. I waited for a while myself, as the blue and red light flickered over the smooth surface of the snow. “In a situation like this, it’s going to come down to who has his vehicle under control, and you didn’t. Now, I’m going to get my camera and take a few shots of these tracks so that if there are any questions later on, we’ve got answers. But my advice to you is to go over there, apologize to that young man, and get out your insurance card.”

By the time I’d taken the pictures, they were all grouped around the hood of the Blazer. I copied down information from both drivers, only partially listening as Saizarbitoria told the older couple that he was here for a job interview, and they wished him well.

The Blazer would continue to the school even though I doubted that there would be any, but the little silver SUV wasn’t going anywhere. Ray had hit right at the wheel well, and the left front was pretty much pushed into the engine compartment. I radioed in to Ruby after we got in the Bullet and arranged for his vehicle to be brought over to Sheridan where it could be repaired.

I also asked about Vic.

Static. “She’s at Fetterman, and the Ferg’s out on Western where one of the snowplows took out a mailbox and got stuck turning around. By the way, you got your coroner from Billings.”

“King Cole is driving down here in a snowstorm?”

Static. “You’ve got to keep up with Yellowstone County politics; Fast Eddie was replaced last November. The new kid’s name is Bill McDermott, and he’s very earnest, so be nice to him.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I turned to the sad young man beside me, pulled off a glove with my teeth, and extended a paw. “Walt Longmire, welcome to Donner Pass. You got anything in that car you’re going to need?”

“Everything.”

I watched as he climbed out and crossed, looking both ways. Fool me once . . . He gave the impression of being a lot bigger than he was. As I watched him dig a satchel bag, a Meeteetse Cowboy Bar ball cap, and a cell phone out of the car and walk back over, I would have sworn he was six feet.

I continued filling out the accident report. “So, what’s the plan?”

“Excuse me?”

“You and your wife. I’m assuming you have a plan for this interview?” I broke the scenario down. “If this goes well, what happens next?”

“Oh.” He nodded and quickly jumped in. “If things look good, we were planning on coming back over the weekend and taking a look at houses.” He looked past me at the crumpled metal of the Nissan.

“So you’re in for the long haul?”

“Sir?”

“Looking for a house? A place to raise kids?”

“Yes, sir.” He waited a respectful moment before asking. “You married, sir?”

I folded up my report book and stuffed it behind the four-wheel shifter. “I used to be. She died a number of years ago.” I sat there and looked out the window until the image of myself as a romantic figure quickly became ludicrous and faded.

“I’m sorry.”

I turned and looked at him to see if he was real and, at that instant, I came to two conclusions about Santiago Saizarbitoria: that he had been brought up right and that he had a heart. He was halfway to being hired. He was wearing a black fleece jacket, and one of the tumblers fell into place. I looked at him the way you size up a pot roast at the grocery. “You’re a climber?”

He smiled and looked at his watch. “Damn.”

“Why are you looking at your watch?”

He sighed. “Because my old chief bet me twenty bucks that you’d make me and every motivation I had in less than an hour.”

Archie Pulaski was the chief in Kemmerer, and we had been known in years past to terrorize the Law Enforcement Academy and surrounding bars in Douglas. “You should know better than to bet with Poles in this part of the world.” I fastened my seatbelt and watched as he automatically fastened his. “What else did Archibald have to say?”

“He said you were the best sheriff in Wyoming, and that if I was smart I’d keep my mouth shut and maybe learn something.”

“Yep, well . . .” I put the truck in gear. “Archie drinks.” I pulled out onto the county road. “I’ve got a deal for you.” It wasn’t a question, and he looked at me. “How about I put you on for seventy-two hours, then we sit down and decide whether it’s working out or not?” I would have thought, with his background, that he wasn’t a gambler, but he didn’t hesitate and I started thinking that he was here for another reason.

“Yes, sir.” He was quiet for a moment. “By the way, how much does the job pay, sir?”

“Eighteen percent more than the job you’ve got now, and don’t call me sir. I ain’t your daddy near as we both know.” It was twenty-three years in the coming, but it still felt good.

3

I was enjoying the usual. “Coronea custodium regis.” He looked at me blankly. “I bet you can figure it out.” I negotiated the last chunk of biscuit back into the spicy gravy with my fork and lifted it into my mouth.

“Keeper of the king’s pleas?”

I looked at Dorothy, and we both looked at him. “Who says the values of a classical education are lost?”

I watched as the woman who kept me alive by operating the only café within walking distance of the jail refilled my coffee cup. “You did, just last week.”

“Richard the Lion-Hearted established these guys as a sort of tax collector. They were in charge of keeping track of convicted felons and their property, which was confiscated in the name of the king.” I laid the fork back on the empty plate. He was about to finish the same amount of the usual that I had, and I was impressed.

There wasn’t anybody else in the little café, so Dorothy’s attention was exclusively on us. “And the difference between a medical examiner and a coroner?”

She was reaching for the coffee pot, but I shook my head. “A medical examiner is trained, a coroner is elected.” The phone rang, and I watched as Dorothy reached to get it. “The last coroner up in Yellowstone County got into a little trouble back in the midseventies.” I went on. “Eddie Cole used to get paid about a thousand bucks an inquest, and it was only when four bear attacks one weekend came up with a victim of the same height, weight, and coloring that King Cole got into a little hot water.”

When I looked back, Dorothy was holding the phone out to me. “Very agitated deputy for you.”

I handled the receiver like it was loaded. “Hello?”

“Are you enjoying your breakfast?”

I pulled the earpiece a little away from my temple. “I was until now.”

“We just got a report here at the office of some very angry individuals over at the old folks home, and now we’ve got those same individuals over at the hospital. I have been informed that this is one of your little fucking deals, so I would advise you to get your ass over there as fast as it can waddle.” The line went dead.

I looked at the two of them. “Gotta go.”

When I dropped Saizarbitoria off at the office with his bag, his cell phone, and his ball cap, I had the feeling I was sending him off to school. I warned him that all the training at the state pen wasn’t going to be of any use to him in there. He seemed undaunted. I told him to make friends with Dog because Harry Truman was right, but I don’t think he got it.

* * *

I stood up straight as I approached the reception desk at the hospital, something I rarely did in everyday life, but height came in handy in times of conflict. I could count on three hands how many physical altercations I had been in since I had become sheriff, but no matter what anybody says, size helps.

I walked between the two people at the desk and loomed over Janine, whom I had a special fondness for whenever I remembered that she is Ruby’s granddaughter. “Janine, you’ve got a situation here?”

She shrugged at the two on either side of me. “Yes.”

He wasn’t yelling when I turned to look at him; he was a good-looking fellow in a studied western way, fifties and trim, with an oversized cowboy mustache and dark hair, about average height. I was willing to bet that his haircut cost forty dollars and that, boots, hat, and leather coat notwithstanding, he wasn’t a cowboy. “Do I know you?”

He was taken a little aback but was attempting to get a verbal footing. “Lyle Lofton, I’m an attorney in Sheridan County.”

A lawyer, great; the tall thing didn’t work with lawyers. “Jeez, Lyle, I thought I was going to have to throw some people in jail for public disturbance.” I turned to the woman. She was in her fifties as well—lean, tall, dark, and a little strained. With her collection of neck scarves and turquoise, I was willing to bet that she wasn’t a cowboy either, but you never know. “Is this your wife?”

“Kay, this is Sheriff . . .”

I was glad she didn’t put out her hand; I didn’t want to risk being bruised by the bracelets. “Where is my mother?”

I paused for a moment. “If you are speaking of Mrs. Baroja, she’s being held in an attempt to ascertain a certificate of death from the attending physician, Dr. Bloomfield. And a possible coroner’s report as to the cause of death.” I made a mental note to call Bloomfield and cover my ass with as many doctors as it would take to hold off the lawyers.

“She was seventy-four years old.” I looked at the red splotching at her neck.

She was ready to blow again, so I figured I’d get it all over with at once. “It’s a standard procedure in deaths such as your mother’s where there may be concerns of reasonable suspicion.”

“Suspicion of what?”

I went ahead and dropped the bomb. “Foul play.”

She put a fist on her hip and looked at me with about as much jangling accoutrement and audacity as we could both stand. “The woman smoked three packs of cigarettes a day.” I waited, because I was sure there was more. “You know, we hear stories in Sheridan about how backward this place is, but until now I never really believed them.”

I smiled as the feathers brushed the inside of my chest like they always do when I get irritated. “Well, I’m glad we’ve been able to live up to everybody’s expectations.” I was always ready to smile when I was winning and, lawyers or not, they couldn’t stop me from doing what I was doing today. Unless my coroner was pumping nickels into the slot machines at the casino on the Crow reservation, I would be done by tomorrow. Lawyers always held domain over tomorrow; it was their gig. I looked back to her as she stared at the rug. “I’m sorry, I know.”

“You’re damn well going to be.”

We all watched as she marched out of the place. I turned back to Lyle, who pursed his lips and silently followed her out. I leaned my elbows against the counter and watched as they whizzed by the glass doors in $50,000 worth of non-Sporty, non-Utilitarian Vehicle. She was driving.

I tipped my hat back on my head. “How you doin’, Janine?”

“Better, since you arrived.”

“Any word on my coroner?”

“He got here about a half an hour ago.”

I found the room with a plastic sign over it that read SURGERY 02. I was just about to push the door open when I remembered what it was I was walking in on. I had been present for too many general autopsies. With as many as two MEs from DCI and a district attorney to boot, I sometimes chose not to participate. Three weeks ago, I had sat in one of these very chairs and spared myself the inevitable outcome of Vonnie’s. I had a dark feeling that forensic pathologists didn’t look at the rest of us the way the rest of us did.

I had forgotten to ask Janine if he had arrived alone, but all I had to do was knock on the door and walk in. I knocked on the door and opened it about an inch or two. “Mr. McDermott?”

“Yes?”

It was a young voice, a little hesitant, and not what I was expecting. I stared at the door handle in my hand as the strong smell of formaldehyde and hospital antiseptic overpowered everything. “Walt Longmire, I’m the sheriff here.”

There was a pause. “I’m almost finished with this part. I’ll be out in about five minutes.”

I closed the door and walked to the nurse’s desk. There was a coffee pot steaming on the back counter, but nobody was there, so I picked up the phone, dialed nine, and the office. As it rang, I thought about my inability to go in and witness yet another autopsy. Maybe it was because it was Mari Baroja and I had already summoned up a romantic image of her, maybe it was memories of Vonnie, but you spared yourself what you could.

“Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department.”

“I’d like to report my holiday spirit as missing.”

She laughed. “I was just writing your Post-its.”

“How’s the new kid doing?”

“He’s wonderful. How can we keep him?”

“Well, we’ve already disabled his vehicle.”

“Lenny Rowell’s uniforms were still in the supply closet. They’re a little loose on him, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s out with Vic right now.” Her voice got low, even though I knew there wasn’t anybody else in the office. “I think she’s on her best behavior. Well, as best as she can be. Walt, where are you?”

“I’m still here at the hospital, waiting on the results from Mari Baroja’s autopsy and making a little list . . .” I became aware of someone standing behind me, so I pushed off the counter and turned to face Bill McDermott. He was a medium-sized young man with sloped shoulders and a haircut like a blond Beatle, from their Liverpool days. He was probably in his thirties, with a childlike face that carried an innocence that was only partly diminished by one of the bloody gloves still on his hand. Bill was evidently a part of the new order of coroners who were qualified medical examiners. I had a suspicion, however, that Mr. McDermott had not been elected. “I’ve got to go.” I hung up the phone and looked at the altar boy. “Mr. McDermott, I presume?”

He nodded a bashful smile, looked at my gun belt, and then my star. “Hello, Sheriff?”

I moved around the desk. I was thinking that a little distance between us might help put him at ease. “Bill, why don’t I buy you a cup of coffee?”

He didn’t respond but watched as I poured us a couple of Styrofoam cups full. “Is there any cream?”

I offered him one of the powdered packets from the tray and was relieved that he peeled off the glove and dropped it into a waste can marked with a red biohazard sticker. He took the packet, tore it open, and dumped it into the cup. I took a sip of my coffee. “Yellowstone County has dropped the coroner system?”

“Yes.”

“The king is dead, long live the king.”

“Both puns intended?” He looked at my blank face and continued. “He’s dead. I did the autopsy on Eddie Cole. It’s how I got the job.”

“How’d he die?”

He took a sip of his coffee. “Suicide. He had an old Cadillac in his garage. Just climbed in, started her up, and took a nap. He left a note.”

“What’d it say?” I had to ask.

“ ‘When you perform the intermastoid incision, make sure the front quadrant is large enough for the frontal craniotomy. Most beginners make a hash of the thing.’ ”

“Professional to the last.” I nodded toward the operating room. “What’ve we got in there?”

He lowered his cup. “Caucasian, female, approximately mid- to late seventies, lifelong smoker, and the scars. I’ve just finished the thoracic-abdominal incision, exposed the pericardial sac, and took a blood sample.”

“Excuse me, but did you say scars?”

“The ones on her back.” He looked at me as if it were something I should have known. “A mass of scar tissue. It looks as though they were administered over a period of time.”

I unconsciously stiffened. “Administered?”

Bill nodded again. “Someone routinely beat the woman at some point in her life.” He looked at his coffee and swirled the tan liquid in the cup. “Probably with a belt, whip, or riding crop, something of that sort.”

I was a little shaken with that revelation. “What else?”

“Slight discoloration of the tissues and blood, but the type is what’s interesting. Was she Basque?”

I nodded. “We have a pretty large population from the turn of the last century; sheepherders mostly.”

“I thought so. The blood type, O with an RH-negative factor. Extremely rare, but 27 percent of Basques have it.”

“Cause of death?”

“I haven’t really gotten that far, but I’m betting that it’s a standard myocardial infarction or cerebral vascular situation.”

“That simple?”

“The numbers don’t lie. Out of five hundred thousand cases of sudden death each year, three hundred thousand are cardiac arrests following heart attacks. Considering her age, use of tobacco, genetic predisposition . . .” He thought for a moment. “Well, I’m far from being finished, and who knows what else we might find before the day is done? I like to do a thorough job.” He finished his coffee and dropped the cup into the biohazard container with the gloves. I agreed with his diagnosis and tossed mine in, too.

* * *

When I got out to the truck, there was another inch of snow, but there were a few streaks of sunshine. I gave the sky my darkest warning look to try and help out the little patches of blue but was only rewarded with a big fat flake in the eye. I climbed in and radioed Ruby. “What number Fetterman is Isaac Bloomfield’s office?” I waited as she looked up the number.

Static. “431.”

“Thanks.” Ruby hated using the radio, but I had told all of them I would only get a cell phone if they let me have a computer; so far, we were at a stalemate. The plows were out, and I watched the blinking yellow lights as I passed. The route up to the mountains looked clear, and I hoped that nobody would take it as an invitation.

The day hadn’t been as bad as I had thought it would be, so far. I started thinking about Cady, the fact that she was going to be here this weekend, and that, so far, I hadn’t gotten her anything for Christmas. She had been difficult to buy for as a child, and the situation hadn’t gotten any better as she had blossomed into womanhood. I would have to enlist Ruby’s help as a covert operator. Ruby enjoyed being a mole, but we were sadly lacking in haute couture. I wondered if I had any catalogs waiting for me at home. I wondered when I might get home. I wondered if the plastic was holding or if there was snow in the living room.

I thought about Mari Baroja as I navigated to the doctor’s office. I thought about who would do that to the woman, who was responsible. The most obvious culprit would be the husband. I didn’t even know his name or if he was alive or dead. Her personal physician was a good place to start, though. I had seen Doc Bloomfield at the hospital a couple of weeks ago when he had given me the final checkup after my adventures on the mountain, but I hadn’t been at his office in a long time.

It was on the corner with a convenient parking lot you could approach from both sides. There was a 1971 silver Mercedes 300 SEL parked next to the steps that I knew belonged to the doctor, but there were no other vehicles, so he was probably free to speak to me.

It was warm in his waiting room, and I watched the clown fish in the saltwater tank as Isaac brewed us two cups of green tea. I had said no, but he insisted. There was music softly playing, Handel, Suite No. 1 in F, and I believed we were at the Andante. It was one of Dorothy’s favorites. Visiting Doc Bloomfield was like visiting your grandfather about ten years after your grandmother had died or the cleaning lady had quit.

“How is the knee?”

I watched as his glasses revealed the multiple folds that did their best to hide the glint in his hazel eyes. I took my mug and glanced down at the pale, ghostly green numbers tattooed on the inside of his right arm where he had rolled up his sleeves. “Good.”

“How is the shoulder?”

I took a sip, and it tasted like kelp. “Good.”

He continued to examine me. “Hands look good; how is the ear?” I turned slightly and took off my hat so that he could see for himself. “Looks good.” He continued to study me. “You’ve grown a beard?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Nobody does.”

I broached the subject of Mari Baroja. He seemed genuinely moved by her death and stared at the faded print of the carpet. I studied the side of his face; his eyes were sharp with a little too much to contain. A thumb and forefinger came up, pushed the glasses onto his forehead and pressed into the sockets, rubbing emotion away. His features were strong, and it was like watching a roman emperor at the fall; I should be so lucky at that age. I waited a respectful amount of time. “Did you know her well, Isaac?” He didn’t respond, so I asked again.

He didn’t move, the fingers still in his eyes. “She was not a happy woman. I think she had many disappointments in her life.” He took the hand away, readjusted his glasses, and turned to look at me through the imperfect world of the lenses.

“Can you give me some idea as to the cause of death?”

I waited as his eyes went back to the floor, then to me. “Walter, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“No.”

“Why are you so interested in this woman’s death?”

That set me back. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

He actually reached out and patted my knee. “Even with the beard, you are a very young man.”

I was flattered, I think, but still didn’t know what to make of his response. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She was an old woman who was tired of living.”

“Are you telling me that this was a suicide?”

His eyes sparked hard for a moment. “No, that is not what I am telling you.” He withdrew his hand; the skin was transparent, and I watched as the blue and red protruded in the fists at his lap. “I think she was tired and gave up.”

“You knew her pretty well?”

“She was my patient for more than half a century.”

I took a sip of the tea out of habit and immediately regretted it. “What can you tell me about the scars?” He looked at me blankly. “The ones on her back?”

He raised his head and nodded. “She was involved in an automobile accident a number of years ago.”

“An automobile accident?”

“Yes.”

“The scars couldn’t have been the result of some form of abuse?”

He turned and looked at me again, the picture of questioning disbelief. “What would lead you to think that?”

“The Yellowstone County Medical Examiner.”

His eyes widened. “You sent her to Billings?”

“No, he’s here. His name is Bill McDermott, and he’s over at Memorial.”

“Walter, it was Mrs. Baroja’s expressed desire that there be nothing done to her remains other than what was legally required.”

“Well, it’s gotten a little complicated.”

“Who did you say was doing the autopsy?”

I sat the tea down on the magazines stacked at the table behind me. “New fellow by the name of Bill McDermott. He’s a licensed ME.” I waited for a moment. “So, you and Mrs. Baroja discussed the possibility of her death?”

He seemed less excitable now. “I discuss the possibility with all my patients. I try to be truthful with them, no matter what the circumstance.”

I leaned in. “Isaac, it sounds like you had a lot more responsibilities than that of family practitioner. Is there something you want to say to me?”

I waited as he took a deep breath and noticed, not for the first time, how small the man was. “I lied to you just now.”

“Yep, I know.” He looked at me again. “It’s something I’m pretty good at spotting.”

“You realize, of course, that due to the physician/patient privilege I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“Yes.” We listened as the little pumps bubbled fresh oxygen into the fish tank; Handel joined the minuet. “You want to tell me about the scars first?”

He sighed. “Charlie Nurburn, her husband.”

I nodded and then stopped. “I don’t know him.”

“He was from the southern part of the county, near Four Brothers.”

“Middle fork of the Powder; not much out there.”

“Used to be a few little homesteads and an old coal mine.” I looked at the thick yellow nails as his fingers tightened at his kneecaps. “I used to run a clinic down in Powder once a week, Saturday mornings, back in the late forties, early fifties.”

I leaned back in the overstuffed chair and unbuttoned my sheepskin coat. “She was one of your patients then?”

“Yes. I delivered her two children and . . .”

“Three children?”

He paused for a moment. “Yes, I always forget about David, but I didn’t deliver him. I wasn’t practicing yet.” I waited. “She didn’t come in about the beatings.”

“What then?”

“Latent syphilis.”

I rubbed my hands across my face. “This guy sounds like a real charmer. How long were they married?”

“Long enough.”

“Jesus.” I looked at Isaac again. “Where is he?”

“Gone.”

It seemed like there was more. “Dead?”

“I’m not sure. Just gone.”

“When?”

“Years ago.” He waited for a moment, and his eyes stayed steady with mine. “It’s probably better that way, don’t you think?” I didn’t say anything. “You can understand my being circumspect concerning her situation.”

“Yes.” I wondered about all the individuals wandering around out there who were in serious need of the administration of a dreadful ass-kicking and weren’t likely to get it. “Why the response to the autopsy?”

“I thought she’d been through enough, and it was her expressed wish that her body not be disturbed any more than it already had. She was very religious.” It was a sad smile this time. “What does Mr. McDermott have to say about cause of death?”

I waited a moment and looked at Isaac, allowing myself the blurred vision of the living hell that he had endured. Lucian said that he had been one of three survivors of Nordhausen, a subcamp of Dora-Mittelbau for inmates too sick or weak to work in the tunnels of Dora. Nordhausen was a Vernichtungslager or extermination camp where starvation was the simple but effective measure. To make matters worse, on April 3, 1945, it was bombed by our air force. Since it was installed in concrete hangers, we thought it was a German munitions depot. A great number of the prisoners were burned alive; a week and a half later, when the 104th Infantry Division liberated Nordhausen, they found three thousand rotting corpses and three survivors. One of them was Isaac Bloomfield, and he weighed fifty-seven pounds.

I always thought that there was a reason why the old man was able to keep going; maybe it was because, as long as he was alive, he was a reminder. “Cardiac arrest. Any history of heart problems in the family?”

He chuckled to himself with a wistful quality. “Oh, Walter, there are nothing but problems of the heart in families such as this.” He continued to smile. “I suppose cardiac complications due to prolonged exposure to syphilitic infection; that, and I believe that Mrs. Baroja took solace in a number of lifelong vices that did nothing to prolong her existence.”

“So there isn’t anything suspicious about her death that you can think of?”

“I don’t think so.” He studied me a little longer than I was comfortable with. “Is this disappointing to you?”

I wondered how much he knew about Mari Baroja and Lucian and suspected that it was more than he was willing to admit. “No, that’s the one odd thing about this job. You’re always willing to turn work away.” I looked down at my uniform, the badge, and the .45 at my hip. It didn’t take much imagination to see the distance that they put between myself and most people, let alone Isaac. Nice people with uniforms, badges, and guns had once told him they were doing things for his own good, his own safety, and his own welfare. Next thing he knew he was being carried out of a reinforced hanger with three thousand dead people. If I were Isaac, I wouldn’t let me in the same room as me. “What do you know about the children?”

“Everything. Carol, Kay, and David.”

“I’m assuming David is dead?” I thought back to the sad-eyed lieutenant in the photograph in her room. “Vietnam?”

“Yes.” His eyes softened a little. “That was your war, wasn’t it, Walter?”

“Don’t blame me, I didn’t start it.” I allowed my mind to play over the photograph again. “I’m trying to think if I knew him.”

“He was quiet.” He said it like I wasn’t. “Mari had a cousin, a priest, I believe.”

“Here in town?”

“He was not a priest here, but I think he retired here . . . If he’s still alive.”

The priest in the family photograph; this would take a little following up. I thought of the picture of the little dark-haired girls on the stoop. “Both of the twins are lawyers?”

“Yes.”

I changed the subject to the only other Baroja I knew who wasn’t a lawyer in an attempt to pick up my spirits. “I understand that one of the grandchildren has a bakery here in town?”

“Yes. Lana was David’s daughter. She is the only grandchild. The twins both have had miscarriages, probably as a result of the hereditary syphilitic condition.” It took a while, but his face brightened. “The bakery is a wonderful place. Have you been there?”

“No, but I’m going there next.” I patted my stomach. “I’ll take a baker over a lawyer any day of the week.”

“You must try the ruggelach, it is the best I have ever tasted.”

As we were leaving, I asked him if he would go by and formally identify Mari Baroja to save the family the grief. He said that he would, and I asked him if he wanted to turn the music off. All he did was lock the door behind us and ask, “Why?”

I watched as the silver Mercedes without snow tires made its way up Fetterman taking a right on Aspen and thought about a man who had escaped the concentration camps and now drove a German car. The Hun be damned.

* * *

I thought the snow had stopped, but it had just satisfied itself with a finer version of delivery. If I squinted my eyes and looked away from the breeze, I could still see the clandestine little flakes ganging up on me. “Okay, so where is this damned bakery?”

Static. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Base, this is Unit One, where is this damned bakery?’ Over.”

It had taken forever to get her to use proper radio procedure, and now I wasn’t sure I was happy with the results. “It’s still snowing, and I haven’t bought my soon-to-arrive daughter anything for Christmas. Have you listened to the weather?”

Static. “More snow. Over.”

“Wonderful. Any ideas about Cady?”

Static. “I’ll work on it, and the bakery is next to the small motor repair place next to the creek. Over.”

“Unit One to Base, thank you. Over.”

Static. “That’s much better.”

The bakery was on the back street, as Ruby had described, next to Evans’s Chainsaw Service, something I was going to need if I ever got my wood-burning stove into operation. The building had been a gift store that had been boarded up for a couple of years. She had pulled off all the old plywood and replaced it with new wood that sported a jaunty red with gold trim. A handpainted sign hung over the entrance between the two bay windows extolling, in a florid script, BAROJA’S BAKED GOODS, as simple as that. Baskets of baguettes and fresh loaves spilled out of carefully arranged displays along with bottles of wine and full pound wedges of exotic cheese. I stood there on the sidewalk and looked up the street to the Durant Courant’s sign just to convince myself that I was still in the county seat. How could I have missed something like this?

I climbed up the steps and pushed the beveled glass door open to the soft tinkling of the attached bell and was immediately assaulted by the smell of vanilla. I pulled my pocket watch out and consulted it as to lunchtime; we concurred that it was early but acceptable.

I looked around, but there wasn’t anyone to be found. I had seen places like this in Denver, Santa Fe, and Salt Lake City, old buildings that had been partially restored but left with a rustic appeal. The red brick walls were exposed on the inside, and the pressed tin ceiling glowed a fiery copper. The floors had been sanded to the original planks, and their distressed quality was preserved in industrial grade polyurethane. There were shelves along the left side of the narrow building that were loaded with all sorts of gourmet goods in assorted bottles and boxes. The counter level had small wicker baskets filled with recognizable Basque baked goods that ran the gamut from black olive bread to Norman loaves. There was a large white porcelain display cooler that held all kinds of cheeses and complicated charcuterie. There were French posters on the walls, lithographs of what I assumed were advertisements for nineteenth-century liqueurs, and an old wooden display case that held a surprising number of antique corkscrews and wine accoutrements.

In the back were two country French tables surrounded by time-worn mismatched chairs, and an upright cooler that held rows of wines and beers that I had never seen before. My attention was drawn to a collection of dark gallon jugs at the bottom. I kneeled down and inspected one of the labels; it read, UNPASTEURIZED BEER FROM THE SPARKLING GEM OF THE HIGH PLAINS, WHEATLAND MERCANTILE, WHEATLAND, WYOMING. There was a jackalope wearing a tuxedo and a monocle on the label. “You have got to be kidding.”

I listened as footsteps approached from the stairwell that I assumed led to the basement. I stood and turned toward the doorway as Lana Baroja appeared, covered in a fine patina of sweat and flour. She still wore her snow boots, but the purple quilted long coat had been replaced with an apron full of doughy handprints, and her hair was now in a French twist. I was getting the feeling that Lana, with her flushed face and darting eyes, was a character in search of a French author. The eyes lost their spark when she recognized me. “I find it very hard to believe that you have a microbrew from Wheatland.”

She placed a fist on her hip and cocked her head. “You’d be surprised at what all I’ve got in here.” She walked past me and behind the counter. “I’m the best kept secret in Durant, not that it’s doing my bank account any good.” She straightened her arms and leaned against the counter. “I assume you’re here because you have some news for me?”

I looked at the cases and tried to spy the item that Isaac had recommended. “Arugula?”

“Excuse me?”

My courage was fleeting. “Something like arugula?” She continued to stare at me as if I were an idiot. “Dr. Bloomfield’s favorite?”

She looked at me through a finely arched black eyebrow and very long lashes. “Ruggelach, a traditional Hanukkah pastry, crescent-shaped, filled, and made with a cream-cheese dough?”

“That would be it.”

“As opposed to arugula or rocket, an aromatic salad green with a peppery mustard flavor?”

“I’ll take both.”

“I only have the pastry.”

“I’ll take that then.”

She smiled and wagged her head; she was enjoying herself. Most people did when it was at the sheriff’s expense. “You’re sure?”

“Anything but.” As she slid back the door of the glass case and extracted a plate of the delicate pastries, I reassessed my thinking about Lana Baroja. There was something old world about her, a practical quality that superceded the popular beauty of the day and drew its warmth from the earth rather than the air. She turned back around from the opposite counter and placed a small waxed bag in front of me. I looked at it. “It’s a gift.”

“For what?”

“Caring about my grandmother.”

I nodded. “Thank you.” I studied the little sack and thought about Mari Baroja. “Did she bake?”

“Yes.” She looked at the little white bag, and it was obvious to both of us that it was symbolic of something important and tactile that was being passed between us: it was a contract. “Whenever we visited from Colorado Springs she would bake things with me.” The dark eyes came up. “I guess that’s how I got started.”

“Your father was at the Academy?”

She brought her palms up from the counter. “Air force.”

“He died in Vietnam?”

“Yes. I didn’t get much of a chance to know him. Did you?”

I thought of the sad-eyed young man. “No, but I know a guy a lot like him. How about your mother?”

She stared at me for a second. “She’s still in Colorado Springs; her, a mean little shih tzu, and Jesus.”

I nodded. “I see.”

“What did Dr. Bloomfield say?”

I leaned a hip of my own against the counter. “He said that your grandmother had heart complications due to a chronic condition, and the medical examiner from Billings seems to concur with the prognosis so far.”

“So far?”

I started for the door; things had gone so well I didn’t want to spoil them. “We should have a death certificate by the end of the day.”

“It really isn’t fair, you know?” I stopped with my hand resting on the brass handle. She still leaned against the counter with her arms folded, staring at the worn surface. “Just when you get to the point where you can enjoy them, they’re gone.”

I thought about it. “It’s that way sometimes with children, too.”

She continued to stare at the wood and extended a finger to trace the grain. “I wouldn’t know.”

I paused for a moment more. “On the subject of family, what can you tell me about your grandfather?”

The finger stopped. “He was a prick, and he’s dead.”

I was relieved but tried to hide it. “He’s dead? Do you know how he died?”

The dark eyes looked straight at me and blinked only once. “Surely you know. Lucian Connally killed him.”

4

I told the ladies at vehicle registration to punch up Charlie Nurburn on the DMV computer and show me what they had or I was going to set fire to the place.

It didn’t take long for them to tell me zip, so I asked them how far back the data went. They asked me how far back I wanted to go. The ladies at vehicle registration were like that. After all the years of abuse at the hands of the local citizenry, they had developed the finely honed tact and manners of Russian wolfhounds. I asked for the forties, and they came forth grudgingly with nothing. I asked for the fifties, and they eventually showed me that Charlie had registered a 1950 Kaiser but had failed to pay taxes or registration a year later. He had also failed to have his driver’s license renewed. There were no further records to date. I asked them what a Kaiser looked like. They said it looked a lot like a Frazer. I asked them what a Frazer looked like. They said it looked like a Hudson. Before I left, I reminded them about the fire. They asked me when the fire was going to start so they could be sure to call the county commissioners and get them in the courthouse for a meeting. I told them I was going across the hall to the county clerk’s office. They said that was a good place to start a fire, that there was enough blue hair over there to burn down the whole damn county.

I walked across the hall and once again put forth the human query of Charlie Nurburn. Wyoming has no income tax, so I asked for anything the ladies there might have concerning Charlie’s birth, life, marriage, children, or death, not necessarily in that order. They were nicer than the ladies over in vehicle registration and came back with more. There were three birth certificates for his children, David in ’47 and the twins in ’48, a death certificate for the sad-eyed young lieutenant, circa 1972, and a marriage certificate dated 1946. Nothing else. No death certificate for Charlie Nurburn, so I copied down his social security number and warned them about the impending fire. They didn’t seem to care either way.

I walked down the hall past the stairs that led to the courtroom above but got corralled by Vern Selby. He wanted to talk about the outstanding warrants we had on people who had neglected to show up for jury duty, which told me that we might not have reached our quorum for the afternoon. He leaned an elbow on the newel post like Clifton Webb in repose and twisted the end of his mustache; it was officially winter because the judge had grown his matinee-idol lip warmer. He didn’t seem pleased. “ We only had seven jurors today.”

“Maybe you need to get more entertainment values involved, you know, bang the gavel more?”

He studied me a while longer. “I knew you were the wrong person to talk to about such things.”

I shrugged and headed for the assessor’s office but stopped after a step. “Vern, do you remember a Charlie Nurburn from the southern part of the county, married to Mari Baroja?” I was saving the lawyers as a final connection.

“Related to Kay Baroja-Lofton over in Sheridan and Carol Baroja-Calloway in Miami?”

I should have known. I noticed he didn’t mention Lana; her not being a lawyer probably dropped her down to the level of the rest of us mere mortals. “He was the father, of those two and another one.”

“David Nurburn?”

“Yes.” So Lana’s father had kept his father’s name, but she hadn’t. Interesting.

“I believe he was about the same age as my William, and you, come to think of it.” The judge contemplated the acoustical tiles in the ceiling for a moment. I wondered how he could play with his mustache that much and still leave it intact. “I don’t seem to recall the father.”

“He wasn’t on the scene for long.”

“Ah,” he smiled. “But I remember her.” I was a little taken aback by the smile. “She used to come to town on Thursday afternoons, park her car in the exact same spot. I used to watch her from the windows of my office as she walked up Main Street.”

The image of his honor hanging out the second-story window of the courthouse and watching Mari Baroja sashay down the sidewalk was almost too much. “Jeez, Vern. You’re a pervert.”

He looked at me and shook his head. “She was a beautiful woman and very hard not to look at.” He took his elbow from the post and patted it in thanks for supporting him. Even inanimate objects were good for votes in Vern’s book. “In any case, I’m not the one you should be talking to. Lucian used to have lunch with her every Thursday, like clockwork.” He stepped down to my level, turned the corner, and carefully put on his coat and muffler. “At least I assume it was lunch . . .”

I stood there for a moment, getting my bearings, until I became aware that the judge had stopped, turned, and was looking at me. “How is she?”

“Dead.”

He continued adjusting his coat. “I suspected as much; too bad, really.” He misunderstood my staring at him. “One hates to see that much beauty go out of the world these days.” The next thing I knew, he was standing next to me with his gloved hand on my arm. “Walter, are you all right?” I mumbled something, and he nodded. “Let’s see about getting some more jurors, shall we?”

After the stun had worked its way off, I went into the assessor’s office and asked Lois Kolinsky if she had anything on Charlie Nurburn. She looked up with her little Mrs. Santa Claus glasses and asked me who was asking, and I remembered to tell her about the fire. She snickered and looked for the ledgers as I stood there thinking.

Lucian had lied. Lucian had lied when he said that he hadn’t seen her for all those years. I looked up at the large map of the county that was illuminated by the flat, winter sun and wondered where in the hell I was. The place on the wall wasn’t where I happened to be as of late; I was in a strange new place, a place where the people I had safely put on shelves were wandering around getting into messy things.

Lois came back into the room, placed a large ledger on the cast-off library table, and opened it to the exact page held by her index finger. I pulled out a chair. It amused me that the two places that had computers couldn’t seem to slap their asses with both hands, but the nice little old lady in the assessor’s office could conjure Charlie Nurburn in a matter of moments. Always follow the money; rendering unto Caesar what is his may not be pleasurable, but the records are great. I was having second thoughts about the computer; maybe I didn’t need one after all. I could use the extra money for a lie detector.

We have ledgers like these back at the office, three of them to be precise. They are beautiful, handbound leather with golden edging and marbled inner leaves with information that stretched back to the mid-1800s. Now we have floppy discs. The ledger was alphabetically organized, so it didn’t take long to find Charlie on the open page; he was the only Nurburn in the county. He had bought a small property in 1946, about 260 acres adjacent to the 50,000-acre Four Brothers Ranch; the brothers had sold it to him. Both Mari and Charlie were on the deed. He had paid the taxes on the property until 1950, whereupon he must have piled his syphilitic, wife-beating ass into his Kaiser, whatever it looked like, and driven off into the sunset. Or not.

Mari had paid the taxes on the property beginning in 1951. The Four Brothers had been split between her and her cousin, the priest, according to the Will of her father, the last of the four brothers to die. I asked for the B book. She said that it had been a popular letter lately. I asked her why, and she said that Kay Baroja-Lofton had been in yesterday to check things out on her mother’s behalf and that Carol Baroja-Calloway had requested information to be faxed to Calloway, Moore, and Gardner in Miami; the letters in Mari’s room were from that firm. It just kept getting better and better.

Where was Charlie Nurburn? I looked at the nine-numeral scrawl that I had made on the scrap pad. It was time to use my own resources. I left the courthouse, completely forgetting to set fire to it.

I keyed the mic. “Charlie Nurburn.” I read her the number from the piece of paper.

Static. “Who is this character?”

“Somebody I’m not so sure I want to find.”

* * *

It was only forty-five miles south to Swayback Road, then another three miles east toward the Wallows where the Four Brothers Ranch was located, or where I thought it was located. As I drove down the interstate, the tailgate of my truck buffeted by the gusts from the northwest, I started feeling like I was being pushed.

I had stood there in the doorway of Lana’s shop. It was one of those moments when you weren’t quite sure if what you heard was what you thought you had heard. In the second that it took me to make up my mind, she laughed. It was a wonderfully musical laugh, one that you couldn’t help but join. After I did, questions didn’t seem appropriate. I told her that if she wanted to see her grandmother, she could probably do it this evening; but, on the lonely stretch of highway between Durant and Powder Junction, with the Big Horn Mountains guarding my right and the Powder River flats racing east, my mind began to wander back to a man who had had the one woman in his life taken away. It’s one thing if she’d been gone but, as near as I could tell, she had only been forty-five miles distant.

There’s no way I’d have been able to stay away. I flattered myself by thinking that, if faced with such a circumstance, I would respond within the letter of the law; but passion is a strange thing, a thing that warps and twists everything with which it comes in contact. It was like the combination of moisture and sunshine on wood; sometimes it turned out all right, most of the times it didn’t, but you couldn’t ignore its strength. I had always dealt with passion with an evenhanded balance of attraction and mistrust, but I was talking about Lucian Connally, and he was a mechanism that operated on the caprice of passion as if it were jet fuel. Thursday midmornings would never be the same for me again. Where was Charlie Nurburn, and what was he feeling lately, if anything? Maybe I needed to see what Mari Baroja was about, but if that were the case then I would have to make an extended search in better weather for the place where a small house leaned away from the blows of the wind.

There was an aged wooden sign for the Four Brothers Ranch, which contrasted with the new one that read PRONGHORN DRILLING, RIG # 29, when I cut off the paved road and onto the county gravel. The snow wasn’t too deep, and there appeared to have been quite a bit of traffic as late as this morning. I slowed to a stop as I rounded the hill that led to the small valley where the homestead still sat, the snow sweeping around me and dropping into the rolling hills of the high plains. I thought about those hard men on their short horses. I wondered if they were still here and if they were aware that Mari was now with them.

I watched the sage straining at its roots to escape the force of the northwest wind, edged the truck farther out on the road that followed the hills, and descended into the valley of the four brothers and one lost girl. I buttoned my coat, flipped the sheepskin collar up, and twisted my hat down tight. With the sun starting to ebb, the temperature was dropping fast, and I was just starting to hear the little voices that spoke to you when you were out where you shouldn’t be when nobody knew where you were and the weather was getting bad.

I stumbled up to the first wheel hub and locked it in, trudging through the midcalf drifts to the other side and locking the mechanism there as well. Over the sound of the big ten-cylinder engine, I listened to the keening of the wind and to the cry of things you didn’t hear in town. If I could just separate Mari Baroja’s voice from the screaming cacophony, I felt that she would tell me the things I needed to know. There was a small switchback around a juniper tree at the base of the hill where the snow had filled a trough, but other tires had busted their way through and had created a path of sorts. I drove up the slight grade and stopped at the edge. This area was slightly sheltered, and the snow blew over the cab of the truck like a fake ceiling.

I had wondered what it was that could be of so much importance and, now that I was looking at it, I felt like a fool. I could make out at least a dozen methane wellheads, containment tanks, and a compression station. If all the wells I could see, and the ones I suspected I couldn’t, were on line and producing, someone was making a lot of money. I followed the most recent set of tracks across the arch of the hill. From this vantage point, I could make out another three dozen wellheads. There was a vague outline of a drilling rig with numerous vehicles parked below it; I shifted into low and headed in that direction.

Methane development in the northern part of Wyoming had become a mixed blessing, and it seemed like every jackleg that could turn a wrench had suddenly become a roughneck. The amount of trucks with plates from Oklahoma and Texas had certainly increased, but the number of people who were actually benefiting financially from the methane boom was few. In Wyoming, there is a practice of carving off a portion of the mineral rights from a property at the point of sale, resulting in ranchers who had very little say over whom the leases were sold to and, consequently, who could drive on your land and pretty much do as they pleased. The methane industry’s propaganda poster children were the ones who had retained their mineral rights, could enforce a suitable surface agreement, and got a portion of the money from the gas that was produced.

The impact the industry had made on my life had been relatively negligible. Other than the odd roughneck getting overly self-medicated and needing some downtime in the jail, keeping the ranchers and the drillers from killing each other was about it. I suppose I looked at methane development as a false economy in a boom-and-bust cycle.

When I got to the site, there didn’t seem to be anybody outside, and there was no activity on the rig itself. I don’t know that much about methane drilling, but just about everything shuts down in my part of the world when the temperature closes in past zero. The printing on the truck doors read NORTHERN ROCKIES ENERGY EXPLORATION, an outfit out of Casper. I waited, but no one in the truck was moving very fast to see what I wanted; finally, the man in the driver’s seat tightened the hood of his Carhartt coveralls and climbed out. He walked in front of my truck, opened the door, and climbed in on the passenger side, slamming the door behind him.

He peeled the hood back, pulled the fleece scarf from his face, and revealed a set of pale blue eyes. He was of average height, but was disproportionately large in the shoulders and hands, one of which he had de-gloved and held out to me. Between the glove finger in his mouth and the amount of ferocious red beard he had to talk through, I had to listen carefully to understand him. “Wanna thank you for cumin’ down, but I think we got ’er under control.”

I looked at him. “No problem.” I kept looking at him in hopes that he would say something more on the offhand chance that I might understand it. I took the hand that was almost as large as my own. “Why don’t you just tell me all about it?”

We shook, and he nodded and pulled the hood all the way back to reveal a lot more red hair and a yellow Northern Rockies Energy Exploration hat. “He’s not a bad ol’ boy, he just gets carried away some times.” He looked at his lap. “I’m not gonna lie to you, mighta been some drugs. Shit, he’s so loopy he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.” He sniffed. “Just a little ol’ thirtytu.” I looked at Yukon Cornelius and raised an eyebrow. “Ah’m aw right.” He nodded. “Just glanced a rib.” He assisted the last statement by unzipping his jacket and poking a finger through what I assumed was a bullet hole in both the front and rear of his coat. There was a dark stain at his side where the blue plaid flannel was exposed, but he only shrugged and looked at me. “Just a little ol’ thirtytu.” He nodded some more. “Told ’em not to call yuh.”

As far as I knew, they hadn’t. “Well, I like to be informed when people are shooting each other in my county.” I pulled the aluminum form folder from the door pocket, placed it on the center console between us, and pulled my pen from my shirtfront. I clicked it. “What’s his name?”

He took a deep breath. “Cecil Keller.” He looked at me, and I was impressed by the direct and steady quality of his gaze. “Constable, I just don’ want him to get in trouble fer this.”

“You don’t want to lose him?”

He shrugged. “He’s just a dumb kid.”

After a moment, I clicked the pen closed and placed it on the clipboard. “What’s your name?”

He automatically stuck out his hand again. “Jess Aliff, foreman.”

We shook again. “Jess, unless you’re willing to press charges, seeing as how you’re the one that he shot, I can’t do too much about this, but I have to file a report on any gunshot wounds in my jurisdiction.” He nodded some more and pulled at a wayward blondish-red tuft just below his lower lip. “But I don’t suppose you’re planning on going to a hospital?”

He blew out a dismissal puff of air and looked at me. “Naw.”

“Well, then I guess there’s not a lot to do officially.” His mood visibly brightened. “But I don’t like the idea of drug-crazed individuals running around my county with unregistered weapons shooting people.” He nodded and did his best to look serious. “Mister Keller is going to have to come in with the gun and have a little chat with me tomorrow.”

We both nodded. I looked out the windshield at the silent rig and the assembled vehicles idling in the frigid air. “Quite an operation you’ve got going here.”

He followed my gaze. “Not today.”

“Just out of curiosity, what does an outfit like this produce in a day?”

He thought and pulled at the tuft again; I was starting to see a pattern. “Well, we’re on tap with three pods, the biggest on the tail end of the Big George coal seam, 220 heads.”

“High production?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Millions. I looked back out the windshield and let it sink in. “How long have you fellas been in operation here?”

“A little less than a year.”

That was a lot of methane being pulled out of the ground of Four Brothers Ranch. From my quick glance at the mineral rights at the courthouse, I figured the Barojas were making more than a lot of money but, if Mari had died of natural causes, there was no need to search for a motive. I had piqued my own curiosity and was going to have to go back to the courthouse, but it was creeping up on five o’clock. There was always tomorrow. I looked back at the man sitting in my passenger seat. “ ’Bout time for you guys to pack it in, isn’t it?”

He glanced past me to the truck alongside. “They will. I’ll stick aroun’ to see if the weather changes.” Before he climbed out, I reminded him that I wanted to talk to Mr. Keller tomorrow. Mr. Aliff said he’d make sure that the young man would be there first thing, and I had no doubts that he would. Mr. Aliff did not strike me as a trifling individual, bullet holes notwithstanding.

I did some quick figures as I carefully picked my way across the ridge to the county road and back toward the highway. I was tired, but I needed to talk to someone about all of this before I went and talked to Lucian. I figured I’d check in at the office, gas up, stop by the house to check for snowdrifts, and go see Henry Standing Bear.

* * *

When I got to the office it was close to six, but I recognized every vehicle, including one that took me a minute. I parked the Bullet and took a deep breath to prepare myself for what was inside.

When I opened the office door, I became instantly aware of a kangaroo court in full session. It was in the air, like the snowflakes. Ruby was seated at her desk, and Vic was leaning against it with her arms folded; Saizarbitoria was standing a little away—he probably didn’t want to get blood on the borrowed uniform. I noticed they were all holding plastic wine glasses, except for Sancho, and there was an open bottle of merlot on Ruby’s desk.

I closed the door behind me and turned to look at all of them. There were a number of Post-its on the doorjamb of my office, but I figured I’d get to those. I was about to say something witty when I caught a pair of very nice legs out of the corner of my eye belonging to someone sitting in one of my visitors’ chairs with a coat and a large dog head on her lap. I leaned forward around the coat rack and met a vivacious set of deep-sea blues, “Hello.”

“Hello.”

“Slow day at the safe-deposit boxes?” I leaned a little farther and took her all in. Dog didn’t move, and I didn’t blame him.

Her hand paused on his head, and she looked down; she was also holding one of the plastic wine glasses. “What’s your dog’s name?”

I felt just a little ashamed. “He doesn’t really have one. I’ve been calling him Dog.” I looked back at her. “I’ve only had him for a couple of weeks now.”

She did a slow nod. “I hope you don’t mind. I thought I’d stop by and deliver a gift of gratitude for last night.” She raised the glass in a slight toast and then used it to gesture toward the pack. “They said it was okay.”

I looked at the assembly. “I bet they did.” I made a great show of pulling out my pocket watch. “Whose got the watch tonight?” Both Ruby and Vic finally looked at something other than Maggie Watson. I looked over at Saizarbitoria, too. “You pulling double duty?”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind. I used to do it in Rawlins all the time.”

I turned to Ruby. “You give him the beeper?”

She didn’t look at me. “I gave him the beeper.”

I needed a quick neutralizer to change the point of interest, so I walked over and poured myself a glass. “Great.” I smiled and turned to Vic. “How’d he do?”

She held the synthetic glass at her temple. “He’s really polite.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

She took a sip and glanced over to Ms. Watson. “We all choose where to expend our energies.”

I was pretty sure that that arched eyebrow could pierce steel, but Maggie Watson saved herself and me. “I was wondering if you were free for dinner?”

All their eyes swiveled back to her.

“Dinner?”

All their eyes swiveled back to me.

“Yes.”

I was feeling a little dizzy with all the attention. “I just have a bit of work to do, and then I’ll swing by and pick you up.” I looked down at the exposed and very lovely legs. “Dress warm, okay?”

“Okay.” It was easier on everybody’s eyes since we were now standing beside each other.

I helped her with her coat and opened the door as she turned and looked at the assembly. “Nice meeting everyone. Bye.” I closed the door as she stepped into the darkness and onto the stoop, and I turned back to face the afternoon of the long knives.

“Her car was stuck.”

“Really?”

I took a sip of my wine. “Really. Look, don’t think that you’re so big that I can’t put you over my knee and spank your little Italian butt.”

She looked up at me with a carnivorous smile. “Watch it, big man, it might work with the locals, but I’ve been to the rodeo.” She walked past me toward her office. “Anyway, I’m not into that stuff, and it sounds like you better save it for tonight.”

At least she hadn’t said fuck fourteen times. Maybe she really was on her best behavior. I turned back to Ruby. “Charlie Nurburn?”

She turned back to her computer, and I noticed there wasn’t anything on it except a blank blue screen. I also noticed that her coat was in her lap, even if she still had her half-glass of wine. “Go read your Post-its.”

I leaned over and kissed the top of her head, sighed, and trudged off to my office. I glanced back at Saizarbitoria. “You got anything to say?”

“No, sir.”

I guess that’s when I hired him. He sat in the chair opposite my desk as I tossed the Post-its on the blotter and carefully placed the mostly full goblet on top of them. People always took precedence over Post-its, so I asked him what was on his mind.

“I’m having a good time.” The silence hung in the room for a moment.

“Good.” I wondered if he’d feel the same way standing in front of the IGA accosting the citizenry. “You can have wine some other time.”

He laughed, and I looked at the bright young man sitting in front of me and felt like Monsieur de Treville with the young Gascon in attendance. It was hard not to with the Vandyke and the mischievous glint. I wondered if, like D’Artagnan, he was going to be an inordinate pain. He seemed to be waiting for more, so I reached into my coat pocket and produced the bookmark I had taken from Mari Baroja’s room. “You’ve got quite a facility with languages. Maybe you can help me out with something.” I flipped the piece of paper on the desk, careful to avoid the wine. He leaned over and turned the scrap so that he could read it. He was smiling. “What?”

“How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That I’m Basque?”

I kept looking at him and, in a flash, it all fit. “Just a lucky guess.”

“I’m French Basque.” I contemplated that one as he looked back at the piece of paper and the scribbled hand. “It says ‘We can no longer say.’ ” He waited, and it was an old world wait, the kind that doesn’t concern itself with giving you a fast answer. The Cheyenne and Crow were masters of such things, but the kid was pretty good. “I’m not sure if it means anything, but it’s also a line from a poem by Jean Diharce about Guernica.” It didn’t take him long to remember the translation. “Guernica. This name inflames and saddens my heart; centuries will know its misfortunes. . . . We can no longer say the names Numancia and Carthage without saying in a loud voice in Euskara, lying in its ruins, Guernica.” There wasn’t a lot of drama in the presentation; he stated it as if it were history. “Is this from the woman that died?” I nodded, and he studied it some more. “You think it’s important?”

“Everything’s important when you don’t know what you’re looking for, or if you even should be looking.”

“She was Basque?” I nodded some more. “Is there anybody you’d like me to talk to?”

I sighed, thought about the old priest, Mari’s cousin, and looked at the scrap of paper. “Maybe.” I looked back up at him. “You got a place to stay tonight?”

“I figured I’d just stay here.”

“Okay, but you might need a vehicle. If anything happens, take Vic’s. There’s an extra set of keys on the wall by the door.”

I couldn’t tell if he was smiling when he left my office, and that probably was a good thing. I picked up the piece of paper. “We can no longer say.” It was capitalized at the beginning, which led me to believe that it wasn’t the continuation of a stanza or part of a poem. I didn’t know Mari Baroja but thought she might have had enough on her plate without political intrigue. She was Basque, though.

I stuffed the paper scrap back in my pocket and picked up my life in Post-it form. Vic appeared in my doorway with her jacket over her shoulder and wine glass in hand. “I can’t fucking believe you’re gonna get laid before me.”

“Maybe you should stop looking at this as a competition?”

“You are such an asshole.” She took a sip. “Not that I give a shit, but where have you been all day?”

I took a sip of my wine, its complex bouquet undiminished by the styrene stemware. “Following up on this Baroja thing.”

“There’s a thing?”

I blew out and thought back on my day. “Spoke with the ME from Billings. His opinion is that she smoked too much, she drank too much, and I’m coming to the conclusion that she might have done other things too much as well.”

She shrugged and toasted with her glass. “That’s how I wanna go.”

I curbed the urge to say something about slow starts. “Talked to the personal physician.”

“Who is?”

“Isaac Bloomfield, who concurred. There was something else, though.” She held the edge of the plastic against her lip. “She’d been consistently beaten.” Her eyes widened. “Massive tissue damage on the back and other areas.”

The lip slipped away. “Holy shit.”

“It gets better. I went to see the granddaughter.”

When I told her what Lana had said, she came and sat in the chair opposite my desk and scooted it in so that she could lay her arms on the flat surface and rest her chin there. The glass dangled over the edge, unseen. Her voice was low, but it cut like only a woman’s voice can. “No fucking way. Lucian?”

“It gets better.”

“It can’t get any better, unless you found the body.”

“Trust me, it gets better.” I told her about the conversation with the judge.

“Fuck me.” She glanced around the room; she had just been given a passport to strangeland where I had spent the day. The big eyes finally came back to rest on me, and they were heavy. “He did it. I’ll bet you anything he did it.” The cutting voice was back. “The love of your life is taken away and is being slowly beaten to death? Charlie Nurburn is lying in a shallow grave in Absaroka County or eaten by coyotes and shit off a cliff, which is too good for the son of a bitch.” She folded her arms on the desk again, having spoken. “What are you gonna do?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are you gonna do?” It was a smile, a wonderfully vicious and lovely smile with no warmth in it. “The sheriff has killed a man, the one-legged bandit, your pal.”

I leaned in until our noses were about sixteen inches apart. “I really wish you weren’t enjoying this so much.”

“I can’t help it. This is one of those great fucking moral quandaries, and I can’t wait to see what you’re gonna do next.”

I folded an arm and supported my head with a fist. “I’m going to wait and see what comes back from the NCIC.”

“It’s going to say that Charlie Nurburn is dead as the proverbial doornail and that somebody hammered him a very long time ago.” She trapped her lower lip in thought. “Can I go with you when you go to talk to Lucian?”

“No.”

She whined. “C’mon.” I didn’t say anything and, after a moment, she asked again: “C’mon.” We stared at each other for a while, and then she drank the last sip of her wine, placed the empty glass on my desk, and stood. “I don’t have to mention that there is no statute of limitations on murder, right?”

I sighed, still holding my head up with my fist. “No, you don’t. You also don’t have to impress upon me how easy it is to drive a man to the act.”

She pulled a wayward lock behind her ear, sparkled her eyes with a quick batting of the lashes, and quarter curtseyed. “Just here to help out.” She paused at the door. “By the way . . . ?”

“Yes?”

“I hope you get the clap.”

I collapsed my head on my arm and looked at the small amount of wine in my plastic glass, trying to figure out how to drown myself in it. What was I going to do? Hard as I tried, I couldn’t see myself marching into Lucian’s room and accusing him of something I wasn’t sure he had done. I was going to have to feel the outside edges of the thing first. I wanted to know why he had lied to me; it was a start, a chicken-shit start, but a start. As soon as I looked toward the Post-its, Ruby appeared in the doorway.

Her tone was stern. “Have you read those?”

“I’d rather have you tell me.”

She came in, and I noticed she had a large mailing envelope under her arm. “You want the good news or the bad news first?”

“There’s good news?”

“Charlie Nurburn is alive and well and living in Vista Verde, New Mexico.”

My head came off the desk like it was on fire. “What?”

She tapped the Post-its with a bright red nail, which had a little holiday wreath painted on it. “According to the records, Mr. Charlie Nurburn has been paying his taxes in Vista Verde since 1951. Here is his address and phone number.”

I yelled out the door. “Vic!”

“She’s gone.”

I got up and walked around the desk and kissed the top of her head again. “Thank you. You have no idea how much.”

She looked up at me. “Does this mean you’re ready for the bad news?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Mari Baroja is in Billings. The medical examiner said that there were tests he wanted to perform and that he couldn’t do them here.”

I stared at her for a moment and then rubbed my hands across my face. “When was this?”

“He phoned about an hour ago.”

“He already took her?”

“Yes. He said that he left a series of autopsy pictures for you at the hospital. I had the Ferg pick them up before he left.” She was watching me, but I was looking out the window and into the darkness of my life. I wasn’t in any hurry to see those pictures. She placed the large envelope on my desk.

“Is there any more bad news?”

“Cady called. She said to tell you she was packed and to remind you that she would be here tomorrow.”

“Oh, God.”

“No, it’s not that bad. I’ve got some ideas. Do you want me to just use the department plastic?”

“Yes, by all means. Just keep the receipts.” I nudged the Post-its with my fingertips. “Anything else?”

She shrugged. “The rest of it’s all kind of mediocre.”

“How’s the new kid?”

She brightened immediately and looked directly at me to let me know that she meant business. “We have to keep him.”

“I’m working on it.” I took the last sip of my wine, my mood having been improved. “He’s Basque.”

“That’s nice.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it; it just seemed like such a Ruby thing to say. “I don’t suppose Mr. McDermott mentioned what kinds of tests he wanted to run?”

“He did not.” She studied me for a while. “This is going to be a problem with the family?”

“Oh, yes.”

“The church?”

I snorted. “Worse than that, lawyers.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You know, I wish somebody would ask me something besides that today.” She waited. “I think I’m going to run away to the Rez.”

She smiled and had a little silence of her own. “Maybe you two need to touch index fingers and recharge.”

I picked up the Post-it with Charlie’s information and the pictures, feeling the weight of the photographs. I followed Ruby out the door and into the snow, scraped off her windshield, and watched her drive slowly away. I loaded Dog into the truck, sat on his snowy footprints, and stuffed the Post-it into my breast pocket. I didn’t look at the photos, choosing instead to place the manila envelope carefully in the center console. When the console lid snapped shut, it was very loud.

5

It was a zoo, like it always was. Maggie and the Bear were sorting through a container full of Mennonite photographs, which were destined for a spring show at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art. The box the photos were in was for a Stetson Open Road model, a hat I had threatened to switch to about a month ago until Vic had voiced the opinion that I would look like LBJ. I looked up at the numerous and sundry pots and pans that glittered copper in the tasteful light of the small votive candles that were everywhere in the room and in the reflections of the bay windows that looked out over a receding hill and ancient sea. It was a culinary island, an eating oasis at the edge of a snowy ocean, and it was cozy, even with the other forty-three Indians eating, drinking, drumming, and roaming around the place.

I tried to concentrate on my appointed task of cutting onions, but the six conversations and the drumming were making it difficult. There were about a dozen of us who were seated and standing around the center island and, as near as I could tell, I was the only one working. I took a break and looked around to give my eyes a chance to clear.

This house knew my secrets. It knew about the time Henry and I had gotten so drunk after a junior varsity Sadie Hawkins Day dance that we had slid from the roof adjoining Henry’s room and dropped twenty feet only to be saved by the deep snow below. Henry’s father, Eldridge, came and got us, sitting us at the kitchen table and forcing us to drink bootleg hooch for the rest of the night until we both threw up and passed out. When he made us eat eggs and Tabasco sauce the next morning, he explained that if we were going to be drunks we should know what the life was like. The house knew about the night I had called from Los Angeles to tell Henry about being drafted by the marines only to find that he had received a similar letter in Berkeley from the army. The house remembered when I had introduced Henry to my new wife, Martha. It remembered when Cady was two and established the ritual of barking like a seal for the McKenzie River salmon that always seemed to be on hand. It had been the nerve center for getting out the Indian vote when I had run for sheriff the first time. It knew when Martha had died of cancer, and it had contained the both of us when I had come to tell Henry that four high school boys in Durant had raped his niece. The house knew a million sorrows, a million victories, and Henry and me apiece. It knew when you were hungry, it knew when you were sad, and best of all it knew when you needed comfort.

I looked longingly at the dark beer in the glass to my left through watering eyes, but I had made myself a promise that I wouldn’t have another sip until I had finished cutting another onion. I cheated and took a swig.

“Lawman, do you have those onions cut?”

I sat my glass back down. “I need some nourishment.”

“Yes, the onions are holding us up.” Brandon White Buffalo had pressed me into service when we had arrived, while Henry had absconded with my date. Brandon was the owner/operator of the White Buffalo Sinclair station in Lame Deer.

I looked around the table and knew just about everybody, including Lonnie Little Bird, who sat in his wheelchair, so close to my stool that you couldn’t tell his legs were missing. “When is Melissa coming home?”

He smiled so broadly that I thought his head might crack open. “She comes back tomorrow. Um-hmm, yes, it is so.” A product of fetal alcohol syndrome, Melissa was finishing her first semester at a community college in South Dakota. I had known the Little Birds for years. They were important in a case that I had solved less than a month ago and so, every once in a while, Lonnie would wheel himself into the office and give me updates on Melissa’s progress. “She’s liking school?”

“She is liking basketball. Um-hmm, yes, it is so.”

I went back to slicing. I yelled to Brandon. “How small do you want these onions?”

He glanced over. “Halves lengthwise into half-inch strips, Lawman.” I shrugged. For me eating was a necessity, but for Henry it was art, and the coda of his art was ease and originality. I was surprised he was allowing Brandon to do the cooking, but it was under close supervision. I glanced at the Bear and Maggie Watson, and it seemed as if they were sitting awfully close to one another. I stuck the knife out to get his attention above the halting tempo of the numerous Cheyenne conversations. “What are we making again?”

He glanced up. “Ga xao xa ot.” He looked at my blank face. “Vietnamese.”

I thought about it and continued in a loud voice. “I don’t remember having anything like this when I was over there.”

“That is because everything you ate over there came out of an American can.”

“I had a lot of Tiger beer.”

“I do not think that could be considered a gourmet item.” He reached over and touched Maggie’s arm as she smiled and looked back at him. They were drinking white wine; I didn’t like the stuff. I remembered a French expatriate at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge who advised me that the stuff was all right for in the morning when you don’t feel well or for the ladies.

I watched her as she talked, the delicate way that her lips moved. They were pretty great lips, really well defined, and they always seemed to have a fresh coat of lipstick even though I had only caught the application a few times. She was positively brilliant now, flushed with the excitement of the exotic, alien surroundings and with the Bear’s stories.

“So, the onions are the first part?” He didn’t answer, but she stopped listening and smiled. “So, the onions . . .”

The response was a little sharp. “Yes.”

I waited a moment to let him know that he’d hurt my feelings. “I was just asking.” He nodded, sighed, and looked back at Maggie. “Well, I just want you to know that you’ve hurt my feelings.” I leaned toward Maggie so that she could feel my pain. “See . . . tears.”

She laughed, I sighed and felt a large shadow cast over me from behind; Brandon White Buffalo was a good six inches taller than I. He took the cutting board full of onions with a pair of gigantic hands, and I watched as the plate disappeared. The festivities had started at the Shoulder Blade Elders Center and then had followed Henry Standing Bear home, where the party was always waiting to begin. It was such a wonderful name, Shoulder Blade Elders Center. It sounded like a place where you could go and get a few things straightened out by men and women who had been down the trail you were now traveling, a place where they could lay a leathered hand on your shoulder, look into your eyes through the cataracts, and help make a few things clearer. Things like that happened at the Durant Home for Assisted Living, but they were harder to come by, as there was just no romance in the place’s name and therefore in its consideration.

I glanced down at the photograph Henry and Maggie were studying. It was of a uniformed man in riding boots handing an American flag to a small group of what might have been Indian chiefs. The flag draped between them like something to catch the promises. I noticed the uniformed man’s end swooped lower, allowing anything that might have been inside to escape. The Indians looked at the flag as if they weren’t quite sure what to make of it. The chiefs wore crisp white shirts, woolen vests, beaded moccasins, and a collective countenance of long-standing indifference. I recognized the land behind them, the few trees and the undulating hills that made up the majority of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation’s topography. I could even make out the shadow of the photographer on the legs of another white man in a baggy suit who stood to the right. I noticed this shadow did not touch the Indians, as if they were immune. There was another chief in full war bonnet to the right; his lips were pressed together, and he was the only one looking directly at the camera as it attempted to steal his soul.

I looked at the dynamic people surrounding the table, a people who had been cheated, frozen, starved, and hunted almost into extinction, a people who, with the combined nations of the Brules, Sansarcs, Minneconjous, Hunkpapas, Ogllalas, and Blackfeet, fought the United States of America to a standstill. My money was still on them.

I watched as the giant took the assembled ingredients and retreated to the stove. He added a little oil and the onions to a large frying pan set at medium heat. He tossed in a pinch of salt and some garlic and juggled the handle of the cast-iron skillet without the assistance of a pot holder.

Maggie was talking to Henry again, the only conversation that was in English, but Brandon had brought the cutting board back. “More.”

I continued to toil in the fields and listened to Henry and Maggie, to the cadence of their talk—not so much the words, but the rhythm. It joined with the wonderful language that encircled us, and I recognized echoes of another time and another woman. Not so long ago, I had sat in a kitchen similar to this one and listened to Vonnie’s melodic laughter and, like soundings into a dark, deep, and liquid place, the vibrations were stirring me; they continued to lap like ripples in a strong current. There was a desperate need to make the right choices concerning matters of the heart.

I thought about Maggie Watson. As much as I hated mysteries, she loved them. For me, the cipher was a rosary bead fed through thumb and forefinger, but for her it was catching butterflies. I was an investigator, and she was a fortune hunter. People loved treasure and must have been happy to hear from her; generally, I was not that lucky.

I turned the onions, halved them, and began cutting the half-inch slices, barely avoiding slicing my left index finger as well; Henry’s knives were very sharp. After I finished the last quarter, my eyes were drawn back to Maggie. When I looked, she was looking at me with the sea blue at full tide. She smiled just a little and then turned back to Henry. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to chase a ghost through someone else’s body, to try and capture a part of someone who was lost by taking someone who was found.

“You’ve cut yourself.” It was a small slice just at the last joint. It wasn’t bad, so I started to stick it in my mouth, but she reached across the island, took my hand, and turned back to Henry. “Do you have any Band-Aids?”

“Bathroom.” He watched us for a moment. “I will get them.”

She turned back to me as he left the room, and I noticed the blue of her eyes was deeper around the edges, like the color was falling from her pupils back into the white ocean. She smiled at all the people around us, finally settling on me. “I’ll apply pressure.”

Boy howdy.

* * *

The second bottle was red, so I had a glass. Every so often, Maggie would look over and I would hold up my finger and indicate my wound as an excuse for not joining in the conversation, but she wasn’t buying it. She made a living out of poking into forgotten spaces, and I was an intrigue she couldn’t solve.

I excused myself to go to the bathroom, took care of business, washed my hands, and leaned my arms on the bathroom sink. I looked at my face. It wasn’t a bad face other than needing about eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, a haircut, the loss of about twenty pounds and ten years. My chin was too big, along with my ears, and my eyes were too deep set. I leaned back to my full arms’ reach, and I looked a little better. I still wasn’t sure about the beard, but it hid a lot.

It was easier when there was a case to distract me, but with Charlie Nurburn alive and Mari Baroja having died of apparently natural causes, there wasn’t any corner of my mind in which to take refuge. Just the same, when I got back into town tomorrow morning, I would have to make sure I called Bill McDermott and the courthouse. Something still wasn’t squaring up somehow. I suppose my next step would be to go to the Durant Home for Assisted Living again. Common sense told me to just let it go, but I had never regarded that voice as being either common or sensible.

I thought about Maggie and how passion was a difficult thing to sustain, but that friendship had a pace that could go on forever. I guess it was that moment that I firmly decided she and I would just be friends. It was disappointing but a relief. I had made a decision. I stepped out of the bathroom and was greeted by my best friend.

“How is your finger?”

“I think I’ll live.”

He took a deep breath. “I followed you here to talk you into what you are in here attempting to talk yourself out of.” The dark hair, the dark skin, the dark eyes, it was like he was carved out of mahogany. Some golem of the Northern Cheyenne, but I knew the heart that rested there.

“You make it sound like a new car.”

He waited as someone slipped by us and went into the bathroom. “Are you sure you are okay?”

I told him about the dream, which had featured Mari Baroja.

He listened quietly and nodded periodically. At the end, he smiled. “It would appear that you now have an advocate in the Camp of the Dead.”

My knowledge of the intricacies of Indian religion was spotty, but I knew about the camp, a place where the Cheyenne tribal ancestors gathered in the afterlife. The elders in the Camp of the Dead sought the society of interesting people in this one. There were items that carried their touch, like the old Sharps buffalo rifle that Lonnie had given me a month ago that stood in the corner of my bedroom. I could see that rifle as we stood there, the long, heavy barrel glowing with a ghostly sheen, cold to the touch like a dead body. I could see the beaded dead-man’s pattern on the fore grip, the ten distinct notches at the top of the stock, and the way the gray feathers ruffled even when there was no discernible breeze, messages from the dead on the wings of owls.

We waited as the person from the bathroom passed us with a smile. “Any more advice?”

“You should be able to figure the rest out for yourself.” He was silent for a moment. “If you cannot, then we are going to need more time than this conversation will allow.”

* * *

On the way back, I stopped off at the massive refrigerator, took out a beer, and paused to look at a few of the photographs lying on that end of the center island. The top one was of three boys, one standing and the other two seated. They wore what looked like military uniforms, and the relaxed quality of their posture was only belied by the tension in their eyes. I knew why; their hair had been cut by the teachers at the Indian boarding school from which, if they were lucky, they got to go home for a visit every two years. I slid it over and looked at the next.

Willy Fighting Bear and Zack Yellow Fox were standing between a couple of ornery-looking Appaloosas and were wearing two of the most enormous cowboy hats I had ever seen, the kind from an earlier period that must have been meant to protect the wearer from meteor showers. Willy and Zack looked comfortable, even though they had probably been in the saddle a good fourteen hours. My dad knew them and had said they were two of the finest horseman he had ever seen. I slid this one over and looked at the next.

I knew Frank White Shield. He was in full Cheyenne chief ’s regalia and was standing between his two sons, Jesse and Frank Jr.; they were in their army dress uniforms, circa 1943. Frank Jr. died in Okinawa, while Jesse went to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands with the Seventh Infantry Division as a sniper. He became famous for tying himself high in the trees so that if he were shot the Japanese would never know if they had scored a hit. They finally did, but never knew.

I looked at the next few photographs. There was one of a group of men and women standing around with the church in the background, and there was one of a young man with beaded leggings standing on a makeshift baseball field. I looked at the broad smiling face and the delicate way the nimble, dark hands held the ball. I could hear the snap when it hit the pocket and the catch phrase of a man without legs, “Um-hmm, yes, it is so.”

The words had escaped my smiling lips before I was aware. I looked at Lonnie Little Bird who was involved in a whimsical conversation at the other end of the kitchen. I tried to imagine him playing professional baseball before losing his legs to diabetes. Lonnie with legs. I took a deep breath along with a swig of beer and made my way to the other side of the kitchen where my romantic fate awaited.

She was leaning on the counter with one elbow, the palm of her hand supporting her chin. “ I thought only women went to the bathroom together.”

She shifted to the other palm and was suddenly a lot closer. “He’s a good friend.” I squeezed in and popped an elbow on the table and rested my chin in my own palm only a little ways away from her face. “I’m beginning to think that you are, too.” I smiled and looked down at the table. The flame of the candles shifted like the owl feathers on the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead. There was something bothering me about something I’d just seen, an inkling of sorts, but nothing I could pin down. Was it something in the photographs or something Henry had said? I looked back up to Maggie just as Henry came back in, and I’m sure I looked like I had just broken a vase. Maggie, on the other hand, leaned back in her chair, reset a pixie chin on the palm of her hand, and batted the blue like a signal. “How’s dinner coming?”

He smiled and joined Brandon at the stove. I sat there for a moment and stared into her eyes, but it became too much, so I glanced out the window. I watched the flakes fly at the pane and momentarily pause before slipping away. It was as if they were trying to drift through the glass and remind me of something that skipped like a stone on smooth water.

The photographs, it was something in the photographs.

I stood quickly, made my way around the room, and threaded through the crowd until I was standing over the assorted snapshots. They were as I’d left them. I studied the one of Lonnie with the beaded leggings that encased the now missing legs and could see him sweeping through the infield like a red-tailed hawk, the top grain leather sailing toward first like a war lance; but it was the car that was parked to the side along the foul line, a large convertible, fancy for the period in two-tone paint that had pricked my thoughts.

I slid the photo aside and looked at the next. A small group of Indians were gathered around the same car. The automobile was closer in this shot, and I could make out the buffalo hood ornament and the letters running down the chrome.

Maggie had followed me and placed her hand on my arm. “Is there something wrong?”

“There is.” I let my heart slow back to normal and looked at the photo again. “Let me ask you.” I placed a finger on the picture for clarification. “Does that look like a 1950 Kaiser?”

She leaned in and inspected the car in question. “I’m not so sure about the year, but the front emblem says Kaiser.”

There was only one white man in the photograph, and I was pretty sure who he was. Henry had come over to my other side, and I shifted my finger. “Does the name Charlie Nurburn ring a bell?”

His eyes narrowed as he studied the image. “Yes, I have heard that name.” He breathed for a moment. “From the southern part of the county, sold bad liquor for a year or so. He blinded and killed some of my people.”

I shook my head and studied the tall, thin man in the photo. “That sounds like Charlie, all right.”

His head shifted. “This involves a case you are working on?”

“Yep.” I thought about it. “No. I mean there really isn’t a case, and he’s really not a part of it since he’s alive and living in Vista Verde, New Mexico.” I stopped talking for a moment to allow myself to think.

I turned to look at Henry, but as I did, the lines on his face disappeared, his cheekbones were more pronounced, and water trailed from the crow-wing black hair. His shoulders were narrow, before the high-octane testosterone of adolescence had made an all-state middle linebacker out of him and, when he smiled, the canine baby tooth that had stayed with him through junior high suddenly reappeared.

* * *

“You are chicken!”

I looked down at him and the swirling water of the Little Powder near the confluence of Bitter and Dry creeks. A bridge was to our right, with a black framework that loomed against the brilliant blue of a July day. My spine felt as though it was falling through my rib cage, and a cold chill scraped along my arms and shoulders. “I am not!” I yelled back.

“Then jump!”

I looked down and instead of the man-sized boots, I saw a pair of scrawny, sunburned legs that shot from a pair of cut-off jeans to bare feet. I shifted, and the sheet metal I was standing on popped back against my weight.

He cocked his head and laughed, the skinny fists resting on the narrow hips. “You are chicken!”

I stared at the faded yellow paint on the metal, the chrome strip with the letters indented, Powder River sediment lying in the lower edges. I looked at the buffalo standing on the hillock of the hood’s crest and the large K insignia . . . and jumped.

* * *

I refocused my eyes in the kitchen and met his. “I know where it is.” I turned to look at Maggie. “Stuck in the bank of the Little Powder, about a mile from here.” I tapped the picture for emphasis. “This very car.” I looked again. “Along with seven or eight other cars that are used to hold the bank where it curves under the bridge.”

His voice doubted me. “How long has it been there?”

I smiled. “As long as I can remember. It was there when we were kids.”

He smiled for a moment, and I watched as he made the journey. “You cracked your head open there.” He didn’t move for a moment. “This is important?”

“Maybe.” I continued to look at the photograph. “This is the car.”

He shrugged. “There were not that many two-tone Kaiser convertibles on the Rez.”

The blue eyes shifted back to the photograph, and her lips thinned in concentration. “Why would somebody bury a practically new car in the river bank of the reservation?”

I looked closely at the man I assumed to be Charlie Nurburn. He was thin, tall, with the thumbs of his bony hands hitched into the front pockets of his work pants. You could just see two pearl-handled automatics sticking out from the waistband, and there were two more in a crossed, two-rig shoulder holster. Charlie Nurburn was well armed. His jeans looked like shedded snakeskin that rolled at the cuffs to reveal a scuffed pair of lace-up logging boots. An old CPO jacket was draped on his narrow shoulders, and a flannel plaid shirt buttoned up to the turkey throat. He wore one of those old hunting caps, the ones with the earflaps that tie on top, perched at a rakish angle to the left. I looked at the face and could make out what appeared to be a gold tooth, front and right. I tried to see a woman-beater and a murderer behind the lowered eyebrows that hid his eyes, but he looked like everybody else. It’s that kind of thing that worries me.

If Charlie had left Absaroka County forever back in 1951, why wouldn’t he have taken his almost brand new Kaiser with him? I looked at the two of them. “This is the man who was married to the woman in the nursing home, the Basque woman who just died.”

Maggie Watson took a seat on the nearest stool and folded her hands over her lap. “What woman in what nursing home?”

“Mari Baroja, the one that was married to Lucian.”

It took a good three seconds for the Bear to respond. “What?”

“Mari Baroja is the woman that died in the nursing home. She and Lucian Connally were married for a couple of hours back in the mid forties before her family annulled it. He said that he didn’t see her again till about a year ago when she got planted in the Durant Home for Assisted Living. For some reason, Lucian has suspicions that the cause of her death might be more than natural, so I locked up her room and called in an ME from Billings for a general. He says she probably died of heart failure, but there are millions of dollars being pumped out of the ancestral manse down at Four Brothers.”

“And that is the Baroja place?” He raised an eyebrow as I nodded. He looked like he was getting ready to ambush a stagecoach. “Motive, yes, but is there a case here?”

“During the autopsy it was discovered that Mari Baroja was beaten and, during consequent conversations with Lana Baroja, Isaac Bloomfield, and Vern Selby, I discover that Charlie Nurburn was possibly the slimiest thing to ooze across the surface of the earth until his disappearance under ever increasingly mysterious circumstances.”

He still looked puzzled, and I was aware that most of the conversation in the room had stopped. “Lana Baroja is?”

I took Henry by the arm and steered him to the far side of the kitchen. I apologized to Maggie as we receded. I pressed Henry into a corner. “Lana Baroja is the granddaughter of the deceased and clearly of the opinion that Lucian Connally had something to do with the death of her grandfather.”

“I thought you said that he is alive.”

“It’s complicated. Also, it appears to be common knowledge that Mari Baroja and Lucian were involved in a Thursday afternoon tryst that lasted for years, but Lucian doesn’t admit to the affair.” I thought for a moment. “That and a ’50 Kaiser imbedded in the bank of the Little Powder for as long as we can remember.”

“So, we are talking about two potential murders separated by more than fifty years.”

I stood there for a while looking at him. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

“Do you think Lucian did it?”

For the first time that evening, the Cheyenne Nation was silent.

6

“I like your friend Henry.”

I had taken route 87 back from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation because, in a fit of optimism, I thought it might have been plowed. Mari Baroja had probably traveled this way in the opposite direction a few hours earlier; I wondered how she had felt about it. She rested uneasily on my mind, so I thought about sharing part of the burden with Maggie as we rode along on the inch or two of compacted snow. I looked over at her; if women knew how good they looked in the dash light of oversized pickup trucks, they’d never get out of them. “Really?”

“Uh, huh.”

The snow had slackened a little, but the fat wide flakes still swooped out of the darkness into the headlights and disappeared around the windshield in uncountable little games of chicken. I was munching on ruggelach and was trying to concentrate on the road and not let the thrill of a new association put us in a ditch.

“How long have you known each other?”

“Since grade school.” I felt a slight twitch as the rear wheels of the truck slipped a little. “I used to go to his auntie’s house, and we would watch the Lone Ranger. We’d play in the yard, and I always got to be Tonto.” She laughed, but I thought about the case. I wondered if Saizarbitoria had spoken to Charlie Nurburn. I’d given Sancho the job in hopes that I’d never have to speak to the man.

“You’re thinking about the Basque woman again?”

I glanced over. “Just concentrating on the road.”

It was pretty obvious she didn’t believe me. “What was her name again?”

I took a glance at the center console, where I had stowed the autopsy photographs. “Mari Baroja.” She was smiling. “What?”

“It sounds like ambrosia.”

I sighed. “Yep, it does.” I watched the snow for a little while. Lana’s statement still worried me. I guess Lana’s statement didn’t matter if her grandfather was alive but, if he was, why would he have abandoned a perfectly good Kaiser and moved to Vista Verde, New Mexico, without it?

She was still looking at me. “You’re a funny kind of sheriff.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek, something I always did when I was forced to really think. “I don’t like mysteries, and I don’t like it when things don’t add up.” I turned and glanced at her. “How about we talk about you?”

“Hey, I’m one of my favorite subjects. Let’s talk about me.” I laughed. “What do you want to know?”

“Oh, everything.” I glanced back at the road but ended up looking at her again. “How does something like you get around without being married?”

She folded down the visor and opened up a small leather purse. “As the queen apparent of Norway, I am only allowed to marry once I’ve reached the age of consent.” She pulled out an even smaller cosmetic bag, glanced at me, and reapplied her lipstick.

I nodded. “That age being thirty-five?”

She closed the vanity mirror and turned back to me with a ravishing smile. “Oh, I do like you.” She replaced the lipstick in the tiny bag and then the bag in the hand-tooled leather purse. “It’s really not all that interesting. I just found myself in an emotional and geographic place where I wasn’t happy.”

“And where was that?”

She cocked her head. “Charlottesville, Virginia. Louis taught at UVA, and after a while we began to regard each other as electives.”

“You chose Cheyenne, Wyoming, instead of Charlottesville, Virginia?”

“It seemed like a clean slate, and the South is full of ghosts. I had a job similar to this one and a degree in economics, so I came out for an interview at the Wyoming state job fair which, by the way, consisted of three balloons tied to the end of an event table in the conference room of the capitol building.”

“We’re a frugal state.”

She kept studying me, but it took a while for her to get up her nerve. “You don’t seem divorced.”

“Seem divorced?”

Her eyes squinted, but the blue sparkles were still evident. “Too much unreined compassion still there, not enough baggage.”

I waited a moment in respect. “Widower.” She nodded but sat there silently with her legs curled beneath her. I didn’t want to talk about Vonnie, but that wouldn’t have been fair. “There was another woman about a month or so ago.” She didn’t say anything. “I don’t think you could call it a relationship in the sense that it was consummated, but we were close, and it didn’t end well.”

Her voice seemed small and far away. “Can I be honest with you?”

“I would hope.”

“I read about it in the newspapers.”

I felt strangely violated, like somebody had burgled my personal life. “Well . . . that’s a price you pay for being a public figure.” She reached an arm out and rested a hand on my sleeve, somewhere alongside my heart. I could feel the welling in my eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether it was for me or for the women whom I had lost. I concentrated on the road and none of the moisture escaped, but I’m pretty sure the blue eyes didn’t miss the emotion. I was pretty sure those eyes didn’t miss much of anything. “We’re talking about me again.”

“Sorry.” Her head tilted forward. “Well, you’re stuck with me for another couple of days at least. I’ve got nine unclaimed security boxes at three different banks so I’m thinking that my predecessor didn’t consider Durant to be high on his list of priorities.”

I was relieved at the change of subject. “So, what do you do when you crack one open?”

“First I ascertain whether the owner is alive and the box has been forgotten or if the box is abandoned due to a death. Next I check on-line credit records or cold-call for possible relatives; if there’s no contact with an owner and the rent hasn’t been paid in five years, it gets turned over to us.”

“How does that go?”

“I get hung up on a lot.” She laughed and shook her head. “It’s really hard to get people to believe that we’re legitimate. They always think it’s some kind of scam, but we turned over eight million dollars to recipients and generated over fifteen million in unclaimed property just last year.”

I whistled. “Fifteen million. I’d say the state is getting its money’s worth. Maybe they’ll buy more balloons.” The visibility was dropping, so I slowed the truck down even more. At this rate, we might as well have gotten out and walked from the Rez. “You’re the department?”

She saluted. “Unclaimed property manager. I’m my own branch of the Wyoming State Treasury Department.”

“I have to ask. What kind of stuff do you find?”

She looked back out the windshield. “All kinds of things. We found an 1863 ambassadorial appointment signed by Abraham Lincoln, and just last week I found an old collection of Nazi campaign ribbons from World War II. Pocket watches, stocks, bonds . . . There was this one in Gillette that had a complete change of clothes, a ski mask, and a pistol.” I turned and looked at her. “Then there are the Polaroids. We’ve got a stack of nude snapshots that is over a foot tall.”

“Must be great decoration for the bulletin board.”

“Not really.” She rolled her eyes. “Most of the time they’re of people you wish hadn’t taken their clothes off.”

That image was broken by an ice slick where melted snow must have collected on a short overpass and frozen. Past that, there was another, and the truck kicked sideways; I steered into the skid and touched the brakes but, as the snow curtain blew away, the dark bulk of a vehicle loomed in front of me. I stomped the ABS brakes and felt the surge of the master cylinder as it attempted to keep me from locking the wheels and sliding into the ton of steel that lay on its side ahead of us. Even with the system-assisted brakes, I wasn’t going to get it stopped. In that split second, I saw the opening between the bridge guardrail and the undercarriage of the disabled car. The adrenalin-induced slow motion allowed me to categorize the median beyond as sloping but not bad enough to tip the Bullet; I just had to make sure I kept the tonnage pointed straight so that we didn’t end up like the other vehicle. As we went off the road, I could feel the sudden deceleration as the big tires snagged on the fresh snow. We slid down into the shallow frontage, up the other side, and slowly mired to a stop past the last post and out of harm’s way. I took a deep breath and looked down my outstretched arm, which was holding Dog from catapulting through the windshield and was pinning Maggie against her seat. Dog scrambled as I studied Maggie. “Are you all right?” She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

I flipped on the light bar and hit the automatic program two on my radio, landing me at 155.445, the HP’s frequency. I needed a lot of help, and I needed it pretty fast. I handed her the mic. “Tell the highway patrol that you’ve got a 10-50 at mile marker 12 on route 87, that you need emergency response with an ambulance and a wrecker.” I smiled. “Got it?”

Her eyes were very large. “How did you know what mile marker?”

“Habit. Stay here, but look for me? 10-50, mile marker 12 on route 87, emergency ambulance and wrecker.”

I crunched through and sank past the powder to the slick surface below. The hard ring of ice at my knees was the only traction I could get, so I used it to bull my way up the slope. The air was burning in my lungs as I got to the shoulder. I looked back in the direction from which we had come; there hadn’t been anybody on the road since we had passed Sheridan, so I had a chance.

I looked at the car again and froze. Lying on its side was Isaac Bloomfield’s ’71 Mercedes.

The doors hadn’t sprung and the windows were intact, the motor was running, and the wheels turned like a gut-shot horse. The lights of the metallic-colored sedan pointed off toward the hills of Lodge Grass as the motor sputtered and started to fail. The steam was still rising from the surface of the road so it must have just happened. I slid into the trunk lid. The glazed surface of the road made it difficult to navigate, but I traversed my way around to the back glass; the condensation had fogged the surface from the inside so that I couldn’t see. As I scrambled, I heard a groan, and I suddenly had a little trouble breathing. I threw myself around the rear bumper and was relieved as the motor finally died, taking with it the hazard of internal combustion and two wheels driving.

Somewhere along the way I must have put my gloves on, which was good because the bottom of the car was still hot. I climbed up, and the sizzle of the wet leather on the exhaust smelled like a burning steak. I reached and grabbed the bump strip at the middle of the passenger-side door. I pulled at the handle and the damn thing actually gave with a quick bump but then settled back and fastened. I yanked it hard enough to get my fingers under the lip of the door and leveraged it open again. It wasn’t going to stay, so I lodged my feet against the opening and hit it with all the weight that had inconvenienced me up to now. The door bent completely back on its hinges and ripped loose, flipping past the hood, and sliding away on the frozen sheen of ice. Piss on Ralph Nader, they never made ’em like they used to.

Isaac wasn’t moving. His eyes were closed, and there was blood on the side of his head. An arm was lying across the trunk of his body. It’s always the same, if there’s even the remotest possibility of neck or back injury, you might do more bad than good. If I went in, I was going to crash down on top of him, so I put a leg over the side to give me a little advantage. He was warm, and there was a familiar rhythm at the inside of his wrist. It was then that one of those little miracles happened. He stirred once, adjusting his weight as if trying to find a more comfortable position. It wasn’t much, but it told me that his spine and nervous system were intact. He could be moved. I strained to reach the seatbelt that had saved his life and thanked God that seat-belts were designed to fasten on the inside. As I pulled him from a sitting position, his legs caught below the steering wheel, and I had to hoist him a little to the right to get him free. As I negotiated the controls of the vehicle, I got my other hand on the front of the doctor’s coat and lifted him up.

That was when I felt the lights. Nothing I had called would have flashing yellow lights, and nothing I called would be that big. The state of Wyoming uses large five-ton plows equipped with shale spreaders that could disseminate five yards of granulated scoriae; this meant ten tons of bad news arriving in a little more than a minute.

Suddenly rediscovering my strength and glad that Isaac hadn’t gained that much weight since prison camp, I pulled him free from the steering wheel and almost had him when his foot caught on the seatbelt. Forcing myself to be calm, I turned him to the side, but the seatbelt clung there. I took a breath and twisted him in the other direction as the belt slipped free and slithered back into the darkness. I raised him up the rest of the way and turned.

It was way too late. The driver must have seen my emergency lights and he had started braking, but it didn’t look like he was going to make it. I looked down at the icy reflection of the black road. There was nowhere we could go. Anywhere we went from here would be just as bad as where we were and probably worse, so I did nothing. I watched as ten tons of WYDOT equipment hit the first ice slick and started its sickening slide sideways.

As we sat there on the side of the car like some bizarre modern pieta, I couldn’t help but think that this is what I got for thinking I could have a night off to take a beautiful woman to a magical place to meet wonderful people. Retribution was at hand in the form of cold rolling steel and red shale.

The guardrail of the underpass looked like a galvanized funnel, and I glanced at the ice plastered on the northwest surface of the metal. Arching showers of melted snow flew from the tires of the truck. The plow seemed as big as the ones I had seen on the front of Burlington Northern locomotives.

I looked down at Isaac and smiled; this shit didn’t happen to Tom Mix when he was saving some nubile young thing who had been tied to the tracks. What happened to me didn’t seem to matter, but Isaac was different; how could a life so full of meaning end so meaninglessly? I smoothed the old man’s hair on one side; there was blood, but I didn’t think he was hurt badly. As the light of the oncoming truck lit the red liquid streaks, I heard a noise in the distance. It might have been the rhythm of the big studded and chained Bandag tires clawing the aggregate surface of the highway or the thump of the Bullet’s diesel, but it sounded like drums.

When I looked up again, the back of the truck was sliding toward us, and the taillights were two angry eyes. The spin continued, but the showers of slush didn’t seem to be arching quite so high. I watched as the headlights turned back toward us again along with the vaulted metal of the plow. The truck slid to a stop about nine feet from where we sat. It looked like an irate buffalo, blowing steam from its stacked nostrils and dripping sweat from its forehead. The drums had stopped.

* * *

Static. “Unit Six, 10-55, over.”

I knew Wes Rogers because he was old like me. He was the first highway patrolman on the scene, and I was helping him with his report. The other HPs oozed in under throbbing blue light in their mercury black cruisers, and the EMTs loaded Isaac Bloomfield into the back of the ambulance.

“So you just sat there?” He was smiling as he wrote on the metal clipboard, his Smoky the Bear hat pushed back in a pretty good likeness of Will Rogers, no relation. It was strange being on the passenger side of the cruiser. He shook his head and chuckled. “You got an extra pair of shorts?”

“I don’t wear shorts; that’s why women are drawn to me.”

He stopped writing. “Well, I don’t mind telling you, I’da had to go home and change mine.” He handed me the clipboard to sign the forms. “How far you away from retiring?”

When I pushed on the pen it lit up the writing surface. “Chronologically or financially?” I handed him back the clipboard and stuck the nifty pen in my pocket. “Why do you ask?”

He tucked the forms back into the center console. “I’m gone next month. Scottsdale, Arizona.”

I was surprised; I figured Wes was going to be around forever. “What’re you gonna do in Scottsdale?”

He looked out at the frozen landscape, and we might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. “Watch my grandson grow up, and keep the Mexicans outta the golf course ponds at night.”

I thought for a moment and came up with Wes’s wife’s name. “What’s Ruth got to say about all this?”

I followed his eyes, and we watched as Pete’s Towing pulled the lowered and narrowed Mercedes over and onto its wheels. “I figure she’ll take it all right, seein’ as how she’s been waiting for it for the last twenty-six years.”

I stuck my hand out, and he shook it back. He told me I could keep the pen as a token of his affection and a fond farewell.

* * *

I trudged through the crusty snow of the roadside toward the Bullet and pulled up short as a chain line dragged Isaac Bloomfield’s sole transport up onto the levered platform of the wrecker; a coveralled driver cinched the vehicle down with log dogs. The elderly physician’s baby was headed for Sonny George’s junkyard, just outside of Durant. They would hold the car there until Isaac could decide what to do with it. It was a shame, really. The doc had owned the car for as long as I’d known him, and he kept it in tip-top condition. Fred Ray, the mechanic at the local Sinclair station, had once told me the car was in immaculate shape due to Isaac’s preventive maintenance. I suppose even German engineering failed sometimes; that, or the eighty-five-year-old driver had.

In the brief conversation we had had while the EMTs had loaded Isaac into the van, he told me that he had grown uncomfortable with the idea of someone else performing the autopsy on Mari Baroja and so had decided to hop in his classic two-wheel-drive Mercedes and motor a couple of hours through a high-plains snowstorm at midnight. He thought it was his brakes that had failed.

As I stood there thinking, my eyes drifted past the ghostly silver of the German car to the rolling snow-covered hills to the east. Henry Standing Bear had said it best. He had started me running about a month ago as the first part of a four-part plan of redemption. I had had one of my collapses along Clear Creek and had stalled for rest time by telling him about the improvements I was going to make to my place with the help of friends of his who owned Red Road Contracting. He didn’t look at me but rather looked across the small valley at the land where his grandfathers used to hunt and fish. I had seen the downturned corners of that mouth before and asked, “What?”

“You don’t own the land.” I had slumped against a pole and prepared myself for another tirade about the heathen-devil-white-man’s theft of the North American continent, but instead Henry’s voice was softened with dismissal. “You do not own your mother, do you? Sounds silly, owning your mother? It is like that with the land, silly to think you own it.” He was silent for a moment; when he spoke, his voice had a tiny edge to it. “But this land owns you.”

I thought about the drums; they were the same drums I had heard on the mountain, the ones that had kept me going when there wasn’t anything else to go on. I wondered if the Old Cheyenne were there, just out of sight. Had they held the big buffalo truck back? Had they ridden alongside it on their war ponies, using their spears to coax it to a sullen stop and had it cost them? Even in the spirit world, I would imagine such actions are not taken without risk. I looked north and west toward the Little Big Horn and the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. It was comforting to think that they were still here, stewards of a mother they did not own. The stinging wind began making my eyes tear, at least I think that’s what it was, so I laughed and lifted a hand, tipping my hat just to let them know I knew where they were and to say thanks.

I turned toward my truck. Fatigue was starting to drag at my shoulders, but I made it. I was almost too tired to walk but drove us safely back to Durant and deposited Maggie at the Log Cabin Motel. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come in?”

I looked past her and into the inviting little cabin, and I was tempted but very tired. “I better take a rain check.” I couldn’t see her face, backlit as she was and standing in the doorway. “I’ve got Dog.”

She studied me for a moment. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Tired, that’s all.” I smiled. “I usually pay more attention to my dates.”

I could just make out the glow of her eyes in the shadow. “When I want your attention, I’ll get it.”

I looked down at my boots that were covering with snow. “I guess it’s only fair to tell you . . .”

“Hey, Sheriff?”

I glanced back up, and her face was very close. “Yep?”

“Maybe you think too much.” She leaned over and kissed me very softly, and my lungs felt as if they were going to burst through my chest. She didn’t close her eyes and neither did I. It was a long kiss, and I leaned in after her as she drew away. A chill fired off from my spine like a coiled snake.

She smiled a slow, languid smile. “How was that, without thinking about it?”

It took me a second to reacquire speech. “Pretty wonderful.”

“Maybe you should try it more often.” She looked into me for a moment more, taking soundings, and the door closed.

I stood there for a while, maybe hoping that the door would open again, but finally trudged back to the Bullet and drove Dog and myself over to the hospital to check on Isaac.

I didn’t know the young man at the desk, but he told me that Isaac had suffered minor scrapes and contusions and that his head had a bump the size of a goose egg, but he was resting comfortably and was in room 111 if I wanted to take a look. I declined, and the kid surmised that as old as Isaac was, he was one tough cookie. I told him he had no idea.

When I got back to the jail, Vic’s unit was parked out front, and the office lights were on. Dog followed me as I made my way in and started down the hallway. There was a Post-it on my doorjamb, but the handwriting was strange. I leaned in and read it: SHERIFF LONGMIRE, I CALLED CHARLIE NURBURN’S NUMBER IN VISTA VERDE THREE TIMES AND

LEFT MESSAGES. SO FAR, NO CALL BACK. SANCHO. It gave the date, and the times of the three separate phone calls. Jeez, the kid was even polite in his Post-its, and obviously Vic was making an impression in that he had signed with his new nickname.

I walked down the hallway to the holding cells in the back. Santiago Saizarbitoria was asleep on my usual bunk, and evidently he was not completely trusting in that his handcuffs were locked around the bars to hold the cell door open. Once a corrections officer . . . Dog and I stood there in the dark, listening to the soft rhythm of his breath as the beeper rose and fell on his chest.

I looked down at Dog. “No room at the inn.” He stayed close as I turned the corner to the other holding cell, and we crawled onto our individual bunks. I pulled my jacket over me, carefully placing my hat over my face. Maybe it was the emotional drain of the evening or just the length of a very physical day, but I forced my eyes closed in a furtive and uncomfortable sleep. I held my eyelids together, and what I saw was like the credits on a movie whose format had not been changed for television.

* * *

I watched the rainbow threads of grass shimmer in a gentle summer gust that traveled across the middle fork of the Powder River with the swell of something beneath. It rolled like the ocean, moving with a quality that was sensual and female. There was a moist, weighty warmth, not in the scorching of the summer sun, but in the laden air the grass trades for carbon dioxide. Heavy riches.

I was floating now, even though I was lying deep in the swaying stalks. The sky was without a cloud. It was late, though, because the light was parallel to the earth and flat.

I could feel the heat burning through my limbs, easing the ache of my throbbing joints and loosening the tightness in my muscles. As the tendons in my neck relaxed, I felt my head slip to the right, and I could see someone lying beside me. I knew who it was before I could really see her; the scarf that I had seen before trailed across the seed heads of the buffalo grass and back to her hand. I was so close I could make out the texture of the material and the quality of the work.

She knew I was watching her. Her profile was sharp against the light of the sky, and the angles of her face planed the colors of the late afternoon like a prism. I felt the breath catch in my throat at the wonder of her and knew that everything I had heard was true. After a moment, she rolled over and looked at me with those dark eyes, a plucked piece of grass between her teeth. She smiled and reached a hand across to touch my shoulder. Her fingers were light, and a shiver went through me; the coolness of her spread like a welcome cloud on an overly sunny day.

She looked toward the mountains, as if she were trying to think of how to say what she wanted to say. After a moment, she looked back, pulled the thick sweep of hair from her face, and withdrew her hand as she rolled over and supported herself. She was still wearing the blue-and-white spotted dress, the one Lucian had described. She had trouble steadying herself, and it was only then that I noticed she was very pregnant. Her hand came out again, slowly, as if she didn’t want to frighten me. The slim fingers wrapped around mine and lifted my hand toward her. A few clouds appeared like solemn voices and broken hearts.

* * *

I started, caught my hat against my chest, and sat up with my weight on my arms. I stared into the small amount of light from the hallway, pulled my pocket watch out to read the time, and took a deep breath; I’d only been asleep for an hour or so. I could feel a cooling sweat at my throat and decided I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep so I reached down slowly to pick up my coat where it had fallen and placed my hat on my head. I was a little unsteady at first but walked out to the main part of the room and turned the corner to check on Saizarbitoria. He was still sleeping, and I had a brief twinge of jealousy; oh, to be twenty-eight, clear of conscience and young of body. “In the May-morn of his youth, ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises.” I wondered how the kid was with Shakespeare.

Dog followed as I made my way to my office and then curled up beside my desk and fell fast asleep; he didn’t have a care. Something was bothering me though, in the recent scheme of things, and the first thing I could think of was Isaac’s car. The old Mercedes was in miraculous condition; why had the brakes failed? In the few words that had passed between us, he had said that they hadn’t worked. It was crazy, but a lot of things were as of late. I got an empty Post-it from Ruby’s desk and wrote a note to Saizarbitoria to go over to Sonny George’s tomorrow and check the Mercedes’s brakes for tampering. I stuck the note on his handcuffs, still locked to the door.

I absentmindedly plucked Sancho’s Post-it from the doorway of my office, walked around Dog, and sat at my desk. It was the middle of the night, and I was too awake to sleep. I looked at the Post-it in my hands, noting that the last time Sancho had called the notorious Charlie Nurburn was at 9:32 P.M. The kid was courteous to a fault.

I looked at the phone and figured what the hell, he’d be home. As I dialed the number, I entertained the thought that there wasn’t anybody who better deserved to be woken up in the middle of the night. It rang four times and then picked up. I started to say, “Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department, I’m sorry if . . .” but stopped speaking when I realized it was the answering machine. Charlie Nurburn introduced himself, apologized for being unable to answer the phone, and then invited me to leave a message after the tone. All was as it should be, just another voice on another answering machine.

The only thing was that it was the voice of Lucian Connally.

7

The stamped plate made a god-awful noise as it clattered across the counter and came to rest beside the little chrome cradle that held the menus, ketchup, mustard, and salt and pepper shakers. “You know what that is?”

He looked at the rusted metal and the small amount of dirt that had shaken loose from its surface, took a sip from his cup, and then placed it back on the half ring of spilled coffee on the counter. “That is a license plate, an old one.” It was early in the morning, and it had taken me awhile to find him. There was nobody in the place, but I took the seat diagonal to him across from the cash register. I was very angry, and I thought that if I sat a little away, it might keep me from grabbing him by the throat. “You know where I got it?”

He took another sip of coffee as though he hadn’t a care in the world. “Off a car, I suspect.”

I got up, moved around to his side, and sat on the stool next to him; it would be hard to grab him by the throat from where I had been before. “You got a story to tell me?” I unbuttoned my sheepskin jacket and pushed my hat farther up on my head.

My own cup of coffee appeared to my right. “The usual?”

“The usual.” She disappeared, and I turned back to the old sheriff. He kept sipping his coffee and staring at the bee collection above the grill. “I wanna hear the one about an answering machine and a vacant room in Vista Verde, New Mexico. I wanna hear the one about your buddy Sheriff Marcos DeLeon down in Rio County, who’s been taking care of the W-2s and social security. I wanna hear the one about an abandoned Kaiser lodged in the embankment of the Little Powder since 1951.”

“52.”

I leaned back and breathed for the first time since entering the little café. “Keep talking, I’m all ears.” It got very quiet, and you could almost hear the water running below the frozen surface of Clear Creek, which flowed alongside the Busy Bee.

“Yer all nose not ears.” He sat the coffee cup down and swiveled his head around to look in my general direction. “What’s the ME say?”

“Not a thing until you tell me about Charlie Nurburn.” I pulled my pocket watch out of my jeans: 6:37 A.M. “I’ve got all day but, this being a Thursday, you’ve probably got an appointment.”

It took him quite a while to come out of the stillness that overtook him, get his coat on, and position his prosthetic leg. I waited as he zipped up an old Carhartt, far too light for the weather, and placed his hat on his head. “You . . . can go to hell.” The heavy glass door swept shut, allowing a gust of snowflakes to skitter across at my boots. I watched as they melted.

“I hear hell’s nice this time of year.” She reached down and studied the license plate as I stared at the floor. “Want some advice?” She continued on course and ignored my warning look as she always did when I needed ignoring. “Go easy.”

I took a deep breath. “I’m trying.” She had held off on the usual and watched me as I rebuttoned my coat. I took the time to sip my coffee; I figured I could catch a one-legged old man in a snowstorm.

When I got outside, he was gone. “Damn.” I watched the vapor of my breath whip past me as I looked up and then down. Nobody. The streetlights were still on, and there was only one set of tire tracks on Main Street. It was about then that I fell back on one of my old Indian tricks and followed the only set of footprints on the snow-covered sidewalk other than mine. I opened the door of my truck, which was parked outside the Busy Bee, and let Dog out. I figured I needed backup.

The tracks stopped in front of the Euskadi Hotel, and the snow was pushed back from the door like the broken wing of a fallen snow angel. I pulled the handle and saw him sitting there, filling his pipe from the beaded tobacco bag. The jukebox was crooning Frank’s “Ave Maria,” and he was at the table in the center of the room, looking very fragile and alone. “Get the hell outta here.”

I stood and looked at his silver belly hat that rested crown up on the white tablecloth; it was still in good shape and was probably the last one the old sheriff would buy. Dog didn’t move. We looked at each other and then back to him. “Dog is cold.”

He shifted his weight and turned away from the door as he zipped up the bag and laid it on the table along with the keys to the building. “The dog can come in, but you better damn well go.” He patted his leg, and Dog was there in an instant. The gnarled old hand gently smoothed the fur behind his ears. “You don’t care who you hang around with, do you?”

The door swung shut behind me as I walked over and sat at the other side of his table and adjusted the plastic flowers so that we would have an unobstructed view of each other. I unbuttoned my coat and waited for a good long time, breathing the warm air. I wanted to start asking questions again, but it was too close and raw. I sat the license plate on the seat beside me, looked at the keys on the table, and settled on another subject. “So, you’re the one who owns the Euskadi?”

It took awhile but, after lighting his pipe and taking a few puffs, he answered. “Hahhm.” After smoking for a while longer, he spoke. “Came up fer sale back in the sixties and bought it for a song. Brought Jerry Aranzadi in as the vocal partner and to run the place; only way to keep it on the up and up, and he doesn’t steal too much.” He took a deep breath. “Still the only place in town where you don’t get offered a blueberry beer.”

“Jerry’s Basque?”

“Yeah, he’s one of them high-altitude Mexicans.”

I smiled; it was a common phrase in these parts. “It’s always been a nice place.”

He looked down at the dog’s head, which he continued to pet. “They used to bring ’em through here, the Basquos. Kind of a halfway house for sheepherders.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “They’d sponsor a Basquo to come over by contacting the Wyoming Range Association, put the herder’s name in, and pay five hundred bucks to cover the immigrant’s travel expenses. The Range would check the fellow out, and if he hadn’t pitched any bombs into any cafés they’d run ’im through a quota system. Usually it was a relative, somebody they could count on. They’d deduct the money out of their pay once they got here. Poor bastards only made about thirty a week; took a while.”

I waited a moment and glanced over at the bar back, which continued to insist on older and gentler times. “You met here on Thursdays?”

“After Charlie was dead.” It took a moment, but he smiled. “We never got remarried. The Basquos are pretty hung up in that religious stuff, but I think I got her to understand that she was missing something. I’m just not sure if I got her to understand that it was me.”

I waited a respectful moment before asking. “Lucian, what happened?”

He stared at his arm on the table, his fingers brushing the brim of his hat. “Do you think I killed Charlie Nurburn?”

I continued to look at him and thought about what the old outlaw was capable of, the stories I’d heard, the stories I knew. “Right now, yes, I do.” I sighed and thought about Dorothy’s advice. “Lucian, I don’t particularly want to get into a pissing contest. You had to know I was going to discover all of this, you trained me too well.” I thought about Mari Baroja, Isaac Bloomfield, about Lana and the pack of lawyers soon to be snapping at my heels. I placed my elbows on the table and rested my chin on my fists. “Do you know she has a granddaughter here in town?”

“Yes, I do.” His look continued to darken. “You’d be amazed at the things I know.”

“No, I wouldn’t, Lucian. I wouldn’t be amazed at all. I’ll tell you what I would be amazed by, you telling me what the hell happened fifty years ago.” I didn’t move, just leaned on my fists and stared at him. I took a deep breath and went easy. “For me to know what’s happening now, I need to know what happened then.”

He nodded almost imperceptibly as something old and brittle broke loose. I watched as it fell into the river of memory and slapped against the rocky cliffs of Lucian’s mind. “What good would it have done?” His eyes took on a long dead look. “What good would it have done for a woman like that to go to prison for the rest of her life?”

* * *

I listened as Lucian’s voice carried us back to a summer night in the middle of the last century. I can still play it back in my mind, like a home movie that is grainy and overexposed. The film slips with the clattering of spanners in the works as a thin man comes home late one cloudy night, a mason jar half full of clear liquid still dangling from his fingers as he fumbles with the knob on the door. The jar slips and busts on the uneven steps with a loud pop, shards of glass and homemade liquor falling through the cracks of the warped and cupped wood. Cursing, he continues to fumble with a latch that has been locked since early in the evening.

There are three children in a bed at the backside of the little house, illuminated by the flashes of lightning along the Big Horns; two are three-year-old girls, twins, with their arms wrapped around their bony knees. They are clutching a threadbare star quilt between them; its floral pattern fades like distance. There is a boy who is a little older. He sits at the foot of their bed, unmoving, but holding a large hammer as best he can in his shaking small hands.

There is a slam against the door as the man throws himself against it in an all too familiar rage. This is the pattern, the framework to which these children have accustomed themselves. They shudder in fear and try to remain silent. A promise made and a promise kept in an attempt to keep the bad from being so bad.

There is a woman standing against an old Republic steel sink, her palms pressed against the coolness of the counter’s lip. The cool feels good on her hands, calloused and raw from a short lifetime of hard struggle. Her long dark hair hides the face that is bowed to a god that no longer hears the trembling split lips pray for just a small salvation.

The slamming on the door continues. It is softer this time, and shortly thereafter there are soft words, words that she has responded to before but cannot anymore. He slams the door again, loud, and her head rises, revealing a dark and seeping bruise. The damage has been inflicted at her cheek but has drained to the jawline and is yellowing like something gone bad.

Words again, and then silence, an active silence that ends with the crash of a kitchen window and a piece of firewood that slides to a stop on the linoleum floor with the broken glass. She screams and rushes to the window, heedless of her bare feet and the triangular shards of heavy lead glass, in an attempt to push him away from her and from her children. His hands reach out for any part of her that he can grasp, finally tangling in her hair, and he yanks her head forward as he brings his other fist upward, propelling her backward in a lazy arch to the wood-burning stove at the other side of the small kitchen, where she lies, crumpled on the floor, still.

He scrambles in a drunken attempt to achieve purchase on the slick clapboard of the house, finally getting enough leverage to balance his weight on the sill, but slips on the edge, the glass slicing his hands as the house itself defends against his intrusion. He falls when he gets inside, rolls over onto his stiffened arm, and looks at his hand, at the glass splinters that continue to make him bleed. He attempts to pull them out but gives up in a thundering slam against the kitchen wall. He cries like a wounded beast before his attention is drawn to the opposite side of the room where a shapely calf and a well-formed foot stretch toward him in an unconscious but provocative manner.

Her father and uncles had said that she was a virgin, but they lied. Slut. She did it too well and enjoyed it too much. Bitch.

It is time for a lesson, time to teach her how to take what a man could give her. A flood of heat accompanies the anger and drunkenness giving it direction and focus. He pushes off with the good hand, tries to straighten his head, and considers the curves and softness barely concealed by the cotton dress. Even unaware, she begs for it.

She is small and easy to lift by the bodice of the dress. Her head slumps to one side, allowing the damage to her face to show. Ruined. So he turns her around and forces her over the sink. He thought of the stove, but the sink is higher and will afford a better angle for his purpose. He raises the dress over her hips and pulls at the cotton panties so that they slide down one leg and dangle from her foot, which is a good six inches from the floor.

There is blood on her undergarment; it is her time. He smells it, a different smell than that on his hands. He grabs the thick mane of her hair, pulling her head back and placing his face beside hers, telling her that he will not soil himself with her blood, that any hole is a hole. He fumbles, one-handed, with his belt and the thick buttons on his pants, shrugging the straps of his suspenders off his narrow shoulders and extracting himself for the work at hand.

She is partially awake now. The coolness of the porcelain has given her the slightest release, has allowed her the ability to center enough to bend her knees and kick. Her arms swing back and claw at him. Dishes fall from the counter, utensils crash to the floor with the melody of broken wind chimes, and the point of a large butcher’s knife sticks in the green linoleum. He slams her head forward again, still holding the fist full of hair. The only sound she makes now is an involuntary grunt as he drives himself into her, forcing the air from her, over and over again.

He has not seen the door at the end of the short hallway open and is not aware that the boy has crossed the room at a desperate but determined pace. The boy is troubled by the burden he carries and surveys the scene before him in a despondent and inevitable fashion, raising the weight as high as he can, not sure if the leverage of the thing will allow it to be brought down on the appointed spot. He does not understand exactly what is happening here, other than the same one is hurting the same one again, and it has to stop.

The three smallest toes on the man’s left foot are broken on impact. He slips and falls sideways, back toward the busted window, where he curses and howls like the animal he has become. The woman still lies facedown on the counter, her feet still dangling above the floor.

The boy moves forward again, raising the pointed edge of the shoeing hammer in an attempt to strike once more before retribution. It is too late. The man reaches forward and grabs him by the shirt and most of his undersized chest. The hand sledge falls from his small hands. The man feels a surge of pain from his foot and pulls himself up and onto his knees; he shakes the little body, draws it close, and slaps the boy backward with his open hand. His free one scrambles across the floor in search of the hammer and pounces on it like a five-legged spider. He smiles through his teeth as he raises the heavy metal head and takes aim on another man’s child.

There is a sudden tugging at his collar.

He feels strange, almost peaceful, as he looks down at the unconscious boy. He stares at the geometric pattern of the floor, having never noticed it before. The hammer drops to the side, forgotten, as he reaches up to his throat. It feels strange and wet, and he coughs as thick, dark liquid passes from his mouth onto the child. The weight of his head pulls it forward, and there is more blood flowing onto his shirt and arms and hands. He opens his mouth to scream, but the liquid blocks his voice and spills onto the floor with the force of an open spigot. It fills the room with its smell and slippery texture, and it is everywhere.

The man tries to raise his head, but the muscles refuse to work, and his face will not rise to follow the boy who is being pulled from him. He slips sideways and falls back against the cabinets below the sink. He lies there, blinking at the tableau before him, as the mother holds her eldest in her lap close to her, her legs tucked as she crouches against the stove like a panther.

He feels cold. He blinks again and remembers how one of the uncles had told him how they always allowed her to butcher the hogs in the autumn, how she had the blood touch. He looks into those baleful eyes, which are willing him to die. Slut. And she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. Bitch.

He takes forever to die, but she waits, unmoving, and watches him for the better part of an hour to make sure, finally kicking his leg to see if there is any reaction. She gathers the still unconscious child and feels his breathing on her neck, and this is when she cries, smearing the tears away with the back of her hand. She carries him to the bedroom where the twin daughters wait, eyes wide, as she gently places their brother between them. She tells them that she must go to the Aranzadi’s, eight miles distant. It will be late when she returns, but they must remain in the bed. They must not move, and they must not make noise, but most of all they cannot go into the kitchen. The smallest cries that she is thirsty but is silenced by her mother’s look.

She reins in the large bay and wheels him around the motorized carriage. The automobile is his, and she does not trust it. The bay is spooked by the lightning that pounds the black edges of the Big Horns. The wind is up, and it might rain; the buffalo grass sways like an undulating ocean of flax and seed. Tired as she is, she hopes for rain. She drives her naked heels into the horse’s flanks and gathers herself low behind his neck. There is only one two-track back to the main road and the nearest phone.

The rhythm of the horse’s hooves on the hard ground lulls her; she tries to stay on, gripping the hair of the horse’s withers. The first drops of rain hit like mercury dimes as she makes the rise overlooking the neighboring ranch house. There are no lights, but they will understand.

The hard flat drops of the high-altitude rain continue to strike at her as she urges the horse faster down the slippery track. Lightning flashes again, and the horse sidesteps in the yard, his stocking feet glowing like spats. She has started off, but the horse has taken her by surprise, and she tumbles forward. He backs away, dragging her as he goes. She holds to the single rein as the horse shakes his head up and down in an attempt to be free. He stops when she speaks to him in the language her husband had never tried to know. “Ialgi hadi kampora . . .”

She drags herself up toward the door and stumbles at the steps, is pounded by the rain, and shakes with the chill of the cold water as it streams from her hair and onto her skin. Her muscles contract, and it is all she can do to drop a clenched hand against the screen door. She cries and tries to strike the door again but can’t. Her head sinks to the step, and she rests there; it cannot end like this, it must not. She stirs, but her hair clings to her broken face, and her joints ache with the strain. Whatever was there, whatever had pushed her to this point, is washing away with the cold wind and rain. She pulls her legs and arms in to protect them, to allow them rest.

There is a sound from within the house, and the door swings wide. A kerosene lantern shines on her with the pointillist pattern of the reinforced screen. Someone is kneeling now, lowering himself to her view and reaching out a thin and gentle hand. As his fingers close around her shoulder, she raises her head and, shivering with the last strains of energy she can afford, she speaks. “Polizia constabule . . . Lucian.”

* * *

He smoked his pipe for a while and then got up quietly, positioning his leg, and moved around to the bar. He pulled a paper filter from a stack on the shelves, placed it in the maker at the bar back, pulled the urn from the burner, and filled it with water from the small bar sink. “You ever seen a man cut like that? Ear to ear?”

“No, not like that.”

He nodded, poured the water into the machine, and placed it back on the heating element. “If you cut an artery completely through, it tries to heal itself by pinching off but, if you’ve got the touch, you only cut the blood vessel halfway so it keeps bleeding until there’s nothing left to bleed.”

“Lucian, this was a clear case of domestic abuse and self-defense.”

He shook his head as the coffee began to percolate. “Not in 1951.”

I waited. “I thought you said it was ’52.”

“That’s when the goddamned Indians stole the car out of the irrigation pond Isaac and I stuck it in down on Four Brothers.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the bar. “How’s I supposed to know it was gonna be a drought summer?”

“Why the elaborate charade with Marcos down in Vista Verde?”

“She wanted him alive.”

“Why didn’t she just file for abandonment?”

He shrugged. “Religion.”

I waited. “Bloomfield was in on this?” He looked away for a moment and didn’t speak. “He’s in a room over at Durant Memorial.” I got Lucian’s undivided attention. “He tried to drive to Billings last night to assist in Mari’s autopsy and wrecked his car near Sheridan.”

Lucian nodded. “She needed medical attention, and I knew he would understand.” He looked at me. “He all right?”

“Yep.” I sat on the stool opposite him. “Lucian, her heart gave out.”

“I don’t believe that.”

I thought about the things I had believed when my wife died, complicated, hurtful things, and how the only thing that seemed to help was to have somebody listen. I glanced back over at him as he waited for me. “Did you see anything that night?”

“No.”

“Would you tell me if you had?”

“Yes, goddamn it. I ain’t got nothin’ to hide.”

“You have up to now.”

He shook his head and turned around, pulled two cups from the cluster below the coffeemaker, and poured us a fresh pair. He pushed one of the cups toward me with his fingertips. “That’s my personal life.”

“Your personal life is this case.” The stillness was back, and I was sure he was thinking about the heart that had failed. I thought about bringing up Isaac Bloomfield’s theories on substance abuse, advanced venereal disease, and hereditary predisposition but, if Mari was resting easier in Lucian’s mind, now was no time to trouble the waters.

When I looked back up, he was studying me. “So, you gonna call in the F B of I on me or what?”

I took a sip of my coffee. “I’m thinking.”

He nodded. “Well, you think about this while you’re thinkin’. You know what a jury can do. You remember what they did for Melissa Little Bird.”

The coffee was hot, or maybe I’d lost my taste for it. I sat the mug back on the surface of the bar and shook my head. “Not the same.” I waited a moment then stood up and buttoned my coat. “I have to go to work.”

He looked at me as I crossed to the door with Dog in tow. “Big murder investigation?”

“Something like that.”

He sat the mug back on the bar. “Which one?”

I looked at the floor and pushed the door open to let Dog out. “I’ll let you know.”

* * *

It was getting colder, so I flipped the collar up on my jacket and scrunched my neck down for cover. So, he didn’t do it, at least not technically. He just covered it up or, in the parlance of the law, he was an accessory after the fact, which could get you from twelve to seventeen. I tried to think about how things had changed in our little corner of the world in fifty years. I thought of Lucian rumbling around the county in the old, upside-down bathtub of a Nash, meting out justice with a tin badge, a long-barreled .38-caliber revolver, and a shovel. I had developed my own ideas about murder from a Vietnamese Colonel COSVN who labeled it as the worst of crimes because once you had taken a life it could not be replaced. He had also stated that Ngo Dinh Diem was an idiot, but he was our idiot, one of the statements I had chosen not to take to heart. All in all, murder was a complicated and dirty business that took up a lot of emotional space in your soul; I don’t think Lucian could have tolerated that kind of occupancy.

I shifted my thoughts to Mari Baroja. I wondered if she would have preferred to die in one of the small rooms in the Euskadi Hotel rather than in Room 42 of the Durant Home for Assisted Living. Some of their lunches must have been longer than their three-hour marriage. I thought about the effect she might have made on the old sheriff’s life had she been able to remain nestled there, the good she would have probably done, the holes in his tattered sails that could have been filled. Why hadn’t they remarried? Religion, maybe, but perhaps the clandestine weight of Charlie Nurburn had been too much. Things like that have a way of gathering momentum until there simply isn’t a way of dealing with them in one lifetime. Maybe they were two different people by then. Maybe it was that those three hours weren’t to be tampered with, that those three hours for those two people had been enough. Some fires can’t bear to dampen and can provide heat even from the distance of time.

As soon as I closed the door of the truck and fired her up, I spotted a well-worn unit of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department sliding down Main Street. She was driving too fast, like she always did, but didn’t stop beside me; rather, she pulled around and parked. She got out, ducked her head against her collar, and trudged through the snow with a silent determination. She stood beside the window, and I noticed a piece of folded paper in her gloved hands. I hit the button, but the window only made a brief herniated sound; it was apparently frozen shut. She raised an eyebrow, then calmly unfolded the paper in her hands and slammed the face of it against the glass. It was a fax from the medical examiner’s office in Billings, and it said that Mari Baroja had died of complications due to naphthalene poisoning.

* * *

“Mothballs?”

We both stared at the speakerphone on my desk. “It’s where the smell comes from but, for it to be toxic, it has to be ingested. It forces the hemoglobin out, causing kidney damage and other assorted niceties.” We continued to stare at the little plastic speaker cover. “Some people have a hereditary deficiency of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenate that makes them particularly susceptible to naphthalene poisoning. Mari Baroja was in that group. It’s usually in people of Mediterranean descent, and Basques are on the list.”

I shook my head and looked at Vic who seemed lost also. “How would someone know that?”

“The same deficiency makes them sensitive to aspirin. If somebody knew that, it would give them a pretty good indication.”

I thought about the stuffed and golden brown crow I was preparing to ingest. “There’s no chance that this could be something else?”

“None.” The little speaker was silent for a moment. “The amount in her kidneys was miniscule, but her medical records showed that the deficiency was diagnosed back in the forties.”

“What medical records?”

“The ones I had faxed up from your hospital.”

“Who was the attending physician?”

There was a brief pause as he shuffled some papers. “You know, doctors really do have the worst handwriting.” I waited. “I. Brumfield ring a bell?”

“Isaac Bloomfield.” I looked up at Vic; I had already filled her in on the Bloomfield front. “Yep, that’s the personal physician of the decedent.”

“I guess you need to go talk to him.” I thanked Bill McDermott, punched the button, and looked back up at my smiling deputy.

“I’m glad I’m not you right now.” She started to get up and head for her own office as somebody opened the front door. I assumed it was Ruby. “Sancho is out at Sonny George’s checking the Mercedes. Do you really think somebody tried to kill the Doc?”

I took a breath. “I don’t know, but the accident sure seems fishy.”

She was grinning, enjoying my quandary. “You want me to head over to that hotbed of illegal activity, the Durant Home for . . . ?”

“Do me a favor first?” I couldn’t resist, she was looking so satisfied with herself. I stood and pulled the Post-it from my shirt pocket and handed it to her. “Call Charlie Nurburn down in Vista Verde and ask him when he’s going to be up here next?”

She took the slip of paper and frowned at me. “You don’t think we have more important things to do?”

I smiled back. “It’ll just take you a second.” She gave me the finger as I passed her on the way to Ruby’s desk. Dog was already there. “Isn’t Cady supposed to arrive sometime this afternoon?”

“All the flights from Denver have been canceled.”

I looked down at her, hoping what I had heard was wrong. “What?”

“All the flights from Denver have been canceled, and I’m not even sure if she made it there yet.”

“I better call.”

She held the receiver up to show me. “What do you think I’m doing?” I glanced at my pocket watch as Ruby watched me. “Got an important meeting?”

I continued to watch my sweep second hand. “No, but I’m expecting an explosion any time now.”

“Fuck me!” It resonated down the hallway from her office and, a moment later, my highly agitated deputy was standing beside me and requesting a private audience in chambers. I looked back at Ruby. “Let me know what’s happening with Cady.”

She smiled. “You bet.”

* * *

“He’s dead.”

“No shit.”

“But Lucian didn’t kill him.”

She rolled her eyes. “Sure he didn’t, he’s too busy providing his answering service.”

“She did it.”

Her eyes widened. “She did it?” I told her the story just as Lucian had told me and watched as she sat there. “Ugh.” She looked at the fax on my desk. “I guess that puts a whole new profile on our victim, huh?”

“That and, from what the foreman told me, she was worth millions.”

“Methane?”

“Yep.”

She pursed her lips. “By the way, your buddy stopped by this morning.”

“Which buddy?”

“Cecil Keller, the roustabout that shot his foreman? Big fucker with bad teeth? Nice of you to give me the heads-up on that one. He said you wanted him to come in and have a little chat.” I smiled. “Go ahead and smirk. No current wants or warrants, but I confiscated the weapon and had a little talk with him about resolving his conflicts.”

I felt the muscles pull at the corner of my mouth. “I forgot about him.”

She shook her head. “You know, I’m glad I’m around, considering the laissez-faire attitude the two previous administrations seem to have taken toward capital crimes.”

I looked at the fax. “Yep, well, I guess the salad days are over.”

She grew quiet. “I’ll go over to the home. Where are you headed?”

“I figured I’d go over to the hospital and talk to Isaac, then I guess I’ll start with the family by telling Lana that somebody poisoned her grandmother.” She started out. “Hey?” She turned back. “There were some cookies on the floor beside her bed. I know it all sounds very Dorothy Sayers, but I thought I’d mention it.”

“And I’ll check the drawers for mothballs. Maybe Mari was schnockered and thought they were breath mints.”

* * *

Isaac Bloomfield wasn’t in his room, but he wasn’t hard to find; he was snoring in the staff lounge with a large bandage running from his temple and around his ear. I sat in the chair opposite his sofa, unbuttoned my coat, and placed my hat on my knee. The old guy snored like a Husquavarna chainsaw. “Isaac?” I said it three times before he heard me.

“Walter?”

“How come you’re not in your room?”

“I’m more comfortable here.” He leaned in and took my hands. “I understand I owe you my life?”

I shrugged. “I almost got both of us killed, if that’s what you mean.”

He shook his head at my inability to accept thanks. “How is my car?”

“Totaled.” I leaned back and watched him. “Isaac, last night you said the brakes failed.”

“Yes?”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes.”

I took a deep breath and went on, before he could interrupt. “Isaac, did Mari have a deficiency of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenate?”

He sat up slowly and looked at me, after rubbing his eyes and putting on his glasses. There was a very long pause. “Naphthalene poisoning?” I nodded. “Clever.”

“Why is that?”

“She was a lifetime smoker, it would have made the trace elements difficult to discover, along with the miniscule amount to be effective due to the deficiency.”

I leaned back in the chair. “You learn something every day.”

“But it must be ingested to be poison. That would create a difficulty under most situations, but Mari’s sense of smell had long been deadened.” He thought for a moment. “We discovered her reaction to aspirin during one of her clinic visits, and it was a textbook response. I induced vomiting with a syrup of ipecac, since her respiration was not depressed, and then insisted on further testing.” He smiled and continued to look at me. “This makes things difficult for you, doesn’t it?”

“How do you mean?”

“You are looking for someone who knew her medical history.” He continued to smile. “If I were you, I would suspect me but, in that I am innocent, I have nothing to fear from your suspicions. So, I give them and you my blessing.” He leaned forward and again took my hands in his. “Find who murdered her, Walter. She suffered enough in life; there is no reason she should have to bear this final indignity.”

I took Isaac off the unofficial suspect list on my way out to the truck. Dog was waiting, so I let him out to pee and stretch his legs. I leaned against the Bullet and thought about all the Barojas I was going to have to contact in the next few hours. I loaded Dog up and headed out to buy some overdue baked goods.

Someone hadn’t been content to wait for the old woman to die, and all the suspects smacked of being too obvious. That’s how it worked, though. Motive and opportunity rode along like two out of four apocalyptic equestrians, grinning with their bony death heads at us lesser humans as we fumbled along, refusing to believe the obvious.

I had eaten the ruggelach, and I didn’t die.

* * *

I parked the truck and noticed a single set of footprints going in but none leaving. Lana must have walked. I opened the door and carefully shut it against the compacted snow at the sill. She needed to shovel. The bell at the top of the door tinkled, but no one appeared. I took a step in as I followed the dog but stopped to knock some of the accumulated snow from my hat and shoulders and to breathe in the fragrance of rising yeast and baking bread. The only sound was the quiet hum of the coolers and the winds of forced-air heating.

Dog had advanced down the long counter but had stopped at the end. His head dropped, and he stared at the small seating area in the back. I was surprised when he retreated a step or two, froze and growled, and looked at something around the corner. “Dog?”

It took about two strides to get to Lana Baroja who was lying at the top of the steps to the basement in a considerable amount of blood. Spikes of black hair were matted at the back of her head where there was a deep wound. One arm was turned while the other shot off to the side in an unnatural position.

I checked her pulse; the rhythm was fast. Tachycardia—no way to know the pressure. She was pale, bluish, and clammy, with a light sweat, classic symptoms of shock.

The numbers started up like an adding machine in my head; large bold numbers that stated simply that one third of the victims of head injury are unconscious and that more than 80 percent of the total deaths came from this group; that a full 50 percent of the individuals who could speak at some point after their injury and later died could have been saved with immediate treatment. I thought back to Isaac Bloomfield on the highway, my recently accumulated experience, and momentarily considered another line of work.

I checked her neck, but nothing seemed broken. I made the decision I had been making a lot of lately and scooped her up, yanking a tablecloth from the nearest table and wrapping it around her, being careful to support her head. As I made my way toward the door, Dog followed.

I had her at Durant Memorial in four minutes.

A doctor I didn’t recognize pushed me away from the gurney as he felt the region at the back of her head, palpating the lacerations and bruising, checking for signs of hemorrhage behind the eardrums, and shining a light into her eyes to see if the pupils were equal and reactive. I wasn’t surprised when the damaged Isaac Bloomfield appeared and called for a CT scan to examine her brain and the inner lining of her skull for evidence of the subdural hematoma he knew was there. I wasn’t surprised when he called for two units of blood as they rushed her into the operating room, nor was I surprised that A-negative was what he asked for, without consulting any files or records. I wasn’t surprised as I watched the snow from the waiting-room windows and felt the cold creep in from a winter that showed no signs of ending.

I was surprised when Isaac Bloomfield reappeared after twenty minutes and told me that Lana Baroja would live.

8

I reached out and pulled her hand down; it seemed that she was probing the wound a little too aggressively. “No idea, huh?”

She smiled, but I think it hurt. “No.”

I looked into her eyes again, but the pupils seemed normal; they must not have given her any drugs because of the head trauma. Even in the gauze turban, she was looking pretty good; amazing what youth can do. “How do you think they got in then?”

She was studying me now. “I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t get the door relocked.” I guess I made a face. “What?”

“No footprints and, odds are, they wouldn’t rely on you accidentally leaving the door ajar. Anybody besides you have keys to the place?”

She looked at me for a second longer than necessary but then answered. “Nobody.”

“Who rented you the space?”

“Elizabeth Banks at Clear Creek Realty.”

I made a mental note to call Beebee. “Have you heard from your aunts in the last few days?”

“Kay called and said that Carol was flying in from Miami and that we have to have a family meeting on Thursday; something about the Will.”

“Today?”

She looked sheepish, and it was a look that agreed with her. “Is it Thursday?”

“Yep, I think they knocked Wednesday out of you.” I was silent for a moment too long, and she blinked and looked at me. They were fine dark eyes giving a clear view into a very fine mind that continued to operate despite recent abuse. “I’ve got something to tell you, Lana.” It hung there between us as the baseboard heaters ticked in the private room.

“It’s about my grandmother?”

“Yep, it is.” She didn’t move as I told her about the evidence we had assembled; instead, her attention shifted to the knees that were pulled up to provide a resting place for her crossed arms. As I talked, it seemed as though she was drawing in, growing smaller as the world grew colder. I calculated the risk and decided to go ahead. “Lana, do you know about the methane development that’s going on down on your grandmother’s place?”

Thought clouded her eyes for a moment. “Kay is in charge of the estate, but I’m not sure. Carol might be in charge of the ranch. There’s a manager who lives in the old house on Four Brothers.” She shrugged. “I really don’t know.” She was still looking at me when I glanced back up. “You think the same person that killed my grandmother tried to kill me?”

I rubbed my face and looked through my fingers. “I’d rather be chasing one killer than two; it gives me better odds.”

* * *

I got all the way to the front desk before Vic accosted me. She was eating an almond cookie. “So did you have to step on every one of the fucking footprints at the bakery?”

“I didn’t want it to be too easy for you.” I leaned against the receptionist’s desk. “I’m assuming you checked those?”

She winked and pulled two more out of a ziplock bag and held them out to me. “That’s what I’m doing now. Want one?”

I shook my head. “I’ll wait till the report’s in.”

She shrugged and ate another cookie. “Naphthalene’s easy to trace in food. The smell is hard to hide.”

“Where’s the high-altitude Mexican?”

“I left him at the office. He went there from Sonny George’s.”

“Anything at the junkyard?”

I noticed she wasn’t smiling. “The bleeders on both the front and rear brakes had been loosened just enough for the fluid to escape. I called Fred Ray over at the Sinclair station, and he said he did a full brake job on the Mercedes about two months ago, and there is no way the car could have lasted that long with them loose.”

I took a deep breath. “I’ll need to talk to Sancho.”

“He’s going through the boxes and cataloging the crap from Mari Baroja’s room which, I might add, is a lot of crap cataloging.” She looked off toward the windows and casually walked over to the waiting room to watch the snowfall. “Letters, boxes, and boxes of letters, notes, and telegrams. You name it. If it was written, she kept it.”

“That may be handy.”

“Yeah, we got her whole life in boxes.” She turned, and her eyes locked onto mine. “Note the phrase whole life in boxes and note that Sancho is at the office. When we got there this morning, there were the cartons. We found out that the staff at the Durant Home for Assisted Living had taken it upon themselves to box up Mari Baroja’s life, send it to us, and clean the fucking room.”

I could feel my jaw muscles tightening. “I guess they didn’t notice the bright yellow tape across the door that says SHERIFF’S BARRICADE DO NOT CROSS?”

“Maybe they can’t read.” She cocked her head and continued to look at me. “Are you going to get really mad? ’Cause I like it when you get really mad.”

I ignored her. “Anything in the letter boxes?”

“Well, we’re just getting started, and a lot of it’s in Basque, so Sancho’s the only man for the job. A couple of letters from Northern Rockies Energy Exploration, pretty straight forward stuff, and all of it from Baroja-Calloway down in Miami.”

She waited, the tarnished gold of her eyes lying heavily upon me. Then she pulled what looked like a stack of assorted letters from her other jacket pocket. They were old and tied together with a faded piece of red fringe that had been pulled from the edge of a scarf. It looked like the one that had blown across the Powder River and had snagged on the European blue sage that I had seen in my dream. I carefully took the stack of thin paper and looked down at the address: Room 201, The Euskadi Hotel, Durant. In a swirling hand, the letters were addressed from Lucian.

“I thought you might want these.”

I nodded and looked at the fragile letters with the faded words and the worn fuzzy edges. Words like accessory to commit fraud, conspiracy, tampering, and a myriad of others hung there in the small space between us. I glanced up at her, but she was watching the snow, and I stood there for a moment, looking at the reflection in her eyes before quietly shoving the letters in my own jacket pocket.

She remained silent for a moment, then reached out to place the tip of her forefinger against the glass, and I saw her as a child, the kind of child who had to touch everything, the kind of child you couldn’t say no to. I had a child like that and reminded myself to ask Ruby if I could expect Cady by Christmas. “So, are you going to go over to the Home for Assisted Living and assist the staff in an ass-chewing or what?”

I ignored her some more. “No moth balls?”

She licked her cookie-crumb lips. “No moth balls.” She held the bag out to me again. “Last one.” She smiled. “So . . . you think we should have a look at Mari Baroja’s last Will and Testament?”

I looked through the glass doors of the hospital at the gentle but ever-falling precipitation. “We should be thankful for the snow, it’s probably the only thing that’s holding Baroja-Lofton-Baroja-Calloway at bay.”

“Oh, the hyphen-harpies called.”

I sighed. “When?”

She finished off the last almond cookie and stuffed the bag in the inside pocket of her coat. “This morning. I’m assuming they are assembling for the charge.”

“Well, that’s my problem. If there’s nothing over at the bakery, then I guess you should go back to the home. Get the names of everybody who went into that room. Start fingerprinting with the easy stuff, get what you can from contrasting powder and silicon lifts, superglue fuming, and simple photography. Hit the AFIS. It’s a long shot, but you never know.” She was already nodding and smiling. “What?”

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

I nodded and self-consciously adjusted the brim of my hat. “I want the names of everybody who was in that room, and I want all of them in my office at exactly 3:45 or I come and get them. Remind them that if I have to come and get them that I will not be happy. We will impress upon them the seriousness of our line of work by fingerprinting all of them in the jail.”

She looked at her watch. “What’re you going to do between now and 3:45?”

“Find the Will.”

She continued to smile. “The will to what?”

* * *

“That would be Jarrard and Straub.”

“That was your old firm. Do you remember any of the details?”

He reshaped the corner of his mustache and smiled. “It was not a close relationship. I think the law made her uneasy.”

Amen.

“When was her Will attested?”

“Which one?”

I studied him for a moment. “Oh, now why do I not like the sound of that?”

Vern leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “She was of a mercurial disposition and, according to her mood toward her children and grandchild . . .” He paused. “This is all completely off the cuff and an old cuff at that. You understand that I had already left the firm?” I nodded for official purposes while he captured the front of his mustache in his lower lip and thought. “The last one that I saw was a three-way split, straight up the middle.”

I wondered about the judge’s ideas on percentages. “Which three?”

“Carol, Kay, and Lana. I assume she didn’t care for David’s wife.”

“Executor of the estate?”

“Carol, I think.”

I thought for a moment and went on. “You know about the methane development down on Four Brothers?” I waited, but he didn’t respond. “About a million a week. It’s going to complicate matters, especially since Mari Baroja died of naphthalene poisoning.” He didn’t say anything, so I told him what I wanted. “Vern, I’m about to be ass-deep in lawyers, but I need room to work. Are you going to help me out with this?”

His eyes drifted to the window that overlooked Main Street where I’m sure the vision of Mari Baroja sauntered down the snow-covered sidewalk in a blue polka-dot sundress and clunky heels. I wasn’t sure if the judge’s daydreams allowed for current weather conditions. “What can I do to help you?”

“I need a peek at that Will.”

Vern nodded out the window. “I’ll call Kyle Straub.” He looked at me. “You need this now?”

“Yes.” I waited as the judge made a telephone call. “Well, I have some good news and some bad news.” It didn’t sound like the first time the judge had expressed this particular sentiment. “He says the reading of the Will is in his office today at 5:00 and that you are more than welcome to attend.”

“Did I mention that Lana Baroja is over at Durant Memorial with a blunt trauma wound to the head, a probable victim of attempted homicide, and that somebody may have attempted to kill Isaac Bloomfield as well?”

The judge stalled out there for a second but got going again pretty quickly. “No, you did not.”

“I don’t suppose Kyle would like to exchange venue for the hospital?”

“He’s under no obligation.”

I sighed; dealing with lawyers always made me tired. “What’s the good news?”

“That was the good news.”

I sighed again. “What’s the bad news?”

“As suspected, Mari Baroja viewed revising her will as something of an avocation.”

I couldn’t risk sighing again; I was losing too much air. “Two quick questions: how many and when was the last?”

“Fourteen, and the latest revision was last Friday afternoon.”

I went ahead and sighed again; maybe my lungs would collapse, and Vic and Sancho could handle the whole thing. “Any idea who attested it?”

He glanced up at the aged Seth Thomas on the wall, which was not unlike the one in my office. I figured a clock salesman at the turn of the last century must have made out like a bandit in this county. “I imagine you will find out at 5:00.”

I got up and shook my head. “If you talk to Kyle Straub again, remind him that I’m going to start taking a personal interest in his miseries.” As I went down the steps, I turned and looked at him through the doorway. “And I’m considering yours.”

He closed his eyes and nodded slowly. “Always comforting to know one is in your thoughts, Walter.”

I’d have never made it as a lawyer.

* * *

It was just past 3:15, and I was hungry, but I knew there was supposed to be a small crowd waiting for me at the jail in half an hour. There was no time to eat, but I had an extra twenty minutes, so I rolled past Clear Creek Realty. Beth Banks, or Beebee as the locals had called her as long as I’d been aware, was attempting to lodge her considerable girth into a spanking new Cadillac. I smiled at her as I pushed the button on the passenger window and watched as about a cubic foot of snow fell inside my truck; I really had to get some seat covers. “Hey, Beebee.”

She giggled. “Uh-oh, what have I done now?” She was wearing a flaming red wool coat, and the flakes were beginning to accumulate in her platinum blond hair.

I left the motor running, so she wouldn’t think I was going to hold her for long. “Beebee, did you lease that building next to Evans’s to Lana Baroja?”

She thought. “Yes, about three months ago.” The smile faded a little. “Is there a problem?”

I thought it best to keep things simple. “Somebody broke into the place, and I’m thinking that they might have had keys. I was wondering if you knew of any other sets?”

“No, but I’ll check.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t know if there were any other keys to that building, but it’s always a good idea to change the locks in a new business.” The smile returned. “Like I have to tell you that.”

* * *

There was a substantial group of vehicles in the office parking lot; I guess Vic had been able to corral all the usual administrators for the mass imprinting. I put on my serious face which, I’m told by some, makes me look like I am mildly constipated and walked in, ignoring them and standing at Ruby’s desk. She was the first to speak, Dog by her side. “Walt . . .”

I whipped my hat off and spoke in what my father used to refer to as a full field voice. “Damn it.” Dog rolled his eyes up in a worried look at my tone of voice. I winked at Ruby, and she almost smiled. “Get me Vern Selby on line one, and tell him that I want to know the sentencing guidelines on obstruction of justice.”

She nodded. “First degree?”

I almost broke, but bit my lip and nodded back. She didn’t mention the chair or the big house, so I made a safe escape into my office and slammed the door behind me with a thunderous clap. The knob came off in my hand. I bent down and looked at the mechanism still imbedded in the core of the wood and hoped somebody would come in before too long. I tossed the knob on my desk and sat down to wait.

After a few moments, the intercom buzzed on my phone. I punched the button, “What?” I made sure it was loud enough for them to hear in the reception area.

“Walt, Louis Gilbert and the people from the Home for Assisted Living are here.”

“Tell them I want them in my office, right now.” I scrambled around and picked up Saizarbitoria’s folder, attempted to look like a captain of destiny, and waited a few more moments. Somebody quietly knocked against the door, and I was relieved that it pushed open a little with the knock. “Come in.”

Louis was talking as he opened it and looked at the hole where my doorknob used to be. “Walt, this is all just a big mistake.”

“I hope so.” I didn’t sound as angry; it was a hard emotion for me to sustain.

There was a small crowd behind him, and I recognized Jennifer Felson and Joe Lesky for starters. “There was a memo we put out saying that unoccupied rooms should be cleared in twenty-four hours.” Louis introduced a small, frightened old woman in the back of the group, Indian and probably Crow. “Anna Walks Over Ice thought she heard Joe tell Jennifer that that meant all rooms, including Room 42, but Joe doesn’t remember having that conversation with Jennifer.” Louis nodded toward the elderly woman. “She doesn’t understand English very well.”

I stared at the blotter on my desk. “Who cleaned the room?”

Louis was quick to speak. “Anna.” It is a long-standing western tradition—when in doubt, blame the Indian.

I looked at the group as they looked at each other. “Jennifer, you were on duty?”

She looked up and slightly raised her hand. “Yes.”

“Joe?” He raised his hand, too, and I started feeling like I was teaching class. I sighed. “Okay, you don’t have to raise your hands. Both of you were on duty?”

Joe was eager to clear things up. “It was near the shift change. I come in at ten o’clock, but I had some extra work to do, so I came in early.”

“And you found her, Jennifer?”

She started to raise her hand but stopped herself. “Yes, I was doing the eight P.M. rounds.”

“Did you have any contact with her earlier in the evening?” She nodded. “What was she doing?”

“Reading. She liked to read.”

“Was she eating or drinking anything?”

“She had some cookies.”

I wondered if Vic had eaten all the evidence. “Anything else?”

Joe piped up, “She always had a glass of Metamucil in the evenings as a fiber supplement.”

“Who mixed that up for her?”

Joe shrugged. “I did.”

“Did she eat or drink anything else that evening?”

They all looked at each other, and Louis was the first to speak. “She probably had her dinner at six with the rest of the clients.” He looked puzzled. “Do you think something disagreed with her?”

I looked at all their faces. “Mari Baroja was poisoned.”

Jennifer crossed herself, Louis stared at me in shock, and Joe paused and then translated to Walks Over Ice. They all looked sad, but they didn’t look like killers; they looked like people that cared a lot and got paid very little for their concern. The Indian woman said something to Joe, who looked at me, shrugged, and translated. “She says she will pray for Mrs. Baroja.”

We all sat there in silence for a moment.

The shock was still in Louis’s voice when he spoke. “Walt, this is horrible.”

“Yep, that’s the official view as well.” I studied them a while longer. “You can see how important this is?” They all nodded again. “Joe, do you have the Metamucil container?”

They all joined me in looking at Joe as his eyes widened. “Yes. Do you . . . ? I mean, do you think . . . ?” They all looked worried, images of other patients flopping around on the floor crowded in on them.

“I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. The amount of this particular poison wouldn’t have an effect on most people.” I leaned back in my chair. “I’m going to need the can of stuff that was used to mix up her dose for that night. I’m also assuming that her meds would be with her personal effects?” Louis nodded. “Were there any glasses or plates left in her room?” After a brief conference, it was ascertained that there had been but that they had all been run through the dishwasher and were now perfectly safe.

There didn’t seem to be any more questions to ask, so I invited them to go down to the jail to be fingerprinted and called Vic to ask her to accompany them back to the home after she finished to collect the rest of the evidence.

It was 4:15, and I had three-quarters of an hour before they read the Will, so I punched the intercom. Ruby answered, “Are you through terrifying the people from the old folks home?”

“Laugh it up, I’m sending you there next. Do we have anything to eat?”

“Potpies in the jail refrigerator.”

It didn’t sound like it would hit the spot. “Vic didn’t bring any bread back from the bakery?”

There was a pause. “No, that would constitute stealing, and we try and refrain from that type of activity within our sheriff ’s department.” There was a murmuring on the other end. “But somebody just came in, and he says he’s willing to buy you a late lunch-early dinner as long as it doesn’t come in a bag.

I put my hat back on and hurried out before the Cheyenne Nation changed his mind. As a precautionary measure, I left my office door open.

* * *

He was staring at his chicken-fried steak sandwich; the long dark hair hid his face and muffled his voice. “How many murders have we had in this county since you became sheriff?”

I counted up quickly, then recounted. “Five.”

“Three in the last month?”

“Yep.”

He picked up the sandwich and looked at it. “You should retire . . . quickly.”

I chewed on my usual as Dorothy came over and poured us more iced tea. “It’s very tempting to go with the lawyers.”

“They have the most to gain.” He growled it, the way he always did when talking about violence. “Assuming Lana did not beat her own brains out with a tire iron . . .” The chief cook and bottle washer looked over at the brave, and they both nodded.

I looked at them and wondered if people in other parts of the country were as smart-ass as the ones that I had to put up with. “You two are a lot of help.” Dorothy shrugged and went back to work. I took a sip of my iced tea and looked at the Bear.

He chewed. “Tell me about the timing on naphthalene poisoning.”

“Five to twenty minutes, so it had to be introduced to the victim less than a half an hour before her death.”

“Then it had to be someone who saw her at the home that night.”

“Possibly, but it could have been left for her in some form of consumable; of course, they washed all the glasses and dishes that were in her room.” I turned and caught Dorothy’s eye. “I need your phone.” She brought it over and sat it in front of me. I looked at Henry. “Why are you in town during a blizzard?”

He looked out the window behind us. “In case you have not noticed, it has stopped.”

I turned, and it had. “I’ve been kind of busy.”

He sat the glass down and continued. “I needed filing supplies and discs for the photo collection I am working on.”

I went ahead and dialed the number of the jail. “How’s that going?”

The lines at the corner of his lips pulled south, pinning his mouth like a pup tent. “The problem with leading Indians is you are never quite sure if they are following or chasing you.”

The telephone began ringing. “Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department, Officer Saizarbitoria speaking. How may I help you?”

I stared at the phone. “Wow.” I jumped in before he could deliver another schpiel. “Sancho, it’s me. Is Vic around?”

“No, she’s done fingerprinting and went with the staff over to the Home for Assisted Living.”

I had seen her fingerprint before; with her Philadelphia technique, I was pretty sure she was the fastest fingerprinter in the West. “How long do you think it will take you to go through the boxes?”

“I’ll be done tonight.”

That’s when his trial period would be over, and I suspected he would hightail it back to Rawlins after that. I waited for a moment and then spoke again. “Hey, Troop? I want you to know that what you’re doing is important, and I really appreciate it.” He didn’t say anything. “About Isaac’s car, what makes you think somebody fooled with it?”

“There was brake fluid all over the place, and two of the bleeder valves were left just loose enough to leak over a short period of time.” He paused for a moment. “It was a front wheel and a back one. The car has a two-reservoir master cylinder, so it could only fail if both systems lost pressure. It just seems like too much of a coincidence.”

“You sound pretty sure.”

“My father was a shade-tree mechanic his whole life. It’s something I’d know.”

I hung up the phone and looked at the Bear. He had put his sandwich down but continued to chew. “Was that Anna Walks Over Ice in your office?”

I nodded and started to take another bite of mine but sat it back down. “She works at the home.” I drank the last of my iced tea and glanced over at Dorothy. “She doesn’t speak English?”

“No. Some of the elders believed it diluted your power.” He drew a deep breath. “She did not speak when she saw me.”

I continued to look at the 220-pound man who looked like he could have stepped from a Curtis photograph or a Remington oil. “You’re kind of hard to miss.”

“Perhaps.”

“If you get a chance, would you talk to her?” It seemed like I was always asking the Bear to help me out in an unofficial capacity. I smiled. “You speak Crow well enough not to embarrass yourself?”

He nodded. “Chiwaxxo diataale, baalaax bishee.” He stood and reached for his long leather coat hanging on the hook behind him, then turned and looked at me as he pulled it over his shoulders. “Anything else?” I was disappointed that he was leaving; I was just remembering the pleasure of his company. I suppose he read my disappointment. “Where are they reading the Will?”

“Jarrard and Straub, on the corner of Main and Gatchell.”

He nodded. “Maybe I will stop by.”

“Bring a lawyer, everybody else is.”

His mouth stiffened before he flipped on his Wayfarers. “Perhaps I will.”

He thumped me on the back and made me spill a little iced tea on my pants. One of the big bronze hands reached out to touch fingertips with Dorothy as she passed him. They did it with the casual assurance of professional basketball players. “Ha-ho, Queen Bee.”

She nodded to him, and he swung the door open. She refilled my glass. “You paying for the Noble Savage?”

“Yep, he’s working undercover.”

He stood on the snow-laden sidewalk and raised his arms to the brief strands of sunshine cascading down on Main. His arms stayed stretched out, the duster splayed like wings, and the dark hair dropped across the black leather to the small of his back. He looked like a six-and-a-half-foot raven, gleaning what warmth he could from the available light in a full Technicolor moment.

“He looks it.”

The war cry rattled the glass in the closed door.

* * *

Jarrard and Straub was the premier law office in the county, having been started by Jim Jarrard and Larry Straub back before Lexis-Nexis and an hourly rate above two hundred dollars. I was more comfortable in the old place with its partners’ desks and tortoise shell lamps and quiet-voiced men. There used to be a remarkable mount of a bugling elk that Larry had taken up near Rock Creek before it became unfashionable to sport such things on the wall of a law office. The elk, of course, was gone, and all I saw were walnut-paneled walls with tasteful watercolors of the area carefully illuminated by recessed lighting.

“Good to see you, Walt.”

“Hello, Kyle. Thanks for letting me sit in.”

“No problem.”

Sarcasm was lost on the man. “Where is everybody?”

“They’re in the conference room upstairs. I just wanted to check a few things with you before we went in.” He stood there for a moment, nodded and looked at the wall-to-wall carpeting. “If I were to give you a copy of the Will now, would you still feel compelled to participate in the reading?”

This was an unexpected turn. “Why would you do that?”

He crossed his arms and sat on the corner of his desk. “I have been in communication with both Kay and Carol.” He hugged himself a little tighter and continued, “With the Will being what it is, I think it might be best for all concerned if you were not present at the time of the reading.”

I gave Kyle my undivided attention. “And why is that?”

“I think they may become agitated.” He handed me a closed manila envelope with the firm’s address neatly affixed in the upper left-hand corner. His eyes came up to mine. “You might tell Lana that I’ll be by later with a copy for her.”

I nodded but, as I opened the door leading from Kyle’s office to the hallway from the reception area, what looked to be the entire Baroja-Lofton-Calloway clan was headed our way. Since Kyle had not appeared on time, they had decided to go looking for him en masse. Kay was in the lead, sweeping and clattering jewelry as she came, husband in tow. A blowzier version of Kay, with a few more pounds of bosom, was bringing up the rear in a full-length mink coat and what looked like a full-body tan.

I rolled up the envelope and stuffed it in my coat pocket. “Hello.”

Kay pulled up a stride away and looked past me. “Is this the reason we’ve been cooling our heels in your conference room?”

I leaned over and blocked her view. “I had some official business with Mr. Straub. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.”

She stared directly at the manila tube sticking from my coat pocket. “Is that the Will?”

I turned to look at Kyle, figuring it was his play, but Kay actually started to snag the envelope from my pocket. I suppose if I’d had time to think about it, I wouldn’t have grabbed her hand with so much force. She yanked back, and about twelve hundred dollars worth of silver, coral, and turquoise came off in my hand.

“You son of a bitch!”

I tried to give her her jewelry back, but she stepped away. I tried to hand it to her husband, but he backed away, too. I was getting ready to hang the Baroja-Lofton Collection on the doorknob when Carol, at least I assumed she was Carol, extended her hand, so I deposited the bracelets with her. “I’m sorry, I . . .”

“You son of a bitch!”

Tears were welling in Kay’s eyes, and she clutched her hand as if she had just pulled it from a #16 bear trap; I had to admit it was a pretty good performance. I looked up and became aware of Henry standing with a young woman behind the Barojas in the overcrowded hallway. The young woman pushed her way through the lawyers and held up a piece of paper in a freshly manicured hand. “Division of criminal investigation. I’m looking for Sheriff Walter Longmire?” She was a tall redhead, long-legged, with an athletic figure and frighteningly direct gray eyes.

“Uh, that would be me.”

She turned to regard me as the very red, full lips kicked to one side in painful annoyance. “I just flew through a blizzard to get up here at your request, Mr. Longmire. The least you could have done was to meet me at the airport.” I looked up at the stone-faced Indian behind her as she stared at the ceiling and expulsed a strong gust of dissatisfaction. “Do you mind if we head back to your office to get me up to speed on things?”

If the Barojas had looked a little closer, they might have seen that the paper she was holding was an airline itinerary. When we got to the steps leading to the parking lot, she paused and cut loose with a toothsome grin. “Hello, Daddy.”

9

“You identified yourself as division of criminal investigation.”

She sat in the chair opposite my desk with her expensive Italian boots curled around its front legs, something she had done with her feet since first grade. “No, I didn’t. I simply stated division of criminal investigation, period, and then said I was looking for you.” She smiled and sipped the coffee Ruby had given her as she studied the Will.

I looked over at Henry who was sitting in the other chair and at Ruby, hovering in the doorway; neither of them was going to be of any help.

She glanced up but not at me. “Ruby, can you believe he hasn’t said a word to me about how good I look?”

Ruby shook her head. “Shameful. Honey, you look great.”

“Thank you.” She flicked her eyes at me before returning to the document.

The phone rang, and Ruby disappeared after giving me a warning look. I glanced back at my daughter. “You can get into a lot of trouble . . .”

“You can get into a lot of trouble manhandling lawyers, but you don’t see me dressing you down, do you?” She took another sip of her coffee, careful not to muss her lipstick. “Can you believe that woman was actually going to grab the Will out of Dad’s pocket?” She turned. “For a professional, that seems like suspicious behavior, if you ask me.”

I sighed and looked at my nameplate on the door, desperately trying to convince myself that I was there, even though no one seemed to be hearing me. “Does that Will say what I think it does?”

She cocked her head to one side and placed the Denver Broncos coffee cup on my desk. “The Testatrix, Mari Baroja, has bequeathed specifically a very large portion of tangible personal wealth and property to the beneficiary hereafter known as Lana Baroja.” The lips pursed again. “Your little baker with the broken head is now a multimillionaire.”

“What about the twins?”

Her mouth kicked to the side again. “Well, they didn’t get chicken feed, but in comparison . . .” She looked up. “They got chicken feed.”

“They’ll contest it.”

“They can try. It’s not my field of expertise, but it looks like a good Will, a Revocable Living Trust with Mari as the Trustee and all properties placed in the Trust. Lana is the appointed Successor Trustee with very specific duties in how the inheritance should be divided. I guess with this amount of money, Ms. Baroja was trying to avoid probate.” She flipped through the pages. “It’s been transposed from the handwritten original, but that’s included.” She turned the pages around and showed me. “Mari Baroja had beautiful handwriting.”

“Who attested it?”

“Two people, which is pretty much standard.” She searched through the signing portions of the document. “Kyle . . . I can’t make this out.”

“Straub?”

“That’s it.”

“Her lawyer. Who’s the other one?”

She smiled. “Uncle Lucian.”

I was getting ready to take my hat off but froze as Henry and I looked at each other. “Does it make any difference if she was married and then divorced from one of the witnesses?”

She continued to scan the papers in her lap. “The Baroja woman was married to this Straub character?” Neither Henry nor I said anything and, after a moment, she looked up, her eyes wide. “No way. Uncle Lucian?”

I went ahead and tossed my hat on my desk. “I’ll give you the details later. If it was annulled, does it make any difference?”

She shrugged. “Not if the annulment was legal; if it wasn’t, it would still be an abandoned marriage and any subsequent marriage would undercut any previous claim.” She looked back at the figures on the papers. “He should have stayed married to her.”

“I don’t believe he had much choice in the matter.” I stayed quiet for a moment.

“It all keeps pointing back to the daughters, doesn’t it?” I listened to the phone ring in the other room and hoped it was Vic. Cady watched me and anticipated my next question. “Are you wondering who gets the money if the little baker should meet with unforeseen circumstance?”

“It was on my mind.”

She looked back at the Will. “The sisters.”

Henry shifted his weight in the chair and looked at me. “Are there other family members?”

“Well, there’s the priest who is Mari Baroja’s cousin.”

“Mari Baroja’s father had three brothers, and they only had one other child among them?” He studied me. “For a very Catholic family that strikes me as unusual.” He waited for a moment. “How about Charlie Nurburn?”

“Who is Charlie Nurburn?” She had been watching us like a tennis match.

“It’s a long story.”

“I believe he is just the sort that might have angry little bastards strung all up and down the Powder River.”

I looked back at my daughter. “Stepchildren?”

“Nope, not unless adopted and stated in the Will.”

Ruby appeared in the doorway. “Vic, line two.” She disappeared.

I punched the conference button. “Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department, Sheriff Walt Longmire speaking. How can I help you?” I thought I’d give Sancho’s methods a try.

“What the fuck?”

I guess it lost something in the translation. “What’ve you got for me?”

“We have a problem.”

I stared at the phone. “You mean besides the murder and the two attempted murders?”

“The can of Metamucil is missing.”

I continued to stare at the little red light on the phone. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, I’m not kidding, and they’re having a shit hemorrhage over here. You’d think that somebody stole one of the Dead Sea Scrolls or something.”

“What the hell happened to it?”

“Jennifer Felson saw it yesterday. Jesus, Walt, it’s a can of Metamucil. I can’t believe our case is hinging on this.”

I started wondering what, exactly, our case was hinging on. “I guess I need to come over to the old folks home?”

The line went dead, so I punched the button and looked at my daughter. Just shy of six feet, most of it leg, she ate like a tiger shark but never broke over 135 pounds. “I bet you’re hungry?”

“Famished.” She smiled, but it faded quickly. “I’d rather not eat at the home.”

I looked over at Henry. “Do you mind?”

He glanced at her and then back to me. “Dinner with beautiful learned counsel?” He sighed. “I suppose not.”

I helped her with her coat and looked down at her. “You’ve only been here for a few hours, and I’m already pawning you off.” She put her arms around me and rested her head on my chest as I breathed in the scent of her hair.

“Daddy, I know what I’m going to get you for Christmas.”

“What?”

She looked up at me through mascaraed lashes. “A razor.”

I remembered all the hours we’d spent napping when she was a baby, her tiny body only covering a quarter of my chest; how she didn’t speak for the first year and a half of her life, and how it seemed that she had been trying to catch up ever since.

She pulled back and smiled as I lowered a fuzzy cheek for a soft kiss. “I love you.”

“I love you, too. It’s wonderful to have you home.” I let her go and watched as she swirled around the corner toward Ruby. Henry turned back after she was gone, and I reached for my hat. “How in the world did you get Cady a flight up from Denver?”

“Omar’s Lear. He says the labor is gratis but that you owe him for the fuel. Merry Christmas.” He took a deep breath. “I suppose the Bee is the only place open?”

“Lucky Dorothy, getting to see you twice in one day. What an embarrassment of riches.”

* * *

It took me a little more than five minutes to get over to the den of iniquity. I had stopped off and bought a six-pack as a peace offering for Lucian; I figured I was going to run into him before too long, and it was better to be wrong with beer than just wrong.

I sat there in the parking lot of the home watching the ever-present Wyoming wind kick at the ridges of the drifts like a gale cutting the tops off waves. I sat there on my heated seat with the defrosters on high and stared at my mountains. I had liked California; it was a beautiful place, but my spirit developed a restlessness there that I couldn’t seem to shake. I had liked Vietnam, except that native peoples were shooting at you all the time, kind of like Wyoming in the 1870s.

I gazed at the mountains and allowed my eyes to relax into the monochromatic landscape where the earth blended with the sky. There was a faint glow separating the two firmaments near Black Tooth, and it was almost like the moon had gotten hung up on the crumbling granite incisor.

I sighed, switched off the ignition, stuffed the keys in my coat pocket, and began the trudge into the home. When I got inside, the place was in turmoil with the soothing strains of Dean Martin’s “Silver Bells” in the background. Vic was talking with Jennifer Felson, who always seemed on the verge of tears. I figured it was time to do a little social damage control.

I collapsed in a seat after I sat the brown paper bag of beer under the chair closest to me. “I didn’t bring the rubber hoses, do you think we can find some here?” Jennifer smiled but still clutched a tattered Kleenex in her lap with shaking hands as her eyes continued to fill. “You know, they got Capone with a can of Metamucil.” I studied the wall, trying to give Jennifer a little room. “You saw the container yesterday?” She nodded. “Who’s been in contact with it since then?”

She slumped into her chair and sobbed. “The entire staff, anybody.”

I looked over at Vic, who seemed to be on her very last nerve. “You can check with the others?” She nodded but didn’t say anything, which was probably for the best, and went back to her reports.

I watched Jennifer for a moment, letting her purge the ducts. “Now, Joe Lesky would have worked last night. Who worked today?”

“Shelly Gatton.”

“Is she already gone?”

Vic interrupted. “Louis called her, and she’s on her way in. Joe Lesky didn’t answer his phone, but Louis said that that’s not unusual since he sleeps through the afternoon and might not get the message until he gets up to come here.”

After Jennifer had gone, I leaned against the back of my chair and perused the AARP posters. I figured I’d let Vic start, just to see if her line of thought was the same as mine.

“This makes no fucking sense.”

I threw my arm over the back of the chair Jennifer had occupied. “Why would anybody go to the trouble of taking the can?” I didn’t really feel like getting up from my chair. “I guess I better go by Lucian’s and take my beating. I haven’t even told him that Mari was poisoned.” I stood up and tried to think of the last time I’d taken my coat off.

“You look like shit.”

I adjusted my hat, just this side of jaunty. “’At’s when I do my best work, when people are underestimating me. Check the supply closet, if you haven’t already; maybe the Metamucil is there. You can take a statement from Shelly Gatton and from Joe Lesky when they get here?”

“Yeah.” She changed the subject. “Cady make it in?”

I nodded. “So you were in on it?”

She was already back to her reports. “Everybody was in on it.”

I picked up my beer and left. Some detective.

* * *

The door was closed to Room 32 when I got there, and no light was showing from under the sill. I checked my pocket watch, but it was too early for bed. I went ahead and knocked.

Nothing, so I knocked again.

Somebody moved in the room. “I got a gun.”

“Me too.” I tried the knob, but the door was locked. In fifteen years of visiting him, he had never locked the door. “Lucian, what are you doing in there?”

No answer. I leaned against the wall and gauged how much energy it would take to kick the door in. I was tired and didn’t feel like kicking in doors, so I went down to the end of the hall and got a passkey. Dean had moved on to “Winter Wonderland,” his voice gliding like a sleigh on cream cheese. Jennifer wanted to accompany me, but I wanted Lucian alone.

“Lucian, I’m unlocking the door and coming in.”

It took a moment for him to respond. “Go to hell.”

He said he had a gun, and I believed him. I unlocked and stood just to the side in case he was drunk enough to shoot. I brushed my fingertips across the door as the slab of light from the hallway bolted across the sand-colored carpet. The first thing to hit me was the smell. At some time during his vigilance, he must have soiled himself, and that smell overrode the tang of his unwashed body, the high heat of the room, and the bourbon. He was seated in a cowhide high-back chair with a 10-gauge sawed-off coach gun across his lap. Both hammers were pulled. “Lucian?”

“Go away.”

The empty bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve was on the floor next to his artificial leg. He was wearing his tattered, checked bathrobe, his Stetson, and one cowboy boot. There were no lights on, and the chair had been pulled against the wall. “What’re you up to, Lucian?” I put the beer down by the door, which I closed, and crossed to stand in front of the brindle sofa against the other wall. I took my jacket off and tossed it behind me. “It’s hot in here.”

“Wha . . . ?”

“It’s hot. You mind if I open the outside door?” He watched me, then took his fingers from the shotgun long enough to gesture toward the sliding glass. I slid the heavy, double-paned glass back about a foot and took a deep breath. The miniature multicolored lights blinked around Lucian’s patio, flashing blue, green, red, and yellow across the icicles on the canopy and across the dimpled surface of snow that had dumped into the small bowl at the back of the building. There was a claptrap Datsun pickup parked in the closest spot of the elevated parking area. The motor was running, but there wasn’t anybody in it. Probably somebody warming his truck up for the cold ride home. I went back and sat on the sofa opposite Lucian and picked up the empty bourbon bottle. “You been drinking?”

He snorted. “Drinkin’ hell, ’m drunk.”

I nodded and watched his fingers still on both triggers. “Scattergun out for a reason?” The smell was getting to me, so I breathed through my mouth.

He wobbled a little, attempting to think and sit still at the same time. He stared at a space to my left, but I was pretty sure he was still talking to me, “ ’M waitin’ . . .” The glittering mahogany of his dark eyes was still visible in the gloom of the unlit room. “You wait with me.”

“You bet.” I sat back in the sofa and wished I had one of the beers in the paper bag, but one drunk and armed sheriff in the room was enough. I scratched my face, felt the hair, and tried to remember the last time I’d trimmed my beard. I reached out with my foot and nudged the prosthetic leg. “Maybe while we’re waiting, we should get you cleaned up and put your leg on?”

He was quiet for a while, staring at the floor between us. “You can’t keep ’em safe, y’know?” His eyes strayed up to mine where they wobbled. “Not always.”

I thought about the woman who had died in Room 42, how she had haunted Lucian long before her death, and how she was now galvanized to his soul forever. “I know.” He started to fall forward, but I caught him before the shotgun fell to the floor. He leaned against my shoulder; he weighed about as much as Cady. “Spent most of my life tryin’ to decide whether ta shit or go blind. Guess I made up my mind to do both.”

I laughed until there was a warm soft lump in my throat and a heat behind my eyes. I palmed the Damascus-barreled coach gun from him and gently lowered the two hammers. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you cleaned up.”

It didn’t take as long as I thought. After I got him in the bath, Lucian was able to seat himself on the specially constructed seat. I was stunned at how old he looked: small, naked, and drunk. I watched him as he clung to the stainless steel help bar and allowed the water to cascade over his scalp and carry the bad things away. The dent where Mari Baroja’s uncle had finally settled the matter of Lucian’s one and only marriage was evident. The water pooled there like some little eddy in his life and collected memories that refused to be erased.

I patted the old man on the shoulder, closed the curtain, and sat on the seat cover. There was a fresh copy of the Durant Courant on the floor next to the toilet brush. When I picked it up, I noticed that it had been carefully folded back to the obituary page. I sighed and looked into the black and white of Mari Baroja’s obit. She had died on her birthday; that explained the drunken jag. I dropped the paper on the floor and went back to the main room to give the poor man a little privacy.

I took the soiled chair and put it out on the patio for future cleaning. The Datsun truck was still warming up and, as I slid the door closed, I could see the ghost of myself in the reflection of the glass, or maybe it was the real me trying to whisper in my ear and tell me what it was that was specifically rotten in Denmark. There were other eyes out there, other shapes that shifted and fell away only to drift back up from the falling snow to watch me and see if I was going to get it right. These shapes moved softly in the deep snow and between the trees; they provided no insight, just audience.

I thought about Vic who was doing my investigative work. I should let her go home. There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t stick around and gather what little information needed to be gleaned here, my daughter notwithstanding. I went back to the partially closed bathroom door. “Hey, Lucian?” I heard some shuffling noises. “You’re not going to drown if I go tell Vic to go home, are you?”

“I don’t give a damn what you do.”

I took the beer with me.

On the way back to Louis’s office, I discovered Joe had replaced Jennifer at the front desk. He looked much as he had two nights earlier when I had fought the Christmas tree. He wheeled his chair back and stuck his arms out, blocking my passage to the bottlebrush conifer. “Very funny.”

“I just didn’t want you to risk electrocution again.”

I leaned against the counter and listened for a second. “How come there isn’t any music?”

“Oh, shit.” He fumbled under the counter with the stereo system, and pretty soon Gene Autrey was crooning “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

“Joe, do you have any idea what could’ve happened to that container of Metamucil?”

“I’m sorry, Sheriff, but it was just on a shelf in the main supply closet. I showed your deputy where it was supposed to be, but a lot of the clients get in there. None of the stuff is prescription, but we try and keep everyone’s name labeled on them.”

* * *

Vic said Shelly Gatton didn’t know anything about the missing container. She had seen Lana the morning I had seen her, after her grandmother had died, and the day earlier when she had brought Mari lunch, along with the cookies. She said Joe Lesky was less helpful in that he hadn’t seen anyone with or without cookies, and that, when he showed her the supply closet, there were four containers of the Metamucil, but none with the name of Mari Baroja. “You gonna test them all?”

She absently pointed to the cans that were on top of her jacket in a brown paper bag. She had been kind of surly about where I had been for the last hour but got over it when I handed her a beer. I watched as she ate the rather bland meat loaf, limp green beans, and pasty mashed potatoes she must have been served quite a while ago.

“You didn’t get me any dinner?”

“You want mine?” She took a sip of her Rainier. “This beer’s not very cold.” I watched her play with the meat loaf, trying to give it a palatable posture on the turquoise plastic tray. “What are we going to do next?”

“The cookies were clean?”

“Will you give up on the fucking cookies?”

“I wish we had them now.” An elderly woman on a walker paused at the doorway of Louis’s office long enough to register a dirty look; maybe it was the language, maybe it was the beer, or maybe that was the way she looked at everything. I noticed that the cans of Metamucil had been opened. “You already start testing these?”

She nodded. “It doesn’t smell like they’ve got anything in them, which means they probably don’t have anything in them.”

“Well, so far that is pretty much representative of the case: where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.” I thought about all the things that needed to be done. “Could you throw a check on the terrible twins and see if anything turns up? I realize it’s a long shot.”

“I already did; Kay’s clean as a whistle, and Carol’s been involved in some questionable deals down in Miami, but nothing that leads me to believe that she’d be capable of something like this.” She continued to study me. “Walt, trust me, I’d like to like them for this, but there’s just nothing there.”

I stared at the window until she spoke again. “Now what’s the matter?”

“I’m resigning myself to the wonderful homecoming I’m giving Cady.”

She crossed her arms and considered me. “Yeah? Tell her to come out to the Morretti mobile manse by the motorway and listen to the wind and the 18-wheelers jake-breaking, then she’ll appreciate what she’s got.”

I looked at my recently divorced deputy, a beautiful, intelligent woman with a body like Salome and a mouth like a saltwater crocodile. I had been to her house trailer when I had hired her, but that was the last time I’d been there. I started to wonder why she hadn’t ever invited me over for dinner when it came to me that I had never invited her out to my place either. I guess it had never really occurred to me, even though I continually swam against the undertow of my attraction toward her. The thought of myself involved with a woman who was about the same age as Cady was an image so pathetic that I erased it in wide sweeps on a regular basis. “You going home for Christmas?”

“No. Mom says Nona should be dead by then, or so she’s promising. Vic Junior got this new girlfriend/fiancée who’s a hairdresser and pregnant, and Alphonse is running off upstate with some friends. Tony’s working at the restaurant with Uncle Al, and Michael said fuck the bunch of us.”

We talked about her extended Philadelphia family on an infrequent basis. As far as they knew, the world stopped at the Main Line in Paoli. I had the most contact with her mother, had spoken to her on the phone a couple of times and seen a picture of her once. Lena was languorously gorgeous with the same olive-skinned, exotic beauty as her daughter but with a few more years on the vine to ripen. She had an equally handsome husband who Vic said pretty much ignored her mother. He was severe and driven and occupied himself with being the Chief of Detectives North, Sixth District, and liaison officer with the Mayor’s Task Force on Organized Crime. “How’s your Mom?”

She crushed the Rainier after the final swallow. “She says I need a good fuck.”

I nodded, sage-like, and looked at the crumpled can still in her hand. “Maybe she’s right.”

“She says you need one, too.” She tossed the wad of aluminum in the trash can under the desk. “Don’t take it personally. It’s been her advice on the human condition since Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the table at the UN, and Dad says it’s always been the case.”

“Something tells me your mother doesn’t use the term good fuck.”

“No, she uses the term roll in the hay, but it just doesn’t have the same poetic ring.”

I found myself becoming slightly aroused as it dawned on me that Vic probably talked dirty during sex, which shouldn’t have come as such a surprise since she did it in accompaniment with everything else. “So, you think your mother needs a roll in the hay?”

“Since Khrushchev.”

“That’s a lot of rolling.”

Her attention went back to the reports. “Yeah. Well, she’s married to supercop.”

She didn’t talk about her father all that much, but his influence was plainly felt. It would have been easy to dismiss Vic’s relationship with him as the difficulties a man with four sons had when confronted with a daughter, but his dealings with the four boys didn’t seem any less rocky. She yawned.

“Go home.”

I helped her put her coat on, and she turned and stood there studying me, looking nothing like a deputy is supposed to look. She grabbed the lapels of my sheepskin jacket and then smoothed them with the palms of her hands. “I still can’t believe you’re getting laid before I am.”

I exhausted a short breath, a reasonable excuse for a laugh. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m not.”

She picked up the containers of Metamucil and waited till she was around the corner and a couple of steps down the hall before calling out. “It does.”

* * *

When I got back to Lucian’s room, it was quiet. The door was closed and locked again. I knocked. “Lucian?” There was no answer, but I could hear muffled sounds along with some splashing noises. “Hey, you getting bashful in your old age?” I listened and could swear I could hear more than one person in there. I glanced back down the hall, where I had returned the passkey, but there was another sharp noise, and I was committed.

I couldn’t hear anything anymore, and a surge of panic raised my head by contracting the muscles along my shoulders. “Lucian!” I pulled my .45 out and crossed the hall; I knew from past experience that if I used my foot to break down the door, my foot would be the only thing that went into the room. I could hear more noises now, so I charged across and planted my entire side, shoulder first, into the door. It exploded and blew me against the wall beside the bathroom. I saw a leg move in the bathtub and brought my head around to see someone running up the hillside outside Lucian’s patio, someone big.

“Sheriff, freeze!” He was gone. I rushed into the bathroom, my lungs settling as I holstered my sidearm and bounced off the edge of the tub as I hit the slippery floor.

The shower curtain was wrapped around the old sheriff ’s body, and the water was still running. I pulled the curtain from around him and cut the tap. His leg was still up on the seat, but the rest of him was lying on his side with a fist clenched at his chest. I reached under his neck and pulled him up from the accumulated water that, having been freed from the curtain, was now swirling down the drain. He coughed, and I turned his face so that when he threw up, it would follow the water. It smelled like bourbon, and I held the one-legged man against my chest as he retched to a stop. He blinked his eyes and looked up at me. “What’re you doin’ here? Go get that son of a bitch!”

I grabbed a towel from the rack, placed it under his head, put him back down, and raced from the bathroom, through the main room, and out the patio doors. I pulled my sidearm, slid to a stop, and looked at the boot prints. They trailed up the hillside. It looked as though someone had brushed against one of the pine trees about halfway up the hill. He must have slipped but had regained his footing and had continued on. The Datsun pickup was gone.

I paused at the edge of the parking lot, having been careful to make my own path up the hill. The tire tracks and the exhaust melt of the Datsun were still compressed in the snow, and I knelt to look at the boot print where he had gotten in the truck. All the prints were marred enough so that we’d never get a decent imprint, but I placed my boot alongside: big, bigger than mine.

Lucian had struggled up to a sitting position by the time I got back to the bathroom, and I was glad I’d shut the sliding glass doors. He was shivering and clutched his remaining extremities, so I propped him back up on his seat and wrapped another towel around him. I pulled a thick Royal Stewart bathrobe that Cady had given him last year from his closet and picked up one moccasin. I caught myself looking for the other one before remembering that he didn’t need it. His prosthetic leg was leaning against the door and on it was the other slipper. I snatched up the leg and continued back into the bathroom, where he looked up at me, still clutching himself. I sat on the toilet and wrapped the bathrobe around him, placing the leg against the tub, secure in the thought that this should be the order of things.

There was a little blood in his smile; he must have bitten his tongue in the struggle. I pulled the old man in and tried to warm him up before looking for a phone. He was struggling with something and, after a moment, his clenched fist came out from the folds of the robe, and he opened his hand. In his palm was an almost foot-long hank of jet-black hair.

The bloody smile held. “Got a piece of ’im.”

10

No one at the home drove a Datsun pickup, and the only one in our tax records was a rusted hulk out on the Miller Ranch down near Powder Junction. It hadn’t run since Steve and Janet’s daughter Jessie had planted it in an irrigation ditch back in ’89. Steve told Ruby I could have it for the annual sheriff ’s auction if I came and got it; I gratefully declined.

I sank my head back onto my folded coat and draped my arm down to pet Dog. I was having a hard time getting Ruby to concentrate on the Datsun pickup rather than Lucian.

“How about the DMV?” Except for the sound of the plastic keys, it was quiet in the office. Cady had left a message last night that she had gotten a ride from Henry and that she had arrived at the cabin safely. She also said that she and the Bear had stopped at the grocery on the way out. She also thanked God that they had. She also reported that it had only taken ten minutes to shovel out the living room and that Henry had used more duct tape to seal up the roof. She was asleep when I got there and, when I risked a kiss on the top of her head this morning, she hadn’t stirred.

The tapping stopped. “Three.”

“Locations?” From my perspective on the wooden bench of the reception area, I could see the serrated clouds on the ridges east of town. The sky was a striped fiery orange, and the snow between was pink.

The thin, nimble fingernails coated in lacquer continued typing. “Lusk, Laramie, and Lander.”

I gave out with my best Basil Rathbone and wondered about the location of Watson. “Hmmm, I’m beginning to see a pattern.”

“They all start with L?”

I held up an index finger. “Perchance a clue. Let’s start with the closest.”

Tapping. “Ivar Klinkenborg.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Wants or warrants?”

More tapping. “None.”

“Age?”

“Sixty-eight.”

“Next.”

There was silence for a moment. “Which is closer, Lander or Laramie?”

I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure. Vic and Saizarbitoria had gone out to a vehicular altercation on 196 just south of town, and it was the Ferg’s day off. The Bear was MIA and was probably back on the Rez. I was idly thinking that at least I had Dog, when he got up and moved back over to Ruby. “Let’s do reverse alphabetical order.”

I got a look on that one. “Jason Wade.”

“Wants or warrants?”

Tapping. “One DUI, two moving violations, both HPs. Recent registration from Nebraska.”

This time I stuck a fist in the air. “Go Huskers. The big red N stands for knowledge.”

Another pause. “Is that a no?”

I threw my arm back over my eyes. “Height?”

“Five-eight.”

“Next.”

More tapping. “Leo Gaskell, thirty-six, three moving violations and a domestic violence charge from two months ago.” Even more tapping. “Involuntary manslaughter, did a five spot in Rawlins, weapons possession, processing, drug abuse violations, clandestine lab operation five years ago, did a year in Fremont County, more drug abuse violations. There’s an assault on a law enforcement officer with no charges pending.”

I was already up and watching her. “Height?”

“Six-five.”

“Hello.” She looked over at me as I thought about it for a moment. “Call up Bill Wiltse in Fremont County and ask him what he knows.” It was quiet for far too long. “What?”

“Had it occurred to you, as a trained and veteran officer, to get the license plate number?”

I let out a large sigh in hopes that she would feel sorry for me. “Maybe I’m slipping.” I slumped back on my folded coat. She took a sip of her green tea that I knew, from one small sample, tasted like lawn clippings. I rearranged my arm and pulled my hat down, knowing full well the silence was about Lucian. “He’s fine, Ruby.”

She exhaled a response, and I waited in the silent darkness of my hat. “You’re sure?”

“You couldn’t kill him with a ball bat.” I thought about how Lucian had looked when I’d run him over to Durant Memorial, flushed with excitement. “He looks better than he has in years. If I’d known what an effect it was going to have on him, I would’ve tried to kill him years ago.” I waited, but she seemed satisfied. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you lie about not knowing Mari Baroja?” It was quiet again.

“At that point in time, I thought it concerned Lucian’s personal life.”

I lifted my hat. “Fair enough.” I stood up and started down the steps to the little kitchenette in the basement. “I’m going to go make coffee.”

“I’m sorry I lied.”

I stopped on the landing and looked up at the painting of Andrew Carnegie, a leftover from the library years. All the time I’d worked with Lucian, he would salute Andy every time he went by. I smiled back up at her. “It’s all right, you weren’t that convincing.”

I paused there on the landing and looked at the photographs, the six black and whites and the one color photo, all in cheap frames. I was the color photo, the one with the silly mustache and the too long sideburns. I scratched my beard and thought about my professional lineage.

Red had retired to ranch in the southern part of the county, had listened to the wind until he had grown loopy as a barn swallow in late elderberry season, and had finally shot himself in the heart. A drunk fourteen-year-old cowboy had knifed Del; Otto was crushed under a team of horses; and, as near as we could tell, Charley and Conrad had just disappeared. I knew why Lucian had called it quits. Things had changed in the seventies, and the world could no longer leave his peculiar brand of law enforcement well enough alone. He had ridden the trail for more than a quarter of a century and that was enough. It wasn’t a happy collection of fortunes, but it did help to put Room 32 at the Durant Home for Assisted Living in perspective.

The old sheriff was a little roughed up, but he was going to be fine. I had saved a small strand of the hair, but the rest was already on its way to Cheyenne and DCI.

I scared up the coffee, folded a paper towel in lieu of a filter, and stepped back to the satisfying gurgle of impending caffeine and thought about another nine months in office. Somehow, it seemed longer than the past twenty-three years and three months altogether.

I noticed the blinking red light on the wall phone in the hallway, picked up the receiver, and tried to think of what Saizarbitoria would say, finally settling on. “Jail.”

“It’s Bill Wiltse. He says he wants to talk to you about this Gaskell character.”

I punched line one. “Hello?”

“Have you got Leo Gaskell?”

I raised my eyebrows and looked at the phone for my own entertainment. “Hi Bill, how are you?”

He was quiet for a minute; I think for emphasis. “Do you have him?”

“No, actually I don’t.” I looked in at the coffee pot, but it wasn’t quite full. “You wanna tell me what this is all about? He doesn’t seem to have any outstanding . . .”

“He assaulted one of my off-duty officers at the Lander Saloon about two weeks ago and broke the orbit around his left eye and dislocated his jaw.”

The coffee was ready, so I turned over one of our rare official mugs with the sheriff ’s star, poured, and watched as a few drops sizzled on the warming pad.

“What’s this all about, Walt?”

I took a sip of the coffee, a little strong but it would do. “Oh, I ID’ed a Datsun pickup last night, and we’ve had someone over here attempting to do that thing that ends all other deeds.”

“What?”

That’s what I got when I quoted Shakespeare to other sheriffs. “You wanna fax over a copy of your files and a photograph of Gaskell?”

“You bet. Hey, Walt?”

“Yep?”

“Be careful with this jaybird, he’s bad news.”

Leo Gaskell fit the bill, but what connection could he have with the Barojas or Lucian? I would have to deal Leo around like a bad card and see what came up. Just for the luck of the draw, I had put out an all points bulletin last night.

* * *

I started up the stairs with my cup of coffee. “Anything on that APB with the HPs?” Ruby shook her head. “Add the plate number.” I called back to her as I made for my office. “You find anything on the priest?”

“He lives at the rectory over at St. Mathias. Father Thallon looks after him.”

I could go find the old priest but, without Saizarbitoria, I couldn’t do much. I could check on Lana, Isaac, or Lucian at the hospital, head over to the home and ask around, or maybe even call in the Baroja twins and have a little chat. The opportunities were endless.

I swiveled my chair around and looked at the orange mountains that paled to lighter shades in the morning light. The sun was out, but it was doubtful we’d get much higher than the teens during the course of the day. The foothills were covered with a deep drift of snow that had piled on from the northwest so that the whole county looked as if it were leaning to the southeast.

I knew better than to call the greatest legal mind of our time before noon on a day she wasn’t billing on an hourly basis. It was still relatively early, and I needed company for breakfast. I figured the Log Cabin Motel was a good place to look.

* * *

“What if I want the special rather than the usual?”

Dorothy crossed her arms and smiled at me like a magician forcing a card. “The special is the usual.”

I nodded, looked at Maggie Watson, and raised an eyebrow. “I’ll have the usual special.”

She looked to Maggie. “Me, too.”

Dorothy opened the waffle iron, set up for Belgian. It wasn’t the usual usual. I looked at the menu absentmindedly and wondered, if I were a breakfast, which one I’d be? Probably the usual. “So, how are our abandoned safe-deposit boxes measuring up?”

She sipped her coffee. “Pretty boring, actually.”

“How much longer do you think you’ll be?”

“Maybe two days.” It was quiet in the little café. “How’s your case going?”

“Don’t ask.” A thought occurred to me, and I looked at the chief cook and bottle washer. “Hey Dorothy, who in this county is bigger than me?”

She was still but didn’t turn. “Bigger in what way?”

“Taller.”

“Brandon White Buffalo.”

I took a sip of my coffee, glanced toward Maggie, and dismissed that suggestion. “Anybody else?”

She sat the bowl against her hip and tilted her head. “There was a guy in here about a week ago, construction worker, really big.”

“Not a local?”

“No.”

“Working around here?”

“Maybe. Outside work; wearing those big arctic Carhartts.” She motioned to the farthest stool at the end of the serving counter. “Sat down there, kept to himself.”

Maggie was watching me prime the pump. “Did he say anything that might’ve given you an indication as to who he was or where he was working?”

She shook her head. “No, he hardly said a word, and it was busy.”

I decided to go with the big indicator. “What’d his hat say?”

“I don’t read every ball cap that comes into this place, life’s too short.” She poured the batter into the waffle iron, closed it, and then turned back to look at Maggie. “Asks a lot of questions, doesn’t he?”

When they had stopped steaming, she flipped the Belgian waffles from the iron, drenched them in maple syrup, and dressed them with confectionary sugar and a few strawberries for good measure. She slid the hot plates in front of us, reaching back for the pot after noticing our cups were about empty.

I started eating as she watched. Dorothy liked to watch me eat, and I’d gotten over it. Maggie seemed to be enjoying her usual usual. “You ever hear of Jolie Baroja, the cousin?”

She poured herself a cup. “Some talk about the ETA. He was over there for a few years during and after the war.”

“That’s a nasty little terrorist group for a priest to be tied up with.”

“Like I said, just talk.” She took another sip of her coffee. “He must be older than dirt. He did the mass at the Basque festival a few years ago in Euskara. As a matter of fact, I don’t think he speaks English, at least not anymore.” She glanced at Maggie, who was doing her best to ignore us. “You know what they say about the Basques; like a good woman, they have no past.”

* * *

I dropped Maggie off at the Durant State Bank and picked up Sancho at the office.

St. Mathias is near the creek where the giant cottonwoods tower over the aged stone buildings that make up the abandoned portion of the Pope’s compound. They built a new church back in the sixties, a really ugly one, the one I always associated with Pancake Day, but the old rectory and chapel still stood by the creek where they always had.

I froze as Saizarbitoria dipped his fingers in the water, knelt, and crossed himself. I stroked my beard and felt like a Viking, there to raid the place. I followed him down the aisle and passed through the sunlight that skipped onto the hardwood floor. The stone pillars stretched to a small gallery where there were ornate stained-glass windows. They were not the usual Jesus lineup but were odd, with strange depictions of biblical passages foreign to me; at least I couldn’t remember any parts of the Bible where Goliath stacked rocks or tiny angels flew around people’s heads.

We shook hands with the amiable blond-bearded priest and followed as he led us to the kitchen where Father Baroja was seated at a table with some hot cocoa. He paid us little attention as Father Thallon put the kettle on and pulled out a few more mugs. “Jolie, you know you’re not supposed to operate the stove without Mrs. Krauss.” The old priest gave no response. “We had a little accident about a month ago.”

I sat at the end of the table and studied the old man. He continued to look at his hot chocolate and pulled it a little closer as if we might take it away from him. He had a long face with a bulbous nose, dangling earlobes, and wrinkles that all congregated at his mouth. He looked like some ancient monk with a heavy wool cardigan that buttoned up around his neck. He could have been any of the hard men I’d seen on horseback in Mari Baroja’s photographs.

Gene Thallon had warned us that Basque was not his second language, or his fifty-seventh for that matter, but that he knew that the language had four distinct dialects, and that the vast number of grammatical tenses included a subjective, two different potentials, an eventual, and a hypothetical. I looked over at my secret weapon and hoped we could get out of there before Father Thallon had us diagramming sentences.

He brought over some cups for us and, with this ecumenical distribution of cocoa, the old priest loosened the guard on his own. It seemed rude to not say anything to the old guy, so I said hello.

He studied me for a moment but dismissed me for the cocoa. I looked at Father Thallon. The young priest smiled. “He can be a little incommunicative at times.”

“Kaixo, zer moduz?” Saizarbitoria casually sipped his own hot chocolate and glanced sideways at Jolie Baroja after speaking.

“Zer da hau?” The gravel in the old priest’s voice could have filled a driveway.

Sancho set his mug back down with a tight-lipped smile. “Bai?”

Jolie Baroja’s head slipped to one side, and then he leaned in close to Santiago, placing a hand lightly on the young deputy’s arm. “Ongi-etorri . . .”

They talked at an impressive rate for a solid five minutes before my translator turned back to me. “Was there anything specific you wanted to know?”

“What was all that about?”

“Cordialities. He thinks I’m a local, and I didn’t dissuade him.”

“Good.” I had watched Sancho carefully, the way he actively listened to what the old man had to say, didn’t interrupt, and maintained eye contact. It was all textbook and well done. It looked as though he had adopted the role of friend and ally with the old priest, a posture that would enable Jolie to speak freely within the coded language they shared.

I looked at Father Thallon, who had been watching the proceedings with great interest, and then back to Saizarbitoria. “Can you gently ask him about his cousin, any family contact he might have had?”

The kid looked at me for an extra moment, then turned and renewed the conversation.

“I had no idea you had deputies that could speak Basque.”

I nodded. “We try and stay close to the constituency.”

The old priest glanced back at me, and Sancho weighed his next words carefully. “He doesn’t like you.”

I glanced at him and then back to Santiago. “He doesn’t even know me.”

“He thinks he does.”

I stood and gestured for the younger priest to lead on. “Well, we know when we’re not wanted.” He paused for only a moment and then led me back into the cathedral. It was small by modern standards, but exquisite. It had been pieced together by the sturdy and articulate hands of not only the Basque but also the Scottish, Polish, Czech, and German faithful. They had been tough men who had brought the old ways with them along with the skills to build beauty such as this. I followed the king’s-bridge truss system of hand-adzed beams that held the roof and admired the wide-plank floors with no board less than a foot wide; the altar and the adjoining walls were local moss stone with the lichens flourishing in the cool of the open stillness.

I took a sip of my cocoa. “Must be tough with all these Basquos around.”

“It’s difficult, especially with the older parishioners; they’re still not sure if I’m going to last.” He smiled. “They have a saying, the Basque. That just because the cat has kittens in the oven, it doesn’t make them biscuits.”

I laughed and looked at him. “You’re probably wondering why we’re here. We’re interested in his relationship with his cousin, Mari. Did you know her?”

Thallon nodded. “Mari? Yes, I did know her. I visited with her last Friday. A terrible shame.”

I nodded. “Do you know any of the rest of the family?”

“I’ve met the granddaughter, the one that owns the bakery. Lana?”

“Seems like a good kid.” The priest remained silent. “Have you met either of the twins?”

“I’ve met Carol; she’s come over to meet with Father Baroja a number of times.”

“How many times?”

He thought. “A half a dozen or so, over a lengthy period. I would imagine that it’s very difficult to visit more often from Florida.”

“Can you remember when she was here last?”

He thought some more and exhaled very slowly. “About two years ago, I think.”

I thought about it. “Was Father Baroja very close with Mari?”

“No.”

“That was a pretty definitive answer.”

“I think there was some tension there.” He glanced back toward the chapel as Saizarbitoria entered from the doorway.

Sancho asked about the church, the congregation, and the community. As they talked, my attention was drawn back to the stained-glass windows. The stone church wouldn’t get long beams of sunshine today; only short blasts of golden light that illuminated first one window, then another. I watched the seemingly random pattern and wondered if I concentrated would I get the message. Probably not.

When I looked back, Father Thallon was looking at me. “They have a name for you, you know.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Basques around these parts, they have a name for you.”

Saizarbitoria was all ears. “They do?”

We waited a moment, before the priest said it very carefully. “Jentillak.” They both laughed.

* * *

I adjusted the heat in the truck and looked at the Basquo. “Well?”

“What do you want to know first? There’s a lot of ground to cover.”

“When is the last time he spoke with his cousin?”

“Nineteen seventy-nine.”

I stared at the fog on the inside of my windshield. “That takes care of a lot of the other questions.”

“That was the last time he saw her alive.”

I turned up the defroster. “And what does that mean?”

“She comes to him in his dreams.” He misinterpreted my stare. “He said that she visits him when he sleeps, that she asks for forgiveness. The dreams he described were very vivid, very detailed.” He turned and smiled at me; he was a handsome kid. “I think the old man may have some demons.”

I thought about my own dreams, about the house and the scarf. “Don’t we all.”

He adjusted his jacket and mindlessly fingered the knob of the glove box. “He said she was immoral. That he had tried to save her his whole life, that the family considered her their greatest failure.”

I drove across the unplowed snowpack of Durant’s side streets. Santiago studied the road ahead. “The old priest doesn’t like you because he thinks you’re Lucian.”

Of course. I nodded and thought about it. “Well, he and Lucian probably didn’t get along.” I thought about filling the kid in, but it still seemed early, so I changed tack. “The old guy seems pretty sharp?”

He paused, the way I was learning that he did whenever you did something to him and he wanted you to know that he knew it. “Well, yeah, kind of.” Santiago sniffed and glanced back at the dash as the windshield began to clear. “He told me to be careful, that there were laminak in the room.”

I turned to look at him. “Laminak?”

He chewed his lip. “Fairies.”

I sighed and made a turn. I had the Old Cheyenne, he had the fairies, and it was all in how you looked at it. “Anything else?”

“I think that about covers it.”

I pulled out onto the main drag and started for the office, barely being missed by an inattentive truck driver. He slowed after he saw the lights and the stars. “All right, what the hell does Jentillak mean?”

He smiled to himself, happy to know something I didn’t. “There are these dolmens, like Neolithic monuments, all over the mountains back in the Basque lands.” He continued to smile. “The Jentillak are a people that once lived alongside the Basque. One day a strange storm cloud was seen in the east and the wisest of the Jentillak recognized it as an omen that their time had ended. They marched off into the earth, under a dolmen still there in the Arratzaran valley in Navarra.” I glanced at him, and he savored the moment. “Jentillak means giant.”

I drove along silently and thought about it. “Giant, huh?”

“Yeah.” He looked back out. “There was a Jentillak who was left behind whose name was Olentzero, and he explained that they had all left because Kixmi had been born.”

I nodded. “Who was this Kixmi character?”

Santiago looked out into the slight sifting of snow and Christmas lights. “Jesus.”

* * *

I dropped Sancho off at the office just as Vic was heading out to a chimney fire on the south side of town. I waved as Saizarbitoria jumped in her unit, and she flipped me off.

It was a quiet day at Durant Memorial, with only a few cars in the lot. “ Janine, is Isaac Bloomfield still wandering around in here?”

She traced a finger down the register and smiled. “You’re in luck, he’s making his late morning rounds.”

I thought about the eight-five-year-old man who had been knocked unconscious only two days ago. “His rounds?”

She nodded. “He has been stalling out in the B Ward dayroom about this time.”

I leaned against her counter and rested my chin in the palm of my hand, happy to discover the Doc was human. “Well, we’re none of us getting any younger.”

She smiled. “That’s not why he stalls out.”

* * *

Lana still looked like a Hindu, but she had obviously gotten supplies from home since she now wore flaming red silk pajamas, a white terry-cloth bathrobe, and pink bunny slippers. The most recent copy of Saveur magazine lay open in her lap. “Looks like you’re settling in.” It was a kooky smile, but a warm one nonetheless.

“I’ve decided to treat this like a spa vacation.”

Isaac was seated on the ottoman next to the bunny slippers, the picture of the attending physician. “Well, Doc, what’s the prognosis?”

He continued to smile at her and, if I were a betting man, I would have labeled him as smitten. “If we can get the patient to stop playing with her head, we can probably save it.”

I stood by the plastic chair. “Stop playing with your head, or it’ll end up looking like my ear.” I glanced over at the Doc. “Or his head.”

“I like your ear and his head.”

Okay, I was kind of smitten, too. “Lana, I need to talk to the Doc. Will you excuse us?”

Isaac and I codgered our way out to the hallway, where I stopped. I didn’t see any reason to drag the Doc any farther than I had to. “How’s Lucian?”

“Asleep in the lounge; it’s where we’ve both been staying.”

I nodded. “Isaac, I need to ask you a question, and the situation being what it is, I don’t have a lot of time for niceties.”

He leaned against the smooth wall of the hallway and crossed his arms. “Yes, Walter?”

I hitched my thumbs in my gun belt and then shifted them to my jacket. It was enough that I wore a gun around Isaac; there wasn’t any need to broadcast the fact. “This human suppository, Charlie Nurburn, did he leave any illegitimate children that you know of?”

He sighed deeply. “This concerns the case at hand?”

“You know, a lot of people have been asking me that lately.” I waited to see if police prerogative would override medical confidentiality. I hated leaning on the old guy, but I needed some answers and, after all, we were talking about ancient history.

“There were a number of women.”

“I’m listening.”

“Perhaps an Indian woman.”

“I’m still listening.”

He took off his glasses and cleaned them with the corner of his smock. “I don’t know her name, or if I did, it has been too long, Walter.”

“When?”

“Early fifties. I could check my private journals and give you an exact date, perhaps a name.” I studied the small indentations at the Doc’s nose, where the same glasses had sat for a half a century. “I have those journals here.”

I straightened a little. “Here at the hospital?”

“In my office here.”

I laughed because it was all I could think to do. “Why would you have those specific journals on hand?” He looked ashamed but not particularly guilty.

“I was transcribing some historic familial selections for the young lady.”

“Lana?”

He smiled and shook his head at himself. “Foolish, yes?”

I smiled back at the charming old man and gently put my arm around his narrow shoulders. “Isaac, everything to do with women is foolish and, therefore, absolutely essential.”

11

“I need to do a little cleaning up.”

His diaries were piled on the desk and looked like old ledger books, the kind that businesses used to use for accounts and which the Lakota used for painting. He sat in the only chair, and I propped myself against an unoccupied corner of the desk.

I watched as Isaac deftly slipped a journal from the stack. It was the oldest of the tomes, and I was beginning to feel like some cleric in training. “My notes are not as complete as I hoped but perhaps something is relevant.” The thin finger with the yellowed nail traveled along the lines like the carriage on a typewriter, pausing here and then there; finally, it stopped.

“Something?”

“It was when I first started the clinic north of here near the reservation.” He looked up at me, his fingertip still on the spot. “December eighth, 1950, a boy, six pounds, two ounces.” He looked back at the ledger. “No name was given to the child at that time.”

“You think this baby was Charlie Nurburn’s?”

He carefully placed the book on the surface of the desk as if the years were in danger of tumbling out, and I thought about all the time that had been collected between the lines. “Acme was a hamlet up near Tongue River, small, even then. Once they stopped producing coal, it became even smaller.” He looked up at me with a thin smile. “It is difficult to hide things in small places.”

“What was the mother’s name?”

He watched me through his overlapped eyelids, which were magnified through the bifocals. He checked the ledger. “Ellen Walks Over Ice.”

I hadn’t moved since he had spoken. “Ellen Walks Over Ice . . . not Anna Walks Over Ice?”

He looked at the ledger again. “Ellen.” His eyes locked with mine. “Anna Walks Over Ice is the woman that works at the Durant Home.”

I looked back at him for only a moment. “Can I borrow your phone, Doc?” He looked around, finally giving up on the landline and handing me the cell phone from his smock pocket. Isaac didn’t have any staff, so he could have anything he wanted. “Isaac, what’s the number for the home?” The phone made a loud beeping noise. “I think you have messages.”

“I’ll check them after you make your call. The phone was in my car, and your new deputy, the young man, was kind enough to return it to me. I get most of my messages through my answering service, but sometimes people don’t want to talk to anyone but me.” He took the mobile, dialed the number for me, and handed it back.

Jennifer Felson answered. “Jennifer, is Anna Walks Over Ice working today?”

“Let me check.” I waited as she dropped the phone, picked it up, rustled some papers, and declared Anna Walks Over Ice missing for the day.

“She’s sick?”

“She’s an Indian. Sometimes they don’t show up, and mostly they don’t call.” Racial slurs aside, most Indians did have their own sense of time; these priorities had worked fine for centuries, so I guess they saw little reason to change. “She doesn’t speak much English anyway.”

I dialed the number for the Red Pony and asked Isaac which button to push. “Ha-ho, it is another wonderful day at the Red Pony bar and continual soiree.”

“Hey, do you know where Anna Walks Over Ice lives?”

“No, but I can find out.”

“Can you check on her for me?” He said he would, and then I asked him if he’d ever heard of Ellen Walks Over Ice. He said no, but that they were a large Crow family. He would ask Lonnie and then get back to me.

“Call me at the office.”

I handed the tiny phone back to Isaac and watched as he hit a few buttons and held it to his ear. He looked at the journal as he listened. “I have her age listed as late teens, possibly early twenties.”

“So she’d be in her seventies?”

He smiled. “You don’t have to make it sound so old.”

I glanced for the ghostly numbers on the inside of Isaac’s arm but the sleeve of his smock hid his dreadful distant past. “She probably hasn’t had as easy a life as you, Doc.”

He continued to smile and nodded. “You’re probably right.” He made a face as he listened to the cell phone. “That’s strange. The messages are from Anna.” He waited for a moment, listening. “She sounds very agitated.”

Evidently, the Doc spoke Crow.

* * *

When I got back to the reception desk, the more tanned and less anxious version of Kay Baroja was standing at the counter talking with Janine about how easy it was to get certified as a scuba diver in a three-day crash course in the Keys. I thought about slipping out the side door, but I needed to talk to her and this was the first time I’d seen the twins apart since she’d arrived. “Carol Baroja-Calloway?”

She turned with a smile like a barracuda. “Carol Baroja, period!” There had been some work done, the face a little tighter, the lips a little fuller, and the hair with bleached sun streaks. She smiled a perfect smile, the teeth a little too white, and extended a hand with no trailing bracelets or wedding ring. “Sheriff Longmire, I am so pleased to meet you!”

Yikes. I smiled. “We’ve met.”

She leaned in and exposed a formidable cleavage, which also looked engineered. “I was hoping you would forget.” She scooped up my arm and steered me toward the chairs at the other end of the waiting room. “I just wanted to apologize for my sister’s behavior. Kay can be rather trying.”

“That’s all right. I didn’t take any of it personally.”

“Even the part about being a son of a bitch?” She sat us on one of the sofas; if she had been any closer she would have been lap dancing. She was still holding onto my arm. “I was on my way in to check on Lana, but this is just too good of an opportunity to let pass. I just want to thank you for taking such a personal interest in my mother’s death and Lana’s welfare.”

“It’s nothing, I . . .”

“No, you have no idea how reassuring it is to know that we can depend on you in these difficult times. Is that horrible young woman from the division of criminal investigation still bothering you?”

I thought about it, finally remembering that she was talking about Cady. “Continually.”

“I’m so sorry.” She blinked, the steady way that contact lens wearers do. “Are there any leads as to who might have done this to poor Lana? The word is leads, isn’t it?”

I nodded and readjusted, but she still clung to my arm. “We’re following up on it, but there isn’t anything strong enough to discuss just yet.” She continued to look at me, and it was the first pause since the conversation had begun. “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

Another pause, and the grip on my arm lessened. “I’m not a suspect, am I?”

I cleared my throat. “When was the last time you visited your mother?”

She thought. “About two years ago.”

“And what was your relationship like?”

The animation in her face subsided for a moment, and I think I was getting the first unrehearsed performance of the day. “Did you know my mother, Walter? Do you mind if I call you Walter?” She measured her next discourse. “In a word, she was a pickle. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think my mother had a very easy life.” That was the understatement of the century. “And I think that that had an effect on her financial views.”

“I see.” I was wondering how long it was going to take for the money to come up.

“She had a simplistic view of our financial situation, all our financial situations.”

“Meaning yours, Kay’s, and Lana’s?”

“Yes. I don’t know if you’re aware of the arrangements my mother made concerning her estate?”

“As you know, I have a copy of the Will to aid in the investigation of your mother’s murder.”

The word murder didn’t stop her. “Lana is not really capable of understanding the magnitude of our financial situation, especially concerning Four Brothers.”

“You mean the meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights?” She leaned back and studied me as though I were suddenly a stain on the bathmat. In for a penny in for a pound, I continued. “What about your father, Charlie Nurburn?”

The look held. “He abandoned my mother fifty years ago, so he’s no longer an issue.”

She looked as though she was ready for the interview to be over. “Just a few more questions. Where does Father Baroja fit into all of this financially? He wasn’t mentioned in the Will.”

She ran a tongue across her teeth and pivoted at the waist, allowing her blouse to open—no tan lines. “Mother and Jolie were the only children of my grandfather and his three brothers. There was another child, Arturo, but he died of pneumonia. When the last of the brothers passed away a number of years ago, the estate was divided between Jolie and my mother, at which point Uncle Jolie sold his half of the ranch back to Mother along with half of his half of the mineral rights and began giving his money away to charity.” She paused, but I didn’t say anything. I was used to quiet, but she wasn’t. “He did not get along with my mother, so I took it upon myself to counsel him on a certain amount of financial responsibility, but I fear that his faculties are beginning to fail him.”

“In what way?” I wanted to hear her talk about the fairies.

“His grasp on reality is a little fractured.”

“So Father Baroja was found psychologically incompetent?” She wasn’t going to talk about the fairies.

“Oh, no. He voluntarily put his part of the estate in a Trust, controlled by a money manager.”

“And who is that?”

She smiled. “I really couldn’t say.” It was probably the fairies.

I cleared my throat and took her hand from my arm as I turned. “Do you have any idea who might have murdered your mother and would wish your niece harm?”

“I wasn’t that good a daughter, and I haven’t been that good of an aunt. I should have kept closer track of Lana, but I’m afraid she’s a little headstrong. The whole Basque thing . . .”

“Basque thing?”

She placed a synthetic fingernail across a mouth I was sure wasn’t finished speaking. “I think she may have been involved with some political activities when she was over there at culinary school.” She said over there as though it were a venereal disease.

I tried hard to not roll my eyes. “Hmm . . . ETA?”

“Yes.” She clutched my hand with both of hers, and it was starting to seem more like a wrestling match than an interview. “I’m afraid that she might have gotten involved with some sordid characters while she was in Europe. It could be that they are interested in Mother’s money.”

“I see.” I let the dust settle on that one and tried to reconcile Lana as the naïve innocent with Lana the intriguing terrorist and couldn’t.

* * *

I went back to the office to see if Bill Wiltse had faxed the picture of Leo Gaskell, but Leo didn’t fit as Charlie Nurburn’s illegitimate mystery child. That child had been born in 1950, which meant he’d be in his midfifties. Leo Gaskell was in his thirties. But someone poisoned Mari Baroja, someone tried to kill Isaac, someone tried to bludgeon Lana Baroja to death, and someone had tried to kill Lucian.

Someone was killing everybody who knew or thought that Charlie Nurburn was dead. Maybe they thought that they could get money from Mari’s estate if Charlie could be shown to be alive. Illegitimate children could not inherit, but Cady had mentioned that in Wyoming a husband could claim half of an estate, even if he was not in a Will or Trust, as an elective share. Maybe they wanted him alive for that purpose and then they could kill him off and inherit?

The sky was the color of liberty ships left in the sun too long with faint tinges of a deeper gray at the horizon. It wasn’t snowing, but what had fallen looked like albino BBs rolling around the parking lot. Vic and Sancho pulled up beside me and disturbed my reverie. I shut the Bullet down and climbed out. Saizarbitoria trailed along after Vic, and I could see that he was covered from head to tactical boot with a thick coating of ice and black soot; even his face was only marginally visible. “The chimney fire?”

He shifted from boot to boot. “You two don’t mind if I go in before I completely harden?”

I stepped aside and allowed him to continue up the handicapped ramp and into the heat and relative comfort of the office. I turned and looked at Vic. “I see your uniform is clean.”

She smiled. “He’s the mountain climber.”

When we got inside, Dog came to greet me and sat with his haunches on my foot. He had carefully avoided Vic. Saizarbitoria was on his way to the jail shower with a fresh towel held between forefinger and thumb. Ruby had obviously fussed over him, and he now had a cup of coffee. “We don’t have much here in Absaroka County, but we do have a fire department.”

“Their ladder truck froze.”

We all watched him go. Vic was still on her best behavior. “He’s fearless. We have to keep him.”

I nodded, and it was unanimous.

Ruby handed me a folder. “Leo Gaskell.”

I flipped it open. There was a regular arrest dossier on Leo Cecil Gaskell, a four-pager to be exact, and a quarter page photo of Leo at his last retreat in Rawlins. He was big, with long dark hair that hung just past the shoulders. Bingo. He had lousy teeth and a broken nose that completed the package, but it was his eyes that were scary. Devoid of any feeling, Leo looked like one of those guys who could strangle a kindergarten and then go home and water the plants.

“Not that fucker again.”

I turned to look at Vic, who was peering over my shoulder. “What?”

She looked at me as if I were the only village idiot left in town. “This is the guy who shot the foreman down on the methane field; Cecil Keller, the one you made come in and write on the blackboard.”

“Cecil Keller?”

“Yeah, this is the guy. He’s got a mustache now, but it’s the teeth. I swear it’s him.” She looked at me. “I’ve still got the gun.”

“Get it.” She disappeared.

I thought about the photograph of Charlie on the Rez with the pistols. I snatched the photo of Leo from the folder and held it up for Ruby to see. Her face reddened. “It’s not the name he gave us before, but that’s him. I’m sorry, Walt, but I didn’t bother to look at the fax when it came in. I know it’s no excuse, but the phone was ringing, and I just shoved it into a folder.”

“Tell Saizarbitoria that he’s earned an inside day and keep him off the roof.” I handed Vic the file as she handed me a chrome-plated, pearl-handled .32 automatic, identical to the four that Charlie Nurburn had worn in the photo. As Vic read the file, she whistled softly at the details. I turned to my second in command. “Looks like we’re going to Four Brothers.”

“I have to pee first.”

I took the file back and sighed. “Go pee.” I sat on the edge of Ruby’s desk and thought about whether Cecil Keller/Leo Gaskell was at work today and about his possible connection to the illusive Charlie Nurburn. The phone rang, and Ruby picked up her receiver and held it out to me. “Henry.”

“I am at Anna’s house, and someone has broken in.”

I looked at the phone. “What?”

“Someone has pried the backdoor open, and it looks as if they were searching for something.”

“I take it she’s not there?”

“No.”

Anna wasn’t at work and wasn’t at home. “Any word on Ellen Walks Over Ice?”

“Her married name is Ellen Runs Horse, and she lives in town at the trailer park by the highway; sometimes Anna stays with her when the weather is bad.”

I closed my eyes and then opened them to glance over at Ruby. “Can you get me an address for Ellen Runs Horse, here in town?” Her fingers began working the keys of her computer.

The Cheyenne Nation cleared his throat. “She is related to Anna. Lonnie says that they are half sisters.”

The wagons were beginning to circle, and all the Indians were related. “Do me another favor?”

“We also serve who drive all over the Rez.”

I ignored the sarcasm. “Could you and Cady go over to Durant Memorial at 2:30? Lana Baroja’s got a meeting with the terrible twins, one of whom just tried to rape me, and I was thinking it might be nice if she had a little representation.”

“At this meeting, what are we supposed to represent?”

“Brains and brawn.”

“Which of us is which?”

I hung up the phone and watched as Ruby scribbled the address down on a Post-it for me, 23 EVERGREEN CIRCLE.

Vic returned from the powder room. “More good news?”

“Unless I am mistaken, Ellen Runs Horse is Ellen Walks Over Ice.”

Ruby and Vic looked at each other and then back to me, Vic the first to speak. “The woman from the home?”

I rubbed my eyes in an attempt to stave off the headache that seemed to be coming on with the velocity of a Burlington Northern/ Santa Fe. “The mother of Charlie Nurburn’s illegitimate child from back in 1950 and the half sister of Anna Walks Over Ice, who works at the home. The same Anna Walks Over Ice who I believe has left messages on Isaac Bloomfield’s cell phone and appears to have just had her house burgled.”

Vic nodded and looked at the Post-it in my hands. “You’ll be wanting to go over to the trailer court first.”

On the drive over, I stuffed the small chrome automatic into the center console on top of the autopsy photographs. “That’s the pistol he shot the foreman with, which looks remarkably like one of the four pistols I saw in a picture of Charlie Nurburn.”

“Where did you see a picture of Charlie Nurburn?”

“At Henry’s. He’s collating a couple of hatboxes full of old photographs for the tribe.”

“Charlie was on the Rez?”

“Yep.”

She looked through the windshield at the snow darting past us. “The guy got around.”

* * *

I looked past her shoulder at the space where a trailer house had been, at a pole with the number 23, and at power hookups dangling to the ground. There was only an inch or two of snow, so it hadn’t been gone long. She turned and looked at me with her hands on her hips. “You know, that’s the problem with using these things for a permanent address.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll go check with the manager.” She marched off down the row of trailers to the one that sat by the road as I knelt and looked at the snow-covered tandem tracks of a very large truck. This was going to make things difficult. What was this world coming to when you could back up to a residence of reasonable suspicion and haul it away?

There were some trash cans, the large metal ones, chained to the low fence that divided the little yards from each other. I walked over and started going through them. The first contained the usual detritus that assembles in any household, apple cores, newspapers, and a chicken carcass. I closed the lid and moved to the next can but stopped when I saw a tiny nose and a set of eyes looking out at me from a small window in the next trailer house about four feet away.

The glass of the vent was open, and it looked like a bathroom window. “Hi.”

I smiled. “Hi.” It was a boy, maybe five, Indian and, from the features, probably Crow. It looked like he was having trouble standing on the toilet and talking through the window.

“You the sheriff?”

“You bet.”

He continued to study me. “You looking for bad guys?”

“Yep, you seen any?” His face became grave, and he slowly nodded. “Tall guy, like me? Long dark hair with a mustache?” He stopped for a second and then nodded some more. I put my hands in my pockets and got out my gloves and put them on. “You see him lately?” The little face continued to nod. “Last night?” More nodding.

“He has a big truck.”

“Did he take this lady’s home away?”

He thought about that one for a minute. “She’s mean.”

“Was she with him?”

“I don’t know.”

I casually opened the second lid and found some mail on the top. “Did they leave last night?” He nodded again as I picked up an offer for long-term insurance from some fly-by-night firm in California; the addressee was Ellen Runs Horse. “Was it late last night?”

“Uh huh.”

“Did they wake you up with the truck?”

“Uh huh.” I nodded along with him and casually lifted the top on the last can.

I quickly closed it. My lungs didn’t want to work, but I took a deep breath and stood there for a minute. “You see anything else?”

“No.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“She’s at work.”

“Who’s taking care of you?”

“My sister.”

I took another breath. “Where is she?”

“Taking a nap.”

“Would you go wake her up and see if she would mind talking to me?”

“Now?”

“Yep.”

“Okay.” The little face disappeared.

I stood there for a moment longer and then opened the third trash can again. I forced myself to look, just making sure that what I was seeing was real.

I closed it and walked back over to my truck and leaned against the side mirror, getting as much air in my lungs as I could force. I looked over the fences, past the snow-covered hills leading to the highway where the 18-wheelers jake-braked to exit Durant. I had to open the door and make some radio calls, but it seemed like all I could do was look off to the horizon and feel the wind that was picking up from the west.

I didn’t think I could trust myself to operate the minute mechanisms of my truck door or the radio, so I waited. I took my hat off and ran a gloved hand through my hair. Still holding my hat, I threw my arm over the mirror and let the truck carry some of my weight. After a moment, I heard Vic coming back from the manager’s office.

“I talked to his wife, and she called him. He works at the welding shop up by the high school, but he’ll be here in about five minutes.” I nodded. “Hey, you don’t look so good.”

I took another breath to quell not so much the nausea but the anger and watched as my hands shook. “I found Anna Walks Over Ice.”

12

Vic was looking at me like I was a crazy person. I hadn’t liked Jess Aliff’s answers. We were standing by one of the compression stations about four miles from everything with the propane engines running in the wind at full blast. It was loud, but I had been louder.

The snow was the stinging stuff that was whisking across the high plains at thirty miles an hour. It was as if the weather had decided to change from bad to worse after I had found Anna Walks Over Ice in the trash can. The anger I felt was like the wind; rage has no place in law enforcement, and I stand fast against it the majority of the time, but it is there, waiting for fissures of passion, waiting for me to slip, and I just had.

The gist of my outburst had been that I wasn’t particularly concerned if Leo Cecil Gaskell/Keller was chairman of the Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission, I wanted his ass and now. According to the foreman, Leo was in a crew that was working in the fields farther south, but he wasn’t sure exactly where. I had asked him if they had radios. He said they did, but that they only worked about half the time. I informed him that this time better be the half that worked.

It was a stubby trailer, the kind that was usually used for hunting. I was the last one in; Vic stood in the little kitchenette, and Aliff sat at the fold-down table where he pulled a radio from a holder on the wall. He looked much as he had the day he had told me about being shot. The condensation from his breath had hardened in his beard and was now dripping onto the Formica-covered table and the assortment of papers that lay there. I stroked my own beard and wiped my hand on my jeans. I started feeling bad about yelling at the man; he likely held no great love for Leo Gaskell either.

“I’m going to need an address for Mr. Gaskell, if you’ve got one.” He tore down a sheet that was taped to the wall and handed it to me. “When was the last time you saw Leo?”

He stared at the table. “ ’Bout two days ago. We had a meetin’.”

“Did he act suspiciously in any way?”

The foreman looked at me. “Nope, I mean, he was like he always is.”

Vic interrupted. “And how is that?”

“Swings back an’ forth. Sometimes he’s so quiet you don’t even know he’s there, ’n’ other times he’s jus’ crazy.”

“I guess one of the crazy times is when he shot you?”

“Yeah.” He slumped against the bench seat of the trailer. “He wanted to borrow some equipment from the company, an’ that’s against the rules.”

“What kind of equipment?”

He shook his head, as if to dislodge the information. I was actually starting to like the guy. “A truck.”

Vic and I looked at each other as he picked up the mic from the clip on the side of the radio. “Station BR75115 this is 75033, do you copy?” We listened as the waves of noise lapped against the antenna. “If they ain’t in the trailer or in a vehicle, we ain’t gonna get ’em.”

There was a burst of static; the foreman caught it and began dialing the squelch up to where it was just below constant. “Come in BR75115, this is 75033. Johnny, it’s the boss. Y’all there?”

“BR75033 this is 75115, over?”

The foreman keyed the mic. “Johnny, is Cecil down there?”

Static. “He said he was supposed to go to field storage yesterday and then work with you guys.”

Aliff turned to look at me. “Well, shit. Field storage is where we keep all the heavy equipment when it ain’t in use.”

* * *

It was the second time that day that I had stood looking at a space where a large thing wasn’t where it was supposed to be. “Where would he get the keys?” He nodded toward yet another stubby trailer that was parked by the opening of the chain-link fence next to the highway. I could see that the door of the camper was hanging slightly open. The door had been jimmied; it appeared that Leo Gaskell had a signature tool for all occasions. When we got inside, we discovered that he had also forced open the door of the lockbox. The foreman leaned in and examined the labeled hook where the missing key had hung. “Mack, CVH613.”

Vic was trying to close the door behind us, and I watched as her breath billowed from the doorway. “Is that big enough to pull a house trailer?”

He nodded. “Oh yeah. It’s a tandem. Haul damn near anythin’.” He looked back to me. “I guess whatever Cecil or Leo’s done, you can add grand theft auto to it.”

Vic half laughed. I turned back from her to the foreman. “Mr. Gaskell is a prime suspect in a number of recent homicides.” I always felt like a used car salesman when I did it, but I pulled out a card and handed it to him, watching carefully to see if he understood the gravity of the situation. “If you see or have any contact with him, I’ll need you to contact me immediately.” He nodded and stared at the floor; the wind continued to beat a tattoo with the loose door. “Is there something else you’d like to tell me?”

He licked his lips and caught part of his mustache with his lower teeth. “Yeah, I reckon there is.” We waited as he gathered a thought and muttered under his breath, “Man, our ass is gonna be in trouble no matter which way you cut it. We dug somethin’ up, jus’ out of the canyon, near that little homestead.” He looked back up at me. “A body, an old one.”

I straightened. “How old?”

“I don’t know exactly, but there wasn’t much left of it.” He looked from Vic to me. “You know how this stuff works, you find ol’ Chief Whosiewatchee and pretty soon yer up to yer ass in archeologists and every tree-huggin’ son of a bitch in three states.” It didn’t sound good, even to him, so he kept talking. “I’m six weeks behind schedule, I can’t keep good people no matter what I pay ’em, the weather is bound and determined to kick my ass, and all of a sudden I’ve got a sack of bones on my hands?”

I tried not to move or do anything that might keep him from talking. “What leads you to believe the bones are Indian?”

“Well, they all are around here.”

Vic was now standing beside me when she spoke. “What happened to them?”

He didn’t speak, so I did. “Let me guess, Leo Gaskell?” He nodded. “How long ago was this?”

“ ’Bout a week ago. Cecil . . . I mean Leo’s got the remains. I think he’s plannin’ on blackmail’n the company.” He looked at the dull surface of the table in front of him. “I guess I’m in a lotta trouble, huh?”

“Probably, but not as much as Leo.” We all nodded.

Aliff said he didn’t need a ride back. We pulled out onto the access road leading to the highway. Vic called in the APB on the truck, and we drove along in silence before she spoke again. “It’s him.”

“It’s not him.”

She leaned a little forward to try and catch my eye. “You just don’t want it to be him.” She pulled a leg up and half-turned toward me, signifying that this conversation was far from over. “Why do you not want it to be him?”

I was getting angry again. “Because Charlie Nurburn never made anything better when he was alive, and I don’t think he’s going to turn into an asset now that his bones might have been unearthed.”

She leaned back onto the passenger door and, after a moment, she crossed her arms. “Jesus, don’t get mad at me, I didn’t dig him up.” She turned and looked out the windshield, and it was very quiet in the cab. She looked like an unfinished oil painting with her profile against the whiteout window, where the artist hadn’t bothered with the background just yet. It was symbolic; there was no periphery with Vic.

Here I was again, taking it out on the wrong person. The person I wanted to take it all out on was out there somewhere with a hundred-thousand-dollar Mack truck, a mobile home, a grandmother and, most likely, the bones of his grandfather. I considered how weird life had gotten in the last week.

“Charlie Nurburn . . . Charlie fucking Nurburn.” She continued to look through the glass as the frozen landscape slid by. “What are the chances? What are the chances that after fifty years . . .”

I sighed. “Charlie Nurburn’s sense of timing, even in the afterlife, is impeccable.” I stared at the ice-covered highway and felt the surge of impending deliberation loosening the traction of my mind. “Let’s go through this carefully, all right?”

I could hear the smile. “Someone finds out that they are the possible heir to millions and counting.”

I swung the Bullet onto the approach ramp and headed back north. “No, they’re not. Illegitimate children don’t get anything. To get anything, you would need a living Charlie Nurburn, so that he could claim his elective share.”

“So, you kill Mari?”

I set my jaw. “And then you try and get rid of every person who knows Charlie Nurburn is dead.”

She propped her snowy boots up on my dash and gave me a long look. “Finding the mortal remains would certainly queer the deal.” She shook her head. “Jesus.” She made a face. “By the way, I don’t see the finesse of poisoning being one of Leo Gaskell’s definitive skills.”

“There is someone else.” I stared out the windshield for a while, and she let me. “Mari and Lana could be the money, but why kill Anna Walks Over Ice?”

“What did Anna say in all those messages to Isaac Bloomfield?”

I passed a ranch truck hauling hay as Vic continued looking at me. “Isaac’s Crow is a little rusty, so I had Henry listen to them and he said that she was upset, wanted to speak to Isaac, but there were no details. There has to be something, though. Her house was broken into.”

She studied me. “So Anna heard or saw Leo do something.” I nodded. “Why move the trailer?”

“Evidently, grandmother Ellen Runs Horse nee Walks Over Ice is a sentimental favorite, and he must have found out that we were looking for him.” My thoughts darkened past black as I thought of the trailer park. “Why leave Anna in a trash can where you know I’m going to find her?”

It was quiet in the cab of the truck. “He doesn’t care, Walt. He’s jacked up on meth and bat-shit crazy. He did it before and got away with it. Hell, Mari Baroja killed somebody and got away with it. It’s in the blood.”

I took a deep breath. “Those two aren’t related.”

She continued to watch the snow through the windshield. “Blood’s in everybody.”

* * *

When we got to the hospital, there was a dark green Excursion with Montana plates parked in one of the official spots, and the small blessing of my day was that Bill McDermott had arrived with the body of Mari Baroja right when I needed him for the body of Anna Walks Over Ice.

I parked the truck and looked at Vic. “You want to go over to the other wing and bring Cady and Henry over here? The meeting must be over by now.”

“Sure. Are we going to check out Gaskell’s address, or what?” I handed her the folded sheet from my shirt pocket that gave Leo’s address as 23 Evergreen Circle. She unfolded the paper and stared at it. “I guess from here it gets serious.”

I studied the steering wheel. “It was already serious.”

* * *

Ferg was waiting for me outside the door of the autopsy room. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

I tried to smile. “McDermott inside?”

“With Bloomfield and the new kid.” The Ferg nodded. “He Mexican?”

I was glad I wasn’t the only one. “Of sorts. Isaac’s assisting at Anna’s autopsy?”

“Yeah.” The Ferg tugged on the bill of his cap. “Walt, I was there. At the Runs Horse place.”

I took a second. “Twenty-three Evergreen Circle? Why?”

“That big ol’ boy was the one that dumped that refrigerator and all that trash over at Healy Reservoir.”

I waited a second before I asked, “Did he answer the door when you went over?”

“Yeah.” It took him a minute to come up with a description but, like all Ferg’s assessments, it carried resonance. “He was unconcerned.” I nodded, but it seemed like he wanted to say more so I made my final attempt at a smile and waited. “Walt, you don’t suppose that woman was in that trash can when I went and knocked on that door, do you?”

I shook my head. “No, she was in my office on Thursday.”

He stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets and dropped his head. “Thank God. I don’t think I could have lived with that.”

We both finally smiled grim tight smiles aimed at our boots and stood there for a moment, letting the trains of silence pass between us, two grown men trying to figure out which way to turn next. “Lord, Walt, this is a nightmare.”

After he left, I sat in one of the chairs and thought about Leo Gaskell. I had to get somebody over to the courthouse to look up any records there might have been on Ellen Runs Horse, on the mystery son, and on Anna Walks Over Ice. I figured Saizarbitoria was good for that. I could get Henry to check the tribal rolls and get Vic to light a fire under the HPs. I could let the Ferg take care of the county while I went over and had another talk with Lucian about current events. What I really wanted to do was strangle Leo Gaskell with my bare hands.

I scrunched down in the chair, my collar came up even with my nose, and I fought the urge to go to sleep; I didn’t last very long, and soon I had that feeling, not so much that I was falling, but that the world was receding.

* * *

The snow was blowing in my dream as well; it seemed that no matter where I went, snow followed. It was dark, with the only light diffused and from a distance, as if the illumination was split and redivided by the air alone. There was the laden feel of fog, which carried a weight in my lungs. I concentrated on the snowflakes as they flew in the light, but it was as if I’d left my peripheral vision behind. There was something out there, a bird maybe, but it was larger than any I’d ever seen, its wings pulling at the air that rushed around us. It was as if it had risen from the snow and was growing as it came closer. I kept looking, but it just wouldn’t focus. Something was wrong, and my neck muscles drained as my head lolled forward. There was a weight in my face that was heavier than it should have been, so I freed a hand and brought it up. It was cold, but I didn’t have any gloves. My hand was almost to my mouth when another reached out from the darkness at my left. It was small, but I could feel the fingers as they tightened around my wrist. It wasn’t aggression but desperation that fed her touch. Dark hair fell into my sight, and she tightened her grip. My head fell forward and my chin struck my chest and there was a flash as my one eye tried to focus. My voice sounded strange to me. “I’m sorry, I don’t . . .”

It was impossible to see her face, backlit by the light, but even in urgency her voice was sultry, and I could feel my blood thicken as she started to speak.

“I can’t . . .”

She looked up and back toward the light; the large bird-like creature continued to draw closer. Her hand deftly released mine, caught my chin, and threaded its way into my beard. Her eyes locked on mine. I could see the lips moving, but the voice seemed to come from very far away. “Gero arte.”

* * *

“Are you all right, Daddy?” I looked up with both eyes at my daughter, who was standing in front of me in the same, full-length coat she’d arrived in. I watched the width of the coat fall open as she placed her hands on my shoulders, the length of it spreading like wings.

I yawned and glanced around at the assembled group. “Just a little tired.” I took one of Cady’s hands and turned to look at Lana. “How did the meeting go?” It was a modified turban now, and the absence of the silk robe and bunny slippers made me long for resort wear. She didn’t say anything, just folded her hands in her lap. “Well, at least you had good representation.” I looked up at Vic and got the ball rolling. “Fax that photograph of Leo Gaskell out to DCI, the HPs, and everybody else on the high plains. Get Bill Wiltse over in Fremont County; tell him I need everything they’ve got on Gaskell. I want to know where he came from, where he’s been, and why. Have Ruby run a check through the NCIC and then get over to the home and get some background on Anna Walks Over Ice. I want to know everything they have on her.”

She smiled, and I caught a glimpse of that slightly overgrown canine tooth. “You bet.” I watched as she man-walked out the double swinging doors.

“Santiago?”

He left McDermott and came over. “Sir?”

You had to love it. “I need you to go to registration and records over at the courthouse. Hurry because they will close right at 5:00.” He nodded. “And find whatever you can on Ellen Runs Horse and Anna Walks Over Ice.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hey, Sancho?”

“Yes, sir?” He stopped, but only his head turned.

“What does gero arte mean?”

His eyes narrowed. “It’s Basque for see you later.” He stood there for a second longer and, when he was sure I wasn’t going to stop him again, he disappeared, too.

I turned back and met Cady’s gray eyes, the ones that had been certain of every situation and had realized how all things were since she was nine. “Would you escort Ms. Baroja back to her room while I have a brief technical conversation with Sweeny Todd and the boys?”

She gathered her purse and pulled her coat around her. “Yes, sir.”

Smartass. I turned and looked at Henry. His look told me he was in for the long haul. With the addition of the murder of Anna and with the disappearance of Ellen, the situation had also gotten personal for him.

I turned to Isaac Bloomfield and Bill McDermott, who were continuing their discussion at the nurse’s desk across the hall. “Gentlemen?” They both turned and looked at me. “I need your help.”

* * *

Things had gotten complicated since we had decided to bring Anna Walks Over Ice back from the dead. Henry had been cast in the lead role as he was the only Indian. The Bear had wanted the room directly below us, but I figured we had a better chance of isolating Leo on the second floor.

“Were they able to get it out this afternoon?”

“The paper came out late, kind of like a special edition.” I handed him the paper I was holding with Anna Walk Over Ice’s photograph on the front page. In bold type it read, LOCAL WOMAN STILL ALIVE AFTER TERRIFYING ORDEAL. “If this works, I owe Ernie Brown, Man About Town, a beer.”

Vic came in from the hallway and stood at the foot of the bed as the Bear read about his pseudo-self in the Courant. She looked strange in the scrubs, her disguise complete with a mask, matching cap, and stethoscope. “How’s the patient?”

He didn’t look up. “Resting comfortably.”

I glanced back at the Bear. “You want to keep the paper?”

“Yes, it might be a long night.” He pulled his Vietnam tomahawk from behind his pillow and placed it in the fold of his sheets, just under his right hand. It was a wicked little beast with an adze end in one direction and a hatchet blade in the other, and Henry could throw the thing with a frightening accuracy.

“You do know we want him alive, right?”

* * *

I met with the rest of our little troop out by the second floor nurse’s station. We were a motley bunch with Dr. Moretti, Saizarbitoria in his North Face cap with a blanket in a wheelchair, and the Ferg in street clothes with a shopping bag. I looked around at our assortment of hidden firepower and almost wished Leo Gaskell wouldn’t come; somebody was sure to get killed.

“There are only two ways he can get to the room, either past the nurse’s station here or the end of the hallway. “Ferg, I want you seated in the waiting area with a clear view down the hall. Santiago, I want you at the doorway near the stairwell as if you’re getting ready to go into or have just come out of your room and get rid of those tactical boots. You look like a cop from a mile off.” I turned to Dr. Moretti. “Vic, you can wander. Everybody ready?”

They all nodded.

“This character doesn’t show a lot of patience, and he’s desperate, so I’m expecting him tonight. It’s still relatively early but that doesn’t mean he won’t come waltzing in here in the next five minutes, so stay sharp. He’s big, he’s mean, and he’s probably self-medicated, so don’t be a hero. If you spot him, sing out.”

They all nodded again.

I checked all the hallways on my way to the elevator and ran into Leonard Goes Far, the Crow gentleman that made sure the floors of the hospital glowed like thin ice. He nodded, which was all you usually got out of Leonard, so I continued into the elevator and felt the drop of my internal organs match my descent.

There was no third floor on Durant Memorial and there were no patients on two that weren’t in on our deception, so there was only one floor and one direction we’d have to worry about. When I got to the front desk, Ruby was waiting, straightening her wig, her eyes a little wider than usual. “You sure he’s not going to recognize you?”

“I am.” Ruby relaxed just a little. “Vic caught him at the door and ushered him back to her office. I doubt he even remembers I was there.”

I nodded. “All the other doors are locked, so the only way he can get in is through here. If he comes in and asks, you just tell him that she’s on the second floor and then get busy with something else. “When you’re sure he’s gone . . .” I waited a moment until she looked back up at me. “When you’re sure he’s gone, use this.” I pointed to the two-way that was under the counter. “Just hit the red button once, that’s all it’ll take. Nobody else is going to use that red button, so I’ll know it’s you, and then I’ll know he’s in.” We were all wearing the walkie-talkies set on vibrate.

I had moved Lana to Room 132, one of the inside corridor rooms where there was a thick, metal-core door that could be locked from the inside. She was in there with Cady. I could have taken them both back to the jail, but I figured it was more prudent and safer to keep all the eggs in one basket. I knocked three times, then once. Cady asked who it was, then opened the door enough to look up at me. “C’mere.” She followed me just outside the doorway where I tried to hand her a snub-nosed detective’s special. “Still remember how to use this?”

She looked at the gun in my hand. “Yes.”

I extended it a little toward her. “Just in case everything goes wrong. Whether it was an accident or not, it looks like he tried to kill her before, he may try again.” I placed the revolver in her hand. “There’s no safety. It’s resting on an empty chamber, double-action, all you have to do is pull the trigger.”

“I remember.” She glanced up at me. “Anyway, I belong to a gun club back in Philadelphia.”

“What?”

Her gaze intensified. “A bunch of the attorneys go out every week and shoot at a local gun club up on Spring Garden. One day they asked me if the cowgirl knew how to shoot, so I went with them.” She leaned against the wall. “I had a really good teacher.”

I waited a moment, but she didn’t say anything, so I pulled her in and hugged her. I held her there and squeezed her close. “If you pull it, use it, if you use it, use it to kill.”

* * *

It was a large closet as supply closets go. There was a built-in drain in the floor with a set of faucets and shelves full of cleaning supplies, mops, brooms, and buckets. I had been smart enough to place one of the waiting-room chairs in there earlier. With the door slightly ajar, I could see the one leading into our Special Forces Anna Walks Over Ice. I hadn’t checked on the Bear; I figured he had his tomahawk.

I settled in and tried to think of something to do while I waited, something other than waiting. I read a couple of labels on some bottles, flipped a mop handle between my hands, and thought. I thought about whether Leo Gaskell would win, place, or show.

I heard someone at the end of the hall. It was a familiar voice. I picked up my hat and opened the door as he continued, “And undercover means you don’t leave the handle of that goddamned Remington, sawed-off scattergun hangin’ outta the shopping bag for every Tom’s Dick and Convict to see.”

Vic was already there when I got to them. “Lucian, what are you doing here?”

“This the way you run a stakeout, with peckerhead here advertising the whole show?”

Peckerhead was the descriptive term Lucian used equally for plants, animals, and inanimate objects. “Lucian . . .”

“I come up here to see how this pissant operation was goin’, and from what I can see, it ain’t.”

I pushed my hat back and sighed. “You were supposed to stay with Isaac.”

“Christ, he snores loud enough to wake the dead. I locked the door when I left.”

I looked back at Vic, who was smiling and folding her arms over her breasts the way she always did when Lucian was around. The Ferg continued to look at the floor. The old sheriff wasn’t going to go back willingly, and I couldn’t leave him out in the open to abuse the staff and draw attention to himself.

* * *

“Dark as the inside of a cow in here.” He sniffed. “Smells funny.”

“It’s a supply closet.” I heard him rustling around and smelled the tobacco pouch he had just unzipped. “Don’t even think about loading up that pipe and smoking it.”

He continued, “Tryin’ to improve the environment.”

“And Leo Gaskell will smell it from halfway down the hallway.”

He zipped up the beaded pouch, for now. “Who the hell is this Gaskell person, anyway?”

“Please keep your voice down?” I leaned my shoulder against the doorjamb and tried to find a comfortable position. “We’re pretty sure he’s the one that tried to drown you in your bathtub.” I let that one settle in for a while. He didn’t say anything. “Leo Gaskell may be related to Ellen Runs Horse. That name mean anything to you?” He still didn’t say anything, so I turned around and looked at him. “Maybe Ellen Walks Over Ice?”

He was sitting with his real leg propped up over the fake one, staring at the tobacco pouch and pipe sitting in his lap. “Yep, Anna’s sister.”

“Did you know she had a kid with Charlie Nurburn?”

“Yep. I was a deputy, for Christ sake.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to tell me, while we’re on the subject?”

He exhaled deeply. “Kid’s dead.”

I continued watching him in the thin strip of light from the partially open door. “Charlie Nurburn’s illegitimate son died?”

“Yep.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me.”

“Ellen Runs Horse?” He nodded but didn’t look up. “Saizarbitoria couldn’t find any reference to Ellen Walks Over Ice or any children at the courthouse.”

“It was an illegitimate, half-breed kid born and died of cholera in Acme in 1950, and you think there were gonna be certificates?” He snorted and stuffed his pipe full.

I decided to let him smoke; maybe it might occupy his mouth. “I’m working on a motive, and I was trying to put together a connection between Leo Gaskell and the Barojas, but if Charlie and Ellen’s kid died, then there isn’t any way to connect the two. I was working under the assumption that Leo might be the grandson, since he had one of Charlie Nurburn’s pistols.” He lit the pipe, and I had to admit that it smelled better. I watched him in the half-light, the smoldering embers of the pipe glowing red in the dark closet. “Lucian, where did you bury Charlie Nurburn?”

A second passed. “Yer just not gonna let that go, huh?”

“I think Leo Gaskell may have found him.”

He was silent for a moment. “Yer shittin’ me.” He chewed on that one for quite a while. His dark eyes blinked, he took the pipe from his mouth, and pointed with the stem across the hall. “Who you got in the room?”

“Henry Standing Bear.”

“Well hell . . . if he gets in there ol’ Ladies Wear’ll cut him from cock to crown with a dull deer antler and save the taxpayers some money.”

Lucian had a way with Indian names that was nothing short of creative. I started to respond, but the air caught in my throat for a second, and we both remained absolutely still. There were voices at the end of the hall, this time they came from Saizarbitoria’s direction, and they were growing louder. I had forgotten that the door opened to the inside of the closet, and two sheriffs with a collective three legs trying to get out offered a variety of excitement.

Once we finally made it, I could see Vic talking to a man whom they had against the wall beside the stairwell door. Santiago had the man’s arm in a reverse wristlock high at the middle of his back with his feet pulled out and spread so that his weight was against the partition. Vic had holstered her Glock, and it looked as if she was trying to keep from smiling.

As Lucian followed me down the hallway, I noticed a potted poinsettia and a card lying on the floor and scooped them up. I stopped a couple of yards away and called off the armada. “Let him go.” Sancho did, and Vic stepped behind Saizarbitoria so that he couldn’t see that she was trying not to laugh out loud. “Joe, what the hell are you doing here?”

He cleared his throat and gestured to the card and plastic-wrapped flowers I held. “We were just glad that Anna was all right, and we all chipped in.” He glanced around again and then over to Saizarbitoria’s empty wheelchair. “Do you mind if I sit down, I think I might be having a little trouble . . .”

Santiago holstered his weapon and held the chair as Joe sat. I thought he might be having a heart attack but then noticed the dark spot on Joe’s pants. I glanced over to Vic and she nodded, knowing I would want to speak with Santiago. I looked back down to Joe. “How about we get you to the bathroom, then we can talk?”

He folded his hands across his lap and nodded, his face pale and his hands trembling. “That would be good.”

I watched as Vic wheeled the poor man down the hall toward the bathrooms near the nurse’s station and turned to the Ferg, Lucian, and Saizarbitoria. “What happened?”

“He came out of the stairwell, and I spoke to him, but he didn’t stop, so I bumped him, and he started yelling like a mad man.”

Great. I glanced to the elder statesman. “What are you smiling about?”

Lucian responded, of course. “Well, as incapable as this outfit may look, we’re still able to scare the piss outta the local gentry.”

I shook my head, turned, and made my way back down the hallway to Henry’s room. He was at the door when I got there with the handle of the tomahawk palmed against his forearm as he leaned against the opening. I noticed that the surface of the thing absorbed light. He seemed perfectly relaxed. “False alarm?”

I was about to speak when the walkie-talkie at my belt began to vibrate.

13

I jerked my head up and looked down the hall at Ferg and Saizarbitoria as they stared from their belts to me. I searched in the other direction, but Vic had disappeared around the corner; when I got back to Henry all he said before shutting the door in my face was “Go.”

“Santiago, throw the blanket over your shoulders and stay there till Vic gets back with the wheelchair. Lucian, get in the closet, and Ferg come with me.” I charged down the hall and almost collided with Vic and the wheelchair as I turned the corner at the nurse’s station. “You vibrate?”

“Yeah, and it was very exciting.”

“Where’s Joe Lesky?”

She was already past me and had forced Ferg to sidestep in the hallway to escape being run over. “First stall in the men’s room; I told him that if he stirred, I’d kneecap him.”

I glanced over at the Ferg, who shrugged. “Sounds like the perimeter’s secure.”

I pointed to his previous spot on the bench. “Sit.” He smiled and hurried by as I went for the supply closet and ran the door into Lucian, who had already manned his post.

“Jesus H. Christ!”

“Damn it, Lucian. Move over.”

“I am over!”

I squeezed past the door and sat on half my chair. “Shhh . . .”

“I ain’t the one talkin’, goddamn it.” I turned and gave him the proverbial dirty look.

It was quiet in the hallway, so Vic must have stayed with Saizarbitoria. I could hear the hospital heating system and Lucian’s aggravated breathing, which had subsided into a regular pattern. I waited and strained my ears, but there was nothing to hear. I went back over the plan and ran through the usual litany of doubts. What were the chances that Leo Gaskell would come straight to the room? Would he be smart enough to check the clipboard we had casually left on the counter at the nurse’s station with Anna Walks Over Ice’s name listed for Room 216? Or, had he asked Ruby what room Anna was in? If he did, there would be an older gentleman seated in one of the hallway chairs with a shopping bag between his legs seemingly falling asleep. At the end of the hall would be a small, dark-haired general practitioner assisting a patient to his room and, if he looked close enough, a supply closet door barely ajar.

I waited twenty minutes and then started thinking about my options. I could continue to wait, or I could blow the whole operation and go do a little clear and hold. For some reason, Leo had decided to take his time and, for my money, that made him infinitely more dangerous. Leo was developing tactics. He owed the state at least two lives; I doubted he was keeping score. That was okay, I was.

Lucian had fallen asleep.

I stood, and he stirred. “What?”

I smiled at my old mentor as he craned his wrinkled neck, the one I had thought of wringing on and off for quite some time. “Nothing. I’m going out for a little walk.”

He watched me and nodded. “Lasted longer than I would have.”

Praise from Caesar. “You want a gun?”

Silly question. He put a hand out as I unsnapped the .45 and handed it to him. “You got one in the pipe.”

“What are you gonna use, harsh language?”

I glanced out the crack in the doorway. “I’ll get the shotgun from Ferg.” I looked back into the darkness at the old sheriff and my gun. “Don’t shoot me if I come back.”

It was blinding in the hallway, but it felt good to stretch my back. I looked down the hall at Vic and Saizarbitoria; they looked competent and questioning as I held a finger to my lips. I pointed at them and looped a forefinger and thumb into an okay. They nodded, and I stepped across the hall. I knocked twice and opened the door a little. I waited a second then spoke into the black. “Henry?”

“What are you doing?” It was a scolding tone.

“I’ve got a feeling.”

“Oh, goodie.” There was a deep sigh.

I closed the door and started for Ferg’s position. He checked in both directions as I stopped just short of the intersecting corridor. I took a look for myself, stepped across, and knelt down beside him. “Got your sidearm?”

“Yeah.”

“Cock it and put it in the bag, I’m going to borrow your shotgun.”

“Going huntin’?”

“Yep.”

“What do you want to do about Joe Lesky?”

I glanced over in the direction of the bathroom. “He made any noise?”

“Not a peep.”

“You reckon Vic gave him a heart attack?”

“She does me.”

As I checked the short-barreled shotgun, the Ferg went over to the bathroom door and reassured Joe. When he came back, I slipped down the opposite direction and checked the only other wing on the second floor. There were no doors ajar, so unless I was going to do a room-to-room search, all that was left was the stairwell at the end of this hallway. There were heavy metal doors with thick, wire-reinforced windows set on a diagonal. I peered through as I passed, casually swung the door open, and held the shotgun ready.

Nobody.

I could go down and check the short entryway that led to the elevators, or I could continue from here to the first floor. The entry corridor would have been easily visible from Ferg’s location, so I decided to drop down through the stairwell. I eased the door shut and glanced through the four runs of stairs to the concrete floor of the basement below. I hated basements.

When I got to the first floor there was a set of tracks leading down the steps. I placed my foot next to the prints and knelt down to look at them. The prints were of a different brand than the ones that had been left in the snow at the home, but they were larger than mine. Different shoes, but it was the same foot.

I decided to forgo the conversation with Ruby that I had planned and continued down the stairs to the next security door, which was labeled, in large red letters, HOSPITAL PERSONNEL ONLY. I eased open the heavy door and looked down the corridor toward a steel screen-encaged bulb that hung about halfway down and that gave off a weak yellowish light. The footprints feathered away on the smooth sheen of the chemically coated concrete, and my only clue abandoned me.

I quietly closed the stairwell door and moved along the wall to the first door on the right. I reached across and turned the knob. Locked.

I glanced into the darkness between the next bulb and myself, another twenty feet away. The second door was on my side and an equal distance from the first. I moved along the wall and tried the knob. It was stiff but turned and opened. I glanced in, but the room was dark. I felt along the wall and flipped a switch. It was a storage room with cut-down trays and medical cabinets. There were sterile dressings, bandages, and utility carts, but no Leo Gaskell, so I flipped off the light and quietly closed the door.

I thought I might have heard a noise, but I couldn’t be sure. I stood there for a moment, listening to the constant thrum of the building as it continued to go about its business of life and death. Join the club.

The next door was locked as well, but I could see from here where the hallways joined at the center, just as they did on the two main floors. There were large pipes sticking from the wall that returned and disappeared into the concrete, and there was a little more light coming from the adjoining hallway. An old metal desk, crowded with papers and folders, was shoved against the wall. There was a chair kicked out to the side, and a faint set of boot prints where whoever had come down the stairwell had sat and waited.

Waited for what? Waited for whom?

It had been a while since I’d checked in, so I plucked the walkie-talkie from my belt. It was a calculated move, but I felt pretty sure about it. I switched the transceiver to silent so the only indicator would be the LED gain that hopefully one of my staff would notice. I hit the button. I hit the button again, clicking it off and on. Still nothing. I hit it one more time and got a response. “Where the fuck are you?” Good thing I had turned the volume down. “See anything?”

“Footprints, you?”

“Nothing. Do you need backup?”

“No.”

It was silent for a moment. “You suck.”

The bottom drawer on the right-hand side was slightly ajar. I stooped and pulled out an impressive ring of keys, each one numbered and color coded with small plastic edges indicating the floor and wing of each. Why would someone leave an entire set of master keys in an unlocked drawer in the basement? I quickly flipped through the sequential numbers to Anna’s supposed room, each key clicking like an abacus. Key number 216 was missing. I entertained a dark series of thoughts as ice water flooded my bowels, and I turned the keys to the 100 series and found that key 132 was also gone.

* * *

The initial response must have been that my left hand pulled the fore grip back, moving the action bar and bolt assembly of the Remington Model 870 back into a cocked position. This same hand must have then come forward as I dropped the keys and slammed a plastic shell with slightly imperfect and deformed buckshot into the action and locked it for fire. Then my right forefinger must have punched the safety through the mechanism, because it did not fire as I lurched forward, pushed the desk back, and ran into the darkness.

I must have chosen the far passageway because it would give me a clear shot from the stairwell to the end of the corridor. I know it took no longer than a few seconds for me to make it down the hall, through the door, and up the stairs, but in the adrenalin-induced state it had all shifted into a hazed torpor. All I remember was yanking the door open to the first floor with the shotgun ready.

My father had trained me; he was a precise and persistent shooting instructor who started teaching me when I was five. Most people are self-taught; they don’t shoot enough to acquire skill or even become used to handling guns. They stand wrong, hold their heads wrong, and even close one eye when they sight, thus cutting down vision and handicapping themselves in their ability to judge distance.

Thirty-five yards.

I clicked the safety off. “Sheriff’s Department. Freeze!”

Only his head turned to me; his hands remained on the knob. He smiled with horrible teeth, and drew his shoulder back.

I knew that I would make the shot, just as I was sure that there was a .38 caliber revolver waiting on the other side of that door that was being held in a two-handed, standing position by a steady hand with a set of beautifully manicured nails. At thirty-five yards the 12-gauge would more than hurt him, but at eight feet the .38 would kill him. It wasn’t that I minded Leo dead all that much, but I didn’t want Cady to do it.

As his shoulder came forward so did mine, and I fired.

Contrary to popular belief, even the most powerful of modern loads and weapons only cause the target to slump and fall; Leo’s attempt to push the door open was converted into an assisted collapse into the doorjamb where his knees buckled for a moment. He straightened as he turned to glare at me.

“Sheriff’s Department, don’t move!”

He did, of course, and transferred his weight into a galloping retreat down the corridor. One foot slightly dragged behind the other in his attempt to get away. I pushed off and started to pursue him. He was moving fast, especially for a man with a couple of extra ounces of lead in him. There were fire exits at the end of the hallways at Durant Memorial, but he turned the corner leading to the front entrance and disappeared in the direction of the desk and Ruby.

I am not the fastest man in Absaroka County; I knew I wasn’t even the fastest man in the hospital right now, but I was going to have to do. I tried to make the corner at the entryway and bounced off the far wall in time to see the pneumatic doors at the front of the hospital slowly close. Ruby was standing at the reception desk waving me on as I approached. “Go! Go!”

I slammed through the two sets of doors and onto the sidewalk. Surely they had heard the shotgun up on the second floor; I was going to need backup. He had changed direction and was running the length of the hospital toward the snow-covered golf course and the town park that were located beyond the drifts that had been plowed against the parking lot’s chain-link fence.

Sixty yards, and I was keeping pace.

The air was cold, and each step felt as if I were pushing a car. I cursed my laziness at not running for the last few weeks but watched with satisfaction as Leo slipped on the man-size mountains of plowed snow and crashed into the fence. I started to bring the shotgun up but, incredibly, his hands clutched the twisted top of the railing, and he threw himself over and into the darkness beyond; I was convinced he wasn’t human.

I knew I had to gain all the momentum I could between here and there, so I lengthened my stride and pushed the car harder. The frozen crust held just long enough for me to use it as a ramp. I calculated my options, threw the Remington over the fence, and hit the top rail at about my hips. The continued momentum carried me over head first, flipping me and depositing me flat on my back onto the cushioning snow below. I forced the air into my lungs, lurched up into a sitting position, and searched for the shotgun; I couldn’t find it. I looked up to see Leo Gaskell making time as I scrambled onto my knees and looked for any disturbance in the snow that might indicate where my only weapon might be.

Nothing.

It was a dreadful decision, but the only one that made sense if I was going to catch him. I rolled to one side, pushed off with my back leg, and started after him unarmed. I could still see him in the distance as the moon struggled through the cloud cover and the branches of the huge conifers that surrounded the ninth green and the Clear Creek reservoir where an awful lot of golfers lost their balls. The snow was almost to our knees, but his long legs made progress like some crazy posthole tamper.

Methamphetamines, had to be.

There was a gradual decline, which led to a flat and a few deciduous trees before you got to what looked like a break in the fence and the creek beyond. He just didn’t seem to be slowing, whereas my second and third wind seemed to be going the way of the first. My lungs felt like they were going to explode, but I could hear something coming up on my left. It was Saizarbitoria, and he passed me. His knees pumped above the snow like Leo’s, and I could see the Baretta 9mm in his left hand and the bare soles of his feet flashing back at me as he pulled away. It didn’t take long for him to get far ahead of me but, after a few more strides, I discovered that I could keep pace by running in Sancho’s naked footprints. His stride was only a little shorter than mine, and I gained speed going down the hill. Just as he got to the flat area, Leo disappeared through the sagging part of the fence.

In the spears of moonlight, I could see where the bank dropped off down to another level area where the wind had pushed the snow pack from the reflective surface of the ice on Clear Creek. I saw Saizarbitoria charge through the fence, through the trees, and he too was gone.

By the time I got to the flat, lumbered through the fence, and bounced off one of the trees, I could see them struggling at the creek bank. The elongated, stalklike shadow of Leo Gaskell struck Saizarbitoria with a hammering, roundhouse blow, and I watched as my deputy slumped, and Leo lifted him to slug him again.

Up until this moment my size and weight had worked against me but, with only thirty feet to go, I put everything I had into Leo. He was just turning as I hit him with all the accumulated speed of the last five minutes; we carried Saizarbitoria with us as we went. I felt the breath go out of Leo as we flew over and out onto the middle of the creek. The three of us landed with a shuddering thud as the surface of the ice indented with a resonating sound that carried vibrations across the surface, through Leo Gaskell, Sancho, and into me. Almost immediately, the ice shattered and dropped us into the freezing water that traveled swiftly beneath the surface. Sancho wasn’t moving, and I could feel he was under us and was dropping faster as the edge of the ice crumbled from underneath.

I closed one hand around Leo’s struggling shoulders and clasped the hood of his insulated coveralls with the other, the quick popping noise telling me it had detached from the rest of him. He lurched sideways in an attempt to free himself of me, but I held on with one hand and dragged him back to the black water behind us. I threw the hood away and slapped a hand on Sancho as the current yanked at his legs.

I could feel Leo wrench away from me again. He was a monster; his huge shoulders and chest were disproportionate in comparison with his lean waist and limbs, and his head seemed like some block teetering out on the end of his stem-like neck. If my suspicions were correct, Leo Gaskell suffered from lack of appetite, insomnia, exceedingly high blood pressure, palpitations, and cyanosis with cerebral hemorrhage next on the list but, right now, he was just strong as an ox.

There were fissures in the surrounding ice, and the thumping of the trapped air and water was as loud as our struggling. I could see large chunks of the ice breaking apart where Sancho was sinking. I tightened my grip and tried to drag him toward me, but Leo took advantage of my brief distraction to twist sideways again and bring his booted foot up and into my face. I heard the surprising crack and grinding of broken bone. I tried to stretch my facial muscles to check the damage, but nothing felt as if it were moving.

I couldn’t hang on to Sancho and Leo; Leo slipped my grasp, getting half his body onto the thicker ice at the edge of the creek, and he watched as the ice surrounding Saizarbitoria and me broke off with the sound of pistol shots.

The last thing I saw of Leo Gaskell, with my one eye, he was smiling, showing those twisted and rotting teeth.

* * *

There wasn’t a lot of time to prepare for the effects of the water, and maybe that was a blessing. There’s a tingling and a high itch that shrieks in the back of your head when you hit water this cold, probably some kind of alarm that’s telling your body that this is a really bad idea. All I could think to do was keep a hold on Sancho’s jacket as I felt him slip down with me. I couldn’t feel the bottom, and the ridge of ice around us was breaking away in handfuls. My legs went along with the current, pushing against the undersurface and giving me just enough leverage to shove Sancho’s chest up and onto the ice.

I turned my head sideways, trying to get the rest of Saizarbitoria’s unconscious body out of the water, and it was then that the ledge I was hanging on to completely let go. I released Sancho so that he would not be dragged under with me and scrambled with both hands to get another grip on the broken lip of the ice, but it was too late. I was cognizant enough to draw a deep breath as the ice broke beneath me.

The sweeping current of Clear Creek yanked me below as my one eye looked for the surface by following the bubbles as they swirled away from me and began a stately rise to the air above. Paisleys of plum and electric green and the stark white of the moon reflected in the world I had come from. I hoped that I had gotten Saizarbitoria far enough up so that he would not be pulled under as well.

I was bleeding adrenaline, and the areas of unprotected skin were now absolutely numb. There were shadowy, echoing sounds that approached from all directions. With a sudden exertion, I slapped my hands against the smooth facade of the underside of the ice as part of my remaining air escaped with a faint rumbling noise that matched the thumping of my hands against the hard surface.

The one eye was still functioning, so I strained to see the bubbles, but the view was distorted and confusing and I continued to feel as if I were falling backward. The weight of my head pivoted me to the side and my arms trailed out behind me. I frantically tried to right myself and turn back, but my arms wouldn’t move, and my fingers felt motionless.

The dull glow of the surface didn’t appear from above but seemed to radiate all around me. Somehow it was lighter now, and I could just see that the bottom of the creek was scattered with broken tree limbs and large stones. Everything seemed to glow with a pale light with no shadow, and grand sweeps of bubbles stood still in the frozen water with deep cracks that shone like knife blades.

The back of my head hit something hard as I moved along, and a little more air escaped. I could taste a small amount of blood in my mouth, and my head was yanked down with the current and a sharp pain lingered in my side. There was a continuous thumping, but it was more rhythmical than before and was now accompanied by a continuous baritone that pressed painfully against my ears.

The vertigo caused by the current had subsided to a dull ache of inverted velocity. The uniform horizon had shifted from green to an almost impenetrable black, and the only thing I could hear was the sound of the drums that pounded my skull against what felt like solid rock.

With all the energy I had left, I pivoted to one side and tried to break free from whatever was holding me. I tried to drive my elbow into the ice above as the current knocked me back and forth. I shifted, this time keeping the movement more compact and not allowing the water to rob me of momentum: a resounding thump and then nothing. The bleeding adrenalin staunched, and air was now the issue. I slammed my hand against the ice this time, and the sound reverberated along with the drums. Shadows moved in the dull glow of the surface as I flailed against it with wooden fingers. I stretched my arms out in an attempt to widen my hunt and searched for any opening, but there was none. I almost laughed when the shadows appeared above me, and there was a strident sound, a shrieking din that sounded like the warbling pitch of Cheyenne plainsong, and I must have been hallucinating because it seemed as if a huge blade had knifed through the thickness of the ice. I fumbled a hand toward it, but it disappeared, and the pressure in my lungs built to the point of explosion. I felt my diaphragm tense as it prepared to blow my lungs clear of my last breath. I held it for a few seconds more, just as the broad blade of something like an axe appeared again.

They say that your life passes before your eyes, but that’s not what happens. What happens is that you think of all the things you didn’t get done, big things, small things, all the things that are left.

I exhaled and immediately drew in two lungs full of frozen water. There were still sounds, the echoing thump of the drums and the shrieking din of the discordant song, but they slowly faded as I wavered there in the current. The pressure pulled my chin down to my chest, and I noticed a white round speck lodged against the dark mud at the banks of Clear Creek just before the rushing eddies rocked me into the black.

* * *

“How is my English?”

Her voice came from the right and was slightly behind me. I dipped my head and looked under my arm to see a beautiful pair of naked suntanned feet. She was standing in the same swales of buffalo grass as she had before. I turned to look at her. “Good, better than my Basque.” She was gorgeous and was wearing what she always wore in my dreams, a flowing summer dress with small white dots on a dark background. A breeze drifted from the mountains and pushed the chiffon against her legs, and the sun glowed warm against the Big Horns. She was petite, and my first instinct was to place my hand at the small of her back and lift her up so that I could get a closer look at the perfect face hidden in the swirl of dark hair. She reached a hand out, then let it drop in resignation, and glanced toward the ridges of the canyon above. I followed her eyes and noticed that clouds had gathered where the mountains and sky met. There was a long line of Cheyenne warriors on horseback pressed in formation to the horizon at the break of the canyon. “Friends of yours?”

She laughed. “Yours.”

I looked back at the feathered headdresses, the beads, the fringe, and the weapons. The horsemen were painted, along with their horses, and their power stopped my breathing. One of them stood in the saddle and looked down at me, the hair a different color than the rest. “Is that somebody I know?”

She gestured with a slight incline of her head. “Yes.” I looked up, but as soon as I smiled, the warriors and their horses and the woman standing in the saddle disappeared.

Mari laughed, and it was stunning. It lingered in a luxurious moment, and I studied the little laugh lines at the corners of her mouth; they were like friends I had forgotten. I watched her talk and felt like I was being towed backward through heavy water.

She stepped forward and took my hand in hers. She was so beautiful, I could not breathe. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s the matter.” Her free hand rested on my shoulder. Her fingers were warm, and a fingernail flicked across the hairs at the back of my neck.

She pulled my face down. “It’s okay.”

I suddenly felt off balance. Her head had tilted to the side to escape the brim of my hat, and I could feel her breath against my chest as she went up on tiptoe. “Sorry, I’ve got something in my throat or something.”

“It’s okay.”

Her face came closer, and all I could see were those huge brown eyes that made me feel as if I were walking in mud that squeezed up between my toes. I was still falling, and the background slid away from me as she made tentative contact with my lower lip. There was still something caught in my throat. “This is getting embarrassing.”

“It’s okay.” She smothered my mouth with hers and blinked. Her hands were now on either side of my face and were holding me as I looked into gold bottle rockets shooting into the darkness of her pupils with contrails of iridescence, but the colors changed suddenly and tarnished, and I felt very cold. My back bent, and I felt it arch against a hard surface.

I still felt her lips on mine. I felt the warmth and the desperation as her hands covered the rest of my face and refused to let go. I rolled to the side, and the pressure in my head lessened as I coughed and breathed with a ferocious intake of air. I felt as though I was being beaten with a hundred broom handles. I blinked, but my left eye didn’t seem to cooperate, and my right one felt like it was about to fall out.

She was still there in my blurred vision; she sat on her knees and held on to the lapels of my jacket. Somebody was there with her, just to the side, some kind of monk with a hood pulled up around his face, and another person I couldn’t make out. I could almost swear the monk had a hatchet. He shook almost as badly as I did, and I was afraid he might drop it on me.

She pulled me up by my collar, held me there, and I could feel her sobbing against me. Her grip was strong, and she pulled my head into the crook of her neck and rocked me. I could feel her pulse as she pressed me against her throat. The trembling in my own body refused to subside. I tried to move, and my head rolled back just enough to see her face. Her fingers slipped, and my head bounced on her warm, soft lap.

* * *

There was a time, a time I remember when people would show up and sit on the hillsides, and the professional diver would come to town from Casper. I was a child and sat on my mother’s lap and watched in wonder as he put on his cumbersome diver’s suit with the military-surplus, two-hose regulator. He would disappear into one of the small ponds to retrieve the little white balls. Every time he would reappear with a rush of bubbles, the assembled crowd would cheer and whistle. I asked my mother why it was that everyone applauded whenever the diver reemerged with the basket of ten-cent golf balls. I looked up at her blond hair and the translucent blue of her eyes where the angle of the sun shone through her pupils, and she smiled and squeezed my hand. “Small mysteries solved.”

* * *

I took another breath, and the tremors became so great that my teeth felt like they were going to break off in my mouth. I started to rise, but her other hand held me against her lap. I tried to smile, but instead bit my lip and breathed out a liquid belch.

My hands fell to the side, and I must have loosened my grip because the golf ball that I had been holding slipped from my grasp and rolled across the ice.

She reached out and pounded my chest in a fury with her fist. There wasn’t much feeling there, and the only reason I could tell she was striking me was that my head jarred a little with each blow. She beat on me until I feebly raised my hands in surrender. Her tears struck my face. “You stupid fucking son of a bitch!”

14

“We think it was the extra layer of fat that saved you.” We were seated on the table in one of the examination rooms and were still waiting for the report from the eye doctor. Henry was sitting on my right because he knew it would irritate me. “A man with a normal amount of fat would have perished.” I sighed, trying not to think about how bad my face hurt and instead fingered the little plastic band they had attached to my wrist. The band had my name, age, blood type, and two bar codes, one for my meds and one for my lab, but I wasn’t planning on being here in another fifteen minutes so the whole system would become academic.

“You are lucky your coat snagged on the tree branch, or we would have never found you.” I fingered the tender spot at my side and stared at the floor with my one eye. “We argued over who had to give you mouth-to-mouth, but since I was the one who pulled you out, Vic did it.” He nudged me with an elbow. “I think she enjoyed it, or would have under different circumstances.” I felt him shift his weight and then hold something far out in front of me so that I could see it. “I thought you would like a souvenir from the briny deep.” He dropped a golf ball into my outstretched hand.

“Thank you.”

“You are welcome.” Simple and honest; no one accepted praise with the grace of the Cheyenne.

“How’s Sancho?”

“I think he was more ashamed than hurt and is up and walking around even though his feet are sore.” He watched me. “I think he is embarrassed that you had to save him.” He was still smiling. “I told him you have saved lots of people.”

I nodded, and it was quiet for a moment, so I changed the subject. “How deep is Clear Creek?”

He slid off the table and walked around to where I could see him. He still had the Vietnam Special Forces tomahawk in an oxblood sheath at his belt. “Usually three to four feet.”

“Then why is it we have the Challenger Deep of the Marianas Trench out there?”

He was trying not to smile. “You picked the part that used to be the old reservoir.”

“I didn’t pick it, Leo Gaskell did.” I looked up through my one eyebrow. “How deep is that damn thing?”

“Twelve feet where you went in.”

I looked up at the clock in the examination room: 11:23 A.M. “I have to get out of here, where the hell is the damn doctor?” I started to reach up to my ear, but he slapped my hand.

His eyes stayed steady with mine as he slowly shook his head. “You are a horrible patient.”

I bounced the golf ball off the floor. “How are Lana and Cady?”

“Still asleep. They had a late night after we brought you in. Their door is locked, and Jim Ferguson is sitting in a chair outside it.” He dipped his head for a better look at my one eye. “Is that Cady’s Chief ’s Special?”

I bounced the ball again. “I loaned it to her.”

He nodded. “There were a lot of guns being scattered about last night.”

“Anybody find the shotgun?”

He stood up straight and flipped his hair back. “I did. I also found Saizarbitoria’s Beretta and your hat.” He gestured toward the offending article on the chair beside the door. “I like him.”

“Who?”

“Saizarbitoria.” He thought about it. “He is tough. He outran me last night, barefoot.”

It was as good a scale as any. “He’s also half our age.” I waited a moment. “How the hell did Leo Gaskell get away?”

“Perhaps Leo Gaskell is tougher.” Henry’s turn to sigh. “That, and Joe Lesky’s car has been stolen.”

I waited a second to make sure I had heard him right. “What?”

“He must have doubled back to the hospital parking lot and taken the car which, lucky for Leo Gaskell, was unlocked and had the keys in it.”

I shook my head and reached up to scratch my eye; he slapped my hand again. “I wasn’t going to touch my ear, damn it.” I rested my head against the pinched fingers that now held the bridge of my nose in an attempt to snatch the pain from my head. I bumped my eye patch and immediately regretted it. “Have we got an APB out on Lesky’s car?”

“Yes.”

“No signs of a Mack truck with a house trailer connected to it, I suppose?”

“No.”

I released my nose. “Where’s the staff?”

“All back at the office; we did not think there was any reason to continue the stakeout.”

I thought about Leo. I sat there like a typewriter with the carriage jammed. “Something’s not adding up.” I waited a while longer but, predictably, it was hovering, my usual itch just out of reach. “If you were going to kill somebody, would you walk there?” I looked down at my clean clothes, a gift from the hospital laundry, and turned my head so that my good eye was toward him. “Something else that’s been bothering me . . .” I scratched that little itch in the back of my mind and started making connections. “Why didn’t Leo kill Lana at the bakery?”

He took a deep breath of his own, and I marveled at how easily it went in and came out. “Any chance you might have chased him off?”

I summoned up the images from that morning. “There were tracks but no vehicle.”

“Taking into consideration Leo’s laissez-faire attitude toward transport, do you think it possible that he was still there?”

I thought about the one set of Lana’s prints going into the bakery and none coming out. “He must have been.”

The door opened, and Andy Hall was the first through it, just the man I wanted to see, even if it was only with one eye. Behind Dr. Hall were Isaac and Bill McDermott, who had decided to stick around in case we turned up some more bodies. It was three against two, but I had the Indian and that always evened things out.

Dr. Andy was the opthamologist from Sheridan and was a kind-hearted soul with an intelligent and quiet demeanor. He reached out with long-fingered hands, raising the eye patch and tilting my head back. It was funny how doctors handled people like luggage. “How do you feel?”

“Great.”

He looked at me doubtfully. “Nonpenetrating fracture of the left orbital with lacerations to the retina.” He half turned to the attending gaggle, and they all nodded in agreement. “I sutured the damage to the epicanthic fold; any cosmetic alterations can be done after the eye has stabilized.” He released my head and looked at me. “How’s your vision?”

“Before or after the eye patch?”

He looked back to Isaac for some assistance. The old doctor stepped forward with his hands clasped together. “The cold water was enough to slow your metabolic rate, but just so you do not underestimate the seriousness of the situation, you drowned last night.”

I glanced over at the coroner. “If it was all that serious, I’d be talking to him.”

McDermott was quick. “You wouldn’t be talking at all.”

Isaac started in again. “Pulmonary edema carries a progressive bacterial infection which we are preventively treating with antibiotics, but your shortness of breath, poor color, and general weakness . . .”

“Walking pneumonia.” I smiled at them, and it hurt. He hadn’t stayed in his hospital, so why should I? I snapped the little plastic wristband off and handed it to Isaac, who already had his hand out. I stood and picked up my hat. “All right, we’ve discussed the pneumonia; let’s do some walking.” I put my hat on; it felt funny, and I’m sure it looked worse. “I’ll take the drugs if you want me to.” He handed me a small plastic bottle. I steered Isaac out of the room and moved down the hall a little ways. “Is there a ring of master keys to the hospital that is kept in the basement?”

He thought. “A custodian might have left a set there, because it is easier for him to get to them, but he shouldn’t have. It is a breach of security.”

“Could you check that for me?”

“Yes, I believe I can do that.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and looked back to the Bear. “Are those keys still on the floor beside that desk?”

“Vic took them for fingerprinting.”

I looked back to Isaac. “I’ll return those to you when we’re through.”

Bill McDermott stopped us as we passed him. “I’ll need written permission to release the body of Mrs. Baroja to the next of kin. They’ve requested her about four times now.”

“I don’t suppose anybody’s asked about Anna Walks Over Ice?”

He glanced at Henry. “Actually, somebody has.”

I looked back to the Cheyenne Nation with my good eye and tried my half smile. “Of course they have.”

* * *

It was a short drive over to the bakery from the hospital; I almost hit three other cars on the way. “Maybe I should drive?”

“This eye patch thing takes a little getting used to.” It had warmed up, but there were still extended icebergs lining the roadsides and median. It had been a humid snow, and the coated trees looked as if they had been vacuum sealed for next year’s use. I looked out at Main Street, at the three-quarter inch, exterior plywood cutouts of bells, wreaths, reindeer, and the like. Twelve years running, and I was sure they were the most unattractive decorations in Wyoming; exterior ply holds ugly a long time. I remembered Ruby’s promise to take care of my Christmas shopping. I would have to check.

I parked in front, cut the motor, and unlocked my Remington long-barreled 870 from the dash. “I wonder if she has a hide-a-key.”

“What’s the fun of that?” We crossed the sidewalk, stepped in front of the door, and looked at the jamb surrounding the entrance to Baroja’s Baked Goods. Henry pressed himself against the facing and placed both hands around the knob, carefully but forcefully shifting the lock mechanism to the right and away from the catch. The door kicked forward as the bolt slid past the jamb with a mechanical clunk.

The shop smelled just as good as it had earlier in the week. “I assume you’ve already been here, as a customer, I mean.”

“Numerous times.”

“Figures.” I walked down the hardwood floor and listened to the hum of the big, white ceramic coolers. He went behind the counter and began filling the espresso machine. “What are you doing?”

“Making espresso.”

I was sure there were entire folders of contact prints, photographs, pathology reports, DNA procedures, serology, and trace evidence on my desk about Lana’s supposed attempted murder, but sometimes it’s important to see the scene, to see the blood. I crouched down. There was the origin target on the floor, but the wave castoff and cast-off bloodstains were what I was looking for, the follow-through and the drawback of the weapon that had struck Lana Baroja. They were there, along the nearest table, on the floor and the baseboard of the back wall. He had stood beside the doorway and hit her as she came up from the basement.

“Walt?” I turned back because his voice had changed. “Someone has cut a loaf of bread on the butcher block, has taken some provolone and buffalo mozzarella from one of the coolers, and has chased the meal with a couple of jugs of Wheatland microbrew.” He looked up. “Lately.”

I was glad I had taken the 12-gauge from my truck.

There were three doors on the landing: one to the bathroom, one that went to the basement, and one that continued upstairs. The steps to the second floor were warped and swayed in the middle. Tongue-and-groove boards paneled the stairwell, and a tiny grime-covered window provided the only illumination on the second landing where the stairs turned and went the other way.

I jacked a shell into the shotgun, flipped off the safety, and started the second flight. I didn’t figure I was going to surprise anybody, so I decided to introduce myself. Henry called from the front, “Ha-ho?”

“Broadcasting.”

It was quiet for a moment. “Careful, I do not want to have to drink two espressos.”

There were three rooms on the upper level: a small one for storage with a few windows that overlooked the alley in the back; another with a two-by-four table pushed against the wall; and the front room with a couple of windows overlooking the street. This was the room where Leo Gaskell had been living.

There was a ragged and torn polyester sleeping bag piled against one of the corners with a child’s bucking bronco blanket and a dirty pillow. The remains of downstairs’ repast lay on the floor nearby. There was a flashlight, which had been stolen from Northern Rockies Energy Exploration, and the coat I had seen him in last night. There was no Leo.

I coaxed the coat from its crumpled position with the barrel of the shotgun and flipped it open. It was a bloody mess. You could see where two of the pellets had done the most damage, one in the arm and the blood on the sleeping bag showed where the other had hit his foot. As bad as I was feeling this morning, somewhere out there, Leo Gaskell was feeling worse.

I nudged the jacket again and examined the inside pocket where two crystal-meth vials had exploded and thought that maybe Leo wasn’t feeling much of anything after all. I put my gloves on and fingered the shattered glass containers. A full 65 percent of the Wyoming division of criminal investigation’s cases concerned clandestine lab activity. It was a scourge. From Leo’s dental situation, I had assumed meth-mouth and was right.

“Espresso?” We all had our addictions. I sat against the wall and clicked the safety back on the shotgun before placing it in my lap. I took off my gloves. My fingers hurt. He sat beside me and sipped. “Well, at least we know where Leo has been keeping himself.”

“As the possible illegitimate grandson of Charlie Nurburn, I also ask myself where Leo’s daddy might be, if anywhere.”

“We are looking for a white male.”

“With an Indian mother; a half-breed.”

“Bicultural.”

I glanced over at him. “Are you aware of the damage you are causing with all this political correctness to the language of the mythic American West?”

“You bet’cher boots.” He studied the grim surroundings. “Age?”

“Ours, according to Doc Bloomfield. Anybody come to mind?”

“I always thought you might be a half-breed.”

I ignored him. “All right, he may have been here when I found Lana, but he’s definitely been here since.” I stretched my legs out. “I’m also wondering where Leo might have hidden an 18-wheel truck and a mobile home.” I took a sip, which tasted pretty good.

“And what is your answer?”

“Well, there’s too much activity at Four Brothers Ranch, and Vic and I were just there and didn’t see any evidence of Leo, but what about the 260 acres that Mari and Charlie lived on that is adjacent to the ranch? If I were looking for a place to hide something as big as a house, I’d go there.”

* * *

Ruby was talking on the phone with Dog’s head in her lap, and Lucian was asleep and snoring loudly on the wooden bench in the reception area with my .45, cocked and locked, lying on his chest. “How do you get any work done around here with all the noise?”

Her head dropped, and she raised an eyebrow over a particularly cold blue eye. “I understand you went swimming last night?”

“Technically, I think it was struggling and sinking.”

She continued to shake her head. “You have Post-its, that woman from the state dropped off a love note and, lucky for you, Vic is delivering a summons to the bookstore for nonpayment on a newspaper ad. They don’t feel they should have to pay for an advertisement that misspelled the word literature.”

“I can see their point.”

“Saizarbitoria is in the basement. He said he was going to look through Mari Baroja’s effects. I think you should go see him first.”

I plucked my sidearm off Lucian’s chest as Henry and I went by.

When we got to the basement, Saizarbitoria was seated in the middle of the open floor with all of Mari Baroja’s correspondence carefully arranged around him in a semicircle. The whole side of his face was dark and bruised, and he was wearing slippers. He stood when we came in and stuck out his hand. “Thank you.”

I shook it. “You’re welcome.” I wasn’t as good as the Cheyenne, but I was learning. We looked around at the amount of paper stacked on the floor around us.

“She wrote poetry.”

“I’m sorry.” Some of the piles were close to a foot high.

He studied the letter in his hand. “No, it’s actually pretty good.” He pointed to one of the larger stacks. “This is personal communication.” He gestured to another pile. “Business correspondence, and this one is the poetry.” I looked around at the neatly ordered mess. “You don’t want to hear some of it?”

He was definitely spending too much time with Vic. “Maybe later.”

We sat down, and he carefully placed the poetry back in its place and looked at the largest pile in front of him. “She was a savvy businesswoman. She bought up all the surrounding leases adjacent to Four Brothers including Jolie Baroja’s, so she was not only getting the methane money from Four Brothers but also from about a quarter of the valley.”

“Maybe Lana should open up a chain of Basque bakeries?”

Saizarbitoria ignored us and went on. “Mrs. Baroja was probably one of the richest women in the state, but she lived like a pauper.” He glanced around and then back up to me. “I’ve been trying to establish some patterns, but it’s difficult.” He pulled a few bank statements out and a few letters from the personal pile. “She had established a trust fund for Father Baroja that he doesn’t seem to know anything about. I remember he said that they didn’t get along, but she must have felt sorry for him when his grip on reality began to slip. It isn’t administered in Wyoming but set up in . . .”

“Florida?”

His eyes widened. “How did you know that?”

“A little bird told me, a little southern bird.” I thought back to what Carol Baroja had said in the hospital waiting room when she tried to tie Lana with the ETA. I suspected that no money had gone to Father Baroja or the ETA. I figured that the money went to Carol Baroja’s private charity, herself, but didn’t think that that particular malfeasance had any relevance to the murders. “What about the personal stuff?”

He leaned in a little, and his voice dropped. “Mrs. Baroja may have had a long-term affair with Sheriff Connally.”

The Bear and I looked at each other and back to Saizarbitoria; it was Academy Award stuff but lost on the Basquo. “Ancient history. Anything else?”

He paused for a moment and then went on. “The relationship between her and her daughters was a little strained.”

“Uh huh.” I turned to the side and stretched my sore legs again: Indian style wasn’t working for me. “Any mention of Charlie Nurburn?”

“Old, numerous, and not kind.”

“Any mention of the financial relationship between Mari and him?”

“Some, early on, but he seems to be cut out of the picture by the early fifties.”

Henry and I looked at each other again, but he was quicker. “You can say that again.”

Saizarbitoria’s eyes were shifting back and forth between us. “Are you two going to keep looking at each other or are you going to let me in on this?”

“What’s the story on Leo Gaskell? You knew him in Rawlins, didn’t you?”

He grunted. “We were in the infirmary. He had sliced his hand open in a fight with some dealer from Cheyenne over what they were going to watch on television.” His eyes narrowed, and he was looking back into a place he wasn’t sure he wanted to go to again. “He was secured to a gurney but kept flexing his fingers, so I asked him if he was all right. He doesn’t even look at me and says, ‘I’m just wonderin’ how long you’d cry like a bitch if I was to get my hands around your throat.’ ”

I listened to the heat kick on in the jail and resisted the temptation to look at the Bear again. “All right, Troop. You in or out?”

He propped an elbow on his knee and placed the pointy end of his Vandyke in the palm of his hand. “You’re not going to tell me about Mari Baroja unless I stay?”

I leveled with him. “A lot of this stuff is local history. If you’re going back to Rawlins then you don’t need to know it.”

He looked at both of us, his black eyes glittering like the backs of trout rolling in dark water. “I’m in.”

We shook on it; the median age of our department was now securely under the age of fifty. “Mari Baroja cut Charlie Nurburn’s throat in 1951.”

He leaned back against the bars of the cell behind him and let out a long slow whistle. “Some of the poetry is a little dark.”

* * *

The plows had been doing their job, and the highway was clear as I set off south to the old homestead, but we had to hurry because it didn’t look like the weather would hold. Henry had made a few calls while I had gathered up some cold weather gear and called the Busy Bee for a few club sandwiches and a couple of coffees. Dorothy had met us at the curb with two paper bags. She hadn’t waited for a response but just waved, turned, and disappeared back into the café. We kept the food in the front, away from Dog, who was still sulking about having to leave the office, but Ruby was going out with her granddaughter that evening and couldn’t watch him.

About three miles out of town, we saw an HP headed in the other direction. He waved, flipped across the median, and pulled up behind us after I’d slowed and stopped. I wondered how Leo had escaped being detected.

“You were not speeding, were you?”

I didn’t acknowledge him but rolled the window down and leaned an elbow on the ledge as the light bar on the highway patrol cruiser began revolving and the door popped open. It was Wes again, and I watched as he straightened his Smoky the Bear hat and strolled up with the gigantic Colt .357 banging at his leg. “License and registration.” He folded his arms and leaned against my door. He pushed the hat back, and a strong dollop of gray flopped down on his forehead.

“Are you the only one working out here?”

“We’ve got our two, three more from the Casper detachment, and another three from over in Sheridan.” He looked at my eye patch. “Jesus, what the hell happened to you?”

I gestured over to Henry. “The Indian beat me up.”

Wes tipped his hat. “Hey, Henry.”

“Wes.”

“You know, all I’m looking for is a Mack truck with a mobile home attached to it.”

Wes nodded. “Seems like we’d be able to find that, doesn’t it?”

I pushed my own hat back. “I thought you were retired.”

“Next week.” He smiled an easy smile. “Why, you gonna have a party for me?”

“No, I was just wondering when we were gonna get some younger HPs around here with better eyesight.”

He shook his head. “Where you guys headed?”

“Down to Mari Baroja’s for a little look around.”

“You want me to tag along?”

“No, but if you or your boys wouldn’t mind swinging through Durant, Leo had been staying over Lana’s little bakery next to Evans’s Chainsaw.” I turned to Henry. “What kind of car does Joe Lesky drive?”

The Bear looked up from a small notebook. “Tan, ’87 Jeep Wagoneer, County 25, Plate 3461.”

Wes nodded and reaffirmed that Ruby had already taken care of the car’s ID. I smiled the half smile I’d perfected and turned toward him. “If I don’t see you? You be careful down there in Arizona.”

He smiled a smile of his own. “You bet.”

* * *

“Do you want to hear about Ellen Runs Horse?”

I negotiated around a slow-moving 18-wheeler, neither black nor Mack. “Sure.”

The dark wave of hair fell alongside his face as one eye studied me. “As we suspected she is Crow.”

I continued to stare at the road through my one eye. “Anyone hint about her having an illegitimate child with Charlie Nurburn?”

He nodded. “Better than that.” He shifted his weight and leaned against the door. “She registered a child, Garnet Runs Horse, in the tribal rolls, but gave the child up for adoption in 1950.”

“Lucian said Ellen told him that the child died. I guess she lied. Where did he go?”

“Wind River.”

“Name still Runs Horse?”

“I do not know.”

I thought about it. “That would figure, since Leo’s been living over near Lander, but where did he get the name Gaskell?”

“Maybe his father took the adoptive family’s name?”

“Maybe so.” I pulled my mic from the dash. “Base, this is Unit One, come in?”

After a moment of static, a cool voice responded, and it wasn’t Ruby; I had forgotten that she wasn’t there. “What the fuck do you want now?”

I glanced at Henry, keyed the mic, and quickly composed myself. “How was the bookstore?”

Static. “I bought you the Idiot’s Guide to Swimming.” The Bear snorted.

“Thanks.” I listened to the static for a moment, since it was more comforting than her voice. “Can you do me a favor?”

Static. “Seems like I’ve done you an awful lot of them lately.” Static. “What?”

“Can you run a check on any Gaskells who might be living over near the Wind River Reservation, Lander, or Riverton?”

Static. “I know what towns are near Wind River.” I nodded at the LED display on the radio, trying to get it to be nice to me. Static. “Have you signed the release papers on Mari Baroja? The Wicked Witches of the West are here.”

I wondered if they were in the same room and quickly figured yes they were. “I signed the papers and gave them to Bill McDermott who should still be over at the hospital.”

Static. “I’ll send them there.”

“Get a hold of Bill Wiltse and see if Fremont’s got anything on the Gaskells.”

Static. “Got it.” Static. “Just in case we need to get in touch with you while you are traipsing around the southern part of the county, how should we reach you?”

I thought about it. “Try the methane foreman.”

Static. “Double Tough?”

I smiled. “Is that what you’re calling him?”

Static. “Fuckin’ A. Over and out.”

Speak of the devil. As I headed down the ramp off the highway, I saw Jess Aliff with a couple of his roughnecks. They were on their way to Four Brothers, but he made the time to come over and answer a few questions. I asked him about the gunshot wound, to which he replied, “What gunshot wound?” I liked Double Tough more every time I saw him. I also asked him if he would direct us to the old homestead where Mari Baroja had lived with Charlie Nurburn and whether the road would support the Mack and a house trailer to which he had responded maybe.

We followed the ridge that he had told us about, moving diagonally southeast toward the north fork of Crazy Woman toward the Nurburn place. With the wind blowing, it was impossible to see if there were any tracks; our own would be invisible in a matter of moments. I stopped the truck after a mile and a quarter where the ridge divided and split off into two directions. “Now what?”

He looked at me. “If I were a creek, I would be where the ground slopes.”

“Right.” Sometimes it was good to have an Indian scout.

We topped the ridge cap and looked down the small valley. The road, or what we assumed to be the road, hung to the right side of the flat. The north fork of Crazy Woman turned right, around a curve, about a half a mile away. The blowing snow had filled in the small canyon, and it was difficult to see where the road might be.

“Would you drive a Mack truck down here with a mobile home attached to it?”

He took a deep breath and looked at the missing road. “No, but there are a number of things Leo Gaskell would do that I would not.”

I slipped the three-quarter ton into granny gear, it was already in 4-wheel, and committed. Most of the fill was powder, and the truck settled even as we idled the big V-10 down the canyon to the apex of the undersized ranch. At the far end of the stretch, I edged the truck against the coulee wall and glanced up at the meadow that opened to the flat at the bottom of the canyon. It was a beautiful spot but, if you spent the first part of the winter here, you spent the last part of the winter here, too.

The house was just as I had pictured it in my dream, weathered and leaning at an acute angle away from the predominant wind. Part of it had collapsed, and it looked like a cottonwood had leaned against it for a moment of support that had turned into forever.

I stopped the truck at the edge of the meadow, cut the engine, and decided to get out and check the ground before driving across. I had done enough swimming for one holiday season. I let the dog out and walked around to the front of the truck where Henry met me. The gusts had increased, channeling their force through the ravine, and hit us full in the face. It wasn’t actually snowing, but the wind was strong enough to take a percentage from the ground and make it airborne. The wind was the only sound. We squinted toward the little house as Dog arched out, dipping his head in the snow and rooting for who knew what. Henry flipped his collar up to protect part of his face; his hair trailed back and swirled above the hood.

I squinted and watched an underlying cloud cover approach from the mountains. You could vaguely see the snow-covered peaks. I thought about a damaged woman, bareback on a horse, racing through a rainy night, and three small children huddled in a back bedroom forbidden to move. It seemed sacrilegious to speak in the face of all the tragedy that had unfolded here.

“What are you thinking?”

I was startled by his voice and took a moment to allow the words to form in my head. “I am thinking about how complicated this case has become.”

He nodded. “It just got worse.” His hand came up and pointed past the dilapidated house where, just visible through the blowing ground snow, was the back corner of a mobile home attached to a black Mack truck.

15

We stood there at the apex of the meadow, with the Big Horn Mountains strung across the far horizon like some painted backdrop in the theatre of our lives. I always felt things that Henry could better describe. “I know it is the earth that is moving, but at this moment it is as if the clouds are in motion, and the world is still and waiting.”

His black leather duster was flapping in the wind, and I noticed the Special Forces tomahawk in his hand. “I’m getting the shotgun.”

I unlocked the Remington and a handheld radio from the cab. Henry spoke to Dog. “Hinananjin.” Dog went over and sat beside him. It had already been established that the furry brute was conversant in Cheyenne, Shoshone, Arapaho, Crow, and Lakota; English was the language he chose to sometimes ignore.

I flipped on the radio and listened to the static. I didn’t expect to get any reception in the canyon, but it never hurt to try. I punched the transceiver button. “Come in Base, this is Unit One?” I looked over at the mountains and felt a familiar sinking feeling.

“Nothing?”

I blinked my one eye at him, dialed the frequency up a few clicks, and tried again. “Base, this is Unit One. Anybody there, come in?”

More static. Then a faint reply. “BR75115, come again?”

I smiled at the radio, keyed the mic, and deferred to the foreman. “Hey Jess, this is Walt Longmire. We made it down here to the old Nurburn place on Crazy Woman. We found your truck.”

Static. “The Mack?”

“Roger that. How long are you guys going to be on it today?”

Static. “Weather’s supposed’ta get bad, but we’re gonna try’n’ stick. I got a meetin’ at 4:30.”

“What’s the meeting about?” It was quiet.

Static. “Firin’ me, I’d imagine.”

You had to love the guy. “I might need you to relay messages back up to my office. This canyon is causing too much interference, and I can’t get through.”

Static. “We can try, but if it gets bad, reception’s kind of touch and go. How you wanna do it?”

“How about I give you a call every hour on the hour?”

Static. “This mean I’m officially deputized?”

I smiled. “I’ll talk to you about that.” I pulled out my pocket watch and rekeyed the mic. “In ten minutes it will be 3:00. Call me at 4:00.”

Static. “Roger that.” If I hired him, at least he already knew radio procedures.

Henry had kept an eye on the homestead while the foreman and I had finished our conversation. I clipped the radio to my belt as he turned to look at me. “We are walking from here?”

I stared at the corner of the mobile home. “Yep, after I put Dog in the truck.” He wasn’t happy about it, but I figured Henry and I were aware of what we were getting ourselves into, so we deserved whatever we got. I told Dog not to play with the radio.

There was a level area to our right where the banks of Crazy Woman shallowed, but it seemed assailable by an 18-wheeler and a house trailer. We crossed the frozen creek and moved within fifty yards of the house. There were a few dormers and a lean-to addition on the near side, and a screen door continually slapped in the wind, a brittle noise that grew louder as we approached. The broken trunks of the cottonwood were bleached out and whitened by the sun and the unending wind.

There was nothing at the house itself to indicate that Leo might have been in there. The Mack truck and the mobile home were buried axle deep in the powdery snow about twenty-five yards west of the homestead. The house trailer was fairly new and was small by white man standards, but it was still almost twice the size of the cabin. I could see where the folding steps had been pulled down at the front door; they were covered with snow and appeared undisturbed.

I glanced over at Henry. “You see anything?” He had stopped about thirty feet from the cabin; I could imagine his nostrils twitching. We had unconsciously fanned out from each other as we had approached; both of us had won hard lessons on what could happen when individuals bunched up in situations like this.

“No.”

“One of the things I don’t see is an ’87 Wagoneer, not that I thought I would have. I don’t think he could’ve gotten a car down in here with all this fresh snow.”

I thought about the dark stories I knew and started forward. It was three steps up to the front door where the screen door beat its arhythmical response to the wind. I placed my hand on it and felt some of the paint crack and fall away like sheet music. The wind had stopped for a moment, and it was quiet. I looked into the house, and you could plainly see it was empty; the only thing that moved were the drifts of some tattered, faded, once-white lace curtains that rolled and fell back against the broken window glass. The curtains, shredded and billowing with the wind’s persistent caress, reminded me that Mari had been here. I hoped she still was, because I needed all the support I could get, but I doubted it. She had lived the majority of her life in the house in Powder Junction. As I saw her, she only came here in the spring or summer, and she never entered the house itself. Her presence was there, though, along with the faded pieces of wallpaper. The house had contained her spirit but had paid the terrible price of purposeful neglect and had died a slow and inevitable death with no songs ever to be heard again.

His voice was soft and, if you weren’t listening, it would have drifted quietly along playing a variation with the wind. “There is a cellar.”

I clicked the flashlight on and cast a beam across the stairs; they looked as if they might hold me. Not much of the snow had blown into the basement, and you could see the hard-pack dirt floor, but not much else. I handed the shotgun to Henry and pulled out my .45. We looked at each other for a moment, and then I stepped onto the first tread, which squealed but held. I hated basements. I ducked my head under the jamb and continued down, casting the light from the flashlight across the small room. The stairs were centered, so I checked underneath and on either side first. There were a few broken nail kegs and floor parts from the room above. The flashlight illuminated the heavy beams and supports that stood centered on raised stone that had been chiseled from the bedrock of the canyon floor. I stepped down onto the smooth surface of the dirt, turned the flashlight back into the darkness, and I heard something move.

It was a muted sound, almost like the one that a feather duster would make. I stepped to the side and flashed my light to the center of the basement; it illuminated chains that hung there and the glowing golden eyes of a thirty-pound great gray owl. He screeched at me, dipped his head, and then exploded in a flurry of powerful wings that must have been six feet in wingspan to the collapsed wall of the broken foundation. His heavily feathered talons clawed at the rubble and found purchase. His huge head slowly turned to regard me: messenger from the dead indeed.

“What is going on?”

“I just flushed an owl from the other side.”

It was quiet for a moment, but then his voice rumbled. “Messenger from the dead.”

“I had that comforting thought all on my own.” I played the light back to the support beam at the chains that hung there. “Wait a minute.” I uncocked my side arm, slipped it back into my holster, resnapped the thumb strap, and walked over to the foot-wide support beam.

They were heavier than tire chains and old. I pulled one up and looked at the metal clasp hanging from the end, checking to see another at the end of the other chain. I held one of the manacles up to my wrist for comparison; these had been custom built for someone with a wrist half the size of mine. The heavy chains were through-bolted, and they had been there for a long time. The clasps were unlocked and hung like gaping jaws. I dropped them and watched as they slapped against the wood, bumping there like a child worrying a pant leg. The corners of the timber were worn from the repeated strikes against them. Horsewhip or quirt marks. I stared and felt the blows, felt the cries, felt that it was good that the man who had put these things here was dead.

“Anything?”

I passed the beam of the flashlight around the cellar for one more look, but all there was to see here, I had seen. I checked the owl one more time, but he hadn’t moved. He continued to watch me as I made my way back up the steps. “Just more evidence to convince me that it’s a good thing Charlie Nurburn is dead.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “I think I just heard something in the trailer.”

I was out and standing beside him when we heard it again. We looked at each other. “Did that sound like somebody moaning?” He nodded his head, and we headed for the trailer and the fold-down steps. I pulled my .45 out again and leaned against the trailer’s aluminum skin, just to the right of the door, and cocked the hammer back. The Bear pulled up to the left; anything bad that was going to happen in the next moment would likely happen in the framework of the doorway we now stood beside.

I took a deep breath and reached for the knob, slowly turning it to the left and the right: locked. I pointed at Henry and the ground, indicating that he should stay there. He nodded, and I started around to look for another way in. I kept an eye to the windows, but the shades were all pulled down. When I got to the back, I could see another door about three-quarters of the way down. I slowly worked along the side of the mobile home, stopping just this side of that door. There were no steps here but, if I stretched, I could just reach the knob. With my fingertips, I pressed it and turned. It was tough at first, but then it clicked, far too loudly, and sprang open about an inch.

I ducked down a little and pulled the door open about a foot and looked down a hallway that seemed to run the length of the thing. Cheap paneling and some sort of indoor-outdoor threadbare carpeting with a few window screens leaning against the interior wall was all that was visible. No Leo Gaskell. I looked down the hallway in the other direction, but all I could make out was the textured ceiling and a cheap light fixture; at least I could be sure that Leo wasn’t going to jump on me from above. I stood back up, took another deep breath, and casually opened the door the rest of the way.

Nothing.

I stood still for a moment, then leaned in about two inches and checked both sides, did it again, and then again. Still nothing, so I shot the works and stuck my head all the way in along with the .45. There was a closed door to my right and another at the end of the hallway that was partially open and led to a living room in which, sitting on an imitation leather sofa and swathed in about four Hudson Bay and buffalo blankets, was, who I assumed to be, Ellen Runs Horse.

I cleared my throat. “Hello.” The condensation from my breath stayed in front of my face; it was probably colder in the trailer than it was outside.

She didn’t move, just kept looking at me from beneath the blankets; after a bit she finally said, “Eeh.” Crow. She said yes as a statement that held neither question nor interest. The small cloud from her breath collected there in the gloom.

“I’m Sheriff Walt Longmire, Absaroka County.” I felt foolish saying it, but it was procedure. “Ellen Runs Horse?”

“Eeh.”

Same inflection. “Are you alone?”

A moment passed. “Eeh.”

I was feeling a little more secure but decided to test the theory using Vic’s litmus test for sanity. “Ellen, did you know that I was a Chinese fighter pilot?”

“Eeh.”

It was a fleeting security.

I stretched up, got the majority of my girth in the doorstep, and wriggled inside. I was relatively sure that Leo wasn’t in the mobile home; if he had been, he would have most certainly bludgeoned me to death as I wallowed on the floor. I pushed off the questionable carpet and slumped against the wall. I looked back down the hallway where Ellen Runs Horse was fumbling with something in the blankets; she was probably trying to get up. I waved a hand at her. “That’s okay, Ellen.”

It was then that I saw the barrel of a chrome-plated, pearl-handled .32 rise up from the blankets like a howitzer and tremble as she endeavored to pull the trigger.

“Ellen . . . ?” That was about all I got out before the .32 belched fire and the ceiling above me blew apart with a smart sound. The crack of the automatic in the confined space was tremendous and my ears rang so loudly that I could barely hear myself yelling. I staggered against the interior wall and could feel my hand tightening around the grip of the .45 in spite of myself. I coughed it out in a yell. “Jesus, Ellen!”

The automatic wavered but rose again as I dodged into the room to my right. The next bullet went through the first wall into a mattress that was leaning against it. I’m not sure how much protection I thought the thin walls of the mobile home were going to be, but the structure was falling below my expectations. I looked at the hole in the wall; she was getting closer. “Ellen?” Silence.

I waited, but the next shot didn’t come. There was another shuffling noise, so I ventured toward the door and slowly peeked around the jamb. Henry was there, kneeling before her, with the tiny automatic cradled in his hands. “I think it is safe now.”

“Jesus!” I turned the corner and looked at the two of them.

“Are you all right?”

“Jesus!”

He was doing his best not to laugh. “You take a little walk down the hallway and come back when your vocabulary increases.”

I stood there and took a few deep breaths as they continued a very low conversation in Crow, a language that, like Cheyenne, seemed to catch in the throat of the speaker. I could feel my heart rate beginning to slow to normal.

I picked up a few words, but they didn’t make much sense to me. Her face was broad, and she had thick brows that seemed to gather at the center and curve up, giving her a sad and questioning look. The outside corners of her eyes folded within themselves, hiding the edges of the baking chocolate pupils. Strong creases at the corners of her mouth, cascading from the cheekbones, made it difficult to tell if she had ever smiled. The movement of her lips was slight, and her voice barely carried.

After she finished talking, Henry took a plastic cup from a television tray to her right, glanced inside, and reached to her feet for what looked like a half-frozen gallon jug of water. He shook it to make sure some of the water was still liquid, refilled the cup, and placed the straw at her lips. While she drank, I took a look around. There was a Christmas tree in the corner, a motley bottlebrush type, which was decorated with homemade ornaments constructed of Mason jar lids and old photographs. Standing beside the blind television set, the holiday enthusiasm of the scraggly tree gave the room the most depressing appearance of any I’d been in, never mind the opened and emptied cans of creamed corn, the mushroom soup with a single spoon sticking up, the heel ends of a loaf of white bread, and another jug of water that had frozen solid.

He closed her tiny hands around the cup, and she held it. Her eyes followed Henry when he stood; he quietly spoke to her again and then stepped toward me. “She is touched.” He glanced back over to Ellen who seemed content to suck from the straw of the plastic cup. “She says that none of her friends have come to visit her for a long time.”

“What’s the story on the pistol?”

“Evidently Leo told her to shoot anybody that came in.”

“What’d she say about him?”

“She thinks I am Leo.”

I nodded a tight nod. “How did you get in?”

“Just forced it with the tomahawk.”

“Noticeable?”

He handed me the automatic, which still had a round left. “Not that much.” His eyes came back up to mine. “Why?”

“You’ve got to get her out of here.” He looked at me. “I don’t see any other option. We’ve got to get her some attention, but he might come back and, if he does, I want someone here to meet him.”

“You are in no condition . . .”

I looked back over to Ellen Runs Horse. “You speak the language, and she trusts you. Chances are he’s still in town somewhere, but I can get Double Tough on the radio and get Vic or Saizarbitoria down here later.” I crossed back down the hallway and looked out the window. “We’ve only got about an hour till it’s really dark.” The wind was blowing again, and my boot prints were almost gone. I turned back to Henry. “You better get out of here.”

* * *

We had tucked Ellen into the passenger side of the Bullet and allowed Dog to share the front, since he seemed to make her more at ease. I looked through my one eye at the Cheyenne Nation. “When you get out of here, call ahead and get them to throw together some supplies and bring a little backup.”

He pulled the heavy leather coat aside and climbed in, fastening his seatbelt and pulling the Special Forces tomahawk from behind him. The carbon steel surface absorbed light like a black hole. “Here.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want that thing; I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” I patted the chrome handle of the tiny automatic, which was sticking out from my belt, balanced the Remington on my shoulder, and felt the .45 in the holster. “I have every gun we’ve got.” He nodded and glanced toward the ridge. “Radio Double Tough and have him call in. I’ll be here.” He nodded and kept looking at me. “Aren’t you going to turn on the lights?” I reached in and hit the switch he was looking for as the blue and red reflectors bled ghosts of light across the late afternoon snow.

He watched them for a moment. “This is the best part of your job.” He placed a hand against the driver’s side window as he passed, the large dark fingers unraveling against the glass like hemp rope.

I watched as the truck struggled to stay alongside the canyon wall, disappearing in the snow as the darker gray of its outline grew lighter with the distance, and the sound of the big Detroit motor planed, muffled, and vanished. I stood there for a while longer, wondering, like I always did, if this was the right thing to do. It looked like it was going to be a long night, so I turned and started the trudge back to the trailer. I was interrupted by a weak call on the radio.

Static. “Hey Sheriff, this is BR75115.The weather is comin’ in, just like . . .” I pulled the radio from my belt. “Absaroka County Sheriff Unit One, come in?” After a moment, a very faint signal came through.

Static. “Hey, Sheriff, how you . . .”

I smiled. “I’m good, how about you?”

Static. “I’m fired.”

The signal faded out completely, and I readjusted the gain. “Hello? Jess?” Nothing. I dropped my head a little and then keyed the mic again. “Jess, if you can hear me?” At least Henry had gotten out. I tried the radio again. Static. I looked at the radio, thought about my luck, and keyed the mic one final time.

Static. Damn.

* * *

I walked around to the back of the trailer so that Leo wouldn’t notice any more of my tracks. I closed the door behind me and decided to check the other rooms. There was a back bedroom at the end of the hall with another mattress squatting in the corner, a particleboard dresser that had seen better days, and a vintage console television. There was nothing in the closet but old clothes and well-worn shoes, giving me an indication of the frugal life that Ellen Runs Horse must live. The next room was a lot more interesting; there was a card table with Sterno burners and all the products used to produce meth on a clandestine laboratory scale. The floorboards were lined with plastic gallon jugs containing the toxic castoff of the operation, and it was evident that Leo’s drug venture was still a going concern.

I walked into the living room and looked at the beat-to-shit fake tree and wished it a Merry Christmas. The ornaments were made out of Mason jar lids with glue around the threaded edges to hold on the glitter, and there were bows of knitting yarn and ribbons to make the tiny ornaments brave; some of them used photographs that were old enough to be in Henry’s Mennonite collection. There was a sepia one that carried the bruised image of a young girl with braids playing marbles. She had on a cap and an old jacket and a face of utmost concentration. I turned the ornament in my hand and read on the back, printed in block letters, ELLEN WALKS OVER ICE. There was another of a young man in a Thermopolis varsity football uniform doing the old chuck and duck; I could see that it was Leo. I turned it over to confirm my guess; the block letters said simply LEO, with no surname.

There were others, but the one that next caught my attention was one toward the back; I guess I noticed it because its face was turned toward the wall. It twisted gently as I watched, revealing a very young Leo with the man who must be his father. He had on a hat, a broad-brim, flattop like the Powder River cowboys wore, and his head was tilted down to the young Leo, the hat hiding the eyes. The jawline was discernible, along with the lips. The connection to Ellen was there, but the black-and-white photo did nothing to tell me whether his skin was white or red; he didn’t look particularly Indian nor did he look particularly like Charlie. It was like doing a lineup with jigsaw puzzles. I turned the ornament over, but all it said was LEO & FATHER. He was her son, and she hadn’t even written down his name, but she had cared enough to keep track.

I had the sandwiches that Dorothy had made and the coffee, so I had something to eat and drink. I went over and retrieved one of the jugs of water as well, the one that was only half frozen. I might need it and, if I didn’t keep it with me, chances are it wasn’t going to stay thawed. I gathered the blankets that were left and the buffalo robe, dragging them to a chair so as to sit as far away from the creamed corn as the furniture would allow. I pulled the Mag Lite from my belt for future use, placed the ornament on one knee, and pulled the little automatic out and rested it on my other knee. I placed the shotgun between my legs and pulled the .45 from my holster and checked it again. I felt like Zapata.

I studied the ornament and stared at the partial face, knowing that I had seen this man, knowing that he was out there, knowing that he and Leo were in cahoots, cahoots being a legal term in Wyoming, see cahooting in the first degree, intent to cahoot, and so on.

I sat there and thought about what a long wait this might turn into and about the course of things and looked around again. I noticed a strap sticking out from under the couch Ellen had been sitting on that was made from the kind of tubular webbing that is used for backpacks. I sat the gun on the floor along with the ornament, flipped back the buffalo robe, and moved across the small room to kneel by the sofa. The strap was followed by a grimy daypack. The zipper to the main compartment was broken, but it had been fastened together with large safety pins. I unhooked the pins and had a look inside: dozens of small glass bottles and a small bundle wrapped in the Durant Courant containing close to what looked like about $40,000 in mixed currency.

Leo, you bad boy. Whether he would slog his way through a blizzard to the middle fork of Crazy Woman to a trailer and his loopy grandmother was suddenly academic. Leo might leave his grandmother to starve to death, but he would come back for the drugs and the money.

I put the bundle back in the knapsack and stuffed the bag under the sofa when I noticed a battered cooler in the kitchen. I wondered what Leo might have put in there. The kitchen reminded me of my grumbling stomach, but my curiosity was stronger than my appetite. If I had been hungry, I wasn’t anymore. I pulled the aged skull of an adult male from the cooler. I leaned against the counter and held it in my hand. “Alas, poor Charlie.” The prominent gold tooth was there, central incisor, right. I guess Double Tough hadn’t looked at the head; I didn’t blame him. “You got off easy, you son of a bitch.”

I carefully placed the skull back in the cooler and walked over to the window where I raised the blind just far enough to see a fog bank beginning to form along the shadowed canyon wall. The creek water must have been warmer than the air and, if the low cloud cover held, this was going to be a very foggy, as well as dark, place in about thirty minutes. Now all I had to do was relax and watch what little light there was at the bottom of the windows die.

* * *

Static. “Unit One, this is BR75115, come in?”

The blankets slipped and the ornament fell to the floor, but at least I didn’t shoot the door. I had forgotten to turn off the radio. I struggled through the folds in the blanket and pulled it out, the small glow of the channel display providing a comforting light. “Hey Jess. You got through. Over?”

Static. “Sheriff, I’m at the base radio at equipment storage. I’ve got your dog here, and he’s been shot.”

I stared at the radio as a million and one things ran through my mind, all of them bad. “Are you sure?”

Static. “Yeah, I’m sure. It looks like a small caliber. I’m doing all I can for him.”

“How did he get there?”

Static. “He must’a drug himself. I went out and followed the blood trail as far as I could, but you can’t see a damn thing with all this fog.”

I thought about Henry. If Dog was shot . . . “I’m going to need you to call my office, tell them that I think we’ve got a man down and that we need all the help we can get. Then get the HPs out here.”

Static. “Roger that, out.”

Here I sat with every weapon that we had, and my closest friend and blood brother was probably dead out there in the snow somewhere. It was a solid three miles back to the methane wells and that was if I could find him. That’s if Leo left him, and what were the chances that Leo would have left him alive?

I’m lousy at ignoring first instincts and mine told me to gather the weapons and head out. I stuffed the little automatic back in my belt, holstered the .45 cocked and locked along with the Mag Lite, pulled the buffalo robe around me, and flipped the shotgun up on my shoulder. I stuffed the ornament into my duty jacket and started for the door, opened it, and sidestepped. I pulled my hat down tight and raised my head slowly to look into the vaporous white. Barely visible in the fog were blue and red lights that blinked across the blurred canyon walls.

My truck.

The headlights were shining at an odd angle and the blue and red ones were simply revolving in place, so I was pretty sure Leo had misjudged the width of the trail and had planted the three-quarter ton over the edge. He was lucky he had done it near the bottom, or the truck would have flipped and killed him. The headlights cast to the left, away from the homestead and the trailer. I stepped down and pulled the door closed quietly behind me.

It was only about 150 yards, but the fog made it seem like miles. I started the slow trudge, staying to the right and keeping my one eye on the slightly illuminated portion of the white distance. If he was coming to the trailer, he was going to have to cross that bit of diffused light and, when he did, I would be there.

I lowered the Remington from my shoulder and allowed it to swing forward; with all my training, here I was shooting with one eye. There was a movement to my left, just out of the headlight beams. I unfocused as always, allowing my eye to become a motion detector, and waited until whatever it was out there moved again. It did, and it was large. Not only tall but wide. I stood there, watching as it lumbered into view, in no way the outline of a man. It was at least four feet across and as tall as I am. I was thinking that it was a cow, confused and trying to find some relief from the storm or a horse trying to do the same. It was a blur in the fog. It swayed there for a moment, and it seemed as though a wing extended outward and then folded back.

After a few seconds, the wing extended again and caught a small movement of the air, then flipped sideways only to fall. It shifted its weight and then both wings caught the breeze, and I was sure the thing would take flight. My mouth fell open, and my mind was jarred to the image of Henry at the Busy Bee when he had spread the wings on his duster, his battle cry shaking the windows of the café.

The fog froze the inside of my mouth. “Bear?”

The blast was instantaneous. Leo had been waiting, hoping that I would say something in recognition, and I had.

It was as if someone had tied a rope around my leg and tied it to a galloping stallion. I couldn’t move. Leg, left, and I thought of bone and the artery as the immediate shock sparked and then subsided. The reason his shadow had been so deformed was that he was carrying Ellen, which meant my shot had to be low. He wasn’t expecting a return volley and was probably as surprised as I had been when he pitched backward with the flame of the Remington still in my hands.

I fell with the recoil, and the barrel of the shotgun buried itself in the snow and frozen ground below, useless. I rolled to the left, trying to keep him in view, but all I could see was the freezing fog that reflected in the dimness of the truck’s lights. The pain in my leg clinched my guts and pulled my knees forward even as I tried to negotiate my left arm up for leverage. He was down too, but I couldn’t be sure which of us would be able to get up first; the smart money would be on the man hyped on crystal meth.

My hat rolled from my head and rested there in the snow as I looked up. He seemed to be growing from the crusted surface. Henry’s coat tried to hold him against the ground for me and, along with the burden of Ellen Runs Horse, did pin him just long enough for me to get the .32 up and out, the .45 still buried at my side.

I attempted to time the squeeze on the .32, waiting until a lull in the pain allowed my aim to stay steady long enough to fire off my only round, the chrome pistol extended into the fog. I felt like one of those near frozen buffalo in imminent danger of being torn apart by a pack of wolves, just waiting for one of those wolves to get close enough. I pulled the trigger, and the little semiautomatic roared and bucked in my hand.

The air left his body as the impact of the slug carried his teetering momentum back. Center shot, or close enough. He fell with an angry, gargling sound, and the report of his pistol smacked like a bullwhip. His shot went off harmlessly into the frosted air.

I slumped down against my side and breathed again, the cold flood of oxygen inflating my chest as well as causing the searing pain in my thigh to start up again. I took a few more breaths and rolled my head back to look at him. He had collapsed backward on his shattered legs, doubled back as though he had been playing some perverse game of limbo. I stayed steady, looking at him, and tried to reassemble my mind so that I could begin making assessments on how badly I was hurt, how soon I could reach Ellen Runs Horse, and how long it would take me to get us both to cover.

Then he moved.

It was a feeble gesture at first, almost an involuntary one, but it was a movement nonetheless. I felt my single eye widen as his hand, still holding a very large stainless revolver, scrambled up from the snow like an antiaircraft battery. A shoulder surged forward as the other arm fought to push him up; like his grandfather, Leo would not stay in the grave.

His head lolled to one side as the trunk of his body approached upright, and the arm with the gun dragged across the snow. Our breaths billowed out to join the fog like two locomotives on a collision course.

I yanked on the .45 and freed it from the robe, feeling it swing forward, but he was already there, the endless, stainless barrel of a Colt .357 pointed at my face. I felt the surge of cold air in my teeth as I tried to bring the .45 around, but it was too late.

There was silence. He had paused for a moment, and all I could think was that this was the last thing I would see. Time froze then, and it was as if the air had died and the snowflakes just hung there like some ethereal mobile as I looked into the darkness of his face.

I waited as he wavered in the silence. The Colt toppled from his hand, and he stood there looking at me before falling forward, a Special Forces Vietnam issue tomahawk driven deep into the base of his skull.

The voice in the distance was garbled but still discernible. “Nesh-sha-nun Na-woo-hes-sten Nah-kohe Ve-ne-hoo-way-hoost Ne-hut-may-au-tow.” Tell your ancestors Standing Bear has sent you.

16

I was pretty sure that the two of us looked like a human junkyard. We were sitting at the veterinarian’s office. Henry struggled out the next sentence with the good side of his mouth, “How is your leg?”

“It hurts, but only when I walk. It’s not so bad when I talk.” He nodded, and we both looked at the carpet. “DCI is going to want to talk to you.” He didn’t move, so I continued. “How about I go through the story, and you can make corrections and additions as we go?”

“Hmm.”

“What?” He turned to look at me, and I could see the bulge of the bandage at his jawline. “Just kidding. So, you found the highway patrol cruiser buried in the snow up on the flat?”

“Hmm.”

“And you stopped the truck and got out to take a look, and the driver didn’t move. So, you opened the door.” I nodded my head for a moment. “What kind of rookie move was that?” He didn’t respond, but I could see his jaw flex. “So he raised the glorified .22 and shoots you in the face right off the bat?”

“Hmm.”

I nodded some more. “You’re lucky it was a .32, the .357 would’ve deviated your septum. You don’t have to answer that.” He didn’t. “All right, you fell backward, and then Leo rolls you over, takes you for dead, and strips your coat off of you?”

“Hmm.”

“Because of this, Dog tries to eat Leo alive, and he shoots Dog twice and drives off with my truck?”

“Hmm.”

I shook my head and looked at the operating room door. “Then you got up, sprinted after the truck, and followed Leo back to the canyon with half your face tied on with a bandana? You ran a half a mile with a subcutaneous bullet trail running from the cleft of your chin to the back of your neck?”

He held the bloody fragment of lead that Isaac had pulled out and handed it to me. “Hmm.”

The door to the operating room was opening and, from the corner of my good eye, I could see Mike Pilch coming out to give us the prognosis on Dog. Mike was a vet who was something of an oddity in Absaroka County in that he actually tried to save domestic animals as opposed to giving up and putting them down. He stopped short. “Wow, you guys look like eight kinds of hell.”

I held a finger to my lips to silence him. “We escaped from the hospital.” I glanced over at Henry to see him wave a feeble hand at the veterinarian and readjust the leather duster over his knee. “The Indian’s not talking today.” He nodded and studied the Bear’s face a little more closely. “How’s Dog?”

He pulled his eyes away from the spectacle of Henry to look at me; I don’t guess the view improved. “It’s pretty bad, but he’s tough whatever he is.” He moved over and sat in the chair beside me. “The first bullet just grazed his skull. It was the second bullet that did the most damage, entering the abdomen and lodging in the muscle near the spine. I did an exploratory and found a section of the intestinal tract was perforated and had to remove eleven inches. I flushed the stomach with sterile saline and placed several drains. With the bullet so close to the spine, we’d probably do more harm than good if I tried to take it out, but the body will wall it off and it shouldn’t cause any future problems. He’s still dopey from surgery but seems to be doing well. I’ll need to keep a close watch on him for the next few days.”

As we left Mike’s office, I finished questioning the Bear. He was buttoning his leather duster. “Did you put the axe in the base of Leo’s skull just to save your coat?”

He gathered it up as he wearily climbed in the truck. “Hmm.”

“Wow . . .” I glanced back at the Bear. “You could’ve missed. What kind of rookie move was that?”

* * *

It had been a long night. We had staunched our bleedings and had huddled in the cab of my truck with Ellen Runs Horse until Double Tough showed up in a D9 Caterpillar and pulled my three-quarter ton out of the creek bed like it was a Flexible Flyer. He had rendezvoused with the HPs so that Dog could be brought to Durant for more professional care and had drunk about a half a bottle of Wild Turkey in the meantime, but he seemed as impervious to liquor as he had been to bullets. He pulled us up and out of the canyon, angling the blade so that a slow-motion wall of snow cascaded away from the dozer and cleared a way for us as we were pulled along. By the time we had gotten to the flat above, revolving blue and red lights joined with our own, telling me that the rest of the cavalry had arrived.

Vic’s unit was the only one that could make it this far. Before we had come to a stop she was there, yanking the door open and applying a more professional pressure bandage to my leg; Saizarbitoria helped Henry on the other side of the cab. We left the Bear in my truck, thinking it might help maintain the quiet Ellen Runs Horse had surrendered to. Saizarbitoria would drive it to the hospital with them, while I would ride along with Vic. As I leaned against her, she tipped her head around to give me a look. “You get him?”

My smile couldn’t help but fade. “The Bear did.” I glanced into the truck bed. So did Vic. The half-frozen body of Leo Gaskell was buried into the cradle of snow that had accumulated there. The black alloy tomahawk still stuck up from the back of his head like a pump lever.

She blew a brief breath from pursed lips. “Fuck.”

* * *

There were four HPs parked at the underpass.

Wes was dead, only one week away from guarding those golf course ponds. They found him where he must have pulled Leo over. He was a veteran cop with more than thirty-five years on the job, and he had known that Leo was armed and highly dangerous, but something had gone terribly wrong.

There was a buzz of activity at the hospital emergency room, one that I had grown used to as of late. Out of the three of us, triage speaking, I was third. I waited on a gurney as they stabilized Henry. Bill McDermott had cut off my jeans above the wound, irrigated the hole in my leg, and was now bandaging me up; Ferg leaned against the wall and watched the process. I glanced at him, trying to ignore the pain in my leg. “Cady and Lana?”

He smiled. “Christmas shopping over in Sheridan.” He shrugged. “They weren’t going to stay in that room any longer, and they don’t know about all of this.” He waited a few moments before asking. “Leo Gaskell dead?” I nodded, as we both stared at my leg. “You do it?”

“Henry.”

After a while he spoke again. “Good.”

It was a strange remark for the Ferg to make. “Why good?”

“He’s better at living with it.”

I felt the dull throb through the anesthetic and wondered where I could get a pair of pants that would fit around the bandage. I looked down at the coroner as he finished. “Does it bother you if I talk to you while you’re working?”

He smiled. “Most of my patients don’t, but go ahead.”

“How’s Ellen Runs Horse?”

“For a dehydrated old woman, who is suffering from exposure and malnutrition, she’s doing quite well.”

* * *

There was a nurse at the desk outside the Intensive Care Unit, but she was committing a copy of Redbook to memory and so only raised her head briefly as we passed. Ellen was in the curtained-off section to the far right with no one else in the room. They had cleaned her up, and she looked a lot better. I only felt marginally shitty about what we were doing, but when I thought about Mari Baroja, Anna Walks Over Ice, and Wes Rogers, I felt better about it. Too many people had died.

I dug into my pocket and handed Henry the ornament that I had taken from the tree in her trailer, and her eyes followed it from my hand to his. He held it there between them; the Mason jar lid that dangled from the yarn turned slowly revealing the photo on one side and the name on the other. She stared at me long enough to convince me that I was interfering with the investigative process, so I went to the other side of the curtain. I could hear her whispering.

The next thing I knew, Henry was standing next to me. “Anything we can use?”

It pained him as he spoke. “She keeps repeating a phrase that means ‘give up’.”

“She’s throwing in the towel after all this?” He shrugged as I glanced back and saw that she was watching us. I smiled and to my surprise she smiled back. She didn’t look like somebody who was calling it quits.

“She is apologetic about it.” I noticed that he was able to talk softly from the right side of his mouth.

She was still holding the Mason jar lid. “I’m going to need that ornament.”

He looked back, and she smiled at us some more. “We will have to wait until she is asleep.”

* * *

Vic had yelled at me last night, and I was thinking there wasn’t anybody left to yell at me when I saw Ruby’s car. It was a Sunday, but Lucian must not have felt well enough to come to work. Henry quietly closed the door behind us, and I felt like we were sneaking in after an all night drunk. We stood there on the landing as a set of ferocious blues looked down on us.

“How is Dog?”

I tried a weak smile. “He’s going to be all right. We can visit him in a couple of days.” The eyes disappeared.

We struggled our way up the steps with Henry assisting by allowing me a hand on his shoulder. My leg was throbbing, so we stopped at the top, and I caught my breath. I looked at the bench by the door; someone was sleeping, covered with one of our PROPERTY OF ABSAROKA COUNTY JAIL wool blankets. The place was like a boarding house. “Who is that?”

She didn’t look up from the computer screen. “The methane foreman.”

I looked over at Henry, who was risking injury by smiling. “Let’s go to my office, shall we?”

My chair felt good, and I thought about spending the rest of the day there, but the obligations of duty called my attention to a large tan envelope that read Sheriff Sweetie Pie; I had forgotten that she had dropped off an envelope what seemed like an eternity ago.

There was a crisp piece of legal paper clipped to a photocopy. I started with the note, a gracefully looping script in red that sprawled across the rigid lines of light blue on yellow. “Mon Amour, I’ve left you a little present I found in one of my investigations of Durant National Bank’s safe-deposit boxes. The manager found an old registration for box number 283, a Mr. Charles Joseph Nurburn. It hadn’t been opened since 1950 but someone had paid the rental fee until around ten years ago when the bill came back with addressee unknown.” I thought about the timing and that was when Lucian had taken up residence at the Durant Home for Assisted Living. I guess he had forgotten about the rental.

I looked up at Henry, but he was looking out the window, so I continued reading to myself. “I’m here for another day and a half, but then I’ve got to be in Denver on the 24th at 9 A.M. Call me.”

I looked up at the old Seth Thomas clock, figuring maybe I could just catch up with her and convince her to stay another day but then wondered how Cady would feel about that. I hadn’t seen her in almost two days and she’d be gone before I knew it. I flipped the note over and looked at the photocopy. It was Charlie Nurburn’s Will and Testament or a copy thereof. It was pretty cut and dried and left all Charlie’s assets to Joseph Walks Over Ice.

Joseph.

We had a name. I handed the copy to Henry and called for Ruby. Even with the limp, I met her at the door. “Get the NCIC and ask about a Joseph Walks Over Ice, male, about fifty-five years of age, born in Sheridan County. See if anything pops up.” She disappeared around the corner as I turned back to the Bear. “Ring any bells?” He shook his head as I went around the desk and sat back down. “I’ve got an idea . . .” His eyes stayed steady with mine. I stared at the surface of my desk. “Whoever killed Mari Baroja did it to get her money. Since illegitimate or stepchildren cannot inherit directly, the only way to do that was to have Mari predecease Charlie so that he could collect his elective share. Then you kill off the already dead Charlie and inherit the money he left you.”

The Bear’s eyes widened, and I continued. “Leo Gaskell and, more importantly, Joseph Walks Over Ice found it suddenly financially beneficial to keep Lucian’s ruse going after the methane started producing. I think it snowballed on them. I don’t think they thought that that many people knew Charlie was dead. Even Lana would have to be on the list. She told me that Lucian had killed her grandfather the day I met her. Everyone who knew Charlie was dead has been either attacked or killed.” I slumped back in my chair and yelled into the other room. “Have you got anything?”

The reply was curt. “Hold your horses!”

“There’s something else that’s bothering me.” Henry handed me back the Will, and I laid the photocopy on the desk. “I’m sure they killed Anna because she was trying to tell Doc Bloomfield about Leo’s plans or Joseph’s, but how did Leo kill Wes Rogers?” It was quiet in the room. “Wes would have known . . . unless Leo Gaskell was not driving the car.”

Ruby’s voice called from the other room. “I’ve got something.”

We rushed in, as best we could, and crowded around the computer screen as Ruby summoned forth Joseph Walks Over Ice. “The name came up in the Department of Child Services in Cheyenne. A child was given up for adoption to a Catholic orphanage, a Saint Anthony’s in Casper, back in 1951.”

Henry and I locked eyes. It wasn’t that Ellen was giving up; it was what she had given up. “What else?”

“The child had numerous altercations and was described as emotionally disturbed. He was never adopted and left the orphanage at age sixteen.” She looked up at me. “That’s as far as it goes.”

Henry spoke softly through his bandage. “At that period in time, a lot of Indian children took the surname of the priest who ran the orphanage.”

Ruby’s fingers started dancing again. She turned to me. “The priest who signed off on Joseph’s papers was a Father Mark Lesky.”

Lesky, Joseph.

Joe Lesky.

I grabbed the phone from Ruby’s desk and punched in the number for the home. Jennifer Felson answered, and I asked her if Joe was on duty. “He was here a little while ago, but he got off at 8:00. Is there a problem?”

“Is he still around?”

“I’ll check.” I stood there with the phone in my hand. “Shelly saw Joe walk out of here with Lucian about twenty minutes ago.”

“If they show up, call me. Thanks, Jennifer.” I hung up and looked at Henry. Double Tough had woken up with all the commotion and was now standing with us. “He has been everywhere in this case.” I looked down at Ruby. “Where are Vic and Saizarbitoria?”

She stuttered. “There was a fender bender on the highway bypass.”

“Radio them and get them in here now. Joe Lesky’s out with Lucian.” I took a deep breath, trying to clear my head. “Where would they go?” I took another breath and thought out loud. “Where would Joe take him?”

It was the clearest I’d heard him speak since he had been shot. “Breakfast?”

I turned to Ruby on our way out. “Tell Vic and Saizarbitoria to meet us at the Bee.” As we started down the steps, I noticed that the methane foreman was accompanying us. I turned my head toward him so that I could see him with my uncovered eye. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

He smiled as he caught the door and allowed Henry to go through first. “I thought ya might need somebody who could both walk and talk.”

He had a point.

We pulled up alongside the Busy Bee, just as Vic’s unit slid to a stop beside us, only missing the front of my truck by inches. Her window was rolled down. “Joe Fucking Lesky?”

The place was packed as we flooded in, all the patrons freezing at the sight of an armed sheriff, two deputies, an Indian, and a construction worker; we probably looked like the Village People.

I caught Dorothy’s eye from behind the counter. “Lucian and Joe Lesky?”

You couldn’t ruffle her feathers with a brick. “Haven’t seen them.”

We regrouped on the sidewalk, and I started breaking it down. “Vic, you and Double Tough go to the home and wait. If they show up, just tell Joe that we’ve got some papers for him at the office. Try not to tip him off but bring him in no matter what.” They left in Vic’s unit as I turned to Saizarbitoria. “Santiago, get Ferg and do a perimeter. Radio the HPs and tell them to stop anything heading south on I-25 and that we’re looking for Lucian and Joe Lesky.” I tossed him the keys to the Bullet, and he was gone.

I turned to look down Main Street and then back at the Bear. I thought for a long moment. “I’ve got a question for you.” He didn’t say anything. “What makes us think that Joe took Lucian?” I looked back down the street at the Euskadi Hotel sign. “What if Lucian took Joe?”

* * *

“Mornin’ Lucian. Joe . . .”

I limped the twenty feet to the table; Lucian was facing me as I came in, the old gunfighter to the end. Joe had his back to the door but turned and lightly smiled as I entered. There were two cups of coffee on the table, but it looked like Joe was the only one drinking. Lucian’s hat was off and placed on the chair beside him with the brim down, which struck me as strange. The old sheriff looked relaxed, leaning back in his chair with his hands folded in his lap. Joe had his elbows resting on the table. Neither of them had their coats on, both were hanging from their chairs, and the jukebox was playing Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanian’s “Ring Those Christmas Bells.”

I hobbled past them to the bar back and poured myself a cup of coffee and gently placed it on a saucer. Coffee bought ten minutes. I raised a cup to Henry, who had stayed back by the door. He shook his head no. As I stalled at the bar, trying to think how I was going to play this, I thought of the mixture of excitements the next few minutes could unleash.

“What happened to your leg?” Joe was looking at me, but he was also glancing at Henry and his bandaged face. “And what happened to you?”

I shuffled back over to their table, turned one of the bentwood chairs around, and sat, giving me ready access to my sidearm and Joe. “Oh . . . we got shot.”

They were both staring at us now. Lucian the first to ask. “Who the hell shot ya?”

I studied the little vase on our table with its decorative plastic sprigs of holly and mistletoe, then trailed an arm over the back of the chair and took a sip of my coffee, my sore hand hardly fitting the delicate dinnerware of the Euskadi. “Leo Gaskell.” I kept my eyes on the old sheriff. “We’ve got him up at the hospital, and they’re patching him up.” Another Lazarus on the pile.

It was quiet for a moment, but then the music swelled with the false vibrancy and good humor of the season. “Who’s Leo Gaskell?”

I turned and looked at Joe Lesky. You had to give him credit; he was good. “Drug dealer from over in Fremont County; looks like he’s the one that hurt Anna Walks Over Ice.” May as well keep everybody alive. “He’s up there talking to the investigators now.”

Joe’s head nodded. He too was trying to buy time but in an establishment where nobody was selling. “Well, it’s good you got the guy that did it.”

“Yep.” The old sheriff was watching me very closely as I turned back to him and tried to get a read. “What’re you up to?”

“Doin’ some Christmas shoppin’.”

“The stores aren’t open yet.”

He looked back at Joe. “I got plenty a time.” He adjusted his hat on the seat of the chair beside him. Now I knew where the gun was.

Joe started to push off from the table. “Well, it sounds like you fellas have a lot to . . .” Out of the corner of my good eye, I could see Henry’s hands move from his pockets.

“Sit.” It was the soft voice he used when he would ask me if I really wanted to make a move in our chess games, the warning voice that sounded like the guttural vibration in the back of a cougar’s throat. Joe eased back into his chair, and I turned to Lucian.

We looked at each other like we had for decades, a blind man talking to a deaf one. There was a line that neither of us was able to cross: his sneering at my supposed weakness and my righteous indignation at his immorality. I was sure that the chasm between us was a generational one. Lucian’s world was simpler, and he was unable to see that law enforcement had become complicated in the modern era; or was it that he was so close, so much of a part of the whole mess, that he had lost perspective on it long ago? Charlie Nurburn hung out there like a reoccurring nightmare and in Charlie’s child and his child’s child.

I guess the heat was getting to Joe, because he felt compelled to interrupt. “We were just having a little conversation somewhere quiet.” His voice was a little unsteady. “I came across some information I thought might interest Lucian.”

I glanced back as Lucian pulled his pipe from one jacket pocket and the beaded leather pouch from the other. The tension eased but only a little. “I got some information, too.” Lucian filled his pipe and struck a match on the side of his chair. “I, um . . .” He sucked on his pipe until he got it going, the thick plume of smoke roiling from the corner of his mouth. “Beebee Banks was visitin’ her mother over at the home. Walt, she told me to tell you she found out who had that little Baroja girl’s bakery building before she did.” The smile played on his face like a reflection on moving water. “Why, it was Joe here.”

Like the motor drive on an automatic shutter, I counted six different stills as my head rotated to Joe, like six separate heartbeats. “Don’t move.”

The weight of it was in the room with us now like a cold cloud-burst had suddenly let loose; the rain of recognition was dripping from all of us and, as I saw Joe’s hand slip from the table, I was positive that of the four men in the room, three had guns. I saw the Bear move, but I was closer.

The bones in his wrist crunched with a nauseating give, and I finally got a look at the Joe Lesky that had been so carefully hidden from me as, with a snarl of rage, he tried to twist and pull away. My left held, but I wasn’t going to trust it to do the job alone. His expression changed as the cold barrel of the .45 pressed up under his jaw, forcing his head back to where he had to look over the contours of his face to see me.

I took a deep breath. “I said, don’t move.”

I watched as his nostrils spread, and he pulled air in like a bellows. “Let go of my wrist!”

“I don’t hardly think so.” I eased the pressure of the .45 and allowed his head to lower enough so that I could see his expression. I thought of an old drill sergeant who had told me that a professional is the one who always has his gun. I risked a glimpse to the right, around the damn eye patch, and saw the long-barreled .38 of Lucian’s duty revolver extended across the table eight inches from Joe’s face.

I looked back at Joe, who was glancing at his coat and thinking about trying the reach with his left. “You do, and I will splatter your brains all over the pressed tin ceiling.” His eyes came back to mine. “Now I’m going to place your hands back on this table, and you are not going to move them, do you understand?”

I swept my hand behind him, lifting his coat and throwing it to Henry. I pulled my cuffs from my belt. “Put those on.”

“You broke my wrist.”

“Put those on.” He pressed the one loop through and delicately placed it around his damaged wrist, only partially locking it as I counted only three notches that clicked. “All the way.”

He looked at me. “It hurts.”

“So will the .45.” He clicked it again and then did the other hand as specified. I leaned back and took another deep breath as I pulled the Colt away from the underside of Joe’s chin. I turned my head, so that I could see Lucian with the inside of my good eye. “You all right?”

“I ain’t the one without a gun, if that’s what ya mean.”

I looked back at Joe. His eyes shifted from me, to Lucian, and then back to me. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m not saying anything until I talk to a lawyer.”

Lucian snorted. “What makes you think that you’re gonna see a lawyer?”

My voice sounded a long way away, like it was coming from the land of reason. “Lucian.”

The old sheriff ’s hand didn’t move, and the extended barrel of the Smith and Wesson stayed even with Joe’s eyes. “I aim to kill this son of a bitch, right here and right now.” He pulled the pipe from his mouth and blew a strong lungful of smoke away from us. The pounding of “Ring Those Christmas Bells” continued as the jukebox charged on.

I cleared my throat and swallowed. “Lucian, I’m going to need you to lower your weapon.”

He gestured toward Joe with the stem of his pipe. “You killed my wife.”

I needed to buy some more time. I studied Joe. “When did you find out that Charlie Nurburn was dead?” He didn’t move, but his eyes switched from Lucian to me. “I’m betting that you knew he was dead by the time you contacted Leo. I guess you figured that Lucian here had kept Charlie alive for fifty-odd years and there was no reason why you couldn’t keep him alive for a little while longer or at least until you could get a share of Mari’s money.”

He didn’t move. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His tongue flicked across his lips. “Walt, you’ve known me . . .”

“No I don’t.” I leaned in on the back of my chair. “Did you kill Mari Baroja before you got Leo over here? You knew you could get him to kill Lana and Lucian, certainly Anna, but he didn’t kill them all, did he? And you didn’t do so well with Isaac.”

I was tired, and I wanted it all over with, but there was so much more to tell. “Leo tried to save his grandmother; he was hurt and was going to run for it but you knew we were down on the old Nurburn place. You were the one that shot Wes Rogers, and then you sent Leo down there in the cruiser even though you knew we were waiting and either way, you figured this problem would solve itself.” I kept the .45 leveled between Joe’s eyes. “What were you going to do, Joe? Blame it all on Leo?”

His voice was strained. “I want a lawyer.”

Lucian exhaled, his arm still extended. “Best you can hope for is a priest, and that right soon.”

“You can’t prove any of this.”

I looked into Joe’s eyes, trying to see some common ground between us, but there was nothing there. I glanced back at his rumpled coat, hanging from Henry’s hand. “If I go over there and pull a .32 automatic from your coat pocket, and it makes a ballistic match with the gun that shot Wes Rogers, I can start proving a lot.”

I reached into the pocket of my jacket and lay the Christmas ornament on the table, face up. I slowly pushed it toward Joe, where the visible part of the man’s face in the photograph matched the man in front of me. “Never mind all the others . . . he was your son, Joe. How could you do that to your child?”

The old sheriff cocked the revolver.

I could see the lanyard ring at the base of the pistol’s butt, the loop that used to attach Lucian’s old service revolver to his belt in the style of the cavalry riders so that they wouldn’t lose their sidearms while mounted. Like Lucian, this morning it was untethered, out there in the wind where bad things could and would happen. “Lucian, you know what it is Joe here was getting ready to tell you. Whether it was as a bartering chip or leverage, you can’t do what you were planning to do because you’re not alone in this anymore.” He blinked, and I could see the welling in his eyes as Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians took the Christmas train home amid four-part harmony.

I saw his trigger finger tighten, and the legendary grip squeeze the wooden handle like a lifeline. The best I could hope for was to knock it away with my own gun, flip the table, or throw myself sideways into him. In the split second I was thinking this, Lucian swung the revolver around and emptied it with five thundering reports into the shuddering and now forever silent jukebox. He tossed the empty .38 back onto the table where it clattered and spun with its barrel pointed at an absolutely immobile Joe Lesky. Lucian’s voice was low and weak in the silence. “Jesus H. Christ . . . I always hated that damn thing.”

EPILOGUE

The sounds the piano made were soft and just a little melancholy, with a poetic lyricism that matched the surroundings. Henry was planted behind the bar; Bill McDermott was dancing with Lana Baroja; Saizarbitoria was dancing with his wife, Marie; and Cady was dancing with our newest Powder Junction deputy, Double Tough. Dog was curled up by the piano; he had already called it a night, the shaved portion of his middle and the bandages on his head and abdomen making him look like a stuffed animal.

I made the musical bridge and cut in with an improvisational riff that paused the dancers but held my attention for a while longer. My fingers felt stiff, but I was loosening up. My eye patch was gone, and there was no serious damage to the cornea; my vision was a little blurred on the right, but Vic was to my left. I kept sneaking glances at her, still a little startled by her civilian clothes. She was wearing a short black dress and black cowboy boots with embroidered red roses and blue leaves. With the turquoise and silver chandelier earrings, it was western, with just a touch of gypsy insouciance thrown in for good measure.

There was brief applause as I reached for my beer and nodded in acknowledgment toward the dance floor alongside the pool table. I shifted my weight and leaned against the wall, looking over at Henry and signaling the jukebox. I had only played a half dozen songs, but my fingers hurt, and I needed a little relief.

Vic took a sip of her dirty martini and shrugged as the wind continued to batter the outside of the bar. Another storm had come in from the Arctic Circle and had dropped about eight inches of snow. The Ferg had volunteered for duty, but so far there hadn’t been any phone calls; it was the kind of holiday we liked, where the weather was so bad that the populace stayed in, including Ruby and Isaac, who had elected to stay home to avoid the amateurs who might have decided to drive.

“How’s your leg?”

“Still not up to dancing.”

“Nobody asked.” She glanced over her shoulder at my daughter. “Cady flying out tomorrow?”

“If the weather’s decent.”

“Air Omar?”

I nodded and took the opportunity to watch her for a moment, like I always did when she wasn’t aware. “You got two new deputies for Christmas.” She stayed turned to the dance floor, watching Saizarbitoria, and tipped the delicate stem of her glass for another sip. “He’s a dark horse, but he’s sharp and he works hard.”

I took another sip of my beer. “The wife is nice.”

“Whatever.”

I smiled behind her back. “What about the hillbilly?”

Her head pivoted a little as she watched Double Tough, who was still dancing with Cady. “He’s durable.”

“That he is.”

She turned back around. “All right, so Joe got his name from the priest in Casper. Where did Leo get his?”

“Foster parents in Fremont County.”

She nodded. “Joe brought Leo over for the job after he laid the groundwork by keeping Charlie Nurburn alive?”

“Basically continuing Lucian’s efforts in hopes of getting a percentage for himself, but who knows? It looks like he was ready to kill half of Absaroka County to get what he thought he deserved.”

“What about Anna Walks Over Ice?”

“We found an unfinished letter at her house, in Crow.” I glanced toward Henry. “She outlined the whole situation; she had seen Joe add something to Mari Baroja’s Metamucil that night.” I took another sip of my beer. “I guess she just wasn’t sure enough, at the time, to accuse him, and then with Leo it was too late.”

She stared at the piano and tentatively reached out for a key. “Very understanding of you.”

I looked at my friend with the bandaged face; he was still mixing drinks behind the bar. “I didn’t have to kill him.”

In the dim glow of the stained glass of the billiard’s light and the Rainier beer advertisements, my chief deputy looked like some courtly renaissance woman, the kind that would poison your wine. “It’s Tuesday night. He’s probably got the board out.”

I waited for more, but there wasn’t any. She just sat there, with her finger resting beside the keys, her eyes far away. She had looked like this at the hospital the night she handed me Lucian’s love letters from Mari. She waited there for a moment, then got up and straightened her skirt in an action that seemed both symmetric and disquieting. “Where are you going?”

She didn’t turn when she said it but downed the martini in one gulp. “Dancing.”

As I watched her approach the stilled dancers to choose a victim, Lana came over and occupied the bench seat next to me. “I’m leaving.”

“I seem to be having that effect on people.”

She glanced back at the Yellowstone County coroner. “Bill says he’ll give me a ride back into town.”

“You should take advantage.” She placed a hand on mine and ducked her head to catch my eye. She kept looking at me with those familiar dark eyes, so I diverted her thoughts. “What are you going to do with all your money?”

She didn’t pause. “Hire someone to work at the bakery.” She smiled the jaunty smile that always seemed to put the world off kilter. “What would you do if you had a million dollars?”

“I don’t have a million dollars.”

She tipped my hat back as she rose and planted a gentle kiss on my bared forehead. “You never know.” I watched with great unease as she turned to Bill, who assisted her in putting on her coat, the same purple, quilted teepee as before. “I left you something on the bar. Merry Christmas.” The teepee swirled out with the coroner, and they were gone through the glass door with a flurry of flakes blowing in to take their place.

I drained the last of my beer and gingerly got up, keeping the weight off my left leg and trying to negotiate between the bench and the piano with the blurred vision of my right eye. I decided that the next time, I would make a concentrated effort to get wounded all on one side; it might make post-adventure life a little easier. I limped my way across the makeshift dance floor as Dog followed and threaded my way between Saizarbitoria and Marie and Double Tough and Vic, who ignored me as I passed.

Henry and Cady were congregated at the bar when I finally got there. We all studied the white box, tied with twine and resting on the worn surface of the counter. Cady laid her forearms along the bar and rested her chin on them, eye to eye with the box, her butt stuck out and her ankles crossed. She was wearing those fancy jeans with the sequins outlining the pockets. “Whatever happened to Charlie Nurburn?”

“Oh, like a bad penny, he’ll probably turn up.”

The lawyer reached down to pet Dog, careful to avoid the patched-up parts. “What do you think happened to him?”

I shrugged. “Who knows if the bones Leo found belonged to Charlie or not?”

“You don’t seem overly concerned.”

I glanced at her. “This case has had enough skeletons in the closet; I don’t think I need to go looking for any more.”

Cady’s smile was brief. “What about Mari Baroja?”

I waited a moment, and then said what I was trying to hold back. “She’s still dead.” They all looked at me. “Mari Baroja is dead, Anna Walks Over Ice is dead, Wes Rogers is dead, and Leo Gaskell is dead . . . All for nothing.”

Henry wasn’t going to let it rest. “What does Lucian have to say in this?”

“He doesn’t have anything to say in this, the law is the law and whatever DCI finds, they find. Whatever Charlie Nurburn was ended with Mari Baroja. She stopped him from hurting her children, and in a way she stopped him from hurting her children’s children. Wherever she is, she can take a certain amount of satisfaction in that.” Except for the jukebox, it was quiet in the bar. “I’m sorry. I’m tired, and I should take Dog and go home.”

Cady protested. “Daddy, it’s not even midnight.”

“I’m sorry, Sweet Pea. I’m just worn out.”

She straightened the collar of my new Christmas corduroy shirt. “Who am I gonna kiss?”

I glanced around the room at all the possibilities. “I bet you find somebody.”

The Bear changed the subject, giving me an out. “We’re supposed to visit Wes’s family on Thursday?”

“Yep.” I pulled on my heavy sheepskin coat from the adjacent bar stool and put on my hat.

He stuck out his hand. “Happy New Year, Walt.” I took the hand, and he pulled me in for a hug, slapping me on the back with his other. “It has to be better than this one.”

When I turned to Cady, she reached up and clasped her hands behind my neck. “What if I don’t let you go?” I slowly stood up straight and felt her feet leave the floor as she trailed up after me, a ritual we had practiced since she could stand, even though I didn’t lift her anywhere near as high as I used to. She frowned the frown that always got her what she wanted but let me go. “I’ll be home, but it might be late. I love you.”

I scooped the small box off the bar and slowly made for the door, Dog in tow. I paused by the dancers and reminded Saizarbitoria that he was on duty tomorrow. He smiled, being the last man on the totem pole of Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department had its disadvantages. I reminded Double Tough to come in on Thursday to get measured for a uniform, and he said he would.

I started to step around Vic but, when I did, she turned and slipped my left hand into a reverse wristlock that suddenly brought my head down to her level. I could smell the alcohol on her breath. The big, tarnished gold eyes blinked as she reached out and nibbled my lower lip, gently sliding into a long, slow vacuum.

She kissed like she was pulling venom.

Her hand glided down the back of my neck, the nails leaving scorched earth as they went. She pulled her face back, and I wasn’t sure if I could stand. She studied me for the effect, lessening the pressure on my left hand as I rose away from her, willing my injured leg to stop trembling. I stood there for a moment and didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. I remembered to breathe, and the moment passed when she turned to Double Tough, pulling him back to the center of the dance floor, her eyes away from me.

* * *

It was dismal outside, with the wind blowing the snow in all directions. I closed my right eye, since it was still a little tender, and opened the door for Dog. I gently lifted him onto the new seat cover, a Christmas gift from Cady, and he traversed to the passenger side, sitting and looking out the windshield in anticipation. I crawled in after him and fired up the Bullet; the small bakery box sat between us.

I adjusted the defroster on the truck to high, backed away from the Red Pony, and turned the wheel, slowly making my way from the border of the Rez toward the quiet of my little cabin.

When we got inside, Dog stopped by the door and looked at me. I looked back at him, then unbuttoned my coat and stood in the middle of the room. “What?” He didn’t say anything back, just sat by the door and waited. “What? We’re not going anywhere, that’s it for the night.”

Red Road Contracting had finished installing my wood-burning stove for Christmas and had left a card on the flat black surface that read, MERRY CHRISTMAS, NO CHARGE.

Dog still waited by the door.

I shrugged and walked toward the bedroom. I was trying to convince Dog of the strength of my convictions. It was Cady’s room for the moment, and the amount of clothing splayed across the floor gave little hope to our meeting Omar at the appointed time tomorrow morning.

The little red light on the answering machine blinked 2 at me; I hit the button. “Hey good-lookin’, I was just hoping I’d catch you home alone, but I guess you’re out playing in the snow. I understand the Wyoming Attorney General has requested your appearance here in Cheyenne.” It was silent for a moment, long enough for me to see dash light reflecting golden curls and a ferocious and devouring set of blues. “I read about you in the papers again. I think I’ll start a scrap-book.”

I stood there, punching my hat back on my head with a forefinger, and looked at the machine. “Anyway, it looks like I’m moving back to Virginia. Louis and I are going to give it another go.” Silence again. “Well, I hope you have a Happy New Year.” I looked at the machine, expecting there to be more, but there wasn’t. Those echoes were still reverberating through me, but I had made the smallest investment and had gotten the smallest return.

The next message played for only a moment with a barely discernable sound. I bit my lip and punched the replay button. “Hey good-lookin’ . . .” I forwarded to the next message and listened more carefully, barely hearing the word. “Horseshit.”

* * *

Dog was waiting for me when I opened the door and walked gingerly out to the truck. I helped him up, and he climbed over the little white box on the seat and happily sat on the other side of the cab. I ducked in out of the wind, straightened my hat as I started the truck again, and glanced at the smiling dog. “You don’t have to look so satisfied.”

There wasn’t much parking at the Durant Home for Assisted Living, and it looked like there was a subdued celebration going on in the main lobby. I wasn’t really looking forward to running the gauntlet. The end doors were locked this late at night, so I walked toward the small stand of pines outside Room 32.

There was a light on, and the hide lampshade cast a warm glow. I stepped off the plowed parking lot and into the midshin depth of the snow, Dog staying in my tracks. As I got nearer, I could see more clearly.

He was seated in his usual chair, his head resting a little forward with his hands on his knees, both real and artificial. The chess set lay before him on the folding table, white toward me as it always was, along with a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve, which was adorned with a green ribbon.

The door opened smoothly with a barely perceptible sound. I shook my head and stepped in, allowing Dog to go over to the sofa as I closed the door behind me. I stood there for a moment to let the room still again. He must have been awfully tired, because he didn’t move, and the gentle whiffing of his snoring filled the room. I wondered how often he must have slept in the chair and figured it was more times than were good for him. I wondered if he was really asleep, if this was his way of welcoming me back. I wondered about the sad-eyed lieutenant and about how much Lucian knew about the baby who had been born perhaps not so prematurely to Mari Baroja, about the child that Charlie Nurburn had tried so hard to kill, and about the man who was fortunate enough to father a child of his own before a senseless war took from him all that he had left to give.

I reached a hand out and once again began the Queen’s Indian Defense, Petrosian Variation, by advancing my pawn to F4 and moving his knight to F6; I approached chess the way I approached life, way over my head.

I smiled and took a step back; when I looked up, I saw a different set of dark eyes. It wouldn’t have been surprising if they had risen from the old man in front of me, but they stared up from the sofa. Dog’s head was lying on top of a chief ’s blanket that covered her. Lana smiled and started to speak, but there wasn’t any need; she was holding the tattered letters that had been bound together with a thin ribbon, and they told the tale.

The letters from Lucian to Mari; the ones that told Lana how her grandfather had loved her, why her father and brothers were so quick to get Mari married after they had separated her from him, why Charlie Nurburn had done so well for himself at her expense. The old man had finally told it all to the person to whom it mattered the most. The rush of information came running in like a waterfall, filling me with the thought that hatred has a poor shelf life but that hope and love can limp along together forever. The water beneath Lana’s dark eyes ran deep, resonating far into the last century.

I held an extended finger to my mouth and smiled again, as she watched me carefully back from the room to the door and silently pat my leg for Dog to follow. He was reluctant to leave the warmth of Lucian’s room and Lana, but finally deigned to follow me as I picked up the bourbon and slid the double-paned glass shut behind us.

* * *

Dog looked puzzled as I collected a couple of the wood bundles and stacked them on top of the battered cooler that I had put in the corner of the cabin, along with the fifth of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve and a book of matches. I opened the backdoor and walked off the edge of my deck another thirty yards. I sat the cooler down and unwrapped the firewood, stacking the pieces in the snow. I opened the bourbon. I looked back at the open door of the cabin and could see Dog watching me.

I took a swig and looked up at the starless sky. It had finally stopped snowing. I thought about what I was doing, then poured a strong draught of the whiskey onto the logs and lit them with one of the windproof matches. The fire took with a tremendous swoosh, and I stepped back to avoid burning my beard off. I watched it for a while and then headed back to the house. I shut the door behind me and took the bourbon to the bathroom. I sat it on the back of the sink and looked at myself in the mirror, started running the hot water, and dug out the shaving cream and razors that I hadn’t used in quite a while. It took longer than I would have thought, but Dog watched with head resting on his paws as I slowly became myself again.

I studied the reflection and considered if I really was me. I was about to do something that I never would have done before, but then I remembered and a small cold feeling overtook my breath and I took another sip of the twenty-year-old bourbon.

I went out to the truck and collected three items from the center console of the Bullet and a shovel I’d stolen from Henry. This time Dog accompanied me out to the fire, and we watched it for a long time. I sat on the cooler with the three items resting beside me, the flickering orange, yellow, and red reflecting in Dog’s eyes and mine.

The fire died down, and it didn’t take long to dig the hole. I took another swig of the bourbon, then took the three items from the surface of the cooler and stuffed them under my arm. I opened the cooler and pulled out a long bone, probably a femur. I looked at Dog but tossed it back. Dramatic moments call for dramatic bones, and it only took a moment for me to find the skull.

I palmed it in my hand; it seemed smaller than it should have. I studied the skull, trying to see something in its structure that would explain the man’s malevolence, but all I saw was the ghostly reflection of the gold tooth. It is said that the evil men do lives on, and the good is oft interred with their bones; I hoped with all my heart that this was not the case here and that what I was doing was the right thing.

I tossed the skull into the hole and eventually added the other bones until the cooler was empty. I pulled the tiny chrome-plated, pearl-handled .32 from under my arm and threw the empty pistol in as well, and then pulled the manila envelope out, undid the clasp, sat and looked at each of the photographs of the tortured and dead woman, returning them to the envelope as I went. When I was finished, I took the shovel and filled in the hole, making a raised area. When the rains came in the spring, I would tamp the area flat. It was amazing, the things you learned loitering in graveyards.

I sat on the cooler again and opened the small white box. Dog and I sat there, munching ruggelach, and I stared at the humped up earth and thought about how, perhaps, the old sheriff and I weren’t that different after all.

CRAIG

JOHNSON

KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED

PENGUIN BOOKS

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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New York, New York 10014, USA

USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2007

Published in Penguin Books 2008

Copyright © Craig Johnson, 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ISBN 978-1-101-20211-1 (ePub)

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

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

For the Donut, who started it all…

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A writer, like a sheriff, is the embodiment of a group of people and, without their support, both are in a tight spot. I have been blessed with a close order of family, friends, and associates who have made this book possible.

I have the usual posse to thank, and a few new deputies that came along for the ride. Thanks to Gail Hochman for pulling out the jail bars. Kathryn Court, Ali Bothwell Mancini, Clare Ferraro, and Sonya Cheuse at Viking/Penguin for having the horses saddled, Susan Fain, Joel Katz, and Richard Rhoades for the cover fire, and to all the Troiano’s for the spaghetti westerns.

Thanks to Mandy Smoker Broaddus for use of her poetry from her book Another Attempt at Rescue (Hanging Loose Press), and to Marcus Red Thunder and Henry Standing Bear for cutting the telegraph lines. Eric Boss for selling the snake-oil, Neil McMahon, Bill Fitzhugh, and Christopher Moore for baking the cake with the file, Margaret Coel for the Derringer in her garter belt, and to Tony Hillerman for the pardon from the governor.

Thanks to Jim Pauley and the City of Philadelphia Police Department Public Affairs Office, the Trauma Center at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, OperaDelaware and the Grand Opera House of Wilmington, Delaware. Thanks to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and to Judy, my favorite masterpiece.

Philadelphia, where no good deed goes unpunished . . .

—STEVE LOPEZ

The Philadelphia Inquirer

January 15, 1995

1

I didn’t wear my gun. They had said that it was going to be easy and, like the fool I am, I believed them. They said that if things got rough to make sure I showed the pictures, of which there were only twenty-three; I had already shown all of them twice. “‘Long, long ago, there lived a king and queen…’”

I looked around the room for a little backup, but there wasn’t anyone there. They had said that I didn’t have to worry, that they wouldn’t leave me alone, but they had. “‘…who didn’t have any children. One day, the queen was visited by a wise fairy, who told her, “You will have a lovely baby girl.” The king was so overjoyed when he heard the news that he immediately made plans for a great feast. He invited not only his relatives, but also the twelve fairies who lived in the kingdom.’”

“Where’s your gun?”

My thought exactly. “I didn’t think I was going to need it.” They all nodded, but I wasn’t particularly sure they agreed.

“How long have you been a sheriff?”

“Twenty-three years.” It just seemed like a million.

“Do you know Buffalo Bill?”

Maybe it was a million. “No, he was a little before my time.”

“My daddy says you’re a butt hole.”

I looked down at the battered book in my hands. “Okay, maybe we should concentrate on today’s story…”

“He says you used to drive around drunk all the time…”

The instigator in the front row looked like a little angel but had a mouth like a stevedore. He was getting ready to say something else, so I cut him off by holding up Grimm’s Fairy Tales open to the page where the young princess had been enchanted and put to sleep for a hundred years. “Why do you think the fairy visited the queen?” A dark-haired girl with enormous eyes who sat in the third row slowly raised her hand. “You?”

She cocked her head in disgust. “I told you, my name is Anne.”

I nodded mine in contrition. “Right. Anne, why do you think the fairy visited the queen?”

“Because their daughter is going to fall asleep.” She said it slowly, with the hearty contempt even young people have for civil servants who can’t get it right.

“Well, yep, but that happens later on because one of the fairies gets angry, right?” Anne raised her hand again, but I ignored her for a slight redheaded boy in the back. His name was Rusty, and I quietly thanked the powers that be for word association. “Rusty?”

“My dad says that my Uncle Paul is a fairy.”

I’m not sure when it was that my storytelling abilities began to atrophy, but it must have been somewhere between Sesame Street and The Electric Company. I think I used to be pretty good at it, but that was a long time ago. I was going to have to ask my daughter if that really was the case; she was now “The Greatest Legal Mind of Our Time” and a Philadelphia lawyer. When I had spoken to Cady last night, she had still been at the office library in the basement. I felt sorry for her till she told me the basement was on the twenty-eighth floor. My friend Henry Standing Bear said that the law library was where all the lawyers went to sleep at about $250 an hour.

“You are the worstest storyteller we ever had.”

I looked down at another would-be literary critic who had been silent up till now and wondered if maybe I had made a mistake with “Brier Rose.” Cady had loved the story dearly at an earlier age, but the current enrollment appeared to be a little sophisticated for the material.

“My daddy hides his medicine whenever anybody knocks on our door.”

I tried not to concentrate on this child’s name. I propped the book back up on my knee and looked at all of them, the future of Absaroka County, Wyoming.

“He says he doesn’t have a prescription.”

I was supposed to make the drive to Philadelphia tomorrow with Henry. He had received an invitation to lecture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with his Mennonite photograph collection in tow. I thought it would be an opportunity to visit my daughter and meet the lawyer who was the latest of her conquests. The relationship had lasted about four months, a personal record for her, so I decided that it was time I met the prospective son-in-law.

“His medicine makes him fall down.”

Henry was planning on driving Lola. I had tried to talk him into flying, but it had been a while since he had driven across the country and he said he wanted to check things out. The real reason was he wanted to make an entrance with the powder blue 1959 Thunderbird convertible; the Bear was big on entrances.

“He smokes his medicine.”

We were going for only a week, but Cady was very excited about introducing us to Devon Conliffe, who sounded like a character from The Philadelphia Story. I had warned her that lawyers shouldn’t marry other lawyers, that it only led to imbecile paralegals.

“My mommy says the only thing his medicine does is keep him from getting a job.”

Patti with an “i,” my daughter’s secretary, agreed with me about lawyer interbreeding. We had talked about the relationship, and I could just make out a little reservation in Patti’s voice when she mentioned him.

“He’s my third daddy.”

We were supposed to have dinner with the elder Conliffes at their palatial home in Bryn Mawr, an event I was looking forward to like a subcutaneous wound.

“I liked my second daddy best.”

It would be interesting to see their response to the Indian and his faithful sidekick, the sheriff of Absaroka County. They probably wouldn’t open the gate.

“I don’t remember my first daddy.”

I looked up at the kid and reopened the book. “‘Long, long ago, there lived a king and queen who didn’t have any children…’”

* * *

Dorothy Caldwell turned toward the patties on the griddle behind her, lifted the press, and turned them. “What’d you read?”

I pulled Cady’s personal copy from the stool beside me and sat it on the counter. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “Brier Rose”—“Sleeping Beauty” before Hollywood got hold of it.

She gave me a sideways look and then leaned over to glance at the love-worn cover. “Kindergarten?” She shrugged a shoulder as she placed the meat press aside. “Kids have gotten a little jaded since Cady’s generation, Walter.”

I set my glass down. “Well, I don’t have to do it again until after the election.” She slipped the hamburger, lettuce, tomato, and bacon onto a toasted bun and slid the plate toward me. “The usual?”

She nodded at the old joke, sipped at her own tea, and peeked at me over the rim. “I hear Kyle Straub is going to run.”

I nodded and put mayonnaise on my burger, a practice she hated. “Yep, I’ve seen the signs.” The prosecuting attorney had jumped the gun this morning and placed his red-white-and-blue signs in all the strategic spots around town before finding out for sure if I was really going to run again. So far, it had been the strongest motivation that I had had to continue my tenure.

“Prosecuting attorney/sheriff.” She paused for effect. “Kind of gives you an indication as to what his administration would be like.”

I thought about my original plan, to run for sheriff, put in half a term, and then hand the reins over to Vic, allowing her to prove herself for two years before having to face a general election. I chewed a chunk of burger. “You think Vic would make a good sheriff?”

Dorothy slipped a wayward lock behind her ear and looked past me. Her hair was getting longer, and I wondered if she was growing it out. The answer to my question about Vic, like everything else about Dorothy, was definitive. “Why don’t we ask her?”

I fought the urge to turn and look out onto Main Street, where I’m sure a handsome, dark-haired woman was parking a ten-year-old unit in front of the Busy Bee Cafe. Wyoming had never elected a female sheriff and the chances of their electing an Italian from Philadelphia with a mouth like a saltwater crocodile were relatively slim.

“She’s got the Basquo with her.” There was a pause as I continued eating my lunch. “Those two are quite the pair.”

Santiago Saizarbitoria had joined our little contingency three months ago and, with the exception of trying to put out a chimney fire single-handedly on an ice-slicked roof, had proven himself indispensable. I listened as the door opened and closed, the laden April air drifting through the brief opening. They sat on the stools beside me and threw their elbows onto the counter. In identical uniforms and service jackets, they could have been twins, except that the Basquo was bigger, with wrists like bundled cables, and had a goatee, and he didn’t have the tarnished gold eyes that Vic had.

I kept eating as Dorothy pulled two mugs from under the counter, poured them full, and pushed the cream dispenser and the sugar toward the old world pair. They both drank coffee all day. Vic slipped her finger through the handle of her cup. “How was this afternoon’s premiere at Durant Elementary?”

I took another sip of my iced tea. “I don’t think we’ll make the long run.”

She tore open five sugars and dumped them in her mug. “I been here two years. How come they never fucking asked me?”

I set my glass back down. “It’s hard to read nursery rhymes with a tape delay.”

She stirred the coffee into the sugar and spoke into the mug. “That monkey pud Kyle Straub’s got signs up all over town.”

“Yep, I heard.”

Saizarbitoria leaned in and joined the conversation. “Vern Selby was talking very highly about Mr. Straub in the paper yesterday.”

“Yep, I read it.”

All our radios blared for a second. Static. “Unit two, 10-54 at 16, mile marker four.”

We looked at one another. Ruby had made a crusade of using the ten code in the last few weeks, and it was turning out to be a royal pain in the ass for all of us. I was the first one to guess. “Intoxicated driver?”

Vic was next. “Road blocked…”

Saizarbitoria took one last sip of his coffee and slipped off his stool; he knew the chain of command. He clicked the mic on his radio. “Ten fifty-four, roger.” He looked at the two of us and shook his head. “Livestock on the road.”

Vic and I shrugged at each other as she tossed him the keys. She sipped her sugar as he hurried out. “Do let us know.”

* * *

Vic hitched a ride with me. As we walked up the steps of the old Carnegie Library that housed the Absaroka County jail and offices, I could smell her shampoo and the crab apple blossoms. We were about halfway up the steps when she stopped me with a hand on my arm. I turned to look at her as she leaned against the iron railing and slid that same hand up the black-painted steel bar. I waited, but she just looked off toward Clear Creek, where the cottonwoods were already starting to leaf. She glanced back at me, irritated. “You still planning on leaving tomorrow morning?”

I adjusted the book of fairy tales under my arm. “That’s the plan, at least mine.”

She nodded. “I have a favor to ask.”

“Okay.”

She sniffed, and I watched as the wrinkles receded from the sides of her nose like cat whiskers. “My mother wants to have lunch with you and Cady.”

I waited a moment, thinking there must be more. “Okay.”

She continued to look off toward the creek. “Super Cop might be too busy, but my mother is feeling negligent in her attentions toward your daughter.” I watched as the muscles of her jaw flexed like they always did when she mentioned her father.

“Okay.”

“I mean…It’s not a big deal. She just wants to have lunch.”

I nodded again. “Okay.”

“You can go to my Uncle Alphonse’s pizzeria—it’s nothing special.”

I smiled and dipped my head to block her view. “I said okay.”

She looked at me. “It’s a family thing, and like most of the family things concerning my family, it’s fucked up.” She sighed. “I mean…they should have gotten in touch with her a long time before this, but in their usual, fucked-up way…”

“We’ll have lunch.” I watched as she studied her Browning tactical boots. Her dark hair stood up in tufts of dissatisfaction. “I would love to meet any of your family.”

“Uh huh.” Nothing was ever easy with Vic; it was one of her charms. She started up the steps without me. “Just don’t expect too much.”

I shook my head, followed her, and caught the beveled-glass door as it swung back into my face. I gently closed it and walked by the photographs of the five previous Absaroka County sheriffs. I saluted the painting of Andrew Carnegie as I mounted the final steps to the dispatcher’s desk where Ruby sat reading the last series of updates from the Division of Criminal Investigation down in Cheyenne. “What the hell is a 10-54?”

She raised her blue eyes and gazed at me through her salt-with-no-pepper bangs. “Ferg says that he’s 10-6 today if he’s got to work the next week and a half solid, and I’m 10-42 as of five forty-five for my church’s ice-cream social.”

I decided to ignore the flurry of tens. “Did he go up to Tongue River Canyon?” She nodded. The Ferg was my part-time deputy who made a full-time habit of harassing the local aquatic life with his hand-tied flies. He was going to have to take up some of the slack while I was gone, so I didn’t begrudge him a day casting bits of fur and feather upon the waters. “Any Post-its?”

“Two, and that young man who is supposed to come in this afternoon.”

“What young man?”

She shook her head. “The young man from Sheridan who applied for the other deputy position in Powder Junction. He said he’d be here before five.”

I sat on the corner of her desk, looked at the time on her computer, and reached down to pet Dog. “Then he’s got twenty minutes.”

The beast’s head rose, and Ruby examined the scar that a bullet had left near his ear; a tongue the size of a dishwashing rag lapped my hand. “Lucian called to see if you’d forgotten it’s chess night.”

“Damn.” I was going to have to go over to the Durant Home for Assisted Living to see the old sheriff.

“Cady called.”

“She’s changed her mind and doesn’t want us to come after all?”

Ruby wadded up the second Post-it and dispatched it with the first. “Not likely. She says for you to bring along your gun because she wants to take you to her shooting club on Thursday.” We looked at each other for a moment, and then she raised an eyebrow. “Shooting club?”

I scratched the corner of my eye, where the scar tissue had healed. “It’s this thing that Devon Conliffe’s got her involved with.”

She smiled. “Devon Conliffe again?”

“Yep…” I didn’t sound all that thrilled, even to myself.

“This kid’s got you worried.”

She watched me scratch my eye for a moment longer, then reached up and pulled my hand away. I thought about it. “Methinks she doth protest too much.”

Ruby shook her head. “She’s scared you’re not going to like him.” She carefully released my hand. “He’s young, handsome, accomplished, and makes about six times what you do on an annual basis. He has wooed and infatuated the most beautiful, intelligent, and precious woman that you know.” She watched me with a smile. “It’s perfectly reasonable for you to hate him.” She batted her eyelashes. “Ten twenty-four?”

I looked at her for a moment, then trailed off to my office and wondered if anybody would notice if I slipped out the back. I sat at my desk and thought about calling the Bear to see if he didn’t want to get going early. He wouldn’t. I hit the second automatic dial button and listened as the phone rang at Henry’s going concern at the edge of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation—free parking, no minimum.

He snatched it up on the second ring; it was his signature. “It’s another beautiful day at the Red Pony Bar and continual soiree.”

“Can we leave early?”

“No.”

I hung up. There wasn’t any reason to argue; I’d lose. I stared at the old Seth Thomas clock on the wall, thought of my packed bags by the door of my cabin, and sighed.

I punched the first number on my automatic dialing system and listened to the phone ring one thousand nine hundred thirty-six and one quarter miles away, to the place where my heart was on sabbatical.

“Schomberg, Calder, Dallin, and Rhind. Cady Longmire’s office; can I help you?”

Patti with an “i.” “Hi, Patti, you guys are working late.”

“Yo, Sheriff. We’ve got a brief that has to be filed by tomorrow. How’s things out in the Wild West?”

I leaned back in my chair and set my hat on my desk. “Uninteresting.” I threw my feet up, something I rarely did, and almost flipped over backward. I grabbed the edge of the desk to steady myself. “Is ‘The Greatest Legal Mind of Our Time’ available?”

There was a clicking noise and the phone rang half a ring before she picked up. Near as I could figure, Schomberg, Calder, Dallin, and Rhind were getting their collective money’s worth. “Cady Longmire.”

I smiled in spite of myself; she sounded so grown up. “You’re a punk.”

There was silence on the line for a moment, then a slightly plaintive voice. “Have you left yet?”

“No, the Indian isn’t packed.”

Another short silence. “Is he still carrying the photographic find of the century around in hatboxes?”

“Probably. What’s this stuff about bringing my sidearm?”

A quick sigh of exasperation. “I told you about it. Devon and I go to this shooting club over on Spring Garden on Thursday nights.”

I was bored and decided to use up a little time arguing. “Why?”

Another, longer, silence. “It’s something to do, Daddy. Don’t start making judgments.”

“I’m not. I just don’t understand why you and a bunch of lawyers feel compelled to go out and shoot things on Thursday nights.”

“We don’t ‘feel compelled’ and we don’t ‘shoot things.’ We go to a registered firing range, where we take out our secured weapons from the locked trunks of our cars, apply for our assigned ammunition, and shoot paper targets under the careful eye of a licensed instructor. He’s an old fart, an Army guy like you.”

“Marines.”

“Whatever.” She sniffed and got soft again. “I just thought you could meet him. It would be nice.”

“Is this a Devon thing?”

Her voice turned sharp. “Bring your gun or don’t. You’re being impossible, and I have to go.”

I looked at the phone. “I’ll bring it.”

“Whatever.”

The phone went dead in my hand. I put my feet back down, placed the receiver on the cradle, and thought about how I was making friends and influencing people. I thought about closing my door and taking a nap but, when I looked up, a tall, slim young man with sandy hair was looking at me through the doorway. “Sheriff Longmire?”

“Yep.”

“I’m Chuck Frymyer.” I stared at him. “About the job in Powder Junction?”

I motioned for him to sit down and pulled his file from the pile on my desk. Only a month earlier, we couldn’t get two deputies to rub together, but now we’d had over a dozen applications for the job. Frymyer had the most experience, with two years in Sheridan County.

I looked at the young man’s application; he was way over-qualified. I glanced back up at him. “You do realize that this job is our equivalent of the French Foreign Legion?”

“Sir?”

I tossed the file back on my desk. “You’re going to be out in the middle of nowhere. Have you ever been to Powder Junction?”

“I’ve driven through it, on the highway.”

“Under the best of weather conditions, it takes me forty-five minutes to get down there, so I need deputies who can take care of themselves and the southern part of this county.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir.” I looked at him a while longer and figured that, like “Beau” Geste, he must have his own reasons for wanting to go off to the end of the world; it probably had to do with a woman, but maybe that was the romantic in me. With his two years of patrol duty, he’d be a nice addition to Double Tough, the other deputy I had down there. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

I stood up and stuck out a hand. “You may curse me for it later, but you’ve got the job. Get your stuff together and report here on Monday morning, eight o’clock, and we’ll get you sworn in. Sheridan’s uniforms aren’t that much different from ours, but you can wear blue jeans in Absaroka County. Get a badge and a patch set from Ruby at the front desk; we’ll order up the rest. No black hats—we’re the good guys.”

I leaned back in my chair as he smiled. Ruby appeared in the doorway and cleared her throat. “I have some bad news.”

I leaned forward and rested my chin on my fingers, which spread across the surface of my desk. “I’m on my way out.”

“It’s Omar and Myra. They’re shooting at each other again.” I raised my head and looked at her. “It’s a 10-16, technically.” She smiled. “I’m going to my ice-cream social. Have a good time in Philadelphia and give Cady a kiss for me”

And she, too, was gone.

I yelled after her. “Who called it in?”

I heard her stop in the hallway. She came back and picked up my hat, carefully dusting it off and placing it on my head. “Go out there, make sure they don’t kill each other, then go over to the Home for Assisted Living and play chess.” I looked up at her. “I’ll take Dog with me, and if you decide to take him with you, just stop by on your way out of town.”

* * *

I drafted Vic before she could get out of the office and told her it was a chance for us to say goodbye before I left; of course, we could also be shot by the matching set of .308s with which Omar and Myra usually held their domestic disputes.

Omar Rhoades was the big dog of international outfitters; if you wanted to kill anything, anywhere, Omar was your man. He led big-game hunts on all seven continents, but the most dangerous game he had ever faced was his ex-wife, Myra. They had been divorced for about a year now, but Myra had left her belongings at the Rhoades ancestral manse, and it was like a ticking time bomb as to when Myra was going to be back. The home they had built together was on the northern border of our county, about halfway up the mountain; if they were serious about killing each other, then they were already dead.

I banked the next turn and gunned the Bullet into the long straightaway.

Vic unlocked the Remington 12-gauge from the center hump. “The gate’s open.”

It was about a hundred-yard shot to the circular turnaround at the main entrance, and I missed the fountain by less than a foot. We slid to a stop, and I jammed the truck into park and unbuckled my seatbelt. Vic was already up the front steps before I could get out. “Hold up! It’s one thing if Omar wants to shoot us, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be shot by accident.”

I pulled my .45 and looked across the heavy, cherry-paneled door that hung open. Vic jacked a shell into the Wingmaster and looked at me. You could hear music, and I’m pretty sure it was Edith Piaf.

I took a deep breath and, after a second, stepped over the threshold.

Vic’s voice lashed at me from behind. “Well?”

It was dark in the main hall, the gallery windows affording only a flat, yellow light from the dying afternoon. There was no one on the landing and no one in the entryway. “C’mon.” I aimed at the stairway to the left, following the wall with a foot along the baseboard and kicked a broken bottle of Absolut raspberry vodka. There was no liquor on the floor, so the bottle had been empty when it hit. Great.

I looked past the mounted heads that led down the main hall toward the kitchen and passed under the cape mount of a particularly large buffalo. “Omar!”

Omar was a friend, having gone so far as to haul my ass up onto the mountain in a blizzard and fly my daughter, who had been caught in another, from Denver for Christmas, but drunk and full of rage he was capable of accidentally shooting either of us.

Vic moved along the wall next to me. “You want me to check the back?”

“No, we’ll go upstairs; that’s where the music is coming from.” I took another deep breath and peered over the foot of the landing. “Omar?”

The furniture was toppled into the middle of the passage like a makeshift barricade. There were holes in the sideboard and the Chippendale chair, with splintered wood and upholstery stuffing scattered on the oriental runner. I slumped against the wall and looked at my deputy. “Either they’re dead, or they can’t hear us over Edith Piaf.”

I started back up the steps; at least the barricade afforded some defense. At the top railing, I made the turn, thought about the layout of the second floor, and remembered that the master bedroom was at the end of the hallway. It was about forty feet to the door, which was closed, but even at this distance I could see where match-grade loads had traveled through it; ten rounds, maybe, at three thousand feet per second. Since Myra was the one who had been in Paris for the better part of the last year and since the music was French, I assumed it was she who was in the bedroom.

I was looking at the door when I ran my leg into the edge of the sideboard, causing the mirror to flip on its pivot and crash to the floor. Even with Piaf, it was a loud noise. I looked at the shards of mirror scattered across the expensive Turkish rug and thought about seven years of bad luck. Edith took a breath, and I made out the distinctive sound of a modular bolt action slamming home.

I dove behind the barricade and flattened myself against the floor as the first round splintered through the wood of the upturned edge of the sideboard. Less than two seconds later, the next round caromed off the door facing and dug into the floor just short of my outstretched right hand. I was attempting to scramble toward the stairway when Vic leaned out from the railing and snapped off two 12-gauge rounds into the ceiling, the salvo allowing me a rather ignoble retreat. I ran into Vic, and we both fell down the remaining steps.

I was lucky enough to have landed on the bottom; she was sprawled across my chest. We looked at each other, and she grinned. “That was close.” We stayed like that for a moment, then she rolled off me and I slid against the wall. We were sitting there on the landing a full ten seconds before we saw Omar. He was standing in the foyer and was eating a ham and cheese sandwich and drinking a bottle of beer.

“What the hell?” He lowered the longneck bottle and cocked his head. “What’re you guys doing? You could get killed up there.” He started up the steps, and I noticed he had a .44 hunting sidearm in a holster at his leg. “I brought you guys a beer.” We continued to look at him. “If you want a sandwich, the stuff’s still out.” He took another sip, and I thought about throwing him over the railing. He motioned for Vic to take the bottles, which she did after shuttling the shotgun under her arm.

“What’s the story?”

He rolled his eyes and pushed his 50X silver-belly hat back from his forehead, the long curls of gold reaching to the collar of his white dress shirt. “She started drinking this morning, after we had a little talk.” He took another bite of his sandwich—I have to admit, it was looking pretty good. “She said she had traded me in on two twenty-year-olds, and I told her she wasn’t wired for 220. The conversation kind of deteriorated from there.” He finished off the beer and threw the bottle so that it shattered against the hand-patterned drywall. He put his hand to the side of his mouth to direct the volume: “Bitch!”

Two more .308s slammed through the door above. Vic and I simultaneously ducked as the rounds sped harmlessly down the empty hallway above us.

Omar took both of the beers from Vic, opened them on his belt buckle, handed her one back, and took a swig from the other as the cap fell to the carpeted landing and rolled down the stairs. “You didn’t, by chance, happen to count how many holes were in the door?” He continued to look after the bottle cap. “There’s only one box of shells for that thing, sixteen in a box…”

I knew that there was an abundance of weapons in the Rhoades household. “What about all the other guns in the safe?”

“No ammunition. I moved it all downstairs.”

They both took sips and looked at me. “Twelve.” I nodded back to the landing. “And two more makes fourteen.”

Omar nodded. “She’s got two left.” We all nodded, as he casually drew the big .44 from his holster, aimed it straight up, and fired two shots; the long-barreled Smith and Wesson bucked in his hand. A few pieces of the entryway, elk horn chandelier, and plaster ceiling fell down on us. “Cunt!” The .308 thundered in response, but this time only once. Omar took another swallow. “Wisin’ up, conserving ammo.”

I looked at Vic, who looked at Omar. “Any chance of talking to her?”

Omar laughed, and I looked at him. “Is there a phone in the bedroom?”

“Yeah.” We traipsed down to the entryway table where an old-fashioned Belgian dial phone sat. Omar picked up the receiver, dialed the number for the bedroom, and handed the phone to me. “She’s not going to talk to me.”

The phone rang three times before Myra answered. “Bastard!”

“Myra, it’s Walter…” She slammed the receiver down with an ear-shattering crack. I asked Omar to dial the number again. She didn’t answer this time, but the thunderous report of the .308 and the brief squall and whine of the line informed us that Myra had shot the bedroom phone.

I hung up and looked at the two of them. Vic looked back at the landing. “She’s out?”

Omar agreed. “Yeah.”

I wasn’t convinced. “How drunk is she?”

“Pretty damn, but she hasn’t missed the door yet.”

* * *

I crossed the landing, staying to the right, where I knew I could dive into the guest bedroom if she had ammunition left after all. The problem was that the closed door seemed a very dangerous twenty feet away. Credit the carpenters that built the Rhoades mansion—the floor didn’t creak as I carefully made my way around the barricade.

I had holstered my .45; I had no intention of shooting Myra.

With the volume of the music, it was impossible to hear any movement in the bedroom. As Edith Piaf continued singing, I looked at what the 150-grain softpoints had done to three inches of solid wood and felt that familiar weightlessness in the trunk of my body.

I counted the holes in the door again, but the damage caused by the large-caliber rifle made it difficult to be sure how many shots had really been fired. I wasn’t betting the farm. It did look as if the shot closest to the knob had taken most of the mechanism with it, and the door itself stood ajar about a quarter of an inch, so I opted for nudging the base of it with my boot; it opened four inches. I waited, but nothing happened. I nudged further, gently sweeping it back about halfway before my leverage gave out.

I took a deep breath to clear my head and stepped through the doorway into the outstretched barrel of the big .308. She had been waiting, but my left arm was still to my right so, with a sweeping gesture, I carried the barrel down and away from me in a backhanded pull that exploded a round into the floor. The sound in the room was just short of deafening.

I was going to kill Omar.

I made a grab for the front stock but missed as she stepped back, and the seemingly endless length of the bolt action swung up.

I had forgotten how good-looking Myra was, and the yearlong sabbatical in France with close to forty-eight million dollars had done her no harm. She had long, blond hair, the kind you see on the covers of magazines, and perfectly tanned skin that I’m sure had been kissed by the French Riviera. She was wearing a pink mohair cowl-neck sweater that barely reached the top of her thighs, and that was all. She was tall and lean, with strong, capable hands. The honking diamond that Omar had married her with was still on the left hand that pointed the rifle at my face. Above the scope was the palest blue eye, and as my lungs froze, the barrel dipped a little, and the sweater-matching pink lips smiled as slowly as glacial encroachment. I listened to Piaf singing “Le Chevalier de Paris” or “Mon Legionnaire,” I wasn’t sure which, and thought about how this wasn’t the worst way to go.

The powder blue blinked, and I settled on “Le Chevalier de Paris” as the little bird trilled and softly breathed out her lovingly aching words.

Myra sagged a little, almost as if someone had punched her, and tossed the rifle aside. She stepped forward, her arms outstretched around my neck as the sharp fragrance of raspberry vodka scoured the inside of my nose and her sweater bottom rose higher. “Walter…”

* * *

“Good thing she likes ya.” He brought his queen out. It was the second game, and my plans for an early evening had gone the way of my three pawns, two rooks, and a knight. I went with the other knight and felt a shadow of impending doom as his bishop slithered along diagonally. The stem of his pipe swung around and pointed at me like the barrel of a gun, the second of the evening. “You get ’er outta the house?” The pipe returned to his mouth.

I leaned back in the horsehide wingback chair and placed my hat on my knee. The old sheriff wasn’t ready to end the evening and skimmed the other bishop across the board for a completely different attack on my king. “She’s at the End of the Trail Motel over in Sheridan; flies out tomorrow.”

It was quiet in the room as the old sheriff looked at me. Lucian’s mahogany eyes flickered in the half-light of the kitchenette behind us. He shook his head. “Well, ya know how my marriage experience ended.”

I did, and we sat there in silence for a while before I admitted a prejudice. “I hate the domestic stuff.”

He nodded and watched me. “Like the third man in a hockey fight, ya get the blame and get the shit kicked out of you for yer troubles.” He waited as I made another inane move. “I hear Kyle Straub’s got signs up all over town.”

I took a sip and crunched one of the cubes. “I heard that too.”

“You gonna stand?”

“I don’t think I’ve got any choice if I want to get Vic in.”

He shrugged. “I’d vote for her, but I’ve got the weakness.” Lucian was referring to his habit of addressing Vic’s chest as if it had an identity of its own. “The rest of Absaroka County is another question. Now, you can make sure she’s the next sheriff, but it’s gonna cost you a year or two of your life.” I made a face. “But then, I didn’t know yer life in office was so damn bad.” His gaze dropped back to the board. “Check.”

I looked at the assembly of courtly pieces and placed a finger on my king, casually toppling him over to premature death. “Yep, well…no act of kindness goes unpunished.”

2

It took five days to get the three of us to Philadelphia. He didn’t let me drive. He drove only during daylight hours, and he went fifty-five the whole way. I read the AAA books as we drove across the country, even though I had an inkling that the Cheyenne Nation had not appreciated my oratory since Iowa, and I decided that the majority of the United States consists of gently rolling hills with light industry. I was still reading as we loped across the Schuylkill Expressway with the top down, eased off the 15th Street exit, took a left on Race and a stately right on Broad. “‘It was a gentleman’s agreement in 1894 that no skyscraper built would be taller than Penn’s hat, but in 1986 all bets had been called off, and now the majority of the fifth largest city in the country looks down on Billy Penn and City Hall.’”

Henry carefully parked the big convertible in front of a high-Victorian gothic building and cut the engine. “You can stop reading now. We have arrived.”

“I’ve still got the Philadelphia section to…” He gave me a dirty look. We figured we had best check in at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, since they were expecting the Bear a day earlier. I unclipped my seat belt, tossed the guide into the cavernous backseat, and scratched behind Dog’s ear. “I hope you’re not in trouble.”

His expression didn’t change as he pulled the handle and swung the four-foot door onto greater Broad Street, causing a taxi to swerve and blare its horn. He stepped out of Lola and stood, stretching his back and flipping his ponytail over his shoulder. He pulled a half-beaded, fully fringed leather jacket from behind the seat and slipped it on, instantly going native. “I am never in trouble.”

I watched as the cars continued to swerve around him. “Thinking you’re not in trouble and not being in trouble are two different things.”

His face remained immobile as he shut the door and walked back against the traffic. “No, they are not.”

Dog immediately jumped into the driver’s seat, another gentleman’s agreement broken, and we both watched as the big Indian casually crossed the sidewalk past the federal-style lampposts, mounted the steps, and disappeared behind the dark oak doors. People who were walking by stared at Henry, then at Lola, Dog, and me. I waved, but they didn’t wave back; so much for the City of Brotherly Love.

I looked south, then west to Market, and then up thirty-two imaginary floors to where the next-in-from-the-corner window of a particularly dark, glass-clad building would be if not for the building in front of it. I had asked Cady why she hadn’t gotten the corner office, to which she had replied, “I will.”

I glanced back to the courthouse clock: 6:20. She’d still be at work; she never got home until at least eight. I looked around for Henry’s cell phone, finally locating it at the end of the power cord under Dog’s appropriated seat. I wasn’t very good with the things, but I pushed one of the little buttons that had a tiny phone image on it, was rewarded with a chirp and an illuminated display of the Bighorn Mountains, and was immediately homesick. I got over it, and selected CONTACTS, working my way through about twenty women’s names just to get to the Cs. I scrolled down to CADY/WORK and pushed the phone button again. It rang only once. “Hello, Bear, are you finally here?”

Evidently, I was in trouble. “If you could look out your window, up Broad Street, you would see a powder blue convertible with a seasoned, yet ruggedly handsome, sheriff and his trusty companion, Dog.”

There was a pause. “You brought the dog?”

Evidently, I was in a lot of trouble. “Is that a problem?”

Another pause, this one no shorter than the last. “Devon’s allergic to dogs.”

I looked over at my buddy, who looked back at me with his big, brown eyes. “You have hurt Dog’s feelings.”

“Daddy…”

I reached over and scratched under his chin, which was his favorite spot. “Well, I can see if Henry can take him.” There was even another pause, and I started getting a little miffed. “We wouldn’t want to inconvenience Devon…”

“Dad.”

It was a short word, but it had a lot behind it.

I watched as an elegant woman of about thirty rushed across the sidewalk and quickly made her way up the stairs, her charcoal trench coat billowing after her. She wore heels and had very nice legs. A set of keys hung from a lanyard in her hand along with a collection of IDs. Probably something to do with Henry.

I was still looking after her when a black, basket-weave Sam Browne belt with a Glock 19 blocked my view. I looked up at a young, blonde policewoman with a name tag that read OFFICER SHARPE, and spoke into the phone. “Let me call you back.”

“Dad? Wait a…”

I pushed the red button, and the tiny phone chirped again. Dog growled, and I hushed him with a quick glance. I tipped my head back to look at myself in the cop’s sunglasses; she gestured with her pen, which was already out.

“He didn’t drive the whole way, did he?”

I tossed the cell phone onto the center console and smiled. “No, we switched off in Cleveland.”

She didn’t smile back. “Ya need’a move the vehicle.”

I looked over the steering column at the empty switch. I had never seen Henry Standing Bear take the keys out of anything in thirty years. I glanced back up. “I don’t have the keys.”

“That’s okay, I’ll get it moved for ya.” She snapped the button on her two-way and held it toward her mouth. “Unit 43, 10-92 at the corner of Cherry and Broad.” She paused. “Roger that, 10-51. I need a hook.”

I thought of my luggage, of Henry’s, and of the Northern Cheyenne photographic find of the century that was in three hatboxes in the trunk. “Patrolman Sharpe, I think my friend just ran inside to find out where we could unload some things.”

She smiled for the first time, maybe because I noticed her name and rank, or not. “That’s okay, we let’ya get ya stuff out, before we take the car. I’ll even let’ya keep the dog.” She was talking into the mic again. “Long as ya got a leash for him.”

I thought about all the things Dog didn’t have, including a leash, as the cell phone began ringing. “Can’t you just write a ticket?”

She pulled out her docket and flipped it open. “I’m gonna do that, too.”

I picked up the phone and read Cady’s work number. “Make it an expensive one, will you?”

I pushed the talk button again. “Hello?”

“Did you just hang up on me?!”

I was distracted by a movement to the officer’s side; the woman I had seen disappear up the stairs was back. “Hi, Kathy.”

Officer Sharpe lowered her pen as she half-turned. “Michelle?”

I looked up at the window on Market, and I swear I could feel Cady looking down on me. “I didn’t hang up on you…”

The woman indicated the car in which I was sitting. “This is one of ours.”

The officer sighed. “Is it movin’ soon?”

The voice on the cell phone was insistent. “Are you still there?”

I tried to speak quietly. “I’ve got a little situation here.”

Michelle nodded and stepped back to trail an arm toward Henry, who was now standing at her side. “This is Henry Standing Bear. He’s here in conjunction with the Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian to…”

“Look, Dad, I’ve got to work late tonight so you’re on your own. I probably won’t make it home till after ten. All right.”

It wasn’t a question. “All right.”

“You remember where I told you I hide the key?”

“Yep.”

“You and the Bear can find the place?”

I nodded at the phone, like I always do when I’m trying to get it to like me. “I think so.”

“See if Henry can take the dog, please? Devon is deathly allergic.” I stared at the receiver for a while. “Dad?” It was quiet on the phone. “It’s been a long day, and it looks like it’s going to get longer.”

I nodded some more. “Anything I can do, like bring you dinner?”

“No, Patti went out already. Dad…” The irritation was returning to her voice. “That Moretti woman called twice to set up lunch with us. I spoke with her earlier today, when I thought you were going to be here, and she wanted to stop by tonight.” The irritation was now back in full. “Do you know why this has suddenly become so important to this woman? I mean…I’ve been here for a while.”

I remembered the conversation on the jail steps. “Vic said something about how her mother was feeling guilty about not getting in touch with you.”

“Well…If you would, her number is on the notepad by the phone at my place. Can you call and set something up with her for some other time? Tonight just isn’t good.”

“I’m getting that.” The longest silence since I hadn’t hung up on her.

* * *

By the time I’d closed the phone and rejoined the outside world, Dog had jumped into the back, Henry was fastening his seat belt, and the women were gone. He watched my face. “Trouble?”

“Always.” I studied the windshield. “Where we headed?”

He watched me for a moment longer and then slipped the big bird into gear. “I can drop you off, then come back here and unload the stuff.”

“You wanna get something to eat?”

He cleared his throat very quietly. “I think I have a date.”

I had to smile and shake my head. “Already?”

His turn to look out the windshield. “The corner of Quarry and Bread, over in Old City?”

I thought about how there were more than nine times as many people in Philadelphia than there were in the entire state of Wyoming and how it seemed that none of them wanted to have dinner with me. We circled around City Hall and headed east on Market. I wanted to reconnoiter a little before being left on foot; I had never been to Philadelphia before and was planning on spending the next day as a tourist, so we took a brief detour around Independence Square, taking in Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell Center and Pavilion. There were more trees on this side of town, and I was comforted by the park rangers in their dark green uniforms and Smokey-the-Bear lids. At least I wouldn’t be the only one in town wearing a cowboy hat. “Where have they got you staying?”

He shrugged, checked the rearview mirror, and took a right on Race, between the National Constitution Center and the Mint. I could see why Cady had chosen this part of town, with its narrow, tree-lined streets, its access to the Delaware River, and the overarching view of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. It felt like a neighborhood. I guess it had always been one; the AAA book said that Old Ben was buried here, at Christ Church.

A year ago, when Cady had bought her building with the trust money bequeathed to her by her maternal grandmother, Old City had again been an up and coming area. As I looked around at the boutiques, coffee shops, and trendy bars, it looked like Old City had arrived. Henry slowed the convertible and waited for traffic to move so that we could turn at Bread Street and Paddy O’Neil’s Tavern, a little Irish bar on the corner that Cady had told me about. She went almost every Saturday night to hear the live music and stayed until the musicians were subdued by the local Yuengling beer. Cady always brought me a six-pack of the longnecks in her carry-on.

I looked at the blue and gold lights of Ben’s bridge shooting into the darkness, the suspension cables only half-lit in the fading umber of twilight. The stacked stone buttresses looked like castled pavilions along the Delaware River, with the arch lights illuminating the stone with a yellowish-green tint. I could hear the clatter of the light rail banging along on the tracks below the bridge’s walking paths. Cady didn’t have a car and generally walked the thirty-two blocks back and forth to work. I wondered if she ever had the time to see this picture-postcard view of her neighborhood. I worried about her walking home at night, but I worried about her brushing her teeth and breathing. Like most parents, I just worried.

“You can drink your dinner.”

It sounded appealing; they probably had food, and it was within easy crawling distance of home. I glanced in the windows of the bar as we passed. It was a Thursday night, which meant I wouldn’t be assaulted by live music or a crowd; I’d just pay for the privilege of my own company.

I had seen pictures of the little tannery building she had bought, and there it was, a strangely squat, one-and-a-half-story commercial-looking structure with a forged-iron atrium. The large carriage opening was still there along the street, but there was also a side entrance with a covered entryway. The Bear eased the car to a stop along the curb. The only light was on the corner about fifty feet and another building down. We sat there for a moment, and I broached the subject of Dog. “If it’s going to be too big of a pain in the ass, just say so.”

“It is going to be too big of a pain in the ass.”

I nodded, and we got out and retrieved my bags from the trunk. I wheeled everything across the cobblestones to the door. “Breakfast?”

“How about lunch?” I nodded and shook my head as he climbed in and started the T-bird. Leave it to Henry to have already arranged a tryst.

“Dog.” The big brute had been waiting for the word and lithely slipped over the side of the car. He joined me on the sidewalk as we watched the twin-turbine’s brake lights disappear down the cobblestone street.

I scratched his bulky head, and he looked up at me. “Piss on the bunch of ’em, huh?” He wagged in response: two orphans in a town without pity.

* * *

The key didn’t work.

I tried it the way she said; I jiggled it and struggled to get it to turn in the other direction, but no go. I walked back to the carriage entrance and tried moving these doors, but they didn’t budge. I thought about abandoning my bags and heading for O’Neil’s, but I wasn’t sure how they’d receive Dog, and we were in it together. There was a narrow walkway of broken flagstone and weeds to my right, so I decided to see what the back of the building held in way of ingress. I stuffed my suitcases in the entryway in hopes that they would still be there when I got back, picked up the sidearm case, patted my leg for Dog to follow, and turned sideways for the two-step between the brick walls. The brim of my hat proved to be cumbersome, so I removed it and held it in the hand with the small locked case. The wall behind me was solid, but Cady’s building had windows set high, about six feet up, and I could see the suspended walkways that made up the mezzanine. Dog was looking as well and cocking his head at what might have been singing.

I was almost to the end of the path when I fully heard it. It was “La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto, sotto voce and melodic without trying, but there was no instrumental accompaniment. I couldn’t help but wonder where you would get such a recording.

I thought the sound might be coming from the building behind me but, when I got to the end and a chain-link fence, I realized it was coming from Cady’s overgrown terrace. If Verdi had been with me, he would have folded his arms across the top of the gate, placed his chin on his arms, and gazed at what I’m sure he would have perceived as the Gilda of his dreams.

At the center of the patio, in the perfect light of dusk, I could make out a fine-featured, dark-haired woman seated at a round bistro table, her legs stretched out before her and crossed at the ankles, with one elbow resting on the table’s pockmarked surface. She wore black Capri pants and a stylish white blouse open at the throat; one arm was relaxed over the iron chair and the other was holding a short-stemmed wine glass, to which she sang like a child.

Woman is fickle, indeed. It’s a tenor part for the Duke, but she sang it effortlessly with a husky soprano that would have had Verdi rethinking his libretto, if not his libido. She paused at one of the breaks in the music and, with perfect timing, raised the wine glass to her lips. Even from this distance, I could see the hint of ginger in her almond-shaped eyes.

I slipped my hat back on for identification purposes and softly applauded as her face turned toward me. “Brava! Bellissima, bella…bella!”

She saluted ever so slightly with her glass and downed the wine in one smooth swig like a longshoreman. “Howdy, Sheriff.”

* * *

She opened the door without any problem. I dropped my bags, and we reoccupied the small terrace. Lena Moretti had raided the pantries of a dozen specialty shops in the Italian Market, and we were currently munching on small slices of stiff bread, prosciutto, mozzarella, and basil, all of which had been smothered in olive oil, first-pressed. We were about to finish the bottle of Chianti Classico, and she still wouldn’t admit she could sing.

“I heard you.”

She pulled her fingers through a thick tress of almost-black hair, touched with just a bit of silver, and then allowed her hand to collapse against her shoulder, the arm crooked like a broken wing. “I think hunger has affected your hearing.”

“I’m tone-deaf; it gives me an advantage.”

She laughed a slow laugh and brought the broken wing down to caress Dog, fingering the bullet scar. “Victor is the real talent in the family.”

“Victor.”

There was only a momentary pause. “My husband.” She looked like Vic did whenever he was mentioned. “They’re doing Rigoletto at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, and Victor is playing Monterone.”

I thought about it. “A considerable role.”

“Not as considerable as Rigoletto, the role he thought he should have received.”

“He’s that good?”

“Yes.”

I took a sip of my wine. “Wow, the Singing Detective.”

“Chief Inspector, Field Division North.” She said it as if she’d been corrected herself, numerous times.

The night didn’t seem dark on the little terrace, almost as if the sky was charcoal rather than black. I took a moment to study her as she looked up and revealed a beautiful throat, and I was glad we were discussing her husband.

“It’s still his first love.” There was a lot in that statement.

I waited a moment before responding. “I’d imagine it’s difficult to sing professionally.”

Her face turned to me, and it was unsettling to see the resemblance to Vic. “Victor came from a working-class family, one that didn’t see the arts as a respectable career choice.”

“First generation?”

“Yes.”

“You?”

“I was born in Positano; my parents had a small hotel there after the war.” She took a sip of her Chianti and continued to study me. “You have to understand the chronology of the Moretti family, with Vic the father, Vic the son, and Vic the Holy Terror.”

I had to laugh. “That would be my Vic?”

She blinked a slow blink in response. “That would be your Vic.”

“Four boys?”

“Victor Jr., Alphonse, Tony, and Michael.”

“Alphonse?”

She shrugged. “He was named after Victor’s brother. Not my idea. We call him Al.”

“Michael’s the baby?”

“Yes.” She smiled with just the corners of her mouth. “You try to not have favorites, but…”

“They’re all police officers?”

“All but Al, who owns half a pizza parlor with the Alphonse who is Victor’s brother.” She nodded. “Also not my idea.”

I took a sip of my wine. “Hard, raising boys?”

“At first, but then it gets easier. Unlike with girls, you only have to worry about one prick.” She immediately blushed, and I got a clearer idea from whom Vic’s linguistic patterns had developed. “Oh my God…”

I laughed, and Dog looked at both of us.

She set her glass back on the table. “I’ve had too much wine.” She glanced around the terrace and desperately tried to find another subject. “Yours seems to have done well.”

I set my own glass down. “Yep, I just wish she was closer. I worry about her a lot.”

She grew quiet, and I waited. “When they’re little, you wonder what they’re going to be, and when they grow up you just want them to be happy.” She nudged her glass with her fingertips. “Only child?”

“Yep.”

Her hand was still. “It’s probably better that the Terror and I have some space.”

“Two thousand miles?”

“Her idea, not mine.”

I looked at her. “I thought it was the ex-husband’s.”

“Yet another one that wasn’t my idea.” She looked back up to me and shrugged again, this time with an eyebrow. “One would think I didn’t have many ideas. I guess that’s what happens when you second-guess for a living.”

My lungs forced out a little air in response. “How did those two end up together?”

She picked up her glass in spite of herself. “We all hated him, so of course she married him.” She took a sip. “Reaction has always been Victoria’s trademark.” She swirled the wine in the glass, regarded it, and I hoped she would sing again. “I never thought it would last; he was such a straight arrow, so…normal.”

I nodded. “We call it mugging. Out where I’m from, if you’ve got a horse with too much spirit, you just tie it to a mule for the night. When you come back the next morning, you’ll have a different horse.”

She studied me. “I guess the mule always wins?”

“Pretty much.” It wasn’t the response she wanted.

She continued to study me, and I was starting to feel uncomfortable. “How come you haven’t gotten remarried, Sheriff?”

I was seeing even more of Vic. “I, umm…”

“I guess that was a little forward of me, huh?” She waited. “I guess it was, since you’re not talking.”

“No, I was just thinking. I do that, sometimes, before I talk.”

Lena smiled, this time with her entire mouth. “Not me, robs the evening of all its spontaneity. A little wine, a little truth, and pretty soon you’ve got a real conversation on your hands.” She took a last sip.

I started to pour us both some more. It seemed like the conversation was getting interesting, and I wasn’t quite ready to leave it. “Did you drive here?”

The smile lingered. “Cab. I lost my license two years ago, and Victor made sure I never got another one.” She watched as I poured with abandon. “You haven’t answered my question.”

I set the empty bottle back down, allowed the muscles in my neck to relax, and peered from under the brim of my hat. “I’m not so sure there is an answer.” I thought about it, as promised, and stared up through the trees at the back of the little tannery. “I was…I don’t know, depressed for quite a while, and I’m not sure I’m out of the habit.”

“Of being depressed or of marriage?”

“Both.”

The smile at her mouth faded, but it stayed with her eyes. “Funny, that’s exactly what Vic says.”

“She knows me pretty well.”

“She says that, too.”

I laughed and widened my eyes, letting them drop back to her. After a moment she stood, and I thought the evening was over. “You want to take a walk?”

* * *

We strolled left on Quarry and went toward the river, having left Dog curled on the leather sectional sofa in Cady’s living area. As we walked down the cobblestone street in the amber glow of the city’s lights, she broached the subject that must have been on her mind for a while. “What’s in the case on the kitchen counter?”

“Sidearm.”

She was silent for a moment. “Have gun, will travel?”

“Something like that.”

We walked past Fireman’s Hall and down to Elfreth’s Alley which, by the sign, was the oldest continuously inhabited street in America. By the time we got to the end, we could see the municipal pier stretching out into the black distance of the river. The surface of the water reflected the lights of the boulevard, and the rumble of traffic thumped away on the concrete surface of I-95 above. It was a beautiful night, and the humidity-laden air of the river made rings around the gumdrop-shaped lampposts. It was odd, seeing that much water just floating in the close air; it was something that only happened with a hunter’s moon on the high plains.

There was sporadic traffic, so we crossed halfway down the block and looked back up at the western buttress of the bridge. “So, what are you going to do in Philly?”

“I’m supposed to meet the potential prospective parents-in-law in Bryn Mawr. You know where that is?”

“Main Line; just follow the smell of money.” She smiled. “Serious then?”

I looked at the flat expanse of the buttress, which stretched up to the illuminated cap above. “No ring, but it’s the longest relationship she’s had so far.”

She watched me. “You don’t like him?”

“I’ve never met him.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

I shrugged. “All right, you got me. It’s why I brought the .45…” She laughed and then laughed again. “I don’t know. I never thought I would be one of those fathers that think no one’s good enough…”

“But?”

“No one’s good enough.” Another laugh. “All of yours married?”

She turned and looked at the water. “No, the Terror’s the only one who has tried it. Vic Jr.’s got a hairdresser he knocked up, so I figure it’s only a question of time. Al’s been dating the same girl for four years but refuses to buy the cow, Tony’s a ladies man, and Michael…” She continued to look at the water with her lips compressed.

“Michael…?”

She didn’t move. “No one’s good enough.”

* * *

It was getting late and I wanted to be there when Cady got home, so we started back from the marine center, where we had been watching the boats gently rock in the current of the big river.

“So, what else have you got planned?”

I tucked my hands into the front pockets of my jeans and listened as my boots made more noise than her shoes on the sidewalk. “I don’t know if Vic’s told you about Henry’s photography exhibit?”

“The Native American photographs?”

“Yep.” I nodded at the political correctness. “The reception is Friday, but that’s about it as far as formalities.” We walked along in silence. “I think I was looking for an excuse to come here, and I think Henry was, too.”

“It’s good to keep tabs.” Her turn to nod. “I don’t worry about Victoria out there. I know it’s foolish, but I figure the odds are better.”

“They are.” I slowed down a little, deciding it was time to comfort my undersheriff’s mother. “There are inherent risks with the job, but county-wise we have one of the lowest crime rates in a state with one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”

I was blowing sunshine her way, but she didn’t seem to mind. “I hear you’re going to retire soon?”

Kyle Straub’s signs had made an impression all the way to Philadelphia. “It’s a strong possibility.”

“What then?”

I thought about it. “Maybe I’ll be your daughter’s deputy.”

* * *

It was amazing to me how many people were still on the streets. There were couples walking arm in arm, people in suits swinging briefcases in a desperate pursuit of momentum, and a homeless guy who put the touch on me at Race and 2nd. He was an older gentleman and rocked gently on dirty tennis shoes with a sign teetering in his right hand that read VETERAN, HOMELESS, PLEASE HELP.

Lena watched as I pulled a five from my front pocket and palmed it into the palsied hand. “Thank you, sir.”

His voice was remarkably cultured, and I looked at him for a second more—at the surprising blue of his eyes—and then continued on with Lena.

“You keep that up, and you won’t have any money by the time you get out of here.”

I nodded.

“He’ll just use it to get something to drink.”

“I would.”

She shook her head and smiled at me some more. “You were in the military?”

I raised a weak fist. “Remember the Maine.”

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

I smiled at her. “I’ll make you a deal; I don’t have to talk about Vietnam, and you don’t have to sing.”

“Deal.”

We crossed at Paddy O’Neil’s Tavern and looked down Bread, where there was a Philadelphia City Police cruiser idling with its parking lights on. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if it sat at Cady’s front door. I glanced at Lena, but she was frowning at the car. “Anybody looking for you?”

“Always.”

We walked down the narrow street; she was hurrying and was just a little ahead of me. By the time I got to the driver’s side of the unit, I could see that the young man behind the wheel looked remarkably like Lena and could only surmise that he was a Moretti. She was the first to speak. “What are you doing here, Tony?”

The patrolman looked up at her, but he didn’t smile. “Hey, Ma.” He looked past her to me and at my hat. “Are you Walter Longmire?”

Whatever smile I had drained away. “Yes.”

“There’s been an accident.”

3

The Trauma Center at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was on the other side of town and the Schuylkill River, but it took Officer Anthony Moretti only twelve minutes to get there. It took me half that to get to the Surgical ICU on the fifth floor, and numerous lifetimes to think about the nature of trauma and how it takes more lives than cancer and heart disease combined. He wouldn’t give me details, only that my daughter had been involved in some sort of accident, that she was being treated at HUP, and that, as a professional courtesy, he would drive me there.

Lena Moretti had accompanied us, stating flatly that she could just as easily get a cab from Penn as from Bread Street. She had stayed with Tony while I found myself looking into the very tired eyes of a trauma physician who explained that Cady had sustained a depressed skull fracture and that she was currently unresponsive. A CAT scan had confirmed the damage, and there was a neurosurgeon battling a subdural hematoma.

There really wasn’t anything I could do but sit there with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and wait. There wasn’t a lot of room in the ICU, so I dragged one of the gray upholstered chairs into the hallway, where I had a clear view of the red doors of the emergency elevator. I watched it the next ten minutes. It was creeping up on midnight and, with the lights on all the time and the sounds of the machines, it was like a casino—only the stakes were higher.

Nobody speaks to you in these situations—it’s like you’re a pitcher throwing a no-hitter—they don’t look at you, and you don’t want them to. I thought about all the people I should call, but it was only Henry who could do anything. I pulled out my wallet; the business card from Fred Ray’s Durant Sinclair Service had Henry’s cell phone number scrawled across the back. I didn’t call him on his mobile very often and could never remember the number. I went to the nurse’s desk and asked if I could use the phone. I dialed and watched the elevator as the phone rang and a prissy little voice informed me that the person I was attempting to call was unavailable but that I could leave a message after the tone, which I did.

“Henry, it’s Walt. Cady’s been hurt, and I’m in the ICU at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.” I gave him the number of the phone I was speaking into, along with the extension. As I hung up, Lena Moretti and another young police officer who was carrying a plastic basket and Cady’s briefcase turned the corner at the end of the hall. I stood there and waited for them; they stopped a full step away, like you would approach a large wounded animal.

Lena’s hand trailed out to me; she was the brave one. “How is she?”

I took two fingers of the hand and looked at the eyes that were so much like Vic’s. I felt my knees buckle a little. The next thing I knew, the cup of coffee from my other hand was on the polished surface of the speckled tile floor, and I was sitting in my chair trying to catch my breath. Lena and the young man kneeled beside me; he had placed the basket beside my chair, and I saw a small purse, a holstered electronic device I didn’t recognize, a cell phone, a wristwatch, and her grandmother’s engagement ring.

“Take it easy there, big fella.” He had one hand on my shoulder and the other at my back and was holding me there.

I took a deep breath. Lena’s hands were cool on my face. “Walter?”

I continued to breathe and leaned back in the chair. “I’m okay.”

She looked at me, not sure. “Do you want me to get a doctor?” She glanced around for comic effect. “I mean, there seem to be plenty around.”

I tried to laugh, but I think all I accomplished was a funny face. “I’m okay, really.” I thought I was but, when I looked at the young officer to thank him, he looked like Lena, too; everybody had started looking alike. I dipped my head back down and blinked to clear my vision; I looked back up at the guy, but he still looked like Lena, although not exactly like Tony. I felt slightly better when I glanced at his name tag. “Michael Moretti?”

He smiled. “How ya doin’?”

Michael was a handsome kid; somehow the features I had grown used to on females worked on him as well. The eyes were a true dark brown, and his chin was a little stronger, with a cleft that neither Lena nor Vic had. He was a little shorter than six feet, but his shoulders and arms were very large. I nodded to him. “I’m okay.”

He continued to smile. “Yeah, that’s what you keep sayin’.”

I looked at Lena, at the parchment lines at her eyes. “You called in the cavalry?”

She nodded. “It’s in his district, the Wild West. Tony’s the sixth.”

Lena got some paper towels from the nurse’s station and cleaned up the coffee as I signed the personal property list. Michael had heard through unofficial channels that Cady was stabilized and would be moved from surgery to the ICU soon. I looked at the favored son and listened as his almost new gun belt creaked in the silence of the hallway. “Mr. Longmire, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Walt, just call me Walt.”

“You sure you’re up to this?”

“Yep.”

He nodded. “Your daughter is an associate at Schomberg, Calder, Dallin, and Rhind?”

“Yep, she was working late.”

He wrote on his notepad and looked back at me. “Working late?”

“Yep. I spoke with her earlier, and she was supposed to have dinner with your mother and me, but she had some work to do.”

His lip stiffened, just a little. “The firm is located on the 1500 block of Market?”

“Yes.” I waited.

“Then do you have any idea why she would have been assaulted at the Franklin Institute?”

“Assaulted?”

“Look, I could tell you that it was an innocent accident…” He paused and then inclined his head a little. “But the attending officer said he spoke with the security guard, and he said there was an altercation between the young lady and another individual: male, Caucasian, approximately mid-thirties.”

“Where?”

“Franklin Institute, across from Logan Circle, near the art museum.” He continued to look at me. “The security guard said he heard voices, and then the next thing he knows the guy is beating on the door and asking for help. By the time he got the door unlocked and got out there, your daughter was lying on the steps and the man was gone. When you spoke with her, did she say anything about another engagement this evening?”

“No, she just said she’d be late.”

“Does the description of the individual sound familiar?”

“Well…she’s dating a young man.”

“And that man’s name?”

I paused a second before I said it. “Devon Conliffe.”

He wrote it down. “Do you have an address?”

“No, but he’s another lawyer…I’m sure Cady has it.”

He looked at the basket. “Would you mind if I looked at her PDA?”

I’m sure he was aware I was staring at him. “If I knew what it was, probably not.”

He reached down and plucked the unknown device from the basket and pulled it from the leather holster. “Is he an attorney with the same firm?”

“No, a different one, but I don’t know the name.”

It looked like a calculator, but evidently it had other abilities. He scribbled Devon Conliffe’s address and phone number on his note pad, put the device back, stood, and looked down at me. “Look, it’s probably nothing, but I’m gonna follow up on this and, if there’s anything, I’ll let you know.” There was an easy quality that overrode how brand-new his uniform looked; I was betting he had been in for less than a year.

He kissed his mother and turned to summon the elevator, but the door was opening, and an entourage of attendants, nurses, and physicians wheeled out machinery and a gurney on which Cady lay. I stood, and we all moved against the wall to allow them to pass. It was good that I had the wall to stand against, because I was feeling a little shaky again. They had shaved the side of her head, where there was a U-shaped incision, and a breathing tube ran into her throat. Her eyes were closed, and she didn’t move. I trailed along behind the group and watched as they installed her in the corner room; the ironic sadness of that was not lost on me.

They parked her carefully like you would a new and expensive car. I watched as the electrocardiogram was attached to the wall monitor, and it began the familiar line and spike.

The same physician who had spoken to me before separated himself and came to the doorway. His ID said Rissman. He looked at the floor, looked at the wall, and finally settled on my left shoulder as a focus. He talked about seizures sweeping across Cady’s brain like electrical storms, flashing from the horizon and disappearing. He explained that Cady’s Glasgow coma score was a seven and that she was only responding to painful stimuli in an involuntary manner. I guess I understood the rest, but the word that hung in my head was coma. How she responded within the next twenty-four hours would determine whether she would join the 53 percent that die or remain in a vegetative state, or the 34 percent that will have a moderate disability and/or good recovery. I wasn’t sure about the other 13 percent, but I knew about head trauma, and I knew about coma; what I didn’t know about was the next twenty-four hours.

He said that she was in excellent physical health otherwise and that youth was on her side, that she had had normal pupil reflex upon arrival, and that the entire team was hopeful. I had heard this speech before, because I had made it; I knew what it was worth.

Dr. Rissman said he would be back in an hour to check on things and then introduced me to the primary nurse, a solid woman in her forties; she said nothing but squeezed my hand before moving away. I sat in the chair beside the bed, and Lena Moretti was the only one left in the doorway of the glass-partitioned area. She came to the bedside and stood beside me, placing a hand on my shoulder and, thankfully, offering no advice. She stood like that long enough for me to start feeling guilty. “You should go home.”

Her voice was very quiet. “You’re sure?” I didn’t say anything; evidently that was okay, because she patted my shoulder and assured me that she’d be back in the morning with breakfast. And she was gone.

I listened as the machines breathed for my daughter, monitored her heart, and fed her intravenously, but I kept looking at the incision where they had removed a portion of the skull to allow her swollen brain enough room to survive. A small piece of Cady was now in a freezer on the fourth floor and, when I thought about it, the weakness threatened to overwhelm me again; so I looked at her face. It was lovely, and every time I looked at it, I had a hard time convincing myself that I had had any hand in it. I always loved the finished quality of her features; she was like her mother in that respect. Mine were more blocked, as if nature had started with a pretty good idea but had gotten bored with the effort. Cady was different. She was beautiful.

I thought about the two photographs that were on my desk at the office in Wyoming. One was a preteen shot. She was tossing her hair back, exposing the large hoop earrings that she had favored until her sixteenth birthday, when she exchanged them for the tiny ones I gave her. She was smiling. If pressed, I’d have to say that I don’t remember her smiling during this period—she mostly frowned in disapproval of my very existence—but she must have, because there was photographic evidence.

The other photo was from the summer of bum, as it later became known. Between law school at the University of Washington and the subsequent bar exams and her current stint at Schomberg, Calder, Dallin, and Rhind, she had spent a perfectly glorious summer along the Bighorn Mountains sleeping, sunbathing, and shopping. The photograph was taken near the end of August, and she was seated on the deck at Henry’s house, her oversized feet in flip-flops. A battered pair of jeans and a stunningly studded Double D leather jacket that had cost me a half-week’s pay completed the outfit. She was smiling again—Tuesday’s child, full of grace.

My eyes started tearing. I looked toward the doorway and tried to clear the heat from my face and the wild thoughts that swooped through my mind like barn swallows under a dark bridge.

The plastic basket along with Cady’s briefcase had been carefully placed on another chair. I went over, pulled her cell phone from the bin, and returned to my seat. I looked at her some more, then flipped open the phone, which was a much fancier version than Henry’s. I scrolled down, and it didn’t take long to find BEAR/CELL. I pushed the green button, and the prissy voice told me that the person I was calling was unavailable; I left yet another message, this time with the caveat that I was calling from Cady’s cell phone. I hit the red button and looked at the other functions on the tiny screen, one of which read RECEIVED CALLS.

I stared at the phone a while longer and then pushed the button: DEVON 10:03 PM. I scrolled down, and it read DEVON 10:01 PM.

DEVON 09:47 PM.

DEVON 09:32 PM.

DEVON 09:10 PM.

DEVON 08:48 PM.

I ran through all the calls: Twenty-six, and all from Devon. All unanswered.

I remembered to breathe and felt the wingtip feathers of vendetta scouring the insides of my lungs. I swallowed, watched my hands shake for a moment, and then hit the function button that indicated that, in all those calls, there was only one message, and it was from the last call.

There was the little voice that said don’t do it, but every other voice was screaming at me to listen. It was what I would do for anybody else; it was my sworn duty. I took a guess and punched in BEAR as the security code.

“You have one message.” I had none, but I was listening.

For the next two minutes, I listened to Devon Conliffe. He was in a spitting rage and referred to Cady as everything but a child of God; the language he used to describe her actions and person would have paled Vic. He threatened to do things to her that I hadn’t heard in a four-year stint with the Marines and close to a quarter century of law enforcement. Toward the end, he had become breathless but no less vitriolic, closing with one last salvo that promised a savage retribution if she did not appear within the next minute. The line went dead.

I closed the tiny cell phone; soundings from a very dark place began working their way to the surface. I knew the timber and the danger of these thoughts. My face cooled where a healthy heat had been, and a stillness crept over my hands.

I placed the cell phone in the front pocket of my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair. I pushed my hat back a little, crossed my arms, and looked directly at Cady; the smooth, steady movement of my actions raised a sliver of panic in the rational man who was abandoning me.

I wondered what in the hell she had been doing on the other side of town. Why would she be at the Franklin Institute instead of with me at her house in Old City? Had what happened been an accident and, if she and Devon had had an argument and he had pushed her, why hadn’t he called someone? Why wasn’t he here?

I pulled the phone from my pocket and listened to the message again.

I now knew some answers. The next questions would most likely be asked by the fifth largest police force in the country. I had no jurisdiction in Philadelphia. I listened as the sliver attempted to gain a little leverage and force some light into the emotional dusk, but darkness can be stubborn.

I sat there in the glare of the ICU and the murmuring of the machines and watched my child as all the shadowy things loosened themselves and began their steady ascent to open air where they could do the most damage. I suppose an hour had gone by when Dr. Rissman came back and checked her vitals.

He closed her eye and again looked past my shoulder. I felt like punching him for not looking at me directly but, instead, shook my head and cleared my throat. “No movement.”

“It’s still early.”

“I know.”

He gave a perfunctory nod and went out to the nurse’s station, and I was alone again.

* * *

It was approaching dawn, and the trauma physician had checked in five more times with the same results. The faint glow of the sun crept against the adjoining buildings, and it felt like I was in the turret of an unending castle. My eyes must have grown tired because, when I blinked, somebody else was in the room. I tried to focus, but the strain of the night made it feel like I was dragging 600-grit sandpaper over my eyeballs. I closed them and opened them again, but the image of the man kneeling by the bed remained blurred.

A small panic sparked, and I shifted in my chair, but he put out a hand and stilled me. It was only when the image shifted and I heard the intricate melody of the Cheyenne song that I knew it was Henry.

Epigrammatic whispers escaped from him as from a man possessed, and maybe it was the voices of ancestors winging their way onto the tongues of the living. I watched the broadness of his back drawing in the air of the room and swallowing the damage that had been done to Cady. There was a momentary stillness, and the song began again with a wailing tremble and ended with a final gasp.

After a moment, he turned to look at me, and I could see that he had been crying and that he must have been singing for some time. He wore a faded denim shirt that I had seen many times, and the collar was darkened with the tears that still streamed down his face. He didn’t stand but pivoted on one foot and sat on the floor by the bed. He didn’t wipe the tears away and gave me a tight-lipped smile as he folded his hands in his lap. “What has happened?”

I explained the medical situation as best I could.

His eyes stayed very steady. “How did this happen?”

I told him what Michael had told me.

His eyes still did not move. “Who has done this?”

I pulled the phone from my jacket pocket and tossed it to him. “There are twenty-six received calls on her phone, but only one message.” I stood as he pushed buttons. “The security code is BEAR.” I walked around to the other side of the bed to stand over Cady and looked for some sign that would give me hope that she would be in the 34 percent that made it back. I waited and watched, feeling the heat return to my face, the quiver to my hands.

He closed the phone with a distinct snap and sat there. His movements were deliberate as he stood and turned and studied me from across the bed. His voice was strained. “Do not do this.”

“Do what?”

“Do not do this thing.” He waited, but I didn’t say anything. “Do not do this thing, because I cannot save you from the man you would become, if you do this thing.”

I took a deep breath and could feel the rattle all the way down to my boots. “I guess it’ll all depend on what happens next.”

He leaned in, trying to get within my line of sight. “That is not what it depends upon.”

I looked at him, but his eyes were drawn to something behind me. I turned to look at the uniform, badge, gun, and Moretti standing in the doorway. “How ya doin’?”

“We’ll see.” I turned back to Cady as Henry made his way around the bed and extended his hand, quietly palming the cell phone into his left.

“Henry Standing Bear.”

They shook hands. “Michael Moretti.”

Henry held on to his hand and took a closer look. “I assumed Vic had eaten any brothers or sisters.”

He smiled. “Some of us made it.” The Bear followed the young man as he stepped to the foot of the bed. “Any improvement?”

“Not really.” We all stood there for a moment, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one that could hear my heartbeat. “They say it’s still early…” I knew which question I was going to have to ask next, so I thought I’d get it over with. “Did you get a statement from Devon Conliffe?”

Every trace of the smile vanished. “Didn’t see her last night.”

I turned and looked at him. “What?”

He pulled out a thin black note pad and consulted his own writing. “I spoke with Mr. Conliffe this morning, and he stated that he had not met with Miss Longmire.”

I listened to my heart. “You spoke with him this morning?”

“Yeah.”

The thumping was like the traffic on I-95. “What about last night?”

“I tried his residence about a half-dozen times.”

I nodded. “Did he say where he was?”

“Phillies game and then his parents’.”

“A baseball game.”

“Yeah…” He glanced back at the notebook. “I’ve got two witnesses, and his parents corroborated. His firm’s got a box, and he said he’s got it today at 12:30 for the businessman’s special.”

I thought about it. “He lives here in the city?”

“Yeah.”

“Any word on why it is he would have gone to his parents’ house to sleep?”

“No.”

Henry was watching the two of us, finally speaking when the silence got to be too much. “He went from the ballpark in South Philadelphia to his parents’ home on the Main Line and then back in this morning to go to work?”

“That’s what everybody’s saying.”

“He did a lot of driving around last night.” I’m sure the pounding in my chest was causing my shirt to jump. “Did he seem concerned that his girlfriend was lying at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in a coma?”

The young man closed his notebook and watched me for a moment. “Mr. Conliffe conveyed to me that the relationship between himself and your daughter was not of the serious nature you might have believed it to be.” He pushed the notebook into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. “He stated that he had been out on a couple of dates with her but that he had ended the relationship because it was far too serious on her part.”

I looked at Henry, who was watching me closely. Devon had lied and, if his parents and two other people had corroborated, then they had lied, too. I nodded, and Henry tossed the phone to me. I punched the necessary buttons and handed it to Michael. He glanced at the two of us and then held the phone to his ear. The young man stared at Cady’s feet, covered with a sheet and a polyester blanket, for the full two minutes. His expression didn’t change; he pushed the disconnect button and closed the phone.

I watched him and then spoke very slowly. “There are twenty-six received phone calls from Devon Conliffe from 5:11 P.M. through 10:03 P.M. last night, ending with the message you just heard.” I took a breath, pointed to the cell phone, and continued. “To me, that doesn’t sound like a man involved in a relationship he doesn’t take seriously.” I could barely talk. “And I didn’t hear any baseball game in the background of that message.”

He held the phone close to his chest. “Do you mind if I take this?”

“I think I’ll insist.”

His smile was grim, and I was liking him more and more. He nodded and placed the phone with his note pad. “I may not be the one who talks to you about this next.”

I looked at my daughter. “That’s all right, as long as somebody does, and damn soon.”

* * *

After Michael left, we sat in chairs on either side of the bed and watched Cady. “It was the right thing to do.”

I had been listening to him think it for so long, I wasn’t sure if I needed to reply. “Yep.”

He glanced over to me. “Why am I not so sure that you believe that?”

“Maybe it was the halfhearted response you just got.”

“Maybe.” He waited. “Is there anybody you want to call?”

“Not yet.”

He nodded, his eyes returning to her. “You should get some sleep.”

“No.”

“You are not doing anybody any good falling asleep in a chair.” I looked at him. “You might as well lie down.”

“No.”

“How about something to eat then.”

“I’m not hungry.”

He sighed a large sigh. “Then go take a walk, anything, but do not just sit here brooding.”

“I’m not brooding.”

“Planning then.” I looked at him, the man who knew me better than I knew myself. “Concentrate on walking, breathing, eating, drinking, anything but this.” I could still see the streaks on his face. “I will watch her. Go.”

* * *

I didn’t make it very far, but I made it outside and, with the number of hallways, elevators, and stairwells I had to use, that was a miracle in itself. I walked through the revolving doors and onto the University of Pennsylvania campus. It was spring, even in the winter of my discontent, and all the freshmen were hurrying to their eight o’clock classes. They looked as asleep as I felt.

There were a few roach-coaches across the street, and I figured I could get a cup of coffee from one of the food carts without contracting a disease. As I stood in line, I noticed people looking at me, and I figured I’d strangle the first one that made a smart remark about my hat. I stepped up to the counter and asked for a large one, which cost me two bucks.

“Here ya go, Tex.”

I let him live.

I wandered back across and sat on one of the low cement walls that had flowering shrubs planted behind them. My back hurt and my shoulders ached. I took off my hat; even Atlas shrugged. It was a gorgeous day, and the apple and cherry trees were exploding in a riot of effusive color. I pulled in a deep breath. As a westerner, I’m always amazed at the balm of eastern air, the coursing, life-giving humidity. Even on the busy street, I could feel the trees, the river, and maybe just a little bit of the ocean off the coast of New Jersey, not so far away.

I took the top off to allow the coffee to cool when someone moved my hat and sat on the wall beside me.

Lena Moretti looked a lot better than I did. She was wearing a simple floral-print sundress and was carrying two small bags that she set on the concrete. She placed my hat on her head, and it dropped down over her ears so that I could barely see her eyes. “Didn’t trust me to bring breakfast, huh?”

“I forgot.”

She tipped my hat back and pointed to the cup in my hand. “Is that coffee?”

I looked at the cup. “I’m just waiting for it to cool.”

She reached out a hand. “Here, I’ll show you what to do with that.” I handed her the cup, and she poured it out on the sidewalk. A young woman, slouched over with the weight of her backpack, was walking past and gave her a dirty look.

“That was my coffee.”

“No, this is your coffee.” She handed me another lidded cup from one of the bags, and I held it with both hands. She opened her own and took a sip. “I took your dog for a walk this morning.”

“Thank you.” I had forgotten about him. “Where did you find a leash?”

“I used an electric cord.” She crossed her legs at the ankle. I was beginning to think that she was capable of just about everything.

I opened my coffee and looked at the decisively dark brew. “This looks strong.”

“Espresso, tall, double-shot. I thought you could use it.” She looked at me. “How’s she doing?”

I took a sip and swallowed most of the enamel from my teeth. “I figured one of your troopers would have reported in by now.”

“He did, but that was almost half an hour ago.”

I nodded. “No change.”

We sat and drank our coffee in silence. “The Indian up there now?”

“Henry. He ran me out.”

She smiled. “Here, I brought you something to eat.” She dug into the other bag and handed me a collection of biscuits and a tiny paper napkin. “Biscotti. I didn’t think you would be very hungry.”

“You’re right.”

She chewed on one herself, and I watched as she unconsciously began swinging her intertwined legs. “Almond, Michael’s favorite.” The biscuits were good, and the only sound for a while was the munching of our communal breakfast. I noticed she was looking up at the brim of my hat that was still barely above her eyes. “Does the Terror wear a hat like this?”

“No, she says they’re goofy.”

She munched some more. “How disappointing.” She glanced down at my feet. “She wear boots?”

“She has one pair she wears on special occasions.”

She watched me for a long while. I took another breath and looked above the buildings to the clear blue sky. I could feel the thumping in my chest as the temptation to turn and count the floors up to five tugged at my jaw. A few fat pigeons ambled over from across the quad and positioned themselves in front of us. I broke off a little biscotti and tossed it their way. They grabbed the pieces and looked at me some more, giving up on Lena as a native.

“Dr. Rissman said the damage was blunt trauma from a fall?”

I nodded. “Concrete steps.”

She didn’t say anything for a while. “She’s going to be okay.”

I looked at her, still wearing my hat like a child. “How do you know?”

She ignored my ridiculous question, smiled, and looked back into the bag. “I’ve got a coffee for Henry, too.”

I had been about to apologize, but took another deep breath instead; the darkness was there as we made small talk. “You got cream and sugar?”

“Yes.”

I tossed the pigeons more biscotti. “He’s particular.”

She smiled. “I’ve heard that.” She sipped her coffee and watched as I continued to feed the birds. “We may have to toughen you both up a little while you’re here.”

The pigeons stood next to the blunt toes of my boots. The darkness was with me again, and a plan was unfolding like a crisp linen tablecloth, snapping across the expanse of a long table and floating down to cover everything. “Lena, I may need a favor later today.”

She turned at my tone of voice. “Anything.”

The pigeons were now standing on the wide part of my boots, happily taking the crumbs from my fingers. “I may need you to take a shift with Cady.”

“Any time. I’m a woman of leisure.” She sipped, and her ginger eyes stayed steady. There were too many cops in her life to fool her for long. “You got plans for the afternoon?”

I handed the remainder of the biscotti to Mutt and Jeff and looked across the street toward the river. “I thought I’d take in a baseball game.”

4

“This is a really bad idea.”

I looked around at the thousands of Philadelphia Phillies fans walking along Pattison Avenue toward Citizens Bank Park. “Seventy degrees and sunny. It’s a beautiful day for a ball game.”

“And a lousy one for aggravated assault.” He looked at me and shook his head. “Where do you want to hide the body?”

“I just want to talk to him.”

The Bear pursed his lips. “How about behind third; the Phillies have not shown any signs of life there in years.”

I bought some upper-tier tickets from a guy standing behind an abandoned magazine stand on the corner of 11th and Pattison. I handed Henry a ticket and stuffed the rest of my money back in my wallet.

We were undercover. The Cheyenne Nation was resplendent in jeans, his weathered chambray shirt, and a pair of running shoes. He had bought a Phillies hat as we’d gotten off the subway at Broad and had tucked his substantial ponytail over the adjustable strap in the back. He could have been from Philadelphia; he could have been a very large Indian from Philadelphia, but he could have been from Philadelphia. I was blending in even better. I had left my hat at the hospital on Lena Moretti’s head, had purchased a natty fitted cap and a vast red-satin jacket from the Broad Street vendor, and now approached the major league ballpark looking like a British phone booth.

“What if he is not here?”

“Then we watch a ball game.” The tiny terror was creeping in on me again, even though we had checked with Lena no more than ten minutes earlier. She said that eleven lawyers from Cady’s firm had stopped in, that even David Calder—the Calder of Schomberg, Calder, Dallin, and Rhind—had been to visit. Lena said she had recognized him from Philadelphia Inquirer society page photographs, that he was ancient but that he liked my cowboy hat. She also said that Cady was resting comfortably but had shown no signs of change.

We gave our tickets to the lady at the turnstile and walked into the broad interior thoroughfare of the ballpark. Under different circumstances, I might have enjoyed the environs, with the Kentucky bluegrass below-street-level playing field, giant scoreboard, and a capacity approximately one-tenth that of Wyoming’s entire population, but I had other things on my mind.

I bought a scorecard and a stubby pencil from a vendor and stepped onto the metal treads of the escalator for the ride up. Henry lingered behind me. “Do we know which luxury suite?”

I shrugged. “How many can there be?”

There were seventy-three, to be exact. This we discovered from a kindly octogenarian in a red straw hat and vest. The Bear also asked what we should do if we were invited to stop by one of the luxury boxes but had no tickets? He said we should call our friends and have them meet us at the back of the secured area at the rear of that level.

We went up. Henry paused at a railing and looked across center field toward the skyline of the city. “Do all the larger law firms have sky boxes?”

“I’m not sure. Why?”

“Do Schomberg, Calder, Dallin, and Rhind have a box?”

It’s thinking like this that kicked Custer’s ass.

I held out my hand for his cell phone, a device at which I had become a past master. I only slightly felt the twinge at seeing CADY/WORK just before I pushed the button. “Schomberg, Calder, Dallin, and Rhind, Cady Longmire’s office, can I help you?”

“Patti, it’s Walt.”

There was no pause, and her voice lowered. “The police were here, asking questions.”

“Was the name Moretti?”

“No, a detective by the name of Katz. He left his card.”

“Patti…?”

“There was a black guy with him. He didn’t leave a card, but I think he was a detective, too.”

“Patti?”

“They asked a lot of questions about her and Devon…”

I let her wind down. “Patti, I need some help.”

It was quiet. “What do you need?”

I explained that we were on a little investigative junket of our own and was wondering if the firm had a luxury suite at the ballpark. She assured me that they did and, after a brief consultation, reported that it was being used by a couple of city council people today but that there were seats still available. I asked her how we could get in, and she said to check the Phillies community relations office in five minutes.

The older lady at the double glass doors smiled as she tore our tickets and handed us the stubs. “Enjoy the game.”

* * *

The gallery that provided entrance to the luxury suites was a carpeted hallway that arched around the balcony from foul pole to foul pole. We were in suite 38, and as luck would have none of it, we were right there. When I glanced into the box, I could see two brassy-looking older women drinking beer out of plastic cups that would have looked more at home strapped to a horse’s nose.

One turned and looked at me, nudging her friend with the frizzy orange hair. “Franny, look, boys!”

I stood with my head in the doorway, not sure of what to say, finally settling on a western favorite: “Howdy.” In retrospect, it probably sounded a little odd coming from someone who looked like the assistant carbohydrate coach of the Phils.

I left Henry to entertain as I excused myself to get something to drink. Bernice said that they had waitresses, but I told her I didn’t want to wait that long.

There were small nameplates beside the doors of each suite, so it was just a question of finding the right firm. I was relying on a distant phone conversation I had had with Cady months earlier when she mentioned where Devon was employed. I remembered it was Somebody and Somebody, as opposed to the Somebody, Somebody, Somebody, and Somebody of Cady’s firm. I remembered that they were not particularly memorable names and, about a third of the way around, I read “HUNT AND DRISCOLL.”

I slipped my scorecard from my back pocket and pulled the pencil from behind my ear when I heard the announcer roar through the starting lineups. I was, after all, undercover. I leaned against the far railing, which gave me a decent view of suite 51. A few people passed by, but I feigned concentration and raised my head only after they had all passed.

I could make out the backs of three young men sitting on the arm rails of their luxury box chairs. They were talking, but I couldn’t hear the conversation clearly. Having never met Devon was putting me at a disadvantage, but fortune took a hand in the form of a young woman in short pants and an abbreviated, torso-baring Phillies T-shirt. “Miss?”

She was another south Philly gem, with mall-chick hair, blue eye shadow, and rounded vowels. “Yeah?”

“Could I get you to do me a favor?”

“Prolly.”

I took this for probably, tucked the scorecard under my arm along with the pencil, and pulled a crisp twenty from my wallet by way of the Durant State Bank ATM. “Could I get you to take the largest beer you’ve got in to a young man in that suite by the name of Devon Conliffe?” She took the twenty, which was a lot even by ballpark standards. “It’s important that he not know who it’s from.”

“Wa’s goin’ on?”

I duly translated and responded. “It’s a surprise.”

She looked at me for a moment more and then looked at the twenty in her hand. “Awright.”

“When you get done, I’ll be over there, and there’s another twenty in it if you tell me his response.” She practically left skid marks.

Henry met me in the stairwell. “I am not going back in there.”

“Okay.”

He looked around, and I noticed that his eyes were dark searchlights scanning the distance and calculating all the odds. “Is he here?”

“I’m about to find out.” We waited as the young woman entered the suite; there was a loud cry of drunken insouciance, and she rapidly reappeared without the beer. I pulled another twenty and handed it to her as she tucked her serving tray under her arm. “Success?”

“Friends a youse?”

“Not exactly.”

She glanced at Henry and then glanced again; I was used to it. “I did like you said an’ tole him it was a secret admirer.”

“Tall kid, brown hair?”

She looked at me. “More blond.”

“Right.” I nodded my head. “Wearing the blue shirt?”

She continued to look at me. “White.”

I nodded some more. “And the red tie?” It was a chance, but he seemed like the red-tie type.

“Yeah.”

I handed her another twenty. “Wait about ten minutes and give him another one, okay?”

She shrugged and was off. I watched Henry watch the hot pants. “Restroom?”

I took a deep breath. “Looks like the best shot we have at getting him alone.”

“Before or after?”

I stared at the doorway to suite 51. “Before. Nobody’s tough when they have to pee.”

* * *

The Phils blew a double play at first, allowing the Small Red Machine two runs, and it was a brand new ball game. Personally, I was beginning to think that Devon Conliffe had a bladder like a sea lion’s. I had paid sixty dollars for the three most expensive beers in Philly and, so far, nada.

Henry had walked to the area that overlooked an atrium to the concourse below. He was watching the game or appeared to be watching the game. He looked back at me, and I shrugged. I was about to order the two of us a couple of beers when Devon came out of the suite. He was pretty easy to spot; it was the smirk. Tall and thin, white dress shirt and a patterned red tie. He had blondish hair parted at the side, classic Waspish good looks, and all I could think of was the phone call I had listened to very early that morning. I said “yo,” and he actually nodded to me as he passed.

“Yo.”

It was the same voice as the one on the cell phone, and I signaled the Bear and disappeared into the restroom.

I had cased the place; there was one row of sinks and mirrors along one side and urinals and toilet stalls along the other. He was just getting ready to unzip his pants and get down to business when I came around the corner. “Devon Conliffe?”

He turned and looked at me, the smirk still firmly in place. “Yeah?” He said it like I should know. “Do I know you?” I kept coming toward him. He was looking a little closer now, but it was only when he saw the cowboy boots that he started to turn. I caught him with a hand to the closest shoulder, which propelled him to the far wall. “What the fuck! Who the hell are you?”

I kept coming, and he tried to go to the right, so I caught him and pushed him back into the corner against the toilet-stall partition and the tiled wall. “My name is Walter Longmire.” He didn’t move, but his eyes flicked around the contained space. I stopped about two feet away. “You know who I am.”

Maybe he was buying time, but I was fresh out. His face stiffened, and he tried to look around me again, thinking that somebody should be coming to his rescue by now, but I knew that when the Cheyenne Nation shut a door, it stayed shut.

I inclined my head a little, wanting to see him up close; I saw the muscles tense in his upper body. I supposed he thought I was going to hit him, but I was wrong; he rabbit-punched a quick jab and popped my nose.

I’m sure I looked surprised. I’ve been punched in the face numerous times, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not. Henry had had the best shot when he popped me one in grade school but, other than that, a blow to my face has never been anything more than an irritation and a nuisance. Whatever it was that he had been expecting, it wasn’t me leaning in closer and whispering. “You do that again, and I’m going to pinch your head off.”

Physical force having failed, he went back to negotiation. “Your daughter’s crazy.”

“Bad conversation.” I could feel wetness on my face, and I guessed my nose was bleeding. “I haven’t really touched you, yet. You and I are going to have a chat, and we’re going to keep it civil so I won’t have to. Clear?”

Some of the smirk came back. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I took a breath to clear the urge to grab him by the throat. “Tell me about last night.”

“I don’t have to…” He was probably used to having his way, of simply changing his tone to obtain the upper hand, but he was in a different league now. He lurched from the wall in an attempt to get clear. I stuck my left arm out to stop him and watched his left retract for another shot at my face. I grabbed his wrist with my right and brought my left up and around his throat, effectively blocking his right arm against the wall with my side. He was almost as tall as me, but the extra seventy pounds I had on him flattened him against the tile. He tried to kick me, but I had prepared for that by turning my body a little away.

“Don’t move.” He struggled some more and started to yell, but I closed my grip on his windpipe and the only thing that came out was a wheezy yelp. His eyes bulged, and I thought about how the thumb fits so well over the larynx, and with one good squeeze…I could feel the nausea in the back of my throat, rising up to tell me that what I was doing was wrong. I stood there swallowing the bile that kept reminding me who I was and of what I could forgive myself. It took a few seconds, but I lessened my grip and allowed him a little more air. His eyes stayed wide, but they didn’t bug quite as much as before. “Tell me about last night.”

“Look, I didn’t do anything!”

“Anything like what?”

I let him swallow. “Anything to her.”

“I don’t believe you.” He looked around wildly, thinking there must be some way out. “Tell me the truth.”

His eyes began to well. “Look…”

“The truth.”

The first tears fell down his well-structured face, and I was feeling worse and worse. “It was an accident…We had a fight.”

“Tell me about it.”

He looked directly at me, and in some frantic, twisted way, I think he believed what he said next. “I love her.”

“You have a funny way of showing it.”

He started to move his arm, probably to wipe away the tears, but I wouldn’t let him move. “She fell! We were having an argument, and I tried to grab her arm…” I watched him as he took a breath. “She yanked her arm away…And then she fell.” I tried to concentrate on what he was saying. “I haven’t even been home! I’ve been wearing the same clothes for two days now.”

My head was starting to hurt. “Why didn’t you stay with her.”

He half howled. “I was scared!”

I felt tired all over, and I released my grip, but he started to slide down the wall. He was openly weeping. I was too weak to hold him up, so I allowed him to slide to the floor where I joined him and sat down, my hands dropping to my lap. We sat there looking at each other.

“Didn’t you care what happened to her?”

He could hardly speak, he was crying so hard. “I was scared. I didn’t know what to do…I mean, she was just lying there.”

“Did you even check to see if she was alive?”

He wiped his face with a sleeve and stared at the floor. “I heard somebody coming, another guy, so I just ran.” He looked back up at me, and I wasn’t so sure I believed him. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I was scared.”

I nodded and took a deep breath. My head hurt, and I was tired of talking, especially of talking to Devon Conliffe. I rolled to my side and stood up slowly; my left leg was still worrying me from a gunshot wound that I had gotten over four months earlier. I put my hand out and against the toilet partition, steadied myself, and took another breath. “Tell the police.”

It took a second for him to respond. “What?”

I looked at him. “Tell the police.” I watched him, not so sure he would, especially once he was out of the restroom. “You call the police and you tell them everything you told me. Understand?” He looked back at the floor, and I waited for a response. “Did you hear me?”

He inhaled. “Yes.” He glanced up at me again, and there was a strange look to his face. “That’s it?”

I nodded. “That’s it.”

I pushed off the partition and stood there. “You call the police and you tell them everything that was said between us.” I started to walk out but paused for a moment. “You tell them…Or you’ll see me again. You’ll see me again just out of the corner of your eye, and I will be the last thing you ever see.”

* * *

The Bear appropriated a bar towel from the waitress as she passed. She stopped and peered at my face. “He didn’ like the beer?”

I shrugged as I wiped my nose. “Some guys just can’t hold their liquor.”

As Henry and I walked toward the escalators, he put a hand out and pulled the towel away. He tilted my head back and looked up my nostrils. “So, what does the other guy look like?”

“I punched him in the fist with my nose, but I think he’ll live.” I pinched the towel over my nose and leaned against the escalator’s moving rubber railing, glad that something else was providing the locomotion. I looked back up at Henry. “I didn’t kill him.”

The wide face nodded, inscrutable to the end. “Good.”

As we were riding down, two men were riding up. The one in the front was silver-haired and was sharply dressed in a charcoal suit with a maroon tie and a black trench coat; behind him was a man with a tightly cropped haircut and a suit, tie, and overcoat all the same shade of dark tan. It was difficult to see where the clothes began and the man stopped. They stared at us as we rode closer; by the time we passed each other, I could see that the first man’s designer glasses had small, red dots on the frames that emphasized his large brown eyes. The second man smiled a very becoming smile, and I noticed the bulge of a shoulder holster at his left armpit. “Foul ball?”

I rolled my eyes and nodded.

* * *

We quickly made our way from the ballpark and walked toward Broad and the subway. Henry didn’t say anything, which gave me plenty of time to think, mostly about whether I believed Devon Conliffe.

At some level, just about everybody lies to you when you’re a cop, whether they have a reason to or not—some little portion of the truth that they feel would be best omitted in their dealings with you. The only good thing about it is that you start being able to tell when people are doing it, and I was sure that Devon was. The kid obviously had a lot of emotional and mental issues to deal with, but I was having a hard time working up any empathy.

I watched Henry pull out his cell phone before we got to the subway entrance and call Lena Moretti. I looked south at the big highway overpass that with a few right turns would take me back to Wyoming. I wondered when that would be, if ever. When I looked back, he was closing the phone. “No change.”

I nodded, and we continued down the stairwell toward the thundering clatter of the Broad Street SEPTA line. We chose an almost empty car and sat across from each other on the orange fiberglass seats at the end. I finished with the bar towel and carefully folded it on my knee. My head was still pounding, and it was good to sit down.

“Lena says she can stay as long as you would like and, if she has to leave, Michael can take over.” I didn’t respond. “She sounds very nice.”

“Yep.”

He watched me. “Are you okay?”

I looked at the floor. “My daughter is in a coma, I think my nose is broken, and I’m about to have every policeman in Philadelphia after me. How could it be any better?”

The train stopped at the next station, and a few more people drifted on and sat down. He looked at me but didn’t say anything until a few stops later. There were a lot of other people on the car now, and his voice was low. “I need to go to the museum and help with the installation this evening.”

“I understand.”

He waited a moment. “I can cancel the whole thing.”

“No.” I smiled, but there was no joy in it. “One of us should be doing something constructive, don’t you think?”

He smiled back, but at least his had some warmth.

I abandoned him at City Hall and took a regional rail line over to University City and the hospital. It was getting late in the afternoon, and all I could think about were the hours that had been ticking by with no improvement, lowering our odds with every passing minute.

It was clouding up to the west, and it looked like there might be a few showers in the evening. There was another street person at Convention Avenue, and I gave him the jacket. There were a few blood spots on it and it fit like a blanket, but he seemed happy. I thought about giving him the hat, but it was growing on me.

* * *

When I got to the fifth floor, Lena and Dr. Rissman were waiting for me in Cady’s room; Lena was the first to speak. “She moved.”

I couldn’t trust my ears. “What?”

“She moved her leg.”

Rissman was next. “She reacts to environmental stimuli. There’s still no eye response, but this is very, very good.”

All the heat came back to my face, making my nose throb even more, and I looked around for a place to sit. I collapsed on the nearest chair and looked at Cady. Lena was crying by the bed and trailed a hand down to my daughter’s foot. Her leg moved, and the sounds erupted from my throat. “When?”

Rissman was kneeling by my chair, and he looked at the wall and the floor before again finally settling on my left shoulder. “About five minutes ago. What happened to your nose?”

I leaned back. “I get nosebleeds.” I looked at Cady. “She’s going to make it.”

“Let’s not get too carried away; she’s moving, and that gives us a lot better odds than before…”

I looked at him, at the silver bristles of his hair, even if he wouldn’t look at me. “Hell, yes.”

He nodded. “I just don’t want you to jump to any conclusions; this is a long road, and at any given time it could just stop.”

I took a deep breath. “I like the odds better now.”

He patted my shoulder as he stood. “Well, they are certainly better than before.” He smiled a shy smile at Lena’s shoulder. “I’m going to run another series of tests in about an hour, which means the two of you will be looking at an empty bed for the majority of the evening.” He glanced back to me, making eye contact for only a second. “I think you should go home and get some rest.”

* * *

We shared a taxi to Old City, where she dropped me off at Cady’s place. I tried to give her some money, but she wouldn’t take it. She handed me my hat, and I popped it on over the Phillies cap. I’m sure I was a pretty sight. Before the cab pulled away, I remembered to ask. “Did you call Henry?”

“I left a message.”

“Thank you.”

“Speaking of messages, you’ve got a lot of them on her answering machine. I hope you don’t mind that I listened to them, but I thought it would help if I copied them all down for you on a note pad. It’s by the phone.”

“I guess I need to call Wyoming.”

I stood on the Bread Street cobblestones where we had taken our walk. It seemed like decades ago. Night and the city—I found myself wanting to ask her in but realized that the poor woman had a life of her own. “Thank you again.”

She leaned forward, looking up through the half-light of the cab. “It wasn’t anything.” She ran her fingers through her hair, and I was still amazed at the bluish gloss.

“Yes, it was. I don’t know if I could’ve gotten through last night without your help, let alone today.” I could see her eyes half closed in pleasure, like a cat being stroked. The smile was there, a soft and easy smile. I didn’t want her to leave without some arrangement to meet again. “How about lunch tomorrow?”

“Deal. I’ll meet you at the hospital?”

I nodded and closed the door. The driver was doing some of his paperwork, so we waited for a moment on either side of the window, and I had a strange twinge of something as she looked at me again. I extended my hand; she sat there watching me as the taxi started off down Bread, took a left on Quarry, and disappeared.

* * *

The skies were looking more threatening, and I wasn’t sure if it was thunder I was hearing in the distance or the train on the bridge. I turned and walked to Cady’s door, reached above the junction box, and pulled down a note with the key. Lena had filed it so that it would now operate smoothly in the lock. I opened the door and was immediately mauled by Dog.

I gave him the ham that had been left over from Lena’s picnic basket and figured I could always get a couple of hamburgers from Paddy O’Neil’s—me too, for that matter. There was a menu, which gave me the luxury of phoning in my order. I opened the fridge and there was a six-pack of Yuengling, so I popped a bottle out and drank it while I looked for the bathroom. I took a shower and got out some clean clothes from my duffle, which I’d left next to the sofa. There was a clock on the microwave that told me I still had three and a half hours before Cady would be back in the ICU, so I got the pad from beside the phone and read the numerous and assorted messages from practically everybody in the Cowboy State. Most of them were from Ruby and Vic, but there were also ones from the Ferg, Lucian, Sancho, Double Tough, Vern Selby, Dorothy, Lonnie Little Bird, Brandon White Buffalo, Dena Many Camps, Omar, Isaac Bloomfield, and Lana Baroja.

There were no messages from Devon Conliffe.

I shuttled the dark thoughts toward the back of my mind and placed the notebook on the glass coffee table. I had been here two days and hadn’t called anybody. I wasn’t sure if word had gotten back to Absaroka County through the Moretti network, the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, or the Philadelphia Police Department, but I had a lot of explaining to do. I suppose I had been waiting till I could give some sort of hopeful prognosis and, now that Cady had given even an involuntary response, I should call.

I looked at the phone but just didn’t have the energy. I took a deep breath, lay back against the pillows on the sofa, and placed my cowboy hat over my eyes. Dog jumped on the couch uninvited and, after what seemed like a long time, we were both asleep.

* * *

I’d been dreaming a lot lately, and there were always Indians in my dreams, so it wasn’t surprising when I could see them from the corners of my eyes. I could feel the wind, the kind we get on the high plains that’s only a notch or two below hurricane force. I was leaning into the gale at the edge of some bluffs near Cat Creek. It was hard to focus; my eyes were thin slits with tears streaming from the sides. I turned my head a little and could see a Cheyenne brave who instructed me to lift my arms by raising his own. He wore a fringed and beaded war shirt with the bands of blue and white seed beads running up the arms, and I could make out a parfleche medicine bag painted red and black with the geometric wind symbol.

The old Indian half smiled, brushing an arm toward my face and forcing me to concentrate on what was in front of me. I glanced at the horizon as the lightning flashed like the seizures in Cady’s brain and swept across the sky in a silent electrical storm. I looked down into the canyon, and a chill shot from my spine like a fuse; there was nothing below us for at least three hundred feet.

* * *

The phone rang, and I lifted my hat to look at the greenish numbers on the microwave that told me that I’d been asleep for about an hour. A pang hit me as I listened to Cady’s recorded voice on the answering machine and heard the beep. “Walt, it’s Ruby. I hope you’re getting these messages…Vic said she got a phone call from her mother saying that there had been an improvement in Cady’s condition. I just wanted to check in and see if there’s anything any of us can do here. We’ve been trying to call Henry, but he doesn’t answer his phone either.” There was silence on the line as I sat there with my guilt and listened. “Vic is threatening to fly back there, so you better call us.” Another pause, and I would almost swear she knew I was listening. “Please call us. We’re worried about Cady, and we’re worried about you.” I was about to reach for the phone when the line went dead.

I sighed. If Cady’s situation stayed the same, there would be no going back; it was as simple as that.

I looked at Dog, and he looked back at me. “You want a hamburger?” He wagged, and I took it for a yes. I ordered us up four cheeseburgers to go from the leprechaun at the end of the block.

I went to the terrace doors and listened to the sporadic drops hit the leaves of the crab apple tree. It was a gentle rainfall that unfocused the hard edges of the city night, making all the surfaces glisten. It was only about fifty yards to the side entrance of Paddy O’Neil’s, so I figured I could get there and back without getting soaked. I watched the drops fall slowly past the yellow of the streetlights and into the widening pools on the cobblestone street. I looked up at the span of the bridge arching into Old City and listened to the steady thrum of the traffic.

* * *

Even over the blare of the Celtic band and the raucous crowd, the brogue wasn’t a generation removed. Black Irish; a handsome kid about Cady’s age with a wayward eye that kept tracking left. “Yore Cady’s fatha’, the sheriff?”

I looked up at the brim of my cowboy hat. “Yep.” He was like one of those bundles of baling wire that I had seen in Vietnam, the ones that went into the Vietcong tunnels with .45s and the balls of a cat burglar. “You O’Neil?”

He smiled a grin. “Hisself. Took the place over from me Uncle Paddy, the original O’Neil.” He handed me the bag full of cheeseburgers, and I noticed the tattoos up and down his arms. I paid him, with a little extra for his trouble. “Where’s ya daughter?”

I waited a moment, the hubbub of the bar swirling around me. “She’s not feeling well.” I leaned in and cleared my throat. “O’Neil, can I ask you a question?”

He wiped his hands on a dishtowel. “Ya?”

“You ever met her boyfriend, Devon Conliffe?”

His hands stopped working the towel. “Ya, I met ’im a couple’a times.”

I nodded, my face only a foot from his. “Nice guy?”

He worked his jaw for only a second. “Ya.”

“O’Neil?” He leaned in a little closer with the question. “You’re a liar.” He watched me for a second, then laughed and walked down to the other end of the bar to help the overworked waitresses. He glanced back at me only when I left.

* * *

Dog ate his cheeseburgers faster than I ate mine, so I gave him the last bite of my second one and tried to fade into another nap, but I suppose I was worried that I might oversleep and, as a result, didn’t sleep at all.

I finally gave up after an hour and called a cab. I looked at Dog from the door; he was watching me with his big, brown eyes. “They don’t allow dogs in the ICU.” He continued to look at me, and I was sure he understood every word. “There’s nothing I can do.” He sat. “I’ll take you for a long walk tomorrow.” He lay down, still watching me. “Honest.”

It was raining a little harder when I stepped out and, just before jumping into the taxi, I noticed the throb of blue tracer emergency lights that seemed to spring from the support cables of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge; in the darkness, it looked like the body of the bridge was hanging in the saturated air. There must have been a wreck. I stood there for a second more, then decided it was somebody else’s problem and climbed in the cab.

There wasn’t that much traffic this late at night, so we made good time, and twelve minutes later I was sitting at Cady’s bedside. She had just been brought back from testing, and the nurse at the desk said that there wasn’t any substantial change but that the stimulus response was a very positive sign.

The gentle spring showers had gradually given way to sheets of rain splattering against the windows like waves in some fifth-floor tide. I sat there for a couple of hours before falling asleep to the sound, my chin resting on my chest.

* * *

When I woke up it was still raining, but there was someone else in the room. I blinked and looked at the man standing on the other side of Cady’s bed. His black trench coat and umbrella were still dripping, so he couldn’t have been there long and, when I glanced back at the doorway, I saw wet tracks leading to where he now stood. On the other side of the glass partition, the black man with the close-cropped haircut was talking to the nurse who had assured me earlier.

When I looked back to the man beside the bed, he was watching me with the brown eyes through the designer frames with the little red dots. “Hello.”

“Hello.”

He looked back at Cady. “You have a beautiful daughter.”

“Thank you.”

His eyes stayed on her. “I don’t suppose you remember…”

“Yes, I do.”

He nodded and turned to look at me. “Good. You know why I’m here?”

“I’d imagine it has something to do with Devon Conliffe?”

He came around to the foot of the bed. “You’d be right.” The detective pursed his lips and stuffed a hand in his pocket, the umbrella’s handle still over his wrist. “What can you tell me?”

I thought about it and about what Devon had probably told them. “I was a little angry…” I yawned, covering my face with my hand. “So I went down to the baseball game and tried to get the truth out of him.”

“And?”

“I’m not so sure there’s any truth in him.” I reached up and rubbed my nose. “I think he roughed me up more than I did him.”

He nodded. “That the last time you saw him?”

“Yep. Why?”

“Because…” He studied me closely. “About three hours ago, somebody threw him off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.”

5

They didn’t take me downtown. I’ve always wanted to be taken downtown, but I guess they didn’t think it was necessary, so we made an appointment for 9:30 in the morning. Henry showed up at 9:00 and handed me a cup of coffee. I told him about my conversation with the detectives.

I took the lid off, but the cup looked suspiciously like the one Lena had poured out on the sidewalk the day before. “I didn’t do it; did you?”

“No, but it certainly makes things inconvenient.” He took the chair on the other side of the bed.

“For whom?”

He sipped his coffee. “Devon, for a start.”

* * *

I grabbed a cab in front of HUP and headed across town to the police administration building; it was about four-and-a-half blocks from Cady’s. It looked a lot like two beehives and had a statue on the newly grown grass of a patrolman holding a child in his arms. They called it the Roundhouse, and it was all very impressive until I had to walk around the block to find a way in.

There was a bulletproof window with a sign in seven languages that said translators were available. I told the patrolman I was here to see Detectives Katz and Gowder and that I might need a translator. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor. There weren’t any chairs, so I stood along the wall and waited and read about Philadelphia’s most wanted. It looked like they had a lot more activity than we did in Absaroka County. I thought about Vic working here and figured her five years’ experience easily surpassed my twenty-three. After seven minutes, both Gowder and Katz appeared.

The coffee that I had bought from the vending machine was worthy of the Lena Moretti treatment, but I sipped it anyway and looked around at the floor-to-ceiling windows and at the benches and indoor trees. “Don’t you guys have a room with a chair and a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling?”

“Budget cuts.” Gowder was doing most of the talking this morning. His suit, shirt, tie, and shoes once again matched his skin; I bet his socks did, too. “That nose looks like it hurts.”

“I’ve had worse.”

Katz wasn’t saying anything; interested cop, indifferent cop.

“Why don’t you tell us about the ball game?”

I sat down on one of the benches and tipped my hat back. “I just went down to talk to him about a phone message he left for my daughter and to get a clearer idea of the relationship between them.”

“And did you get a clearer idea of that relationship?”

“I think so.” I thought about it. “On his end, not a remarkably healthy one.”

He leaned forward and crossed his arms. “Well, we’ll have to take your word on that, since neither party is available for comment.”

I set my coffee on the table in front of me and let a long moment pass. “Maybe you’d better speed this up. I’m starting to lose interest.”

Gowder smiled and looked down at my hand that had just relinquished the paper cup. “Big hands.” I waited. “The late Devon Conliffe had marks on his neck indicating that he might have been strangled by somebody with big hands.”

“That the cause of death? I thought it might have had something to do with falling off the bridge.”

“Deceleration trauma.” It was the first time Katz had spoken.

I didn’t have anything to hide, so I went ahead and told them everything. “I put him up against the wall in the restroom, and my hand was around his throat because he was trying to kick me in the groin.” I looked at the two of them. “Look, if you guys liked me for this you would have arrested me last night. I realize that taking a nap is not the best alibi in the history of the western world but, if we can figure out when I bought the cheeseburgers from O’Neil’s and check that against your time of death, then you guys can get started on catching whoever really did this.”

“Where were you after the baseball game and before the nap?”

I turned back to Gowder. “The hospital.” I shook my head. “I can appreciate what you’re up against, but when would I have tracked him and how would I have gotten him up there?”

Gowder smiled some more. “Like I said, you’re a big guy.”

Katz set his own coffee down. “What Detective Gowder is alluding to is that the killer would have had to have thrown Mr. Conliffe over the railing and across the PATCO lines. That, without Devon’s participation, would have been quite a physical feat.”

I leaned back against the bench. “What about suicide?”

“What about it?”

I made a face. “I only spent five minutes with the kid, and I could tell he had problems, plus what happened the night before last.”

Katz leaned in this time. “And what did happen night before last?”

I told them what Devon had told me, including his promise to tell the police. “What’d he say to you?”

“He said that you had gotten rough with him and that he had to kick your ass.” I sighed and looked down at the surface of the table. Gowder chuckled. “We thought it sounded a little funny, too.”

“What did he say about the relationship?”

The one detective glanced at the other. “Same thing he told Patrolman…umm…”

Katz finished for him. “Moretti.”

The smile was back, and he looked at Katz longer than necessary. “Moretti. How could I forget?”

“I’m assuming you’ve listened to the phone messages?”

Katz pulled Cady’s cell phone from his breast pocket and handed it to me. “We have. We also checked his cell phone, his home phone, and as much correspondence as we could find at his residence, all of it confirming that the relationship was indeed of a serious nature.” He adjusted his glasses and looked at me between the red dots. “Mr. Longmire, I want you to know how sorry we are for what has happened to your daughter, but there are going to be a lot of questions concerning this young man’s death.”

Gowder raised his eyebrows. “His father is a judge with criminal appeals, and he has a lot of ties with the city’s current administration. Read: shitstorm.”

I thought about it. “What leads you to believe it wasn’t a suicide?”

“No note and, more important, even with the history of emotional problems, there’s no track record of attempts.” He looked at Katz, who shrugged.

“Look, Sheriff, you’re right, we don’t like you for this, but you had an altercation with the young man. He’s killed eight hours later a block and a half from where your daughter lives, and there you are without a strong alibi.” He laced his fingers together and looked at me from over the top of them. “We’ve done a little research and know everything there is to know about you. Marine investigator, one silver, one bronze star, Navy Cross…You’re a regular Audie Murphy.”

“Don’t forget my merit badge in macramé.”

He studied me for a moment and then continued. “More than a quarter century in law enforcement with backing from the state attorney general’s office, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, and the governor of Wyoming, all of whom seem to think you walk on rarified air.”

I watched the two of them. “So, what do you want from me?”

Gowder smiled again; I was trying to get sick of it, but it was a great smile. “We both have a half-dozen homicides in a case load…”

They needed an ally. The things you can always count on in law enforcement are that you’ll be underpaid, overworked, and looking for somebody to jump in the foxhole with you. “You guys hiring?”

Katz raised his head, and he was smiling, too. “We thought you might be able to assist us in that you have an advantageous position in connection with the case.”

I’d never get away with a statement like that in Wyoming. “You bet.”

We agreed to meet again in wind or rain, fair or foul, but mostly tomorrow at breakfast. They told me to keep Cady’s phone. I asked if I got a Junior G-Man ring, but they reminded me of the budget cuts.

* * *

When I got to Cady’s, Dog was happy to see me and was even happier when I found the extension cord that hung on the hook by the door. Clouds continued to threaten but nothing fell. I walked him up Race and took a left on Independence; there was a locked gate on the north side of the bridge. I looked at the open south-side walkway and decided to at least give it a try. There were two cruisers and a van from the crime lab unit still there.

I could see what Gowder had meant. There was a substantial railing and a light-rail track’s width across the high-speed train line, and only then the street below. Would have taken quite a throw; I figured Devon must have been moving about forty miles an hour when he hit the alley. The walkways looked to be twenty feet across, so there had been plenty of space to launch him, but who would he have trusted to join him that late at night?

There was a patrolman from the other side yelling at me to move on; he must not have gotten the memo. I waved and took Dog back down the walkway. At the bottom, we found a quirky subterranean passageway to the other side. We emerged just past the locked gate on the north and continued to street level, cut back on New Street, passed Saint George’s United Methodist Church, crossed Second, and stopped where the police barricade blocked the alley.

There was a chubby cop eating an honest-to-God donut. His collar insignia said unit 6, which I had learned was Cady’s district. He seemed like the friendly type, so I asked him what had happened.

He looked at Dog, the extension cord, and me. “You’re not from aroun’ here, are ya?”

I was going to have to lose the cowboy hat and get Dog a leash. “Visiting my daughter.”

“She live aroun’ here?”

“Over on Bread.”

“Well, if the jumper had been so inclined, she could’ve had a hole for a skylight.” He fed the last part of his donut to Dog. “Some society kid from out on tha…” He clinched his jaw for the imitative effect. “Main Line.” He licked his fingers after feeding Dog, and I liked him.

“Seems like an odd place to jump.”

He looked back. “Yeah, they usually go out over the water. Who knows, maybe he couldn’t swim.” He scratched Dog’s head as the beast looked around for more donut. “What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Cady Longmire. She bought the little tannery behind Paddy O’Neil’s.”

He nodded. “O’Neil’s I know.” His name plate read O’Connor. “Ian got it from his uncle ’bout a year ago. He runs a clean place, jus’ don’ talk politics.”

“IRA?”

“With a vengeance. You Irish?”

“Isn’t everybody?” I looked past him toward the crime lab truck parked in the alley. “You guys stuck here long?”

“Nah, we’ll be outta here this afternoon.” I made a mental note and walked Dog on down the street. “I’ll keep an eye out for your daughter.”

I half turned. “Thanks.”

* * *

By the time we got back down Race, O’Neil’s was ready for business. I stood at the propped-open side entrance with Dog and heard noise from behind the bar. “Anybody home?”

Almost immediately, hisself popped up. “’Ello.”

I gestured toward Dog. “You mind if we come in?”

He paused for a moment. “It’s against city laws, but there’s n’body ’ere. C’mon in.” I sat on the stool nearest the side entrance, and Dog curled up in the doorway. “What’ll ye have?”

“How about an Irish coffee minus the Irish?”

He smiled. “One American coffee comin’ up.” He poured two and joined me, leaning on an elbow and extending his other hand. I noticed scars on his forearm along with the rows of Celtic snake tattoos coiling up and into his black T-shirt. “We waren’t properly introduced las’ night. Ian O’Neil.”

I shook the proffered hand. “Walt Longmire.”

He leaned over to get a look at Dog. “Who’s the beastie?”

“His name is Dog.” He looked at me. “Honest.”

“How’s ya daughter doin’?”

“A little better.” I changed the subject just to see if he’d trail along and looked behind me toward the bridge. “Looks like they’ve got some business?”

When I looked back, he was still looking at me. “Aye, somethin’ ta do wi’ tha boy that fell.”

“What do you know about that?”

He reached down the bar for a copy of the Daily News and tossed it in front of me. “Only what I read in tha newspapers.” There was a portrait photograph of Devon Conliffe and another of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge; the headline read JUDGE’S SON DIES IN BRIDGE FALL. The brawny young Irishman leaned in the way I had last night. “Sheriff, if ye wanna drink or a bite ta eat, yer more then welcome, but if yer in ’ere playin’ policeman, I’d just as soon ye go somewhere else.” He smiled to show me there were no hard feelings.

I smiled back, feeling like a complete ass. “Sorry.”

He reached behind for a bottle of Jamison’s and poured a dollop into his coffee. “I don’ see how ye can drink tha’ stuff without assistance.” He held the bottle out to me, but I shook my head. “So, yer tryin’ to find out who killed yer daughter’s boyo?”

“Something like that.” I took a sip of my coffee. “What makes you think it wasn’t suicide?”

He snorted. “He was a prick. If nobody killed ’im, they should’ve.” He set his coffee cup down and looked at it. “Look, Sheriff…I don’t need any trouble. I’ve had me share between Ireland for the Irish an’ Ireland for the Catholics. Now is jus’ an Irish bar, know wha’ I mean?”

* * *

When I got back to Cady’s place, I began my investigation by going through the mail I had been dumping on the kitchen counter. There were the usual bills and junk but nothing pertinent. There was a calendar on the side of the refrigerator; I had forgotten about the shooting club until I saw that Thursdays had been marked. I tried to think of the street that Cady had mentioned on the phone and finally came up with Spring-something. I fished around in her desk drawer and pulled out five inches of Philadelphia Yellow Pages, flipped to GUNS, and found the subheading “Safety & Markmanship.” There were a half-dozen, but only one was on Spring Garden Street. It was listed as Tactical Training Specialists.

I copied the address and number onto the note pad on which Lena had written all my messages and looked at the phone. It was too early to call anybody in Wyoming except Ruby, who was always on duty early.

“Absaroka County Sheriff’s Office.”

“It’s me.”

It was quiet on the line. “How is she?”

“Oh, as good as can be expected, responding to external stimuli but still no eye movement.”

The silence again. “Oh, Walter…”

“Yep.”

I could hear the choking in her throat. “What are you going to do?”

“Wait.” The silence again, and I thought I could hear sniffing on the other end, so I changed the subject. “How are things back home?”

She tried to laugh. “You want your Post-its?”

“Sure.”

Her voice strengthened, and she cleared her throat. “Chuck Frymyer came in and got his uniform.”

“Who?”

“The young man you hired for Powder Junction.” There was a pause. “Somebody stole all the pool balls at the Euskadi Bar.”

“Look under the table where they keep the rack; folks think it’s funny to hide them there.”

“Bessie Peterson reported that somebody dumped garbage over her back fence.”

“Talk to Larry Stricker. He’s the one that’s got the barking dog that she complained about last week.” Dog, thinking he heard his name, came over and put his head on my knee.

“A woman reported that an elderly man was walking down the middle of Route 16 wearing coveralls and a hunting cap. He sticks his thumb out and, when you drive by, he raises both arms.”

“That’s Catherine Bishop’s brother; he gets confused and goes out for unscheduled walks.”

“A caller requested an officer’s assistance, then hung up. Officers were dispatched and found a couple in a verbal argument. The telephone was found ripped out of the wall. An open bottle of whiskey was found on the kitchen counter.”

“What brand?”

“The report doesn’t mention.”

I petted Dog’s head, and it was silent on the line. “You know all this stuff.”

“Yes.”

“So this was all for my benefit?”

“Yes.”

The heat in my face was returning. “Thank you.”

She breathed on the phone for a while. “People are asking, so the prognosis is guarded but hopeful?”

The heat was on high. “Yep.”

“Vic was threatening to jump a flight to Philadelphia or call Omar and commandeer the Lear.

“Tell her I’m okay.”

“You don’t sound okay.”

“I better go.”

“Walt?”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

I hung up the phone and stared at the glass surface of the coffee table that reflected the clouds passing over the skylight. It seemed like everything in the world was moving.

I petted Dog again, then went over to the work area and looked at Cady’s desk. There wasn’t a piece of paper on it, but there was an expensive-looking laptop. I could call Ruby back and ask her to help me with the computer, or I could wait and let Henry have a shot at it. There were some framed photographs on the desk: one that I had taken of her at the Absaroka County Rodeo when she was about eight; another of Cady with a young woman I didn’t know on some sort of cruise ship; and one of Henry looking at the camera with an eyebrow pulled like a bowstring.

There were no pictures of me.

I opened the desk drawers and found supplies but no work. I looked up at the metal-framed atrium and the walkways above. I knew there were two bedrooms up there, but so far I hadn’t made it to either one.

At the top of the spiral staircase, the master bedroom wasn’t very large, but it had a balcony overlooking the terrace in the back. It must have been the offices of the tannery when it had been a commercial venture, but now it contained a large four-poster bed and a French country bureau that her mother had bequeathed to her. I stood at the end of the bed and was flooded with Cady’s scent. I hung there like an impending avalanche, thinking about her, about Jo Malone grapefruit shampoo, about a partially shaved head and a U-shaped scar.

I sat down and stared at myself in the simple cherry mirror. It reflected me and a small, metal case that sat on the surface of the dresser. I went over and tried to open it, but it was locked. I put in Cady’s birth year and the small clasps popped open; I shook my head at her predictability.

Sig Sauer P226, 9 mm. It was a pricey version with plated controls and 24-kt-gold engraving; leave it to my daughter to get a designer handgun. There were two fully loaded clips in the case, and I made a mental note to discuss gun safety with her, if I ever got to talk to her again.

I pulled the ammo, placing it in the bottom drawer, closed the case, turned, and walked out of the room to the small landing above the kitchen. Dog watched me from the sofa below and then lowered his head to continue his nap.

I stood there for a while, holding onto the railing, and tried to think of what Cady would want me to do. Like me, she couldn’t abide mystery. Even as a young child, she asked questions—questions as statements, questions as answers, and questions as endless inquiry. She wanted to know everything and, if you told her to go look it up, she would and then come back with even more questions. Even then, she could interview a stump.

I turned and walked into the other bedroom. There was an old Pronghorn skull we had found on the backside of the ranch when she was six. It had probably been shot in the dirty thirties, dehorned, and left to bleach in the high plains sun. Cady had asked me what had happened to the antelope, and I told her the truth, like I always tried to do. She had taken it to Henry and, with his help, had decorated it with beads and feathers. It had hung in her room at the house in town; had hung at her assorted apartments in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Seattle; and now it hung over the guest bed in Philadelphia. There was also an elaborately framed but rusted sign that read “Department of the Interior—Indian Affairs, Boundary Indian Reservation” that Lucian had given her, and more photographs, but still none of me.

I glanced down at the bed at what had caught my eye from the landing. It was an ivory vellum envelope that read DADDY. I picked it up and saw an After Eight mint on the pillow beneath it. I opened the tiny envelope and read the three words, then carefully closed it and placed it in my breast pocket over my heart.

* * *

I had called Lena Moretti to tell her that there had been a change of plans and that we’d be having lunch at the Franklin Institute. She said that she’d never eaten there and probably for good reason, so we opted for Philadelphia-style pretzels. It was my first and was slathered with brownish spicy mustard. I had spoken with the head of security, and he said he’d send Esteban Cordero, who had been the security manager on duty at the time of Cady’s fall, down to speak with me as soon as he got in.

Lena was wearing jeans and a white snap-button blouse I was sure Vic had sent her. I figured she was trying to make me feel more at home. We sat munching and drinking cherry cream soda as children raced up and down the steps from the buses to the entryway of the museum. “What was she like as a child?”

I readjusted my Phillies hat. “We had the two-cheek rule. Cady always sat about halfway on a chair whenever we were trying to have dinner, so we instituted the two-cheek rule.” I sipped my soda. “What was the Terror like?”

Lena shrugged. “Disapproving.” She watched the children, who were making noises like birds—indiscriminate, bright sounds that made you happy to hear them. “She was a thirty-year-old trapped in a child’s body. She and her grandmother Nona always got along in their mutual dissatisfaction with me.”

“You? What’s not to like?” It was an innocent question, but it hit something along the way, glancing off and taking a lot with it.

She licked a spot of mustard from the corner of her mouth. “I had a rough period a while back.” She took a sip of her pop and looked at me. “I had an affair eight years ago. I’m surprised you didn’t notice the red A on my blouse.”

I was about to reply when a shadow crossed over me from the other side. I looked up and an elderly Latino in a blue blazer was looking at me with concern.

“Are you the man whose daughter was hurt?”

I stood and introduced Lena. We followed him up the steps and to the right as he told us about the police interview. “They asked a lot of questions the night it happened, and then another patrolman came and asked again.”

I finished my pretzel and pop on the way up the stairs, where a handicapped-access ramp ran along the side of the building, then changed direction and returned to the sidewalk below. He pointed to the flat area. “She landed there.”

I looked at the cement sidewalk. I tried to see the evening as Devon had described it; he had grabbed her arm, she had jerked it back and had fallen. It made sense as I looked at it. He was upset, she had gone to meet him, and there had been an argument.

I looked back at the entrance to the museum, but I couldn’t see the doorway from where we stood. “You saw her fall?”

“No.”

I turned and looked at him. “Then how did you know this had happened?”

“The kid banged on the door.”

“He came to the door?” He nodded, and I thought about what Devon had said at the ballpark, how he had said that he had run away. “Devon Conliffe came to the door of the museum?”

He nodded some more. “Yeah, I was in the main lobby when this kid ran up to the door and started pounding and screaming.”

“What’d he look like?”

He thought. “Tall, suit, blue tie, raincoat…” He watched me. “He said his name, pointed to what had happened, and yelled for me call 911.”

“He told you his name?”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“I called the police, got another one of the guys to come up to the lobby, and came out here.”

“How long did that take?”

He took a breath. “A minute, maybe two.”

“Then what?”

“When I got out here, he was gone.”

“When did the police arrive?”

“A couple of minutes later.” I stared at the concrete, and I looked back up at him. “What’d he look like?”

“The cop?”

“No, Devon Conliffe. You said he was tall and how he was dressed, but what did his face look like?”

“I don’t know. White kid, dark hair parted on the side…”

“Do you have this morning’s Daily News?”

He looked at me for a second and then nodded. “Yeah, I’ve got it up at the front counter, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.”

“Would you mind if we take a look?”

We passed the statue of Benjamin Franklin, who was seated contentedly in the warm glow of the science museum.

My attention was drawn back to the security desk. Cordero had slapped the newspaper onto the counter. I looked at it for a second and then spun it around so that it faced him. “Look carefully. Is that the kid who pounded on the door?”

He stared at the front page for a minute and then looked back up at me. “You know…I don’t think it is.”

6

“Three things. Devon said that he had run away as soon as another person had arrived. I assumed it was the guard he was talking about but, when I noticed that you couldn’t see the museum entrance from where Cady had been hurt, I started wondering.” I took a bite of my ice-cream bar and watched as Lena did the same. What would lunch have been without dessert?

“Second, Cordero said that Devon had dark hair, but it was blond.”

“And third?”

“The blue tie. When I spoke with Devon, he said that he hadn’t been home and that he was still wearing the same clothes. At the ballpark, his tie was red.” We were sitting on a bench in Logan Circle watching the fish and swans blow water twenty feet in the air, as if the humidity needed any help. “Individually, it’s not much, but all together…Of course, now that Devon’s picture is plastered across every newspaper in town, it’ll probably be harder to find the mystery man. Whoever he is, if he’s smart, he’ll fold up the tents and head home.”

“What if he was just some passerby? I mean, it is a big city.”

“I don’t think so. There weren’t any functions at the Institute that night, so why would anyone be hanging around the museum steps? How would he know Devon’s name, and why did he identify himself as Devon Conliffe?” I leaned back on the bench and took another bite of my ice cream. I thought about it as I looked at the nearest Indian in the Fountain of Three Rivers; he was representative of the Delaware River and had more than a passing resemblance to Henry. “Maybe, after Devon ran, the other fellow decided to pin him to the incident.”

“Then disappeared himself?”

“Evidently he had something to hide, too.” I finished my ice cream and was chewing on the stick. “We are looking for a Caucasian male, approximately thirty years of age, dark hair, and at least six feet tall.”

“You think the mystery man had something to do with Devon’s death?”

I could feel the wood beginning to splinter between my teeth. “It makes sense. Somebody cares enough about Cady to follow her, cares enough to chance revealing himself after she’s hurt, and cares enough to possibly toss Devon off the bridge.”

She finished hers. “That’s a lot of caring.”

“Yep.”

“Are you still hungry?”

“Hmm?”

She smiled. “You’re chewing the stick, and I thought you might want something else to eat.”

I dropped it in the nearest trash can. Henry was with Cady this morning, and I wanted to get back to the hospital before he had to leave for the museum, but Lena was doing so much. I took a deep breath. “You want to tell me about this affair?”

She laughed and then looked at me through the corner of an almond-shaped eye. “I wasn’t sure if you remembered that part of the conversation.”

“I’m pretty good with details, especially those involving domestic disturbances.”

She looked at the Indian maiden leaning modestly on her side against an excited swan. I had read the plaque after we had crossed the street and knew that the young girl represented Wissahickon Creek, but in Lena Moretti’s mind she was possibly emblematic of something more. “It was eight years ago. Victor had made inspector and just started working with the Mayor’s Task Force on Organized Crime. He wasn’t home a lot, and I guess I got bored.”

I waited, but she didn’t say anything else. “It sounds like there’s more to this story.”

She continued to watch the fountain. “There is, but that’s probably all you need to know.”

I waited a respectful moment before replying. “Okay.” I watched the people around the fountain, and it was only after a moment that I realized I was looking for a thirty-year-old male with dark hair and a darker reflection.

When I looked back, she had turned toward me and was smiling. “Who’s got the afternoon shift?”

“I do, but if you could check on Dog and cover for me for a little while this evening I’d really appreciate it.”

The smile held. “Buy me dinner?”

I looked back at the Indians. “Sure.”

She tossed her stick into the trash can as well and stood; she looked exactly like Vic. “My pick.”

* * *

I put Lena in a cab and grabbed one going in the opposite direction for myself. It didn’t take long to get to Spring Garden, and I felt a release doing something to track down some answers.

Tactical Training Specialists was the only going concern on the block, with gratings over the windows and a door that would have been more appropriate back home at Fort Fetter-man; it didn’t look like the best part of town. The sign on the glass read “Retail Handgun Sales—New and Used, Home Defense Classes, Indoor Shooting Range, and Basic through Advanced Training.” There was an adjacent parking lot with a side entrance that probably led to the range. I tried to remember what Cady had said about the instructor but could only come up with him being ex-army and a pretty good shot. I wondered casually how he handled throwing bodies over bridges.

I pushed the door open and an entry bell sounded. There was every gun I’d ever seen lined against the walls all the way to the back of the place. Glass-topped counters held the handguns, while the rifles and shotguns stood at attention, chained to the racks behind the counters. There were displays of body armor and home security sensors with locks and alarms at the center of the shop along with three-dimensional targets and gun safes.

“Can I help you?”

Jimmie Tomko was a little younger than I was, of average height and build with a light complexion and pattern balding that did nothing to hide the fact that he was missing his left ear; it also looked like he had a glass eye. He was sitting on a stool behind the counter and to my right, where he could see whoever walked in before they could see him. I noticed he was wearing a shoulder holster with a Kimber .45 and was reading the Daily News, which was folded back to the second page and the continuation of the Devon Conliffe saga.

I extended my hand. “Walt Longmire. My daughter is Cady Longmire.”

He smiled without parting his lips. “Hello, Sheriff.”

We went to his office, which overlooked the firing range, and he told me about his experiences in Quang Tri Province, which ended with a pressure-detonated mine made from one of our duds, a 105-millimeter round that had been booby-trapped. “Roughly two platoons had walked right by the damn thing, and I was next to last when the guy beside me stepped on something, and I turned.” He gestured toward his left eye. “Poached my eye just like an egg. They say the sand was probably the only thing that saved me and the guy in front of us.” I didn’t ask about the fellow who had stepped on it.

Not for the first time, I was anxious to get out of Vietnam, so I changed the subject. “Jimmie, how long have you had this place?”

“Since ’77.” He gestured toward the shooting gallery. “Put the firing range in about ten years ago, and it’s been the only thing that saved my butt.”

“That many people want to learn how to shoot?”

“There’s that, but it’s also the permits.” I looked at him questioningly. “A lot of these yuppies want concealed permits, but the chances of getting one in the city, even with training, are about as likely as Wilson Goode joining the Strategic Air Command.”

I vaguely remembered an instance in the city involving the ex-mayor, a helicopter, a bomb, and a housing project, and deduced that getting a concealed weapon permit in Philadelphia was nigh on impossible. “So, can they get limited permits through you?”

“Yeah, that way they get to transport the weapon to and from the premises within a locked case in the trunk of their car, ammo separate.”

“I gather that some of them have been abusing the privilege?”

He sighed. “I had been making good money until we had a prominent assistant district attorney who unloaded on a Toyota station wagon on Roosevelt Boulevard. He said a couple of guys had chased him at speeds in excess of a hundred miles an hour.”

I thought about it. “I wasn’t aware that Toyota station wagons could go a hundred miles an hour.”

“He said it was drug dealers.”

I thought about it some more. “Is the Toyota station wagon the vehicle of choice for Philadelphia drug dealers?”

“No. So then he said it could have been the KKK, except that in the earlier statement he said the two occupants were not white.” Tomko watched me with the one eye. “Now, there could be two nonwhite members of the KKK cruising around Philly in a Japanese station wagon, but…”

“There’s just as much a chance of Wilson Goode joining the Strategic Air Command?”

“Exactly.” I was getting the hang of it. “Now, you are probably wondering why it is that I have told you this story.” He angled the front page of the paper toward me.

I stared at him. “Devon Conliffe?”

He nodded. “He was in the car with ADA Vince Osgood, a buddy of his.”

“What were they doing being chased by drug dealers?”

“There were a lot of questions along those lines.” He dropped the corner of the paper back on his desk. “Surprise, surprise, the charges were dropped. I think it might have been because Devon’s father, the judge, had pull with the court.”

“His father?” Tomko nodded. “And Devon still came here?”

“Lawyer League. They all come in on Thursdays.” He sat back in his chair and leaned a scarred chin on his fist. “They didn’t cancel his permit and, like I said, all the charges were dropped.”

I thought about the judge’s son. “So he might have been involved in some things he shouldn’t have been.”

“It’s likely.”

“Can you think of anybody who might’ve wanted to kill him?” The one eye stared at me for a while. “Besides me.”

“About half of Philadelphia.” He looked away for a second. “Look, I know your daughter was dating the guy, but he was a piece of shit. Did you ever see the two of ’em together?”

“No.”

“Not for nothin’, but it was like she was his personal servant.” His eye came back to me. “Why don’t you ask your daughter?”

I studied him but could tell nothing. “I’m saving that as a last resort.”

He nodded. “I’m not so sure why it is you’re concerned; best thing that could’ve happened to her.” He cleared his throat and shrugged. “Sheriff, in case you hadn’t noticed, your daughter is quite a looker, intelligent, and possibly one of the best shots I’ve ever had the pleasure of not teaching.” He folded his hands in his lap. “It’s none of my business, but I think she’s a lot better off.”

I withheld comment. “You mind if I come in tomorrow night?”

“Nah, but there’s a guest fee, thirty bucks plus ammo. What d’ya shoot?”

“A .45 ACP.”

He nodded; the caliber probably reminded him of Quang Tri, land mines, and poached eggs.

* * *

It was close to one o’clock when I got back to the hospital. “When do I get to meet the mother?”

I ignored Henry and watched Cady. “Anything?”

“No, but I sang to her all morning.”

I sat down. “Thank you.”

His eyes stayed on Cady. “She hears us.”

I had thought about it a great deal, but I wasn’t sure. “You think?”

“Yes.” He exhaled a short laugh. “This may be your only chance to get the first, middle, and last word.” He looked at me now, his eyes steady. “She must hear our voices so that she can return to us.”

I thought what a wonder it was that this individual should be with me, here, now. Even as a child, he had always known something the rest of us didn’t. I thought about the book I’d brought from Wyoming, the love-worn collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Maybe I could read her that. “Well, I don’t sing. Any suggestions on what I should say?”

He smiled. “Tell her how much you love her; everything after that is small talk.”

* * *

I talked to Cady for the next four hours, and then the nurses ran me off so that they could bathe her. I took my chair and sat in the hallway. The Daily News was at the nurse’s desk, so I appropriated it.

JUDGE’S SON DIES IN BRIDGE FALL. I studied the photo of Devon Conliffe; it was most likely a publicity shot from his firm. There was no denying that he was a handsome kid, but there was a wayward quality to the eyes, something that said the young man was looking for a way out. I guess he found it, or it found him.

I looked at the picture of the bridge that had a superimposed dotted line of his fall and an arrow showing where he had landed. I thought about the alley where I had spoken to the cop with the donut and made a mental note to return there in the morning when the police and the crime lab people had cleared out.

“…10 P.M. as the traffic grew sparse on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, Devon Conliffe, son of judge Robert Conliffe, fell to his death.” The article was pretty straightforward, concentrating on Devon’s career in the law and on the assorted community services he was involved with, only mentioning the episode that Jimmie Tomko had described as “the incident on Roosevelt Boulevard.” Robert Conliffe was quoted as saying that his son was a good man and an excellent lawyer who would be sadly missed in society.

There was no mention of Cady. I figured the Conliffes and I were off for dinner. The Roosevelt Boulevard thing bothered me; I needed to find out more about Devon’s background. I knew two detectives who might help me out. I dug Cady’s cell phone from my jacket, but the battery was dead. I put it back in my pocket and settled on brooding, something at which I was pretty good.

It was possible that what had happened to Devon had been triggered by what had happened to Cady, but not exclusively. It appeared that the young man could have been involved in any number of situations that could have led to his violent end.

The nurses had finished. I folded the paper, placed it back on the counter, and leaned my elbows on the ICU desk. Nancy Lyford, the head nurse, the one who had held my hand when we had first arrived, came over and stood by me. “Your friend has a beautiful voice.”

“Yep, he does.”

“He’s Native American?”

I smiled. “Indian. Yes.”

“Isn’t Native American the correct term?”

“I suppose, but most of the Indians I know would laugh at you if you used it.” I figured I’d better explain. “Most Indians don’t identify themselves as American particularly, but as members of nations unto themselves.” She looked at me blankly. “A nation, like a tribe.”

She thought about it. “He said he was Cheyenne?”

“Northern Cheyenne and Lakota.”

“Sioux?”

I shook my head. “You start calling Lakota the Sioux, and you’re going to get in real trouble.”

She laughed. “Sounds more complicated than Native American.”

I gestured toward my daughter. “How’s she doing?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “The bilateral constriction subsided to a normal reaction of the pupils, which gives her a much better opportunity of recovery. The involuntary response to external stimuli is also a very good sign.”

It was basically the same speech I’d gotten from Rissman the day before, and I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. “Still a wait-and-see situation?”

She nodded her head and looked a little sad. “It’s not like television. It’s a long process that takes a lot of effort, even if things go well.” I nodded, and she looked back at Cady. “I’m not sure if now is the time to mention it, but the things that people have been sending and bringing are beginning to pile up.” I guess I still looked blank. “Cards, stuffed animals, flowers, and things like that.” She smiled. “She’s a very popular young woman.”

I had the flowers donated to other units and started to put the rest into a large shopping bag the head nurse thoughtfully provided. I was still talking to Cady. “I’ve half a mind to leave all this stuff here and have you lug it all home yourself.” There were stuffed animals, mostly indicative of the West—buffalo, horses, and a bear. There were assortments of candy and a stack of cards, most of which had her name on them, except for one that had mine. I held the little envelope up for her to see. “There, I’m popular, too.”

It was the usual size of a thank you note, with a mechanical, typewritten print that read SHERIFF. I nudged my thumb under the flap and opened the sealed envelope. Inside was a plain white card that looked like the ones used for names at a place setting; it read, in the same type, YOU HAVE BEEN DONE A FAVOR, NOW DROP IT.

I looked at it for a long time. I finally noticed that my finger and thumb were holding the card like a life preserver; I guess I thought that if I let go, the card might disappear. I studied the envelope. There was nothing to indicate where the note had come from or whom it was from. I held it up to the fluorescent light and could see the indentation of the mechanical typewriter’s strike, worn, with a small dropout at the bottom of the O. A typewriter? No one used one of those anymore.

I stood and walked out to the nurse’s station. I held up the envelope. “Excuse me, but do you have any idea where this one might have come from?”

She shook her head. “No, I really can’t say.”

“Can you check with the rest of the staff and see if any of them remember anyone bringing this particular envelope?”

She reached out for it. “Certainly.”

I held on. “I need to keep this, but there aren’t any others that are typewritten. Do you think you could bring them here or describe it to them?” She looked uncertain. “It just says SHERIFF in capital letters.”

“Yes.” She continued to sit and look at me.

“I mean now.”

The other three staff members who were on the floor had never seen the note and, after a few phone calls, it was ascertained that the others hadn’t either. I plucked a card from my wallet, looked at the great seal of the City of Philadelphia, and thought about the deep-set eyes that had watched me so carefully this morning. Asa Katz, Detective, Homicide Unit, 8th and Race. There were four different phone numbers, and I didn’t call any of them.

I was standing with the head nurse in Cady’s room when Lena Moretti arrived.

The sun had set, but the last of its golden light reflected off the other sides of the building in a burnished brilliance of dying illumination, peaking and then dimming like a thought having passed.

“No, I didn’t write it.”

I reached out and held Cady’s foot; I felt the momentary reflex of response and the heat in my face as I looked at hers. “Well, I just wanted to give you the chance to give yourself up.” I heard her exhale with a smile.

“What are you going to do?”

I gave a little laugh myself. “You know, your daughter asks me that a lot.” The hot spots of the sun were reflecting back to my mountains in Wyoming, and I thought about how deceptively simple life seemed there. “I figure I’ll give the detectives a full report in the morning.”

“Yeah, but what are you going to do tonight?” She was holding the card and stood in the golden light with her other hand propped at the small of her back.

“That note seems to indicate that Devon Conliffe’s death is a direct result of Cady’s accident.” I smiled at the floor tile some more and didn’t answer.

* * *

I stood there with the Cheyenne Nation, looking up at the tall building and the night sky. “Are you going to tell me that this is a bad idea, too?”

He considered the streetlights running down Market. “Nah, this is a good idea.”

Now I was worried.

The clouds hadn’t given way to the moon and were still skimming along the tops of the buildings and reflecting the city’s light. It was a warm, balmy evening and, with the cloud cover, everything felt close.

I looked at my pocket watch and glanced down both sides of the city street. Patti-with-an-i was to have met us at nine o’clock, but it was creeping up on a quarter past. “You think she changed her mind?” He didn’t say anything, just looked off toward City Hall. He looked remarkably like the Indian at Logan Circle.

“For what, exactly, are we searching?”

“I don’t know. That’s why we have to look for ourselves.”

His eyes turned to me. “You do not think the police have already done this?”

“I’m sure they asked some questions, but that’s probably all. It’s hard to deal with lawyers without a warrant.”

He looked back at the building. “Which is why we are breaking and entering?”

“Just entering; I’m not planning on breaking anything.” He nodded but didn’t look particularly convinced.

It was just then that the woman I assumed was Patti turned the corner and approached from the plaza on Broad. She was looking around as she crossed the street. “I’m sorry, I had trouble getting a babysitter…” She stopped talking and looked at Henry. The Indian had that kind of an effect on people east of the Mississippi River.

“Patti-with-an-i, I’m Walt and this is Henry Standing Bear.”

He inclined his head, extended a hand, and smiled while she melted into the cracks of the sidewalk. “Patti-with-an-i, I have heard a great deal about you.”

I rolled my eyes and converted it into a glance through the revolving doors of the lobby, where a couple of security guards sat at a centrally located desk between the banks of elevators. I wondered mildly if we might have been better off leaving the Cheyenne Nation out of the equation.

Once inside, Patti just waved at the men; I noticed one of them was reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, which had a more demure take on the Devon Conliffe saga. The other looked at us a little quizzically but made nothing more of it.

We watched as Patti punched the up button, and we got on the elevator as she slipped a security card into the panel and hit a red one marked thirty-two. We got off and followed her to a set of opaque glass doors where she inserted the card again. The doors buzzed. I pushed one only partly open. “This is as far as you go.”

She looked up at me. “I thought…”

I shook my head. “It’s bad enough that the guards have seen you with us. If we get caught, I don’t want you anywhere near.”

“You’re not going to know what to look for.”

I glanced over at Henry. “We’ll have to take that chance.”

She sighed. “Her office is straight down the hall past the library, then take a right and go to the corner; she’s the next to last door on the left.”

I saluted, and we waited till she was gone. I turned to look at Henry. “I like to ask myself, what would Gerry Spence do in a situation like this?”

“Gerry Spence would not be in a situation like this.”

The main hall was a straight shot to a conference room. The lights were all on, and I expected somebody to cross at any second and turn to look at us. I waited a moment, then stepped into the entryway and looked both left and right down the first intersecting hallway. There seemed to be three more before the end. We listened, but the only sound was the heating/cooling air handlers.

I watched as Henry took his rightful place at the front, always the scout. He advanced to the next intersection and motioned for me to follow, never taking his eyes off the area ahead. I moved out and up behind him as he crossed and continued.

We were at the doorway of the library when he stopped and angled his head in the direction of the opening. I expected to hear the shriek of lawyers, aware that they were being attacked by a war party, but it was silent. I waited as Henry held up a fist, then a single finger, and then the fist again.

Hold, one person, stay there.

I waited as he crossed and peered into the room from the opposite angle. I watched as the dark eyes flicked around. He froze for a second, then slowly turned away and placed himself flat against the far wall; I did the same. I listened more carefully as someone rustled some papers and walked through the room about twenty feet from the door.

After a moment and more than most white men would wait, the Bear inclined his head and looked into the library. He glanced back and gestured for me to come along. I crossed and followed him to the far corner, where he stopped, and once again looked both ways.

Every light in this part of the damn place was on as well, and I started wondering how much Schomberg, Calder, Dallin, and Rhind could shave off their billing by turning them out. Paintings on the walls in the corridor that led to Cady’s office were abstracts of what I took to be Indians. When I turned to look at Henry, he was studying the nearest one, looked at me, and shrugged.

To my relief, most of the doorways leading to the right were either dark or closed. Seeing the lights from the other tall buildings glide past as we worked our way down the hall was making me dizzy, so I was glad when we got to the door that read CADY LONGMIRE on a little brass plaque. The door that was three before Cady’s was open with the light on. The plaque on it read JOANNE FITZPATRICK; the name sounded familiar. Henry turned the knob to Cady’s office and closed the door behind us after I followed him in.

It was a small room, and we stood there for a moment to let our eyes adjust to the darkness. I could feel some of Cady’s clothes hanging on the back of her door and steadied their swinging with my hand. Henry stood slightly to the left, looking out the floor-to-ceiling glass wall ahead of us. William Penn and City Hall were to our right, and the yellow glow of the clock below Penn told us it was a time when all good lawyers should be home and in bed. The bluish light of the building across Market reflected the streetlights below and the image of the building we were now in.

Henry reached across the shadow of a desk and clicked on a green tortoiseshell lamp. The illumination was ample but not so much that it reached the space under the doorway. I breathed the first deep breath since entering the offices. “Somebody was in the library?”

The Bear nodded. “Yes. Pretty girl, about Cady’s age with long, dark hair.”

I thought about it as I looked around. “I don’t know anybody she works with by sight.” He nodded.

There wasn’t much room to move; there were file boxes lined up against the wall, so I crossed behind the desk where there were more piles of folders and a computer. There were even more boxes at the foot of the windows, with another wall of file cabinets to the right.

I sat in her chair and looked around. There was a large map of Wyoming from the turn of the century in a heavy gilded frame. There were four ledger drawings that Henry had acquired for her flanking both sides, and an etching Joel Ostlind had done of Cloud Peak. I looked at the elegant simplicity of the etching and could feel the air and the cold wind of the west ridge.

On the desk, there was an old photograph of Cady with Martha after the chemotherapy had begun taking its toll. I studied the beautiful bone structure of the two women, mother and daughter, the brightness of their eyes, and the languid relaxation of their hands as they lay draped over each other’s shoulders. There was another of Henry standing with Dena Many Camps in traditional dress at the Little Bighorn reenactment. There was even one of Dog.

I suppose my disappointment was evident. “What is wrong?”

I waited a moment and then responded. “I know it’s stupid…but there aren’t any pictures of me.” I cleared my throat, hoping that maybe I wouldn’t sound so stupid and pathetic when I continued. “There aren’t any photographs of me at her house or here.” He was silent as he watched, watched the guilt of my misplaced emotions blunder forward like those of a wounded animal. “I just thought I was important enough in her life to support one or two photographs.”

He quietly reached across the desk and hit the space bar on the computer.

I raised my eyes, and the wave that hit me was like a wall of sentiment: wet, deep, and ancient. I sat there as the swell subsided, but the saltwater stayed in my eyes and blurred my vision.

It was a full-screen wallpaper of me with my head crushed against Cady’s, and it was obvious from the angle that she had taken the photo at arms length. We were both smiling, and her nose was stuck in my ear.

7

We had made it through only one box. The one thing we were able to discern was that Cady was involved with an awful lot of cases and that we knew little actual law.

Henry rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”

I glanced back over my shoulder at City Hall. “Coming up on ten.”

He closed his folder. “We are looking for some personal connection in one of her cases?”

“Yep.”

“Someone who thinks that killing Devon Conliffe would help Cady?”

“Yep.”

“May I see the note again?” I pulled it from my pocket and handed it to him.

I waited, but he didn’t speak. I gestured toward the card. “We can deduce through this that the killer knows Cady, that the killer knew of Devon, and that the killer knows us.”

He was looking at a photograph of Cady and a young woman with long, dark hair. They were on horseback, and there was a sign that read Gladwyne Stables in the background. “A warning?”

“A threat?”

His eyes came back to mine. “And you think it is someone connected to her through work?”

“It’s the only criminal element that she has any contact with.” I shrugged. “When I’m looking for candy, I go to a candy store.” We looked at the boxes. He stood, moved toward the door, and stretched his back. “What are you doing?”

“I am going to go get two cups of coffee…” He turned the knob, opened the door, and slipped into the hallway. “And a lawyer.” Like a fool, I figured he would come back with only the coffee.

* * *

I leaned back in Cady’s chair and looked at the city stretching out along the Delaware River, the only dark band in what seemed like an ocean of diamonds on a velvet pad. It was easy to make out the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, with its blue cables and yellow buttresses stretching over to New Jersey, where I doubted life was any easier.

Who could have gotten him up there? The signs on the walkway said that the gates were closed and locked at 7 P.M., so it wasn’t a casual meeting. Somebody had wanted Devon Conliffe on that bridge, somebody who had wanted him dead.

I thought about the people I’d talked to earlier. Jimmie Tomko obviously held no great love for Devon, but in our brief interview he didn’t strike me as the type to toss people off bridges. It would be interesting to go to the firing range the next night to broaden the suspect pool. Ian O’Neil was intriguing—a young man with a past—and I figured he had a thing for Cady, but that’s about as far as that went as well.

I closed my eyes and listened to the skyscraper, to the elevators rattling up and down their shafts, to the retreating surf of the air conditioning, and to the building itself, sighing and shifting with the breeze like some colossal ship at dock.

I leaned back and felt as if I too were coming unmoored. Out of my element, it was possible that the deductive process I had always relied on was now leading me astray, or maybe it was just that I couldn’t stop thinking about Cady. I thought about walking over to the other side of the building to look out one of the windows so that I could find her. It felt like up here, with our ships anchored in the sky, I might be able to catch a glimpse of her as she used to be.

I could hear more than one pair of footsteps padding along the carpet. The door opened, and Henry stood there holding a bassinette; beside him stood a young woman with long, dark hair. She wore jeans, sneakers, and a western-style rhinestone belt; her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but she was the same woman as the one who was in the photograph.

“I got us a lawyer.” I stood up as he handed me a cup of coffee. He looked at the baby. “This is Riley Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, and this is Joanne Fitzpatrick, an associate of Cady’s.”

I noticed the way he used the word associate, like it was a friendship rather than being at the bottom of the firm’s food chain. Cady would have noticed, too. I took off my baseball cap and held out my hand. “Walt Longmire. I’m Cady’s father and potential felon.”

She laughed, then put her hand to her mouth and looked out the partially open doorway. She glanced at her daughter, Henry, and then me. “I understand you need some help.”

* * *

The current case on Cady’s agenda was one that involved the SEC and didn’t seem personal enough to get anybody thrown off a bridge. The only criminal case we had stumbled across so far was a pro bono one that concerned an inmate of Graterford Prison, a maximum-security facility in eastern Pennsylvania. He had a religious grievance, and Cady had named the file WHITE EYES. Henry was the first to ask. “How many Indian cases does the firm handle?”

She shook her head and looked a little nervous, the way Easterners do when talking about Indians to an Indian. “Hardly any, but Cady’s the one who would get the pro bono stuff concerning Native Americans. The plaintiff is one of those cell block lawyers with about forty-seven grievances.”

Henry looked up from the file. “If this William White Eyes is Indian, why is his vita marked Caucasian?”

Joanne shrugged, still looking slightly anxious. “White Indians. It’s really big in the prison system.”

“You’re kidding.” I rubbed my nose, which had started itching. I peeked in the bassinette, but Riley Elizabeth continued to sleep peacefully.

“No, I guess their experiences with our society didn’t work out so they decided to go over to the other side.” She glanced at Henry. “No offense.”

He smiled. “None taken.”

“He’s even got a 1983 filed with the DOC for not having a sweat lodge available to him in pursuance of the right to freely practice his religion according to PRP Act 71 P. S. 2402.”

Whatever that meant. “What are the pendings on this William White Eyes?”

“It looks like he’s been released, but he’s just a cook; no violent crimes.”

“Cook?”

“Designer drugs. Looks like William is a pretty smart kid with chemicals, but I doubt he’d know which end of a gun to point.”

Everybody tossed the files into the open box on Cady’s desk. “Jo, do you ever go shooting with Cady and that bunch?”

She looked at me, then shook her head. “Thursday nights? No, that was more of a Devon thing.” She thought for a moment and then glanced away. “There’s a guy from the district attorney’s office who used to go with them. Vince Osgood.”

“Vince Osgood’s the assistant district attorney who was suspended in the Roosevelt Boulevard incident?” She nodded. “Can you think of anybody who might want to protect Cady, to the point of going after Devon?” She looked at the Bear and me a little too long. “Besides us.”

She thought about it. “Not really. I mean, everybody loves Cady, and nobody was really crazy about Devon, but strongly enough to push him off the BFB? I don’t know.”

“Can I ask you another thing?”

“Sure.”

I glanced over at Henry, looking for a little backup. “Why was she dating him?” He smiled and shook his head, but I thought it was a pretty good question.

She paused for a second. “He wasn’t that bad of a guy, and I think he was a reclamation project.” She looked at me. “I don’t have to tell you; she was like that.” I stayed silent. “I mean, she knew about his problems…”

“And what were those?”

“I’m not sure how much of this I should really be telling you.”

“Please?” Begging, I have found, can be a very persuasive tool in law enforcement, not to mention with women.

She looked from me to Henry and then went ahead. “There was a drug problem a while back…”

“Does that include the Roosevelt Boulevard incident?”

She nodded her head. “Yeah, it was about then that they booted him out of the firm.”

“This firm?”

“Yes.” She crossed her arms, and I thought she might stop talking, but she didn’t. “Booted is probably too strong of a term. He was a recreational cocaine user that let the stuff get the better of him. His work was suffering and, when his yearly review came around, it was considered best that he pursue his career as counsel elsewhere.”

“Where did he go?”

“Hunt and Driscoll.” We tried to look blank. “It’s a very good firm.” She went on. “That’s how they met. Devon still had a few acquaintances here, and he and Cady went out to lunch with a mutual friend.”

“Who was that?”

She sighed and looked at the filing cabinets. Her eyes came back to mine. “I introduced them, but I didn’t tell them to start dating.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m just feeling bad about the way that things turned out.”

I smiled, just to let her know that I didn’t consider her responsible. “I think everybody is.” I picked up my coffee from the desk and took a sip; I wasn’t drinking it because I was thirsty. “So, you knew him pretty well?”

She looked at me, Henry, and then back at me. “He was very kind to me in a period when I needed it.” Unconsciously, her hand went out and touched the bassinette. “I dated him a couple of times before Cady. Nothing serious.”

“What was he like?”

She bit her lip. “I think he wanted people to like him; he just didn’t know how to get them to. I think he was already chemically imbalanced, and once you added the cocaine…”

“Where did he get the stuff?”

Her eyes sharpened. “I really wouldn’t know.”

“Who would?” I was pushing, but it was part of the job.

She watched me for a moment and then sighed. “There was the guy I mentioned, Vince Osgood, Oz. There was a story on WCAU about him where he said he liked to go out with the boys and kick some butt. Word has it he was trying to get himself appointed by the new governor as assistant attorney general, but he’s still under suspension for being involved in the Roosevelt Boulevard thing.”

“Was anybody prosecuted in that case?”

“One of the guys in the other car.”

“Do you know any details, like their names, and whether they were convicted?”

“I’m really not sure.” I made a face. “You don’t believe me?”

I cleared my throat, trying to soften the tone of what I said next. “I find it odd that you were dating but that you don’t know any more.”

She stiffened a little in her chair. “Like I said, Oz and I weren’t dating; he was just helping me out.” Her hand was still on the bassinette.

I glanced up at the photo of her on horseback and then back to mother and daughter. There were parts here, but I wasn’t quite sure how to put them together yet. “Do you mind if I ask who your baby’s father is?”

Her eyes looked directly at mine. “Yes, I do.”

* * *

When we got downstairs, two cops were standing in the middle of the lobby. “Hello, Michael.”

“How you guys doin’?”

“We’re all right.” I glanced back at the two security guards. “They call you?”

“Yeah, they thought it was suspicious that you went in with the lady, and then she came out without you.”

I waved at the security guards, but they didn’t wave back. I was beginning to think that Philly was just not a waving kind of town. “Who’s your friend?”

Michael gestured toward his partner. The young man beside him was roughly the same size as Michael and in very good shape. He looked like he was enjoying himself, too, and I figured we’d have to fight them because we’d never outrun them. “This is Malcolm Chavez. Malcolm, this is Sheriff Walt Longmire and his Native American sidekick, Henry Standing Bear.”

“Actually, I’m his sidekick.” Henry didn’t seem to care one way or the other. “Aren’t you guys out of your district?”

“Yeah, we heard about the wild west show on the radio and called it in ourselves.”

I looked at the Bear’s fringed jacket. “It’s your fault.” He didn’t seem to care about that either. “Are we in trouble?”

“Well, we have to file a report even if you didn’t do anything.”

“We didn’t do anything.”

“Yeah, well, we have to file a report which means you’re probably going to hear from Vic the Father.”

“Our Vic and this one’s dad.” Henry nodded, continuing to give the cops the wooden Indian treatment. I put my hands in my pockets and looked at my boots. “Do Katz and Gowder work for him?”

“Yes, they’re Homicide North, but I heard that Katz had switched over to Internal Affairs.” He glanced at Chavez, who nodded. “I’m not sure why he’s back with Gowder in homicide, but it must’ve been some real juice from upstairs. I’m sure Vic Senior ain’t happy about it.”

I looked back up. “I got a question for you. Does Vic the Father get along with anybody?”

It was the first time I’d seen him smile without any warmth in it. “I gotta feeling you’re gonna find out.”

We filed through the revolving doors and back onto the street. Chavez opened the back door of the cruiser for us. “You guys are just giving us a ride, right?” He nodded, and we got in.

It was the beginning of the late watch, so they dropped Henry off at the Academy and drove me over the bridge into their own district. The lights on the Schuylkill River reflected the buildings along the west side of the city, and I got a quick glimpse of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the stairs that Sylvester Stallone ran up in Rocky. Just past the museum, the eerie outline of Boathouse Row gave the empty impression of haunted houses, and I tried to think about something other than how the back seat of the cruiser smelled.

I watched the back of the two patrolmen’s heads through the screening, the high and tight haircuts and the perfect uniforms; they even wore their hats in the car. Most of my stuff was pretty threadbare, like me. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d requisitioned a duty shirt.

Chavez responded to a call on the radio as we drove past 30th Street Station on the way to the hospital. Michael leaned back, laid his arm across the seat, and looked at me through the rearview as we waited at a stoplight. “We have to make a little detour.”

“As long as your mother doesn’t mind staying with Cady a little longer.”

Michael looked at Chavez, who smiled back at me. “Hey, man, did he just say something about your mother?”

They both exhaled a laugh and then turned on the light bar and sirens. We turned up 34th and turned left on Lancaster Avenue. I called Lena. She said to take my time, that there was no change, and that she was reading a Margaret Coel and was fine. The neighborhood began changing from the late-night bustle of Market and the colleges as we headed west; the buildings became smaller, rundown, and dirty. People began disappearing, and the streetlights grew farther apart. We were in a place like the Indian reservations back home, a place where dreams would die unquestioned, a place for the quick and, more than likely, the dead.

We traveled a ways up Lancaster before Michael responded to another call and slowed the cruiser to a stop, turning off the lights and siren. We parked in a deserted gas station. There was a wig shop across the street at the end of the block with only one unbroken window. Michael switched off the headlights and let his eyes adjust to the dark. He peered past the corner, but I had to lean forward to see where he was looking.

It was an abandoned lot, unwanted and unoccupied except for the usual urban detritus. There had probably been more than one building there at one time, but they had collapsed or burned. Only a three-story row house was still standing. I could tell that it had been something in its day, but the years of neglect and abuse had left it looking decrepit and dangerous. There were no lights in the building, only the mirrored illumination in the broken windows, which reflected the glow of the one streetlight left lit half a block away and the close shine of the low-flying clouds. There was garbage everywhere, and a barricade of dumpsters overflowed across the street.

Chavez turned his head to look at me, putting his palm out flat to introduce the scene. “May I present Toy Diaz’s Fort, the Wanamaker’s of crack houses.” I could make out patterns of movement in the shadows as he spoke. “The seller takes the money from the buyer, the seller goes into the building to give the money to the holder, the holder gives the stuff to the seller, and the seller comes back out and gives the stuff to the buyer. Pretty slick, and according to the letter of the law, at no time is the seller on the street with the money and the stuff…”

I finished the statement for him. “Which means possession, but not possession with intent to distribute.”

Chavez laughed. “There’s a new sheriff in town.”

I watched as Michael’s jaw clenched like Vic’s. “Some scumbag realtor in the Northeast owns the building, and he gets a monster kickback from the whole deal.”

“Who is Toy Diaz?”

“Salvadoran refugee, truly a grade-A asshole. His brother caught some time a few years back, but we’re still trying to get the devil himself.”

Chavez pointed. “With all the open space around the building, we can’t get near the place without somebody giving the high sign. We come roarin’ up and they just pitch the stuff and the guns.” They were silent for a moment. “There’s a lot of guns in there.”

“Tell ’em about the 32s.”

“That’s what we were just responding to on the radio. Business gets good, and they just call in a 10-32 on the other side of the district to keep us distracted.” Even with my limited knowledge of the city ten code, I knew a 10-32 was a man with gun and a priority call. “They keep about twenty vials out on the street, hidden all over the place. I found one in an empty potato chip bag one time. They sell those out, then they go back in and get more, usually during a shift change.”

Michael shook his head. “They don’t even walk away when we roll on ’em anymore. We’ve hit that damn place a dozen times now; we hit ’em twice this evening. Nothing.”

We watched as the shadowy figures went about their business. I wanted to get back to Cady but started thinking about what the Cheyenne would do in this situation. “Do you think they count?”

Both of the young officers turned to look at me. “What?”

“Do you think they count how many cops go in during a bust, and how many cops come out?”

* * *

They called a point-to-point for some of their buddies so that the radio signal wouldn’t reach Central. The eleven officers who showed up were like Moretti and Chavez—young, hopeful, and pissed off. Michael started to describe the plan.

Three cruisers would make their standard run at the place, with the fourth parked close but not within view. Nine of the eleven officers would rush the Fort, and the two men in the fourth car would call in a 10-32, pretending they’d gotten the call from the district. The cops would race out of the place, jumping in their units to respond to the fake point-to-point that no one else in the district would hear besides them and the drug dealers monitoring the police radio. The trick was that four officers would remain on the roof of the building and wait about five minutes for the dealers to reacquire their weapons and restock from inside.

Malcolm Chavez wanted to be on the roof squad, but Michael convinced him that he could go better undetected by the dealers since all white guys look alike. Chavez and another officer by the name of Johnston would do the fourth car position and call in the thirty-two at the appropriate time. Only the radios in the immediate vicinity would receive the call, but that would include the spotter the drug dealers were using, who would watch as the cops all piled out of the house, jumped in their cruisers, and sped off. At least all the cops he knew about. Then the ones on the roof would rush the building from behind. My job was to sit in the back of the cruiser on my hands and try not to think of why I was here and not with my daughter.

* * *

“So, when you were planning your trip to Philadelphia, did you ever think you’d be sittin’ in the ghetto with two brothers?”

“You bet.”

Rayfield Johnston was a likable sort, a little older than the others. He had been an elementary school teacher but had grown restless and decided to switch careers. I told him about my experiences reading to Durant Elementary School students. He thought it was pretty funny.

Johnston shook his head and compared notes. “We got the Police Athletic League, and I umpire up north of Belmont…”

Chavez blew air out. “Shit…”

Johnston laughed. “Combat pay, man. Combat pay.”

The radio broke in with Michael’s voice. Static. “Unit 18, 10-34, Lancaster and Pauley.” We listened through the open windows as the sirens of the associated units sped toward the Fort about two blocks away. You could actually make out the blush of the surrounding buildings as the flicking red lights caromed off the uneven surfaces of the derelict row houses.

I thought about the people in the little buildings, dwarfed by the towers of Center City only a short distance away. You could see the tops of the skyscrapers from here, hovering over the moat of the Schuylkill like some magical kingdom. I wondered what they thought about the activity just outside their doors. Would they be happy that this little cottage industry of poison was being interrupted, or were we just another event in a constant cycle of tired desperation and civic stupidity? I looked at the heads of the two men in the front seat and thought about Johnston being screamed at by over-enthusiastic parents and coaches, and about Chavez returning to a place he had fought so hard to escape. Hope is what it always comes down to, whether it’s a trailer home on the other side of the tracks in Durant, Wyoming, or a tiny row house in the Wild West of Philadelphia. I smiled to myself and hoped my thoughts wouldn’t carry to the patrolmen up front—they would laugh. Far beyond the badges and the guns, hope and laughter were their most powerful weapons.

Chavez started the car, and it seemed like he was in slow motion as he lifted the mic to his lips. “Unit 41, I’ve got a 10-32 at 52nd and Market.” We listened as the sirens fired up again and the light show increased its intensity. The cavalry had made its charge and now appeared to be retreating.

Chavez hung the mic back on the dash and slipped the cruiser into gear. “Here we go.”

We slipped through the remaining blocks to another corner, made a left, and were looking straight at the back of the row house. There were partial balconies at the rear of the building all the way up to the third floor, with a flight of stairs winding their way from the righthand side. The remnants of aluminum awnings cast shadows across the back of the structure, making it difficult to see where anyone might be stationed. There was an abandoned car with its wheels removed and what looked like the remnants of an old chain-link fence stretching across the backyard. It was like a demilitarized zone, and all I could think of was the amount of guns that were about to converge there.

When Chavez slid the cruiser behind a derelict van, he and Johnston got out of the vehicle; the young officer reached back and lifted the handle to allow me to join them on the street.

“Lose your batons and hats.”

Johnston turned and looked at me, neither of them having heard a word I said. “What?”

“Lose the batons and hats; they’re going to fall off anyway. Turn your jackets inside out so that none of the metal reflects.” They both looked at me for a moment more and then did as I told them. They looked so young.

Chavez, having prepared himself, studied Johnston. “You still look like a cop, man.”

Johnston smiled. “Yeah? Well, you do, too.” They both turned to look at me. “He doesn’t.” I smiled and took off my Phillies cap, placing it on Chavez’s head.

He pulled it off at an angle, gangsta style. “You gonna be all right while we’re gone?”

I looked up and down the street, where there was only one light on in a second-story window at the end of the block. “Looks pretty quiet in my part of the neighborhood.”

“That could change.” He reached back in the open window and unlocked a black Mossberg 590 DA 12-gauge and handed it to me. “You know how to use that?”

I checked the breech and safety. “Yep.”

He smiled. “I bet you do.”

The requisite amount of time had passed, and in the next few minutes Michael and his team would begin a very noisy descent from the roof. We were counting on it.

I watched as Chavez and Johnston moved around the discarded van and started working their way across the street and over the sagging fence. They stayed apart, and I didn’t hear any warning sounds coming from the Fort as they slowly covered the fifty yards to the abandoned car.

I draped the Mossberg down along my leg after rechecking the safety, resting the end of the barrel on the toe of my boot. I figured if anybody were looking out the window, it would be prudent to not advertise the shotgun. I moved along the side of the van for a better vantage point and watched as the squad cars returned after pulling a quick U-turn. Michael and his group should now be descending the stairwell inside the building.

I could hear the thud of the back door being kicked in and watched as Chavez and Johnston disappeared into the darkness. People were yelling all over the place, and I could make out someone from inside shouting that they were the police and that whomever they were talking to should freeze. There was more yelling, and I watched as the beams from the cops’ Maglites flashed inside the row house, some on the third floor and some on the second.

There were people running everywhere; the patrolmen coming from around the front tackled a few. Some of the more lithe individuals were able to slip by and disappeared into the streets and alleys beyond.

It was then that I heard the first shot, that cattle-prod reaction to the sharp sound of gunfire. It doesn’t sound like in the movies; it is more like a quick smacking sound that makes you second-guess. I heard the sound again and was pretty sure it was coming from the second floor. I looked down at the 12-gauge in my hands, noticing that I had already clicked off the safety.

I moved across the street and was approaching the sagging fence when I saw some commotion at the second-story window and heard the report of a handgun. I sped up.

An uneven image crowded the window, and I watched in horror as what looked like two men scrambled and then tumbled from the second story. They crashed through the partial aluminum awning of the first floor and slid onto the back porch. There were more shots with a lot of screaming and yelling before one of the figures stood and leapt from the stoop, clearing the back of the collapsed porch in one leap. He turned as other people crowded the doorway and reached for something at his waistband. He tripped but converted the fall into a lope that brought him back up on a course for where I now stood.

It appeared as if his eyes were right on me as I stood there at the fence with the shotgun trained at his middle. I could make out Chavez’s voice screaming for him to stop and prayed that they wouldn’t open fire with me directly in line, but no bullets came whizzing from the Fort, only a half-naked man who still seemed to be fussing with something in the low-hanging pants at his midriff.

The police behind him screamed again, but he wasn’t listening, intent only on his line of escape. As he got closer, I could see the well-defined muscles that covered his body and figured he was roughly my size, but in a lot better shape.

I looked over the shotgun and then thought about what I was doing and where I was. I clicked the safety back on. As he got closer, I could see the tattoos that seemed to cover his body. He was a monster. I stayed alongside the abandoned car for a moment and then took two steps, catching him halfway over the fence.

* * *

There were two things they taught me when I was an offensive lineman at USC back in the Dark Ages. One: after a holding call, grab anything that moves because they’re not going to make two holding calls in a row. Second: never underestimate the power of a good clothesline tackle. I felt the liquid thump of a body giving way as my right arm came up and caught him in the middle of the chest, forcing the air out of him,

He didn’t make it over the fence, but what was in his waistband did; a small 9 mm semiautomatic pistol that struck the sidewalk and skittered over the curb and into the street, next to a sewer grating.

I watched as he gurgled for a moment, then breathed in an unsteady motion, clutching his abdomen and rolling from side to side; I noticed in a moment of irony that he was wearing black alligator cowboy boots. As one of the cops made it to the fence, I slipped the shotgun under my arm and walked into the street to look for the automatic, but I was pretty sure it’d dropped into the sewer.

There was a gaggle of police vehicles and EMTs, all with their gumballs going, at the front of the Fort, so before anybody with more authority could get back to where we were, I handed the shotgun to a patrolman named Fraser. His partner rolled the already complaining man over and cuffed him.

“This one had an automatic, but I think it dropped into the sewer grate.”

Fraser smiled. “We’ll light it up and take a look.”

“Everybody okay over there?”

“Moretti stepped on a nail, so the big pussy’s going to have to get a tetanus shot.”

The large man in the cuffs cocked his head and stopped groaning long enough to yell toward me. “Hey, motherfucker, my ribs are broken!”

I looked back at Fraser. “What was all the gunfire?”

“Hey, motherfucker, who are you?!”

He motioned to the drug dealer. “One of his buddies threw a few into the stairwell before shooting himself in the leg.”

“Motherfucker, I asked you a question!”

The other cop yanked him a little to the side. “Shut the fuck up, DuVall!”

“Who went out the window with this guy?”

The patrolman looked serious for a moment. “Johnston.”

Two of the EMTs were working on Rayfield by the time I got there. He had dislocated his shoulder and broken a collarbone, but he was smiling when I leaned against the porch, eye to eye with him. They were stabilizing his arm and preparing a gurney to transport. “How you feeling?”

He groaned. “Like shit. How’d we do?”

I looked around at the assembled cops, spotting Chavez and some of the others smiling like guys who had gotten away with something. “I think pretty good.”

* * *

My nostrils flared, and my nose hurt. I rubbed it cautiously and looked at Cady. I thanked Lena and apologized for being late, but I didn’t ask the usual changing-of-the-guard question, whether there had been any improvement, and Lena hadn’t volunteered any information. I wondered if that was the first phase in giving up, if I had passed over some threshold of hope. I didn’t want to start saying Cady as I had said Martha, with a level of such misery and despair that I just couldn’t say it without people looking away.

I sat in the chair by Cady’s bed and remembered a game we used to play when she was around eight. If I would get home late, later than her bedtime, I would carefully make my way down the creaking hallway of our rented house, softly push apart the painted surfaces of the door and jamb, and stand in the backlight of the doorway. She was supposed to be long asleep, and she was a very good actress, but I could tell. If I thought it was a performance, I’d walk over to the bed and place my face only inches from hers, say the magic word, and be rewarded with an explosion of giggles.

I scooted my chair over and rested my chin on the sore arm that I had carefully placed on Sleeping Beauty’s bed. I leaned in very close to her face and whispered. “Faker.”

She didn’t move.

8

This time I got the ride downtown; as a matter of fact, I got a ride to another state.

The big Crown Vic took the Broad Street entrance ramp onto I-95 southbound. There were ducks on a lake off to the right; I felt like joining them.

By the time the PPD had gotten its investigative ducks in a row and been fully informed about what I’d been up to, it was late in the afternoon. Katz and Gowder had picked me up from Cady’s, where I had retreated for a shower, and hadn’t mentioned anything about missing our breakfast. Henry had taken the afternoon shift at the hospital and had called to warn me of the detectives’ impending arrival. I had taken Dog for a walk, and they had been waiting when I returned.

I studied the small red dots on the frames of Katz’s designer glasses and wondered where he had gotten them. “So, you guys are going to drive me back to Wyoming?”

He sighed deeply as Gowder changed lanes, took the unmarked car into the far lefthand one, and leveled off at an even ninety; evidently, wherever we were going, we were in a hurry.

Katz cleared his throat. “I’m trying to figure out if I have made a terrible mistake.”

I could feel my face redden a little. “No, you haven’t…”

He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “I’m trying to figure out if you are going to be an asset or a detriment.”

Gowder was watching me in the rearview mirror as I answered. “An asset. Cross my heart.”

Katz blinked for the first time. “We have about 350 homicides per annum here in Philadelphia, and we try to keep the number of police officers on that list to a minimum.” He glanced at Gowder, who might have smiled. His eyes returned to me. “Do you have any idea how lucky you were last night?”

“Probably not.”

He nodded. “Personally, I don’t think you have any idea, but since the Chief Inspector’s son was injured…”

“He stepped on a nail.” It was the first time Gowder had spoken, and Katz looked at him like he was a potted plant with blight. He stared at the side of Gowder’s head until Gowder leaned an elbow on the window ledge and covered the smile with his index finger.

After a moment, Katz looked at me again. “So, do you mind telling me how your adventures last night are going to aid in our investigation?”

“They’re not.”

He compressed his lips. “You can’t do things like that anymore.”

We rode along in silence, Katz studying me a while longer before handing me a manila envelope with more than a few files inside. I looked back up at the two of them as we rocketed down I-95. “Devon Conliffe?”

Katz spoke over his shoulder. “You’ve got thirty minutes.”

I opened the envelope. “Do you guys mind if I ask where we’re going?”

“The opera.” Gowder smiled, and the mole under his eye kicked up in the rearview mirror.

* * *

The Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware, incorporated the same wedding-cake characteristics as Philadelphia’s City Hall but with slightly less drama, inside or out. French Second Empire with a cast-iron façade, it was lit from below with floodlights that highlighted the detail.

A grumpy, elderly gentleman was sitting on a stool in the lobby and ushered us into the main auditorium, where Gowder and I sat just below the balcony. Katz continued on into the dark of the theater to a large soundboard that straddled two rows at house center and tapped the stage manager on the shoulder.

The young woman pulled her earphones aside and spoke with him. He waited as she returned to her headset, prefacing and ending her conversation into it with the word “Maestro.” The seats were comfortable; I watched as Gowder propped his feet over the back of the next row, and I noticed that his socks did, indeed, match today’s ensemble. He whispered, with his head inclined toward me. “Where in the world did you get the idea for the crack house?”

I also whispered. “OIT.”

“What’s that?”

“Old Indian Trick.”

He smiled the becoming smile, and we watched the rehearsal. It was the end of Act II, where Monterone confronts the hunchback, reaffirming the curse he had placed on Rigoletto and the Duke. The irony of the father/daughter opera was not lost on me, and I could only hope that Cady and I would have a happier ending.

The scenery and costumes were brilliant, with the Duke’s salon and adjoining apartments drifting to the sixteenth-century Mantuan skyline. It was night, and the jester was watching as the tortured father was dragged away. Inspector Victor Moretti cut a bold figure as Monterone, in a torn robe stripped aside to reveal his lashed back. He was tall and lean like a Doberman, and even from this distance I could feel his eyes. Lena was right about his voice; Victor could sing his baritone ass off.

I watched and thought about the manila folder the two detectives had shared with me. The chain holding the gate to the north-side entrance of the bridge closed had been cut with a substantial pair of bolt-cutters, and there had been a scuff mark on the sidewalk next to the railing of the bridge that indicated that the perpetrator had worn leather-soled shoes or boots. There were no fingerprints at either location, and it was surmised that the killer had also worn gloves.

The decedent had been propelled over the railing and across the PATCO rail lines before landing in the alley below. Somebody had thrown Devon in an arch close to twenty feet before he fell. I would have suspected me, too.

The topper was Devon’s blood sample, which indicated that he was loaded with ketamine hydrochloride, otherwise known as Special K, a club drug that he had snorted in powder form. A chemical cousin to the animal tranquilizer PCP, ketamine creates a dreamlike state by binding the serotonin transmitters in the brain, consequently destroying the user’s ability to regulate mood, appetite, sleep, and temperature, but it supposedly feels good.

That was probably how Devon had been coerced onto the BFB late that night, in search of another hit; he’d got it, all right, and then had been thrown off the bridge. I was working on a Rasputin-like scenario when I noticed Detective Katz standing in the aisle with Verdi’s Monterone.

They were talking sharply, but sotto voce, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t in English. I looked at Gowder. “Are they speaking Italian?”

He nodded. “Asa does it to piss Victor off. His Italian is better.” He chuckled to himself. “He does everything he can to piss Victor off, including fuck his wife.”

I sat there for a moment and then turned in my seat. “What?” He didn’t have time to answer because the next thing we both knew, Chief Inspector Moretti was standing with his arms folded in the aisle in front of us. It could have been the stage makeup, but he seemed like the most intense person I’d met in quite a while. His hair flourished in a sweeping mane with eyebrows to match, and he wore a silvered goatee. With the torn robe and lacerated back, it was like meeting the returning Jesus Christ; a pissed-off, returning-like-a-lion Jesus Christ.

I smiled, but he didn’t. “Sheriff Longmire?”

I stuck my hand out. “Walt.”

He looked at my hand, then back at me, his voice flat and emotionless. “Sheriff, I’m terribly sorry about what has happened to your daughter.”

I let the hand drop. “Thank you.”

“But you must realize that you have no jurisdiction here in the city of Philadelphia or the state of Pennsylvania.”

“I am aware of that.” I was also aware that we were in Wilmington, Delaware, but figured now was a bad time to argue geographic discrepancies.

He glanced at both Gowder and Katz. “We have a number of very fine detectives assigned to the incident that concerns your daughter and to the one concerning Mr. Conliffe.” He paused for a moment. “You need to listen to this next part very carefully.” He unfolded his arms and placed his hands on the seat in front of me. “If I find that you have involved yourself in this case, in any way, I will have you in the Roundhouse so fast your eyes won’t have time to water.” He leaned in with his exposed and stage-makeupped chest. “Do you understand me?”

I nodded. “Yep, but before you get yourself all worked up, you better take a look at this.” I pulled the card from my shirt pocket and handed it to him.

He took the envelope and, to my unseen amusement, Katz lent him the designer glasses. He looked back up at me as the detectives gave me worried looks. “Where did this come from?”

“It was left in my daughter’s room. None of the staff had any idea who could have left it or when.”

He lowered the glasses and handed them back. “Did you know about this?”

I interrupted. “I asked them to let me tell you.”

He held the card a little higher. “So, from this, we are to assume that you are already involved.”

“It kind of looks that way.”

“Let’s make sure it stays in an unofficial capacity.”

“You bet.” I waited a moment. “But can I give you a piece of advice?” He didn’t move. “Monterone wouldn’t wear the Rolex.”

* * *

“I think that went well, don’t you?”

They weren’t talking to me.

“Guys, I’m sorry…”

Katz didn’t turn this time when he spoke. “We have just given you access to some of the most sensitive evidence in this case, and you withhold something like this?” He held the note, now safely encased in a ziplock bag.

“I was going to tell you about it.”

“When?”

I looked out the window and into the velvety darkness of the Delaware River toward the New Jersey pine barrens. “After you showed me the reports.”

Katz finally turned and looked at me. “This is not a poker game where we call and see; this is a murder investigation, and if you don’t start coming clean with us, then all bets are off, and you can take the next flight back to cowtown.”

We sat there for a little longer. “I’ve got more.” They looked at each other. “I questioned the security guard at the Franklin Institute, Esteban Cordero, in a little more detail.” I had to be careful how I did this, so that none of the blame would fall back on the inexperienced Michael Moretti. “He remembered that a young man had banged on the door after Cady’s fall, but I don’t think it was Devon Conliffe.” I had the detectives’ full attention as I explained about the incongruities of the man’s appearance and the red tie. “After we looked at the picture on the cover of the Daily News, he positively stated that it wasn’t Devon who knocked on the door.”

Katz turned to look at me again. “So someone else was there.”

“Someone who identified himself as Devon Conliffe and was gone by the time the guard got outside.” As they absorbed that, I asked them a question. “What can you guys tell me about Devon’s Roosevelt Boulevard incident?”

It was Katz’s turn to sigh. “That was yours, Tony. You tell it.”

“It was before Thanksgiving.” Gowder made eye contact with me in the rearview. “Assistant district attorney with the Special Narcotics Prosecution Unit…”

“Vince Osgood.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

I paused a moment, not wanting to get anyone else in trouble. “He sounds important.”

He laughed. “Important enough to get charged by a federal grand jury for violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act; about a half-dozen counts for racketeering, possession with intent, conspiracy to extort money, conspiracy to manufacture drugs, witness tampering, and retaliation against a witness.”

“This guy’s on our side?”

“Wait, it gets better,” Katz interrupted. “Tell him about the retaliation.”

“Tim Gomez, writer for the Daily News, investigates and writes about Osgood’s activities with the Special Narcotics. Being a good reporter, he catches wonderboy Vince outside 13th and Samson, where he asks the assistant DA about property seized by the drug task force. Oz loses his mind, has to be forcibly restrained after kicking Gomez and screaming about how he’s going to bitch-slap him all the way to Camden if he doesn’t lay off.”

“Always good to have positive relations with the fourth estate.”

Gowder laughed. “Some of the extortion charges dealt with sums over $100,000.”

I shook my head and looked out the window. “What about the possession/distribution charges?”

Gowder shook his own head and concentrated on the road. “Oz was reported to have watched another man cook about 118 grams of designer stuff and then accepted half in June of last year for distribution. Local kingpin Toy Diaz is picked up on a traffic stop by Osgood’s buddies in the drug task force and relieved of about two million dollars worth.”

“Must’ve been a big car.” I thought about it. “Toy Diaz is the operator of the house we took out last night.”

“Could be. He’s got his fingers in a lot of pies.”

“In the aforementioned transaction, all the evidence disappeared from the holding unit, and that under Vince Osgood’s supervision.”

“What about Roosevelt Boulevard?”

I saw the mole kick up again, and I was sure he was smiling. “Easter Sunday, and Oz leaves the office with good friend and fellow attorney…”

“Devon Conliffe.”

“You got it.”

I glanced at Katz. “Easter morning?”

Gowder went on. “As they pull away, they notice that they are being followed by a Toyota station wagon occupied by two nonwhite males, approximately thirty years of age. Osgood pulls a sawed-off shotgun from the under the seat and rests it in his lap. Then he instructs Conliffe to take the 9 mm, which he keeps for insurance, from the glove box and be prepared for what happens next.” He took a deep breath, glanced at Katz, and continued. “Being a concerned citizen and aware that gunfire may result, Oz takes the exit at Fifth and pulls up at an abandoned lot in Fentonville…” His voice slowed for effect. “Three congested city miles from where they started. Oz’s initial statement was that they had decided to confront the individuals in a neutral area.”

I cleared my throat. “Going to a police station didn’t occur to them?”

“Evidently not.” Gowder eased his way around a slowpoke, and I noticed we were approaching ninety again. “Oz states that, after a brief but heated discussion punctuated by rapid small-arms fire, he saw the passenger’s head thrown back on impact and then the Toyota sped away.”

I had to ask. “What was Oz…?”

“A Hummer.”

I nodded. “I heard that Osgood also stated that they might have been KKK?”

“Yeah, his statements were a little confusing. Then Toy Diaz showed up at Temple University Hospital with numerous shotgun pellet wounds and a wounded Ramon Diaz, who had just done a three spot at Graterford.”

“Ramon any relation to Toy?”

He inclined his head to indicate I was a good student. “Brothers.”

“So it was revenge?”

Katz answered. “Well, that was the tack the U.S. District Court took, but Toy Diaz continued to state, with a great deal of emphasis, that it was an independent capitalistic venture that took a surprising turn.”

“Osgood didn’t want to pay for the drugs?”

“That was Diaz’s story, but since he is from El Salvador, and a four-time loser on assorted drug charges, his statements were taken with the proverbial grain of judicial salt.”

“Where is Toy Diaz?”

“Good question.”

“What’d Devon Conliffe say?”

Gowder laughed. “He said whatever Osgood said, and whenever Oz’s story changed, he said that, too.”

Katz studied me. I glanced up and watched the lights of Penn’s Landing reflect from his glasses. “So, Osgood was suspended?”

It was quiet in the Crown Vic as we took the off-ramp just past the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. “Yes, but he has a lot of friends in the city.” There was a moment’s pause as we stopped at a red light. “I assume we’re taking you to your daughter’s place, but if you need to go to the hospital we can drop you there.”

“Actually, as much as I’d rather go to the hospital, I need to go to a gun shop up on Spring Garden.”

They were both looking at me now.

* * *

When we got to Tactical Training Specialists, I had Gowder pull into the secured and packed parking lot and waited as he released the locks. There were no handles on the inside, so I waited for them to let me out. “Graterford.”

Gowder was looking at me, and it was a relief to see his entire face. “What?”

“It might be nothing, but there was a pro bono case that Cady was working on when we went through the papers at her office; something about Graterford. A white Indian.” I thought about it for a moment. “William White Eyes.”

They both looked at me blankly, Gowder cocking his head in disbelief. “A white Indian?”

“I’ve been told that it’s not that unusual.”

“By who?”

I folded my hands in my lap. “This guy White Eyes was trying to arrange for a sweat lodge in Graterford through the freedom of religious expression legislation. It was a pro bono case Cady had worked on, the only criminal case I could find.”

Katz shook his head. “There are four thousand guys up in Graterford…”

“It could be nothing, but I thought I should mention it.”

“William White Eyes?” I nodded. Katz wrote the name in a small note pad. “We’ll check it out.”

I stepped out, and Katz closed my door. “Thank you.”

“Hey, you’re doing us a favor.” He noticed the bright yellow Hummer parked alongside the building. “Want company?”

I looked back, thought about what Gowder had intimated about Lena Moretti, and looked at Katz with new eyes. “No, I think I’ll get better responses in my official unofficial capacity.”

Gowder’s voice caught me as I approached the wire-mesh, steel security door. “Hey, Sheriff?” I stopped and half-turned to look at the detective, still seated in the cruiser. “Is that a government-issue Colt .45 I see in a pancake holster at the small of your back?”

I stood there for a moment. “Why? Does it make me look fat?”

* * *

The party was in full swing. I was in a side hallway with Jimmie Tomko, and I could hear music playing and the excited sound of young people’s voices, younger than me at least. I held up a finger, pulled out Cady’s cell phone, and called Lena. She said there was no change but that she wanted dinner at the end of her shift. I told her it was still her pick and that Henry had promised to be there in an hour. I told her I’d met Vic the Father, and she said she was sorry. I left out the part about who had introduced us.

I’ve spent a lot of time in gun ranges but never one like this. The entire shooters’ area was carpeted, and the walls were paneled with black walnut and decorated with green-matted Currier and Ives hunting scenes illuminated by turtleshell sconces. There was a bar, but all I saw were water bottles and nonalcoholic beer. The back wall was lined with tufted leather sectionals that gave spectators an unobstructed view of the seven firing ranges in front of them.

The place was crowded, and I stepped back as a diminutive blonde with a 9 mm Beretta approached. I looked at the congestion and then at Tomko. “Are they all lawyers?” He nodded, the glass eye drifting off. “Good time to spray for ’em.”

I tried to find a familiar face, finally recognizing a striking, dark-haired woman at the bar. As the blonde half-pointed the Beretta at our feet, I released Jimmie Tomko to his appointed rounds. “Greta, you need to not point the weapon toward…”

I turned sideways and made my way past the staging table, all the while trying to spot someone who could be Vince Osgood. They were an attractive crowd, well-dressed and coiffed, but they were lawyers, not paupers, so it was to be expected.

There was a tall man holding forth at the center firing range, his voice probably sounding normal to his muffed ears and in competition to the hip-hop music. There was a small man standing with him, and I was starting to think it odd that no one was firing when the blonde who had aimed at my feet let rip with a scattered salvo, only two rounds out of fourteen striking the paper silhouette. Jimmie Tomko raised an eyebrow at me; just in case, I kept my front toward the range to keep from being shot.

I watched as the short Latino peeled away from the tall guy so that he would intersect with me about halfway across the crowded floor. I tried to step to one side, but he countered, and we were nose to sternum. I nodded an apology and stepped to the right, just as he did. I was struck by the precision of his appearance, how defined his hair and clothes seemed. As he looked up, I noticed that his pupils were very large and that they gave his face a lifeless quality.

His voice was soft and cultured. “Pardon.”

“No, my fault.” He slipped to the side before I could continue the conversation and watched me as I made my way across the room.

Joanne Fitzpatrick’s eyes locked with mine as I lumbered up to her. “Hey, Jo.” I looked around for effect. “What’re you doing here?”

She smiled. “I thought you would be happy to see a friendly face.”

She didn’t have one of the cases that most of people in the room carried. “You don’t shoot?”

“No.”

“Me either.” She laughed, and the smile was an exact replica of the one that was in the horseback photo in Cady’s office. I took one of the bottled waters from the bar and glanced back over my shoulder, but the tiny man was gone. “Do you know that guy I was just dancing with?”

“Who?”

“The little guy?”

“No.”

I nodded my head at the tall man at center. “Is that Osgood?” She nodded slightly. “He doesn’t seem real broke up about his buddy Devon.”

She leaned in. “No, he doesn’t.”

About that time, Osgood unloaded his 9 mm into the paper target at the center of the firing range. The kid was pretty good. There was a smattering of applause as he turned and took a perfunctory bow, taking just an extra moment to glance at me.

I turned back to Jo. “C’mon, I’ll teach you how to shoot.”

* * *

Tomko handed me a tray with a box of .45 ACPs and a questioning look until I patted the small of my back. By the time I made my way to the other side of the room, Osgood was openly watching me. I gave him a tight-lipped smile and a nod, but he didn’t respond.

I set Jo up at range 7 along the wall in hopes that numerology would be on our side. “I’ve never done this before.”

I unsnapped the thumb strap from the Colt at my back, pulled it, and placed it on the counter with the slide group locked in the open position and the magazine removed. “That’s what they all say.” I palmed the seven-shot clip in my hand, dropped it to my side, and told her to pick up the .45.

“It looks old.”

“Older than you.” After getting her acquainted with the particularities of the weapon, she adopted a wide stance with her arms extended; we both now wore the hearing protectors that had been hanging in the stall.

She squeezed the trigger as instructed, and the big Colt jumped in her hands; it was pointed at the ceiling, but I caught her shoulder. She peered at the paper target but could see no effect, unaware that the gun hadn’t fired. I pulled one of her ear cups back. “You flinched.”

“No, I didn’t.”

I cocked the empty .45. “Try it again, but make sure you keep your eyes open this time.” I put her ear cup back, and she imitated the exact same motion, but this time the automatic stayed steady.

She turned and looked at me. “It didn’t fire.”

“It didn’t last time, either.” I showed her the clip in my hand. “The involuntary response is pretty common. You think the gun’s going to jump, so you make it jump.” I took the Colt, popped the mag into place, cocked the slide, and placed her hands around the gun, aimed toward the target. “Don’t worry about blinking; a lot of people do it.”

She spoke out of the side of her mouth. “Do you?”

I looked at the target. “No.”

She doubled her attentions on the silhouette and squeezed, all her efforts going into not blinking. The .45 blew her back and, from her expression, there was no doubt in her mind that it had fired this time. We both peered at the target; there was a perforation at his left kidney on the line between the four and five score. “Much better.”

She smiled and pulled the ear cup back again. “Do they all kick like that?”

I smiled back. “No. This one’s just an antique, heavy, hard to aim, slow rate of fire…” Her smile faded quickly as she looked over my right shoulder, past the barrier, and I figured I had accomplished what I’d set out to do.

She handed me the automatic and pulled her ear protectors all the way off. “Hello, Oz.”

I didn’t turn but lowered the hammer on the Colt and pushed the safety. His voice wasn’t what I’d expected; it was higher-pitched and discordant.

“I thought I’d come over here and see who was shooting the howitzer.” It was silent, except for the music and a few conversations that were still going on a little ways away. “Who’s your friend?”

Her face remained still. “This is Walt Longmire, Cady’s father.”

“Oh, my God.” He was as tall as me, mid-thirties, with an athletic build, a receding hairline, and the ubiquitous goatee. “I am so sorry about your daughter.”

I placed the Colt on the counter. “Thank you.”

He switched the Glock to his other hand, and I noticed the clip was in and the safety was off. He extended his right. “Vince Osgood. They call me Oz.” I nodded, and he continued. “I was a friend of Cady’s.”

I noticed he used the past tense, which made me want to grab his throat. “You were also a friend of Devon Conliffe?”

His eyes were steady. “I was…Did you know Devon?”

I pointed at the Glock in his left hand. “Would you mind securing that weapon before we talk?”

He froze up for a second. “It’s got a safe-action feature…”

I did my best ol’ boy routine. “I’m just a little nervous around unsecured firearms.”

He reached down and pushed the button, the image of allocated grace. “Sure. I’m around these things so much that they just become second nature.”

“I was able to meet Devon just before the accident.”

“Yeah, I heard about that.” He leaned against the stall, and I could smell his aftershave. “You and I should talk.”

I nodded and glanced at Joanne. “I agree. You might be in a position to give me a better insight as to what’s going on.”

He puckered his lips and looked down at his four-hundred-dollar shoes, the picture of the all-knowing assistant DA, if suspended, there to assist his rustic cousin. “I think I can do that.” His head came back up. “Where will you be later tonight?”

I thought about Lena. “I’ve got a dinner date this evening, but I could meet you after for a beer. You know a place called Paddy O’Neil’s on Race?”

He watched me for just a second too long. “Near the bridge?”

I pulled out my pocket watch. “Ten-thirty?” He nodded, and I gestured toward the Glock 34. “You’re pretty good with that thing.”

“Goes with the job.”

I wondered about lawyering in Philadelphia and picked up my Colt. “You gonna shoot again?”

“Oh, yeah, how about you?”

I let him watch as I reloaded and replaced the .45 in the pancake holster at my back. “No, thanks.”

He smiled and bobbed his head. “I guess you’re pretty good, too, huh?”

Good enough to know I was cocked and locked with a full clip and one in the pipe; good enough to know he was empty.

9

“Alphonse, if you don’t turn the tourist music down, we’re going somewhere else.”

The restaurant had been closed, but Lena had unlocked and marched through the back door as if she owned the place. She deposited me in a small booth by the kitchen and called up the steps to Alphonse, threatening him with brimstone if he didn’t come down and fix us dinner.

Alphonse, the uncle, was Victor Moretti’s brother, and his restaurant was quintessential Italian Market, from the red-and-white-checkered tablecloths to the battered, raffia-covered Chianti bottle with a tapered candle flickering in its throat. The booths were high-backed and worn, with the many layers of varnish making their surfaces glisten, but it was Alphonse who made Alphonse’s. Alphonse Moretti must have weighed as much as I did, no mean feat since he only stood about five foot six.

“You want me to create, I have to have music.” He blew through the kitchen door with a fresh bottle of wine and an assortment of water glasses, pulled the cork with his hands, and slid onto the bench with me, singing along with Frank Sinatra in a soulful duet of “The Lady Is a Tramp.” He wore glasses but, like everything else on his face, they looked as if they were being swallowed by flesh. The only part that seemed up to the fight was his mustache, a salt and pepper affair that drooped past the corners of his mouth. It would have looked dour on any other man, but it gave Alphonse the look of a painter who had stuffed a brush in his mouth and had forgotten about it. “She is beautiful, isn’t she?”

Lena rested her chin in the palm of her hand and looked at him. “Alphonse…”

He poured the wine into the water glasses and slid one toward me. “A race of principessas, not like us peasants.” Lena slouched against the wooden back of the booth and looked at me; I was sure this was a repeat performance. “You know the island of Capri?” He extended a chubby finger toward Lena and spilled a little wine on the table. “This one, she will tell you she is from Positano, but this is not true.”

She picked up her glass and retreated from the candlelight. “Al, you don’t have any wine glasses?”

He gestured toward her again. “You see—principessa.”

“Al…”

“Un pezzo di cielo caduto in terra they call it; a piece of heaven fallen to earth. They say Lucifer stole the place and brought it to Italy, and if you want to know about beautiful women, you ask the devil.” Lena blew air from her lips in dismissal. He continued. “You know Tiberius, the emperor that threw people off cliffs?” I nodded. “He had palaces built across the entire island, even moving the imperial capital to Capri.”

Her voice was soft. “Jesus, Al…”

He crossed himself. “She is a bad woman, but so delicious.” I felt Lena kick at him under the table. “Tiberius has all these palaces scattered across Capri, now he needs women with whom to debauch. The word goes out across the empire that all the most voluptuous and desirable women should be brought from all Italy. Villa Jovis is the palace of palaces, so it must have the woman of all women. Tiberius has all the principessas brought to the palace and disrobed, one by one.” He gestured toward Lena. “This one’s ancestor, Dona Allora, is last, and when she drops her robe, the court is silent. They have never seen a woman until they have seen this woman. The emperor must have her at once, so he takes her on the floor of the palace with the entire court in attendance.”

In the silence, I thought I should say something. “Romantic devil.”

Lena shook her head. “Bullshit.”

“Allora had her revenge.” Alphonse took a drink of his wine. “They say Tiberius was suffocated by a rival, but…” He pointed the sausage-like finger at Lena. “You cannot love a women as beautiful as this; she will twist your heart.”

“I wish I could twist hearts the way you twist the truth.”

He was looking at me. “I chased after this woman for three months before she took my ugly brother who is not as smart as me.” He touched my arm to make sure he had my full attention. “This one’s daughter, the Terror, works for you?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“When she was a teenager, she used to lifeguard at the pool on Christian Street…”

“Alphonse…” Lena’s voice carried more than a little warning.

He ignored her and continued. “The Terror, she used to wear this black, one-piece bathing suit, a white blouse tied at the waist and little sandals with flowers between the toes…”

“Al…”

“In the summer, the men of Christian Street always found a reason to be out on the stoop at ten in the morning to watch her go by.”

“Al…”

“Fourteen years old, and she is cussing them like a sailor.”

I took a sip of my own wine as Lena spoke. “If you’re through with your stories, we’re starving.”

He looked at me. “You see…Principessa.”

She leaned forward. “What are we having?”

He raised his hands with a flourish. “Pizza Rustica Alphonse.”

Lena clapped her hands. “My favorite!”

He downed the rest of his wine, set the glass back on the table with more flourish, and stood. “I stole the recipe from Termini, but he is not here…” He disappeared through the kitchen doors, singing “One for My Baby” just under Frank.

I raised my glass, and she touched the rim with hers. “Here’s to the lady’s revenge and sandals with little flowers between the toes.” She smiled and drank. I motioned toward the kitchen where Alphonse was overpowering Sinatra. “He’s quite a character.”

“My ally.”

“He seems to enjoy life.”

Her head tilted slightly. “And he makes excuses for people who also make that mistake.” The glass lingered there at her lower lip, a movement that echoed Vic’s. “When I had the affair, Alphonse let me stay above the restaurant.”

“You make it sound like an historic event.”

She took a sip. “In our family, it was.” She studied me. “I’d imagine you were true.”

“True?”

“You know what I mean.”

I thought about it, trying to come up with some way of not sounding like a self-righteous prig. “We were always saving for something. I mean I don’t think it was that we got along all that great. There were plenty of times we would have called it quits, but it seemed we were always needing something, a new television, a washer and dryer, a car, or for Cady…It’s amazing what civil service wages can do for fidelity.” She laughed, and I studied the pattern of the tablecloth. “I’m not sure how to go about this, but I think we’re close enough friends that I have to tell you something.” She looked back up at me. “I think I’ve stumbled onto who it might’ve been that you had the relationship with.”

Her expression changed very slightly, and then she looked at the tablecloth. It was a very long pause, and I was about to say something when she started talking. “I understand Michael threw you out of the hospital?”

“Yep.”

“He is healing fast.” She held the glass at her lip. “He got a three-day suspension, and it seems to me I should be mad at you about that.”

I waited and then spoke very carefully, “As long as that’s all you’re mad at me about.” She raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow as I continued. “It was my plan, but it wasn’t my idea.” I didn’t care for this line of conversation either, so I changed the subject again. “I went to Delaware today. First to sign the Constitution; they have a plaque.”

“How was the opera?”

“I think your husband would just as soon I go back to Wyoming.”

“I’m sure he would.”

I smiled and took another sip of the wine. “Opening night tomorrow?”

“Yes, why?”

I shrugged. “I was looking for a date to take to Henry’s opening, but I guess you’re otherwise engaged.”

She took a long moment to respond, looking at her glass. “Yes.”

It was quiet, and I watched her clench her jaw muscles; again she looked like Vic. We listened as Alphonse finished up on a note. “Victor really can sing, but I think I prefer Alphonse; more heartfelt.”

“And flat.” She laughed a slow laugh that pulled at the top of my chest. “So, if we can’t seem to talk about anything else, what’s happening with the case?”

“I’m having a beer tonight at O’Neil’s with an assistant district attorney. He was a friend of Devon’s and was a player in the Roosevelt Boulevard thing.”

“Vince Osgood?”

“Yep, I guess it was in all the papers…”

“No, just recently there was something.”

I let her think while I continued. “Suspended…”

She held her hand out to stop me from speaking. “No, this was something that connected with something you said. I’ve heard those two names mentioned together. Osgood and Conliffe.”

“Roosevelt Boulevard…”

“No, no, no. It was something else.” She continued to think. “I knew I’d heard that young man’s name before, but now I can’t think where.” Alphonse returned with two plates and wrapped flatware, carefully placing them on the table, and poured himself another glass of Chianti. “Alphonse, what do you know about Vince Osgood?”

“The assistant DA on suspension?” He tightened his lips under his mustache. “He would burn his mother to stay warm.”

“What about him and Devon Conliffe, the judge’s son?”

“What about him?” He took a sip of his wine. “He fell off the bridge; end of story.”

“Al…”

He looked at me. “You know, I leave you here with this beautiful woman, wine, candlelight…And you talk like cops.”

Lena set her glass down. “You were a cop.”

“Not anymore. You want to talk cop stuff, you talk to your husband; you want to talk women, wine, or song, you talk to me.”

She held the glass with both hands and didn’t look at him. “Do you still have those friends of yours in the DA’s office?”

“No.”

Now she looked at him. “Are you going to make me ask Victor?”

He sipped and thought about it, finally sighing. “What do you want to know?”

“There’s some kind of connection between Osgood and the Conliffe boy, something I overheard or read somewhere, something recent.”

“I’ll make a phone call…tomorrow, but only on one condition.” We waited. “No more cop talk.”

* * *

I called Henry from O’Neil’s. He had a number of ceremonies he wanted to perform in Cady’s hospital room and told me he would relieve Michael, and to take the rest of the night off. I told him I wasn’t sure I could do that. “Then you have to help.”

“I’ll help.” I could hear him talking to the nurses and wondered about the other patients and the upcoming rituals. “How did the installation at the Academy go?”

“Wonderfully well. They are very accommodating.” I thought about the woman with the keys and the security pass. “You are coming to the reception.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I can, but somebody’s got to stay with Cady.”

There was silence on the phone. “She will be better by then.” The heat in my face hit like exhaust, and the stinging in my eyes wouldn’t go away. Even across the telephone lines, he felt it. “Do me a favor?”

“Yep?”

“Wait until very late. I am not sure that they like pagan ceremonies…and bring some eagle feathers.” The line went dead.

Ian looked at me as I hung up the phone. “Trouble?”

“Just a little. I have to find some eagle feathers.”

He crossed his muscled arms on the bar, the intertwined Celtic snakes writhing up his forearms. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He probably got stranger requests. I looked around the room and spotted an empty table near the window. The place was crowded, but not as bad as I might have suspected. “Not too busy?”

The Irishman shrugged. “The band cancelled.”

“What happened?”

He slid an unasked for Yuengling longneck across the bar to me. “Started drinking too early.”

“Irish?”

He smirked. “French, I think.”

“Damn French.”

“Yah, they’ll fuck up the EU, wait and see.”

I glanced back at the still-empty table. “I think I’m going to go sit over by the window.”

He swallowed a fearful dollop of what the Scots call the creature. “Yer too good to drink at the bar, Sheriff?”

“I have to meet with a lawyer.”

“Cady’s comin’?”

I took a breath as I stood. “No, and that’s something I probably need to…” It was then that I noticed Osgood standing at the front door. I raised a hand and got his attention, motioning toward the table in the corner. Ian’s looks had sharpened, either at my statement or Osgood’s appearance. “I’ll have to tell you about it later.”

“I’ll keep me eyes out fer eagle feathers.”

I took my beer and napkin to the table and eased my back against the wall, a good frontier sheriff. “Howdy.”

“How are you?”

“I’m good. Can I buy you a drink?”

He took off his suit jacket and hung it carefully on the back of his chair, loosened his tie, and rested his arms on the small table. He nodded before looking around the place. “Why’d you want to meet here? The place is a dump.”

I nodded at O’Neil and turned back to Osgood. “Cady lives only about a half a block away.”

“Oh.” That’s all he said.

Ian approached, and I noticed that Osgood didn’t bother to look up. “Scotch and water, anything over twelve years old.”

Ian looked at him for a second more, then turned and walked away. I watched Osgood. “You two know each other?”

The assistant district attorney shook his head. “Never seen him before.” I was pretty sure he hadn’t seen him just now, either. “How’s your daughter doing?”

“She’s improving, starting to have involuntary responses.” I thought about Henry. “We brought in a specialist.”

He nodded. “I hear you’re doing a little investigative work?”

I wondered where he had heard it. “Just keeping my hand in on account of Cady, nothing too serious.”

He nodded some more. “Watch out for Gowder and Katz.” He glanced out the window. “The kike is Internal Affairs and could give a shit and a shake about the truth.” He continued to look at the sidewalk outside. “They’ve been after me for years, and I have no idea why.”

Close to ten counts, I figured. “What can you tell me about Devon and Cady?”

“Well…” He pulled at the end of his goatee. “I was kind of hoping that we could share information, you know? Help each other out?”

I nodded, all innocence. “You bet.”

Ian appeared with the scotch and water and motioned to my untouched beer. “You wan’ another?”

“In a bit. Thank you.” He nodded and glanced at Osgood, who continued to study the surface of the table. His head came up after Ian had left.

He took a sip of the scotch and rested it back on the paper napkin. “I’m assuming that your focus of interest is the connection between Devon and your daughter?”

“Cady.”

He looked at me for a moment longer. “Cady.”

“You’d be right.”

“There isn’t any connection.” I looked mildly surprised. “Between what happened to Devon and what happened to your…to Cady.” He leaned in. “Devon was involved in a lot of shit in which he shouldn’t have been involved.” I took a sip of my beer and waited. “He had a little problem, if you know what I mean.” He laid a finger alongside one nostril and sniffed. “His difficulties started with this guy, Shankar DuVall, who used to provide Devon’s medication for him. They started working on a barter system, you know, medication for legal services rendered.”

I thought about the man that I’d tackled at the crack house, the one they called DuVall, but it had to be too much of a coincidence. “What’s this guy DuVall look like?”

“Black, tattoos, and one big fucker. Pharmaceuticals and firearms are his thing. Something of an aficionado, I hear.”

Not too much of a coincidence as it turns out. And big enough to throw somebody off the BFB, I figured. “So what happened with him and Devon?”

“This ass DuVall and a buddy of his, Billy Carlisle, get caught with eight kilos of designer stuff in a roach-coach at the food distribution center in South Philly. They had this bright idea to sell the stuff like ice cream.” He raised a hand, pulling on an imaginary bell. “Ding-ding, get high! They showed pictures of the truck to the jury. There were little kids licking popsicles painted on the sides. You can imagine how that went over.” He took another sip of his scotch and shook his head. “Couple of criminal masterminds here. So, anyway…DuVall and Carlisle make offers to cooperate with us and the DA picks up the tab on DuVall, leaving Carlisle to dangle, figuring anything Billy-boy knows, he got from Shankar.”

I worked on the label of my beer with my thumbnail. “Okay.”

“It happens a lot. For a number of these shit bags, cooperating with the authorities means they get a 5k1.1, which means a substantial assistance letter from the prosecuting attorney.”

“Cooperation means DuVall avoids the sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum prison term?”

He held up four fingers. “Four years, three months. Eastern Pennsylvania leads the league with 41.1 percent of the defendants receiving reduced sentencing for playing ball.”

“And Carlisle?”

“Nineteen and seven.” He exhaled a short laugh. “All for driving an ice cream truck.”

“But with enough dope to fill up all the nostrils on Mt. Rushmore.” I thought about it. “DuVall got four and three? That seems light.”

“He played ball.”

I tried to figure a way of introducing the Roosevelt Boulevard incident, but maybe Osgood would bring it up himself. “Where does Devon enter into this?”

“He made a phone call to yours truly, wanting to see if there was anything I could do about Billy Carlisle.”

“And was there?”

He shook his head. “Nope.” He spread his hands in innocence. “I play by the rules.”

In for a penny, in for a pound. “What about Roosevelt Boulevard?”

“What about it?” His voice was stiff.

“I heard some stuff.”

His eyes stayed steady. “What’d you hear?”

“I heard you and Devon were involved in a shootout up north of here.”

He kind of laughed. “What, you got a file?”

I smiled and took another sip of my beer. He watched me, then took another sip of his drink and held it there alongside his head. “That was a Devon deal.” He sighed. “It almost lost me my job and may still if those two pricks Katz and Gowder have their way.” I tried to decide how much of what he was telling me was untrue. “Devon had a deal with these assholes, and he got scared and asked me to come along.”

“So, they weren’t chasing you when you came out of your office?”

“No, I made that up, but you gotta admit it sounded better than the two white lawyers going up to Fentonville for a drug deal.”

“It does.”

“I thought I’d use Devon’s connections for a little sting operation I was working on with the narcotics task force. Just laying the groundwork, you know. There wasn’t supposed to be a buy, but Devon was hungry, so things fell apart.”

“I hear you did some damage to Ramon Diaz with a sawed-off shotgun?”

He set the glass down. “It was him or me.”

I had an idea that I had just heard the Osgood mantra and figured I’d just hear the same one if I brought up the small man at the shooting range. “Why has the thought that Devon might have committed suicide been so completely dismissed? I only met him once, but he struck me as a likely candidate.”

“I wondered about that myself…”

I was warming to the subject. “He was thrown almost twenty feet over the PATCO line to the alley below.” I leaned back in my chair and tried to make the facts self-evident. “Unless you had his assistance, I don’t know if that’s physically possible. I mean I couldn’t throw somebody that far.”

He lifted his drink and looked at the ice swirling in the amber liquid. “Maybe you could if you were properly motivated.” Here’s where it was going to get tricky. Osgood was so used to spreading the bull about how tough he was, it was possible he was blind when someone else was doing it. I waited and didn’t say anything. He leaned in close. “All I’m saying is that I’d understand how a man could be driven to something hasty, under certain circumstances.”

I looked at my beer, like a man with something to hide. “Spoken like a true attorney.”

His mouth twitched to the side, and I thought I might have overplayed my hand, but he continued following my thread. “That’s my job, but I can see how the trash has to be taken out sometimes.”

I brought my eyes back up to his. “That’s very understanding of you.”

“Look…” He glanced around, and his voice dropped. “Sheriff, I don’t know if you did it and, to be honest, I don’t care. There’s no way they can mix me up in this, ’cause close to a thousand people can place me at the Painted Bride Art Center’s fund-raiser that night.” He sighed. “If you did it, happy motoring and God bless.”

For the first time that night, I believed him. It didn’t mean that he and Devon weren’t involved in any number of dirty deals; it just meant that he hadn’t personally thrown Conliffe off the bridge. He didn’t strike me as a calculating killer. He might be stupid enough to get himself into situations where he had to kill people to get out, but only in the heat of the moment.

Maybe he was happy to believe it was me; it was a mystery solved as far as he was concerned. Whatever his motivation, I had more information to work with and the reputation of a ruthless and avenging father, for whatever good that was.

I was saved from any more questions by Ian’s arrival. “Two more?”

I shook my head. “I really have to go.”

Osgood threw a twenty onto the table. “This one’s mine.” He pulled a card from his pocket as he put his jacket back on. “Look, if anything turns up, give me a call.” I nodded and took the card like a guilty man. “And if those pricks from IAD start being a problem…” He straightened his tie and let that one float as he turned to O’Neil and gestured to the twenty. “That gonna cover it?”

The Irishman studied him. “Sure.”

Osgood and I shook hands, and he swaggered his way from the pub. Ian watched along with me as Osgood climbed in the yellow Hummer and was gone.

I swigged the last of my beer and handed it to O’Neil. “Where’s the Painted Bride Art Center?”

He gestured with his eyes. “’Bout two blocks from ’ere.”

Convenient. I got up. “You two know each other?”

His eyes stayed on the street. “He’s been in a couple’a times, with Devon Conliffe, actually.” I turned and looked at him. “They had a few heated conversations.”

“Have you told the police anything about that?”

He smiled. “Thought that was what I was doing now.” He had something behind his back. He deftly swung his arm around and placed it against my chest. It was a beaten up Philadelphia Eagles helmet braced with painted eagle wings on either side. I looked at him, and he smiled. “Close as yer gonna get, Sheriff.”

* * *

It was still too early to head to the hospital and, after the conversation with Osgood, I figured I needed a little fresh air, so I went up on the bridge. The north side wasn’t locked this time, so I could get my first look at the actual crime scene. I looked down on the traffic headed for New Jersey, the taillights of the cars making a random, red-dotted line over the arch of the bridge. I leaned against a large metal bar and watched as a man ran by. He was wearing a reflective vest and was going at a pretty good clip. He glanced at the football helmet dangling from my hand, said “Yo, man, maybe next year,” and kept on going.

I reached the general area where Devon had taken the plunge and looked over the edge toward the PATCO line. It would be difficult to throw a man that far. I thought about the man called Shankar DuVall. The guy fit and certainly would have been able to flip Devon like a poker chip. I’d have to see what Katz and Gowder knew.

There were a few vehicles parked along one side of the alley, and I thought it might have been better for Devon if he’d hit one of them instead of the patchwork of concrete, asphalt, and brick below.

A graffiti artist had written ROB LOVES MELISSA on a billboard on top of the building to my right. I thought about the Little Birds and wondered how Melissa was doing these days. I was surely and not so slowly becoming an expert on wounded women.

The building to my left was an old warehouse that looked as if it were being converted into residential loft space. Whoever had picked the spot for Devon’s murder had done a pretty good job of finding an area in a city of six and a half million people where nobody would see what happened.

Without the anonymous note that I had received at the hospital, I could have believed a suicide. With all the shit that he and Osgood were involved with and the damage he had done to Cady, who was the one decent thing in his life, I could see the logic of that scenario.

Katz and Gowder had been awfully quick to dismiss the possibility, though, even before I had received the note. Why? And what possible advantage could anyone hope to gain by taking credit for a homicide they didn’t commit? And why tell me? Someone didn’t want me to investigate this murder and was trying to warn me off. YOU HAVE BEEN DONE A FAVOR, NOW LET IT GO.

I slid my hand along the powder blue railing and felt something under my fingers. I leaned over the edge, far enough to see whatever it was that was taped to the underside of the barrier. The tape and the paper looked fresh, so it had been placed there recently. It was an envelope and, as before, it read SHERIFF.

I’ll be damned.

I thought about waiting for fingerprints but, if my pen pal was the one who killed Devon, he wasn’t that stupid. I pried a finger under the flap and opened it. It was the same place-card stock, this time with the typewritten message that read GO BACK TO THE INDIAN. Same dropped out spot on the typewritten O.

I stared at it and suddenly felt someone at my side. I started and turned with the football helmet automatically swinging back.

“Whoa, big guy.” She was short, dark-haired, and wore a black leather jacket with the collar turned up. A bottle of beer dangled from her hand as she turned and placed both elbows on the railing with utter nonchalance. She took a sip. “Don’t do it. Human life is a valuable commodity…” She paused for a second. “Ah, fuck it, I can’t remember the rest.” Vic turned and looked at me, then at the helmet in my hand. “But I can see why you’d want to jump after last season.”

10

“So, are you trying to fuck my mother?”

I watched the taxi driver’s head turn toward us as she finished off the beer and dropped the empty bottle on the floor of the cab. The driver’s voice was high and foreign. “Madam?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m the emissary from Wyoming; you don’t write, you don’t call.” She propped an elbow on the sill of the open window and pushed her fingers into the black hair. “You didn’t answer my question.”

The driver’s voice rose again. “Missus?”

“Why would you ask that?”

She looked out at the city night speeding by. “I got a flight in earlier and saw the two of you at my Uncle Alphonse’s. You looked pretty cozy together so I didn’t want to intrude.”

“Kind lady?”

I sighed. “Your mother has been a great help.”

“You say that like I’m not gonna be.”

The driver wasn’t giving up. “Madam?”

Vic looked annoyed and glared at him through the rearview mirror. “What!?”

He sounded apologetic. “You cannot leave that beer bottle in the cab.”

Vic looked at him for a moment and then picked up the container by sticking an index finger in the opening. “This bottle?” She then slung it from the open window and over the railing into the Schuylkill River. I almost rebroke my nose on the Plexiglas divider when the driver hit the brakes.

It was only a three-block walk the rest of the way to the hospital, and I watched Vic as she soaked up her hometown. “No, I can see that you’re going to be a great help.” She looked different in the city, as if she were home. She didn’t blend in Wyoming, but here it was as if all the pieces fell into place. I had never seen the clothes she was wearing—the black leather jacket, black T-shirt, black slacks, and black Doc Martins. “Does your family know you’re here?”

“Only Alphonse. I went in after you guys left.”

“How come you didn’t come in before?”

She pursed her lips and glanced toward the river. “I like to time my entrances.”

The security guards at HUP looked up as we passed by but looked back down as we went up the escalator to the elevators on the mezzanine. Vic stopped and was looking at the note. “It could only mean Henry.”

“That’s what I thought, but I don’t get it.”

“Maybe the Indian will.” She threw an arm up to hold the automatic doors of the elevator. “You got a key to Cady’s place?”

I stood there, unsure. “You’re not coming?”

She shook her head. “I don’t do this kind of thing well, so I just don’t do it.”

“Don’t you want to say hello to Henry?”

“I’ll see him soon enough.” It was an awkward moment, but then she smiled and gestured behind me with her chin. “Normally, I’d say let’s go get the asshole who did this, but I think somebody beat us to it.”

* * *

I had to blink to adjust my eyes to the artificial light in the ICU. I could smell burning cedar and sage. The night nurse started to stand but noticed it was me and sat back down. She looked at the helmet in my hand and just smiled. Evidently, Henry had already worked some magic just by getting the clearance that would allow us to perform the ceremony.

He turned and looked at me, registering no surprise when I told him that Vic had arrived. I looked at the intricate arrangement of items in the room. “It is already working.”

I handed the Bear the football helmet. “Good thing you didn’t need a tomahawk or I would’ve had to go to Atlanta.”

He studied the helmet and the wings with trailing feathers. “This will do.”

There was a buffalo skull at Cady’s feet with the nose pointed toward her. There were two black stones by her right side on the bed, two red ones on her left, and a red one and black one on the pillow above her head. There was a ceramic bowl that was filled with dirt on one of the carts. Evidently, as a stranger in a strange land, the Bear had great gathering skills.

He put the helmet on one of the monitors, and I watched as he laid sticks on the bed in two parallel lines with each pair of ends joined by a V-shaped connection; it was a Hetanihya, or Hetan, a man figure. It looked as if the Bear was performing a Cheyenne sweat lodge ceremony but without the sweat or the lodge.

His beaded medicine bag was also draped over the cart; he took his ceremonial pipe, the bowl of which was carved from catlinite into the shape of a buffalo, from it. He fit the buffalo into the stem, filled the pipe, lit it, and then drew a circle around the Hetan with the stem. He puffed on the pipe for a while, then motioned me to the opposite side of the bed and handed it to me. I smoked for what I thought was a commensurate amount of time, then handed it back to him. We went through four bowls of tobacco, and then the Bear scattered sweetgrass and juniper on the stones surrounding Cady. He picked the pipe up and pointed it to the cardinal directions and rested it against the buffalo skull, the stem between the horns. Then Henry took a medicine bundle out of the green velvet bag that he always carried with him—and which, according to him, had saved him from dying of a gut-shot wound deep in a Bighorn Mountain blizzard. He placed the bundle on the pillow by Cady’s head and handed me an old turtle rattle that was decorated with teeth and hair and deer toes. I wasn’t told to shake the rattle, so I remained still. Henry spoke in a quiet but authoritative voice.

“Spirits, hear me; think especially of me, a miserable man. Those that enter my sweat lodge for safety, going out may they leave behind all that is bad. Take thought of them; that good may come to them, take thought.”

He stopped and took a deep breath, and the next part was spoken as if it had just occurred to him. “Let horses of different colors come to them.” He nodded toward the west-facing windows and gestured toward the buffalo skull. “Your pipe is filled; come and smoke. When they go out of my sweat lodge, may some good go with them. To the places whence they came, may they all take good luck. May all their relatives receive good; their children let them embrace with joy. Let their way lie along the good road.”

The emotion was creeping into his voice. “That our patients may arise with ease, take thought of them; let them once more walk about with joy.” His voice caught in his throat, and it was only then that I realized he was speaking English.

“Who are ye that taught this custom? I do not claim to know anything; I am poor; I am far from knowing anything. Old men taught me this way, and if I make a mistake, turn it to good. Everything I ask of you, grant me. Henahi!”

I shook the rattle four times, as instructed, and then listened as Henry sang eight songs in Cheyenne. When he finished, he slumped into the chair beside me with his hands trailing to the floor.

I reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “Thank you.”

He nodded and smiled knowingly. “It worked.”

I looked at him, then at Cady, and back at him. Nothing seemed to have changed. I got up and took a closer look, knowing that Henry didn’t make statements like that lightly. I turned back and looked at him. “How can you tell?”

He raised his face, and he continued to smile. “I had a vision.”

“Just now?” He shook his head, but the smile remained. He was making me nervous.

“Earlier.”

I watched him. “Why are you smiling?”

He laughed. “The vision, you are not going to like it.”

I quickly convinced myself that if it were really bad, he wouldn’t be smiling. “What?”

“Horses, you will be assisted by horses; powerful horses, paints.”

I laughed with him. “I’ll take any help I can get.”

His face grew serious. “You know the power of this medicine.” He stretched his back muscles and looked at me again. “You will be assisted by horses; powerful horses, paints.”

“Okay.” He seemed satisfied, so I pulled the note from my breast pocket.

He took it and studied it without opening the envelope. “Again?”

I nodded. “At the crime scene on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, taped to the railing.”

He opened the envelope and read the note. “Do you know any other Indians in Philadelphia?”

“No.”

He looked at the card again. “Then I do not know…Perhaps something to do with the reception?”

“Possibly.”

Henry placed the card back and handed it to me. “It will be revealed to you.”

I stuffed the tiny envelope in my breast pocket. “Let me guess, by horses.”

He shrugged. “That, or by another note.”

* * *

I decided to sleep in the chair for the rest of the night, sending the Cheyenne Nation to his guest-artist bed. I wished I had my cowboy hat to pull over my eyes, but it was at Cady’s. I thought about using the football helmet, but I didn’t want to upset the mojo. I borrowed a towel from the night nurse and folded it. I remained like that for a while, staring at the underside of the towel and thinking: GO BACK TO THE INDIAN. Who was involved with all of this who would be sympathetic toward us? Who did we know here? GO BACK TO THE INDIAN; I had, and I didn’t know anything more than I had before. Some detective.

I took the towel off and rubbed my eyes. Henry had left a partial bottle of water on the other chair, so I picked it up, screwed off the top, and chugged what was left. There was a slick portfolio underneath it with a water ring on the cover where the bottle had been. I picked it up and studied the beautifully lit main hall gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It was the brochure for the Mennonite photo exhibit.

The photograph on the inside cover was of a horse haltered to a broken-down Studebaker pickup. The paint was looking at the camera, and the water bottle that Henry had left on the brochure had wept a perfect circle around its eye. I laughed, remembering Henry’s vision, and looked at the text. It was one of the poems that Dena Many Camps had been gracious enough to bestow on the project, and it was elegant and powerful.

…Walks the quiet rushes of the Mni Shoshe, then moves north, to higher ground. He motions toward the ponies as they rise up

and release their tears, large drops the size of ripe apples. They dance then, as my mother and father shift in sleep, dreaming to the rhythm of horses’ hooves.

The horse that had been dead for seventy years looked at me, and I wondered if Dena would be at the reception; probably not, as Henry hadn’t mentioned that she would be. I could be wrong, but he seemed to talk of her less. I had asked him about the pool tournament in Las Vegas, which she had won, but Henry said she had been seen in the company of a tall, handsome Assiniboine about half his age. The conversation had dwindled from there.

I set the brochure back on the seat, refolded the towel, and replaced it over my eyes, staring at the five words in my head, the warning, the clue, the note passed between the aisles.

I guess I was getting used to the sounds and rhythms of the ICU. I struggled for a while but then tossed myself into a fidgety, ungrateful sleep.

* * *

I was still looking at my boots, which floated above the buffalo grass and sage of northern Wyoming. I kicked my feet back and forth and could feel the looseness of my boots on my feet, the air between my socks and the innersoles. I snuck a glance to my right; the same medicine man was there, and the wind still suspended us above the bluffs at Cat Creek.

We weren’t moving but were being held aloft by the current, with our arms outstretched toward the Bighorn Mountains. I could feel the gusts whip my hat away, and I laughed. The medicine man laughed along with me, and I turned my head with the tears streaming from my face, lids clenched with a flattened image of the elderly man who floated beside me. I had to yell over the howling of the wind, but you grow used to such things on the high plains. His head turned toward mine, and I watched as the fringe of his leggings swirled behind him like trailing eddies in the air stream.

He nodded at my one-word question and pointed with his nearest hand, the leathery finger aimed at the canyon below, and they were there: an entire remuda of wild ones, the wind buffeting their manes and tails as they threw the gusts against their broad withers, using the coming storm to their own advantage. The sound of clattering hooves overtook the aching cry of the wind and joined it with a resonance that rose from the stone walls of the canyon. The orange and white pattern of their bodies was like the pattern of the thunderheads that ascended as if they were time-lapse photography, cumulus explosions stronger than technology.

The horses were large and potent, the muscles of their limbs reaching out like the flexing of fingers, gobbling up the distance and reaching out for more. The aged Indian beside me laughed when I glanced back at him, chuckling at their approach.

As they reached the end of the canyon, they climbed the walls with powerful, striking hooves that drove into the rock with sparks of electricity that arched upward, shooting past us and into the clouds. The air was cool with the promise of water, and I could feel my hair standing on end.

They thundered their way up at the same speed that they had entered the canyon, seemingly on a crash course with us. I veered from them and threw myself off balance. I closed one eye like a kid at a Saturday matinee and waited for the impact. The lead mare kicked as though she was ridding herself of an unwanted rider, and the cloud-pattern body twisted. The earth fell away like a flanking strap, and the impact of our collision threw my shoulder down and against her neck as her head stretched upward and the long mane covered my face.

I scrambled to get my fingers into her hair, wrapped an arm around her neck, and dug my legs against her sides. The pressure of her rising body forced the air from my lungs, and it was all I could do to hold on as the backing of the metal star pinned to my jacket drove itself into my chest.

Her hair still covered my face but parted at the rim of the canyon, just enough for me to see that the old man was now astride the broad back of his own cloud pony, his one hand wrapped in the mane of his horse, the other reaching into the billowing expansion above us.

I looked up at the detonation of clouds that seemed like a saturated watercolor. Compacted flares fired deep in the towers of umber, white, and disappearing blue and reflected in the flanks of my paint. Her rhythm was steady and sure and her eyes watched carefully, as if a misplaced hoof would send us plummeting into the distant earth below.

The medicine man’s lips moved, and even though his voice was barely a whisper, the sound of his words echoed within the clouds like drums. “This is better, yes?” I stared at him, and it was clear to me he was insane. He laughed. “How can you know the earth if you never see it?”

I looked past his outstretched arm at the glow of the clouds and at one that looked like an eye with a circle around it.

* * *

“Mr. Longmire…Sheriff?” I opened my eyes, moved the towel, and looked at the hand on my shoulder. It was a man’s hand of pretty good size and had a graduation ring on it from the Philadelphia Police Academy. “How ya doin’?”

“Howdy, Michael.” He smiled and watched me some more.

“You were snoring.”

“Sorry.” I looked up at the windows, but they were still black. “What time is it?”

“Little after four. I told Mom I’d take an extra shift, seeing as how I’ve got time on my hands.”

I took a deep breath and looked at the handsome young man with so much of his life ahead of him. “Michael, have you ever heard of a guy by the name of Shankar DuVall?”

He thought about it. “Doesn’t ring any bells…” He shrugged. “I can ask around.”

I nodded. “He might be one of the guys we arrested out on Lancaster Avenue.”

“I’ll check.” He looked at Cady, at the arrangement of the ceremonial pipe, the buffalo skull, and the stones. “Looks like you guys’ve been busy.”

I stood, stretched my arms above my head, and approached the bed with hope ready to curdle at the slightest notice. “I decided to refer to a higher authority.”

There was no change, and I could feel my heart cannon-balling into my bowels, taking my lungs along for the ride. I took a deep breath and listened to it clatter in my throat like a rattler in shedding season when it is blind, pissed, and strikes out at everything. I heard Michael say something. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You should go home.”

I turned and looked at him. “You’re right.” I then thought about whether I would be giving up Moretti family secrets, finally deciding that I wouldn’t. “Your sister’s in town.”

He looked blank. “Victoria?” His smile returned; he couldn’t hold the joke. “I know; I’m the one that called her. I called her day before yesterday.” He studied me for a moment. “I didn’t think you’d mind, and I thought she’d be a help.” I didn’t say anything. He continued to smile and shuffled his purple-and-orange-clad feet, still not sure of my response. “She’s a good cop.”

I finally nodded. “I’m in a position to know that.” The kid was a prince.

* * *

I started off with a taxi, but my restlessness drove me to abandon it at 20th and Market. I kind of knew where I was and figured if I headed north by northeast, I’d eventually hit Race and take a right. If I got to the river, I’d have gone too far. I watched as a black Expedition stopped at the light and then started up the street. I saw a sign for the Franklin Institute about a block up and decided to continue north for a while.

It must’ve rained while I was asleep, sometime during my vision, as Henry would have called it. The streets were wet, but it was still the cool of the morning before sunrise, and the halos of the streetlights looked like chain links drifting up the dark city streets. I listened to my boot steps echoing off the tall buildings and gathered wool on the directions our lives take, on the intersections that allowed no U-turn and committed you to your fate. I thought about how I wished there was somewhere I could go and just pay the fine and take my daughter home.

At the corner of Arch, I stopped and looked around. My eye caught some movement behind me, and I turned my head just a little; it was the same black Expedition that I had seen on Market. It sat there at the red light, the reflection of the street lamps making it impossible to see inside. I put my hands in my pockets and acted as though I was deep in thought. It passed me, and I watched the taillights of the vehicle slow and then recede, listening to the radial tires growl as they turned down the deserted street. I took my hands out of my pockets and laughed out loud. What was I thinking? That I was important enough to be followed around the streets of Philadelphia? I shook my head and continued on.

The sun wouldn’t be up for a while, so maybe I could grab a couple more hours of sleep before calling Katz and Gowder for a meet. It would be interesting to hear their take on the Vince Osgood Parade of Stars but even more interesting to see their response to Vic. I wondered what Lena’s response to Vic would be and wondered if Alphonse had gotten anywhere with Lena’s hunch about a different connection between Osgood and Devon.

I was in the middle of all this wondering when I saw the black Expedition again, crossing the street a block ahead. There was a narrow alley to my right, and I ducked in there. I wedged myself in a doorway between a power pole and a utility box alongside the back of a building. I stood there feeling foolish for a few minutes, until I saw the black SUV slowly go up 20th. It looked like a government vehicle, but who would be trailing me in something like that? Osgood? Katz and Gowder? It just didn’t make sense, unless they’d come to the conclusion that the notes had made me a viable candidate for being thrown off a bridge next.

I went to the corner and watched as the Expedition turned right a block ahead and, once again, circled around. Whoever they were, they weren’t very good at this, which led me to believe they weren’t on the job.

I looked back up the alley and started jogging toward 19th. By the time I got to the other end, the Expedition was moving slowly down the street in its attempt to double back. A large Amorosso bread truck pulled up to the light just south, and I pressed myself against the corner of another building. The SUV passed me and stopped behind the truck.

If I was feeling frisky, now was the time.

Approaching unsecured vehicles was how the majority of police officers got killed, but I thundered down the sidewalk, slid to a stop along side the Ford, and yanked the door open anyway. Before I could say anything, the driver yelled. “Yo, man…”

“You tailing me?”

I looked at the tall, lean kid at the wheel. He didn’t look like a cop or a robber. He wore glasses and had long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and a three-day beard. He looked like a graduate student, and he looked at me like I was crazy. “What?”

I was having the same doubts myself. I held up my hands to show there was no intent. “Sorry, I thought you were following me.”

He studied me. “You a cop?”

“Yep.” I didn’t have to say from where. He nodded and took a breath. I guess I’d almost given him a heart attack. “Sorry.”

He didn’t move but kept looking at me. “Jesus, man. You scared the shit out of me.” He took a deep breath as the bread truck released its air brakes and started around the corner. “I thought you were some kind of carjacker or something.”

“No, I just…You were driving slowly, and I thought you were following me.”

“I was looking for an address, man.”

I nodded, feeling the complete fool. “Sorry.”

He stuck a hand out and stopped me from closing the door. “Hey, man, do you know where the Municipal Services Building is?”

I shook my head. “No.” I started closing the door, but he kept talking.

“I’ve got this package that has to be delivered by…”

I closed the door as he held the FedEx envelope toward me, and it was at the last second that I noticed the ignition switch and the destroyed lock where the Expedition had been hotwired. I clawed at the door, trying to get it back open as he hit the gas, and I slapped at the back of the vehicle’s glossy surface.

I watched as he made the mistake of turning left behind the bread truck that was now halfway down the street and backing into a loading zone with the reverse alarm chirping. I watched as the SUV screeched to a stop at the middle of the block. He hit the horn, but the Amorosso man was having none of it. He locked the air brakes on the big truck and turned on his emergency blinkers, whoever was behind him be damned.

God bless Philly truck drivers.

I pushed off a parked car at the corner and ran for all I was worth, struggling to pull the .45 from the holster at my back. The driver of the Ford continued to blare his horn but, when I was only thirty feet from the SUV, license number 90375, city plates, the reverse lights flicked on.

I slid to a stop in the center of the street in a widespread stance, raised the .45, and yelled. “Sheriff! Freeze!”

He didn’t, and I had to decide if a hunch was worth shooting a man, finally deciding that it wasn’t. He was still in reverse, but he wasn’t going that fast, and I figured, what’s the worst that could happen? I jumped up on the back bumper and grabbed the luggage rack as the air left my body on impact. My left hand held the black bar, and I listened as the bracings buckled into the sheet metal of the roof. My feet slipped from the bumper as he accelerated, and I scrambled to get a tiny purchase, trying to not think about what the hell I was doing.

I wasn’t going to last long like this, so I raised the butt of the Colt and swung it down on one of the back windows; the glass spider-webbed out to the framework. I could feel the luggage rack starting to go as he hit the brakes at Race and made a right onto Logan Circle. A Japanese compact barely missed us as we made the turn and cut across four lanes.

I brought the butt of the .45 down on the window again, and this time the glass blew into the interior along with my arm, and I was able to leverage myself up to the armpit into the vehicle.

I pressed my face against the cold metal of the window divider and could feel the glass cutting along my jaw line. “Peace officer! Stop this vehicle now!”

I could see him sawing at the wheel and could feel the pressure of my grip starting to slide me toward the edge of the bumper as he continued to veer around Logan Circle and the Swan Memorial Fountain.

He swerved back toward the outside, deciding to test the waters on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, but a utility company van cut him off. I took advantage of the slowing velocity to reestablish my grip on the doorway just as the luggage rack pulled completely off the vehicle.

My feet slid on the bumper as I slipped sideways, and I felt my boot hit the surface of the road and pogo with a large hop as I threw my other arm into the back window and scrambled for a grip.

I was to the point of dropping the .45 when my other hand grabbed hold of some small leverage, and it was only when the door I was hanging from made a small jump with a chunklike sound that I realized that it was the interior door handle.

The door swung wide with the momentum of the vehicle, and I was no longer attached. I rolled my back, my head cracked against the concrete sidewalk, and my legs went over my shoulders. I tucked my arms into my chest along with the semiautomatic and hoped that wherever I was rolling nobody would run over me.

I didn’t move at first, just watched the black Expedition continue the wrong way down 18th and disappear as I listened to sirens approach like hounds to the hunt.

I tried to focus, but my vision was blurred. My head hurt, and I closed my eyes. I could hear people, so that was a good sign. I opened my eyes and looked up at a gigantic individual with a tricornered hat looking down on me. It was only when I saw it was a statue and that the title on the base had way too many consonants that I collapsed against the cement and tried to breathe.

“Sir?” I felt somebody gently pull at my right shoulder in an attempt to turn me over. “Sir, are you alive?”

I rolled onto my back and watched as whomever it was backed away when they saw the big Colt in my hand. “It’s all right…” I coughed and cleared my throat, my voice sounding like somebody else’s. “I’m a peace officer.” The face returned, and I looked at his uniform. “You a cop?”

He shook his head. “I’m the bellman. I been here since the hotel opened, and that was the most dramatic entrance to the Four Seasons I ever seen.” I laughed weakly and felt a pull at my abdomen, curled in a little, and returned to my side where it felt better. He kept his hand on my shoulder and talked to me in a soft voice. “Don’t you worry, there’s help comin’, you jus’ lie there.”

I stared at the traffic and took shallow breaths, absorbing some of the cool from the sidewalk. I felt a little dizzy for a moment, but it passed with the adrenaline discharge, and I stared past the traffic at the fountain at the center of Logan Circle with the swans blowing jets of water thirty feet into the air.

And there it was, the Indian I was meant to go back to.

11

“So, you got the license plate number of the truck that hit you?” She sat on the back of the chair with her feet on the seat, the kind of posture that made teachers yell.

It was a cop convention at HUP. They had tried to take me to Hahneman, which was only four blocks from the Four Seasons, but I had told them I’d throw myself from the ambulance if they didn’t take me to the same hospital as Cady. After careful consideration and in light of recent events, they took me at my word.

“Like I told the fuzz, city plates, 90375.” The stitches at my jawline pulled when I talked. Dr. Rissman was looking at my ear, but he didn’t say anything so he must have figured that was old news. I guessed he had come down to take a look at me out of curiosity and that you could pretty much jump in anytime if you were a neurosurgeon.

Vic turned to look at the two detectives as Katz flipped his small notebook closed. “Stolen from the city lot two nights ago.”

Gowder looked at Vic, she looked at Katz, and I could tell that they had all three known each other for quite some time. Michael was leaning against a wall, and they had posted a patrolman outside the curtain.

Gowder stepped forward and held up a standard wants-and-warrants vita with a two-by-two photo of William White Eyes. He was slightly heavier, wore no glasses, and the hair was loose. “That’s him.”

Katz walked over beside Vic and adjusted his glasses, the red dots jockeying for a good seat on his nose. He was a handsome devil, and I could see Lena making the reach. “Released a week ago. After you mentioned him last night, we did a quick look-see. Any idea why he was following you?”

“We cowboys have that problem with Indians, even white ones.” Katz gave me a look. “Any word on Shankar DuVall?”

The two detectives turned and looked at Michael, who grinned. “Looks like he was the one that you ran into the other night. Turns out Fraser and the others couldn’t retrieve the gun, and he wasn’t carrying, so they had to let him go.”

“What about his connections with Toy Diaz?”

“We got a hit on an abandoned car in Atlantic City, but no Diaz.”

“I think I may have met Toy Diaz last night.” They all looked at me as Gowder continued to wait on the phone for the current address of one William White Eyes.

Katz cleared his throat. “Where?”

“At the shooting range; he was with Osgood. At least I think it was him, short guy, Latino, very precise, eyes like a snake?”

The detective nodded his head slowly. “That sounds like him.”

Gowder flipped his cell phone closed. “We’ve got an address.”

Vic sipped her coffee. “Asa, why would William White Eyes want to hurt Walt? If he’s the one that knocked on the Franklin Institute door, sent Devon to flight school, and wrote the note? We should focus on Toy Diaz.”

“Believe me, we are, but maybe the sheriff here was getting too close for comfort.”

“He could have run over him twice…” I shook my head and raised a single sprained finger. “Excuse me, once.”

Katz glanced back at me. “I think White Eyes did a pretty good job on him.”

“But he didn’t kill him.” She hadn’t said anything about the note I’d given her, and I thought maybe I wouldn’t say anything about it just yet. I reached for the fresh shirt that Vic had brought me from Cady’s. She said that she had met her mother there and that Lena was taking care of Dog.

Gowder was watching me. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“With you.”

He shook his head. “Oh no, you’re under house arrest until we get William White Eyes.”

I looked at the two of them. “So, the partnership is over?”

Gowder smiled as they left. “Looks that way.”

I waited till they were past the curtain. “What if I told you I got another note?” Vic took a sip of her coffee and snorted.

They stopped without turning, stood there for a moment, and then Gowder looked back at Vic, to Katz, and then to me. “Bullshit.”

“Vic?”

She took her time taking another sip. “Off the bridge at the crime scene.” She pulled the envelope from her pocket and held it up between her index and middle fingers.

I went ahead with putting on my shirt. “I also know where the next one is.”

Katz took the envelope, opened it, and read the card. “I don’t suppose it occurred to you two to have this dusted?”

“Were there any fingerprints on the other one? Any DNA sample from the envelope?” He didn’t answer, and I had mine.

Katz passed the note to Gowder and looked up at me. “Where?”

Vic climbed off her chair and stretched. “Does this mean the partnership’s back on?” She stepped over and helped me from the gurney. “So, did my little brother start his crush before or after your daughter was in a coma?”

* * *

Bodine Street was in an industrial complex five blocks north of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. I mentioned to Vic that it was convenient, since she was the only one in the car speaking to me. John Meifert, White Eyes’s parole officer, was going to meet us there, which was good, because without the tan sedan parked at the corner we might’ve never found the place.

He was heavyset with sandy hair and was waiting for us on the sidewalk. He made for the door next to a truck dock. I looked around, but I didn’t see anything that would have led me to believe the address was a residence. Meifert shrugged and pushed open a steel door that had a wire-mesh grate over the glass. There was an unused, beat-up counter in an entryway with a scratched Plexiglas divider that led to a freight elevator. We all stepped over the opening between the floors, and Meifert clanged the heavy metal sliding gate that closed from the top and bottom, dropped another safety grating from above, and hit the button to his left.

The whine of the counterweight system and the condition of the cables inspired little confidence, but the battered elevator rose to the sixth, where Meifert aligned the black spraypainted arrows on the gate with the ones on the adjacent bricks. He lifted the safety gate, and we walked out into a large, industrial loft that was surrounded by eighteen-foot glass-paned walls. The floors were hardwood, and there was nothing in the 5,000 square feet except a painted teepee. It was in the center of the space, and its sixteen hand-peeled poles extended upward and into a ventilation cupola.

Everyone, including Meifert, looked surprised. “I take it this is new?”

Nobody said anything but turned and walked toward the structure that would have looked much more at home…well, back home. I watched as Gowder unsnapped the holster where his .40 Glock rested.

It was a family-sized teepee with rows of ledger paintings traversing the heavy canvas. It sat there, a domestic island at the center of industrial isolation. As we got closer, I could see that the stake loops were tied off to Velcro straps that had been attached to the wooden floor and that there were buffalo rugs and blankets spilling from the opening even though the flap was secured and tied shut. There was a totem with a mule-deer skull that was painted and wrapped in trade cloth and beads in the Crow style. There were feathers and a fringe of leather draped from the upright pole, which stood in a slot that had been cut in the floor. The place was clean, the floors swept, and the hundreds of windowpanes had been washed and reflected the structure in the middle of the room.

Gowder was in the lead and turned to look back, the empty eye sockets of the antlered skull looking at me over his shoulder. He pointed at the head. “What in the hell is this?”

“A teepee marker.” They all looked at me blankly. “It’s kind of a combination welcome sign and mailbox.”

Everyone else stopped, but I continued to the right, reading the story of the drawings that circled the teepee. The centerline had caught my attention. There were horses with men on them, shooting at each other, not something totally unique to the form, but the details were different than those I was used to seeing. The men on horseback were not red but were white and black. They were not shooting arrows or Sharps but were firing modern weapons; one even wore a 76ers jersey. The uniforms of the white riders and their hats indicated that they were policeman, and the large man falling comically from the back of a horse wore a star on his chest. The centerline had not been finished.

There was a set of paints on the floor, a Dixie cup full of thinner, and a couple of brushes, one of which had paint on it. I stooped and touched the brush, and the bright red pigment was still wet. I looked around and spotted an open window hinged at the top at the back of the loft. “Is that a fire escape?” They all looked at me as I held up a fingertip daubed red. “He was just here.”

Gowder was the first to move, quietly slipping the Glock from his holster and heading for the fire escape while gesturing for Katz to take the stairwell. Asa’s sidearm appeared in his hand, and they fanned out. Meifert turned and looked at me. “I don’t carry.”

I caught Vic’s attention as she came around the other side and tossed her the .45 from my pancake holster; I wished I were feeling better. I watched as she took the route I would have, the one toward the fire escape. She looked odd with my large-frame Colt in her small hands, but she held it with a confidence born of five years’ street duty, all in these very streets.

I watched them, sighed, and continued with my bruised ribs and aluminum-shrouded finger around the teepee. There were more ledger drawings on the backside—one with a man in a suit and tie pushing a red-haired woman from a cliff and then another of the same man falling from what looked like a burial platform: the Devon Conliffe story.

Vic returned with Gowder from the fire escape. He looked at the paints on the floor, kneeled, and tested the brush. Evidently, he didn’t trust my analysis. “Careful, or you’ll get it on your suit.”

He nodded and wiped his fingers on a stained towel that lay on the floor. “Nothing on the roof.”

I looked back at Meifert. “If you don’t mind my asking, how does a guy like William White Eyes have a place like this?”

“His uncle owned the building and left it to him in a trust.”

I straightened up and breathed for a minute. “I take it William comes from money?”

“Quite a bit, actually. The kid had it all, address in Gladwyne, Ivy League advanced degree in chemistry, even a shot at the Olympics in dressage.”

Interesting. I turned back to the front and looked at the closed flap. “I assume we are ignoring the fact that we might need a warrant.”

Meifert cocked his head. “It’s a tent.”

We stared at each other for a second, then I glanced over at Vic, tugged at the strips of canvas, and watched as the flaps opened. I looked into the relative darkness of the teepee. “I don’t suppose anyone has a flashlight?” They all shook their heads, so I kneeled for a better view. The top flaps were closed, so only a little light made it to the floor. There was stuff in there and the only way I was going to find out what it was was to go in, so I did, warrant be damned.

I was able to keep the finger guard from bumping into anything as I slid into the teepee with my legs trailing behind me. It had occurred to me that William White Eyes might be inside, but I couldn’t hear any breathing and made the assumption I was alone.

All I could see were the folds of more buffalo skins and a few Navajo blankets piled in one corner. There was nothing more in there; evidently, William White Eyes was living somewhere else. This place must be a work in progress or just for show, at least for now. I sat there in the muffled silence; I could barely hear the conversation among the three policemen outside. It felt like home, and I closed my eyes for just a moment to block out the talk, the traffic from the streets below, and the thunder of jets overhead.

I thought of the old medicine man that I had seen in my dreams and heard the words that had lifted the two of us above the canyon on the wind that had cleansed and combed the high plains. “How can you know the earth if you do not see her?”

Under the buffalo robes, where the earth would have been if the teepee had been in Wyoming, was a parfleche satchel painted with bright geometric shapes and decorated with horsehair and the tiny cone bells that the Cheyenne call axaxevo. I moved back toward the opening so I could see, untied the strips of leather that held the satchel closed, and pulled out two actual ledgers. I opened the top one, and it was a full accounting of some kind of business dealing and was written entirely in a language I recognized but could not read.

I looked up to see Vic’s outline in the opening. “No sign of him.”

I nodded and took as big a breath as my ribs would allow. “I’ve got something here.” I closed the book and placed it carefully on top of the portfolio. “But I’m not sure exactly what it is.”

Once I’d wriggled my way outside, I set the book on my lap and opened it to a random page. Everyone looked, and Vic kneeled in front of me, but Gowder was the first to speak. “What language is that?”

“It’s Cheyenne. The teepee design is Assiniboine, that marker is Crow…It seems to me that William White Eyes is having trouble deciding what tribe he wants to be when he grows up.” I turned a few pages. “He strikes me as a very bright guy.”

“First in his class at University of Pennsylvania, majored in mathematics.”

Vic was quick with the response. “So, he’s a fucking Fortune 500 drug dealer?”

Meifert ignored her. “His father is an investment broker who is listed in Who’s Who, but his mother died when he was a child—abducted and murdered, strangled up near East Falls in the mideighties. The case wasn’t ever solved, probably drugs involved.”

“What was the mother’s name?”

“Candace Carlisle. She…”

I interrupted with a question. “Did you just say that his mother’s name was Carlisle?” Meifert nodded. I turned to look up at Gowder, who suddenly found the windows of interest. “So, his surname is Carlisle?”

Meifert nodded. “Yeah.”

“William Carlisle is Billy Carlisle, who was arrested with Shankar DuVall for trying to sell steamer trunks full of Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substance Act out of the back of an ice cream truck?” I carefully stood, walked over to Gowder, and stepped between him and the windows. “Billy Carlisle, who was in business with Shankar DuVall and Toy Diaz, whose brother was shot by Assistant District Attorney Vince ‘Oz’ Osgood in the presence of the recently deceased Devon Conliffe?” Gowder still wasn’t looking at me. “The same Billy Carlisle who was represented in his pro bono appeals case by my daughter?” I turned, and my voice echoed. “Billy Carlisle is William White Eyes?”

Katz looked at Gowder and finally nodded. “Yes.”

I shook my head. “Is there anything else in this little partnership of ours that you’re not telling me?”

Gowder looked at Katz. “Devon Conliffe was about to turn state’s evidence and implicate Oz, which will take us a little further than the current indictment and suspension.”

I stood there for a while, allowing all the lines to connect. “Then it’s Osgood.”

Gowder shook his head. “Not possible.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I was with him at the fund-raiser the night Conliffe was killed.”

I was fully irritated now. “Then he had it done.”

Katz was watching me. “By whom?”

I was yelling now. “Toy Diaz by way of Shankar DuVall, I’d imagine!”

“You don’t have to raise your voice.” We stood there, looking at each other. “They don’t owe him any favors, and they’re not on the best of terms anymore.”

I stepped toward all of them. The ache in my ribs had receded with the increase of my anger. “Then how about William Carlisle White Eyes?”

Katz adjusted his glasses again. “It occurred to us.”

I wondered if I was up to throwing the two of them out the open window. “Partnership’s over.”

I started lumbering toward the stairwell, with Vic coming up behind me as Katz spoke. “What about the third note?”

Vic called over her shoulder. “If we find it, I’ll stop by and personally shove it up your ass.”

* * *

I only lasted two flights. Vic sat beside me on the flaking gray paint of the tread’s metal surface. After catching my breath, I spoke in a low voice. “That was stupid.”

She nodded and smiled. “I bet you feel better.”

“Not really.”

“Look, I know both these guys and, if it means anything, I don’t think they took it to heart. Anyway, they’re going to want to know about the third note, so I bet you’re forgiven by the time we get to the sidewalk.”

She was right.

Katz was waiting at the truck dock with his hands in his pockets and the ledgers under one arm. “We need that third note.”

I leaned against the concrete shelf with my good side. “Yep, and people in hell need ice water.”

He closed his eyes and gave the sun his face. “Nice day for it.”

“Where’s your playmate?”

“Caught a ride with Meifert; he’s decided you don’t like him.” Katz smiled. “On account of you getting in his face and yelling at him. He’s not used to that.”

“I’m sorry.”

He opened one eye and looked at Vic, who was standing beside me. “Yelling one of those law enforcement techniques you learned out in Wyoming?”

She was now sunbathing as well. “Yeah, that and lunch.”

Katz nodded. “Terminal?”

“Yeah.”

I hoped it was a location and not a result.

* * *

The Reading Terminal Market on 12th and Arch was created in 1892 when the Reading Railroad opened markets below the elevated tracks of the new train shed. It had consistently housed an undetermined amount of aromas since then by creating a gastronomic bazaar conveniently located at street level.

We walked past the Amish baked goods, farm produce, and fresh flowers to a little diner and sat on red leatherette stools at a stainless steel counter. I was in the middle and noticed that neither Vic nor Katz had picked up a menu. A heavyset woman of uncertain age and in oversized overalls set rolled flatware, glasses of ice water, and three cups of coffee in front of us. “What’ll it be, hon?”

The wave of nostalgia for the Busy Bee overtook me, and I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “The usual.”

She nodded. Evidently, it was a universal.

Katz slid one of the ledgers onto the counter, opened it, and glanced at the incomprehensible text. “So, you know where we can find an expert on Native American languages?”

I sipped my steaming coffee. “It just so happens…” I set it down to cool and took a closer look at the book. “He should be at the Academy; said he had to put the final touches on the exhibit.”

“Isn’t the reception tonight?”

“Yep.” I glanced at Vic. “But don’t you have to go to the opera?”

She rolled her eyes. “Puh-lease…”

I looked back at Katz. “Henry can translate.” I looked at the ledger to give him a little room. “Why didn’t you tell me William White Eyes is Billy Carlisle?”

“It’s IAD, special prosecutor for the DA’s office, and we really weren’t able to come forth with any of the information connecting the two.”

“Fair enough.” I lined up the suspects and started supposing. “Vince Osgood and Toy Diaz are in business.”

“It’s possible.” I looked at him, and he shrugged. “It’s likely.”

“Devon Conliffe, my daughter’s almost-fiancé, was a hophead and a friend of Osgood.”

“Yes. And Devon was the money launderer.”

I nodded and stared at my coffee. “That makes sense. So, Osgood goes to bat for Shankar DuVall in his official capacity, leaving Carlisle/White Eyes to linger in Graterford.”

“Yes.”

“I have a question.” I placed my hands on the edge of the counter, bumped my finger guard, and felt the vibration all the way up to my elbow. “Who was Shankar DuVall’s lawyer?”

Katz thought for a moment. “Not your daughter.”

I smiled at him. “I figured there were other lawyers in Philadelphia; I was just wondering who it was?”

“Why?”

I thought about an itch I’d had in my head for the last few days. “I think there are more connections among all these people.” Katz scribbled in his pad. “So Carlisle/White Eyes did the cook, DuVall the muscle, Diaz the distribution, and Devon laundered the money while Osgood looked the other way.”

“That’s the way it’s headed.”

I thought about the things that weren’t adding up. “If Osgood sent Diaz’s brother Ramon up the river, why would Toy go into business with him?”

“It was not a happy family; if Oz hadn’t gotten rid of Ramon, Toy probably would have.”

“How did you find out about the money laundering?”

“We checked the files at Hunt and Driscoll; Devon was channeling large sums of money through clients’ accounts, but we’re having trouble finding all the numbers. You want to hear the kicker?” I continued looking at him. “They hired him on Osgood’s recommendation.”

“There’s got to be more.”

Katz studied me for a moment. “You’re thinking that more of these lawyers might be involved?”

“I don’t know.” I took a sip of my coffee since it had finally cooled enough to drink. “I’m just saying that part of this puzzle is still missing. Some connection is out there; somebody.” I thought about it, and it all made sense.

“Didn’t Meifert say Carlisle’s mother was killed when he was a kid?”

“Yes, it was a well-publicized case.” Katz gestured toward Vic. “Her father had that one.”

“Can you get me a psychological workup on Carlisle?”

“Absolutely, but why?”

“I think he was the one at the Franklin Institute the night Cady was hurt, and I think he’s the one that’s been sending me love letters, but I don’t think he threw Devon Conliffe off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.”

Katz made a face. “Then why was he following you this morning?”

“Protection.”

He made a show of looking at my battered body. “You sure about that?”

I shrugged. “I’m the one that pulled my gun and tried to arrest him.”

“So, who’s he protecting you from?”

“I don’t know; Osgood, maybe Diaz.” The food arrived, and the usual turned out to be chicken livers with onions, bacon, and fresh mozzarella. Dorothy would have been pleased. “Billy Carlisle is a Philadelphia drug chemist, but William White Eyes has a romance with the West, a west of which Cady and I may be emblematic.” I reached out with my broken finger and gently tapped the leather surface of the ledger. “I think this is going to be a very detailed record of William White Eyes’ business dealings with Toy Diaz.” I took another bite of the usual. “Anyway, we have to go see an Indian.”

Katz picked up his fork and cleaved off a section of his salmon salad. “We need that third note.”

I nodded and chewed. “That’s why we’re going to see the Indian.”

* * *

The swans and fish the Indians were throttling were still shooting water into the air of Logan Circle when we got there. Katz pulled the unmarked car into a no-parking zone in front of the Four Seasons and cut the engine. As we got out, I waved at the same doorman who had waited with me after I’d been ejected from the back bumper of the Expedition. “Hello, Sheriff.”

“Howdy, Lou.”

We’d gotten to know each other pretty well while I’d bled on his sidewalk. He came over from his official station and assisted me with the door. “How you feelin’?”

“Fit as a fiddle and ready for love.” I reached over the top of the car. “Asa, you still have that photo of Billy Carlisle?”

Katz pulled it from the file on the seat and handed it to me. “Lou, you strike me as a guy who doesn’t miss much.” I held up the photocopy. “You ever see this guy?” He glanced at the photo. “Some very bad people on both sides of the law are looking for this kid. I’m just trying to bring him in safe.”

Lou really looked at the photo this time. “Yeah, I seen him.” The old man tipped his hat back and looked over toward the fountain. “’Bout ’n hour ago.”

Vic was first. “Are you kidding me?”

“Crossed the street against traffic and sat over by the fountain for a while, then moved on.”

“An hour ago?” He smiled at Vic and nodded. She turned back to me. “Why the fuck would he do that?”

I looked at the Logan Circle noble savage in profile. “He changed the note.”

I thanked Lou, and Katz gave him a card and told him that if he saw the young man again to give the police a call immediately. We crossed with the traffic and pulled up in front of the Indian that represented the Delaware River. Vic walked a little past us and placed her hands on her hips. “Christ, it does look like Henry.”

I sat on the bench. Katz sat beside me, his suit looking better than it would have on a mannequin. “So?”

“I would imagine it’s taped to the underside of the seat. Why don’t you look?” He stooped down, reached beneath, and pulled something off.

Vic walked back. “Why this bench?”

“It was the one your mother and I sat on after I questioned the guard at the Institute.” She nodded and didn’t say anything, and I started wondering how far the competitive mother/ daughter thing went. “I think he’s been following me since I got here, the night Cady was hurt.” I looked at Katz. “Aren’t you going to dust that?”

He ignored me, thumbed a fingernail under the flap to break the seal, and opened it to reveal the same stock as the others.

I leaned over for a look, but Vic kicked my boot. “You and my mother come to the park a lot?” I raised an eyebrow and kicked her back.

Katz handed me the note. “I’d say your assessment that he changed it after we took the ledgers is correct.”

It was typewritten with the same dropout “O.” SEE PAGE 72. LOOK WEST, YOU CAN FIGHT CITY HALL.

12

Katz said he would catch up with Gowder and then meet me with the ledgers at the Academy later so that Henry could have a look at them. I wanted to get over to the hospital, but it was late in the afternoon and I had run out of time. I needed a shower and could get dressed at Cady’s for the reception, thereby killing two magpies with one stone. When Vic and I got there, Lena was gone and so was Dog. There was a note on the counter, along with a roasted chicken and a six-pack of beer in the refrigerator.

Vic sat on the stool. “You don’t think we’re looking for William White Eyes.”

I pulled two of the longnecks from the refrigerator. “No, at least not as a killer.”

“Osgood?” I opened both of them and handed one to her.

“I don’t think so, but I’ve been wrong before.”

“Diaz?”

I took a sip of my beer. “He’s a killer.”

“You don’t think that he and Osgood could have kissed and made up?”

“Toy Diaz does not strike me as the forgiving type.”

She took a sip of her own beer. “The assistant DA could be a pretty convenient partner in crime.”

I thought about it. “I think they’re in cahoots.”

She laughed. “Cahoots, Jesus…” She slugged down the rest of her beer. “It is pretty convenient that Toy Diaz appears to be flying around under the radar, and all the inconvenient people in Osgood’s life are meeting with the pavement.”

“Including Cady?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me it didn’t cross your mind.”

I shrugged. “Devon was very convincing.”

“I would be too if somebody was trying to tear off my head and flush it down a public toilet at Citizens Bank Park.”

“I was a little more civilized than that.”

She nodded and placed the tip of her tongue at the bottom of a particularly pointed canine tooth. “Yeah, I’ve seen you in those moods; I bet the meeting was very civilized.” She stood and stretched, her black T-shirt rising and exposing the flat, toned muscles of her midriff. I looked away, but I was pretty sure she’d seen me looking. “I need a shower.”

“Me too, but you go first.”

She had taken the second bedroom upstairs, so I collapsed on the sofa and noticed the blinking light on the answering machine. Vic had stopped on the landing and was looking through the glass of the cupola at the cables that rose from the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. “Cady’s not involved with this.”

Not for the first time, I studied her profile. “You mean in cahoots?”

She grinned. “Yeah.”

I took one of my shallow breaths. It didn’t hurt as much. “I think Osgood put the pressure on Devon, and Devon tried to put the pressure on Cady. I think Cady discovered Devon’s laundering scheme through William White Eyes and was going to drop a dime on them. I’m just trying to figure out why she didn’t do it.”

“You still think Devon hurt Cady.”

I nodded and watched her as she stood there looking at the flat light on the powder blue bridge. “I think if it’d been Toy Diaz, we’d have already been to a funeral.” I cleared my throat and voiced what had been on my mind since I had heard the message on her cell phone. “How could she let herself get involved in an abusive relationship like that?”

“You mean the daughter you raised?” I didn’t say anything. “It can happen to anyone, that’s the point.” She still looked up at the skyline, and her hands slid across the railing as if she were petting the city. She nodded a sad smile, looked down and watched me for a few moments more, and then disappeared.

I was left with the answering machine. There were people back in Wyoming who were desperate for information about Cady and me. I started to reach across and press the button, but the energy eluded me again. I slumped against the cushions and pulled my hat down, thinking that a short nap might do the trick.

The water began running through the pipes, and it was like rain. I could feel myself drifting off. I sat like that, with my back crooked and my finger guard lying on the back of the couch and thought about what I was going to do about Cady.

The water stopped after a while, and I heard Vic’s bare feet padding across the balcony above. I felt myself slipping away but woke a few minutes later because of pressure across both of my thighs. I started to push my hat up, but she took it from me and placed it on her head, an old western tradition. She straddled me with her strong legs and, since the hat was out of the way, I could see that her bathrobe was untied. I could smell the still-wet of her skin, smooth and full.

I started to speak, but she put a finger to my lips and leaned in. “Just shut the fuck up.”

She pulled my face forward with the fingers of one hand twisted into the hair at the back of my head, and I buried my face into her breasts as she reached to unbutton my pants. I could feel her taking the majority of her weight up onto her knees as her fingers quickly undid my belt and began working me through the opening in my underwear and jeans. Her fingers felt cool encircled around me, and it was all I could do to restrain myself from climaxing right then.

I could feel her leveraging me, and I slid into her. She gasped and yanked my head back, locking her mouth over mine, her tongue sliding deep between my lips. I could feel her grinding her hips down onto me, the furious quality of hungry passion as if she might swallow me whole.

I thought I heard a noise from behind her, almost as if the door had opened, but ignored it and slipped my hands under the robe, feeling the heat of her body as my fingers slipped beneath her breasts and cupped them. She broke from my mouth and gasped, a guttural growl coming from the back of her throat as she looked down at me and began pulling my face forward again.

I stopped her. “No.”

I watched as her nostrils flared and the pebbled surface of her nipples rose and fell inches from my face. “No what?”

“I want to see your face.”

Her eyes softened, and she smiled. She pulled my head back, her face a little above mine, and we settled into a rhythm with our eyes locked. I slid myself to the edge of the sofa and for the first time was able to push myself all the way into her. Her eyes flashed again, and her breath caught in her throat as she stayed like that, her grip tightening.

* * *

When I was able to think again, I was in the shower trying to wash myself with one hand, the other with a bread bag over it, secured with a rubber band. I couldn’t be sure if I was ever going to leave the water; it wasn’t safe out there.

Vic must have been reading my mind because, after about fifteen minutes, I became aware of her outline through the opaque surface of the shower door. I turned off the water and stood there, dripping.

“Walt?”

“Yep?”

She waited a moment and then spoke again. “It was just sex.”

“Uh huh.”

It was a longer pause this time. “You’re still who you are, I’m still who I am, and we’re still who we are.”

“Right.”

I watched as she put earrings on and applied lipstick. “The only difference is that we had sex.”

“Okay.”

She laughed and turned toward the shower. “Are you all right?”

I took a deep breath and winced a little. “Yep.” She waited, and I finally heard her let out a long sigh. I wiped the water from my eyes. “Vic?” I stared at the shower control and tried to stay focused. “We can’t ever do that again.”

She chuckled as she went out, not closing the bathroom door behind her. “Speak for yourself, big guy.”

* * *

I didn’t have any clothes upstairs, so I had to go down with a towel wrapped around my middle. She sat at the counter with another beer and the two-day-old Daily News that had the story about Devon Conliffe’s death on the front page.

I memorized every detail of her appearance with just one glance: the wife-beater T-shirt; the brown, pebbled leather jacket with studded conchos; the belt with green copper studs; a dark green lace skirt which stalled out at midcalf; and a pair of clunky-heeled alligator packers.

She had blown her hair dry so that it feathered down and covered her eyebrows, and she wore a turquoise choker and earrings, with my hat sitting ludicrously large on her head. I had known her for three years and, as good as she had always looked, she had never looked this good. “You want your hat back?”

I clutched my towel and pulled my only suit jacket and tie from my bag. “Eventually.”

She took a sip of her beer. “You’re being weird.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.” She smiled.

“Look…” I wondered about what I wanted her looking at. “I’ve got a lot of things going on in my life, and the last thing we should be…”

She cut me off with each word as a statement of its own: “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” She tried to continue, but the urge to laugh was too much. I waited while she laughed at me. “Jesus, Walt, you’re acting like some fucking prom queen the morning after.”

I stood there in my towel and felt ridiculous.

She got up from the stool and dangled the bottle from her hand like she had on the bridge and walked toward me, slowly. “How about I make it easy for you? We’ll just call it rape. I raped you. There. Do you feel better?” She was very close now, and she smelled like our sex, which she hadn’t tried to cover up. She gave me a long look from toe to head, where she replaced my hat. “And, if you don’t get dressed, I may do it again.”

It’s hard to scamper in a towel.

* * *

Vic said she’d meet me at the Academy with Katz and Gowder and had left me to my own devices and the hospital. We had taken the same cab for a while; Vic’s attention stayed out the window as the city rushed by. I kept trying to detect a weirdness in her, but it just wasn’t there. It was quite possible that she had more experience than I did. Since the end of her marriage, she’d been briefly involved with a dentist and had had a ferocious weekend with some rodeo cowboy who’d then showed up at the office and been treated to a reenactment of the Battle of Benevento; Ruby and I had desperately tried to pretend that we weren’t listening.

“I’ve only had sex with six women in my entire life.” It came out before I had a chance to edit it or make any additions, and I said it like I was talking about heart attacks.

She turned her head and looked at me, with a little bit of sadness. “Oh, Walt…”

* * *

When I got to the ICU, the head nurse told me they had been trying to call me. Cady had opened her eyes. Michael had been in the room. He was by her bed, standing easily on the one unwounded foot. “How ya doin’, Sheriff?”

I looked at her, but her eyes were closed.

“She had them open for about an hour and a half, and she closed them no more than ten minutes ago.”

I sat down in the chair by the bed and stared at her motionless face, at the ceremonial Cheyenne trappings still surrounding her, and started to cry. I couldn’t stop. All the pent-up emotion of the last week found fissures in my stalwart act and began cracking like ice dropped into hot water. I could feel the strike of tears dripping onto the two-fisted grip of my hands. I wasn’t aware of Michael moving, but I felt his hand on my shoulder. The wretched, cynical husk that had written Cady off and had prepared me to let her go was dying. The transition from malice to relief was quick and, when my eyes could refocus, I noticed that I’d crushed the finger brace.

Michael and the nurse kneeled in front of me, both of them looking at the twisted aluminum wrapped around my broken finger. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

I tried to catch my breath and noticed that my ribs weren’t aching either. I looked past the nurse’s head and could see that Cady had opened her eyes again. I smiled. “Not anymore.”

Rissman had been called; he had left a message that he wanted to talk with me when I arrived. He was trying to keep my attention as I watched Cady’s eyes and counted how long it took her to blink. He said that most comas end with the patients opening their eyes and regaining consciousness, but that 10 percent of those who do fall into the category of Apallic Syndrome and don’t respond to environmental stimulus.

I squeezed Cady’s hand, but she didn’t respond. Her eyes looked into the distance to places I could not see. The color was clear, and the whites as bright as I’d ever seen them.

He said that for her to regain consciousness, both reactivity and perceptivity would have to be present.

I bit my lower lip and could feel the heat returning behind my eyes.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” He looked at the ceiling, the floor, and my left shoulder.

I looked across the bed at him. “She’s going to make it.”

He shook his head. “Please don’t get your hopes too high. Even in the best of circumstances…”

“She’s going to make it.” I sometimes underestimate the vigor of my statements, and I’d imagine it has to do with having to deal with the law on a continual basis. I rarely let emotion get a strong grip on me or have an influence in my responses, but this was different. I’d been waiting so long for hope that I wasn’t letting it slip away. I’d seen what the hopeless approach was like, and I was never going back there again. “She’s going to make it.”

Rissman said that he was ordering some more tests now that she had opened her eyes and that I had at least a few hours. Michael said he’d be happy to stay and wait for Cady while I went to the reception. I tried not to concentrate on the features he shared with Vic.

* * *

“This section tells the story of the Autumn Count; it is a legendary buffalo robe inscribed by Crazy Horse that supposedly had the ability to tell the future.” He looked up at us. “I have never heard it mentioned outside the tribal council and certainly never by a white man.” He looked back at the ledger and turned the page. “This is the most comprehensive history of the Notame-ohmeseheestse I have ever read outside of the reservation.” He shook his head. “I would very much like to meet this William White Eyes.”

Katz pulled out a chair and sat down across from Henry, while Gowder leaned against the table with his arms folded. Vic stood beside him. “Welcome to the fucking club.”

The Academy staff was setting up the finishing touches on the reception that was scheduled to open in less than an hour, and it promised to be quite the wingding. The main hall was festooned with billboard-sized enlargements of the Mennonite Collection, as it was now called, and it was a little odd to have a gigantic Lonnie Little Bird looking at me from behind the table where Henry sat. I could almost hear the “um-hmm, yes, it is so” drifting across the marble-floored hall.

“What about page seventy-two?”

He flipped the pages, placed a hand gently in the corner, and held the book open. “It is a record of business dealings, numbers, but there is a code that I do not understand.”

I glanced at Katz, who nodded. “Money laundering accounts.”

“So, this ledger possibly gives us the numbered accounts of Toy Diaz’s operation?” Katz shrugged, probably weighing the evidentiary value of a prosecuting attorney holding up the ledger in a court of law. “But I guess without William White Eyes’ corroboration, these things are pretty much useless?”

Henry looked back at me. “They are incredible works of art.”

I reached over and took the ledger from him. “You’ve been hanging around in museums too long.” I handed the book to Katz, who stacked it on top of the other one. “I guess we need Billy Carlisle.”

The detective dropped his head. “I’ve got a wife and kid who’ve forgotten what I look like.” He scooped up the ledgers, placed them under his arm, and glanced at Gowder. “I’ll head back to the Roundhouse and get Meifert on a search for Carlisle. You?”

“I might hang around.”

I put my hat back on, and we all stood. I made the general announcement. “Cady’s eyes opened.”

The Cheyenne Nation was the first to respond, even if his expression stayed the same. “Of course they have.” He reached out and thumped both paws on my shoulders. “I wondered why you were acting strangely.” I glanced at Vic, who covered her mouth. Henry had followed my look and then added. “We will retire to the hospital after the reception.”

“I may not last that long.”

He smiled. “I understand. I will meet you there.”

Michelle Reddington, the dapper woman with the black dress and security pass, came around the corner from the gift shop and took Henry up the ornate, brass-railed stairs toward the Great Hall, where the majority of the photographs had been hung. He paused at the railing, looked back at me, motioned with his right hand in a fist against his chest, and then pointed his index finger down, the Cheyenne sign-talk for hope/heart.

I smiled back and brought my open right hand within a foot of my face, lowering it down and out to the right with a slight bow: thank you.

Katz and Gowder were equally congratulatory, but I told them what Rissman had said about being overly optimistic. They agreed that whatever the outcome, Cady’s eyes opening was certainly a good sign. Vic stood apart, clutching herself with her arms and smiling; after a moment, she turned and walked away.

Katz excused himself, and suddenly Gowder and I found ourselves looking at each other. “I owe you an apology.”

He waved me off. “Forget about it.” He gestured toward the bar up on the mezzanine. “C’mon, I’ll buy you a drink.”

As we were walking up the steps, I noticed that the gates had opened and the lower lobby was filling with well-dressed receptionees. Vic and Katz were carrying on a conversation by the revolving door at the front, and I started wondering what they were talking about—and then wondering why I was wondering. It was about that time that I noticed Vince Osgood and a beautiful young woman handing over their wraps at the coat check. This was beginning to have all the makings of an interesting evening.

Gowder ordered a gin and tonic; I ordered a Yuengling. We wandered up the rest of the stairs and decided to beat the rush to the exhibit. There were about two hundred of the photographs, some in montage, some in their original snapshot format, and some enlarged to the size of doors. Dena Many Camps’s poetry was etched across the bottoms and sides of the large ones in a bold italic.

I sipped my beer. “You mind if I ask you a question?”

He studied the photo of the chiefs, who were holding one end of the American flag while some cavalry officers held the other. “Go ahead.”

“This case seems pretty important to you and Katz.”

“Is that your question?”

I tipped my hat back. “Yep.”

He thought about it for a while. “Different reasons; with Katz it’s a way of cleaning house. Dirty cops, dirty lawmakers, dirty lawyers bring out the inquisitor in him, and the last thing anyone in Philadelphia ever wants to hear is that Asa Katz wants a sniff of him. He did fourteen years with homicide and they tried to kick him over to cold case, but he took Internal Affairs Division.”

“That kind of move can make a man unpopular.”

Gowder smiled. “He doesn’t care. He never went in for that cult-of-the-cop shit.”

“So it’s Osgood?”

“For Katz.”

I nodded. “He’s here.”

“Osgood? Yeah, I saw him. Why do you think I stayed?”

I smiled back. “And you?”

He glanced at the picture of Henry’s father sitting on the steps with the cat. “You know all these people?”

“Yes.”

He nodded and chewed on an ice cube. “You know that crack house you guys took out earlier this week? I was born two blocks away from there.”

I studied him carefully. “You mind if I ask you another question?”

“Go ahead.”

“You guys were interested in Devon because of the money laundering thing, but who put you onto Cady and me?”

He took a sip of his drink and smiled. “Asa got a phone call from somebody who wanted you looked after.”

“Who?” He kept looking at the picture, but the message was loud and clear.

* * *

I left him behind and walked along, looking at the familiar photographs. I stalled out at the one of Frank White Shield’s wife, who was stringing snap peas on the front porch of their two-room cabin. The photo was compelling, but it was Dena’s words that froze me.

can you hear the sound of old women clacking

their old tongues to the roofs

of their mouths in the dust?

this is prophecy so never

ask the Indian whether she’d take

the million dollars or the match.

gasoline is on the shelf in all our houses.

I hadn’t noticed that Vic was standing beside me. “You look nice, Walt.” I wasn’t sure what to say, so I self-consciously straightened my tie. She made an exasperated sound and reached out to straighten my now crooked tie. “I said you look nice. Stop fidgeting.”

“Sorry.”

“And stop apologizing.”

“Okay.” She studied the photograph and was reading Dena’s poetry, the point of her nose turned up. I couldn’t help but wonder if the world had changed, that things were, indeed, different. “Lucian calls it my union-organizer suit jacket.” She wasn’t really paying attention to me but was thinking about Dena’s words. “You look great, too.”

Her head turned back to me. “Thank you.”

She smiled, and I smiled back. “Why do I have a feeling that what we did this afternoon was for my benefit?” She didn’t say anything, but took a sip of her dirty martini, and I watched the iridescent sparkling in the tarnished gold eye, and was thinking that I was doing exactly what I’d been fighting against for years: falling in love with my deputy.

Someone was standing beside us. It was Osgood and the young woman I’d seen with him in the lobby. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting.”

“Howdy.” I stepped back and introduced Vic. The blonde’s name was Patricia Fulton, and she was making it abundantly clear that we hillbillies were not the people she had come to meet. He dismissed her to get drinks, which produced volumes of lower lip, but she disappeared.

Osgood gave Vic a strong look, from her turquoise choker to her boots, and I had the urge to toss him off the balcony. “So, you’re from Wyoming?”

She finished off her cloudy cocktail and took an olive out that had been impaled by a tiny, plastic sword. “I’m from Ninth Street, shitbird, and don’t you forget it.” She bit the olive, turned, and started for the bar in a calculated retreat.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No.” We both looked after her.

“Is she a Moretti Moretti?”

“I’m afraid so.”

He sighed, and his head dropped a little. “Man, I can’t catch a break.” He noticed my stitches and the finger guard. “What happened to you?”

I shrugged. “I got mugged.”

“When?”

“This morning. It’s no big deal.”

He leaned in closer to me, and his voice dropped. “I have some information for you.”

I waited. “Okay…”

“Not here.” He glanced around. “The bridge. Later?”

I took a moment to respond. “No.”

He studied me. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean no. I’ve got other things I have to do tonight and running to the other side of town and hanging around on bridges is not one of them. If you’ve got something to tell me, just tell me.”

“It has to do with your daughter.”

“Cady. Then I’m interested, but I don’t have the time to go anywhere else.” I pulled out my pocketwatch. “As a matter of fact, I’m only going to be here for about twenty more minutes.”

He thought about it. “I’ll meet you outside.”

“Where?”

“There’s an alley behind the building; it turns a corner and there’s a loading dock. I’ll meet you there in fifteen.”

I took a tip from the blonde and tried to look bored. “You bet.”

I left him and continued around the gallery, careful to catch Gowder’s eye as I got another beer from the bartender and retrieved Vic. “You got your sidearm?”

She looked genuinely shocked. “What?”

“I take that as a no?”

“Yes, that’s a no.”

I steered her out of the main gallery to the landing as Gowder appeared, and I nodded him toward us. “Osgood just arranged a little meeting with me out back.”

His eyes widened. “Put him off, and we’ll wire you.”

I shook my head. “No, I have every intention of being back at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital within the hour. This case is important, but Cady is more important.”

The detective sighed. “How you want to play it?”

“You guys go ahead and get set up. I’ll be along in a few minutes. If he sees us together it may not happen.” I reached into the pancake holster at my back and handed Vic my .45, which she slipped under her jacket. “It’s probably nothing, but the people around this guy have an alarming tendency to turn up dead.”

Gowder looked around. “I’ll find that woman from the Academy. Maybe there’s another way into the alley than the Cherry Street entrance.”

Vic looked at me a moment longer then followed him. I stood there and watched as Osgood came down the stairs past me and disappeared into the crowd below; he was talking on his cell phone.

What was it the assistant district attorney had planned? I didn’t figure there was any real danger from him, but if Toy Diaz and he were in cahoots, then discretion was the better part of armed backup. And what about Cady? Was it something to do with her connection to William White Eyes? Or was it simply a ruse? Anyway, I had a meet.

There was a general commotion in the lobby. Of all the things I thought I might’ve seen coming through the brass revolving doors of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Lena Moretti with Dog on a leash would’ve probably been the last.

Two security guards, who seemed to be having a hard time keeping up, were following her closely. People were backing away, even though Dog seemed to be in his best form. Evidently the time in Lena’s company had done him some good, since he appeared freshly washed and trimmed. She pulled up with the brute and smiled as I got to the bottom of the steps. She was beautiful, flushed, and breathless.

“I brought you your dog.”

She reached the leash out to me, and I noticed that it was a black leather one rather than the extension cord we’d been using. I also noticed it matched her outfit, a sleek and sophisticated formfitting black skirt with a black ruffled cardigan over a black knit top. The opera was going to get a run for its money.

“Thank you.” Dog sat on my foot.

She studied my face. “I know it’s inconvenient, but I didn’t have anywhere to keep him tonight.” She glanced around the room, and I’m sure she was looking for her daughter.

I thought about the noise I’d heard while Vic and I had been on the sofa. “I, um…”

Her eyes flashed back to me. “I’m out tonight, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to check on him tomorrow, so I thought I’d just bring him over here.”

“Thank you.” Dog looked up at me, and I tried to think of what to say next, finally settling on the most important thing. “Cady opened her eyes.”

She softened and stepped forward, hugging my arm. “I know. Michael called me. It’s wonderful.” Her genuine happiness cut through the awkwardness. “I have to go. Can’t be late for Rigoletto.”

She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and turned. I watched as the fluted skirt twirled just enough to show a shapely calf, and she disappeared back through the revolving doors. Like mother, like daughter.

Dog looked at me, and I wondered what the hell I was going to do with him. I looked at the two security guards, and the two security guards looked back at me. “Sir, the dog can’t stay.”

I petted Dog. “That’s okay, neither can I.”

* * *

It had begun raining on Broad Street, a gentle, misting drizzle that glossed the surfaces of the city and diffused the light from the globes above. Even the thunder was gentle in the soft, eastern spring, gently bouncing from the tops of the skyscrapers.

I flipped the collar up on my jacket and pulled my hat down a little as we started around the block; Dog seemed happy to be outside and, truth to be told, I was too.

I stopped at the corner and looked down the narrow alley. The yellow Hummer was there, and there was an identifying sticker in the window that stated OFFICIAL. There were a few other cars scattered along the building, but the windows were clear of condensation and nobody was in them.

A weirdo wearing sunglasses and a knit cap was smoking a cigarette under the awning of the back door, but I didn’t see Osgood. I turned up the alley and walked past an empty Cadillac where the brick pavement turned and ran alongside the building. There was a loading dock, just as he had said, along with a four-story brick warehouse with numerous alcoves that housed windows and doors. There was a chain-link fence at the end of the dock that blocked off the two-foot-wide area between the buildings. I tried to think of a better place for bad things to happen, but the alley was easily the dankest, most forbidding place I’d been in in a long time.

The kid in the knit cap called out to me as I got to the corner. “Hey, mister? You’re not supposed to be back here.”

I waved him off. “It’s okay.”

I looked ahead and saw Osgood in a trench coat with his hands in his pockets. His collar was flipped up too, and he nodded as I looked past him. He didn’t make any move to come toward me, so I continued to walk to him, wondering where Vic and Gowder might be, and then Dog paused.

It was at that precise moment that the assistant district attorney’s head exploded.

13

I watched as the headless body fell forward into the pools of rain-water that had collected on the uneven surface of the brick pavement. It wasn’t so much that Osgood’s head had exploded as it had vaporized in a crimson mist that had sprayed me along with Dog.

I had ducked and turned my head to the side with the sound, and I was lucky that I had, because deflected 10-gauge pellets smacked against the side of my hat and stung my neck and shoulder. Dog lunged on the leash and barked ferociously as I hung on to the leather strap and yanked him toward me.

There was a familiar roar, and I watched as a slug from my .45 ricocheted off the surface of the narrow passageway between the buildings. Vic stepped from the doorway of the Academy’s loading dock and moved swiftly toward the alley in a two-handed stance, firing as she went, while Gowder ran toward the chain-link fence with his .40 at the ready.

I looked up from Osgood’s twitching body to the eight-foot barrier with the razor wire strung across the top. I released the leash, and Dog charged toward Vic. I yelled as I started back out of the dead-end alley. “Grab him!”

As I rounded the corner, I took the deepest breath I’d taken since falling onto the street that morning. The pain blurred my vision, and I ran into the kid with the cap, slamming him backward as I stumbled over him and lost my hat. “Yo, man!”

I had regained the sidewalk, and it was a straight shot down Cherry to Broad, but the fifty yards looked like Ten Mile Road. It seemed to take forever, but I turned onto Broad in time to see a large man in a hooded sweatshirt covered with some kind of black rain slicker and with a firearm that looked like one of the old Ithaca Roadblockers sticking out of the unsnapped front; he had just turned the corner at Arch.

I grabbed my side, ran into traffic, and took a diagonal approach that gave me a geometric advantage. I heard brakes squealing as I thundered across Broad and felt the draft of a sedan as it missed me by about a foot. I stumbled a little as I made the median but bulled another car to a full stop on the other side, extended my hands, bounced from the grille, and pivoted across the street as another car swerved and disappeared behind me.

I dodged between two parked cars and turned the corner at Arch as well. People were screaming farther down the block, and a crowd had gathered. “Police! Has anybody seen…” About twelve people pointed south. I turned and ran.

He was cutting the corner and taking a left at the next street and was slowing down. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why he was walking; it was possible that he thought he was clear. I fought the urge to throw up and put my last scrap of energy into the final block.

There was a mob on the sidewalk near the Reading Terminal Market; something must have been going on at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. I looked up through the misting rain and read the moving sign: NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION NATIONAL CONVENTION.

As Vic would say, fuck me. Maybe I could buy a gun from Charlton Heston.

I tried to see the guy in the gray sweatshirt through the throng; he had seemed pretty tall, so I thought I might have a chance. I started walking toward the large overpass, convinced that he’d gone that way, saw a guy with a hood, but it was the wrong color. I wiped the rain from my face and felt a twinge at my neck; I was bleeding. It wasn’t too bad, but I wasn’t going to blend in if things got close.

I caught some movement across the street and a little down the block: gray hood. I couldn’t see the shotgun; he must’ve slipped it under the slicker. If it was actually one of the old Ithaca Mag-10s, he’d never have pitched it; it would be too difficult to get another.

I tried to keep up. He was hurrying now, but not so much that I couldn’t stay with him. He wasn’t going to blend either. He stopped at the next corner, and I panicked for a moment when I thought he was going to hail a taxi; instead, he pulled out a cell phone.

As Vic would say, fuck me again. I had forgotten about Cady’s mobile. I reached into my jacket pocket and dialed 911. He jumped the puddle at the curb, careful to hang onto the gun under his coat, crossed the street, and continued down the block as sirens began whistling through the night around us. A dispatcher answered the line. “Nine-one-one.”

“This is Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming. I’ve got a 10-32 at the southwest corner of Filbert and 11th. I am tailing a homicide suspect who just killed Assistant District Attorney Vince Osgood at the Academy of Fine Arts, and I need assistance.”

There was a pause, but not much of one. “Sheriff, that was Filbert and 11th?”

“Roger that. A black male, tall, with a gray, hooded sweatshirt and a long, black rain slicker, headed east at a quick walking pace. The subject is armed with a tactical shotgun.”

“Roger that. Can you stay on the line?”

I laughed a short laugh with very little humor in it. “I’d really rather not have this cell phone in my hands when I catch up with him.” I started closing the phone as I crossed the street; the man was only about ninety feet ahead and slightly to the left. It was the guy from the crack house, Shanker DuVall.

“Sheriff…?”

I closed the phone and stuffed it back in my suit jacket, and silently cursed as he took a left at the next block and disappeared north up 10th. I picked up the pace and saw him slip across a parking lot behind the Greyhound Bus Terminal. I cut across the street at a diagonal, again hoping to gain a little distance.

There were rows of buses, most of them running, and I walked alongside one. DuVall was in front of another row on the opposite side of the lot; he was talking on the cell phone again.

There was a DMZ of about twenty yards that I wouldn’t be able to cross without him seeing me. I stopped and started to pull the phone from my pocket when I heard a thumping noise and looked up to see an angry bus driver yelling at me. Even through the windshield and the noise of the diesel, I could hear him plainly. “Hey buddy! You can’t be out here!” I motioned for him to keep quiet, but he honked the air horn, and the noise was tremendous. “Buddy, you’re not allowed out here!”

There wasn’t much choice, so I crossed the lot in the direction that I had last seen DuVall, but he was gone. I glanced between the parked buses and tried not to think about the last time I’d seen most of Vince Osgood.

When I got to the area where the shooter had been standing, I peered around the parked bus and saw nothing but a concrete wall and some weeds. I stooped down, checking to see if I could see any feet, but it was so dark there wasn’t any way to tell. I slid along the corrugated side of the big vehicle and wished I had my sidearm.

There was a pole at the end of the row nearest me, but it shed only scattered blocks of light through the bus windows. I wiped the rain off my face again, stepped around a large puddle, turned sideways, and started sliding between the concrete wall and the back of the bus; I figured it was the only direction DuVall could have gone. There was just enough room for me to squeeze after him. Evidently, he hadn’t had any trouble, but then he hadn’t had any trouble squeezing between two buildings and shooting Osgood either. It was possible that he’d left and that I was alone, playing Greyhound limbo for my own amusement. I tried not to think about the alternative.

I stopped for a second and listened, thinking I heard talking. I listened again, but there was nothing. The driver revved the engine of the bus I was pressed against a few times to get the big motor cleared out; I closed my eyes and held my breath until the cloud of exhaust and soot dissipated. The noise was all-encompassing, and I could see the access doors to the engine rattling as I turned my head and looked down the barrel of an Ithaca Mag-10 Roadblocker shotgun.

I could see only part of his face in the dark and within the shadows of the hood, but I could see his lips moving as his finger tightened around the trigger mechanism.

“What?” Here I was, trapped between a bus and a hard spot, and I couldn’t hear the last words I would ever listen to. He paused and then spoke again. His voice was much louder, but I still couldn’t make out the words. “What?”

“I said, I was gonna let you live!”

I yelled back. “Thank you.”

“But…” And he pulled the trigger.

The Ithaca Mag-10 Roadblocker was introduced a few decades back as a tactical 10-gauge designed to stop cars; hence the name Roadblocker. It was expensive, heavy, and carried only three rounds, the idea being that three two-ounce helpings of lead served at just over the sound barrier were enough. However, it had problems that could only be corrected with a longer forcing tube; without the modification, it had a propensity to jam.

And it did.

His eyes widened, and I saw him continue to pull the trigger as I slapped the barrel up; just because it hadn’t gone off didn’t mean that it still wouldn’t.

And it did.

The sound of the buses was bad enough, but the blast from the business end of the 10-gauge shotgun made me hear a high-pitched squeal that felt like a band saw cutting through my brain. I held the barrel above me as the back glass and parts of the bus’s aluminum skin skittered down on my face. He tugged at the heated metal of the shotgun, but I yanked, and the weapon came loose, skimmed over me, and clattered onto the ground.

I turned my head, but he was gone. I sidestepped and looked down; he had fallen, and his arm was lodged between the dual wheels of the Greyhound—center shot to the head. I looked up, and Gowder stood about ten yards away in a two-handed stance with his .40 still pointed at the now-dead man.

He looked up at me and said something, but all I could hear was the ringing and all I could do was look back, breathe as deeply as my ribs would allow, and try to stop shaking.

* * *

It was a source of great interest to the Philadelphia Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office of Southeastern Pennsylvania that Shankar DuVall was leaking onto a stainless-steel table at the city morgue. Gowder said that he got a ride to my call, started walking, and when he saw someone trying to shoot somebody behind the bus, he had taken appropriate, if deadly, action. I was glad that he had, and I reflected that opinion in my formal statement and recorded interview for the investigators.

I looked at the battered tactical shotgun lying on the table between us; it hadn’t had an easy life, and I was starting to think that I hadn’t, either. Gowder was sitting across from me without his gun or his badge. Both of us periodically glanced at the large mirror on the wall under the military clock and wondered who was on the other side. It was 2:33 A.M. I smiled at him and listened to my voice; it sounded as if I were underwater. I could talk, but I still couldn’t hear that well. “I’m glad you shot a bad guy, or we’d be here all night.”

He smiled and said something.

“What?” He smiled some more and pointed to his own ears. “They say it isn’t permanent, that it should get progressively better in the next seventy-two hours, half of which I intend to be asleep.” He looked at the surface of the table and probably was seeing all sorts of things that were not there. After a while, I placed a hand out and got his attention, the dark eyes slowly rising to mine. “If you hadn’t shot him, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

He nodded. After a while, he nodded some more.

They turned us loose; they were through with me, but Gowder would have to sit through another battery of interviews in the morning. By the time we got to the main hallway of the third floor, there was a group waiting for us.

Asa Katz leaned against the wall, and I almost didn’t recognize him in tennis shoes, jeans, and a blue windbreaker. Every time I’d seen him, he’d looked like a print ad for GQ, but right now he just looked like one tired cop. Vic was also there, still in her clothes from the reception. She looked great and was the only one of us who didn’t look exhausted.

Katz spoke to Gowder and then said something to me.

“What?”

They spoke among themselves, and then Vic smiled up at me, slipping her arm through mine and leading me down the hallway and into the elevator. She took Cady’s cell and called someone as we left the Roundhouse.

* * *

She thanked the cops who had given us a ride back to Cady’s, unlocked the door, and watched as I walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer; I was feeling a little edgy and thought a nightcap might help. I motioned to Vic and she nodded yes, so I pulled another one from the icebox.

Dog came over for a wag and a pet. I placed the two beers on the counter, sat at one of the stools, and ruffled his ears. My .45 was lying there, along with my hat. I touched the brim and watched as it pivoted on the crown in a lazy circle.

Vic opened the Yuengling longnecks and slid mine toward me. I sighed and smiled at her as she looked back at the door and Dog barked. Maybe it was my ears—most likely it was recent circumstance—but I found my hand on the big Colt as Vic paid the delivery guy and came back with a pizza box. She acted like she hadn’t seen my hand on my gun, put the pepperoni with extra cheese and anchovies on half on the table, and retrieved two plates and silverware. She pulled two paper towels from the holder above the sink, handed me one, and said something.

“What?”

She shook her head, opened the box, and placed a slice with anchovies on my plate. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but as near as I could remember, I hadn’t eaten since lunch. I chewed in a mechanical fashion and sipped my beer.

I tried not to laugh at the situation; here we were with so much to say, and I couldn’t hear. I made a conscious effort to not look over to the couch, but something stirred rather deeply in the reptilian coil of my primal nature, and I felt very much like doing it again.

I concentrated on the food instead and finished half of it to Vic’s quarter as Dog alternated between us for the crusts. After a while, she stood, saying something with a sense of finality.

“What?”

She placed her hands together, laid them alongside her head, and closed her eyes. I nodded and watched as she stood there for a moment longer, then turned and went up the spiral staircase to the guest bedroom above.

I sat there wondering if I was supposed to follow. I sat there wondering if I wasn’t supposed to follow. I sat there wondering.

The answer came to me as I finally noticed the sheets, blanket, and pillow that made up a makeshift bed on the epic sofa. I reached up with the protector on my index finger and used the other digits to feel the gauze padding where the EMTs had patched my neck. I picked up my hat, turning it over and looking at the marks where one of the pellets had raced across the brim and missed my head by a quarter inch.

Cady was lying at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in a coma after having been pushed down the stairs at the Franklin Institute by Devon Conliffe.

Devon Conliffe was dead after being thrown from the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

Osgood was dead, shot in the head by Shankar DuVall.

Shankar DuVall was dead after being shot by Gowder for trying to kill me behind a Greyhound bus.

That’s all I knew.

I turned out the lights, put my hat on since it was easier to wear than to carry, and wondered who was next. I picked up my sidearm, jacking the slide mechanism to make sure that it was empty, glanced up at the balcony, where the light from the guest bedroom was off, and limped over to the sofa. Even after having Vic call and finding there was no change, I wanted to get to the hospital at a reasonable hour in the morning, so I thought that maybe I should try to get to sleep.

My hat seemed out of shape; maybe the shotgun blast had done more damage than I’d thought. I flipped it onto the coffee table and placed my gun under the brim, pulled off my boots, and shrugged off my filthy jacket, shirt, and tie, trying carefully to avoid my numerous and sundry injuries. I stripped off my blood-spattered jeans and collapsed gently onto the sofa with a groan that caused Dog to come over and rest his head on the cushion beside mine. I petted him with the back of my hand and watched as he curled up on the floor, the ever-vigilant protector.

The ambient glow from the bridge cast blue through the glass of the cupola. The rain had subsided to a soft drizzle that shifted the light from above. There was probably a comforting sound that went along with it, but I couldn’t hear it; all I had was the ringing.

Cady’s eyes had opened. I thought of going to the hospital now. I wanted to see those clear, cool, gray eyes again. I wanted to watch them blink and know that her fine mind was working in there somewhere, finding its way back, but that was stupid. I was tired, filthy, and couldn’t hear.

I pulled the covers up and started to roll over, but my ribs reminded me that I couldn’t, and my eyes wouldn’t stay closed, so I stared at my hat. It would be a shame if it was ruined—it had gone through so much—but if it no longer fit, it no longer fit. I thought of trying it on again and started to reach for it. The inner band was brown and the lining a shiny rayon red, but something was poking up from the liner that was pointed and white.

“Well, hell.” I was still underwater, but I know the words had slipped from my mouth. I blinked and looked again, hoping that perhaps my eyes were playing tricks on me along with my ears, but it was still there. I let sleeping Dog lie and reached over, using my middle and ring fingers to pull the tiny envelope from the battered piece of beaver. The usual typewritten word struck across the crisp stock, and again it read: SHERIFF.

I thumbed open the flap, pulled out the tiny place card, and flipped it over: MEDICINE MAN.

I stared at it, trying to figure out the significance of the two words, but again all I could think of was Henry. He wasn’t the only medicine man I knew, but he was definitely the only one I knew in Philadelphia. I thought about the last note. SEE PAGE 72. LOOK WEST, YOU CAN FIGHT CITY HALL. I assumed that one had to do with the ledgers but, in combination with the earlier note, I wasn’t sure.

GO BACK TO THE INDIAN had been a location, and perhaps a portion of the note about CITY HALL was, too; if that was the case, then MEDICINE MAN might also be a location. I thought about the Indian sculpture at Logan Circle and started wondering about Billy White Eyes’ fixation with all things native and the public art of the greater Philadelphia region.

* * *

I woke up still wondering. When Vic came down the stairs in the morning in an oversized green T-shirt, I had coffee waiting for her.

I slid her the mug; she yawned and perched on a stool. I tried not to notice her legs. “What’re you doing up?”

I sipped my own coffee and sat down to look over the collection of books I had scattered over the surface of the counter. “I needed to call the hospital, and I had some thoughts.”

She looked at me for a moment. “Your hearing’s back?”

I continued to study the open books. “Not completely, but it’s a lot better.”

I had discovered Cady’s library along one of the long walls of the living area. When the law firm in Philadelphia had hired her, she had begun accumulating books on what was to be her adopted city. There were books on its history, its architecture, politics, food, sports and, most important for the moment, its statuary.

“Did you know that Philadelphia has one of the largest collections of public sculpture in the world?”

“So?”

I thought about the prophet having no honor in his own country and that if you wanted a shitty impression of Philadelphia all you had to do was ask a Philadelphian. I held up the note from the crease of the book. “I got another note last night.”

Now she was awake. “Where?”

“I literally pulled it out of my hat.” I looked at her. “Who gave it back to you last night?”

She studied the note and glanced up at me, distracted. “The coat check guys. They said that one of the serving staff had picked it up in the alley behind the Academy.”

I thought of the dark-haired kid smoking the cigarette. “I’ll be damned…”

“What?”

I shook my head at my own stupidity. “There was a kid at the back door of the Academy, and I ran into him when I was chasing Shankar DuVall.” I looked up at her. “It had to be William White Eyes.” I thought back. “He was wearing sunglasses and a cap to disguise himself, but it was the same voice as the one who was driving the SUV, using the same phrase ‘hey man’ or ‘yo man.’ Something like that.”

“Walt, I would say that a full 70 percent of the residents of Philadelphia use the term ‘yo man.’”

I kept my eyes steady with hers. “It was him, and that was also him on the bridge.”

“What bridge?”

“When I met you here in Philadelphia.”

“All right, just for argument’s sake, let’s say it was. Why is this kid following you around?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t think it’s possible that he’s involved with this Toy Diaz group and the recently deceased Shankar DuVall?”

“He was, but I don’t think he is now, and I don’t think he’s a killer. I think he was the cook and the accountant.” She started shaking her head before I could finish. “Look, the drug business is like any other business; if you don’t keep track of your money, you don’t make money.”

“Granted.”

“If you’re running a drug operation, you can’t exactly walk into the office of the nearest CPA. You need somebody good with numbers, somebody you can trust, but somebody under the radar.”

She nodded. “Gladwyne on the Main Line, Ivy League, Phi Beta Kappa, and Rhodes Scholar William Carlisle.”

I refilled my mug and held onto the pot. “But somehow Billy Carlisle became a loose cannon in the Diaz organization somewhere around the same time he became William White Eyes, and I think that happened because of Cady.”

“In the pro bono appeal?”

“Yep.”

She smiled. “You think your daughter had a strong enough moral influence on this guy that it turned him?”

I poured her some more coffee. “You’d be amazed at the influence a woman can have for good or bad.”

She grinned and nodded her head. “Uh huh.”

I set the pot back down. “I don’t think Billy Carlisle was that bad of a guy to begin with. I think he made some bad choices and got involved with some bad people. I think he got reminded of his conscience in his dealings with Cady, and I think she became emblematic of something.”

Vic nodded and looked down at the collection of books I had spread across the counter. “What’s all this shit, anyway?”

“Research. The kid’s a genius. What’s the one thing he figured I’d eventually pick up on and even be drawn to?”

She looked at the books. “Statues?”

“Indians.”

Her eyes widened. “Fuck me.”

“The first note wasn’t Henry. GO BACK TO THE INDIAN was the statue at Logan Circle. I think LOOK WEST, YOU CAN FIGHT CITY HALL means the Indian statues facing west at City Hall.” I turned one of the books and shoved it toward her and pointed at the photograph of a Plains medicine man on horseback, his arm raised above his buffalo headdress. “Dauphin at West Thirty-third Street, east Fairmount Park.”

“Medicine man.”

I nodded. “I’m headed over to the hospital, but I thought I might stop off at City Hall since it’s on the way. The City Hall note came before the medicine man one, and the sequence might be important.”

* * *

The wedding cake that is the City Hall of Philadelphia was designed to be the tallest building in the world, but by the time it was finished, the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument had surpassed it. On four and a half acres of Penn Square, its domed tower tops out just shy of 550 feet to the top of Willy Penn’s hat. There are 250 other statues that adorn the interior and exterior of the building to keep him company.

We got out of the cab at the west side of the building and walked across the sidewalk with Dog as though we were approaching some fantastic ship that had been docked at the center of the metropolis.

“I hate this building.”

I ignored her and studied the façade. “It’s Second Empire, the same as the Louvre.”

“It’s fruity.”

“This is quite possibly the greatest architectural achievement of the late nineteenth century.”

I allowed my eye to cast over the dormer pediment figures on the west side of the building and walked a little ahead of Vic as she stopped to buy an Italian ice from one of the vendors that populated the area. Dog strained a little at the leash and attempted to be a part of Vic’s transaction, but I gently yanked him back.

It was a beautiful day, and the skies and streets were washed clear with the previous night’s storms. I could feel the humidity, and the air felt like the breath of someone close. I dragged Dog along behind me as I angled a little to the left and stood there, studying the dormer caryatids. Above them were two colossal bronzes at the north corners of the tower, twenty-four to twenty-six feet in height: one was an Indian maiden, the other a brave.

I looked at the more than two hundred vertical feet between the statues and me as Vic came over with two cups of Italian ice. “We don’t have to climb this ugly fucker, do we?”

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do.” I took my ice and spooned out a mouthful; it was piña colada, and it was very good. “Is there a tour of the building?”

“Yeah, or at least there used to be.”

I clarified my question. “When?”

“When it used to be my division, it was Monday through Friday at 12:30.”

“It’s Saturday.”

“It’s Philadelphia; nothing’s easy.”

I sidled a little more to the left, continuing to study the massive sculptures. “A woman with a child, and a man with a dog.” I looked down at Dog, who seemed to be taking an inordinate interest in my ice. “You don’t have any notes on you, do you?” He sat in expectation of a treat. I turned back to Vic. “Do you think we’re supposed to figure it out from here?”

She shrugged and continued eating her lemon ice. “That hasn’t been the case so far.”

I went back to ignoring Dog and studied the tower. LOOK WEST, YOU CAN FIGHT CITY HALL. It didn’t make sense that William White Eyes would leave a note in a place where we couldn’t get it. He hadn’t done that before, and I think he was a creature of habit, albeit a creative one. As I finally succumbed and lowered the cup to Dog so that he could lap the remaining syrup at the bottom, I thought I heard somebody say something.

I looked at Vic, who was standing another twelve feet closer to the northwestern corner of the building. “What?”

She stared back at me. “Huh?”

“What’d you just say?”

She looked at me quizzically. “Is your hearing going again?”

I stood there. “Didn’t you just say something?”

“No.”

This time the voice came from directly behind me. I turned and looked at the grizzled man who owned the Italian ice cart—a stocky balding man with a soiled red apron and striped shirt. “Excuse me?”

He smiled and said it a little louder this time. “Medicine Man.”

14

He didn’t know William White Eyes or Billy Carlisle; he just knew that a guy had paid him twenty bucks to keep an eye out for a large man in a cowboy hat with a dog and when he saw him to say “Medicine Man.” He said the guy that had given him the message was tall, skinny, and had been wearing a cap and sunglasses, so he didn’t know what color his hair or eyes might’ve been, but that he was well dressed and had been wearing shiny shoes. He said he always noticed them and that you could tell a lot about a person from their shoes.

He liked my cowboy boots.

He said the guy told him I’d be around yesterday and that he’d tried the two words out on a man that was wearing a cowboy hat but wasn’t so big and didn’t have a dog. He said the man had looked at him funny, and he figured it was the wrong guy. He said the fella with the twenty had given him the message to pass along yesterday afternoon. He studied me for a while and then wanted to know if he was in trouble. I told him no.

He wanted to know if he got another twenty bucks. I told him no to that, too. He wanted to know whether if he came up with anything else, there might be another twenty in it. I told him I was a police officer and that if he hadn’t told me everything, we could continue this conversation at the Roundhouse.

He said he’d told me everything. I asked him if he was sure.

He said he was twenty dollars sure.

* * *

The cabbie took the Market Street Bridge, and I looked out at the Schuylkill River and wondered if there were any fish in it. Vic didn’t have anything to throw out the window, so I figured we’d make it all the way to the hospital.

“Why would he deliver the message twice, once with the vendor and once in the hat?”

“He didn’t think we got it from the vendor, and he was right.”

“So, after the hospital, we head up to eastern Fairmount Park with Katz and Gowder?”

I petted Dog and thought about it. “Let them do it.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“I’m more concerned about Cady.” She nodded, and we rode the rest of the way in silence, but she petted Dog, too.

The detectives were waiting for us outside when we arrived. I asked Gowder about his inquiry. “Postponed till this afternoon.”

“What about your badge and gun?”

He smiled the trademark smile. “I’ve decided to operate on my winning personality and bulletproof spirits.”

I glanced at Katz, and he gave me a thumbs up. Vic followed them. “I’m going with them. You don’t need me.”

I stood there on the sidewalk with the leash in my hand. “Would you do me a favor?” She took Dog.

* * *

When I got to Cady’s room, Henry was asleep in a chair by the bed with his Phillies cap pulled down over his eyes. Lena looked up from the Daily News and held the front page so that I could see a smiling photograph of Vince Osgood when he had a head.

The headline read ASSISTANT DA SLAIN. She raised her eyebrows and spoke quietly. “You’re making quite a name for yourself here in the big city.”

“I didn’t shoot him.” I sat in the chair next to her and also spoke sotto voce. “How was the opera?”

“Tame, in comparison.” She handed me a cup of coffee from the windowsill, and I took it even though I’d consumed enough of the stuff to tan a buffalo hide. “What happened?”

“It was a lot of running, screaming, and shooting.” I looked at Cady. “How is she?”

Lena folded the paper and slid it to the floor beside her chair. “Her eyes were open when Michael and I changed the guard, but she closed them about an hour ago.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since about eight.”

“When did the Cheyenne Nation show up?”

“Michael said a little after midnight. He’s been asleep since I got here.”

She was wearing a floral print sundress and the shapely arch of her foot showed in strapped sandals. She lay back in her chair and stretched her legs. “He’s very handsome.”

It wasn’t hard to imagine Lena as she had been in her midthirties any more than it was hard to imagine what Vic would look like in her late fifties; each was a reminder of what could be and what was, with the grip of the past too strong and the grip of the future too frightening.

“Where’s the Terror?”

Obviously, she was reading my mind. “I got another note stuffed in my hat after I dropped it last night.”

She placed a hand over her eyes and sighed. “Enough of this cloak and dagger stuff.” She leaned forward. “I have news for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Not that it matters that much now, but Alphonse says Devon Conliffe was turning state’s evidence on Vince Osgood.”

“I know that.”

She looked at me. “How do you know that?”

“Katz and Gowder had to tell me after I found out Billy Carlisle was William White Eyes.”

“Who is Billy Carlisle, and, for that matter, William White Eyes?”

I studied her for a long time. “Lena, how come you called Katz and told him to keep an eye on me?”

Her eyes didn’t come back to mine, and she sat there quietly with her hands holding onto the paper cup of coffee. “I was worried about you.” A little time passed as we looked at each other. She smiled. “Well, I’m not one to pry into police matters for too long.” She picked up her purse from the sill, stood, and turned to look at me. “I’m too well trained.” She took a pair of sunglasses out and slipped them on. “Do you have plans for dinner?”

“Pardon?”

“Dinner?” She picked up her empty coffee cup and dropped it in the nearby trash can. “Victor and I thought it might be nice to have you and Vic for dinner late-afternoon? We’d be honored if you brought Henry. It’ll have to be early, since Victor has another performance tonight. About five? Nothing special, Lena’s Risotto a la Marinara Moretti.”

I stayed seated and watched her continue to stiffen. “Lena, have I done something to upset you?”

She didn’t look at me. “Possibly.”

I listened to the flap of the sandals as she disappeared down the corridor of the ICU and wondered if I was developing an unwanted talent for driving women away.

“That was well done.”

I turned to look at the Indian as he raised his hat. He studied me as I took the top off the coffee Lena had given me and went ahead with a sip. “You think?”

He adjusted the cap and leaned on the arm of his chair to get a better look at me. “You were using your cop voice. I think that was what pissed her off more than anything.”

“Cop voice?”

He nodded. “It is a pedantic tone you use when you are questioning a suspect that…”

“All right…”

“She has probably heard enough cop voices in her life.”

He flexed his neck and moved to the chair Lena had just vacated. I offered him the coffee, and he took a sip. He handed it back to me and noticed my new bandage. “You are hurt again?”

“Yep.”

He picked up the paper that Lena had left on the floor. “Would you like to tell me or should I just read about it in the newspaper?”

“Osgood’s dead, along with Shankar DuVall.” I raised my hands in innocence. “I didn’t kill either one of them.”

“That is good.”

I smiled with him and passed the coffee again. “I got another note…”

“I heard. What is your new theory?”

“I think the notes concern themselves with Indian statuary.” I pulled one of the books from my backpack and opened it to the photo of the Plains medicine man.

He took the book and cradled it in his hands, and somehow it became more important. His fingers traced down the page. “You think that the preoccupation of William White Eyes with all things Native extends to the art world?”

“Yep.”

He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “I am relinquished of my duties at the Academy and can now assist you full time.”

I felt guilty about not having kept him company. “How was the reception? It seemed like a success.”

He continued to study the book. “It was.”

“How was your speech?”

“Brilliant.”

I took another sip of the communal coffee. “You’re sounding pedantic.”

He nodded and handed the book back to me. “I am now in cop mode.”

“You know…” He watched me as I watched Cady. “You may be going back to Wyoming alone.” He continued studying me as I slipped the book back in the pack.

“That is what you want?”

I shifted in the chair. “I just can’t keep you here while I wait for…” I could feel the heat rising in my face, so I took a few moments to swallow and let the warmth dissipate. “I don’t know when I’m going to be able to go home.”

He straightened in his own chair. “Maybe the wait will be shorter than you think.” He brought his large hands up and clapped the leather palms together like the report of a rifle with a voice that thundered from the high plains. “Cady!”

I spilled the coffee. The head nurse was standing, but she remained behind the desk; she was probably afraid that the Indian was on the warpath. I turned back toward him with my face set, but when my eyes rested on Cady, hers were open, and they were not staring at the ceiling but at us.

I felt myself rising from my chair and walking toward the bed, and her eyes followed me. I couldn’t breathe, and my vision was clouding with the pent emotion of what seemed like a lifetime. I had never seen eyes as beautiful as the ones I was looking into now.

I reached out and took her hand with my battered, finger-guarded paw. “How long have you known?”

He smiled and shook his head at my ignorance. “Just now.”

I was standing there looking at him when I thought I felt a mild pressure in my hand that a man without hope would have perceived as a reflex action. I turned and looked at Cady, and her eyes stayed steady with mine. I gently squeezed her hand in return and, once again, ever so gently, she squeezed back. I kneeled down by the bed, the tears stinging. “I see you. I see you, and I felt that just now…” I stayed with those eyes, staying with them just as sure as I held onto her hand. “Don’t you go away. Don’t you ever go away again.”

She didn’t nod or even move, but I knew she could hear me and understand. I squeezed her hand again, but she didn’t squeeze back this time, and that was okay. She was probably tired, and we had a long way to go.

* * *

It was Dr. Rissman’s day off. Another surgeon from the floor below said that it was a cognitive effect that denoted a reactive concept but not necessarily one of perceptivity. He started to give me the reactivity/perceptivity routine, but I refused delivery and told him “The Greatest Legal Mind of Our Time” was on its way back, so get ready.

The narrow rays of hope I’d been nurturing cracked across the ICU like the sound of Henry’s hands, and I sat at the side of Cady’s bed for the next hour and forty-three minutes until her eyes closed again.

They wanted to run more tests, and I was the thing that was holding them up. I didn’t want to let go and wanted to be there when her eyes opened again, but one of Henry’s thunderclap hands rested on my shoulder, and I felt the tug of home from two mountain ranges away.

I brushed the sleeve of my shirt across my face, smearing the residue of sentiment and careful to avoid the parts that were freshly stitched. I laughed.

“What is it?”

I tried stretching my shoulders without pulling at my beat-up, Raggedy Andy head. “I was just thinking that if my face was the first thing I saw when I came to, I might go back to sleep myself.”

I looked to see if she would respond when he dragged my hand away, but she didn’t. Like Sleeping Beauty, she was enchanted again, and all I could do was wait.

* * *

It was a beautiful day, and the warmth of the sun felt good on my back. Henry had picked the Vietnamese stir-fry place near the university for an early lunch, and the food was actually pretty good. The guy had almost dropped his spatula when the Indian ordered in Vietnamese. Since it was a Saturday and the students were otherwise engaged, we occupied one of the picnic tables; my two regular pigeons hopped over and stood beside my boots. I motioned with my plastic spork. “Mutt, Jeff, meet Henry Standing Bear.”

Henry nodded at the two freeloaders. “Ha-ho, Mutt and Jeff.” Mutt cocked his head at the baritone Cheyenne, but Jeff kept his beady eyes on my fried rice.

I looked toward the façade of Franklin Field and thought about what had happened today. I thought about the chain of violence and death that had been at least momentarily reversed. I thought about acts of kindness and acts of risk that were due a reward.

Henry ate his shrimp with rice and looked at me but didn’t say anything. He took a sip of his green tea and studied me with the steady, dark eyes. “What do you think they will find at the medicine man statue?”

I took a deep breath, and it seemed like my ribs didn’t hurt as badly. “Now that I’ve had time to think about it, nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I think William White Eyes was going to be there.” I put my paper plate on the ground so that Mutt and Jeff could get a shot at some rice. “He’s not going to show for Philadelphia’s finest, but he will for us.”

He sat the cup down. “This is not over then, is it?”

“He saved Cady.” He didn’t reply. “You and I both know that if she hadn’t gotten medical attention as quickly as she did, she’d be dead.” It felt good having some idea of what I was going to do. “He exposed himself, not once, but a bunch of times to make sure that we were okay.” I used the finger guard to scratch at the stitches at my jaw. “That’s just not something I can walk away from.”

“Toy Diaz?”

“Has to be. The way I see it, Devon Conliffe tried to put pressure on Cady about the laundering scheme, but when she didn’t bite, he was going to turn state’s evidence on Osgood. Either Osgood or Diaz got antsy and decided to have Shankar DuVall toss Devon off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, but then Billy Carlisle became a loose cannon, and everybody decided they couldn’t trust anybody.”

“You do not think that Shankar DuVall was there at the Academy to kill you?”

“No. It might have been what Diaz told Osgood, or what Osgood planned with him, but I think Diaz had decided that Assistant DA Vince ‘Oz’ Osgood was not the type to go down with the ship. Besides, DuVall told me himself that he hadn’t planned to kill me.” I sipped my iced tea. “Now, the only one left with any of the answers is Billy Carlisle, aka William White Eyes.”

“So you think it is our responsibility to keep him alive?”

“It’s mine.”

“Then it is ours.”

Our attention was drawn to a sassy brunette who was attempting to walk an oversized dog into the lobby of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. Henry stuck both fingers in his mouth and whistled with a piercing note that rattled the surrounding windowpanes.

Vic stopped arguing with the security guard, flipped him off, and crossed 34th without looking. Mutt and Jeff scattered in the presence of Dog as Vic sat next to me and took my iced tea. She sat very close. “So, you got any other great ideas?”

“Nothing?”

She held a few ice cubes in her mouth. “Nothing.”

“Where are the cops?”

“There was a possible Toy sighting up in Germantown, where a competitor in the highly volatile commerce of grass-root pharmaceutical distribution came down with a critical case of NFP.” We continued to look at her. “No fucking pulse.”

“Did this competitor fall off a bridge?”

“No bridges big enough in Germantown.” She shook her head and continued crunching the ice between her teeth. “Somebody ran over him with a car. Twice.”

Henry and I looked at each other, and then I looked back at Vic. “I want to go up to the Medicine Man and have a look for myself, or have William White Eyes have a look at us.” I remembered Lena’s invitation as I looked at her. “Your mother and father invited us over for dinner.”

Vic choked, picked up the cup again, and began eating more ice. “Yeah, tell ’em I’ll pencil ’em in.”

Henry watched her for a few moments. “They say chewing ice is a sign of sexual frustration.”

Vic slipped her hand on my knee under the table, and I almost jumped off the bench. She continued chewing. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

* * *

“Four hooves down means that the individual died in battle.”

I looked at the four bronze horse hooves planted firmly in the granite base. “I thought died in battle was one hoof lifted.”

Vic held Dog and input her two cents. “What are two hooves lifted?”

I glanced down at the description in the book. “You mean rearing?”

“Yeah.”

I looked around. “Fell off his horse during battle?”

The sloping lawn of this part of Fairmount Park was at odds with the sordid squalor across Ridge Avenue. The row houses on the block were falling apart from the neglect, and the only retail establishment was an after-hours club in what looked to have been a restaurant.

I turned back to the statue and read from the book. “‘Cyrus E. Dallin, 1861–1944.’ He was from Utah.” The Bear moved a little closer to the statue but seemed distracted and looked at an area to the southwest. “‘Famed Native American scholar Francis LaFlesche described the nudity of the holy man typifying the utter helplessness of man in comparison to the strength of the Great Spirit, whose power is symbolized by the horns upon the head of the priest.’”

The Cheyenne Nation walked past me. “Looks like a high-five.” I glanced up, and it did. “What now?”

“Well, while we’re waiting for William White Eyes, we look for a note.”

* * *

We looked for fifteen minutes. No note. Vic was sitting on the hillside looking at the book of statuary, and Dog had decided to join her. Henry and I were still searching the surrounding trees in hopes that the wind might have caught the note and landed it on a branch but had still found nothing. “It is not here.”

“I’m beginning to think you’re right.”

We walked back over and stood in front of Vic, and Henry asked. “Is this the only Medicine Man?”

She placed a hand across the open page and looked up. “Yes.”

I shrugged. “I guess we might as well head back to the hospital.”

Henry had parked the Thunderbird across Edgely Street. We made our way to the car when I noticed a tricked-out, fully chromed Escalade bristling with oversized wheels, brush guards, and enough off-road lights to illuminate the Miracle Mile. It was stopped at a discreet distance, and I was thinking about William White Eyes when the tinted windowed vehicle made a casual U-turn and thrummed its way back toward the reservoir and the depths of Fairmount Park.

“If you were an Indian in the city, where would you hide?” I held out my hand to Henry as we watched the Escalade disappear behind the sloping green of Athletic Field. “Gimme your keys.”

“Why?”

I started around the car toward the driver’s side and tossed the daypack into the backseat, feeling the weight of my .45 inside. “You drive too slow.”

He stopped and looked genuinely hurt. “I do not.”

“Give them to me!”

He handed me the gold-colored anniversary keys that he had put on the lucky rabbit’s foot chain. Vic quickly climbed in the back with Dog, and Henry took shotgun. “Do not wreck Lola.”

In the rearview mirror, I watched as Vic put her arm around Dog. “I’ll try not to.”

I fired up the 430-cubic-inch police interceptor and began intercepting. Fortunately, we were parked in the right direction, so I gunned her and quickly motored across the hill, following the only road the Cadillac could have taken. At Fountain Green Drive we had to make a decision. Vic hung over the seat and pointed left. “Stay on the reservoir road. He’ll either double back or continue the loop back up 33rd.”

She was right. We turned the corner in time to see a black Escalade continuing north on the four-lane. I made a turn on a late yellow, drifted to the right, and pulled in behind a delivery van in the slow lane. Back at Dauphin he stopped at the light, and we slowed behind the truck, but the light changed too quickly. “Damn.”

Henry’s eyes stayed on the black SUV. “What?”

“If he’d stopped at the light a little longer, I was going to get out.”

“Yes, that worked so well last time…”

Vic was still hanging between the seats as I pulled around the step-van and accelerated. The Cadillac made a left without hitting the turn signal, then a hard right on Strawberry Drive. “I don’t suppose either of you got the license number yet?”

I hung back at the turn, but it’s hard to go unnoticed when you are a powder blue vintage convertible with a cowboy, an Indian, a brunette, and a dog inside. He had steadily accelerated as we approached the light at Strawberry Mansion Bridge, and by the time he got to the intersection, he was running a straight sixty. Fortunately, the light was green, and we shot onto the ramp of the bridge about ninety feet behind him, barely missing a bicyclist who shook his fist at us.

The fifty-year-old steering on the big Bird felt a little loose as we dropped over the Schuylkill Expressway and watched as the Caddy continued to gain speed but easily make the corner at Greenland Drive. I hit the brakes a little as I turned the wheel, powered through the curve, and flattened the accelerator to the floor as the bulk of the cast-iron engine exploded internally, shooting us up the tree-lined thoroughfare at eighty.

I noticed that Vic had pulled my .45 from the pack. “There’s a stop sign up here!”

I saw the Escalade blow through the sign with a squealing right and continue up the next street at full throttle. I looked over my left shoulder but couldn’t see anything but the forest for the trees. We were committed, and I only hoped that our luck would hold as I kept the pedal to the classic metal.

I had guessed we’d pushed our luck about as far as it would go when I saw the brand-spanking-new Grand Cherokee pulling the two-bay horse trailer just as we got to Chamounix Drive. I cut the wheel, and we dropped off the road, easily outrunning the laboring Jeep and jumping the street. We missed an oncoming Volvo station wagon in the other lane, slid into the gravel approach to the stables, and clipped the sign as everybody blew their horns. I saw the Jeep turn into the stables as we renegotiated the asphalt and straightened into our lane. I looked down the road ahead of us but could see nothing.

“I cannot believe you just dented Lola.”

I ignored him and slowed, asking over my shoulder. “Where does this go?”

She slid the mechanism back on the semiautomatic. “It connects with Conshohocken Avenue, turning back where we came from, or down Falls Road and the expressway.”

I yelled over the engine and wind noise. “Which way would you go?”

“Expressway!”

We rounded the corner, drove behind a large mansion, and suddenly the point became moot. There were large sawhorses across the road that effectively blocked entry and declared in large black and orange letters, ROAD CLOSED DUE TO CONSTRUCTION.

I hit the brakes, and we all looked at each other. Vic gestured with her chin. “Go on ahead around the circle and back down.”

I followed her directions and continued around and back onto the drive, where we could see straight down Chamounix. There was no Escalade. She gestured to the right, where an unlabeled road disappeared into the trees. “There.”

I made the turn and hit the throttle again. “Where does it go?”

“Nowhere. It dead-ends in about a quarter mile.”

I made a sweeping turn and looked down at a pastoral idyll. I could see the Cadillac backing up with the beginning of a three-point turn at the end of the road. I hit the gas and barreled down the two-lane drive with no name, rapidly coming up on the black Caddy. He finished the turn and whipped the big vehicle straight at us. My nerve stayed steady as we approached each other at a climbing sixty.

Henry grabbed the dash. “What if it is not William White Eyes?”

Almost in answer, I felt and saw two things: the tinted side window on the Caddy was down and something was being thrust between the side-view mirror and the windshield. At the same time, I felt Vic rise and shoot just as the tick-tock compressed fire of a fully automatic weapon blistered the surface of the road in front of us and ripped its way up the front of the Thunderbird.

I veered to the right as the windshield exploded, and I tried to yank Vic down by her leather jacket. The return fire of the big Colt had struck home, and I watched as the heavy slugs bit into the hood, windshield, and door of the Escalade as it rushed by us and glanced off the side of the T-bird.

I hit the brakes and turned the wheel, stretching our momentum into a sliding turn, but at least two of the tires were flat, and we warbled to a stop; the Escalade was about fifty yards back down the road. I threw the door open and pushed off from the side of the car. I’m not sure what I thought I was going to do without a sidearm, but I figured I’d think of something when I got there. I heard Dog barking and coming up fast behind me.

In the reflection of the Cadillac’s side mirror I could see someone frantically attempting to do something and desperately hoped that he wasn’t about to reload. I got about halfway there when Dog overtook me, and I yelled at him to come.

The man in the Cadillac turned, roared the motor, sprayed grass and turf as he reached the curve, and was gone. I slowed to a stop and stood there in the middle of the road with the spent shells of the 9 mm scattered across the pavement. I made a few silent vows to myself as my jaw muscles clenched and stretched at the sutures.

Toy Diaz. Had to be.

I placed my hands on my knees and attempted to catch my breath as Dog came over and stuck his nose in my face. My sides were killing me as I made the slow walk back to the T-Bird. I was dizzy, and I was sweating, and it seemed very hot as I looked up at the big convertible, which was stretched across the road. Henry was in the back, and I picked up my pace. There was blood on the white leather of the cavernous seat, a lot of blood.

Henry had pulled her down and had cradled her head while applying pressure to the wound with his shirt. One of the slugs from the assault rifle had caught her in the side, just under the arm at the oblique muscles. It was hard to say where else the slug had gone. I leaned in and looked at her tarnished gold eyes, which were already glazing with shock. She raised a blood-coated hand and smiled. “Stop being weird.”

15

It was as bad as it looked and maybe a little worse. The 9-mm slug had taken a hard left where her love handle would have been if she’d had one, and a second had clipped her just above the collarbone and had taken a bit of the shoulder blade with it. My attempts at filling the available beds at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania had not gone unnoticed, and Rissman had asked if I wanted all my people in one wing. I noted that it’d be convenient.

I called the Moretti family, although Vic had told me not to, and sat down in the hallway to await the onslaught. Chavez had taken our statements; he said that Asa Katz would be here momentarily but that Gowder was still being queried about the Shankar DuVall shooting.

“How’s that going?”

He shrugged and slipped the papers into his aluminum clipboard. “I’d put it down as a service to society, but you never know.”

Henry said he had a few loose ends to tie up and that he’d be back in a couple of hours. I apologized for getting dents and bullet holes in Lola, but he didn’t say anything. He took Dog, and I figured I was in deep trouble.

I went up to Cady’s to wait for Vic to get out of surgery and found Jo Fitzpatrick sitting in a chair by my daughter’s bed. Jo was incognito in jeans, a worn pair of rough-out boots, and a weathered Carhartt coat that looked familiar. They were deep in the throes of a one-sided conversation concerning the case of the Atlantic City company that had attempted to do a little under-the-table trading. Evidently the case had been transferred to Jo, and she was getting Cady up to speed, even if all my daughter could do was look at her while she talked and occasionally squeeze her hand. It was hard to breathe when I went into that room.

“What happened to you?”

I had a tendency to forget what I looked like as of late. “I thought I might blend in better if I had a few more bandages.” She looked at me doubtfully as I stepped to the other side of the bed and reached out to hold Cady’s other hand. “How is she?” Cady squeezed back, and I watched as her eyes slowly tracked from Jo to me. I sighed and listened to my breath rattle as she squeezed my hand again.

“She’s looking much better, don’t you think?”

“Yep.”

She waited a few moments before speaking again. “I had a little time this morning and thought I’d come over and help out.”

“Thank you.” I kept my eyes on Cady’s, but hers had closed. I gently slipped my hand away. “Jo, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

It was a slow response. “I guess not.”

“What would you say your firm’s position is toward Cady?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

I swallowed. “I’m thinking of taking her back to Wyoming and, without the ability to consult with her in all this…”

She stepped a little forward and into my line of sight, and I could see from the general attitude of her body that she was more relaxed. “Cady is one of the best lawyers in the firm.” Her voice broke a little, and I could hear the wind outside the windows and in between her words. “David Calder, the senior partner, called me up to his office yesterday morning to make sure that we were doing everything we could for her.” When I glanced over, tears were on her face. “He said that no matter what it took, and no matter how long it took, we were to be committed to Cady’s recovery and her continued position in the firm.”

I nodded and looked back at my daughter. “Then I think we’re going to go back home.”

“To Wyoming?” She sounded a little relieved.

“As soon as she can.” I squeezed Cady’s hand again, but she was asleep. “I’ve got a few things to attend to and so does she.” I smiled and looked at the young lawyer on the other side of the bed. “Can I ask you another question?”

She smiled back and wiped her face. “Sure.”

I waited. “Who assigns the pro bono cases at the firm?”

She coughed and swallowed, wiped her eyes some more, and then cleared her throat, gesturing with her hand to explain the time it took to respond. “That would be me.”

I nodded. “You.”

“Yes.”

I nodded some more. “So, you assigned William White Eyes to Cady?”

She stayed steady. “Yes.”

“Jo…” I smiled again, just to let her know I wasn’t going to jump over the bed and handcuff her, and went and sat in one of the chairs beside the window. I thought that maybe if I sat down it would be easier for her. I picked up the book on the public art of Philadelphia. She didn’t move, and her back was to me. “The way I figure it, Osgood pressured Devon…”

“I told them to not let Cady find out about any of this stuff.”

I kept looking at the book. It was an old trick, but she didn’t fall for it and stayed as she was. “Well, it looks like you were right.” I waited, but she stayed silent. I flipped through the book to the section on northwest Fairmount Park. “Where’s Riley Elizabeth?”

At that, she turned and looked at me. “What?”

“I was wondering where your daughter is?” I studied the book as she crossed to the other chair, sat, and folded her hands in her lap.

“My mother is taking care of her.” She turned her head and looked out the window.

I took a deep breath and let out with a heavy exhale, attempting some comic relief but probably sounding more like a tire going flat. “William White Eyes wasn’t supposed to get out.”

“No.”

I looked at Cady. “Leave it to ‘The Greatest Legal Mind of Our Time’ to mess up the appeal.” I laughed, and Jo turned to look at me. Her hair hung back on her shoulder, providing a stark contrast to the cream-colored luster of her skin. I smiled at her. “You want to hear something funny?” She waited. “I partially believe you.” I thought about it. “It’s pretty obvious that when Billy Carlisle went native he became a problem, but when he met Cady, he took Devon and Vince Osgood into the liability column with him. I might be a problem for Diaz, but nothing on the level of Devon Conliffe, Vince Osgood and, worse yet, the now named William White Eyes.” I continued to look at Cady and interrogate Jo Fitzpatrick. “Did you know that Osgood was in business with Toy Diaz and Shankar DuVall?”

“No.”

I went back to the book and read about a statue near the Rex Avenue Bridge on Forbidden Drive, of all places. She didn’t say anything more. “What more do you know about William White Eyes?”

“Nothing.”

She had waited just a moment too long, so I gave her one more opportunity. “You’re sure?” I listened as the severity of all the things I had told her settled like a sedimentary layer of criminal activity, making us both feel unclean. Her lips trembled and her mouth opened, but it took a long time for no words to come out. I looked at the waning afternoon sun as she quietly picked up her things and left.

I studied Cady and sighed, thinking about the photograph in her office of her and Jo. “The tiniest reason I have for wanting you back is so you can help me figure out all of this.”

* * *

Katz was coming out of the elevator when I got to it, so he did an about-face and followed me in as I pushed the button and stuffed the book on Philadelphia statuary under my arm.

“You might want to skip the third floor.”

“I take it the entire Moretti family is in attendance?”

“En tutti.”

He adjusted the glasses on his nose with an index finger. He looked at me for a while longer, but I continued to stare at the numbers as the elevator slowly descended to three. “So, it was Toy Diaz?”

“Yes.”

I felt suddenly tired. “Let me guess; the Escalade was stolen.”

“Off a lot in Wynnewood.”

“Where’s that?”

He was distracted and looking at his notes. “The Main Line; Toy has expensive tastes.”

“Is that near the area of the Medicine Man statue?”

“Not particularly.” He looked up at me. “You have a theory?”

I thought about it. “Not anymore.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“We know that Diaz is looking for William White Eyes.”

“Yes.”

“With all the notes, it’s pretty obvious that White Eyes was tailing me for Cady’s sake, but with Osgood dead I think he realized that he was the one who needed protection and so has come to the conclusion that we’re the only thing standing between him and a Salvadorian necktie.”

“Okay.”

“The Indian statues are the key, and the trick is knowing which one is next.”

He closed his notebook and grimaced, leaning against the elevator wall. “That may be a little difficult.”

“Maybe not; there’s only one left.” I opened the book from Cady’s library and held it for him to see as the door to the third floor opened.

Lena was standing alone in the hallway as we stepped out of the elevator. I handed Katz the book and reached an arm out to her. She looked up and smiled sadly. She didn’t take my hand. “I hear she’s doing all right?”

“Yes, thank God.” Her smile weakened. “She was asking for you, so you better go in.”

I stood there, glancing down at my scuffed-up boots. “I’m sorry.”

I listened to her take a deep breath and watched as she folded her arms across her chest and looked past me. “Hello, Asa. You might want to stay out here with me.” There was no edge in her voice, just fatigue. I glanced back at Katz, who quietly closed the book, looked at her through the split lenses, and put a hand out to touch hers.

I stood there for a moment more and then continued down the hallway. I opened the door and stepped into the room. Vic the Father and a group of young men were gathered around the bed; there was a younger version of Victor, a variation on Alphonse, one that didn’t look like anybody in the family that I knew, and Michael, who glanced up and smiled.

“How ya doin’, Sheriff?”

“I’m okay. Thank you, Michael.”

She was watching me, but they had her trussed up pretty good, so I felt confident in going the rest of the way into the room. I looked at her father and brothers, then back to Vic, who smiled and raised her hand to me. “Where the fuck have you been?”

* * *

By the time Asa and I got outside, Henry was valet parking a dark green, one-ton duelie, fortified with grille guards and an extensive roll bar and fifth wheel. He took the keys back from the valet guy when he saw us.

I gestured toward the giant vehicle. “What is this?”

“We needed a rental car.”

I looked at the behemoth. “Why didn’t you just get a Bluebird bus?”

“If you are going to drive like Patton, then we need a tank.” He waved at Katz and then walked around as I went to the passenger-side door. “Besides, I am thinking that we may have to haul something.”

“Where did you rent this?”

He smiled across the broad scoop that straddled the hood. “I did not rent it, your insurance did.”

Great.

I stopped and invited Katz along, but he said he’d check in with Gowder at the inquest and meet us at the Valley Green Inn at the Wissahickon ravine in Fairmount Park at six. He handed me back the book.

I climbed in and shut the door; it sounded like a vault closing. I reached back and scratched behind Dog’s ear, then turned and fastened my seat belt. Henry studied me; I knew I’d fooled everybody up to now, but he knew me too well, perhaps better than I knew myself, and was unlikely to let my mood go without comment. “Uh-oh.”

“Drive.”

The uh-oh was all I got. He hit the starter, and the truck clattered to life. “I have been in touch with the Delaware Indian Association, and they…”

“The what?”

He turned and looked at me, better than matching my stone face. “The Delaware Indian Association.”

“What the hell is that?”

“It is a rural institute for the advancement of Indian resources in an urban environment. I spoke with a nice young woman there, a Felicia Sparrowhawk, who said that the last contact they had with William White Eyes was when they arranged for a part-time job for him at the Chamounix Stables in…”

“Fairmount Park.”

“Yes.” He navigated the on-ramp for the Schuylkill Expressway alongside 30th Street Station and joined the traffic headed west. “It was a probation program between prison stints.”

“That would fit for numerous reasons.”

“Yes.” I watched as he glided the big, more-than-utility vehicle through traffic like a tiger shark swimming lazily through a school of smaller fish. “There is a contact at the stables, but Ms. Sparrowhawk didn’t have her name. She thought, by the sound of things, that there might have been something more there than an employer/employee relationship.”

I nodded and watched the traffic skitter out of his way; Henry drove smoothly, if slowly, navigating to the exit at the right. I thought of a Gladwyne cowgirl, and how it was all too convenient. “I already know who it is.”

He glanced at me and then nodded. “As do I, but there is more.” He slipped a hand in the inside pocket of his black leather blazer and handed me another note, identical to the ones we had received before. “I returned to the Medicine Man, in hopes that with Toy Diaz even momentarily inconvenienced, William White Eyes may have returned with a note.”

I opened the tiny envelope and read BIG CHIEF.

“You know where this is?” I opened the book in my lap so that he could see the illustration at the upper lefthand corner. He glanced down and nodded. “Close?”

“Very.”

“Tonight?”

“Yep.”

“How is Vic?”

“Good.” I had done pretty well up until now, but I could feel the numbness returning to my face and the stillness to my hands. I slowly unwrapped the bandages from my left, bent the aluminum protector back from my index finger, and dropped it on the floor of the big truck.

He glanced over. “What are you doing?”

“Trigger finger.”

“You are righthanded.”

I watched the trees. “I want both.”

* * *

He took the exit, and we drove the same ravines that we had earlier. “The woman teaches horseback riding to urban underprivileged children on Saturday afternoons.”

I nodded. “The Saint of Fairmount Park.”

He shook his head and studied me, his eyes pleading with me to behave. “Maybe it would be best if you were to wait in the truck, since you are angry with the world?”

I folded my arms and looked out the side window at all of the trees. In Wyoming, the silver-green aspens would be in leaf, quivering in the breeze like pinwheels. “I’m not mad at the world. I’m angry with William White Eyes for taking us on this wild goose chase, but the distiller’s choice, single-cask, limited edition, pissed-off I am holding in reserve is for Toy Diaz.”

“Let us try and remember that, shall we?” He pulled into the Chamounix Stables, and we both looked at the sign I had knocked over earlier, still lying in the barrow ditch.

When we got out of the truck, Dog followed, and Henry and I put the sign back against the pristine and manicured garden that led alongside the path to the stables a short walk away.

We each propped a boot on the first rung of the corral, leaned our folded arms across the top of the fence like bookends, and watched as a girl in pigtails who looked like she was in grade school made a strained and determined attempt at keeping her tiny bottom on a Western saddle. A young woman in her early thirties held the lead and twitched the bay’s flanks, keeping the fat mare moving at a regulated pace. The horsewoman looked as though she would have been more at home in Wyoming, and just looking at her brought a longing in my chest. She wore a battered, black quarter horse 60 hat, and a thick brunette braid uncoiled down the back of her sand-colored Carhartt barn coat. When she turned I could see a jacquard silk scarf at her neck, the denim, snap-front shirt, Western belt, and shotgun chaps.

Jo Fitzpatrick.

I felt a little of the preparatory anger fade with the blue of her eyes as she glanced at Henry and me. On the next go-round, she tilted her head and nodded toward the stables. “I’ll be done in just a minute.”

We returned to the main path and entered the barn through a large opening pointed toward the road. It was a pretty good-sized place, with two dozen stalls running the length of the slate flooring. There were about a dozen horse heads that turned and looked at us as we entered, one nickering loudly from only a few stalls down.

Dog and I tagged along behind the Bear as he went straight to the animal that had spoken to him, a large paint, patch-worked like clouds of cream in iced coffee. I pulled up short and looked at the animal, Dog stopping alongside. The big girl swung her head from Henry and looked directly at me, letting loose with a lung-vibrating whinny. Henry followed the horse’s gaze and smiled. “She knows you.”

“Uh huh.”

“Come say hello.”

I walked toward her; the small, brass nameplate read “Creampuff.” She looked exactly like the paint in my dreams. She stuck a prehensile and exploratory nose toward me, and I could see her powerful withers as the large brown eyes blinked. I reached a hand out, palm down, and let her sniff me, rubbing her lips on my knuckles. I pushed a forelock from her face, and Dog nudged my pant leg: jealous.

Henry had walked to the center of the stables to another opening at the side that led toward the corral where we had first seen Jo. There was a large tack shed adjacent to the passageway and next door, a makeshift office. I stopped petting the mare and walked to the doorway as Henry and Dog continued toward the corral. Dog stopped to look back at me when he realized that I was not following. The paint whinnied again, and I looked at her.

Henry spoke. “What?”

“Wait a minute.” I entered the office and pulled the latest note from William White Eyes out of my pocket, extracted it from the envelope, and threaded it into the mechanical typewriter that squatted on the plywood desk.

I struck the O key; it had the dropout.

I stood there, until I could hear a horse approaching at a relaxed pace on the stables’ slate floor. I slowly stuffed the card and envelope back in my pocket and followed after Henry and Dog. Jo Fitzpatrick was leading the little girl in from the corral. She nodded at Henry as he looked up at the smiling child, riding tall in the saddle; she and Henry were eye to eye.

“I hope we did not cut your ride short?”

“You did.” The little girl nodded, and her pigtails bounced up and down.

“She’d stay out there all day if I let her.” Jo glanced at the aspiring equestrian. “She likes the riding part, but not the work afterward part.”

Henry rumbled back. “Who does?”

Joanne led the horse past Henry around a corner and to the left. We followed them to the last stall, and I watched as Henry lifted the little girl from the saddle and placed her on the ground as Jo unhooked the cinch and removed the saddle, placing it on a stand in the walkway. The Bear put his hands on his knees and looked at the child as she spoke to him.

“Are you an Indian?”

He raised a palm to her and spoke with all the seriousness of a Senate subcommittee. “How.”

She giggled and pointed toward me. “Is he a cowboy?”

The Bear regarded me. “Sort of.”

The little girl motioned toward the horse. “This is Thunderbolt.”

Henry nodded and glanced at the overweight mare with an appraising eye. “Looks fast.”

She nodded enthusiastically. “He is.”

“She.” Jo removed the bridle and the blanket and dragged a set of steps beside the horse, now munching noisily on a feeder full of alfalfa cubes. She handed a couple of brushes to the girl. “Get to work, Juanita.”

She led us toward the tack room/office but changed her mind and took us out toward the corral. “It’s so nice; I hate to be inside on a day like today.”

“I agree.”

I glanced back into the stables. “Is she going to be all right in there alone?”

Jo snorted a short laugh, the first sign of humor I’d seen in her today. “Unless Thunderbolt eats her.”

We pulled up at the fence, and she hooked a boot heel in the lowest rung, trailed her arms across the top, and looked at the two of us. She seemed more relaxed than in the firm’s offices or in Cady’s hospital room, our presence notwithstanding, so I decided just to ask what I had suspected. “Osgood is the father of your child?”

She stayed looking at me. “Was.” I nodded, but it took her a while to get going. “He wasn’t a bad guy, not in the beginning.” I nodded some more and looked at my boots. “Needless to say, it didn’t work out. He provided monetary support, but that was about it.” She pushed her hat back and pulled at a wayward lock behind her ear. “Oz found out about Devon’s drug problem and, when he left our firm, he got him the position with Hunt and Driscoll, essentially blackmailing Devon into money laundering. Devon was always delicate but, with the escalated drug use, he was threatening to cave on the whole deal. I’m sure that Oz didn’t kill Devon himself, but I’m just as sure that he had it done.”

I looked at the beautiful young woman and thought of her beautiful young child, and I made the mental note that the damage would stop here, but I needed information. “William White Eyes. I don’t have time for any more fictions; if you care about keeping him alive, you need to tell me everything you know. Now.” I fished the note from my pocket and held it up.

She looked at it and looked away, the tears collecting at the corners of her eyes. “Jesus…”

“He’s staying here?”

She finally spoke again. “Off and on. There’s a gardener’s shed on the trail.”

I stuffed the note back in my pocket. “Is he there now?”

“No.”

I let it settle for a moment. “That was a pretty quick answer.”

She shrugged and looked resigned. “You’re welcome to look, but there’s nothing up there. He borrowed a horse this morning and said that he wouldn’t be back.” She turned away again.

I looked at Henry. “A horse?”

“Yes.”

That was a twist I hadn’t counted on, William White Eyes riding off into the Fairmount Park sunset. “He didn’t say where he was going?”

“No.”

I stood there and watched as the tumblers fell into place. “You’re both from Gladwyne.”

She exhaled a soft breath of amusement. “We grew up across the street from each other.”

* * *

Katz and Gowder were seated at a table on the Valley Green Inn’s porch, which was located in yet another part of Fairmount Park, and were sipping iced tea as Henry and I walked up the steps and sat in the two empty seats next to the detectives. “How’d the inquest go?”

Gowder smiled and raised his glass. “Exonerated.” He pulled back his suit jacket, revealing both the badge at his belt and the .40 at his armpit.

“Congratulations. I would’ve hated for you to lose your job by saving my life”

Katz had a large map of Fairmount Park laid out on the table, and I had my book with the photograph. Gowder leaned in and looked at the red spot where Katz now pointed. “This is our boy, huh?”

“Just below Rex Avenue.”

I looked at the map. “The next road north?”

“Yes, but it’s not as easy as that. There are access points here at Valley Green, Rex, Thomas Mill Road, and Wises Mill Road on the other side.”

I studied the light green section of the map where Wissahickon Creek curled its way north and west. “What’s this dotted line along the creek?”

Katz adjusted his glasses and placed his chin on his fist. “That’s Forbidden Drive.”

I examined the relatively innocent-looking road. “Why Forbidden Drive?”

Gowder and he both looked at me like I was an idiot. Katz spoke slowly, just to make sure I got it. “Because you’re Forbidden to Drive on it.”

“Oh.”

Henry and I looked at each other; we were thinking the same thing.

16

The Indian chief Tedyuscung was neither a chief nor an Indian, but he sat as a memorial to the Lenape who first occupied the area anyway. This particular rendition of Chief Tedyuscung was actually the third to occupy the rock overlooking Wissahickon Creek. He was over fifteen feet tall, with a hand at his brow to shield the sun so that he could watch the departure of his people who had seen the white man’s writing on the wall and had moved to Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, of all places. His nose was broken and his peace pipe was missing, but the nobility of royalty was still there. Lesser beings had made their pathetic bids for immortality by scratching their initials in his sides, but he forever looks west and does not move. I took a tip from his book, and neither did I.

I had picked a small outcropping of rocks to the west of the chief and was huddled at the base of a black oak with the rain dripping off my hat and into my lap. The showers had started around ten-thirty and continued to drench the place for the next hour and a half. I had confiscated a hunting poncho from Cady’s place, one that I had given her years ago, and it was doing a pretty good job of keeping me dry except for my boots, which were beginning to squeak whenever I moved my toes.

It was dark, but I could still make out the profile of the big chief, and it wasn’t hard to see Henry in him, just as I’d seen my friend in the Indian statue at Logan Circle. The giant Indian was looking toward me but beyond to a place where I hoped to return. I watched as the sheets of rain fell between us, and I allowed my eyes to adjust for the thousandth time to the momentary blindness caused by the brief flashes of lightning and my ears to recover yet again from the thunder.

The outcropping provided a clear view of the area, of the trail leading up from below, the cut-off to the statue, and Tedyuscung himself. Other than the leaves, which blustered with the periodic wind, the only movement had been when I had stretched my legs from underneath the poncho more than an hour earlier, an event I had now convinced myself had blown my concealed observation.

I had been here for four hours, but William White Eyes or, more importantly, Toy Diaz, may have been here for five.

I thought about the course of events that had led me to wait for an informant and a killer in this small, tree-shrouded ravine in Fairmount Park as it crept up on midnight. Other than the obvious obligations of the law and its enforcement, I was here because I was attempting to save William White Eyes’ life in repayment for his saving Cady. I was here because of Jo Fitzpatrick and Riley, and because of the two men sitting in a Fairmount Park Services truck parked at the barricade near Valley Green Avenue, one of whom had saved my life in a bus station only two nights before. And, I was here because of Toy Diaz and what he had done to Cady, Vic, Osgood, and Devon.

Somewhere in the distance, the synchronic circles of our pasts had tripped a domino, and the steady whirr had grown till it now drowned with the roar of contingency. I knew he would show as surely as the dark rain was falling around me, just as my aching legs knew they would receive no quick relief.

* * *

I listened as the unsteady clop of horse’s hooves made their way up the broken trail behind me. At first I thought it must be Henry, who had grown tired of waiting, but the Bear’s patience could rival that of the marble chief, so I assumed it was finally William White Eyes. The sound was faint at first but slowly grew with each step until the horse stopped on the trail to my left, only a dozen feet away.

I listened as his mount situated a hoof forward for an even plant and expulsed a deep exhale into the moist, cool air. The vapor from its breath clouded for a moment in my peripheral vision and then misted in long trails with the prevailing eastward wind.

I had shallowed my breathing so that it didn’t show in the cold of the spring storm and, with the appearance of the horseman, I was lucky I remembered to breathe at all. I listened as his weight shifted on the horse’s back and looked at him as he searched the surrounding area. After a moment, he nudged the bay forward, and they continued around the appropriately shaped horseshoe corner of the trail and approached the Indian statue. William White Eyes wasn’t wearing a poncho or a jacket; he was naked, except for a loincloth that appeared to be perilously attached around his hips, and his body, as well as that of his horse, was painted with the multicolored geometric patterns and red streaks of a Dog Soldier.

William glowed in the limited light of the hillside, and if Toy Diaz was out there, there was no way he could miss him. I watched as the pale young man, who was decorated for battle, stopped, pivoted, and looked around; he didn’t see me.

It was possible that Diaz was not there, that the evening would end with me convincing William White Eyes to fill in all the gaps in the story and with the police rounding up Toy Diaz in a nonviolent interaction, so that I could take my daughter, my friend, my deputy, and my dog and go home to Wyoming. It was possible, but not likely.

Diaz had displayed a knack for cleaning up the loose ends of his operations by the most expedient and merciless means. You didn’t get where he got by sending thank-you cards; you got there by being the biggest, meanest son-of-a-bitch in the Valley of the Shadow of Death or on Forbidden Drive, as the case may be.

William rose, threw a leg off, and started to slide to the ground on the opposite side of the horse. I scanned the hillside but nothing moved. I could continue waiting, but I needed to get him out of here.

I stood on stiff legs and teetered there for a moment; William had stopped his dismount and stayed on the horse; he was still looking at the statue. I couldn’t lose him this time. I stood there, sure that the crunching of my knees and the rustling of the stiff, plastic poncho would turn his attention toward me, but the constant washing sound of the rain against the trees must have drowned me out. The horse had heard me and was looking directly where I stood, his far eye circled with red paint. I waited, scanning the hill to see if there might be any other response from anywhere else.

Nothing.

I took half a step to the edge of the rock ledge and looked at him. I was now a good fifty feet distant, and I didn’t want to spook him; he was on horseback, and I’d never catch him. “William?” He turned in the saddle, and I could see the line of his profile in the flash of lightning to my right. “It’s Walt.”

This time he heard me. “Sheriff?”

“Yep.” I stood there waiting as he turned the gelding toward me.

“I guess you got my note?”

“I did.”

He looked around. “You’re alone?”

I cocked my head. “Pretty much.”

He nodded and even in the distance, I could see him gnawing on his lip. “Devon hurt her.”

“I know.” I circled around in the direction he’d taken to get to the statue. “And I owe you an awfully big favor for getting help.”

He laid the reins to one side as the horse turned toward the trail. “I didn’t kill him.”

I waited. “I know that, too.”

The horse shifted his weight, so I stopped. He watched me for a moment and then asked, “How is she?”

“Improving.” I started to take another step and then thought better of it. “Her eyes are open, and she’s responding.”

He nodded and shifted the reins. “That’s good news.” I waited as he watched me. “I guess this all seems kind of weird to you, huh?”

I figured, why lie? “A little.” I gambled on another step and, in three more, I could block his retreat to the path, at least as well as a man afoot can block a man on horseback.

He cleared his throat. “I’m more at home here in the park than in the city.”

“I was hoping that would be the case.”

He shifted his weight on the gelding as it planted a hoof in anticipation, the circled eye still on me. If William White Eyes didn’t know what I was doing, the horse did. “I don’t know how much you know about me.”

“Quite a bit, actually.”

He nodded and looked down at his hands. “Cady told you?”

“No, I’ve made a case study of you lately.”

He nodded some more. “I wasn’t sure what I should do next, but I thought you might have some ideas.”

“Well, the cops want you, but they don’t want to kill you.” I took another step. “It seems to me you’ve got an awful lot of information they need.”

“Toy Diaz’s account numbers.”

“Yep.” I took the final step, William watching as I stood at the trail. He turned the bay toward the stone stairs and retainer wall where I could look him in the eye. “I’m not sure if Mr. Diaz is around, but I wouldn’t be surprised. We need to get you out of here.”

“I’m the safest I could be, here.”

“No, you’re not.” I looked around, acutely aware that we were not out of the proverbial woods. “I think they’ve been all over this park looking for you. I think the sooner we join my friends at the bottom of the hill the better.” I stepped back to block him from taking the trail behind us and gestured to the path below. I stepped around the bay and looked up at him. “I’ll go first; just in case.” I cleared the .45 from the poncho and looked ahead, where I hoped, if there was trouble, was the direction from which it would come.

We zigged the first part and had just begun our zag when I thought I saw movement at the next curve. I stopped and studied the shadows of the trees in the black of the rain-soaked ravine, raised my arm, and stopped the horse on the rounded stones of the trail. “Whoa…” The bay halted and let out with a sigh that pressed hot breath on the exposed back of my neck.

I had just about convinced myself that it was nothing when I thought I heard a sound like something moving. It was not discernable, just a sound that sounded different from the rest. I waited and then motioned for William to stay put.

I eased down the path with the big Colt pointed in the direction of the movement and sound. Henry wouldn’t have left his position at the base of the hill, and the police were all stationed at the vehicle entrances of Wissahickon Park.

I slipped a little on one of the larger rocks and caught myself before I landed on my ass or shot myself in the foot. I waited and then carefully approached what still looked like a tree. It was a tree.

I shrugged and turned back, walking with the .45 to my side. There was no reason for me to climb the hill again, so I motioned for William to come down. He nudged the horse in response, and we were lucky he did, because that’s when the first series of shots ripped through the woods like the tearing of the muscles in your chest.

The muzzle flash came from the trees above. Toy Diaz must have followed us. He made the mistake most civilians make with an automatic weapon—his shots were high and climbed—and, once again, if William White Eyes didn’t know what to do, the bay did; it ran like hell and straight toward me.

I threw myself to the right and landed against one of the retainer walls as the bay passed me, with William unhurt and holding on to the horse’s mane and riding low against his withers. Another volley from the automatic dotted an unconnected blaze after him, kicking rock shards and sparks as it went. I rolled up on one shoulder and fired four rounds into the darkness behind us. There were no answering shots.

Nothing.

I stood and listened and hoped that William and his horse had arrived at the bottom where Henry could corral them. I kept the .45 pointed up the hill and hustled into the type of situation I despised.

I ran up the path to the spot where I thought the shooter must have been. There were shell casings scattered across the trail and a muddy slick where someone had slipped and fallen. There was a dark liquid on the rocks. I smeared it with my hand and held it to my nose: blood.

I looked up and down, still seeing nothing. I was at the end of a turn and I couldn’t see to the next segment of the trail through the foliage, but I knew it was there. Taking the direct route was a calculated risk, but the only hope I had was to cut the distance to William White Eyes before Diaz cut that same distance. I thundered over the hill and threw my arms up to block at least some of the branches from blinding me as I went, half-running, half-falling with all my momentum. I was top-heavy and could feel the weight of my upper body and arms pulling me forward so I flipped the safety back on the Colt before I toppled onto the path below.

I struggled to my side, lifted up on one arm, and watched as a dark figure turned the corner ahead of me and disappeared. I could hear the clatter of horse’s hooves on the trail below; I was still a distant third.

I heaved myself up and stumbled forward in another straight-line attempt at interception, feeling as if I’d run the gauntlet of tribal initiation. I finally gave up on protecting my face and pummeled my way forward like some refrigerator catapulting its way down the hillside after being thrown from above. I raised my head but couldn’t see anything.

The sounds of the chase were still below me. The cutback was not as lengthy this time, and I was able to arrive at the ditch alongside the main trail as Henry charged from the rock-walled path to the left; he was on one of the paints and was holding the reins of the bigger of the two horses for me.

“Where are they?!”

“They did not come this way.” He wheeled his horse toward the bridge farther down the hill. Mine balked and crow-hopped toward Henry as I holstered the .45 and attempted to get a hand on the horn, but the Bear held the leather straps steady as I mounted.

In the best of situations, I am only a competent horseman and, after being beaten half to death by every tree in eastern Pennsylvania, I was lucky I even knew which way to face. Henry was already gone, and I felt the lurch of gathered horse muscles as the big mare shot from under me and surged toward the arch of the stone bridge. I grasped my hands around the leads and bounced forward, almost coming unseated at the first strike of her gallop. She was very fast, and she seemed to know where we were going. I assumed she would follow Henry, and the only thing I needed to do was remain neutral and allow her to take us where we needed to go.

Hi-yo, Creampuff.

The trail split in two directions on the other side of the bridge; the Bear had reined in his mount and was standing in the stirrups; he looked west and then east as my paint slid to a stop alongside him. I settled my rear into the seat and tucked my heels down for a better ride. “Well, hell…”

He actually smiled as he turned his paint to the left, and they blew down the incline to the east, easy in the saddle and melding together in a rhythm of man and horse. Creampuff started to follow him, but I wrapped the reins and veered her to the right. I broke west and thundered down the ramp to Forbidden Drive as the rain continued to pummel me. The big paint’s gallop was steady and, after I got centered, I could see further down the trail to the periodic illumination of the dusk-to-dawn lamps, which were momentarily faked to darkness by the flashes of lightning.

I dug in my heels and allowed the mare to have her head; in an instant I was around the far turn. I heard the terrible sound of the automatic again, like fibers being torn in cloth.

I could feel Creampuff reaching out and grabbing the rough surface of the path and throwing it behind us. I leaned with her and missed a sign by inches, almost spilling the two of us on the rain-slick trail. Just around the corner, I could see that something was down and that Toy Diaz was warily approaching it. It was a horse, kicking and screaming in the pathway, with William White Eyes trapped underneath.

The drug dealer could not catch a galloping horse, but the 9 mm had.

The fickle streetlights chose that moment to burst into full illumination, and there was a sharpness to the edges of everything, a glistening, as Diaz stood to the side of the fallen horse, careful to stay clear of its kicking legs. My paint’s mean streak and mine kicked in in a last-second attempt to save William’s life, and I felt the surge as Diaz lifted his arm.

It’s possible that he was so concentrated on the action that he didn’t hear me or that the echo of thunder in the ravine had deafened us all. Either way, by the time he heard us, it was too late. The big paint didn’t slow; she didn’t veer or misdirect her momentum. She simply ran right over Toy Diaz.

He must have pulled the trigger on impact, but the rounds flailed emptily into the hillside to the left. There was a momentary muffling of the horse’s hooves, and her balance shifted just a little as I reined in and veered from the injured horse lying on the gravel.

I thought I would come unseated when the paint reared and pivoted to the left. She stiffened her legs and backed away from the smell of blood and the screaming of the other horse. She wanted nothing to do with the scene in front of us and backed away into the trees along the creek bank.

She reared again, and this time I wasn’t as lucky. I fell against the saplings that lined the Wissahickon as she went over backward, slipping on the wet gravel and falling to the side. I clawed my way to the left as she slid right and rolled. We both made it to the flat area of the trail at the same time, whereupon she turned left and disappeared away from the vehicle approaching from the direction we’d been heading, its revolving yellow emergencies strobe-lighting the shiny surface of the pebbled path.

I pulled the .45 from the small of my back and clicked off the safety.

Diaz had been thrown to the side of the trail; he still lay there, face down and unmoving. The shoebox-shaped automatic was there as well, where the horse and I had struck him, far out of reach even for a whole man.

I approached carefully with the Colt pointed at his head. He didn’t move, so I knelt beside him, and placed my fingers along his wrist. There was a pulse.

His clothes were soaked from fording the stream, and he wore a hooded black leather jacket that was waterlogged and must’ve weighed a ton. I put his hand back on the pavement and lowered myself enough to look at his face. He was, indeed, the small man I’d seen with Osgood at the shooting range. He might have been handsome then, but he had struck the pavement like a cue ball, and his head seemed lopsided under the hood of his coat. The leather was torn at the shoulder, and he was bleeding from a spot where one of my .45s had clipped him, near a gauze bandage at his throat where Vic must’ve gotten him before.

He opened his eyes and blinked but said nothing as I watched him. My voice came out in a heavy rasp. “Don’t move.”

I felt the blood rushing to my head and the throb of my own pulse as a large, white truck pulled up. The door read FAIRMOUNT PARK COMMISSION, but the two men who got out weren’t carrying rakes.

“Are you all right?” I stared at the little red dots. “Sheriff, you all right?”

I converted the chill in my back to a nod. “Yep.”

Katz looked past me, and Gowder continued on to Toy Diaz. I stumbled a little as I walked away, stopped, and just stood there, breathing and fighting the nausea that rose in the back of my throat. I became aware of a noise in front of me and a screaming that wasn’t human.

William White Eyes had disengaged himself, pushing with his good leg, and had dragged himself to a shallow ditch; he was covered in dirt and leaves. His eyes were large as he struggled to rise up on one elbow but, even from a few yards away, I could see that something was broken in him. He slumped back against the ground, groaned, and looked at me as the screaming continued.

I stared at his pale, white body in the stark illumination of the street lamps that had pulsed on again and noticed how all the different colors of his war paint now looked black. I went over and kneeled beside him. “You okay?”

His voice wheezed with effort. “No.”

I kept quiet and held onto him till the EMTs arrived and took over.

I walked back up to the path where the gelding still kicked weakly. I kneeled again and placed a hand on the bay’s neck beside the Cheyenne medicine sign for wind. The horse attempted to raise its head but let out a rattling gasp and resettled. I counted at least five bullets in the poor animal. My father was a blacksmith and had told me when I was a little boy that the beasts of the field didn’t feel pain the way we humans did. I remember not believing him then, and I still didn’t.

I could hear the steady clop of hooves on the pathway stones as Henry rode up from behind and, from the sound, I could tell that he had captured my mount. More vehicles arrived, adding blue and red to the already abundant yellow that ran between the trees. I’m sure if it had been daylight, I would have been able to look back up the ravine and seen Chief Tedyuscung with his hand over his brow, looking west, at the mess of things in general. The screaming continued along with the sirens, and something was going to have to pay; that’s the way it always was, and it was usually the innocent.

I was cold, and my legs complained at carrying my weight. My eyes didn’t seem to want to focus as I pushed my hat back and felt the trapped rain run down my back. I looked at my hands and watched them shake, and a chill ran through me. I placed my hand back on the bay’s neck to steady him and, looking into the eye with the circle around it, spoke to him softly. “Easy…Easy boy…”

A weight hung in my chest and, before my eyes could completely blur, I raised the Colt and fired.

EPILOGUE

Two weeks, and I still had the screaming in my head.

I tossed a few more crumbs from my bagel to Mutt and Jeff, who were looking a little thicker than their hundred or so compatriots scattered across the roach-coach area of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. I guess they felt like they’d found good pasture and saw no reason to move on. It was slow going with the finger brace Rissman had put back on me. My ribs still groused every time I took a breath, but everything still hurt a little, so I just ignored it all.

“Are you going to answer my question?”

I looked up and again thought about how much she looked like her daughter. I thought about how seeing women in floral-print summer dresses gave me hope about things in general, and I thought about what she knew, which was probably more than I wanted to admit. “I’m sorry.”

Lena took a sip of the coffee she had brought with her. “Toy Diaz?”

“He’s a little worse for wear. He’s going to have a supervised rehabilitation at Graterford, and it promises to be lengthy since he no longer has his friends in the district attorney’s office.”

“What about the young woman?”

“Jo Fitzpatrick?”

“Yes.”

I tossed the pigeons more crumbs. “By the letter of the law, she didn’t do anything wrong.” I reached over and picked up the cup of coffee she’d brought for me; it was finally cool enough to drink. “Maybe it just seems like enough people have been punished for this mess. Every mistake she made was because she cared about people or because she cared about her child.” Lena nodded, but I don’t think her old-world sense of justice was satisfied. I sipped my coffee as she and Mutt and Jeff watched. “I don’t know.” I slapped my hand on the backpack, containing all my homework from Detectives North. “If Katz and Gowder want to pursue it…” I let it trail off, just as I had the investigation.

“I hear William turned state’s evidence?”

“Yep, it was as I’d suspected. Vince Osgood and Toy Diaz headed up the operation and, when Billy Carlisle became a bit of a problem, Osgood decided to streamline the operation by retiring him to Graterford. The wildcard was the unscheduled release of William White Eyes. That set a power play into motion between Osgood and Diaz, which meant that one of them had to die.” She looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup, the ginger of her eyes in full bloom. “Diaz needed a soldier, and Shankar DuVall fit the bill. The official Academy of the Fine Arts plan was to kill Osgood; DuVall just didn’t count on Gowder or Vic.”

“Or you.” She finished her coffee and decided to give law enforcement a rest. “The Indian abducted my daughter today?”

Vic had been recuperating at Cady’s, while I had been spending most of my time at the hospital with my daughter. “Henry said something about Pine Street. Since they’re driving back, I think they were taking Dog and going antiquing.”

She nodded but couldn’t resist more questions. “So the lawyer connection was through Devon Conliffe, and he was responsible for the money laundering?”

I tossed some more bagel to the pigeons. “The tripping point was Cady; she wouldn’t play.”

“And so Diaz had DuVall throw Devon off the Ben Franklin Bridge?”

“Yep. As Alphonse said, Devon was preparing to turn state’s evidence. When Osgood and Diaz found out their boy had all the fortitude of a cheap lawn chair, they decided to start doing a little housecleaning. At least that’s what William White Eyes said.”

She stretched her legs out and crossed them at the ankles. “How does he know?”

“He was there.”

She turned to look at me. “William was on the bridge?”

“Yep. He was tailing Devon to make sure he didn’t go back to hurt Cady any more.” I thought about it. “I don’t think he knew Diaz was going to have Shankar DuVall kill Devon but, when he did, I think it might have sealed the deal on his wavering allegiances.”

She watched me, and I watched Mutt and Jeff. “So, was there anybody in this case that didn’t deserve to die?”

“Yep.” I didn’t say anything more but just sat there thinking of a large brown eye with a painted circle around it.

* * *

Lena let go of my arm when we got to the hospital valet parking kiosk and swung around to look at me. The dark luster of her hair shone blue in the morning sun, and I noticed that her smile had the same lupine slant as Vic’s. The Moretti women smiled like they were going to eat you, and you’d like it. “Dinner? I know a place for pizza.”

“I bet you do.”

“Bring Henry and the Terror. Michael says he’ll stay with Cady.”

“I think that might be turning into a situation.”

She nodded. “I think you’re right.”

She examined my finger brace and gently stroked a valentine-red nail across the bruised flesh. I waited a while before I spoke again. “It was you who opened the door at Cady’s when…Before the reception, I mean.” Her head slipped to one side and she looked up at me through her lashes, her eyes sharp for only a moment.

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean.”

She saw the Thunderbird pull up before I did, and that most likely explained what happened next. She stepped in close, rose up on tiptoes, and placed a very gentle kiss on my lips. I might’ve leaned in a little after her, but she gave me my hand back and turned to walk past the powder blue convertible like a panther in floral print.

Vic was studying her mother very closely as she passed, the summer dress swaying provocatively in time with the slap of sandals against her naked heels. “Mother…”

Lena paused at the back seat for only a moment to scratch under Dog’s chin. “Victoria…”

I walked over and leaned against the chrome frame of the windshield as all the males in the vicinity watched Lena disappear down the sidewalk and into the crowd.

Vic poked me in my still-sore ribs. “What? Are we fucking interrupting something here?”

It took me a while to think of anything safe to say. “I thought you guys were antiquing.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Looks like you were, too.”

Henry interrupted, before it could get any uglier. “It is our last day, and I have not seen the Liberty Bell.”

I nodded and looked down at Vic’s arm, which was still in the sling. “It’s cracked, but like most broken things, it’s worth keeping.” She looked up at me and smiled. I glanced at Henry. “Headed back early tomorrow morning?”

“Yes.” He looked back at the beast. “Are you sure you do not want me to take Dog?”

“No, I might need him, and he’s good company.” I studied the streamlined flanks of the Thunderbird, admiring the work of the South Philly body shop. “You gonna be all right driving back by yourself?”

He smiled. “Yes. I am meeting my brother in Chicago.”

I stood there, more than a little surprised. “Lee?”

“Yes.”

I knew that the two had spoken only once in the last fifteen years, and only a handful of sentences at that. “I thought you guys didn’t talk?”

He nodded. “I thought it was time we started.” A moment passed. “Dena is in Rapid, so I may stop and see her, too.”

I continued to watch him, but he didn’t say anything else, and I could feel those slender strings thread their way down the Rocky Mountains, across the plains, over the Appalachians, finally coming to rest in attachments, here, in Philadelphia. I pulled the backpack further up on my shoulder and looked down at Vic. “What about you?”

“I’ve got a flight to Billings this afternoon. Chuck Frymyer’s picking me up.”

“Who?”

“Frymyer, the deputy you hired for Powder Junction?” I nodded some more, and they both watched me very carefully. “What do you want me to tell the county and Kyle Straub?”

There was everything to say, but no way to say it. “Tell them that I’ll be coming home, eventually.”

She exhaled a quick laugh. “They won’t like the sound of that.”

I cleared my throat and got off Henry’s fender, allowing two fingers, including the one in the finger guard, to rest on the side mirror. “Well…Tell them I’m slow, but eventual.”

She continued to smile and gently enclosed my fingers with hers. “That, I know.”

* * *

Cady was no longer in the ICU but had been downgraded to a regular room on Vic’s old floor. Dr. Rissman was standing at the nurse’s station when the elevator doors opened. “Those cops were here, looking for you again.” He adjusted his glasses. “But I think it was a social call.”

I stopped and put my hands in my pockets. “They know where to find me.” He looked at the floor, the wall, and finally at my left shoulder. I thought about how irritating I had found the trademark behavior when I’d met the man and how it endeared him to me now. Lightning rods didn’t look you in the eye. “I want to thank you for all you’ve done.”

“I didn’t do that much.”

“Excuse me, but that’s crap. Besides all the manual labor, you gave me hope and that gave her hope.” Finally, he looked directly in my eyes and smiled.

Michael was sitting by the bed reading the sports page of the Philadelphia Inquirer out loud. He was back on regular duty and was wearing his uniform.” How ya doin’, Sheriff?”

“They still punishing you with third watch?” His eyes were tired, and he really didn’t have to answer. “So, you got out of having dinner with us tonight.”

He nodded and folded up the newspaper. “I told Mom I’d stay here, but you get everybody else.”

“Who’s ‘everybody’?”

“Mom, Al, Tony, Vic the Father, Vic the Son, and Vic the Holy Terror.”

A tiny terror of its own ran through me. “I just saw her downstairs, and she said she was flying out this afternoon.”

He nodded and stretched his back. “I guess she found a way out of it, too.” He stood, squared his shoulders, and placed his cap back on his head. “I guess it’s just you and the family.”

“Sounds interesting.”

He laughed. “It’s always that.” He tucked the paper under his arm and covered a yawn with his hand. “I’m going home to take a nap; see you here around seven?”

He turned back to Cady, squeezed her hand, and left.

I sat in his chair, pulling it a little closer to the bed, I covered my face with my hands and again listened to the screaming that now resonated like the strings in a piano. I listened to their vibrations, to the chords and the melody that connected all of us. I thought about Henry’s brother, Lee, about Dena. I thought about Vic, about her family. I thought about Cady.

I pulled her book from the backpack, from its spot between the printed dossiers and depositions Gowder and Katz said I had to read through before my meeting with the district attorney’s office and the fifth district court. I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and her book in my hands. Like a lot of things in my life, I’d just about worn it out, but it was worn out with love, and that’s the best kind of worn-out there is. Maybe we’re like all those used cars, broken hand tools, articles of old clothing, scratched record albums, and dog-eared books. Maybe there really isn’t any such thing as mortality; that life simply wears us out with love.

It took a while for my eyes to focus, but when they did, the words were familiar. “‘Long, long ago, there was a king and queen…’” I felt a squeeze on my hand but tried to keep my attention on the page. “‘…who didn’t have any children.’”

“Da-ddy…?”

I continued reading. “‘One day the queen was visited by a wise fairy…’” My eyes blurred like they always did, and I watched as the drops hit the wrinkled page where they had struck so many times before.

“Da-ddy…”

Her voice was not strong, and Rissman said the pronunciation will continue to get better. We had a legion of hours in rehabilitation ahead of us, but if she continued to improve at the rate she had so far, the neurosurgeon said I might be able to take her back to Wyoming next month. I continued reading. “‘…who told her, you will have a lovely baby girl.’”

“Da-ddy…ish okay.”

I look up at the clear and beautiful gray eyes, at the winning smile of youthful invincibility, at someone far more courageous and determined than I, and sometimes I make it through the entire story.

But most of the time, I don’t.

CRAIG

JOHNSON

ANOTHER MAN’S MOCCASINS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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New York, New York 10014, USA

USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2008

Published in Penguin Books 2009

Copyright © Craig Johnson, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ISBN 978-1-4406-2985-3 (ePub)

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

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

For Bill Bower and all those crazy bastards who flew off

the USS Hornet and into those cold, gray skies on the

morning of April 18, 1942—and everybody who ever

threw a salute before and after.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A writer, like a sheriff, is the embodiment of a group of people and without their support both are in a tight spot. I have been blessed with a close order of family, friends, and associates who have made this book possible. This book is a work of fiction, and as such it’s important to point out that the guys at the 377th Security Police Squadron were top-notch law enforcement personnel.

I would like to thank Kara Newcomer, historian for the United States Marine Corps History Division, and the folks down at Willow Creek Ranch. Janet Hubbard-Brown and Astrid Latapie for helping out with handling the French at the Indo-Chinese fire drill, and the staff and doctors at the VA Medical Center over at Fort Mackenzie in Sheridan, including Hollis W. Hackman and Chuck Guilford.

Thanks to my chiefs of staff, Gail Hochman, Kathryn Court, Alexis Washam, and Ali Bothwell Mancini; to my officer in charge of logistics, Sonya Cheuse; and to Susan Fain, my military council. Thanks to Marcus Red Thunder for taking the muffler off the jeep to convince the enemy that we had tanks. Kudos to Eric Boss for requisitioning everything I needed, including the beer. A big thanks to James Crumley for the canteen and to Curt Wendelboe and Rob Kresge for leaning over and pointing out that it was quiet—too quiet.

And to the person I enjoy sharing my foxhole with most, my wife, Judy.

Great Spirit, grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.

OLD INDIAN PRAYER

1

"Two more.”

Cady looked at me but didn’t say anything.

It had been like this for the last week. We’d reached a plateau, and she was satisfied with the progress she’d made. I wasn’t. The physical therapist at University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia had warned me that this might happen. It wasn’t that my daughter was weak or lazy; it was far worse than that—she was bored.

“Two more?”

"I heard you....” She plucked at her shorts and avoided my eyes. “Your voice; it carries.”

I placed an elbow on my knee, chin on fist, sat farther back on the sit-up bench, and glanced around. We weren’t alone. There was a kid in a Durant Quarterback Club T-shirt who was trying to bulk up his 145-pound frame at one of the Universal machines. I’m not sure why he was up here—there were no televisions, and it wasn’t as fancy as the main gym downstairs. I understood all the machines up here—you didn’t have to plug any of them in—but I wondered about him; it could be that he was here because of Cady.

“Two more.”

“Piss off.”

The kid snickered, and I looked at him. I glanced back at my daughter. This was good; anger sometimes got her to finish up, even if it cost me the luxury of conversation for the rest of the evening. It didn’t matter tonight; she had a dinner date and then had to be home for an important phone call. I had zip. I had all the time in the world.

She had cut her auburn hair short to match the spot where they had made the U-shaped incision that had allowed her swelling brain to survive. Only a small scar was visible at the hairline. She was beautiful, and the pain in the ass was that she knew it.

It got her pretty much whatever she wanted. Beauty was life’s E-ZPass. I was lucky I got to ride on the shoulder.

"Two more?”

She picked up her water bottle and squeezed out a gulp, leveling the cool eyes back on me. We sat there looking at each other, both of us dressed in gray. She stretched a finger out and pulled the band of my T-shirt down, grazing a fingernail on my exposed collarbone. “That one?”

Just because she was beautiful didn’t mean she wasn’t smart. Diversion was another of her tactics. I had enough scars to divert the entire First Division. She had known this scar and had seen it on numerous occasions. Her question was a symptom of the memory loss that Dr. Rissman had mentioned.

She continued to poke my shoulder with the finger. “That one.”

“Two more.”

“That one?”

Cady never gave up.

It was a family trait, and in our tiny family, stories were the coinage of choice, a bartering in the aesthetic of information and the athletics of emotion, so I answered her. “Tet.”

She set her water bottle down on the rubber-padded floor. "When?”

“Before you were born.”

She lowered her head and looked at me through her lashes, one cheek pulled up in a half smile. “Things happened before I was born?”

“Well, nothing really important.”

She took a deep breath, gripped the sides of the bench, and put all her effort into straightening the lever action of thirty pounds at her legs. Slowly, the weights lifted to the limit of the movement and then, just as slowly, dropped back. After a moment, she caught her breath. “Marine inspector, right?”

I nodded. “Yep.”

"Why Marines?”

“It was Vietnam, and I was gonna be drafted, so it was a choice.” I was consistently amazed at what her damaged brain chose to remember.

“What was Vietnam like?”

“Confusing, but I got to meet Martha Raye.”

Unsatisfied with my response, she continued to study my scar. “You don’t have any tattoos.”

“No.” I sighed, just to let her know that her tactics weren’t working.

“I have a tattoo.”

“You have two.” I cleared my throat in an attempt to end the conversation. She pulled up the cap sleeve of her Philadelphia City Sports T-shirt, exposing the faded, Cheyenne turtle totem on her shoulder. She was probably unaware that she’d been having treatments to have it removed; it had been the ex-boyfriend’s idea, all before the accident. “The other one’s on your butt, but we don’t have to look for it now.”

The kid snickered again. I turned and stared at him with a little more emphasis this time.

“Bear was in Vietnam with you, right?”

She was smiling as I turned back to her. All the women in my life smiled when they talked about Henry Standing Bear. It was a bit annoying, but Henry was my best and lifelong friend, so I got over it. He owned the Red Pony, a bar on the edge of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, only a mile from my cabin, and he was the one who was taking Cady to dinner. I wasn’t invited. He and my daughter were in cahoots. They had pretty much been in cahoots since she had been born.

“Henry was in-country, Special Operations Group; we didn’t serve together.”

"What was he like back then?”

I thought about it. “He’s mellowed, a little.” It was a frightening thought. “Two more?”

Her gray eyes flashed. “One more.”

I smiled. “One more.”

Cady’s slender hands returned to the sides of the bench, and I watched as the toned legs once again levitated and lowered the thirty pounds. I waited a moment, then lumbered up and placed a kiss at the horseshoe-shaped scar and helped her stand. The physical progress was moving ahead swimmingly, mostly due to the advantages of her stellar conditioning and youth, but the afternoon workouts took their toll, and she was usually a little unsteady by the time we finished.

I held her hand and picked up her water and tried not to concentrate on the fact that my daughter had been a fast-track, hotshot lawyer back in Philly only two months earlier and that now she was here in Wyoming and was trying to remember that she had tattoos and how to walk without assistance.

We made our way toward the stairwell and the downstairs showers. As we passed the kid at the machine, he looked at Cady admiringly and then at me. “Hey, Sheriff?”

I paused for a moment and steadied Cady on my arm. "Yep?”

"J.P. said you once bench-pressed six plates.”

I continued looking down at him. “What?”

He gestured toward the steel plates on the rack at the wall. “Jerry Pilch? The football coach? He said senior year, before you went to USC, you bench-pressed six plates.” He continued to stare at me. “That’s over three hundred pounds.”

“Yep, well.” I winked. “Jerry’s always had a tendency to exaggerate.”

“I thought so.”

I nodded to the kid and helped Cady down the steps. It’d been eight plates, actually, but that had been a long time ago.

* * *

My shower was less complicated than Cady’s, so I usually got out before her and waited on the bench beside the Clear Creek bridge. I placed my summer-wear palm-leaf hat on my head, slipped on my ten-year-old Ray-Bans, and shrugged the workout bag’s strap farther onto my shoulder so that it didn’t press my Absaroka County sheriff’s star into my chest. I pushed open the glass door and stepped into the perfect fading glory of a high plains summer afternoon. It was vacation season, creeping up on rodeo weekend, and the streets were full of people from somewhere else.

I took a left and started toward the bridge and the bench. I sat next to the large man with the ponytail and placed the gym bag between us. “How come I wasn’t invited to dinner?”

The Cheyenne Nation kept his head tilted back, eyes closed, taking in the last warmth of the afternoon sun. “We have discussed this.”

“It’s Saturday night, and I don’t have anything to do.”

“You will find something.” He took a deep breath, the only sign that he wasn’t made of wood and selling cigars. “Where is Vic?”

“Firearms recertification in Douglas.”

“Damn.”

I thought about my scary undersheriff from Philadelphia; how she could outshoot, outdrink, and outswear every cop I knew, and how she was now representing the county at the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy. I was unsure if that was a positive thing. “Yep, not a safe weekend to be in Douglas.”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “How is all that going?”

I took a moment to discern what “all that” might mean. “I’m not really sure.” He raised an eyelid and studied me in a myopic fashion. “We seem to be having a problem getting in sync.” The eyelid closed, and we sat there as a silence passed. "Where are you going to dinner?”

“I am not going to tell you.”

"C’mon.”

His face remained impassive. “We have discussed this.”

We had, it was true. The Bear had expressed the opinion that for both of our mental healths, it might be best if Cady and I didn’t spend every waking hour in each other’s company. It was difficult, but I was going to have to let her out of my sight sometime. “In town or over in Sheridan?”

“I am not going to tell you.”

I was disconcerted by the flash of a camera and turned to see a woman from somewhere else smile and continue down the sidewalk toward the Busy Bee Café, where I would likely be having my dinner, alone. I turned to look at Henry Standing Bear’s striking profile. “You should sit with me more often; I’m photogenic.”

“They were taking photographs with a greater frequency before you arrived.”

I ignored him. “She’s allergic to plums.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure if she’ll remember that.”

“I do.”

“No alcohol.”

“Yes.”

I thought about that advisory and came clean. “I let her have a glass of red wine last weekend.”

“I know.”

I turned and looked at him. “She told you?”

“Yes.”

Cahoots. I had a jealous inkling that the Bear was making more progress in drawing all of Cady back to us than I was.

I stretched my legs and crossed my boots; they were still badly in need of a little attention. I adjusted my gun belt so that the hammer of my .45 wasn’t digging into my side. “We still on for the Rotary thing, Friday?”

“Yes.”

Rotary was sponsoring a debate between me and prosecuting attorney Kyle Straub; we were the two candidates for the position of Absaroka County sheriff. After five elections and twenty-four sworn years, I usually did pretty well at debates but felt a little hometown support might be handy, so I had asked Henry to come. “Think of it as a public service—most Rotarians have never even met a Native American.”

That finally got the one eye to open again, and he turned toward me. “Would you like me to wear a feather?”

“No, I’ll just introduce you as an Injun.”

Cady placed her hand on my shoulder and leaned over to allow the Cheyenne Nation to bestow a kiss on her cheek. She was wearing blue jeans and a tank top with, I was pleased to see, the fringed, concho-studded leather jacket I’d bought for her years ago. It could still turn brisk on July nights along the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains.

She jostled the hat on my head and dropped her gym bag on top of mine. She turned to Henry. “Ready?”

He opened his other eye. “Ready.”

He rose effortlessly, and I thought if I got it in quick that maybe I’d get an answer. “Where you going?”

She smiled as the Bear came around the back of the bench and took her elbow. “I’m not allowed to tell you.”

Cady’s current love interest, Vic’s younger brother, was supposed to be flying in from Philadelphia on Tuesday for a Wild West vacation. I still hadn’t gotten a straight answer as to with whom he was staying. “Don’t forget that Michael is calling.”

She shook her head as they walked past me, pausing to lift my hat and plant a kiss on the crown of my head. “I know when he’s calling, Daddy. I’ll be home long before then.” She shoved my hat down, hard.

I readjusted and watched as they crossed the sidewalk, where Henry helped her into Lola, his powder-blue ’59 T-Bird convertible. The damage I’d done to the classic automobile was completely invisible due to the craftsmanship of the body men in South Philly, and I watched as the Wyoming sun glistened on the Thunderbird’s flanks. I had a moment of hope that they wouldn’t get going when the starter continued to grind, but the aged Y-Block caught and blew a slight fantail of carbon into the street. He slipped her into gear, and they were gone.

As usual, I got the gym bags, and he got the girl.

I considered my options. There was the plastic-wrapped burrito at the Kum-and-Go, the stuffed peppers at the Durant Home for Assisted Living, a potpie from the kitchenette back at the jail, or the Busy Bee Café. I gathered up my collection of bags and hustled across the bridge over Clear Creek before Dorothy Caldwell changed her mind and turned the sign, written in cursive, hanging on her door.

* * *

“Not the usual?”

“No.”

She poured my iced tea and looked at me, fist on hip. “You didn’t like it last time?”

I struggled to remember but gave up. “I don’t remember what it was last time.”

“Is Cady’s condition contagious?”

I ignored the comment and tried to decide what to order. “I’m feeling experimental. Are you still offering your Weekend Cuisines of the World?” It was an attempt on her part to broaden the culinary experience of our little corner of the high plains.

“I am.”

“Where, in the world, are we?”

“Vietnam.”

It didn’t take me long to respond. “I’ll pass.”

“It’s really good.”

I weaved my fingers and rested my elbows on the counter. “What is it?”

“Chicken with lemongrass.” She continued to look at me.

“Henry’s dish?”

“That’s where I got the recipe.”

I withered under her continued gaze. “All right.”

She busied herself in the preparation of the dish, and I sipped my tea. I glanced around at the five other people in the homey café but didn’t recognize anyone. I must have been thirsty from watching Cady work out, because a third of the glass was gone in two gulps. I set it back on the Formica, and Dorothy refilled it immediately. “You don’t talk about it much.”

"What?”

“The war.”

I nodded as she put the tan plastic pitcher on the counter next to me. I turned my glass in the circular imprint of its condensation. “It’s funny, but it came up earlier this afternoon.” I met her eyes under the silver hair. “Cady asked about the scar on my collarbone, the one from Tet.”

She nodded slightly. “Surely she’s seen that before?”

“Yep.”

Dorothy took a deep breath. “It’s okay, she’s doing better every day.” She reached out and squeezed my shoulder just at said scar. “But, be careful...” She looked concerned.

I looked up at her. “Why?”

“Visitations like those tend to come in threes.”

I watched as she took the tea and refilled some of the other customers. I thought about Vietnam, thought about the smell, the heat, and the dead.

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1967

I had flown in with them.

A spec 4 on the helicopter ride had asked where I was going and watched as I’d tried not to throw up on the dead that were stacked in the cargo area of the Huey. I wasn’t sick because of the bodies; I’d seen a lot of those. I just didn’t like helicopters. The men had been in a truck that had hit a mine—fi rebase support in the DMZ for Khe Sanh. They were wrapped in plastic ponchos because the army had run out of body bags. They had run out of food, ammo, and medicine, too—the dead were one of the few things of which there always seemed to be plenty. The spec 4 had shaken his head and told me not to worry. He said that if I got hurt, they could have me in a base-camp hospital in twenty minutes, real bad and they would have me in Yokosuka, Japan, in twelve hours. He had gestured to the plastic-wrapped bundles behind him. Like them, they would have me home in a week.

Later, I studied the chromate green interior of the Quonset hut as a lean air force investigative operations officer squinted up at me through his thick glasses and the sweat. He was studying my utility cap, so I yanked it off my head and returned to attention. I was sweating, too. Specifically, we were there to win over hearts and minds, but mostly what we did was sweat. I had been fighting the feeling that, since arriving in Vietnam coming up on six months earlier, I was melting.

He made me wait the commensurate amount of time to let me know that I had performed a breach of military decorum with my cover and that the major was not pleased. “What the hell am I supposed to do with you?”

The majority of the humidity in my body was draining between my shoulder blades and soaking the waistband of my fatigues. “Not sure, sir.”

“What the hell is a MOS 0111?”

“Marine police, sir. Investigator.”

He continued to shake his head. “Yeah. I got the directive from MAF. Your papers cleared the provost marshal at Chu Lai, so I guess battalion headquarters has decided that you’re my problem now.” He looked up at me. He had the look, the look I’d seen a thousand times in the short period I’d been in-country. He was old—an age that had snuck up on him in the place would stay with him for the rest of his life. The event had him, the war was his religion, and his youth was gone with his eyes. “Marine inspector?”

I remained silent and focused on the corrugated wall in an attempt not to stare at the photo of DeDe Lind, Playboy’s Miss August 1967, that was hung there.

It was December.

The major looked back at my duty papers, rustling them in disbelief. “Inspect? Hell, I didn’t even know you jarheads could read.” He flipped the page, and I figured the real trouble was about to begin. His eyes came up slowly. “English major?”

“Ball, sir.” I’d found it best to downplay higher education in the armed forces, and football was always a quick and successful diversionary tactic.

He blinked behind the glasses and frowned an acceptance that I might not be the complete wastrel he’d first imagined. “What’d you play?”

“Offensive tackle, sir.”

“The trenches? Outstanding. I played a little in high school.”

With a leather helmet, I figured. “Is that right, sir?”

“Halfback.”

“Yes, sir.” Backup, no doubt.

He studied my papers some more. “I didn’t play much.” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just stood there with my mouth shut, another method I’d learned in dealing with military hierarchy. “Look, somebody owes somebody a favor and that’s why you’re here.” He leaned back in his green metallic chair, which almost matched the chromate walls, and finally remembered that I was still at attention. “At ease.” He dropped my papers and concentrated on me as I took a quarter step to the side and placed my hands behind my back. I was still holding my hat. “We’ve got a little drug smuggling problem on the base, but nothing big. We’ve already got some very good men working on the situation. I’m only guessing, but I’d say the provost marshal wants one of his brand-new MOS 0111s to get his feet wet.”

He continued to consider me, and I guessed that he wanted a response. “Yes, sir.”

“Why mother-green-and-her-mean-machine can’t police her own messes, of which there are plenty, is a mystery to me, but you’re here and we’ll just have to make the best of things.” He glanced back at the papers on his desk. “You are new, and it won’t take long for everyone to figure out why you’re here. So the best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told. You got me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All of the work you’ve done in the past has been under the direct supervision of navy investigators; now, however, you will be working with air force security personnel and central intelligence detachment, who, I am sure, you will find infinitely more capable than the swabos.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m putting you with Mendoza, who is our own 377th, and Baranski of central intelligence division. They’ve been working the case for about five weeks, and you will provide the muscle.”

“Yes, sir.” If he belched, I was going to yes-sir it.

“They’re first louies, and you will follow every order they give you. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re class of ’66.” He slipped my papers back in the folder and handed them to me. “That means there’s one of you butter bars left; gives great hope to the war effort.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

When I got to the outer office and handed my folder to the airman, there were two first lieutenants leaning against the doorway. One was short and dark; the other was a tall bon vivant with an Errol Flynn mustache. The tall one had blond hair, air-force-blue eyes, and army fatigues. He stuck his hand out and I shook it, taking in the casual, self-assured swagger of a man very content with himself. “You our new pet Marine?”

“Yep.”

He lit a Camel cigarette and swiveled his head to look at his partner, who now extended his hand. I shook his as well. He spoke with a strong Texas accent. “Mendoza. This here is Baranski.”

I had already read their names just above their right pockets, just as I was sure they’d already read mine, but it was now a different protocol. I slipped my hat back on. “Longmire.”

* * *

"Sheriff Longmire?”

I turned and looked up at Rosey Wayman, one of the few females in the Wyoming Highway Patrol. She’d been transferred up from the Elk Mountain detachment about six months ago and had been causing quite a stir here in the Bighorns. “Well, if it isn’t the sweetheart of I-two-five.” I watched as the trademark grin showed bright white teeth, and her blue eyes sparked.

Maybe my evening was looking up. I wondered when Vic would be back.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Walt, but we got a call in, and Ruby said this would be where you were.”

"What’ve we got?”

“Some ranchers found a body down on Lone Bear Road near Route 249.”

Maybe my evening wasn’t looking up.

That was near Powder Junction. It was July, and it didn’t take much deduction to figure out why the locals were out on that desolate part of the county road system. “Swathers or balers?”

“Balers. They supposedly swathed last week.”

No square hectare of grass went unshorn in a Wyoming summer. The Department of Transportation usually subcontracted the cutting of grass along its motorways to the lowest-bidding local ranchers, which allowed the state grass to become a private commodity commonly known as beer-can hay.

I poked a thumb toward the blond patrolperson as Dorothy returned with the dish full of chicken and lemongrass. “Can I get that to go?”

* * *

No matter what aspect of law enforcement with which you might be involved, there’s always one job you dread. I’m sure at the more complicated venues it’s the terrorists, it’s serial killers, or it’s gang-related, but for the western sheriff it’s always been the body dump. To the north, Sheridan County has two unsolved, and Natrona County to the south has five; up until twenty-eight minutes ago, we’d had none. There you stand by some numbered roadway with a victim, no ID, no crime scene, no suspects, nothing.

I got out of Rosey’s cruiser and nodded to Chuck Frymyer and Double Tough, my two deputies from the southern part of the county. “Walt. She’s down over the hill.”

We headed toward the giant balers at the edge of a large culvert. Lieutenant Cox, the highway patrol division commander, was standing halfway down the hill toward the barrow ditch with two more of his men, still writing in their duty books. It was near their highway, but it was my county. “Hey, Karl.”

“Walt.” He nodded at one of the pieces of equipment where two elderly cowboys sat, one in a beaten straw hat and the other wearing a Rocking D Ranch ball cap. “You know these gentlemen?”

“Yep.” The two got up when they noticed me. Den and James Dunnigan were a couple of hardscrabble ranchers from out near Bailey. James was a little wifty, and Den was just plain mean. "How you doin’, James?”

Den squinted and started in. “We swathed two days ago, and she wasn’t here....”

James cut him off. “Hey, Walt.”

"What’a we got?” I figured the HPs had already gotten a statement from them, but I thought I’d give the brothers another shot at the story before we went any further.

"Already told ’em.” Den gestured toward the HPs. It had probably been a long day, it was late on a Saturday afternoon, and he evidently felt they had been detained long enough.

“Tell me.” I remained conversational but made sure it wasn’t a question. Frymyer had his notebook out and was scribbling.

James continued in a soft voice and did his best to focus on the conversation at hand. “We was balin’ and come up onto her.”

“What’d you do?”

He shrugged. “Shut ’er down and called 911.”

"Go near the body?”

“Nope, I didn’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yep.”

I glanced at Den, who was blinking too much. "Den?”

He shrugged. “I went over to the edge of the culvert and yelled at her.” He blinked again. “I thought she might be asleep. Then I saw she wasn’t breathin’.”

I had Den show me the exact route that he had taken, and then I retreated to the top of the culvert with my two deputies, where it was unlikely anybody had been. I squatted down in a hunter’s crouch and listened as Cox dismissed the Dunnigan brothers.

I turned to Chuck. “You know how to open a baler?”

The sandy Vandyke smiled back. “Born to it.”

“Go crack that one open and check the contents and then split the last two bales northbound. If she was walking or running from somebody, then she might’ve dropped her purse or something along the way.” Frymyer paused for a moment, and I looked at him. “You need help?”

He glanced back at the one-ton bales. “Yes.”

I looked at Double Tough, and he started off with Chuck.

There was still a lot of light—it was like that in the summer this far north—and you could plainly see where the young woman had played out the last moments of her life. She was provocatively dressed, inappropriate for the surroundings. She had on a short skirt, a pink halter top, and no shoes. Her long, dark hair was tangled with the grasses; it had been blown by the ever prevalent Wyoming wind, and you could see her delicate bone structure. The eyes were closed, and you might’ve thought she was asleep but for the blue coloring in her face and a swollen eye, and the fact that, from the angle, it was apparent that her neck had been broken.

I listened as Cox came up and squatted down beside me. "You losing weight?”

“Yep, I’m in the gym with Cady every day.”

He nodded. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s good, Karl. Thank you for asking. Hey, speaking of Cady, could I get you to have Rosey call into our dispatch and ask them to tell her I won’t be coming home tonight?”

“You bet.” He tipped his campaign hat back. “DCI’s on the way. I think you got the wicked witch of the west herself.” I nodded. T. J. Sherwin was always looking for a reason to come up to the mountains in the summertime. The division lieutenant plucked a piece of the prairie and placed the harvested end in his mouth. “We checked all the way back to Casper, Walt, but no abandoned vehicles.” He glanced after my deputies. “Your guys gonna check the baler?”

“Yep.”

“Good. My guys wouldn’t know which end to look in.” He studied the body of the dead girl and then looked up at me. “I’ve got men checking all the Chinese restaurants in Sheridan, Casper, and Gillette to see if anybody’s missing....”

“Don’t bother.” I ran my hand over my face. “She’s Vietnamese. ”

2

“She wasn’t walking, not without shoes.” T. J. Sherwin watched as the technicians zipped up the black plastic bag and carefully placed the Asian woman’s body onto a gurney under the constant racket of the generators. The flat, yellow shine of the emergency lights made even the living look jaundiced.

I closed my eyes. “Fresh?”

It was getting late, and the warmth of the sun was long gone, replaced by the stars and the clear, cool air creeping down from the Bighorn Mountains. It hadn’t rained in more than a month.

She hugged herself. “Less than twelve hours.” I put my arm around her because I wanted to keep her warm and because I wanted to. She’d been the chief forensic pathologist for Wyoming’s Division of Criminal Investigation for half of my tenure in Absaroka County. She’d thought me antiquated, but in seventeen years I’d grown on her. “She wasn’t killed here. Preliminary says asphyxiation, manual strangulation by someone very powerful. Whoever it was, they started by strangling her and then broke her neck.”

“They didn’t do a very good job of hiding the body.”

I could feel her eyes on me. “No, they didn’t.”

I took a quick look ahead to the county road, toward the highway. “There’s an exit only a mile up.” I looked at the uncut grass on the other side of the culvert. “We’ll have to look for drag marks or footprints farther north. We’re going to need to check the roadside back to 249 and down to 246 at the south fork of the Powder.” She shivered and snuggled closer under my arm. “My guys about through with the bales?”

She snickered. “They’re gonna love you.”

“Yep.” I watched as the bag boys loaded the dead woman into the Suburban for transport to Cheyenne. “So, you’re not going to stick around?”

“Too much to do.” She left my protection and started back up the slope toward the emergency vehicles splaying their revolving blue, red, and yellow lights across the wildflowers that were blooming under the sage.

I started to follow but stopped, sighed to myself, and called after her. “Anybody check that thing yet?”

She turned back to me. “The tunnel? No, I think they were going to wait until daylight.”

* * *

“You wan’ company?” Double Tough gave me his Mag-Lite.

I took half an egg sandwich and shook my head. “Nope.” The food had just arrived, and I knew they were hungry; I figured I could prowl around on my own. “But I’ll take one of those cups of coffee.”

It was a clear night, and the full moon and thick swath of the Milky Way gave plenty of illumination on the area surrounding the tunnel, if not the hole itself. I threw a leg over a guardrail and started down the embankment to the entrance on the other side of Lone Bear Road. I wasn’t expecting to find a culprit shivering at the mouth of the thing; I figured that whoever had killed the young woman had walked back to his vehicle and driven away, but it never hurt to look.

I opened the Styrofoam cup, shook off the lid and stuffed it in my back jeans pocket in an attempt to keep Absaroka County clean, and stepped down into the three-quarter inch of Murphy Creek.

I sipped the coffee, listened to the distant sound of the eighteen-wheel trucks on I-25, and shone the beam of the four-cell flashlight into the black opening of the drainage tunnel; there was something blocking a complete view of the other side. I took a step and listened to it resound off the hardened walls of the concrete. In the most likely scenario, it was a yearling that had followed the creek bed and gotten stuck or confused; few things in the natural world are as easily confused as a heifer— just ask any cowboy.

There were some rabbit carcasses and a few deer bones a little farther into the tunnel, and I could see that there were some broken pieces of two-by-fours and truck skids piled at one side with a collection of blankets, tarps, and cardboard boxes gathered on them. It was possibly the regular flotsam and jetsam of Murphy Creek, but I didn’t think the water flow was that strong.

I thought I’d seen a small movement, but it was probably the shadows of the flashlight. The refuse pile smelled like something dead and got worse as I leaned in closer and nudged one of the blanket layers of the sofa-sized bundle—more cardboard. Something must have been using the blockage as a nest, and the stench made my eyes water.

An old warning bell went off, so I transferred my cup of coffee to the flashlight hand and pulled the Colt 1911 out and to the right, cocked and locked. I clicked off the safety and stooped down as close as I dared, recognizing the quilt as a packing blanket from a rental truck place.

I had pulled my sidearm on a pile of trash.

I started to resafety and reholster my weapon when something in the pile shifted, and the entire collection of blankets, cardboard, and smell exploded straight at me, lifting me completely off the ground and against the far side of the tunnel. The flashlight disappeared, coffee went everywhere, and the .45 in my hand fired as my fingers contracted on impact with the cement wall. The compressed sound of the big Colt plugged my ears like a set of fingers. All the air in my body hung there as I fell forward.

Whatever it was, it was bigger than me, and hairy, and it caught me by my chest and pushed me back. It was roaring in my face as it slapped me, the Colt splashing into the water.

My head felt like it was coming apart, but I thrashed at whatever it was, bringing my arms forward and kicking with my legs. It pressed against me with the force of a front-end loader. My only hope was to get away from the thing before it sunk its claws into me or took off half my face in one bite.

I got a lucky punch at its head, but it still threw me sideways, where I slid along in the muck. The thought of being mauled to death or eaten alive in the darkness of an irrigation tunnel renewed my fortitude for fighting; I leveraged a fist loose and brought it forward with all the force my clumsy position would allow. There was a bit of a lull, and I took advantage and raised my head, but it was back on me in an instant.

I shouldn’t have exposed my throat because it started to choke me. I flailed with both fists, but I might as well have been striking the concrete floor. I kicked, but the weight of the thing held me solid, and I was just beginning to feel the blood vessels in my head explode and my vision fail.

I could see flashes of light where there were none, and I could see faces in the flashes; women, they were all women. I could see my mother on a grassy hillside, the summer sun shining through the sides of her pale blue eyes. I saw my wife, the first time I asked her to dance, and the gentle way her fingers first reached for mine. I saw Victoria Moretti, lowering her face to me with her bathrobe undone. I saw my daughter, her determined look in the weight room, and could only think, Ish okay, Daddy.

There was splashing, and there were other voices above the roaring of whatever had me and whatever I had. I made one last struggle to bury my thumbs into the front of its throat and could just feel my fingers making headway into the fragile, egg-carton-like cartilage of its larynx, a method I’d used to stay alive in Khe Sanh.

If I was going to die, something was going with me.

I heard a loud crack and felt a shift in the thing’s weight as it toppled to one side, just before the women’s faces disappeared and it all faded to black.

* * *

I sat there on the bank of the hillside as the EMTs worked on the back of my head. I continued to clear my throat and massaged my forefinger and thumb into my eye sockets in an attempt to replace the stars in my eyes with real ones.

Double Tough stood by as T.J. handed me another cup of coffee. I wasn’t sure I could swallow it, but it was reassuring just to be able to hold it. We all watched the faint glow of the sunrise on the horizon toward Pumpkin Buttes and Thunder Basin. I nodded thanks and cleared my throat, still unable to speak.

T.J. glanced back at the EMTs, who were finishing up the job. “I assume he’s going to be okay?”

Cathi leaned around and looked at the front of me as she finished doctoring the back of my head. “The long arm of the law’s gonna have a lump, but we’ve patched him up before.”

Double Tough smiled his slow grin and looked across the grassland to the wall of red rocks. “Lord Almighty, you see the size’a that son-of-a-bitch?”

I swallowed and tried a sip; it tasted pretty good but set off another coughing attack. “What did you use to get him off me?” My voice sounded rough and wheezy.

“One’a them pieces’a two-by-four.” He thought about it as Cathi and Chris gathered up the rest of their equipment to change venue. “I think ya surprised him.”

“Not as much as he surprised me.”

The creature from the cave was as big as a grizzly, and it took four men to carry him out of the tunnel. I noticed they used ankle bracelets at his wrists because the handcuffs would’ve been too small. He was an Indian, Crow from what we could make of him.

I started to get up but felt a little dizzy and sat back down. T.J. placed a hand on my shoulder and held me there. “Easy.”

I sighed. “He still alive?”

Double Tough snorted. “Yeah. I hit him hard enough to fell a mule, but he’s still breathin’.”

I watched as Chris, Chuck, and two HPs carried the now unconscious man up the hillside, his hair trailing all the way to the grass, snagging here and there as if it were trying to stay the progress. It was as if his hair, like the Vietnamese girl’s, had wanted to remain here until all the questions had been answered. He was wearing an old army field jacket, torn and ragged, with the remnants of a denim shirt and a wool sweater underneath. His legs were swathed in tatters of plaid-lined overalls. Everything was frayed and filthy except the intricately beaded moccasins that were on his gigantic feet. They were a design I’d never seen.

I tried to stand again, and this time succeeded, and I staggeredup the hill with Double Tough’s help. “Anybody checking all that stuff in the tunnel?”

“They’re gonna, but they’re not gonna be happy about it. The place smells bad enough to gag a maggot off a gut wagon.”

I nodded toward the giant. “What about him?”

“He’s goin’ to the hospital, and then he’s most likely gonna be in our jail.”

“Find anything in the tunnel to connect him with the Vietnamese woman?”

He shook his head at me. “Not yet, but we figured tryin’ ta choke the life out of the sheriff was good enough reason to hold ’im.”

We watched as they loaded the gurney into the EMT van, the rear suspension compressing with the weight of one woman, four men, and one very large Indian. “You guys knock him out with something?”

Double Tough gave a halfhearted laugh. “We didn’t have to. You jus’ about collapsed his larynx, and I pretty much battered his head in.”

They closed the van doors and departed toward Durant Memorial Hospital. After the sirens died down, he spoke in a soft voice. “That is one FBI.”

I didn’t bother to translate the acronym, but I knew he didn’t mean Federal Bureau of Investigation.

* * *

T.J. had left with her DCI crew and said she’d be in touch as soon as they knew anything, so Rosey gave me a ride back to the office. It was still early morning, and the darkness was slow to release its grip on the county. Ruby, my dispatcher, was always first in, but she was Dog-sitting and hadn’t gotten there yet. My dog, Dog, still didn’t have a name and after calling him Dog for the better part of a year I was concerned that he would be confused if I gave him a real name or maybe I was concerned about confusing myself.

I took advantage of the situation to go back to the holding cells to catch a quick nap on one of the bunks. I tried sleeping on my back, but the damage to the muscles in my throat made me feel like I was strangling, and the little yarmulke of bandages at the back of my head made that position even more uncomfortable, so I rolled over on my side and stared at the bars.

Where did he come from, and what was he doing there?

If he had killed the woman, why would he have left her in such a conspicuous spot? Why wouldn’t he have just dragged her into the tunnel with him?

Besides, what the hell was a Vietnamese woman doing in northern Wyoming, especially dead alongside Lone Bear Road?

Maybe I’d know more when T.J. called with the official report.

I thought about the girl’s face, the cyanosis discoloration, the hemorrhaging of the skin around the eyes. I guessed there would be small, linear abrasions at the throat, either from the perpetrator or from her attempts to dislodge the attacker’s arm or hands.

I thought about her bone structure, which was the big tip-off as to her nationality. If you spend any time in Southeast Asia, you pick up the basic differences pretty quickly, and I sure had spent time in Vietnam.

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1967

“No beau-coups, you scat riki-tiki baby-san. He a Marine and they no boom-boom. He a Marine and they no boom-boom, just kill.” Baranski laughed, enjoying his own charm, elegance, and immense style.

I smiled, shrugged at the young woman, and took another swig of my Tiger beer, her image swimming in the blown-out sweat and strangeness. She shook her head and placed a provocative leg forward to test the theory. “He no killa.”

Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” pounded the room as the tiny Vietnamese woman swayed to the driving rhythm. Baranski crossed his ankles on the chair in front of him and belched loud enough to rattle the windows in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, if it’d had any—windows, that is. The lounge was just outside Gate 055 near the old French fort known simply as Hotel California. I had been in California a short while earlier and, from my perspective, I could not see the resemblance.

The concrete walls of the old fort were twenty feet high and three feet thick, forming a whitewashed rectangle. Each of the arch-ways had solid iron gates, and I expected Franchot Tone and his troop of French legionnaires to march through at any minute. There was an Army of the Republic of Vietnam company posted to the fort, but the real action was just outside the lounge, where there was a civilian mortuary and a cemetery with thousands of white grave markers. It was strange, having the local bar next to the cemetery, but I’d seen stranger things since arriving in Vietnam. Boy howdy.

“Little sister, you sabe specialists in Uncle Sam’s fi ghting forces?” Baranski gestured toward me. “This numba one killer.”

She smiled at him and then reconsidered me, but not her opinion. Her eyes were hard, but her smile was dazzling; good teeth, something you didn’t see much over here. “What your name, numba one killa?”

I ambled to a six-and-almost-a-half-foot standing position as quickly as the heat and eight Tiger beers would allow, all my mother’s lessons moving past the alcohol and to the fore. “Lieutenant Walt Longmire, ma’am, from the great state of Wyoming.”

Baranski lit another Camel and smiled. “Killer, hell, he’s a cowboy.”

Mendoza raised his head just long enough to make one statement. “Bullshit, I’m from Texas, man, I’m the cowboy.”

Baranski removed the cigarette from his mouth and spoke with absolute authority. “You’re a beaner, asshole.”

Mendoza’s voice was muffled against the sticky surface of the table. “What’a you know, you fuckin’ Hoosier?”

I turned back to the girl as she snapped a finger and pointed it at me, practiced at diverting conflict. “Cowboy better than killa. USA, numba one.”

I smiled back. “You bet.” She laughed a short burst and sought more monetarily advantageous pursuits at the bar, or the row of powder-blue fifty-five-gallon fuel drums and plywood that made up the bar. “Hey?”

She glanced back with a lascivious wink. Her voice was husky. “You change mind, cowboy?”

“No, miss. I just want to know your name.”

Her eyes softened, and she turned completely around to make a formal introduction of herself. “Mai Kim, I am please to make acquaintance. ” Her head bowed, and I suddenly felt like a visiting dignitary instead of a Marine investigator making the outrageous sum of $479.80 a month.

“The pleasure is mine, Mai Kim.” She paused there for a moment, considered the surroundings and her situation, her eyelids slowly blinking in shame, then turned and walked away. She didn’t strut.

I looked at the landscape of empty bottles to allow her an unstudied retreat and noticed that there was an old broken-down upright piano beside the bar.

“Tell ’em to turn down that spook music while you’re over there, Mai Kim!” Baranski shouted as he took another sip of his 33 Export. “Damn, I been here for almost two months an’ never knew her name.”

I continued to study the piano as a few of the black airmen stared at our table. I set my beer bottle down and looked at Baranski and decided to go right up the middle. “So, what is the local drug problem?”

He smiled. “Not enough drugs, that’s the problem.” I didn’t smile back, so he felt compelled to continue. “What have you heard?”

“A lot of personnel are passing through here and turning up self-medicated. ”

He shook his head and sighed. “That’s the provost marshal’s view?”

I peeled the label of my beer with my thumbnail. “Yep.”

It was silent at the table for a minute. “Look, this country is crawling with drugs, and a lot of the shit comes from our very own CIA. There’s bhanj growing all over the place, opium in the highlands, and ma thuyi heroin is the cottage industry of choice.” He lifted his beer and tipped mine in a toast. “Pick your poison. Hell, watch this.”

He motioned to an ARVN captain, who disengaged from a group at the far end of the bar and promenaded over in polished boots, a sky-blue flight suit, and an honest-to-God white silk scarf. As adjuncts to the USAF, the Vietnamese flyers were allowed a certain amount of freedom in assembling their uniforms, most of which were, well, flamboyant.

He smiled and inclined his head to Baranski as the matinee idol turned to me. “Lieutenant Longmire, this is Hollywood Hoang.” The small man extended a hand, and I shook it; his nails were clean, clipped, and polished, his skin lotioned smooth—I figured him for quite the dandy. “Hollywood here can get you anything you need.” He grinned at the helicopter pilot. “Hollywood, I need to score a pound of legendary Montagnard grass. How much?”

“One carton Marlboro.” His accent had just a touch of French and was remarkably cultured even with the lack of prepositions. He glanced at me. “This for you, Lieutenant?”

“No.”

Baranski was laughing. “You get my point?”

The flyboy interrupted. “Half carton.”

“That’s okay, thanks.”

“Half carton is very good price.”

“I’m sure, but I’m really not interested.”

He gave a slight shrug and smiled. “If anything you need, I get for you.”

I watched him swagger back to the bar and glanced at Baranski. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Anything. Anything you want, he can get. He was Central Office of South Vietnam when they were fighting the French, but now he’s got ties to the CIA, so whatever you want he can get it.” He watched me as I scraped the rest of the palm tree off my beer label and stared at the table. “Hey, don’t make the long face, Longmire. Battalion headquarters don’t know shit. Do you have any idea how many personnel we have going in and out of here every day?” He leaned back in his chair, waved his cigarette in the air, and laughed. “This air base is roughly the size of LaGuardia Airport back in the states. We got air force, navy, and army personnel, not to mention you grunts; we got South Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thais, Laotians, and the odd NVA running through this place every day. Now, do you think we have any idea what they’ve got with them when they get here, what they have when they leave, or what they might’ve left here once they are gone?”

I looked up. “Tough job.”

“Impossible is more like it.” He took a deep breath and leaned in, placing his elbows on the table and looking at me over the empties. “The shit is everywhere, and if you go around asking a bunch of stupid questions and causing a lot of trouble, you’re going to end up dead; that’s your business.” He pointed a finger at his most recent partner, still passed out on the table. “But you might get us killed, too, and that shit is a no-go. You sabe?”

I looked at him blankly, still trying to figure it all out.

“Look, fucking new guy. I was sent up here six weeks ago; I drink too much, smoke too much, bird-dog a few ao dai...” He glanced around and then leaned in even closer. “And then I got with the program. I’m an investigator with CID. And then along comes Second Lieutenant Walter Longmire and we’ve got a new sheriff in town? Fuck you.” We sat there in silence, looking past each other, listening to the music and the idle chatter at the bar. “Why don’t you tell me what it is that’s got the bug up battalion’s ass, and I’ll try to narrow our field of operations.”

"U.S. Marine PFC James Tuley, of Toledo, Ohio.”

Baranski thought about it. “Never met him.” The horn section in “Rescue Me” started up from the jukebox as the blond man shouted, “Damn it, I said no more splib music!”

A few more of the black soldiers glared at us as I slowly started to stand. “Well, you missed your chance. He died of a heroin overdose in-flight from this air base about two weeks ago.”

He shook his head and motioned for two more beers. “So let me guess; there’s a Governor Tuley, or a Senator Tuley back in O-hi-O that wants to know why his little boy died of a drug overdose in sunny South Vietnam?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything about how James Tuley’s father was neither a senator nor a governor, but a night watchman at an automobile parts plant. I didn’t say anything about a Marine investigator who took an interest when he read that a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird was found on the body of the young man from the wrong side of the Toledo tracks.

I took my beer from the passing waitress and moved toward the battered upright alongside the bar. More than a few faces watched my approach. It was time to introduce the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge inhabitants to live music and to the wonders of James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Joe Turner, Art Tatum, and the Harlem Stride.

Real soul music.

* * *

“Rise and shine, buttercup.”

I raised my hat from the side of my head, just far enough to see two handcrafted Paul Bond boots and two knees, one real, the other artificial. I lowered my hat, effectively blocking the view. “Go away.”

He kicked the underside of my bunk. “Get up, we got work to do.”

Lucian Connally had been sheriff of Absaroka County the twenty-four years previous to my administration; he was a rough old cob who had lost his leg to Basque bootleggers back in the fifties, the prosthetic of which I was preparing to twist off and use to beat him to death. “I worked all night, old man, now go away.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t do too good of a job ’cause yer Indian’s over at Durant Memorial, takin’ the place apart.”

I raised my hat again. “What?”

“He come to, and he’s over there payin’ ’em back for Sand Creek.”

I hustled off the bunk. “He’s Crow, not Cheyenne.”

“He’s one pissed-off Indian, is what he is.”

* * *

It was a disaster.

The ER staff, assuming that the EMTs had given the wounded man a sedative, had rolled him into an examination area and left him until an overworked internist could get to him. A child with an ear infection, an elderly man with chest pains, and a woman going into premature labor had distracted the doctor.

In the meantime, the slumbering giant had awakened.

Luckily, Double Tough and two of the HPs were still at the hospital when the excitement began. He had thrown the gurney and then began yanking very expensive machinery to throw next. They had charged him en masse, only to be plucked off one by one like the gurney and the pricey machinery. The tide shifted when Frymyer joined the fray, and the four men were able to get the Indian down long enough for the internist to pump enough Thorazine into him to knock out a buffalo.

The two HPs who had participated in the newest melee were sitting on the hood of one of their cruisers—Ben Helton’s nose was still bleeding, and Jim Thomas was nursing a hand that was wrapped up to the elbow.

Lucian nudged me as we stood there; he couldn’t help but give them the needle. “How you doin’, girls?”

Ben, the older of the two and the one with the broken nose, spoke through the assembled cotton and gauze with a muffled, nasal voice; he was going to have two black-eye beauties. “Piss on you, old man. Where the hell have you two been?”

Lucian said it like it was manifestly obvious: “Why, safely out of harm’s way.”

Jim, the other wounded trooper, nodded. “He wakes up again, you call game and fish and tell ’em to bring a dart gun.”

We continued into the emergency room, where Frymyer was seated on the floor of the hallway. His hands were bloody, his uniform was torn, and one ripped sleeve draped down over his elbow, which was in a sling, showing a more than prodigious bicep. The entire side of his face was bruised, from the eye socket to the jawline, and the eye that looked up at us was almost closed shut.

“You all right?”

He nodded and then gently touched the swelling at his face. “But Double Tough’s arm is dislocated.”

Lucian glanced at me. “Maybe he ain’t as double tough as we thought.”

Frymyer started to stand, but I lowered myself down to his level instead. I pulled the remainder of his sleeve back up his arm. It was a shame that it was ruined since he’d just gotten his Absaroka County patch set and had sewn them on himself. “I asked how you are?”

“I guess I’m okay.” He probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue. “Except I think I’ve got some teeth loose.”

I took a closer look at him and his ruined shirt, noticing the name bar on his chest, which read FRYMIRE. “You spell your name with an ‘I’ and not a ’Y’?”

He stretched his jaw. “Yeah, like yours.” He tried to smile but quickly regretted it. “It’s okay, they still cash the checks.” He paused and looked down the hallway to where the Durant Memorial Massacre had taken place. “The internist says they can’t handle anything like this guy, and as soon as they get him patched up, we have to take him.”

3

I wandered back to the holding cells and watched the big Indian sleep.

They had carted him over from the hospital, and he seemed to be, as the nurses would say, resting comfortably. The term barrel-chested did not apply to him—he was more like refrigerator-chested. He cleared his throat and swallowed a few times; I watched as the muscles bunched and relaxed under the bandages.

The report from Durant Memorial indicated hemorrhaging of the short strap muscles of the neck surrounding the thyroid gland in front of the larynx, with a slight fracture of the hyoid bone and possible damage to the esophagus and trachea.

I thought about the Vietnamese woman. If he had been anywhere near normal, I would have killed him but, for now, I was glad that I hadn’t.

They had cleaned him up and supplied him with clothing from the hospital laundry—one of those show-me-your-ass gowns that they stick on everybody. It must have been an XXXXL, but it still strained across the width of his shoulders. I had a thought and retrieved a pair of gigantic sweatpants from my office that read Chugwater Athletic Department, a joke gift from Vic, and hung them on the bars. If I woke up in like situation, the first thing I’d want would be a pair of pants.

They had pulled his hair back, and it was the first time I’d gotten a really good look at his face. It was broad, almost as if it had been stretched to fit his oversized frame, with a strong brow, a very prominent nose, and a mouth that was wide with full lips. There was a dramatic, caved-in spot at his left brow and a lot of scar tissue. It wasn’t what you could call a handsome face, but it was certainly full of history, hard-fought history. The creases in it were deep and, even though it was sometimes hard to judge the exact age of Indians, I figured he and I were pretty close.

The hospital had sent over his clothes, which rested in a Hefty bag on the kitchenette counter. I figured I’d fish out the moccasins and put them in the cell for him and then thought there was no time like the present to go through his things.

I put on my latex gloves.

The moccasins were on top; they were intricately beaded in a pattern unlike the other Crow work I’d seen. It was Crow, there was no doubt, but a variation on a theme. The soles were still damp from our altercation in the tunnel, and there was a little bit of dried mud on the edges, but that was the only wear that I could find on them. Whatever else the giant’s habits were, the moccasins were something important. I placed them inside the cell and continued my search.

There were a few personal items that had been placed in a ziplock. I pulled the plastic bag out and looked at the contents. There was a bandana, a book of matches from the Wild Bunch Bar down in Powder Junction, and an old KA-BAR knife that looked to be of Vietnam War vintage—one of the good ones, with a separate pouch for a whetstone. I opened the bag and pulled out the knife; it was roughly eight inches long. I slid the blade from the worn sheath and felt the keen edge, then slipped it back in the sheath and placed it on the counter for the property drawer.

Under the bandana there was a pink plastic photo wallet, the kind a little girl would have had. It had white plastic whip-stitching along the sides, and the clear vinyl that held the photos was clouded and brittle. There were only two photographs in the wallet.

The first one was of a woman staring off to the right; it was the kind of strip photo you got at an arcade in sets of four, black and white, the emulsion fading just a little at the edges. She had dark hair, part of it draping across her face, half hiding the smile that was there. She was quite beautiful in a simple, matter-of-fact way.

The other was of the same woman seated at a bus station, the kind you see dotting the high plains, usually attached to a Dairy Queen or small café. She was seated on a bench with two young children, a boy and a girl. She wore the same smile, but her hair was pulled back in a ponytail in this photo, so her face was not hidden. She looked straight at the camera as she tickled the two children, who looked up with eyes closed and mouths open in laughing ecstasy.

The sun must have been behind the photographer, because there was a very large shadow of the man who was taking the photograph, and it didn’t take much imagination to figure out who it might be. At the back of the laughing little family was a tin RC Cola sign with a chalkboard hung below that was sloppily hand lettered and read Powder River bus Lines, Hardin 12:05, and in smaller print, Indians must Wait OUTSIDE. I read along the foxed edge of the photo and could just make out the date, August 6, 1968. I closed the wallet and set it aside.

Well, he was definitely Crow.

There was also a hand-stitched medicine bag in the ziplock, with a few straggling ends of fringe left. It was beaded in a primitive pattern that looked like an animal of some sort with a wavy line through its body. It might have been either a bear or a buffalo, as they were the only animals who could have a heart line. I put it and the wallet inside the bars, alongside the moccasins.

The field jacket was regular issue, but it came as no surprise that there were no identification marks. It was in rough shape and smelled bad, but there was a design on the back of a war shield and the words RED POWER were painted in now-faded crimson.

I needed my expert.

I folded the rest of the clothes and returned them to the properties bag, popped the knife in, and carried the collection out to Ruby in the front office. I sat on the corner of her desk and threw my gloves in the wastebasket. Dog looked at them, but I told him no and reached down to pet his head. “Thanks for coming in on a Sunday.”

She smiled. “I had things to do on the computer anyway.”

“We may have to call the Ferg.”

“He’s floating the Big Horn. You’re not going to be able to get him until tomorrow, if at all.”

I sighed. “Still no word from Saizarbitoria?”

She shook her head no, looking past me at the unconscious ex-sheriff asleep on the bench behind me. “There’s Lucian.”

“Uh huh. How about Double Tough and Frymire?”

“Repaired to their respective lairs, to lick their collective wounds.”

I nodded. “Any word from DCI or the HPs?”

She looked like she was tired of answering my questions. "No.”

Ruby didn’t have to work weekends, but nine times out of ten she’d be here, answering the phone and keeping the machinery of Absaroka County’s law enforcement juggernaut staggering forward. I reached out and gave her a playful poke on the shoulder. “Hey, did you hear about my fight?”

She batted the neon-blue eyes in all innocence. “I hear he wiped the floor with you.”

“He did.”

“Aren’t you getting a little mature for that kind of foolishness?”

I felt the bandage patch and the knot at the back of my head. “He was fighting; I was just trying to escape with my life.” She shook her head at me, and I decided to change the subject. “How about my daughter and the Cheyenne Nation?”

“As of an hour ago, they were finishing up lunch and going to work out.”

I made a face. “That’s my job.”

“They thought you might be busy.”

“I am, but that doesn’t mean I can’t continue with my responsibilities.” I stood, feeling out of the loop, so I changed the subject again. “I guess we should start by checking the VA here in Durant and the one over in Sheridan; maybe they’ve heard of the guy. An Indian this big is going to be hard to miss.”

She studied the sad resolution in my eyes. “What’s the matter?”

I avoided the highly calibrated, direct, blue lie detectors that reflected up at me. “Maybe I should just go see if she’s all right.”

She covered her smile with a hand and turned back to her computer, all mock seriousness. “Maybe you should.”

I stood there, valiantly attempting to cover the ground where I stood. “Henry doesn’t know her workout schedule.”

She still didn’t look at me. “Right.”

“I think I’ll go down there.”

She nodded. “You do that.”

Having set everybody straight, I headed down the crumbling steps behind the courthouse, past the Uptown Barbershop and the Owen Wister Hotel, and went in the alley entrance of Durant Physical Therapy. I was almost halfway up the steps to the old gym when I heard Henry’s voice, patient but persistent. “Two more...”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1967

“No.”

She looked at me, hurt and not understanding, recrossed her legs under the silk yukata, and smoothed the Stars and Stripes on her lap. The military newspaper had become her version of See Spot Run.

It was early at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, and we were the only ones there. The bartender, Le Khang, would come in a little after six and make coffee but would quickly depart when he figured there was no profit margin in my custom. The last three mornings he hadn’t shown up at all, leaving the coffee making to Mai Kim. She was always in the bar when I was there, always anxious for another English lesson. She had dragged a stool over from the bar and sat there, perched in anticipation.

She took a sip of her coffee; she didn’t like coffee but felt that drinking it advanced her cause in becoming American. She cocked her head. “More lesson, yes?”

“No.” I blew a breath from my distended cheeks and tripped my fingers along the piano keys, abusing Rachmaninoff’s Concerto no. 2 in C Minor, which matched my mood in the key of melancholy. It was the Adagio sostenuto that my mother had imprinted into my soft head, evening after evening. Somehow, the Harlem Stride didn’t mesh with the quiet mornings just off Tan Son Nhut’s Gate 055.

Not dissuaded, she unfolded the wrinkled and yellowed copy of Stars and Stripes. I had been doing my part for the winning of hearts and minds by working with her on her English. She had settled on an article warning against using C-4 explosives as a field-cooking implement and was miffed that I’d shown little enthusiasm for her presentation. She cleared her throat and sat up straight. “Cookie with fire...”

I automatically corrected her. “Cooking, not cookie.”

“Cooking with fire...”

“Mai Kim, I really don’t feel like doing this this morning.”

She straightened her paper with a brisk gesture to let me know she wasn’t pleased with my interruption. “What matter with you?”

“Nothing. I just don’t want to do this right now.”

She watched me over the newspaper as I sipped the coffee she’d left for me on the corner of the piano. “Battalion command has issy-ued a dire-connected...”

“Issued a directive.”

She looked hurt. “That what I say.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

She was reading again. “Con-cern-a-ring the use of C-4 plascatic espelosove...”

“Plastic explosive.”

She nodded and studied the paper as if it had tried to trick her. “Plastic explosive.”

She was an excellent mimic and a pretty good student. “Mai, please?”

“Resydoo may result in C-4 poisonee, an’ fumes from encoseded quarter...”

“Enclosed quarters.”

“Enclosed quarters, that what I say.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

She ignored me and continued. “Can be etremelousely dangerous. Wepeaon Speshulist Mack Brown report that atatempie to stamp-out C-4 can produss explosion....” She turned to me, looked over the rim of her cup, and winked. “I get that one right, yes?”

“Close enough.”

She saw the uninterested look on my face and continued to study me. “You no like coffee, cowboy?”

“No, your coffee is fine.” I continued poking at Rachmaninoff with an extended forefinger. “You ever have a shitty job that you didn’t enjoy doing?” I glanced up at the tiny prostitute sitting there in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge. “Forget I asked that.”

Mai Kim’s story was not a unique one in the rural villages of Vietnam; when she was eleven, she had been sold. She was fifteen now, and the four years of use in the world’s oldest profession had aged her like the major who had greeted me upon my arrival. Maybe it was the place; youth could not be maintained without innocence.

She blinked and folded the paper in her lap. “You no like here?”

I swiveled on the beat-up piano bench and rested the coffee cup on my knee, finally giving her my undivided attention. I could hear in the distance, but approaching, a group of Kingbees tipping their motors and flying over for a morning patrol. I’d learned that the H-34s, with their thirty-two-cylinder radial engines that sat right under the cockpit, were slower than the UH-1s but treasured for the large chunk of metal between the pilots and whoever might be shooting up at them. “It’s not that.”

She folded her arms. “What it, then?”

“Then what is it.”

“Then what is it?”

I smiled at her Wyoming accent.

Baranski and Mendoza had become irritated with my hardheaded naiveté and had begun spending more time on other investigations, leaving me with hours to sit and contemplate what I wasn’t getting done. Just as the major had intimated, the locals had quickly made me, and simply being observed talking with me had become reason for suspicion. But the hookers still talked to me; at least Mai Kim did.

I looked into the face of what seemed like the only friend I had in the place and wondered how long she’d keep talking to me if I didn’t start holding up my end. “You know about the drugs.” She nodded her head with concentration. “There was a young man who died after visiting the air base.”

“Lot of men die after visiting air base.”

I looked up at her. “This one was different.”

* * *

Henry studied the sleeping Indian.

“Different than what I know.”

“Crow?” I leaned against the counter.

He took a deep breath. “Yes, but not River or Mountain Band. He is something else.”

I pointed toward the moccasins. “The bead pattern is one I’ve never seen; it’s geometric, but not the Crow that I know.”

He knelt by the bars and examined the medicine bag and moccasins, though I noticed he touched neither, and nodded. “Kicked-in-the-Belly.”

I waited a moment. “You mind telling a heathen devil white man what that is?”

He pivoted and sat on the floor with his back to the cell, which Dog took as an invitation and joined him. “Eelalapi’io, a shunned band, one of thirteen exogamous maternal clans; fourth clan, grouped with ackya’pkawi’a, or Bad War Honors. ” I watched as he thought about it, first categorizing the information and then translating it so that it would be relatable to me linguistically and culturally. “Seventeen-twenty-seven, or thereabouts, there was a Crow war party led by Young White Buffalo that raided the Fat River country and came back with a very strange animal. This animal was as large as the elk but with rounded hooves, a long tail, and mane; it had no antlers, and the tribe was very interested in this new thing. A brave got too close to the rear of the animal and touched it. The creature struck the man as quick as lightning, knocking him to the dirt, where he rolled and clutched his midriff.”

"A horse, hence, Kicked-in-the-Belly?” I plucked the olive-drab field jacket from the top of the bag, crossed the room, and sat in the chair with my arms folded over the backrest. “It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, unless he’s got a hiding place out there that my guys couldn’t find.”

"Nothing on him” Henry continued to pet Dog.

“Just the matches, knife, photo wallet, and medicine bag, but Saizarbitoria is down there now going through the stuff in the tunnel.” I could see Henry was having the same doubts I was. “Why would he leave her lying out there where anybody could see her?”

He stopped petting Dog and playfully pulled at one of his long ears. Dog opened his eyes but nothing else. “I understand he is not a reasonable individual?”

“He’s tried to kill everybody he’s come in contact with so far, if that’s what you mean.” He nodded and, as I thought about the story, I connected it to the owner/operator of White Buffalo’s Sinclair Station up on the Rez. “Is the young White Buffalo in that story an ancestor of Brandon White Buffalo?”

“Probably.”

I glanced toward the cell. “Is Brandon related to this one?”

The Cheyenne Nation turned his head and looked at the Crow in the holding cell. “I know most of Brandon’s family. Brandon’s father is Cheyenne, but the White Buffalo are Crow, and it is possible that some of them adopted the relatives of the mother.” He shook his head and turned back to me. “I do not know this man, but I am unfamiliar with some of the Crow bands, especially Kicked-in-the-Belly.” He raised a thumb to the cell behind him. “He resembles Brandon.”

“You mean in raw tonnage?”

Henry snorted a soft response. “I can make some phone calls and check the tribal rolls.” He stayed motionless for a moment, and I knew there was more.

"What?”

“The medicine bag is warrior society—Crazy Dogs and Crooked Staff.” Dog looked up at his name, but Henry scratched behind his ears, and he settled his broad head back onto the Indian’s lap.

“Big deal?”

He nodded in a barely perceptible manner. “Great warriors. ”

I lifted the back of my hat and felt the bandaged lump. "Myself, a deputy, two HPs, and a couple of hospital orderlies can attest to that.”

“Crazy Dogs are the fifth and least structured of the warrior societies—they committed themselves to death in battle.”

I had heard of such things. “Kamikazes?”

“In a sense. The death is not to be foolish or useless; it is to be beneficial in the battle as it is fought.” He paused for a moment. “It is said that these individuals are known to become very reckless in their lifestyle.”

I nodded along with the solemnity. “And Crooked Staff?”

He took a breath and looked back at me. “Every spring the leaders of the war societies would give out four staffs to the newest members. These young men were to plant their staffs upon meeting the enemy and tie themselves to them, essentially fighting to the death. This provided a rear guard to any action and supplied further impetus to the war party to rally and come to the young warrior’s assistance.”

I unfolded my arms and tossed him the field jacket. “What do you make of that?”

He turned to one side, so as not to disturb Dog, and opened the jacket as I had. He flipped the snap-buttons back and examined them, something I hadn’t thought to do. “Scovill Manufacturing, tropical issue; no liner buttons on the inside.” He looked up. “He looks to be our age.”

“Yep.”

"Army surplus, or...” He let the sentence hang there between us.

“Or what?”

The dark hands smoothed the broad back of the thread-bare field jacket. He looked at the horned medicine shield and the words RED POWER. "Or...he is one of us.”

Henry Standing Bear didn’t mean Indian.

* * *

Santiago Saizarbitoria had had a rough morning; he hadn’t gotten beat up by the Indian like the rest of us, but he had to go through the things in the tunnel. I wasn’t sure which was worse. Saizarbitoria was the Basque contingency of our little department and my second bid to keep our median age under fifty. He’d transferred up from Rawlins where he had worked in the high-risk division of the state’s maximum-security correction facility, or what we used to call prison in the old days, and Vic had nicknamed him Sancho before they had even met. He was lowest on the proverbial totem pole here in town, so he usually worked Sundays because he had to and because he had a wife with a child upcoming and needed the overtime. He was sitting on the bench in the outer office drinking a cup of coffee and flirting with Ruby. Henry continued making his phone calls.

Dog kept nosing one of the garbage sacks at Sancho’s boots, but he kept pushing the beast’s muzzle away. Dog didn’t take it personally and plopped down beside the bench to wait for the deputy to open the bags. Santiago motioned to one of them. “There was a lot of dead stuff in his belongings.”

I glanced at the bag that was tied-off. “Dead stuff?”

“Skulls, hooves, and things like that. I don’t think we should open this one indoors, especially since it’s kind of hot.”

“Granted. And the other?”

He looked a little dejected. “You’re not going to like this.” He reached in and took out a small, cheap black purse that he had put in a ziplock.

“Where did you find it?”

“About a third of the way back in the tunnel.”

I got up with a sense of finality as Santiago followed me to the holding-cell counter. We donned our disposable latex gloves and began the preliminary. Dog followed us and the second bag.

The pocketbook was covered with mud only on one side and was waterlogged where the water of Murphy Creek had entered the unzipped cavity. We began by opening the main compartment. There was an imitation silk scarf, which I carefully allowed to unfold toward the floor. “Doesn’t look expensive.”

Saizarbitoria nodded and continued to write on the property roster attached to the clipboard at his lap. “Except for the mud, the pocketbook looks new.”

“Yep.” I dropped the scarf into an evidence bag and reached in again, pulling out a set of keys on a remote. “GM.”

My deputy looked at the fob. “Yeah.”

There were some other keys but they had no manufacture or code numbers. I dropped them into another bag and set them aside.

There was a romance novel with a bodice-ripper cover of a young woman standing on a cliff with an ocean below her. It was in French and dog-eared about a quarter of the way through, but there was nothing else peculiar other than a zippered pouch that matched the purse, which was filled with about eighteen dollars, all in quarters.

I picked up the pocketbook and started thinking about the young woman who had owned it. It was possible that she was a dust child—a child of a Vietnamese mother and an American father. One generation removed, she still looked Vietnamese to me. "Sancho?” He looked up. “Get the car keys checked.”

He scribbled on the margins of his legal pad. “Got it.” There was a side compartment on the purse. I unzipped it, and there was a photograph plastered against the inside in a crease where, if you weren’t looking, you’d never find it. I turned and looked at Santiago. “No money except for the quarters, no ID, and a book in French. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

“Yes.” He looked up from the clipboard. “What’d you find on him?”

I glanced at the sleeping giant in cell one. “There was a child’s wallet with some photographs but nothing really incriminating and nothing current except a matchbook from the Wild Bunch Bar.”

“You want me to head back down to Powder Junction?”

“Yep, please. I’m afraid Double Tough and Frymire are going to be laid up for a while, and I still haven’t heard from the Ferg.”

I pulled the photo from the damp insides of the purse lining and flipped it over to look at it. It was old and sun-faded, curled at the edges where the water had soaked the paper. It was a snapshot of an Asian woman on a barstool. She was reading a newspaper with a man seated at a piano to her right with his back to the camera. He was wearing fatigues, and his face was partially turned. He was big, young, and heavily muscled with a baby face and a blond crew cut.

And he was me.

4

My daughter held my hand. Ruby and Henry sat at the reception desk and looked at me, Henry with the receiver still at his ear.

Saizarbitoria had put our set of photographs of the young woman’s body on Ruby’s desk, and they lay scattered beside the battered snapshot. I had sent Sancho to Powder Junction to ask some questions at the Wild Bunch Bar, and Lucian lay on the entryway bench, still thankfully sound asleep.

"Daddy?” She was nuzzled up close, standing right next to me with her arms trailing down mine and her chin at the scar tissue on my clavicle. “Daddy, is it possible...?”

I looked at her, and it was almost as if she wanted it to be true. “No.”

“Then why would she be here?”

“I have no idea.”

Ruby looked again, studying the photos with renewed vigor. I faced the blue yonder in her eyes, and she nodded. “Walt, they could be related.”

I compared their faces. There was a resemblance, but with the swelling and discoloration of the victim in our photos, it was hard to make the leap.

Or I simply didn’t want to.

Henry began speaking into the phone in Cheyenne; I could understand the references to Brandon White Buffalo, but that was about it.

She was smiling at the camera, and she had great teeth, just as I’d remembered. There was a nervousness in the smile, though, a wayward tension that showed that she wasn’t used to having her photograph taken.

I thought about the body of the dead young woman by the highway and tried to connect it with the smiling woman in the old photo and to the one in my memory. I reached down and turned one of our photographs so that the profile of the woman matched the snapshot. Some of the bone structure was the same.

I glanced at Henry, and it looked like he was on hold again. He nodded toward the pictures. “It is possible.”

I crossed to the bench beside the stairwell and sat, careful to avoid Lucian’s boots; the last thing I needed was for him to wake up. I sat there thinking and looked at the streaming patterns of sunlight on the hardwood floor. Thinking about Vietnam, about Tan Son Nhut and Mai Kim—remembering the heat, the strange light, and the moral ambiguity.

“Who was she?”

I was startled by Cady’s voice and looked back up. I thought about all the wayward memories that had been harassing me lately, the recrimination, doubt, injured pride, guilt, and all the bitterness of the moral debate over a long-dead war. I sat there with the same feeling I’d had in the tunnel when the big Indian had tried to choke me. I was choking now on a returning past that left me uneasy, restless, and unmoored.

I chewed at the skin in the inside of my mouth and stared at the floor. “She was a bar girl at an air force base where I was sent on an investigation.” I glanced up at Henry. “You met her, when you came down.”

He nodded. “Before Tet.”

“Yep.” My eyes went back to the sun-scoured pattern at our feet, and I watched the dust that floated in and out of a sunshine that seemed far away.

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1967

Gusts of dust, pebbles, and dirt scoured the airfield as the two rotors of the big Chinook forced everyone to crouch and look away. The wind from the blades was enough to knock me down and lift tarmac sections of over a hundred pounds. I kept my eyes closed and waited for the stinging to stop. The big helicopter landed, the gun crew relaxed, and the .50 caliber machine guns went limp as if the will to fight had left the aircraft.

It had.

I felt a hand on my shoulder as someone gripped me and shoved me away from the swirling, filthy air. “Ya-tah-hey, white boy!”

I had gotten a message from battalion headquarters indicating priority one from Special Operations Group, Military Assistance Command. Everyone in the communications shack wanted to know what it was about, but I’d quietly taken the closed paper into the street outside to open and read the short note. “Hue and Dong Ha in last twenty-four. Stopping in for R & R tomorrow night, eighteen hundred. Nah-kohe.”

When I could see again, we were standing at the edge of the airstrip, and I noticed that the Bear was loaded for bear—unsecured weapons hung around him like casually prepared death. The Cheyenne Nation, RT One-Zero, Recon Team Wyoming, wore a claymore mine in a canvas satchel, with a homemade detonation device in his chest pocket, a string of the golf-ball-sized V-40 minigrenades, a CAR-15, and a sawed-off M79. He was weighed down with every ammunition pouch I knew of, along with a Special Forces tomahawk at his back. I tapped a finger on the explosive device at his chest. “You better disconnect the blooper on that thing; we’ve got a lot of loose radio frequency around here, and you’re liable to go off to the happy hunting ground.”

He didn’t move.

I shook my head and looked at him. “Did you think you were going to have to fight your way in?”

It was a tight, flat smile. “In or out; it makes little difference.”

He wasn’t traveling alone; beside him stood a recon Montagnard, as the French had named them. About half my height, the little guy was a fierce-looking individual issuing sullen looks from under his pith helmet. He also carried the cut-down version of the M16, as well as a suppressed .22 caliber High Standard, a 60 mm minimortar with ammo, and a Special Forces Randall Model 14 Bowie knife.

“Walt, this is Babysan Quang Sang.”

I stuck out my hand. “Glad to meet you.” He looked at my hand as if he’d never seen one. I waited a moment and then dropped it. "C’mon, I’ll buy you guys a beer.”

As we turned to go, Henry stepped into a lieutenant colonel who was headed the other way. The Bear’s movements slowed until he was absolutely still. “Watch where you are going.”

The light colonel stood there for a moment looking at the collective armament and at the tall Indian with the carved bone amulet in the image of a horse at his throat, the recon patch, and the ID bar that read STANDING BEAR. The half-bird then looked at the indig who in turn looked ready to pull his knife and leap for the officer’s throat. It took a moment for the colonel to respond, but when he did, he smiled. “That’s watch where you’re going, sir.”

It promised to be a stimulating forty-eight hours.

Action at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge was well under way when we arrived, and there were no tables available, so we sidled up to the bar like a threesome of fur trappers from the great northwest. I ordered three Tiger beers, turned to toast my best friend in the world, and yelled to be heard over the crowd. “Good to see you alive!”

“Good to be alive!” He looked behind him and saw that the tiny Montagnard was being ingested by the crowd. Henry set his beer down, turned to pick Babysan up, and placed him on the bar between us. Quang Sang smiled as if this were an everyday occurrence and drank his beer in one breath. Le Khang gave me a warning look from the other side of the bar but quickly went back to polishing the glassware when Henry took off his cap and rested it between them. “So, this is where you have been spending the war?”

“I sometimes reconnoiter to the piano.” He nodded his head, knowing full well I was lying. “Henry, they cut your hair.”

He smiled. “They cut yours, too.”

It was quiet for a moment, and I felt compelled to ask, “Where to next?”

He looked around but figured there weren’t any VC in the immediate vicinity. “Hill 861 and then back over the fence to Laos!”

“I didn’t know they were in the war.”

He shrugged and sipped his beer. “They are not.”

I nodded. “What’s on Hill 861?”

“Cong.” He smiled. “But there will be a lot less in twenty-four hours!” He nudged the Montagnard. “Powder River!”

The tiny bushman screamed out in a voice as high-pitched as those of most of the women in the bar. “Powder River! Mile-wiye an inch-deep letter buck!”

The Cheyenne Nation stood there, illuminating pride. “I figured if he was going to be on Recon Team Wyoming, he should know the history.”

“Boy howdy.”

“Would you like to hear his rendition of ‘Cowboy Joe’?”

I shook my head and looked back at Henry. “You’ve gone native.”

He smiled, but it was all teeth. “I have always been native.” He tipped his beer up and downed it in three swallows, slamming it down alongside Quang Sang’s knee. The tiny man followed suit, so I slammed mine and held up three fingers.

He flipped a thumb toward Babysan. “Do you know the story on these people?”

“A little.”

He leaned in close, and our more reasonably projected conversation took place over Babysan’s knees as I handed them their beers. “They’re a combination of Malay tribesmen, Chinese Han, Polynesians, and Mongols.” He smiled again, and again it was all teeth. “Did you know that the Mongols used to ride 250 miles a day?”

I made a face.

“Made the Pony Express look like pikers.” He took a sip of his beer. “They do not get along with the rest of the Vietnamese. They figure they are a bunch of effete snobs that wouldn’t last twenty minutes out in the bush. The lowlanders call them . . . ,” he looked around, and his eyes dismissed the other southern Vietnamese in the loud room, “. . . savages.”

I nodded along with him. “I get the point.”

“They make fun of them because their skin is darker and their pronunciation is different, but they routinely whip the VC with bows and arrows.”

“I got it.”

“They have a jungle economy, so money does not mean anything to them. The French used to pay them in beads. . . .”

“Got it.”

“Uncle Sam pays Quang Sang sixty bucks a month, and he’s the highest-paid yard in his tribe.” I stopped saying anything. “These people have one of the strongest warrior ethics of anyone I have ever met.” Even though we were close, his voice had risen to the previous level. “They have been abused by the Vietnamese, the Communists, the French, and now by us. And when this criminal war is over, I can guarantee you that they will pay the highest price.”

I took a breath and waited as the all-around radical calmed back down. Henry had always been a hothead, but it seemed as if his temper had gotten worse in the last few years; maybe it was the war, maybe it was the times. “I guess that ‘native’ remark got you a little angry.”

He took another swallow of his beer, reset his jaw, and looked at me some more. “Yes.”

“I’m sorry. I sometimes think I’m funny.” I watched him continue to watch me as I sipped my beer, a little slower now.

It was well into the witching hour. I had introduced Mai Kim to Henry and Babysan. We had transferred the party to the piano bench, and Henry and I watched as the two of them slowly danced to “Hurt So Bad.” I was accompanying Little Anthony and the Imperials with a one-finger melody. It was a big piano bench, which was good, because the Cheyenne Nation and I pretty much filled it up. He was turned toward the dance floor, while I was drunkenly focused on the piano keys.

Henry Standing Bear swayed with the music but broke the rhythm by bumping my shoulder. I turned to look at him, and he gestured with his beer toward the dance floor. I half turned on the bench and looked at the pair. They were the only dancers still out there, and they swayed in the green and red glow of the dim Christmas lights and in the shadows of the floods from the air force base.

After a few turns, Babysan Quang Sang gave me the thumbs-up. “I think he likes me.”

Henry smiled. “I think he likes her better. He was negotiating true love, but I told him you were paying for her services. I arranged it with the pilot over there.”

I shook my head and looked back toward the bar. Hollywood Hoang raised a glass of what looked like champagne to seal the deal, and I looked back at Mai Kim. “She’s a good kid.”

I could feel him studying the side of my face and turned back to the piano. He continued to watch me. “You get some?” I shrugged and shook my head no. “Why not?” He took a sip of his beer, I took a sip of mine, and we sat there in silence longer than sober people would. “You still dating that blonde back in Durant?”

As near as I could remember, Henry had only met Martha once at the county rodeo dance, but the Cheyenne Nation didn’t miss much. “I don’t know if I’d call it dating. I haven’t heard anything from her in about a month and a half.”

He snorted. "Walter...” He always called me Walter when he was going to drop a load of philosophical crap on me, as though the shorter version of my name couldn’t withstand the strain. “It is a war.”

“Even here, I noticed.”

“There is a certain suspension of the normal rules of engagement.”

“We’re not engaged.”

“You might as well be. Shit, Walt, you shake hands with a woman and you feel like you have to be true to her for the rest of your life.” I didn’t say anything but kept plinking, and the silence returned to our voices.

The USO had a piano tuner, of all things, who was touring Southeast Asia, but since the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge was off base, they hadn’t come here. I moved up an octave, but it was only marginally better.

“I am sorry.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him and turned. “What?”

He continued gazing at the dancers. “For yelling at you, I am sorry.”

“It’s not important.”

“Yes, it is.”

He was silent again.

The Bear didn’t make statements like this lightly, and I’d learned to pay attention to him when he spoke in this tone of voice. “I am not so sure that I am going to make it through this war, and I would not have you think poorly of me.”

I sat there staring at him and tried to think which part I wanted to argue with first, finally settling on the most important. “Of course you’re going to make it through this war.” He still didn’t say anything. “One day we’re going to be old, fat guys, and we’re going to sit around and drink beer and talk about getting me laid.” It sounded flat, even to me, so I stopped. “I know it’s hard out there....”

“It is not hard out there.” His head turned, but he didn’t look at me. “I like the night; I see my ancestors in the dark, a thousand foot-steps, deadly quiet. The ghosts are with me, and I see them, but it was different the last time I was out on recon-ops.” His eyes came around like searchlights. “I saw myself.”

I waited.

“But it was okay, because I was behind me. As long as my ghost is behind me, like a shadow, then I am safe.”

I continued to wait.

“If he ever moves up in front of me, it will be bad.”

* * *

“It is really too bad.”

I took my eyes off the road and glanced at him. “What?” Due to DCI’s slow response, the VA administrative staff not being available till tomorrow morning, Brandon White Buffalo not returning our calls, and my inability to sit still, we had decided to take a drive down to Powder Junction and talk to the bartender at the Wild Bunch Bar.

“For the young woman to have come so far seeking a relative. . . .”

“We’re not related.”

He smiled. “I believe you.” He gestured toward Cady. “If it were not for what sits between us, I would be willing to swear that you have never had sex in your life.”

She ignored Henry. “Evidently, she thought you were related, or why would she come all the way to Wyoming?”

“And how else would she know who you are or, more importantly, where you are?” He looked out the window at the passing landscape and the trailing edge of the Bighorn Mountains. “Who knew you from back then and could provide that kind of information now?”

I thought about it, and the thought was depressing. “You really think that she thought she was related to me and came all the way from Vietnam?”

“It is the worst-case scenario.”

I shook my head. “Why wouldn’t she have written or made a phone call?”

“Perhaps her circumstance did not allow for it.”

The radio interrupted the philosophical debate. Static. “Unit one, we got the report from DCI, and Saizarbitoria says to tell you he forgot and took the personal property packet for them and says that he’ll give it to you when you get there. He wants your 10-40. Over.”

I tried to pluck the mic from the dash, but Cady was faster. She had always liked pushing buttons. “Roger that, base. Our 10-40 is...” She looked at me.

“You started it, now finish.”

Henry’s voice rumbled in his chest. “Mile marker 255.”

She stuck her tongue out at me and rekeyed the mic. “Mile marker 255, about a mile north of Powder Junction.”

I leaned over and added my part. “We’re a minute away. Tell him to keep his badge on.”

We pulled off the highway, drove through the underpass, and saw two young boys, who looked like brothers, standing at the corner of a day care and jumping up and down in unison with their hands above their heads. They waved.

I waved back, figuring there probably wasn’t a lot to do in the southern part of the county.

I turned right onto Main Street into the slanted parking spot alongside Sancho’s unit. There was a motorcycle with a cover partially over it and with Illinois temporary plates that was parked on the sidewalk; there was a battered maroon Buick, which had California plates, that was clumsily parked at the curb at the far end of the boardwalk; and there was a forest-green Land Rover with the words DEFENDER 90 across the side parked next to it—didn’t see many of those, even during tourist season. We got out and walked down the wood planking, and I noticed that the Land Rover was from California, too.

The Wild Bunch Bar wasn’t too different from any other bar along the high plains; it was a rambling affair with three pool tables and a connected café, although there were a few things that made it stand out a bit in comparison with some of the others in the county. Reflecting the influence of the Australian and New Zealand sheepshearers, there was an All-Blacks soccer poster by the door and a tattered Aussie flag over the jukebox.

There was a flat-screen television at the far end of the bar, certainly a new addition, and a dark-haired man in a leather jacket and sunglasses was seated under it; he was actively watching the Rockies being pummeled by the Dodgers. He smiled, cried out, and raised a fist as L.A. loaded the bases. There were no other customers in the café.

The bar was along the left-hand side of the room, and Saizarbitoria was seated on the stool closest to the door; he was having a cup of coffee with the bartender, a stringy-looking young man with flame tattoos and a shaved head. Thirty, maybe. “’Sup, Sheriff ? Can I get you folks something?”

I looked at my daughter, who in turn looked at him. “Diet Coke.”

I motioned to Henry and me. “Iced teas.”

I sat on the stool next to Sancho and pulled his written report from under the personal property bag at his fingers. The bartender’s name was Phillip Maynard, and he had a local address but had only moved here a week earlier from Chicago. He came back with our drinks, and his eyes lingered on Cady. “You new around here?”

She slid the can closer to her. “No.”

I folded my arms on the bar and got his attention. “Are you?”

He looked at me and quickly made the familial connection. “Uh huh.”

I sipped my tea. “So, there was an Asian woman in here night before last?”

“Yeah.”

I nodded toward Saizarbitoria. “He show you the photograph?”

“Yeah.”

“Same woman?”

He put his hands behind his back and tried to look at the report. “It was kind of hard to tell, but the clothes were the same.”

I nodded. “You get a lot of Asian women in here?”

He paused for a second. “I don’t know, I started less than a week ago—they could come in here in droves. I don’t know.”

"When did she come in?”

“Friday afternoon, before the after-work rush.”

“Right. And what time is that?”

He thought about it and shrugged. “She was gone by four-thirty. She wasn’t here for very long.” I finished my drink and looked at Henry, who had yet to touch his. I followed his eyes as they traveled to the man with the sunglasses in the corner, who smiled a worried smile and then returned his attention to the National League West.

“What’d she have?”

Maynard refilled my glass. “I think she just had some wine.” He thought about it. “And a bag of pretzels.”

"She say anything?”

He reached around and took a sip of the beer that he had stored on the counter behind the bar. “Nope.” His eyes went back to Cady.

I studied the report. “It says here she arrived around noon?”

“Yeah.”

"Four and a half hours?” I looked at him. “You don’t consider that to be very long?”

The blood was rising in his face. “Well, I mean...some people stay in here all day.”

“And for four and a half hours she didn’t say anything?”

“Nothing in English, just French and a little Vietnamese.”

I gave him a look. "Vietnamese?”

He nodded. “I washed dishes in a Vietnamese restaurant in Chicago. I don’t speak the language, but I can recognize it.”

“Who did she talk to?”

“Herself.”

“Was there anybody else here?”

He studied the bar. “There were a couple of ranchers that came in to get out of the sun.”

"You know their names?”

“No.”

"Ever see them in here before?”

He shook his head no. “Like I said, I been here less than a week.”

I glanced at Henry, who was still watching the man in the corner who still appeared to be enjoying the ball game. “What’d they look like?”

“Working ranchers—locals, not the fly-in type.”

I thought that the description fit the Dunnigan brothers who had been haying the roadside along Lone Bear Road. “About sixty-something? One of them wearing a straw hat, the other in a ball cap with a ranch brand on it, had a squint?”

He started nodding before he answered. “Yeah, that was them.”

“They talk to her?”

“A little, yeah.”

“Catch any of the conversation?”

He shrugged. “They were tryin’ to hit on her. I mean, she was good-looking.”

“They leave together?”

“No, she left before they did.” He paused for a second, and I knew he was thinking about changing this part of the story. "You know...”

The trick in these types of situations is to assure the subject that you know there’s more to the story and to let them tell it. “Yep?”

“They did leave just a little after she went out.” He partially closed one eye and bobbed his head. “They really were hitting on her pretty hard, now that I come to think about it.”

I nodded. “Anything else? It’s a homicide investigation, so don’t feel as if you have to hold back.”

“She paid in quarters.”

“Quarters?”

"Yeah.”

I continued to look at him. “That’s odd.”

He nodded, quick to agree. “I thought so, too.”

“You’re not going anywhere, are you?” I handed the report back to Santiago and stood. “I’m assuming that we can contact you here or at the address my deputy’s got on the report?”

“Yeah, I’m here all summer. I don’t have a phone yet, but I’m workin’ on it.” He pulled a thin, black cellular from his back pocket. “I’ve got this, but it only works at the parking spot outside the veterinary office.” He nodded up the road. “They’ve got painted rocks to mark the spot, and a sign that says ‘telephone booth.’”

“Welcome to Wyoming.”

He was suddenly talkative. “They supposedly have WiFi down at the motel, but I have yet to find it.”

I stood, anxious to end the interrogation and work the rest of the room. “Okay. Let us know, would you?” I walked behind Cady and toward the dark-haired man with the sunglasses, who still seemed completely absorbed in the baseball game. I noticed it was in commercial. “Hello.”

He looked from the television to me and stood, dropping his sunglasses with an index finger to peer his almond-shaped eyes over the top. “I’m good, Sheriff. How about yourself?”

I was a little taken aback by his friendliness, not to mention the non sequitur, but you get used to this kind of reaction when you wear a badge. “Fine, thanks. Is that your Land Rover out there with the California plates?”

“Yes, sir.” He looked about fifty, perhaps a little older, and appeared to be in very good shape. “Is there a problem, Officer?”

"Just passing through?”

He paused when I didn’t answer his question. “I have a piece of property I’m taking a look at in anticipation of retirement. ”

“Here in the area?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what do you do, Mr.... ?”

He extended his hand, and his grip was strong. “Tuyen. I’m in the motion picture industry, in the distribution of Asian-market films in the United States.”

“Mind if I see some ID?” He immediately trolled in his back pocket, brought out a black leather wallet, which he held close, pulled out his driver’s license, and handed it to me. He waited. His name was Tran Van Tuyen, and he was out of Riverside, California. Even in the photo, he was smiling. Fifty-seven. I memorized the license number and handed it back to him. “Thank you.”

"Have I done something?”

“No, we’ve just had an incident concerning a young woman who might’ve been from out of state, so we’re simply checking everyone.” He stopped smiling, just a bit. “Mr. Tuyen, are you Vietnamese?”

He blinked, and I felt guilty for even asking. “Yes.” He didn’t say anything else.

“The reason I ask is that the girl I mentioned is Vietnamese.”

He stared at the bar stool between us. “I see.”

“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“What did this young woman look like, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Long black hair, midtwenties, dressed in a pink top with a black skirt.”

It appeared that he was thinking about it and seemed sad that I was asking. “No, Sheriff, I’m afraid not.” I watched what looked like a flood of emotions in him, a mixture of sorrow, loss, and then suspicion. “What has happened to this young woman?”

“I’m afraid it’s an ongoing investigation, and I’m not in a position to divulge that sort of information at this time.” I listened as the training kicked in and thought about how I sounded like a recording and that maybe after the statement, I should have beeped. I had had this feeling before. “Are you going to be in the area long, Mr. Tuyen?”

He seemed preoccupied but answered with the same practiced smile. “Yes, the property I am looking at is near the town of Bailey, which is nearby?”

“Just up the way, off county road 192. What’s the name of the property?”

“Excuse me?”

I leaned on the bar and tried to get a read on him. “The property you’re thinking of buying, Mr. Tuyen.”

He pulled what looked to be a fax from one of the realty offices in Durant. I studied it. “The Red Fork Ranch—that’s a nice place.” I handed the paper back to him and noted it was dated yesterday. “Richard Whitehead moving?”

“I’m afraid I do not know; I only know that the property is for sale.” He returned the paper to his pocket, his license to his wallet, slipped a ten from it, and then stood and placed the bill-fold into his jacket. He was about five feet nine, tall for a Vietnamese, thick of wrist, and his movements were very precise.

"Mind if I ask where you’re staying?”

“The Hole in the Wall Motel, in room number three.” He picked up the empty bottle and set it on the inside of the bar. “I’m going to look at the property after I leave here. You’re not going to pull me over a mile up the road, are you?” He sighed. “Because if you are, I’ll just take the Breathalyzer test now.”

I inclined my head toward him. “I get the feeling I’ve offended you, Mr. Tuyen.” He didn’t say anything. “If I have, I certainly didn’t mean to. I’m sorry to say that we don’t get too many Vietnamese here in Wyoming, and you’ll have to excuse me if I find it odd that we should suddenly have two.” I continued to look at the man and was conflicted with my own mix of feelings. It was possible that I was bordering on racial profiling.

He smiled, just enough so that you weren’t sure if he’d done it at all. He took a card from his breast pocket and handed it to me. His head dropped, and he headed for the door. He looked back when I followed him and paused for a moment with his head still down. The smile was gone. He pushed the door open and disappeared.

Santiago stood and laid a five on the bar. “If you think of anything, here’s my card, give me a call?”

Phillip Maynard palmed the fin and the card. He called after us, but mostly to Cady. “Come on back anytime.”

The glass door bumped unevenly behind us. Tran Van Tuyen was driving west in the Land Rover, which looked like a passing emerald in a backdrop of overexposed sepia as it rolled down the Main Street of Powder Junction.

It was an absolutely gorgeous summer afternoon, and I took a deep breath like I always did when I remembered it was the pay-off time of the year; and felt like crap.

Cady pulled my arm, always reading the fine print of emotion when I was attempting to appear unruffled. She hugged me. “What’s the matter?”

"What’s WiFi?”

“Daddy . . .”

I took a deep breath and hitched a thumb in my gun belt. “I’m afraid I may have just engaged in a bit of profiling.” I watched as Tuyen faced straight ahead and the shiny green utility vehicle made the turn on 192 and then under the overpass of I-25. I squeezed her arm back. “You were popular in there.” I plucked a pen from my deputy and scribbled Tuyen’s license plate number on the envelope of the dead Vietnamese woman’s personal property packet. I read his card—Trung Sisters Distributing, with an address in Culver City and three phone numbers. I glanced at the Cheyenne Nation as I handed Saizarbitoria back his pen. “What do you think?”

Henry took a breath. “Yes, Walter, you are deeply prejudiced, and I have long been meaning to discuss this with you.”

I nodded and dug into the property envelope as they all watched me. “Only against Injuns.”

He nodded. “It is to be expected.”

I plucked out the plastic bag I wanted and handed the larger one back to Sancho, who was smiling and shaking his head at our banter. “You didn’t ask him about the Indians and the matches, boss.”

“No, I didn’t... Call those two numbers in to Ruby and see what she comes up with, then check the Hole in the Wall to see if he’s registered and alert the HPs just in case he decides to go somewhere.”

“Got it.” He disappeared into his unit and left us standing on Powder Junction’s old west boardwalk.

The Cheyenne Nation and my daughter watched as I searched the ziplock. She tugged at the short hair near the scar. “What are you doing, Daddy?”

I didn’t answer her but held up the key fob, still in the plastic, and pushed the button. The lights flashed, and the doors unlocked on the maroon Buick junker at the end of the row.

5

The car had been stolen from a not so small community in Southern California called Westminster, which was, according to the dispatcher at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, better known as Little Saigon. Ruby said she’d spoken with a charming young man who’d confirmed the not so grand theft auto. He said that the vehicle had been stolen from a recycler’s lot and that the former owner, Lee Nguyen, had stated that he’d donated the Buick to charity but that the organization must have decided the car wasn’t worth the trouble.

We’d done as much physical investigation of the automobile as our limited abilities would allow, so we loaded the rusty sedan onto a flatbed and shipped it off to Cheyenne. The fingerprints we’d lifted from the vehicle were probably female, judging from their size, or possibly from a child, and the tread deposits were from the immediate vicinity. There was nothing in the trunk, and the only thing in the glove compartment was a receipt for a new water pump that had been replaced in Nephi, Utah, only three days earlier.

I sent Henry and Cady back to Durant in my truck since Cady was looking a little tired and hitched a ride with Saizarbitoria over to the sheriff’s substation. We drove with the windows down, since the Suburban didn’t have air-conditioning.

* * *

Santiago spoke over the heated wind and the monster motor that got about eight miles to the gallon. “The bartender didn’t seem genuinely surprised about the Buick.”

We’d gone back in and questioned the guy again; he said he’d noticed the car there, but that he didn’t think it was a big deal. He said that even in the short time he’d been here, he’d noticed a lot of people got ripped and left their cars and trucks on the street rather than be harassed by us. I had asked him if a lot of them came from California, to which he’d responded that he hadn’t noticed the license plates. “Did he seem more nervous the first time we questioned him?”

The Basquo thought about it. “Yes, he did.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“The guy in the corner, Tuyen?”

“I think so, too.” We parked in front of the WYDOT annex where we had a small office. “I’ll call Ruby and see if she’s got anything on this Tuyen guy or heard anything from DCI. You check on the repair bill in Nephi.” I handed him the plastic bag which had the receipt in it.

He looked at me, a little worried. “I think they only have one phone down here.”

Powder Junction was going to take a little getting used to.

“Then I’ll call her on the radio.” I plucked the mic from the dash and stopped him as he started to close the door of the unit. “Hey? Call Maynard in about an hour and tell him that we need him to come and talk to us tomorrow morning here at the office.”

Santiago smiled. “What time?”

“Make it early.”

He continued to smile and adjusted his sunglasses like a movie star, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the gascon with a beret, feather, and sword. “Does this mean I’m being promoted to chief undersheriff of the Powder Junction Detachment of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department?”

“Acting CUSPJD of the ACSD. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? I’ll look into getting you a second phone line.” As Saizarbitoria went into the office, I keyed the mic and sang, “Oooooh Ruuuuuubeeee, don’t take your love to town. . . .”

Static. “Stop that. Over.”

“So, you have any news?”

Static. “I’ve got information on the guy from California.” “I’m all tin ears.”

Static. “Tran Van Tuyen became an American citizen in 1982, which is when he obtained an operator’s license. He doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket to his name.”

“Well, it was worth a try.”

Static. “You’re not going to start singing again, are you?”

I keyed the mic and ignored her. “Keep digging. He said he was here looking at some property, the Red Fork Ranch. Get a hold of Bee Bee and see if she’s ever heard of the guy, then call Ned Tanen at the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and see if he can come up with anything.”

Static. “Roger that.”

“Anything from DCI?”

Static. “They just faxed up the report.” There was a pause, and I listened to the silence of the radio. “They got an ID on the young woman.”

“Who was she?”

Static. “Her name was Ho Thi Paquet. Turns out she was a Vietnamese illegal who was picked up on prostitution charges in L.A. six weeks ago. She was scheduled for deportation, but I haven’t gotten any straight answers about what she might have been doing in Wyoming.”

“Ask Ned to talk to his friends in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and to throw that name around along with Lee Nguyen and Tran Van Tuyen; see if they can come up with something down in Little Saigon. Anything else?”

Static. “I’ll just let you read the report. When are you coming back up?”

“I’m going to run out and talk to the Dunnigan brothers, and then I’ll have Saizarbitoria give me a ride back. I figure I can let him have one more night with his wife before banishing him to Powder Junction. How’s Dog?”

Static. “He’s fine.”

“Thanks, Ruby.” I paused. “Cady and Henry make it back?”

Static. “Yes, and they’re planning on having dinner later.”

“They say where?”

Static. “I’m not allowed to say.”

Cahoots.

Static. “I have a Methodist women’s meeting at seven o’clock, so can you make it by six-thirty?”

I pulled my pocket watch from my jeans and flipped it around. “Easily.”

Static. “I’m holding you to that.”

* * *

After talking to Santiago, I commandeered our only vehicle and drove out toward the Rocking D and the ghost town of Bailey. The two kids who had been standing in the fenced-in yard were still there. It took me a minute to find the appropriate switches on the unfamiliar Chevrolet, but I tapped the siren and lights and watched as they jumped up and down, this time in counterpoint, both of them continuing to wave as I made the turn and headed west.

Small joys.

There had once been a coal mine near the town, but with the caprice of geology and with the disaster that had claimed the lives of seventeen miners just after the turn of the century, the last one, Bailey had bailed. All that was left of the settlement were a few buildings clinging to the trailing end of the Bighorn Mountain range and a cemetery.

I slowed to look at the abandoned buildings in the late afternoon sun, vertical structures attempting to join the horizontal landscape. There were only six—a few were wood frame and a few were stone, a couple had storefronts, and only one was worthy of a second story. The old grayed walkway was twisted, and the wood was pulled from its substructure, but the rough-cut two-by-eights were still there, waiting for the ringing sound of silent boots.

There was a union hall and a tipple at the end of the street, with an assortment of roofless shacks that had been built along the stone cliffs that rose at the end of the abandoned town; the weedy graveyard was on the far side. Seventeen markers had been placed where there were no bodies. The disaster had happened when the unfortunate miners had hit a gas pocket, and the resulting explosion had shaken the ground all the way back to Powder Junction almost twenty miles distant.

None of the bodies were recovered, and I always felt strange driving by the lonely little spot of abandoned civilization.

There weren’t many ghost towns left in the state; most had been packed away and carted off to amusement parks and tourist destinations along I-80. I guess it would be for the good of the county if we got rid of the fire hazard, but it would be sad to see the place go. One of the buildings had already partially burned when some kids had come up from Casper, had drunk too much beer chased with too many shots, and had decided to see how quickly hundred-year-old buildings would burn. We were lucky in that it was winter, and the snow had isolated the damage to one collapsed wall, one DUI, and three minors in possession.

I doubted many tourists came up 190 to the gravel Bailey Mountain Road, and those that did probably mistook what they saw for the real Hole in the Wall of Butch-Cassidy-and-the-Sundance-Kid fame. Through a side canyon, the road leaves the river and the formation of stunning red sandstone with a passage just large enough to allow the entry of a single wagon. A handful of men at this location could hold off an army of sheriffs, but they’d never had to, the Wild Bunch’s reputation doing their fighting for them.

Fiction writers would have you believe that this spectacular location was the Hole in the Wall of western fame; it was in reality a cinematic fabrication at best and an uninformed lie at worst. The actual Hole in the Wall was a good thirty miles south and barely noticeable as a slight break in the cliffs, allowing just enough slope for a man on horseback to pass. It had been described by my father to me as the least memorable historic spot in Wyoming.

It was now private land on the Willow Creek Ranch, and the Ferg had been pestering me for years about getting him on the place to do a little fishing at the rustler’s settlement, where Buffalo Creek tumbled out of the canyon and into a perfect triangular pasture. The dozen or so log cabins that Butch, Sundance, and the Wild Bunch had used were all gone, the last having been hauled over to Cody and the Buffalo Bill Museum.

I continued on my way and drove past the Bailey public school, which was a one-room schoolhouse, a last bastion of public education with, at last count, two students. It troubled me to think about the school closing, the cabins disassembled, and the ghost towns being flattened; it reminded me that the majority of my life had passed. I had started my education in a school very much like the one here and had spent my childhood in a town a lot like Bailey would have been if there had not been the mining disaster.

I thought about Cady as I drove; about Michael, who was due to arrive imminently; about Vic; then about the upcoming election in November and the debate on Friday.

I tried to stop thinking and propped my hat over the big eyelet hook that was anchored on the dash. We had a lot of DUIs in Powder Junction, and I guess Double Tough had improvised this way to secure drunken drivers to the vehicle.

The road was rough—it obviously hadn’t been graded since early spring—and the ruts and bumps kept me from getting the twenty-five-year-old unit above thirty. The clouds of dust obscured my view to the rear as I took a right and continued up through the lodgepole pines and scattered cottonwoods that grew along the draws. It was as if life had chosen to run away and hide in the ragged crevices of the harsh country and forgotten to come back out.

I trailed along a small ravine where swallows cartwheeled in the thermals of the russet cliffs, and glanced over the edge to where the creek still carried the snowmelt of the Bighorn Mountains. It looked like pretty good fishing on the Dunnigan place, but I’d also noted the NO HUNTING signs, and figured that the fish, like everything else, were something the brothers didn’t give away.

They were both handsome old bachelors; I figured that they hadn’t married because they were too tightfisted to consider a wife. To hear Lucian tell it, their father, Sean Dunnigan, had been like that as well, except that back in the dirty thirties he had had no choice but to marry Eileen if he wanted to eat—he was that broke. Hence Den and James.

Eileen had been known to play her violin from the porch of the ranch house, a lone and plying sound that had echoed from the canyon. She’d never grown used to the isolation of the place, had grown senile on the ranch, and had died in the late seventies, rapidly followed by Sean, who had evidently grown used to the music of the only woman he’d known.

The brothers were good hands and tough old boys, tough enough to outlast all their neighbors, and they had slowly bought up the surrounding land and the water and mineral rights until the Dunnigans pretty much owned the Beaver Creek Draw.

James was the eldest and had inherited the ranch, even though he’d been kicked in the head by a cantankerous mare when he was a teenager and wasn’t “quite right,” as the locals had put it.

Den had known that James would inherit, had been pissed off at this rule of succession, but had accepted his lot and consequently taken a job in corrections up in Deer Lodge, Montana. He had even been engaged to a woman, but when the engagement entered its second decade she took exception. Den had returned at his father’s request when it became clear that James could not run the ranch by himself and that Sean had gotten too old to be much of a help.

My professional interaction with the Dunnigans was mostly with Den. There had been an incident where he had almost killed another rancher with a shovel in an altercation over water rights and another where he’d broken a bottle off on the bar in town and threatened to perform an amateur tracheotomy on a rodeo cowboy, but other than that, we’d been limited to the instances when Den would call in a lost James. He did this on a periodic basis. A couple of years earlier, during hunting season and an early snow, we’d responded, along with the highway patrol and the county search and rescue, only to find James seated at the Hole in the Wall Bar, adamant that he had phoned his mother and explained that he was safe and spending the night in town.

The problem was that his mother had been dead for a quarter of a century.

* * *

I rolled across the cattle guard and parked beside a turquoise and white ’76 Ford Highboy; the motor was running, but nobody was in it. The ranch house was simple, sided horizontally with a low-slung roof, and there was a metal shop nearby that was four times the size of the house.

By the time I got to the sidewalk, Den was coming out the front door. His eyes widened beyond his usual squint and then settled into a general dissatisfaction at seeing me. He had on a clean, white straw hat, hard like plastic, with a black, braided horsehair band, and was dressed in a freshly pressed shirt and creased jeans that cut the air as he walked. There was a red and white cotton bandana at his neck, and he’d even polished his boots. “I guess I need to turn off my goddamned truck.”

I stopped at the single step leading into the house. “Sorry, Den, but I need to speak with you and James.”

He stood there for another moment looking at me and then hobbled past on bowlegs, which approached a full circle, to the parking area where he reached into the side window of the old Ford and shut off the motor. A rifle rack cradling a beaten .30-30 Winchester showed through the rear window.

Den came back down the poured concrete walk, and I could smell the beer on his breath as he scuffled past. I followed him into the house without a word or invitation.

The tawny light of early evening was spreading across the Powder River landscape, and it settled a comfortable glow inside the kitchen. James was seated at a Formica table with a shot glass and a bottle of Bryer’s Blackberry Brandy, which I assumed was dinner. There was an empty bottle of Busch with more than a few bottle caps pinched together and scattered across the table where I assumed Den must have been sitting before my arrival. The walls were paneled in knotty pine, and all the appliances were what they had called golden harvest in the fifties. I was sure that nothing in the kitchen had been changed since their mother had died.

The heat was oppressive, even with the industrial-type box fan that was propped in one of the windows. The older of the two brothers stood when I entered, wiping his palms on his jeans and sticking out his hand. He seemed embarrassed that I’d found him drinking in his own home. “Hello, Walt. Would you like some coffee? Mother makes it in the morning for us.”

I withheld comment. "No, thanks. Mind if I sit down, James?” He pulled out a chair for me and glanced at his brother, who stood by the door with his arms folded and his hat still on. “I suppose you know why I’m here?”

James sat back down and laid an arm along the table. “It’s about that girl we found?”

“Yep.”

He nodded and then trapped his lips between his teeth. “About the bar?”

“Yep.”

“We did see her there.”

I took my hat off and set it on the orange vinyl seat of the chair beside me. “That’s what I understand.”

James looked at the surface of the table. “Well, we...”

“We don’t have to tell you a God-damned thing. We didn’t do nothin’ to that girl.”

I turned toward Den, but his eyes were fixed on the linoleum. “I’m not aware of anyone having said you did.”

He folded his arms a little tighter and continued to look at the floor. “But that’s why you’re here, ain’t it?”

“There are some questions I wanted to ask you and your brother.” I waited a moment. “Why don’t you have a seat, and we’ll talk.” He sat on a fold-out stool by the refrigerator. I turned back to James. “You want to tell me about the bar?”

It took him a while to speak, and he didn’t answer my question but instead gestured toward the bottle on the table. “Would you like a little, Walt? I’ll git you a clean glass.”

“No, thank you.” I waited and started getting the feeling that there might be something more to this than I had at first anticipated.

James licked his lips and poured himself another shot of the sugary liquor. “It was hot on Friday, so we took a little break about one or two in the afternoon. You know, duck in for a cool one.” I noticed his hands were shaking as he put the bottle back down. “She was in there, sittin’ at the end of the bar. So, Den and I sat a couple’a stools away.” He looked up and smiled sadly. “She was a good-lookin’ young woman, and she kept glancin’ over at us.” His eyes turned to the full shot glass. “We’re just a couple of old hands, Walt. We’re not used to a good-lookin’ young woman payin’ us much attention.”

“You talk to her?”

Den interrupted. “Hell, we thought she was a Jap. She didn’t speak no English.”

I waited, and James started again. “We tried to buy her a couple of drinks, but she wouldn’t take ’em. After a while she got up and waved a little wave at us and left.”

“Bartender can tell you that.”

I looked at Den. “Then what?” He clammed up, sullen again, but James cleared his throat, and I turned back to watch him down his shot. It seemed to me his face was redder than it ought to have been.

“We went out and started to get in the truck, and she was standin’ by her car like she was waitin’ for us.”

Den interrupted again. “She was damn well waitin’ for us.”

I tried to keep the conversation moving. “Then what?”

James cleared his throat again and looked as if all the blood in his body was rising in his face. “She needed gas money....” His face continued to grow redder, and if I hadn’t known any better, I’d have said that both of the Dunnigan brothers were about to implode of embarrassment. “And she . . . she wanted to couple with us.”

I sat there for a moment to make sure I’d heard what I heard. “I thought you said she didn’t speak any English?”

James seemed to be on the edge of a cardiac arrest. “She didn’t. She didn’t, but...”

“Then how could you tell that?”

Den yanked off his straw hat and threw it against the kitchen cabinets. “She grabbed James’s crank and pointed toward the gas cap. That good enough for you, God-damnit!?”

* * *

I stopped at the top of the office stairs and stood there glancing around the reception area and listened to the continuing ring of the phone. It was late, but the lights were all on and Ruby’s purse sat in her chair along with her sweater.

I stumbled forward and ran to get the phone, but as I reached for it, it stopped. I stared at the red light that had stopped blinking but stayed steady; someone had gotten it, someone in the building.

Dog was gone, too. I walked down the hallway and past my darkened office where I looked for any Post-its on the door jamb—Post-its were our prose form of communication—but there was only one and it was from Cady. I held the yellow square up to the light and read, “Daddy, we’re at the Winchester—come join us.” Ruby had marked the time at 6:17 P.M. Four hours ago.

There was a noise from the back of the building, so I continued to the end of the hall where I could see the lights on in the holding cells and the kitchenette.

I stopped in the doorway and watched as Ruby stepped away from the phone on the adjacent wall and sat down on one of our metal folding chairs to pet Dog and resume what looked like knitting.

I leaned against the wall and spoke. “Ruby?” She didn’t hear me, even though Dog looked up and wagged. “Ruby! ”

She glanced up and looked stern. “I missed my Methodist women’s meeting.” Her eyes shifted to the holding cell, and I leaned around the corner for a peek at our only inmate.

He was eating with his fingers, and there was a carefully stacked pile of potpie containers near the door of the cell. He didn’t look up when I stepped around the wall to get a better look at him. His hair hung down around his face and to his knees, but he had on the sweatpants I’d provided, and the moccasins. “I guess he woke up.”

“And he was hungry.”

I glanced at the assembled cartons at the big Indian’s feet. “How many has he eaten?”

“Eight, at last count. That, and three Diet Cokes.”

“I guess his throat wasn’t hurt that bad.” He continued chewing as I crossed to stand by Ruby’s chair. “He say anything?”

“No.”

“How did you know he was hungry?”

She looked up at me. “I made the assumption that since he had been living in a culvert under Lone Bear Road...”

The giant deftly placed the empty tubs on the top of the others but didn’t move from the bunk. “Does that mean he wants another?”

“It has eight times now.”

I dug into the minifreezer and pulled out the last of our pot-pies, removing it from the box and tossing it into the microwave. I punched the requisite buttons I’d memorized from my own gracious dining and turned to stand by my dispatcher. “Why are you still here?” I folded my arms. “You knew I was coming back.”

She picked up her knitting and ignored my question.

I looked into the holding cell—the big Indian still hadn’t moved. “Where’s Lucian?”

“He decided to go home.” The microwave dinged, and I pulled out the freeze-du-jour, quickly resting it on the counter and out of my burning fingers.

“Let it cool or he eats it still cooking.”

I nodded, pulled a plastic spork from the drawer, and rested it on the rim of the potpie. “DCI’s report?”

“On your desk.” She continued knitting.

I turned and started back to my office to retrieve the report. I held my daughter’s Post-it so that Ruby could see it. “She go home?”

“That was her on the phone just as you came in, and in answer to your question, she’s in bed, where all sane people should be.”

I stopped. “Well, since you’re answering questions, do you mind answering why it is you’re still here?”

She stopped knitting and looked back at me. “Would you like to see why?” She stood and stuffed the needles and yarn into her oversized canvas bag. “Would you like me to show you why I’m still here?”

I recognized a loaded question when I heard one but just nodded my head and gave her the strange look I gave crazy people that asked the sheriff those kinds of questions. She calmly walked past me and down the hall out of view. Dog had started after her but stopped when he reached the doorway. I stooped down and ruffled the fur behind his ears. “What?”

Ruby had turned to look back at me. “Come here.”

I shrugged and walked over to her, the three of us standing there as Ruby listened for something. After a moment, I asked again. “What?”

She held up an index finger. “Just a minute.”

We all listened, but the only thing I could hear was the air-conditioning of the building and the hum of Ruby’s computer on the reception desk. “What?”

There was a sudden thunder of sound and impact, and I would’ve sworn a truck had hit the building. I actually stuck a hand out to the wall to steady myself. Not much time went by before the noise and vibration were repeated, and I would’ve sworn that the truck had backed up and taken another run at the building. “What the...!”

The roar and impact seemed to come from the holding cell, and I stumbled over a barking Dog as I rushed back into the room and watched as the big Indian launched himself into the bars with all his considerable force and with a sound I’d never heard come from anything human.

A private contractor had set the bars back in the fifties, when Lucian had inherited the old Carnegie building from the Absaroka County Library after they’d moved a block away. I hadn’t thought about the quality of the job in more than a quarter of a century, but it was foremost on my mind as I watched the monster back up to the opposite wall of the cell and prepare for another charge.

"Hey!”

I subconsciously backed against the counter, knocking the potpie into the sink, and watched as about 350 pounds of bull muscle slammed against the bars.

I could’ve sworn they moved.

"Hey!” I stepped forward, placed my hand on my sidearm, and thought about how bad it was going to hurt if he and the bars landed on me. “Hey!”

The giant had just started backing up for another run when he heard me and noticed that I was standing there only six feet away. His head rose, and I have to admit that it was a strange feeling, having someone look down on me. His hair had parted a little, and I could see one eye beneath the scar tissue as his hands came forward and rested lightly on the bars. He wore a silver ring with what looked like alternating coral and turquoise wolves running around it, and I was pretty sure I could’ve gotten it over my big toe.

I put my own hands up to show I didn’t mean any harm, even if I had been capable, and stood there looking into that one eye. “It’s okay. It’s okay... I’m not going anywhere.”

He stood there for a moment and then slowly lowered himself back to a sitting position on the bunk. He was breathing heavily from the exertion of trying to tear the jail down, and I stood there listening to the wheezing of his breath from behind the bandages at his throat.

After a moment, Dog stopped barking, and I noticed that he and Ruby were peering around the doorway. Some backup. I pulled the palm of my hand across my face and looked at her, still a little breathless myself. “You couldn’t have just told me?”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

He shook his head. “No, it is classified.”

Babysan Quang Sang had never seen a hamburger before and poked with a finger to lift the bun as if it were booby-trapped; it was water boo, or water buffalo, and the local viande du jour. He turned and looked at Henry, who picked up his own hamburger and took a bite. A few seconds later the Montagnard picked up his own sandwich and took a bite, chewing quietly and watching Henry for more pointers. “Il ne gout pas comme le jambon.”

Henry laughed. “He says that it does not taste like ham.”

We watched Babysan try to figure out the fries, and I studied the tall Indian who would have been more at home scalping white men on a sunny afternoon along the Little Big Horn River. “I’m going to say something I never thought I would.”

He picked a fry up from Babysan’s plate, dipped it in the ketchup, and stuck it in his mouth as an object lesson. He turned back and leaned in close. “What?”

Babysan ate part of a fry and then dropped the remainder back on his plate. It was possible that the Vietnamese had had enough of all things French. “I envy you.” The exhale of his laugh was as if I’d punched him, and he sat there only inches away with a look a shade past indescribable. “I envy the clarity of what you’re doing.”

He laughed again and thought about it. The pause was so long you could’ve said the pledge of allegiance in it, but for the Northern Cheyenne, it was nothing. “What, exactly, are you doing here?”

I took a long pause of my own. “Not a lot. I got sent up from BHQ to investigate a drug overdose, but nobody’s talking.” I looked into a set of eyes that saw the world the way it really was and felt the shame of my duty. I thought about what I was doing and whether it was making any difference. “This place is such a mess....”

Henry took another fry from Babysan. “That may be the understatement of the century.”

My next words were out before the thought was fully formed. “Take me with you to Khe Sanh.”

He looked back at me and laughed, but he realized that I was serious and so became very serious in turn. “Are you insane? Everybody, including every Marine in Vietnam, the general staff, and LBJ are trying to get out of there, and you want to go in?”

“Yep.”

He looked around as if the guys in the white jackets with butterfly nets might be hovering nearby. He was silent and then lowered his head as if I hadn’t said what I’d said, his eyes just visible below his boonie hat. “Walt, you can get killed up there.”

“Better there than dying of boredom here.”

"Walter...”

“Look, I’ve got a three-day at China Beach, and that is not where I intend to be.”

* * *

I read the report with my hand on my chin.

She had been unconscious within seconds, although her heart had probably continued to beat for another fifteen to twenty minutes. As was assumed, the manual strangulation applied by the forearm indicated an assailant much stronger than the victim.

There were small linear abrasions on the neck, but these had been caused by the decedent’s fingernails as she had attempted to dislodge the arm around her throat. The flesh under her nails had been tested and, as I’d surmised, it had turned out to be her own.

Fracture of the hyoid bone and other cartilage was evident, as was hemorrhaging of the thyroid gland in front of the larynx. I read the thing again, from the beginning, and looked up at the man lying in the cell.

It didn’t make sense. Why would a man this size, and with this much strength, use his forearm in a chokehold strangulation when he could’ve practically snapped the tiny woman’s neck with a thumb and forefinger?

The giant had finished the last potpie hours earlier, had carefully replaced the unused spork, and put the empty plastic tray in the others, slipping it forward, halfway through the bars. He was dead asleep now, and his whispery snores provided a steady beat to the conversation Sancho and I were having.

Saizarbitoria had spent a night at home with his wife while I stayed on duty for both Durant and Powder Junction. He’d called the Hole in the Wall Motel and had ascertained that Tran Van Tuyen was actually staying there through Wednesday. He sipped his coffee and then added more sugar from the container on the counter, just like Vic. I sipped my own coffee and pulled the sleeping bag a little closer to the wall where I’d eased my aching back. I yawned and looked at my well-rested deputy. “What about the Veterans Administration?”

He retested his coffee and found it to his liking; he came over and sat on the chair that Ruby had occupied last night. “The administrative staffs don’t work much on Sunday nights, so we might want to call around again.” I nodded and continued to sip my coffee. “But I can tell you one thing...”

"What?”

He gestured with his mug toward the stacked pie pans at the bars with the lone utensil handle pointed out. “He’s been inside.”

“How so?”

“We used to have them get rid of their dinnerware in just that fashion in the extreme-risk unit of the high security ward.”

The Basquo had done two years in Rawlins and knew more about corrections than I ever wanted to. “He look familiar?”

“No, and it’s not as if he’s somebody you’re likely to forget.” The young man tipped his hat back and stroked his musketeer goatee. “If I was guessing, I’d say federal.”

“The hospital was going to send his prints down to DCI. Check it.”

“I will.”

I sipped my coffee and watched the big Indian sleep. “You ever have anybody respond the way I described he did when we left him alone?”

He nodded. “Once or twice.”

“What’d you do with them?”

“Straight to Evanston.”

The state psychiatric hospital. “Check that, too.”

“Okay.”

“We’re going to have to keep somebody in here at all times.” I turned and looked at him. “Otherwise, I don’t think our jail will be able to take it.” He got up and started out. “Vic or Ruby make it in yet?”

He called back from the hall. “Nope.”

I yelled after him as I glanced in the cell. “Call and tell them to pick up more potpies.”

6

“That is one Fucking Big Indian.”

She reaffirmed what FBI really stood for.

Vic was back from her sabbatical in Douglas, but it hadn’t broadened her vocabulary. She sipped her coffee and looked at me; I was trying to decide what all I needed to take with me to Powder Junction, since that appeared to be where I was going to be spending my day. Her feet were propped up on my desk where she had put the shooting trophy she’d won over the weekend.

“You out-quick-drew the entire Wyoming Sheriff’s Association?”

“Yeah, including that ten-gallon ass-hat Sandy Sandberg and that butt-cheek Joe Ganns.”

Sandy was the sheriff over in neighboring Campbell County, and Joe Ganns was the controversial brand inspector who was reputed to be the fastest gun in the West. “Oh, I bet that made you popular.”

My diminutive deputy from Philadelphia shrugged, and I tried not to notice the muscles of her bare arms in her sleeveless uniform. “Kinda frosted his flakes, but shit, Walt, what is he, a hundred and three?”

It was quiet in the room as I tossed the shooting bag on my seat and piled a couple of hand radios in along with two large bottles of water, the reports from Illinois, and my thermos, a mottled green monstrosity made by Aladdin with a copper pipe handle and worn sticker that read DRINKING FUEL. She finally spoke again. “So, you get to go play in Powder Junction, and I get to talk to all the VAs on the high plains?”

“You wanna trade jobs?”

She thought about it. “No.”

“Call Sheridan first; they’ve got a psychiatric unit in ward five. See if they ever had this guy.”

She made a face, and then the eyes balanced on me like a knife. “How do you know where the psychiatric unit is in Sheridan?”

I looked at the collection in the duffel. “I visited with a fellow over there back in ’72; Quincy Morton, the PTSD coordinator.”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder?”

“Yep.”

She studied me. “What were you doing, having flashbacks?”

I sighed and zipped up the shooting bag. “It was different back then; nobody wanted to discuss that stuff, so I’d go over to the VA once a month and drink a beer and talk with Quincy at closing time on Friday afternoons. It helped.”

“Nineteen seventy-two?”

“Yep.”

She continued to study me. “That’s when you came back, got married, and started with the Sheriff’s Department?”

“Yep.”

“I got a question.” It was pretty obvious where she was headed. “You got out in ’70, but you didn’t show back up here until ’72.” I waited. “What’d you do for the two years in between?”

I threw the strap of the duffel over my shoulder, walked to the doorway, and looked down at her. “Who can speak broader than that has no house to put his head in?”

The eyebrow arched in its trademark position. “What the hell is that from?”

“Timon of Athens, Varro’s Second Servant.”

She nodded. “Oh, how could I forget.” She reached over and slipped a forefinger in the pocket of my jeans. “You really are a dark horse.” She pulled, and I shifted my weight toward her. She looked up at me, the tarnished gold pupils softly feathered by the long dark lashes. “So, you gonna have any free time when my brother gets here and reinstitutes the courting ritual with your daughter?”

“I’m hoping.”

The carnivore smile returned. “Maybe we could double date.”

I took a moment to take in all that she was giving me, thinking about that night in Philadelphia, thinking about the parts of her I hadn’t seen since then. There were about a half-million things I wanted to say, starting with the part about when I looked at her or thought about her, about that night; that I felt like something inside of me took flight and I wasn’t sure if I’d come back to earth yet. Then I thought about the years between us, how they would never go away. How the distance would only grow greater, and how even if everything went right, there were so many ways it could still go wrong.

Her gaze flicked across my face, and it was like my thoughts were leaking out of me and into those iridescent Mediterranean eyes. “What?”

I tried to breathe and then looked at the worn marble floor; it was easier. “Look...”

“No.” She sat there for a moment and then stood, both of us aware that her finger was still in my pocket. She was close now and was standing next to my arm and slightly behind me where I could feel her breath on my shoulder. “I’m not looking for hearth and home.”

“Yep.”

It was silent in the room, but I could still hear Ruby typing at the receptionist’s desk in the front. “You are so fucked up, and you’re carrying so much shit around...” I felt her chin on my tricep. “But I just like being around you, okay?”

“Yep.”

Her breathing continued on my arm, and even that felt good. “That’s all I need.” I nodded and didn’t say yep again, because I knew she’d hit me. After another moment, she pulled away, and I felt the finger leave my pocket with one last tug. “What about Henry? Does he have any leads in the big case?”

I nodded and tried to get my mouth to work in complete sentences. “There might be a family connection with Brandon White Buffalo.”

Her voice continued to come from behind me. “Another FBI.”

“Henry’s working out with Cady this morning, and then he said he’d run up to the Rez and try to track Brandon down.” I adjusted the bag, leaned against the doorway, and played with the hole in my door where I’d yet to replace the knob—still not meeting her eyes. “You’ve got Frymire back there Indian-sitting, but I don’t think you’re going to get anything else out of him or Double Tough, so call the Ferg again and tell him to get his butt in here.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.” She saluted. “What about the guy in the Land Rover, Tran Van Tuyen?”

I looked at her and tried to think about it; about anything else. “I might go by the Hole in the Wall and check him out.”

“You want me to come down to PJ later?”

I thought about that, too. “Somebody’s got to work the rest of the county.”

She nodded. “I can take your daughter to lunch.” She smiled, her eyes igniting again, and I thought about Philadelphia. “We can talk about your wartime indiscretions.”

“Uh huh.” I walked ahead of her, but she followed close behind me into the hallway.

“Ol’ love-’em-and-leave-’em Longmire...” She was still talking as we got to Ruby’s desk. “Suckee-fuckee, fi-dollah . . .”

Fortunately, Ruby was fussing with the computer and not paying any attention to us. She was going through the gray-mail, trashing unwanted messages, of which we’d had a rash last night. I decided to quickly take the conversation in another direction. “Are we still getting all that gobbledygook?”

“Yes.” She continued to hold the delete button down, and I watched as the words marched up the screen and disappeared. “Seventy-two since yesterday.”

“Any idea where they’re coming from?” She moved the mouse, and I watched as she clicked it a few times and gestured for me to have a look. The setting read Absaroka County School District: BPS. “I guess the school board is out to get me before the debate.”

She ignored me and looked at one of the messages. “It’s just a random mess; they started late last night and stopped early this morning.”

Vic leaned in, and I could smell her shampoo. “So it’s not automated.”

“No.”

I looked up at the wall clock and figured I’d better get going if I was going to make it to Powder Junction for our meet with the bartender. “Any word from Bee Bee over at Durant Realty or Ned in L.A.?”

Ruby’s big blues looked up at me in irritation. “It’s a quarter till eight.”

I glanced at the two of them and nodded. “Right.”

“Which means it’s a quarter till seven on the coast.”

I was about halfway down the stairs when Vic called after me in a singsong voice. “You come back soon soldier-boy, me so horneeeeeeee...!”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

“Fifty dollars?!”

Hollywood Hoang stood there on the tarmac in the late afternoon under a pan-fried, tropical sun as the big Kingbee warmed up. He was waiting for his money with his arms folded over his powder-blue flight suit. We were shouting at the top, bottom, and middle of our lungs even though our faces were only about six inches apart. “He with her all night. I like you, Lieutenant, and that why you get half discount rate!”

I looked past Hoang to where Henry was carrying Babysan Quang Sang into the cargo hold. “Fifty dollars is the discount?!”

He smiled. “It extra for girls to sleep with Montagnard tribesmen, so that remove discount! I happy to take greenbacks or MPC; no dong.”

I pulled out my wallet and gave him the five tens. “She sure didn’t seem to mind last night....”

“She world-class entertainer!” He slapped me on the shoulder and drew me toward the slow-moving rotors as he turned to where Baranski stood on the flight line. The inspector from CID and Mendoza had told me that this particular idea was a bad one but had relented when I’d remained obstinate. Baranski motioned for Hoang and gave him a messenger satchel. He waved one last time as the pilot followed me and we climbed in the cargo hold of the helicopter, the slight Vietnamese man carefully slipping the satchel behind the copilot seat.

It was dark in the Kingbee even with the cargo doors open. I pushed my steel pot further down on my head and waited for my eyes to adjust. There wasn’t much room with all the supplies that were going into Khe Sanh, so the flight personnel consisted of the Bear, Babysan Quang Sang, two navy corpsmen, and me. I pulled at my flak vest, stiff from nonuse, and felt it constricting my chest as the big machine began to rise; at least I hoped it was the flak jacket.

By chance, it was the same helicopter I’d flown in on, the one with the dead. I wasn’t sure if Hollywood Hoang had been the pilot, but we’d had a conversation about hauling them. He said that once the ma, or spirits of the dead, had ridden with you, they were always there, riding along. Flamboyant and dramatic, the flight crews were a superstitious lot who had tapped into that resonance, and they knew death, like suicide, was catching.

Babysan was propped up asleep against the bulkhead, with a cargo net partially wrapped around him and secured with some nylon webbing, just in case we were to make any unexpected turns. Henry was checking the magazines on his assortment of weaponry and looked over to see how I was doing. It was going to be a long flight, and he knew about my stomach’s stance on helicopters.

“How are you feeling?”

I nodded but kept my head straight, where I wouldn’t see the passing countryside as we sped north at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, willing it to grow darker so that I wouldn’t be able to see anything.

“Do not puke in here.”

“I won’t.”

“The one thing you must do...”

“Yep?”

“When this thing lands, you run like hell.”

I glanced at him but quickly averted my eyes so that I wouldn’t see any of the smoke from the lower hells we were flying over—the whispering gray smoke from the burned rice paddies of strike-free zones, the alabaster of the phosphorus smoke, and the smudged black smoke and gasoline smell of the napalm. I hoped I would see the purple landing zone smoke that would mean the ride was over.

The medics always offered you Dexies when you went out at night. I never took them, because I was so wired I was afraid that with the extra stimulant I’d fry my wiring and go stiff. I tried to hand the pills to the Bear, but he just shook his head and smiled, his teeth glowing like river stones in the gloom of the cargo hold. “I do not need them; you?”

I leaned over and felt his shoulder against mine. “Right now, you couldn’t pull a needle out of my ass with a tractor.”

He laughed, and as we flew, the light died.

No grunt ever called Khe Sanh the western anchor of our defense, but a lot of other people did. The heroic image of besieged Marines holding out against unimaginable odds had captured the imagination of the public, enough so that Lyndon Johnson called in the boys of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sign a statement to “encourage public reassurance” that Khe Sanh would be held at all costs.

Khe Sanh was a group grope for the high command.

Within the rolling hills, astride an old French-built road that ran from the Vietnamese coast to the Mekong Delta’s Laotian market towns, Khe Sanh began as a Special Forces encampment built to recruit and train local tribesmen. Now, it was an uneasy fort with U.S. intelligence reports stating that four North Vietnamese infantry divisions, two artillery regiments, and assorted armored units were converging on that wide spot on Route 9.

It was Westmoreland’s capstone.

It was déjà vu and Dien Bien Phu all over again.

It was Masada.

I wasn’t sure what I thought I was going to do once I got there, but I figured something would turn up. More than eight thousand personnel were there, more than three times the size of my hometown, and I guess they had caught my attention, too. They were Marines in trouble, and I didn’t want to have had the chance to go and then have to say that I didn’t. I couldn’t say that my head was the clearest it’d ever been, but sitting at Tan Son Nhut and enjoying the sunsets was driving me crazy, and I knew I had to get out.

I studied the canvas webbing of the jump seat and then the black plastic surface of the M16A1 that seemed to absorb what light there was. In basic, they’d given us honest-to-God comic books to tell us how to operate and maintain the rifle—it made the M16 seem even more like a toy. There was even a shapely cartoon blonde who told you important things like you should never close the upper and lower receivers with the selector lever in the auto position, or how to apply LSA, which stood for Lube oil, Semifluid, Automatic weapons. I thought of another blonde, a night at the Absaroka County Fair and Rodeo, about a slow dance that had ended with a soft kiss. That was the thought I settled on for the remainder of the flight, until the buffet of air currents reminded me what I was doing and where I was going.

I glanced over at the navy corpsman and read his name patch, MORTON. When I glanced at his face, he was looking at me. “Quincy Morton, Detroit, Michigan.”

I took the hand. “Walt Longmire, Durant, Wyoming.”

He smiled. “The crazy Indian a friend of yours?”

“Yep.”

He nodded his head. “He’s got that shit right; when this thing touches Mother Earth, it’s di di mau, di di mother-fuckin’ mau.”

I nodded as we flew over the tortured ground and thought about a raw recruit that had asked about foxholes and remembered a sunny sergeant in basic telling us that Marines didn’t dig.

But they had at Khe Sanh.

As we approached in zero-zero, you could see that the fortifications were slapped together in a haphazard manner, with sandbags and tanglefoot wire stretching to the dusty, smoky hillsides and the mist of the night. The landing zone, only a short distance ahead, had circuitous roads and makeshift buildings; it looked like we were landing in a Southeast Asian junkyard.

The ground was shaking, the hills were shaking, and the air was shaking, which meant the chopper was shaking. I could see Henry leaning over the piles of cargo, holding on to a handset and screaming into it as Babysan Quang Sang’s lips puckered and his eyes focused into the darkness from under his pith helmet. The Bear fell back against the quilted bulkhead, turned his face to me, and smiled a stiff smile.

I shifted in the seat. “What?”

He took a breath and then expulsed the words as if he were eager to rid them from his body. “We are backed up. They are bringing in reinforcements, so we have been shuttled off to the garrison.”

“Where’s that?”

“Khesanville.” His eyes widened. “Outside the wire.” I nodded my head, or I thought I did. He leaned in again, and his voice was the most intense I’d ever heard. “Listen to me, when this thing hits the ground, you run. You run and you do not stop for anything, do you hear me?” This time I was sure I nodded. “They are going to be targeting this chopper like a tin bear in a shooting gallery, so you run like you have never run before. Run for the slit trenches, run for the sandbags, but make sure you run till you get to something far from this helicopter.”

“Di di mau?”

The Bear smiled, and Corpsman Morton gave me the thumbs-up.

After a moment, Henry leaned back and pulled the CAR-16 closer to his chest, along with the claymore with the detonating device. He pulled out the horse-head amulet and ran his thumb across the smooth surface of the bone.

I dropped the clip on my own Colt rifle and checked the safety. “What about the supplies?”

It took him a moment to respond and when he did, he wasn’t smiling. “We are not in the supplies business anymore.”

* * *

I poured him a cup from my thermos and looked around. There might’ve been more depressing places than the sheriff’s substation in Powder Junction, but I couldn’t think of any.

I’d been here back in the dark ages, when I’d first made the grade with Lucian. The standard used to be a trial period of duty in PJ before being transferred to Durant and the Sheriff’s Department proper. Santiago Saizarbitoria had sidestepped the process, and it appeared that he now realized how lucky he’d been. There was a metal desk, three chairs, a filing cabinet, a plastic clock, one phone, a collection of quad sheets encompassing the entirety of the county, an NOAA radio, and that was about it.

I poured myself a cup and sat in the chair in front of the desk, which allowed Sancho to sit in the command chair. He sipped his coffee but seemed dissatisfied. “Got any sugar?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Any objections if I go over to the mercantile and get some more supplies for the duration?”

“Nope.” I felt like I should be making some effort, so I tried to continue the conversation. “Did I tell you about James Dunnigan?”

“What about him?”

“He thinks his mother makes coffee for him in the mornings. ”

Sancho nodded, a little puzzled. “That’s nice.”

“She’s been dead for almost thirty years.” I sipped from my chrome cap-cup. “Den told me that he bought one of those coffeemakers with a timer and that he explains it to James every day, but every morning James thinks his dead mother makes the coffee.”

A moment passed. “You think he’s dangerous?”

I smiled at the Basquo; he was so serious. “No, I was just making conversation.”

“Oh.” He set his mug on the desk and leaned in. “After Maynard, we go over to the Hole in the Wall Motel and check out Tran Van Tuyen?”

“Yep.”

“I just got the skinny on the Utah receipt. I think you’re going to find this interesting.” I glanced up at the clock and figured we had an easy five minutes for more conversation before the bartender arrived, if he got here on time. “There’s no telephone number on the receipt, so I called up the Juab County Sheriff’s Department, faxed a copy, and got a deputy to run over there and see what she can find out. She called me back and reported that it’s not actually a repair shop, but more of a private junkyard alongside the highway. She said when she got there and found the mobile home in this maze of junk, after being chased around the place by assorted dogs, goats, and a mule ...”

“Okay.”

“... there’s a guy standing outside the trailer, and a woman throwing what appears to be all his stuff at him. The deputy asked him what was going on, and he said that he doesn’t know, that she’s just crazy. The deputy showed him the fax of the receipt, and he said he’d never seen it before. Now, along with most of this guy’s worldly possessions that have come flying out the door was a checkbook, which the deputy picked up and casually compared with the handwriting on the receipt. Dead match. She showed it to the guy as they’re dodging the next salvo, and he admitted that he might just remember the girl. He described our victim and said she rolled up to his gate with a busted water pump and that he fixed it and sent her on her way.

“Sounds plausible.”

“Now, I’d told the deputy about the quarters and that the girl probably didn’t have much money, so she asked him how the Vietnamese woman paid for the repair...”

“She had sex with him.”

The Basquo stopped and looked at me. “How did you know?”

“She used the same morally casual bartering system with the Dunnigan brothers.”

He studied me for a second more. “Well, that certainly establishes a pattern.”

There was the sound of a motorcycle and a knock at the glass pane, and Santiago got up to get it. He opened the door, Phillip Maynard came in, and Saizarbitoria gestured toward the empty seat to my left. The bartender sat, and he looked like he needed it. He looked like he had been up all night.

“How are you, Phillip?”

He sniffed and readjusted in his seat. “I’m good, a little tired. . . . What is all this about?”

“Phillip, I made some phone calls back to Chicago and got some information relating to some incidents that involved you on Maxwell Street, where you’re originally from?”

He looked at the manila folder lying on the edge of the desk. “Uh huh.”

I nodded toward the envelope. “I don’t have to tell you what’s in this, but we both know how seriously some of the charges could be interpreted—two cases of unlawful entry, larceny, one domestic charge, and a restraining order that’s still being enforced.”

“Look, that was a bullshit deal and...”

I held up a hand. “Phillip, hold on a second.” I allowed my hand to rest on the file. “To be honest, I don’t care about any of this. It tells me that you’re no Eagle Scout, but as long as you keep your nose clean in my county, we’ll get along fine. But we do have a problem.” I let that one sit there for a moment. “I think you might’ve lied to me yesterday, or at least you didn’t tell me everything you know. Now, is that the case?”

He shifted in his chair. “Yeah.”

“So, why would you do that?”

He shrugged and sat there, silent for a while. “He paid me.” “Who did?”

“The guy.”

I could feel Saizarbitoria watching me as I questioned Maynard. “Tran Van Tuyen?”

“Yeah, him; the Oriental guy at the bar.”

“Asian, Vietnamese to be exact. What did he say?”

“He asked about the girl the day before yesterday, then came back in and gave me a hundred bucks to not mention his name.”

I glanced up at Sancho, who snagged his keys from the desk and quickly went out the door. “What kinds of questions did he ask?”

“Just if I’d seen this girl or heard anything about her. He had a photograph of her.”

“Did he call her by name?”

“Yeah, it was something like Packet.”

“Did he say anything else?”

Maynard thought and then shook his head. “Just that he knew the car was hers and that she’d run away and he was looking for her.”

“Nothing else?”

He shook his head again. “Nothing, and that’s the truth, Sheriff.”

I walked him out, stood there by my truck, and warned him that if he ever lied again that I’d find a place for him under the jail. He nodded and threw a leg over the Harley and rode off toward the rows of shanty housing at the south end of town.

I was still standing there when the Suburban came reeling around the corner; Saizarbitoria stood on the brakes and ground to a stop in front of me. He started to reach across and roll down the window, but I saved him the grief by opening the door. “Tuyen’s gone.”

I nodded. “What’d they say?”

“They said that he came into the office, paid his bill, hopped in the Land Rover, and took off.”

“How long?”

“About twenty minutes ago. I already called it in to the HPs.”

I thought about it. “You take 192 out to the Powder River, do the loop up toward Durant, and then circle back on 196. I’ll take 191 and 190 toward the mountains.”

He disappeared east, and I headed west.

I was about to make the turn at the underpass of I-25 when I saw the same two kids who had waved at me the day before and noticed that one was wearing a Shelby Cobra T-shirt. They were leaning on the same fence like regular eight-year-old town criers—well, one eight, the other maybe six. I had a thought and pulled onto the gravel. I pushed the button to roll my window down, but before I could say anything, the taller one with the glasses spoke. “Are you the sheriff?”

“Yep. I don’t suppose...”

He grinned and grabbed the younger boy by the shoulder. “I’m Ethan, this is my brother Devin.”

“Good to meet you. I don’t...”

The smaller one piped up. "Are you looking for bad guys?”

I nodded. “Yes. You didn’t happen to see a green Land Rover go by here about fifteen minutes ago, did you?”

They both nodded. "Yes, sir. DEFENDER 90...”

The older boy continued. “Coniston green with the convertible top, the ARB brush/grill guard, and front wing diamond plating.”

I sat there for a second looking at him, wondering what to say after that description, and then fell back on an old western favorite. “Which way did he go?” They both pointed toward I-25. “Did he get on the highway?”

The blond one answered. “No, he went under it.”

“Get on the highway on the other side?”

The one with darker hair responded this time. “Nope. Hey, can we have a ride?”

“Not right now, maybe later.” I saluted them and hit the lights and siren, but this time I left them on, thanking the powers that be for the American male’s preoccupation with all things vehicular. I thought of the Red Fork Ranch and called Saizarbitoria to tell him to turn around and take the 191 leg of the west side of the highway, and that I’d take 190.

The next call I made was to Ruby, who still sounded irritated, and that was without me singing. “What’s the matter?”

Static. “It’s another flood of these e-mails, and I’m getting tired of deleting them.”

I keyed the mic. “Any word from L.A. or Bee Bee?”

Static. "Nothing from L.A., but Bee Bee called and said that this Tuyen fellow inquired about the Red Fork Saturday, so if he was interested in the property, it was a sudden interest.”

“Well, I’m not sure how, but this guy is involved.”

Static. “Have you got him?”

“No, but I’m working on it.”

I hung the mic back on the dash and made the gradual ascent through the red wall country and broke onto the gravel road leading past the ghost town. I had just topped the hill when I noticed the flash of something reflective and slowed. I shut off the lights and siren, threw the truck into reverse, and backed down to where I could get a look into the canyon at Bailey’s ramshackle and only street. The Coniston green Land Rover sat parked along the boardwalk at the far end. I turned the big three-quarter-ton around and pulled off and into the ghost town.

In Bailey’s heyday, it had had a peak population of close to six hundred. The town had had a bank, hotel, hospital, post office, and something you rarely saw in high plains ghost towns: a large union hall, which stood at the top of the rise beside the road leading to the mine.

I drove slowly down the short street, looked back and forth among the buildings, and pulled my truck in front of Tuyen’s vehicle. I got out and walked over to the Land Rover; it was locked and unoccupied. Tuyen’s bags were in the back, along with a solid case that looked like the kind that might hold a computer.

I looked around the street again and unsnapped the strap on my Colt.

Nothing.

I stepped up onto the warped boardwalk and started down one side of the street. I tried to be quiet, but my boots resonated off the planks like I was starring in some B-movie western.

Most of the windows in the buildings were broken and boarded up, but between the cracks I could see the gloom of the interiors; the floors in most of them had held up. The buildings were dusty and dirty, but they were solid, and only Zarling’s Dry Goods, which was at the end of the street and had been the one with the fire damage, looked as if it might fall over.

There was a stone wall at Bailey’s far end; it was partially collapsed and provided a large, picture-framed view of the hillside that led to the mine, the weed-filled graveyard and, above the overhang, the union hall.

There was a wrought-iron fence around the old graveyard, a token of condolence from a company that hadn’t bothered to try to retrieve the bodies of the seventeen dead miners. Tran Van Tuyen sat on one of the thick iron rails beside the gate, with his back to me.

I walked the rest of the length of the boardwalk and down the stairs to the dry, cracked earth of the roadway and began walking up the hillside to the cemetery. The trail was overgrown with purple thistle and burdock, and the only thing you could smell was the heat. As I approached, Tuyen didn’t move even though I was sure that he’d heard my truck and me in the street below.

I stopped at the gate and looked over at him. He was sitting with his hands laced in his lap, his head drooping a little in the flat morning sun. He had the same light, black leather jacket he’d had on in the bar draped over his knee, and the sunglasses. It was hot and getting hotter with every second, but he wasn’t sweating.

After a minute, I saw his back rise and fall. “All of them died on the same day.”

I continued to watch him as the cicadas buzzed in the high grass, and I thought about rattlesnakes. “It was a mining accident, back in 1903.”

“A terrible thing.”

“Yep.”

He paused again. “Do you believe in an afterlife, Sheriff?”

It wasn’t the line I thought the conversation would take. “I’m not sure.”

"What do you believe in?”

“My work.”

He nodded. “It is good to have work, something you can devote your life to.”

Something wasn’t right. “Mr. Tuyen, I need to speak with you.”

“Yes?”

“It’s about the young woman.”

He nodded. “I assumed as much.”

“We questioned the bartender at the Wild Bunch Bar, and he said you were asking questions about this Ho Thi Paquet, and that you paid him some money.”

His hand moved, and I found mine on the .45 at my hip. He had been holding something in his hands, and he extended it toward me. It was a photograph of the same young woman wearing a dance outfit, perhaps younger, a snapshot of her in a crowd; she had turned her head and was smiling.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “This was taken when she graduated from a dance school in Thailand when her mother came to see her perform.” I thought he was done speaking, but the next words barely escaped him. “She was our only grandchild.”

7

We sat in the office. Tuyen was holding his coffee cup, the contents of which he had doctored using the supplies that Saizarbitoria had procured from the Powder River Mercantile. He must not have liked the nondairy substitute, because he had yet to take a sip.

“I have another business; a group that unites Vietnamese children with their American relations—bui doi, which translates to ‘dust child’ in English.” He stared at the floor. “Children of the Dust is a nonprofit organization, and I became active in their efforts two years ago.”

“Working with the Vietnamese Amerasian Homecoming Act?” Santiago looked at me, and I shrugged.

“Exactly.” Tuyen glanced at Saizarbitoria. “Since 1987 we have assisted twenty-three thousand Amerasians and sixty-seven thousand of their relatives in immigrating to this country.”

I sipped my coffee. “Must be rewarding work.”

“Very.”

I nodded and made the mental note to ask Ned to check the organization from California. “What’s all this about Trung Sisters Distributing?” I thumbed his card from the folder on the desk.

He looked up. “It is another of my businesses, and the one that makes a profit.” He pulled another card from his jacket pocket and handed it to me; this one was emblazoned with the words CHILDREN OF THE DUST and had an address the same as the one for the film office, with the same three phone numbers. “I sometimes find it more advantageous to be in film distribution than an individual tracking down men who may have illegitimate children.”

I nodded. “Especially men in my age range who might’ve been in Vietnam?”

“It can be rather shocking, and sometimes responses are not particularly positive.”

“I can imagine.” I put my coffee cup on the desk. I had had enough of the stuff. I looked at Saizarbitoria, who seemed to be studying me. I turned back to Tuyen. “What about the Red Fork Ranch?”

“I am genuinely interested in the property.”

“But that’s not why you’re here.”

His face lowered. “No.”

“Mr. Tuyen, I’m really sorry to be insensitive, but I need to know about your granddaughter.” He placed his still untouched coffee on the desk, and I wasn’t happy about what I had to do next. “I’m assuming her married name was Paquet?”

“Yes, she was briefly enjoined to a young man, here in the U.S.”

"And that would be in California?”

“Yes. Orange County, Westminster.”

“Little Saigon.”

He looked up and smiled sadly. “I am not used to people referring to the area in that manner outside of Southern California.”

“Mr. Tuyen, do you have any idea why your granddaughter might’ve stolen a car and then run all the way to Wyoming?”

“A number of them, actually.”

“She obviously didn’t want you involved, so how was it you were able to find her?”

“She acquired one of my credit cards, a gas card. She also, well, borrowed a valuable laptop computer, some jewelry, and a few other items, but it was through the credit card I was able to follow her.”

I watched him for a moment. “We didn’t find any credit cards on your granddaughter’s person.”

“The card was left at a Flying J truck stop in Casper. I recovered it there.”

“So you figured she was heading north and drove to Powder Junction?”

“Yes, it was as good a guess as any other.”

“Did it occur to you to contact any law enforcement agencies to see if they could find her?”

He laced his fingers in his lap and stared at them. “My granddaughter . . . Ho Thi had some unfortunate incidents, which I thought might color a more official response to her disappearance.”

I looked at the planing light on the side of his face and then plunged ahead. “That would have to do with the troubles of a month and a half ago?”

It took a commensurate amount of time for him to respond. “Yes.”

“So you figured with your experience in working with Children of the Dust, you would find her yourself?”

“Yes.”

“These incidents you referred to concerning Mrs. Paquet: We got some information from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department concerning some charges?”

He looked at me with a sharpness that he couldn’t or didn’t want to hide. "I don’t see how that is...”

“I’m just trying to get a clearer idea as to her situation, and how and why it is she ended up here the way she did.”

His eyes stayed steady with mine. “I understand you have a man in custody?”

I knew he was upset, but I needed answers. “The prostitution charges?”

He took a deep breath. “It was the young man she was married to; he was party to a number of illegal ventures and got her involved.”

“In prostitution?”

“Human trafficking.” He picked up his cup but only looked into it. “There is an underlying problem with the Vietnamese Amerasian Homecoming Act in that a number of corrupt Vietnamese staffers in the U.S. consulate, along with human brokers who acquire these mules who assist them, are—what is the colloquialism?—piggybacking illegals into the United States. Visas are granted as long as they are prepared to take their new, well, family, one can say, along with them. These human brokers make close to twenty thousand dollars for each accompanying visa.”

“And this man, Paquet?”

“Rene Philippe Paquet.”

“He’s involved with this?”

“Was. He died in Los Angeles.”

“How did he die?”

Tuyen swallowed, as if the words were leaving a bad taste in his mouth. “He was also involved in the drugs and found dead in his apartment.”

I got up and walked over to the only window, which was in the top of the only door, and looked through the curling and sun-faded decal of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department at the overexposed light baking the empty playground of the elementary school across the street. “I guess I’m a little confused, Mr. Tuyen. How did Ho Thi, whom I’m assuming was a United States citizen, get involved with Paquet?”

From the sound of his voice, I could tell he had turned toward me. “I’m afraid you may not understand the complications of my relationship with my granddaughter, Sheriff.”

I leaned on the door facing with my back still to the desk and waited.

“Perhaps, Sheriff, I should tell you my own story first?”

“You were in the war?”

“Yes.”

A rusty, half-ton pickup chugged by on the otherwise empty roadway. “You speak English very well.”

He took a deep breath. “Yes. I was drafted from a small village in the Lang Son Province and, because of my ease with acquiring languages, was sent from the South Vietnamese Army to the Rangers. I spoke English especially well, along with French, Chinese, and Russian, and so they conscripted me in conjunction with the American Special Forces and the Short Term Road Watch and Target Acquisition program.”

“Black Tigers and STRATA?”

“Yes. I was twice wounded and received a battle citation before being transferred to the American Embassy in Saigon. As the war worsened, I was given the opportunity to expatriate myself to the United States, but not with my wife and son. I stayed, and we survived through my bureaucratic skills until I was able to take my family on a vacation to Taiwan, where we escaped to France and then here. With my contacts in the embassy, I was able to procure a job in film distribution and six years ago was finally able to open my own business.”

Santiago poured himself another coffee. “Sounds like the American dream come true.”

I kept looking out the window. “I notice you didn’t mention a granddaughter?”

“Yes.” Something in the way he said it caused me to turn my head and look at him. “It is sometimes difficult to explain the abandonment of wartime to those who have not experienced it. You were in the American war, Sheriff?”

“I was.”

He studied me awhile. “Then perhaps you will understand. There was a woman whom I spent time with in Saigon, both during and after the war; not my wife.”

I nodded, abandoned the playground, and came back to sit on the corner of the metal desk. “Your participation with Children of the Dust came from your personal experience?”

“Yes, and then my granddaughter arrived over a year ago, and it was obvious that she had not had an easy life which, as she grew older, exhibited itself in numerous ways.” He took another breath. “She did not speak English and made no attempts to learn the language after arriving. She was trenchant and rebellious toward us and began spending more and more time with the young man I mentioned.” I watched as he examined his laced fingers. “She was arrested for solicitation six weeks ago.”

“I think I’m getting a clearer picture as to why she would want to run away, but do you have any idea why it is that she would come to Wyoming?”

“None.”

Saizarbitoria was still watching me as I reached over the desk and into the Cordura shooting duffel. I slipped the photograph, still in the plastic bag, from one of the folders and handed it to Tuyen. “Do you know this woman?”

He took the photograph and studied it, finally looking up at me. “No.” His eyes stayed on me for a moment, went to the photo again, and then back to me. “And this is you?”

"Yes.”

"When was this picture taken, if I might presume to ask?”

“The end of ’67, just before Tet.” He studied the photograph again, and I could hear the years clicking in his head like abacus beads. I leaned forward. “Third generation; is it possible that this is Ho Thi’s grandmother?”

“It is not the woman I knew....”

“Then possibly her great-grandmother? This woman in the photograph, her name was Mai Kim and she died in 1968.”

He stared into the black-and-white, memorizing the woman’s face and comparing it with his granddaughter. “It is possible. Did you know her well, Sheriff?”

“Not in the personal sense, but she was a bar girl at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge just outside Tan Son Nhut air force base, where I was sent as a Marine inspector.”

“You were a police officer then, too?”

“Yes.”

He thought about it some more. “You think it is possible that Ho Thi received this photograph from her mother or another woman within the family and mistakenly believed that she was related to you?”

“Right now, it’s all I’ve got to go on and the only connection to Wyoming that I have.”

“I see.”

“Mr. Tuyen, I’m going to need you to look at some photographs of your granddaughter for purposes of recognition, see some identification that she was, indeed, your granddaughter, and then we can make arrangements with the Division of Criminal Investigation to have the body shipped back to California. ”

“Yes, of course.”

“Were you planning on heading back anytime soon?”

He was still looking at the photo in the plastic bag and possibly thinking of other things in other plastic bags. “I had intended to leave today, but I didn’t seem to have the energy once I’d gotten in my vehicle.”

I stuck my hand out for the black-and-white, but he misinterpreted and shook it, so I took the photograph back with my other hand. “That’s perfectly understandable. I can appreciate it if you need some time alone, but if you’d rather look at those things this afternoon, you’ll have to come up to my office in Durant.”

“I’m not sure if I will be up to that this afternoon, but perhaps I will go back and check into my room again and see how I feel later today.” He stood.

“That’ll be fine. Tomorrow morning is just as good. You still have my card?”

“I do.” He stopped at the door and looked back at us. “And you have my granddaughter’s belongings?”

“Yes.”

“I would like to pick up those things.”

“I’m sure we can release them as soon as we get all the information back from Cheyenne, and I get some documentation on you and your granddaughter.”

“I will see to it.” He still stood there, and I knew what was next. “I am reticent to ask again, but I understand you have arrested a man for the murder of Ho Thi?”

I crossed my arms. “We have a man who is being held under reasonable suspicion in connection with her death. However, there is not conclusive evidence against him.”

In the backlight of the glass-paned door, Tuyen’s outline was dark and featureless. “This man was living under the highway?”

“I’m afraid so.”

I could see the outline of his chest rise and fall. “It is difficult to remember that things like this can happen, even here.”

He turned the knob, pushed open the door, and was gone.

* * *

“Jeez, Boss . . .”

Saizarbitoria had followed me out the door to the playground where I stood with my boot propped up on the jungle gym. I looked out at the flat grasslands leading to the Powder River. There was a low rise to the east of town before the breaks of the northbound water crumpled the plains like an unmade bed. Everything was a dried-out watercolor, and it looked like if you touched anything, it would crumble and blow away. We needed rain.

“What did you say?”

He stood next to me, his hand wrapped around one of the bars for an instant, then he yanked it away from the cooking metal. He blew on his hand. “Kind of rough on a guy who just lost his granddaughter.”

“He didn’t find her that long ago.”

“Jesus.” He barely said it, but I still heard him.

I was having a hard enough time thinking about the things I needed to think about without the weight of his judgment. “Call up Jim Craft down in Natrona County and get him to go check out the Flying J, see what they say about the stolen card.”

He cleared his throat, adjusted his wraparound sunglasses, and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “All right.”

“And then ask DCI if there was anything in Ho Thi indicating drug use.” The brim of my hat hung across my brow, so I pushed it back and continued to look at the horizon for clouds that weren’t there.

He stiffened a little. “Why?”

“Because Paquet was and, most likely, if she was involved in prostitution she was involved in drugs.” I took my boot off the rung and stood there looking at him. He was a handsome kid, and there wasn’t any back-down in him, especially with me, and that’s why I liked him so much. I turned and started toward my truck. “You’d be amazed at what you’d do if you were desperate.”

Khe Sanh, Vietnam: 1968

The NVA had found the range of the helicopter pretty quickly, and the mortar fire was singing around us like roman candles in the monsoon wet.

I ducked against the bulkhead and forced air in and out of my lungs, unsure if the whistling I heard was my breath or the enemy rounds. I looked over and saw Henry disconnecting Babysan Quang Sang from the webbing and the cargo net in anticipation of the Indo-Chinese fire drill from the helicopter.

He looked at me only once. “Run, and do not stop until you reach something.”

The generators along with the Willie Petes, or illumination rounds, from inside the wire lit up the area with a blinding sideways glare that threw dramatic contrasting shadows on the wet, rain-slicked surface of everything—as if the situation needed it.

We were coming in hot, and the big Kingbee followed the contours of the valley as we made the final approach, skimming in about six feet off the hard ground and stalling our movement at the LZ, with the gigantic circles of water imitating the interlocking revolution of the rotors.

Everybody moved at once. Hollywood Hoang gunned the engine with a roar as we piled off on one side, the two corpsmen following Henry and Babysan Quang Sang out of the helicopter’s side door and into the pouring rain and incandescent night.

I came out of a crouch and shot after the receding images of the running men; the two corpsmen had slanted right, toward the burned-out hulk of an M47 tank, and Henry and Babysan disappeared into a trench about fifty yards away.

I felt like a buffalo chasing antelope.

As my foot came off what pretended to be the landing strip, I felt the chopper begin its hurried ascent like it was falling from the earth instead of rising. Hoang had given us all the time he could and was now on his way out. I ran the first twenty or so yards from the helicopter when something pushed me to the red mud with a tremendous outburst of air and an immediate loss of oxygen, along with an explosion much louder than the rest. The impact of the overpressure forced my helmet onto my nose and pushed me forward, and I slid diagonally in the raw scarred mud.

I was pretty sure I was burning. It wasn’t that I felt like I was on fire, but the smell was so close that it had to be me. I couldn’t hear anything, just the sound of my breath and the coursing blood in my temples. When I moved, it was as if I were viewing myself in slow motion; even my head pivoted like it was on some long boom.

I forced myself to get up but fell to one side in the muck, and I half turned toward all the light. My eyes closed with the fury of it but, when I half opened one, I could see someone lying in the distance. The fire backlit the outline of a hand, and then an arm reached out into the night air. I stumbled up through the smoke and slanted sheets of rain.

There was wreckage everywhere, and the acrid taste of the fire filled my throat and pushed itself back out from my body. I gagged but staggered forward, looking for the arm that had reached out to me. I fell over smoking debris and could make out part of the helicopter’s fuselage as the drops sizzled on the superheated metal.

Hollywood Hoang’s uniform was singed but still mostly powder blue. I reached down and grabbed him, fell back, but held on, still trying to get my ears to clear the shrieking.

He didn’t weigh much, so I carried him, slowly pulling him the distance toward the trench and wondering what had happened to everyone else.

That’s when I saw the other bodies.

One of the corpsmen hadn’t made it. For some reason, the majority of the explosion had blown to the left and had taken him with it. The rotors, the engine, or just the sheer ferocity of the blast had caught him, and he lay there in three pieces. The other was crawling through the burning oil and was screaming. At least I assumed he was screaming since his mouth was open.

I got to the man, picked him up by the front of his flak jacket, and leveraged him onto one of my muddy knees. I grabbed again and got a better hold of him as his face rolled up toward mine. “Don’t leave me.”

I lifted Quincy Morton from Detroit, Michigan, put Hoang over my shoulder, and turned, starting toward the trench again. The smoke enveloped everything, and it was as if we disappeared. I slogged forward into the darkness; the heat pressed against my back like a steam iron, and the weight of the two bodies slowed me down to a crawl in the mud that collected under my combat boots.

I remembered the blocking sleds at USC and the grueling two-a-days under the California sun, squared my shoulders, put my head down, and pulled.

I had taken a good seven steps when somebody ran into me. He bounced off and must have fallen to the ground, so I released the swabo corpsman only for a second to try and help whoever had fallen, but the swabo misinterpreted the movement and grabbed my arm just as I saw the barrel of the AK-47 rising up and into my face. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have my rifle.

He fired, the cicada sound of the machine gun coming unwound as I fell with the whistling rush of the bullets flying beside me; I came down on him hard and could feel him trying to get the automatic loose from under me, but I’d yanked a hand free and could feel his throat. Everything was wet, and we slithered there against each other.

He was kicking, but the weight of all three of us didn’t allow for much movement. I tightened my grip on his larynx and felt the cartilage begin to give as his voice box collapsed and pressed into the air cavity of his esophagus. I couldn’t hear anything since the explosion, but I could imagine that I could still hear the spittle. He must have gargled like a baby working itself up for a full-blooded scream.

It never came.

He wasn’t moving and wasn’t breathing, but I still wasn’t sure if he was dead.

I lay there on top of him, retching, coughing, and finally vomiting.

I spit and cleared my mouth and felt for the two men who lay beside me, feeling the corpsman’s hands grabbing my arm. I got to my knees and then my feet, picked them up again, and staggered forward into the smothering rain. I gathered momentum, realizing that if we stayed out there in the open for much longer, we were dead.

The NVA had overrun the garrison and were headed for the wire; we were only a few steps ahead of them. I could feel my boots digging into the goose-shit ground, and what adrenaline I had left propelled me as we blew through the swirls of the remaining smoke-and mist-clogged night.

I continued to push off with each stride growing just a little bit longer, and with the mantra I will not die like this... I will not die like this... I will not die like this....

Men rose up ahead, but I didn’t have time to fight them all so I just continued on, blasting forward and taking them with me. The biggest was at point and tried to shrug down like a running back looking for a hole in the line, but I was too much weight with the two bodies I carried and took him as I lost my footing and carried us over the edge of a flat world.

We fell, and I could finally hear the weapons firing around me and the curse words, thankfully, in English. I opened my eyes but could only see the reddish rainwater that filtered between the stacks of soggy sandbags and Henry. He was cradling his brow with blood fil-tering through his fingers as he laughed and shook his head with that bitter secret-survivor smile.

He spoke out of the side of his mouth as he fired the CAR-16 over the lip of the trench, the flame from the 5.56’s barrel extending from the black metal like the eyes of some deflated jack-o’-lantern. The blood was still seeping from his head where I’d hit him, when he looked at me.

“When I said run till you reach something, I did not mean me.”

* * *

She tossed part of a crust to Dog, who was sitting in the hallway to my left. We watched as the beast took the baked dough and swallowed it in two bites.

“Because it’s your turn, and there isn’t anybody else.” She didn’t look satisfied with my answer, but she was relatively happy that I’d brought dinner before I headed back to the ranch to check on Cady.

Vic sipped her Rainier beer and watched as the giant folded the last slice of his pizza, stuffing it into his mouth behind the impenetrable curtain of black hair, and chewed. He had eaten all of his own pie and all but the one slice Vic had picked at and the three slices I’d devoured of another. He’d chugged the liter of pop that we’d provided and finally lay back on the bunk and covered his eyes with his arm.

Vic studied him for a moment and then spoke. “So the one night I’m going to sleep in the jail, you’re going home?” I didn’t say anything. She watched me as I took a sip of my beer. “Sure you don’t want to stick around?”

“One of us can’t leave this room.” I glanced at the prisoner, now snoring softly. “And under the circumstances . . .”

She shrugged. “This is the shittiest pizza I’ve ever eaten.”

I continued to watch the Indian. “He seemed to like it.”

“He lives under the highway; I’m not so sure his culinary sensibilities are all that refined.”

I peeled the R on the label of my beer bottle with my thumbnail. “Saizarbitoria thinks I’m a racist.”

“That’s okay. I think you’re a slave driver.” She pushed her ball cap back; the hat was a sign that she was having a bad hair day—something that I had learned not to mention. “Why?”

“I was kind of hard on this Tuyen fellow today.”

“Really?”

“Yep.” I looked at the glue strip where the label had peeled away. “I don’t know, maybe it is prejudice. He was in the Black Tigers and STRATA.”

She stared at me. “And for those of us who weren’t born until after the Age of Aquarius, what the fuck does that mean?”

“Black Tigers were the South Vietnamese version of our Special Forces, and STRATA was a program that dropped these guys behind enemy lines. There were, I think, about a hundred of them and about a third never made it back.”

“So this guy’s one bad motor scooter?”

“Could be.” I took a deep breath. “His English is good, better than any Vietnamese speaker I’ve ever heard....” It was silent too long, so I changed the subject. “Anything from Quincy, over at the VA?” She lowered her beer bottle and looked at me as I stood and gathered the detritus, setting the two empty pizza boxes and bottles on the counter.

“He’s on vacation in the garden spot of garden spots, Detroit, and won’t be back until first thing tomorrow. I told them somebody would be by.”

“Did you ask them if they were missing a seven-foot Indian?”

“I did, but the twit I was talking to didn’t really come forth with much.”

“You want to ride over to Sheridan with me tomorrow morning?”

“No.” She stood, considering me as I stopped in the doorway, and then leaned back against the minifridge door. “Not after sleeping on the jail floor all night . . . alone.” I watched her as she approached me—the way the uniform hung in all the right places, the lush, hanging-gardens-of-Babylon quality of her general physique. “It’s the uniform, right?”

“No, it’s not the uniform.”

“I mean . . . because it’s okay. I mean some guys are freaky, and they like a woman in uniform, but you’re not.”

We were standing in the doorway, just out of the giant’s line of sight, and somehow the conversation we’d been meaning to have was even worse here. “Not what?”

“Freaky.”

“No, I’m not.” She was standing close, and my back was against the wall in more ways than one. She put a hand out and touched my sleeve, running her fingers up my arm and feeling the embroidery at the sheriff ’s patch. Those eyes turned up to me. I could smell her, all of her, and started remembering that night in Philadelphia again. “Look . . .”

Her face was about eight inches from mine. “What?”

“I just . . . I don’t know if...”

In the dim light of the hall, her eyes shone, and I found myself studying the haloed glow. “What?”

“What we did, that one time, was out of context and now we’re back...”

She slowly went up on tiptoe and her hand trailed to the back of my neck as she pulled, and the distance between our faces decreased. “What’a ya say we slip out of these uniforms and get out of context again?”

I brought my hands up to the small of her back and felt her shiver like a colt.

Contrary to popular belief, the best kisses don’t start lip to lip. This one started at the scar at my collarbone, nibbled its way up the muscles at the side of my neck, and paused at my jaw. I was having trouble breathing when I heard her moan, and it sounded as if it were coming from somewhere else, somewhere east and not so long ago. I turned my face to allow our lips to meet, but she’d frozen and had turned her head toward the holding cells.

We both stood there breathing, and her voice caught. “I think the prisoner is waking up.”

I nodded and watched as her arm and face slipped away. I caught her and pulled her in with one hand, placing the tip of my chin on top of her head and holding her there for just a moment, not talking. I felt her sigh and then loosened my grip.

“I guess I better get back in sight.”

I watched as she moved the folding chair and sat in plain view of the Indian, who immediately quieted down.

“If it makes you feel any better, I was thinking about asking you out on a date.”

Her head rose, and the dark gold of her eyes again shone, the lengthy canine tooth exposed like an ivory warning flare. “A what?”

I could feel my courage heading for the hills. “That’s what we used to call it back in the old days—dating.”

“Really?”

“Yep.” I’m pretty sure my face was taking on a little color, but I braved it through and went back to pick up the trash from the counter. “What do they call it now?”

The half-smile smirk stalled there like a cat playing with a mouse as she looked up at me. “Sport fucking.”

I lingered beside her for a moment and then glanced at the big Indian before heading out. It just seemed like our timing was never right. She waited till I was halfway down the hall before calling after me. “You sure you go? Me love you loooooooooong time....”

8

I took Cady with me to make the sixty-six-mile loop over to Sheridan after we’d worked out in the morning. We were just passing Lake DeSmet along I-90 with Dog seated between us. She had her sandals kicked off and her legs folded up on the seat the way she always did.

I noticed she’d dressed for Michael’s arrival later that day in a bright turquoise broomstick skirt and a black-sequined, cap-sleeved T-shirt. She was wearing a stylish straw cowboy hat with a leather strap adorned with conchos and lots of feathers on top of her auburn hair. Her earrings matched her skirt. Biker/cowgirl haute couture. She glanced up at me and continued to pet Dog. “Don’t make fun of my hat.”

“I haven’t said a word.”

“You were thinking about it.”

I set the cruise control and settled back in my seat. “It’s a very nice hat.”

“Don’t.”

I glanced at her. “What?”

“You were going to try and be funny.” She took a deep breath and looked out her window and back down the Piney Creek valley.

This is the point where as a father you’re supposed to say something—the right thing—and I wondered what that might be. She was obviously nervous about Michael’s arrival, and it was my duty to assuage some of the anxiety. “You look great.”

Her head dropped, and I waited. “I’m wearing the hat because of the scar.”

“Oh, honey . . .”

“I just thought at first . . .” She was silent for a moment, but it wasn’t because there was nothing to say. “My hair is too short; I haven’t gotten enough sun. . . .”

“You look great, honest.” I passed an eighteen-wheel truck and steered back in our lane. “It means a lot to you, this visit?”

She reached out and adjusted the air-conditioning vent, then readjusted it back to the same position. “Yes.”

There was something I’d been meaning to talk with her about, and this was the closest to an opening I’d gotten. I’d decided that as a parent I would adopt a relationship with my little redheaded, large-eyed daughter that was based on an unrelenting truth, and it had become the only language we both understood. “Well, this’ll be a good opportunity for the two of you to spend some time really getting to know each other even if it’s just a couple of days.”

I was hoping it sounded better to her than it did to me.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

It hadn’t.

“I just think it’ll be a good visit; before, you had these roles—he was a police officer and you were a victim. . . .” I glanced over and then quickly returned my eyes to the road. “It was a hospital and then it’s been phone calls. I just think this’ll be a good opportunity for the two of you to be in a more natural setting and really get to know each other.”

“That’s the second time you’ve used the word ‘really,’ meaning we don’t know each other now?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Really?”

It seemed to me her mind was rapidly getting better. I tried my last hope, the authoritarian patrician voice of reason. “Cady . . . ”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

We drove the next twenty minutes in silence as I took the second Sheridan exit, turned off Main, and made the gradual ascent to the Veterans Administration. The VA had taken over Fort Mackenzie, and it was in a gorgeous spot on a plateau just north of town with vast, feathering cottonwoods and solid, redbrick buildings. We passed the unmanned guard shack and the rows of conifers stretching shadows across the pavement, and she decided to talk to me again. “So how come I never met this Quincy Morton guy?”

“He was before your time.”

“More stuff that happened before I was born?” She glanced around as I wound my way through the fortlike buildings. “So, you had a hard time after the war?”

I thought about it. “I don’t know if I’d call it a hard time.... It was a confusing time, and I was looking for some answers. Quincy wrote me and said he was transferring to Sheridan from Detroit.”

She watched me. “Did Mom help?”

“Yes, but she wasn’t in Vietnam, and I think I needed somebody who had been.”

“What about Bear?”

I shrugged. “He wasn’t around.”

I could feel those composed, gray eyes on the side of my face. “It doesn’t seem to have affected you.”

I parked the Bullet under the shade of a tree and left the windows partially down for Dog. I thought of the contract I’d made with her. “Well, it did.”

When we got out of the truck, I noticed she left the hat on her seat.

* * *

The Sheridan founding fathers had lobbied for Fort Mackenzie as protection against hostile Indians. The fact that there were only 23,133 Indians spread over an area roughly the size of Europe; that this count included men, women, and children; or that it was 1898 and the director of the U.S. Census Bureau had stated plainly that the frontier was dead, didn’t appear much in the argument.

Pretty cagey, those Sheridan politicians—realizing the economic advantages that accrued by having an army post nearby. The market for local goods, especially beef, would increase, and the fort would provide jobs for a burgeoning workforce; it would also supply young West Point cadets to whom the founding mothers could marry off their daughters. One can only imagine the looks on their faces when the first troops of the Tenth Cavalry, Companies G and H, disembarked from the Sheridan trains, and were—buffalo soldiers.

Quincy Morton’s office was not in the same location; in fact, nothing was. I hadn’t been to the VA for a while, and it appeared that the place had gone through quite a growth spurt. It was good to see Quincy again, and when I described the big Indian in my jail, he definitely knew who he was.

“You realize I’m under no obligation to give you any information without the proper authorization?”

“I am and, if it makes you uncomfortable, I can go over to Chuck Guilford and get the avalanche of paperwork sliding, but that’s not going to help this man I’ve got sitting in my holding cell.”

I watched as Quincy twisted his fingers into his wooly beard, which was now curlicued with a gray that I didn’t remember. It was easy to see how the plains Indians had made the association between the soldiers’ hair and the coats of the roaming herds. He adjusted his glasses, glanced at Cady, and then crossed to a large oak file cabinet and knelt down. I noticed the drawer he pulled out was the bottom one, W-Z.

White Buffalo. Had to be.

He pulled a thick file from the hanger and came back over, setting the folder on the edge of his desk; I noticed he didn’t sit. “I’m taking this lovely lady over to the dayroom in ward five, which has mediocre coffee but a glass solarium with incredible views of the mountains.” He hooked his elbow out to Cady, and she smiled and joined him at the door with her turquoise skirt twirling. He plucked an ID off the navy blazer on his coat rack. “The file stays in my office, but I will expect you in fifteen minutes. It’s a voluntary lockdown ward, but just tell them you’re with me and they’ll let you in.”

He shut the door.

I pulled Quincy’s chair closer to the desk and looked around the room; I guess I was avoiding the file. The therapist had a framed poster from the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody of the Tenth Cavalry buffalo soldiers on the wall, a couple of unopened Meals-Ready-to-Eat on his bookshelf, and a fake hand grenade on his desk with a small plaque that read, IN CASE OF COMPLAINTS—PULL PIN. At least I assumed it was a fake grenade.

There was a white adhesive label on the cover of the file that read Virgil White Buffalo.

Virgil.

I thought about the author of The Aeneid and Dante’s supposed guide through hell. I studied the folder and hoped his travels had been more pleasant. They hadn’t.

* * *

It had taken the full fifteen minutes to get through the file, and since I’d left Quincy’s office on my way over, my mind repeated only one word.

God.

It was a cloudless day, if hot, and I took a deep breath and smelled the pungent fragrance of cut grass. I thought about what I’d read as I walked across the trimmed sidewalks leading to ward 5. I stopped at the double-paned Plexiglas doors and watched as the officer came over. I mentioned Quincy’s name, and he told me to go down the hall to the second right and to just keep going.

They were sitting at a small round table on which were three thick-handled coffee mugs and a white plastic carafe. I sat and listened as they continued their conversation, which was mostly about Michael’s impending visit and Cady’s plans to return to Philadelphia after Labor Day.

I sat and gazed out at the mountains and thought some more about what I had read back in the doctor’s office.

God.

Cady slid me a mug of coffee. “Quincy says you saved his life.”

I turned my head and looked at her. “Yep? Well, he’s delusional and that’s why they keep him in a place like this.”

Figuring that she wasn’t likely to get the story out of me, she turned to Quincy, who told her a tale that made me sound like Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. He said that I’d talked so much about Wyoming that when a job came up in the Veteran’s Administration in Sheridan for a post-traumatic stress disorder coordinator, he and his wife, Tamblyn, had made the jump and never looked back.

“We had only three black people in Wyoming at the time, and I was in charge of trying to achieve a racial balance.”

Quincy shook his head, patted Cady’s arm, and pointed to another set of double Plexiglas doors leading outside to a grass field so green it looked chartreuse. “There’s a walkway through there that leads to another walkway that surrounds the parade ground and then to a big mansion that used to be the fort commander’s residence. There’s a ballroom upstairs with a hardwood floor and bay windows that look out on the mountains. ” He waited a moment. “You should see it.”

Cady, used to being dismissed from my more indelicate law enforcement conversations, nodded and squeezed my shoulder as she passed, looking back at Quincy. “If you decide to keep him, you can’t; we need him too much.”

The Doc smiled. “He’s too smart; the smart ones are always trouble.” We watched as an attendant pushed the door open, and she slipped off her sandals to walk across the parade ground barefoot. “My God, Walter. What an amazing young woman. . . .”

I watched her pick her way across the field, periodically skimming a foot across the blades of soft grass, before walking on. “She’s a punk.”

He turned to me, and his concern was palpable. “She told me about the problems in Philadelphia.” I nodded but didn’t say anything, wondering exactly how much she’d told. “It appears as if she’s progressing magnificently.”

“I hope so.”

He studied me. “What’s worrying you?”

I groaned. “That she’s pushing too hard, that she’s not pushing hard enough, that we’re doing too much physical and not enough intellectual, that we’re doing too much intellectual and not enough physical. . . .”

He laughed. “You haven’t changed, Walter.”

I took a deep breath and tried to wash my anxiety through my lungs. “I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, Doc.”

“It is.” He sipped his coffee. “You read the file.”

“I did.”

“And?”

I looked into my cup and a past that made my coffee appear transparent.

“And if I ever labor under the supposition that I’ve had a hard life, I’m going to think of Virgil White Buffalo.”

He set his mug down and pulled in his chair. He listened to the story of Ho Thi Paquet and nodded gently at the smooth surface of the table without interrupting—a ritual I’d remembered. When I finished, he looked up at me. “Do you think he did it?”

I took another breath. “I didn’t until I read that damn file.”

We sat there in the comfortable silence we’d cultivated from long ago before he spoke again. “I just went back there.”

“Where?”

“Vietnam.”

“Why?”

He laughed. “It sounds like you’ve still got some issues.”

“Issues, hell; I’ve got volumes.”

I poured him some more coffee as he continued to laugh. “I took Tamblyn and we went back just last year, stayed at the Morin Hotel in Hue. We’re sitting there having breakfast and drinking Buon me Thuot-style coffee and watching the nuts fall off the bang trees like incoming...” He took a sip.

I nodded. “What was it like, other than nuts?”

He smiled. “Everybody’s trying to sell you something.” He glanced back up at me. “We took Route 1 through Da Nang to this old fishing town, Hoi An—motor scooters all over the place and not a single water buffalo. Shops everywhere with paintings, jewelry, and T-shirts. The nightclubs in Hue have names like Apocalypse New and M16. I showed Tamblyn Red Beach 1 and Red Beach 2, where we dropped off the first American ground troops.” It was a long pause, and it was only then that I figured he was talking to himself. “All in all . . . it was pretty strange.”

I sipped my coffee and looked off to the few narrow and melting snowfields on the mountains. “Maybe we won after all.”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

The same air force major as before was still the security officer, and DeDe Lind, the Playboy playmate, was still on the wall of the Quonset hut and insisting it was August. “I find it strange that you were posted here by the provost marshal to investigate the overdose of a soldier but ended up in Khe Sanh in an exploding helicopter.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked back at the folder on his desk, which contained the hospital discharge papers. It’d been almost a week, and they’d tried to send me back to Chu Lai and battalion HQ, but I told them that I wanted to return to Tan Son Nhut. “It says here that the swabos have you up for a Navy Cross and a Silver Star.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’d you do up there in Khe Sanh, sink a submarine?”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked up through the thick glasses. “What was that?”

“No, sir.”

He studied me a good long time with the dead eyes. “Your official investigation was to be four weeks in length, but I’m going to see about getting that rescinded to three and get you out of here early.”

“Sir, but my orders from HQ...”

“You mean those orders about an investigation that you ignored because you were out joyriding in Khe Sanh?” I didn’t say anything, so he stood up and walked around his desk. He looked at my arm, still in the sling, and the sutured split on my eyebrow where I’d run into Henry. “How’s that investigation going, Lieutenant?” I started to speak, but he cut me off. “The job you were sent here to do? How’s that going?”

My head hurt, and I figured informing him that drugs were rampant in every part of the country and that I’d been warned off by his own personnel wasn’t going to make my situation any better. “Not so good, sir.”

He folded his arms and sat on the edge of his desk. “In the remaining time period in which we are to be blessed with your presence, you will confine yourself to this investigation and to this air base.” He shook his head at my incompetence. “Do you read me?”

I thought about those comic book manuals for the M16s. “Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

It was late in the afternoon—that point in the Asian day when the sun seemed like it just wouldn’t die. I walked out to Gate 055 and to the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge with the explicit idea of getting epically hammered. There weren’t too many people in the place, so I got four beers from the bar and retreated to my weapon of choice. I took off my sling and tossed it on top of the piano, doodled a little in the key of F and then attempted to slide into some Fats Waller.

Mai Kim came over and pulled up a bar stool to watch me play. The Stars and Stripes was folded up under her arm, but she didn’t ask for a lesson. I guess my mood was evident. She hovered there, though, looking at me. “Hey, Mai Kim.”

She smiled and crossed her legs. “Hi, you back?”

“For a little while.”

She looked concerned. “You go to America?”

I sipped the first of the second brace of beers. “Eventually, but for now it will just be BHQ in Chu Lai.”

She leaned forward to look at my face and the bandages on my forearm. “You hurt?”

I looked up and was struck by the symmetry of her China-doll face, framed by the black silk hair. “Not so bad.”

“You sad?”

“A little.” I continued to look at her and noticed she seemed down, too. “How ’bout you?”

She smiled a flicker of a smile that died before it could catch. “Tennessee boyfriend, he no write.”

“He rotate home?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “What you think about?”

“A girl.” I thought about the blonde back in Durant and wondered if she was still around.

She seemed even sadder. “American girl?”

“Yep.” I continued to vamp the stride piece “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” my left hand alternating between single notes at the lower portion of the keyboard and chords toward middle C.

She made an attempt at brightening, the smile catching a little at the corner of her mouth. “This my favorite song, you play.” I kept the title to myself, even though I think she knew it, and continued playing. “You tell me about America?”

“Big subject...”

She reached out and stroked the side of my brow, careful to avoid the stitches. “Tell me favorite place again.”

“Back home?”

Her fingers brushed through my hair and then settled on my shoulder. “Yes.”

The words flowed like the stream I was thinking of, and I smiled back at her. “There’s a spot in the southern part of my county in Wyoming, by the Hole in the Wall down near a place called Powder Junction.”

“Hole in the Wall?”

“Yep. I told you, remember? It’s a famous spot where the outlaws used to hide out.”

“Outlaws.”

“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” She nodded her head in recognition. I thought about how, after serving three-quarters of his sentence, George LeRoy Parker had been brought before Governor William H. Richards and declared that he would never rob another bank in Wyoming. He was released and, true to his word, never robbed another Wyoming bank—nobody said anything about Colorado. “They took cover near where Buffalo Creek spills out of the canyon just as you get to these gigantic red walls that run fifty miles.” I thought about the big, wary trout that swam in the sun-sparked cold waters below the narrow-leaved willows. “There’s an old ghost town called Bailey, and near there, it’s the best fishing in all the Bighorn Mountains.”

“Bailey, Bighorn Mountains.”

“Yep.”

“Mai Kim!” Le Khang’s voice called from the other side of the room. She turned and looked at him and at the ready airman with the mustache who stood by the counter.

She looked at me, smiled, and got off her stool. “You go back there?”

I set my bottle back on the piano and stared at the keys. “I don’t know . . .”

She slipped her hand from my shoulder onto my wounded arm and carefully stroked the gauze and bandages that were wrapped there. “This girl, she there?”

I laughed a short exhale. “Yep.”

She gave me one last pat on the shoulder before walking away. “You go back.”

I drank steadily through the afternoon, the weight of my wounded arm sloping my shoulder farther and farther down until it was all I could do to continue raising my one hand to play.

I’d probably gone through an entire case of beer by the time I noticed it was full night; the crowd was pushing in against me. I’d also noticed that Le Khang hadn’t brought any more beer over for a while, a sure sign I had been cut off.

Rescue came in the form of a familiar powder-blue arm, which reached across and placed another beer next to all the empties on the flipped-up cover of the zebra-striped, grained piano.

“How you feelin’, Hollywood?”

He smiled and sat on the edge of the bench, and I noticed how little room he took up in comparison to Henry Standing Bear. Hoang had been released only two days after the incident at Khe Sanh, had already been reestablished to active flight duty, and had flown three more missions since the beginning of the week. “I buy you beer.”

“Thanks.”

He continued to smile at me. “You drunk.”

“Stinking.” He looked puzzled. “Stinking drunk.”

He brightened, always game for another piece of American slang. “Stinking drunk?”

“Stinking. Drunk.”

He held his beer up to mine as he chanted the phrase to himself. I picked up the bottle, wet with condensation, and tipped his. The English lesson made me think about Mai Kim, and thoughts of her battered away at the waves of alcohol that kept rolling onto the beaches of my mind. “Where’s Mai Kim?”

He looked at me blankly. “She not here.”

“Where is she?”

“She gone.”

I drank my beer. “Oh.”

I scratched my head and watched as my hat slipped off and fell on top of the foot pedals of the piano. Hoang reached down and snagged it and placed it back on my head backwards. “You stinking drunk!”

I pushed back and stood, none too steadily, and waited for the world to stop moving. It was getting late, and I decided to make the long trek back to the other side of the airfield where they’d lodged me in the visitors’ barracks. Hoang was next to me and put an arm on mine to help me steady a persistent list. “You go home?”

“Yep.” I stuck a hand out to grip the piano, which provided a little more support than the compact pilot. “If I can.”

“I help you.”

I half tripped over the piano bench and watched as everyone moved away. There was a brief upsurge of nausea, and I belched, which made me feel a little better. “I’m okay.”

As I turned and shambled toward the open doorway, Hoang raised one of my arms and slipped under to help me navigate what now appeared to be the pitching deck of the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge. I pulled away and fell down the two wooden steps that led out of the bar.

I rolled over and stared up into the hazy star-filled night. “Ouch.”

Hoang’s face was above mine. “You fall.”

“I guess I could use a little help.”

The Vietnamese pilot grabbed an arm and helped me get to my feet. He was surprisingly strong and half led, half supported me as I wavered down the deserted red-dirt road. He nodded his head. “You save my life.”

I looked at the ludicrous figure of the tiny man in the powder-blue jumpsuit and white silk scarf. “When?”

“You funny guy.”

I stopped and saluted the two air policemen who were stationed at Gate 055. The APs asked Hoang if I was going to make it or should they call a patrol with a jeep or maybe a forklift. Hoang shook his head and explained that we would walk the perimeter to the next gate to give me a chance to sober up. He also explained how I’d saved his life.

They said that was great.

He then explained how I’d saved other people’s lives, too.

They said that was great, too.

I puked.

I don’t think they thought that was so great.

Hoang supported me as we walked along the fenced boundary and looked at the moonlight casting down on the high whitewashed walls of the old French fort—Hotel California, as the locals referred to it. It didn’t look real, or it looked too real, and I felt like I was on some movie set where we would walk behind the structure and see the two-by-four bracings that held up the naked backs of the walls.

The nausea was creeping up in my throat again, and I stopped, leaning against something and sitting on a hard surface. “Hey, Hollywood, you ever see Beau Geste?”

“No, but need to talk to you.”

“One with Ronald Colman?”

He looked a little worried. “No...”

“Gary Cooper?”

“No.”

I looked at Hoang, who was blurred and wavering in the close strangeness of the Vietnamese night. “How about Gunga Din, did ya see that?”

"Lieutenant... need to tell you something.”

“What?”

He looked around. “Need to tell you something.”

I ignored him and started reciting Kipling.

You may talk o’ gin and beer

When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,

An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;

But when it comes to slaughter

You will do your work on water,

An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.

He edged away. “Lieutenant . . .”

I shook my head and immediately regretted it. “Doesn’t matter.”

I looked down and saw that my hand was resting on a cemetery headstone. I focused and saw more of them around me; they stretched into the late-night mist, thousands of them, and with the moonlight it was as if they were glowing like teeth. A dog barked in the distance, the sound rolling toward me like the cutting edge of harsh whispers.

When I looked up, Hoang was gone.

* * *

Quincy had gone back to work, and I’d made the march across the VA parade ground with my boots on.

It was Ranald Slidell Mackenzie that the fort was named after, and it was his residence to which the Doc had sent Cady. I thought about him and the history of the place as I crossed the foyer and climbed the steps to the upstairs ballroom. Mackenzie graduated West Point in 1862, number one in a class of twenty-eight. He fought in the Civil War and, before it was over, he’d been wounded four times, received seven brevets, and was a major general in charge of an entire division.

In our part of the country, however, his fame arose from the defeat of Dull Knife, the Cheyenne chief, and his village. On a cold November day in 1876, on the Red Forks of the Powder River, a spot just up the creek from where I’d been the day before, Mackenzie and four hundred men of the Fourth Cavalry, along with four hundred Indian scouts, took the Cheyenne chief and his 183 lodges by surprise. He destroyed the village and their supplies and effectively ended the nomadic lifestyle of the Northern Cheyenne nation.

Henry Standing Bear liked to remind anyone who would listen that Mackenzie died in his sister’s home on Staten Island, New York, in 1882, victim to the later stages of syphilis and, as Lucian would say, crazy as a waltzing pissant. It was, Henry also noted, not an unpleasant enough death.

Cady was standing in front of one of the large casement windows and was looking out at the last thin remains of snow that clung to the shadowed crevasses of the rocky heights. She was still barefoot. She turned and the broomstick skirt swayed as the wide-planked oak floor popped and echoed under my approach.

She raised her arms. “Dance with me?”

I smiled and took her hand. “There isn’t any music.”

“Sure there is.” She placed my other arm behind her back and led me in a fanciful waltz, her face tucked against my shoulder. We wheeled around the empty and silent ballroom, and I thought about Virgil White Buffalo and watched my daughter as her head rose and she smiled. After a full sweep of the dance floor, I bent down to kiss the U-shaped scar at her hairline and attempted to keep time to the counting of my blessings.

9

“Forty-two charges of manslaughter?”

“At the least.” I could picture the California native, born in the high desert up near Edwards Air Force Base, and sheriff of a county that had eighteen times the populace of my entire state. “They brought ’em in through Long Beach, and we got an anonymous tip from down at the municipal pier; container vessel out of Belgrade, Yugoslavia.”

“Why Yugoslavia?”

“The Vietnamese don’t need a visa to go there. About 40,000 Chinese go through the place every year, and they can blend. Not everybody can tell the difference, like you can.”

I took a breath and played at pulling Dog’s ear, his head resting on my knee. “What happened?”

“The traffickers had told the illegals on board the container ship to not make any noise and had packing crates of fruit pushed against the walls to help insulate any sound. The assholes closed the air vents, gave them four five-gallon buckets of water, and told them they’d be transferred in a matter of hours.”

I’d met Ned at the National Sheriff’s Association meeting in Phoenix, where we’d both avoided the social hour by hiding in the hotel bar and lamenting about our grown daughters.

* * *

He liked to fly-fish and had made the trek out to the Bighorns twice in the previous eight years. He was a good man, and I could hear the pain telling the story was causing him, but I needed it all. “Didn’t happen?”

“No. They loaded the container onto an eighteen-wheeler and headed up to Compton.” I waited. “This jaybird, Paquet, parks the truck in a lot behind his apartment and goes in to have lunch, watch a movie and, while he’s at it, shoot a little smack. He misjudges the product and ODs, leaving forty-two people in an airtight container on an asphalt parking lot in Southern California in July at 103 degrees.”

I slowly exhaled, and Dog looked at me.

“They stripped down to their underwear, tried drinking the juice from the tomatoes, and tried to pry open the vents.” After a moment, he continued. “We figure they started panicking after about six hours and began pulling the cases from the walls and pounding on the doors. I guess there was a lot of screaming and shouting, but nobody came. . . .” There was another pause. “Walt, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

“All of them?”

“All but one. I had a freight supervisor from the DOT, Danny Padilla, with me late that afternoon and we were the first ones in after we got the doors open. He said it was strange that it was a produce truck and not refrigerated; then we got the smell. I shined my flashlight, the floor was covered with bodies, none of them moving; like something out of Night of the Living Dead. Then I saw this young girl in the back. She was tapping the side of the container and trying to get our attention. She had to crawl over the bodies to get to us.”

“What happened to her?”

“Took her to County General, ran her through INS. Then she got a sponsorship from some group who deals with that sort of thing.”

“What was her name?”

“Not Paquet.” I listened to him rustling the papers. “Ngo Loi Kim. The poor kid. . . . Hell, I thought about adopting her myself.”

“Did you say last name Kim?”

“Yeah, ring a bell?”

I stared at the blotter on my desk and watched my hand write the name. “An old one. There was a girl I knew in Vietnam with that last name.”

The phone was silent for a second. “Walt, you know what the English translation for Kim is, don’t you?”

“Smith?”

He chuckled. “That, or Jones.”

Ruby appeared in the doorway, but I held up my hand and she disappeared with Dog trotting after her. “What else did you get on this Paquet?”

“Quite a bit, actually. We seized his phone records, computer, and a bunch of other stuff. There was somebody moving a lot of Vietnamese illegals through L.A. County—child porn and some brothels that were in operation down here—and it turned out he was the kahuna on the deal, or so the California state attorney general’s office tells me.”

“Big investigation?”

“Whopper. They even wanted to know how you were involved in all this.”

“Ever heard of this guy, Tran Van Tuyen?”

“Can’t say that I have, but I can make some phone calls from this end.”

“That would be great if you could. Thanks, Ned.” I could hear someone talking to him in the background and waited.

* * *

I looked up at the clock on my office wall and figured Vic would be back from lunch any time now. “What about the prostitution charges on the granddaughter?”

“First-timer, and she had the unfortunate, or fortunate—I guess it all depends on your point of view—experience of having her premier customer turn out to be an Orange County plainclothes deputy.” It was silent on the line. “It’s hard for some of these people to assimilate into a new culture, and if she was from the wrong side of the tracks . . .”

I stared at the name I had just printed on my desk blotter. “Hey, Ned?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you check and see where this Ngo Loi Kim ended up?”

“I can do that.” It was silent again, the way it always was when men talked about things they’d rather not. “What makes you think this big Indian fella didn’t do it?”

“Just a hunch.”

I could hear him sniff out a laugh on the other end. “Sounds like he did a number on you.” I didn’t say anything. “You want that information faxed or do you guys have e-mail?”

“I am speaking to you now from a push-button phone and hope you are duly impressed.” I transferred him to Ruby, and he called me a dirty name just before I pushed a button, and the coast grew silent.

I sat there and watched the aspen leaves quiver in the slight breeze along Clear Creek; the sky was still cloudless, and we continued to need rain. I was getting that feeling, the one like an itch I couldn’t quite reach. There was something going on with all of this, something below the surface, and I had a notion that when I found it, it was going to be something pretty simple.

I got up and walked down the hallway to the holding cells where the big man lay with an arm over his eyes and where Frymire sat snoring in his chair. My dispatcher/receptionist appeared a moment later with Dog and a notepad. Dog leaned against my leg with all the grace of a pet Kodiak, and Ruby lowered her voice upon seeing that everyone else in the room was asleep. “Henry says that Brandon will be back from Rapid City tomorrow, and Lucian called.” I looked at her blankly. “It’s Tuesday.”

I stared at her for a while longer, then shook my head and gestured toward the holding cell and whispered in return. “Vic and Cady are going to Sheridan to pick up Michael at the airport, so it’s my night to sit Virgil.”

“He said he’d bring the chessboard over here.” She crossed something off of her list and then sighed, making a face at the notepad.

“What?”

“More of these garbled e-mails from the school WiFi system marked BPS.”

I pretended like I knew what that meant. “Call the school board.”

“I am.”

“Anything from Saizarbitoria?”

“No.”

"Vic?”

“Court duty, and that’s the second time you’ve asked.”

“DCI?”

“No.”

“Do me a favor?” She looked up at me, the Webster’s Dictionary illustration of irritated. “I don’t have a computer, or I’d do it myself.”

"What?”

“Look up this organization, Children of the Dust, and see what their connection is with Tuyen.” I stood there, looking into the holding cell, unable to tell if the big guy was really asleep. “And let me know when that report from LASD comes through?”

“He called.”

“Tuyen?”

She nodded. “It was next on my list. He was asking about his granddaughter’s body and her personal effects.”

“Did you tell him that’s a DCI deal?”

“I did.”

“How did he respond?”

She looked up. “Not well, but considering the circumstance . . .”

“Did he mention anything about any official documentation that connects him with Ho Thi Paquet?” I could feel the big blue eyes on me.

“No, but he said that he’d be at the Hole in the Wall Motel, room number five.”

I returned her gaze. “He changed rooms?”

“He said the television wasn’t working in the other one.” She continued to watch me. “Walter, the man lost his granddaughter, and he’s sitting in a motel room by himself in Powder Junction.” Except for the quiet hum of the minifridge and Frymire’s snoring, it was silent in the holding area—her voice carried the extra weight of being whispered. “You don’t think that Saizarbitoria should go over and check on him?”

“I’ll go down in the morning—Cady will be spending time with Michael.” My voice sounded a little harsh, like it always did when I was embarrassed. I stood there for a while longer thinking it was probably time to take a Ruby moral sounding. “Can I ask you a question?”

She folded her arms. “Sure.”

“Do you think I’m a racist?”

She smiled and then covered it with a hand. “You?”

“Me.” I stuffed my hands in my pockets.

She tipped her head up and considered me, and I felt like I should be wearing a lead vest. “You mean because of your experiences in the war?”

“Yep.”

“No.”

It was a strong response, and one that didn’t leave a lot of room for further discussion. I glanced at her unyielding eyes and shrugged, turning to look back as Virgil’s arm moved and he looked at the two of us. “Just wondering.”

“You do have one prejudice though.” I looked back at her again from under the brim of my hat. “You don’t care about the living as much as you do the dead.”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

I leaned there on the headstone, but before long gravity and alcohol forced me to slip, and my head jarred with the impact of my ass hitting the ground. I sat there looking at my lap for what seemed like a long time before a streak of red light ricocheted off the thousands of white markers that surrounded me.

There was a movement to my right, and I rolled my head in that direction and rested it against the cool surface of the stone. There was somebody there. She was looking into the distance, standing in the graveyard. It took a while for me to find my voice. "Hey...”

The young woman turned. She was Vietnamese and familiar. She raised a hand and reached out to me, the fingers loose but imploring.

I started to move, but all I could do was swipe a gesture toward her. “Can’t, sorry....” I took a few breaths to get my stomach settled. I remembered her from somewhere but couldn’t see clearly through the red shooting stars.

Her fingers were still extended; they looked cool somehow, but they were just out of my grasp. I pushed my weight against the stone and raised myself on one arm, catching the edge of the next grave marker with my fingertips, and stood. I felt like a poleaxed Lazarus and wasn’t sure if I was going to make it.

I looked around, but she wasn’t there. When I saw her again, she was moving lithely through the stones, her fingers trailing on their surfaces, and I’m sure it was because I was drunk, but each time she touched a grave, I heard music.

I moved forward in her wake. She paused and looked back at me. The red lights flickered again, and there was a slight movement at the corner of her mouth like a smile.

“Wait, miss, please. . . .”

She turned slowly as though dancing, with two fingers whispering back toward me as I stomped forward like a sleepwalker, my head floating on my shoulders.

"Ma...” Her fingers traced the tops of the markers, and she played the headstones like a piano. She played like me, making the same mistakes, using the same dissonant chords.

I could see the waves of sound ringing from the markers like pebbles striking smooth water. The song was melancholy and sad, and I recognized it and started to sing—“A good man is hard to find / you always get the other kind”—I surged forward, but each time I touched a stone, the note it held was silenced until there was no more melody.

The night mist from the random bamboo stalks and irrigation ditches consumed her, the flickering red light was gone, and it was dark. I crashed against a line of markers and fell, lay there for a moment, breathing, and then finally rolled over again and pushed myself up. I looked for her, wavering a little, but there was no one there. I blinked. Nothing. Then I slowly stumbled forward using the now silent tombstones as crutches.

* * *

When I got through daydreaming, the sun was booming through the windows, and even with the air-conditioning it was hot. Frymire was still asleep in his chair with his arm in a cast and sling, his face discolored from his brow to down below the jawline.

I figured if Virgil White Buffalo had hit him any harder, it would’ve killed him.

The giant was standing by the bars now. He was so tall that he could see through the bars and out the window of the common area to the elementary school across the street. There was no formal school in the summer, but the county ran a day care, and the little citizens were scrambling over the playground like barn swallows. I had been a little unnerved when he’d first started doing it, but since reading his file I understood. Whenever the kids came out for recess, he would stand there with the bars in his hands and watch. When the bell rang and the youngsters went indoors, he would sit back down and the dark hair would once again enclose his face.

I thought about how the guys in Alcatraz could hear the New Year’s parties going on across the bay in San Francisco, how the prisoners at Folsom could listen to the passing trains, and wondered what they heard in Leavenworth.

I’d spoken to him, everybody had, but he remained incommunicative. He was scheduled for an examination with the attending physicians later in the week, and I was still trying to figure out how we were going to pull that one off without loss of life, limb, or deputy.

“He had a big lunch.” I turned to look at Chuck, who was now awake but was still talking a little funny. “We shared a family-style bucket of chicken from the Busy Bee; I had three pieces and he had thirteen, along with all the coleslaw, baked beans, six biscuits, and four cans of iced tea.”

We watched the giant as he continued to study the children. “That may be his plan, to eat his way out.”

Frymire stood and stretched, wincing a little when his right arm slipped. “I’m going to make a run to the bathroom, if that’s okay?”

I threw a thumb up, sending him out and then crossing to the window for a look at Virgil’s world. I watched the kids with him and thought about the boy and girl whose photograph was in the plastic child’s wallet, the beautiful woman who was tickling them on the bus stop bench, and about the hateful words scrawled on the chalkboard.

I thought about the file.

God.

The bell rang, and we watched the children flow to the open doors of the primary school as if somebody had pulled a stopper and they were all draining away. After the doors closed, I turned and looked up at Virgil. “Don’t worry, they’ll be back.”

He said nothing, lay down, and crossed his arm over his eyes again.

I watched him for a while before the intercom on the holding cell phone buzzed, and I crossed over and picked it up. “DCI on line one.”

I punched the required button. “Longmire.”

“No drugs.”

I nodded and leaned against the wall and tipped my hat back. “Hi, T.J.”

“Walt, this young woman was most likely a prostitute.”

“The sheriff of L.A. County pulled her sheet. He said it was a first offense.”

“Well, she might have been arrested only once, but the physical evidence indicates a number of vocational eccentricities.”

I could feel the old cooling in my face and the stillness in my hands. “Such as?”

“She’s been used to excess; internal abscess, ulceration, and thickening of the vaginal walls uncommon in a woman this young.” It was quiet on the line. “And she’s been modified.”

“What?”

“At some point in time, she was sewn up to appear virginal, and the breasts are implants; a poor job.”

I took a deep breath and let the dregs of emotion trail out with the exhale, as well as the haunting image of the Vietnamese woman lying along the interstate.

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

I looked at her body before the air patrolman stepped into my line of sight. She could have been asleep; it was difficult to tell in the gloom of the early morning. The red revolving lights of the air security patrol’s jeep had drawn me from the cemetery.

“Whoa there, chief. Where did you come from?”

He looked like one of the guys from Gate 055. I pointed back at the cemetery, immediately regretting the jarring that traveled from the middle of my back to the fracturing pain in my head. “Over there.”

He looked past my shoulder. “The graveyard?”

I stepped to the side and almost fell down. “Is that the girl I was following?”

He tried to block me again, but a voice commanded from behind. “Let him by—he’s one of us.”

I moved forward, and my eyes focused as Baranski looked up at me; he was sitting on the fender of a jeep and was filling out paperwork as the crimson lights flashed across our faces every two seconds. “Well, what’a ya know. It’s the First Division’s secret weapon.”

I stood there weaving, trying to get some idea of what was going on. “What are you guys doing out here?”

Mendoza stood and stepped in close to me and looked up from the second button of my uniform. “More to the point, man, what are you doing out here?”

I didn’t like his tone, so I pushed him. I guess I misjudged my own strength, because he fell backward and bounced off the jeep before falling to the ground. I felt one of the security detail grab my arm, but I threw an elbow at him and he went away. Another guy grabbed my other arm, but I pushed his helmet down and slammed him away, too. I stood there for a second and looked down at the woman who was lying on a collection of sandbags in the crumbled remains of the old bunker.

I recognized her and reached down through the pain in my head. She looked as if she’d fallen, so I thought the only thing to do was help her up.

There was a jarring at the back of my head, and suddenly my eyes wouldn’t focus. I could hear loud voices coming through in waves—and the world pitched to the left. I slowly started shifting in the same direction so I tried to correct the problem by transferring my weight, but then my legs collapsed from under me like a weak chair.

I hit the ground and could feel people piling on top of me. I lay there and could see the familiar face now, the stillness of the hand stretching to the arm, and finally Mai Kim’s eyes, which did not move.

* * *

“It’s your move, and it’s been your damn move for about three minutes now.” Lucian had decided to bring the game to the jail.

I looked at the chessboard again and couldn’t remember a single tactic. “Sorry.”

I was black and, from all appearances, black was in deep trouble. I reached across and hooked a knight in to take one of his pawns, a move he immediately countered by taking my knight with a rook that had been loitering with intent.

“Damn. . . .”

He shook his head, tipped back his hat, and clutched his chin like a fastball he was preparing to deliver high and inside. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You havin’ flashbacks or what?”

I half smiled. “I guess I am—daydreams at least....”

“This all about that Viet-nam-ese girl from out on the highway?”

“Yep.” I started to bring out my queen but thought better of it. “Her grandfather, the fellow I told you about?”

Lucian peered into the holding cell where Virgil sat slumped on the bunk with his back against the wall. He was staring at the space between us. Lucian nodded. “That Van Heflin character.”

Jesus.

Lucian’s malapropisms were usually reserved for the Indians, but the Vietnamese had given him a whole new venue.

“Tran Van Tuyen.” I explained the situation, along with the ambivalence of my feelings toward the man.

Lucian didn’t say anything but studied the board. “They ought’a burn down that ol’ ghost town, that or ship it off to Laramie, put in a slicky-slide and a carousel up and charge admission.”

I opted for a pawn, and he immediately stymied the move with the same rook. I thought about the old Doolittle Raider and his experience in that Japanese prison camp. “You ever think about the war?”

"Mine?” I nodded, and he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Not so much as I used to.”

We sat there for a while, sitting on the folding chairs and looking at the chessboard balanced on the wastepaper basket between us. Every once in a while a question hangs in your throat waiting to be asked of the exact wrong person, but I asked it anyway. He laughed hard, fighting to catch his breath. “You?”

I nodded.

He shook his head. “You could do with a dose of prejudice.”

It was, after all, the response I expected. I brought my queen out.

He sat there looking at the board as I watched him, the smile slowly fading from his face as his ears plugged with the racket of two radial-cylinder Pratt and Whitney engines roaring him into his past. I listened to the ticking of the clock on the wall and waited.

“We ditched just off the Chinese coast, and the impact pushed my copilot, Frank, through the windshield. We had two men that were wounded so bad that they drowned before we could get to shore. A civil patrol pulled Frank and me out and pretty well beat the shit out of us right there on the boat. I guess that was one of the scary parts; there were so many of ’em that I figured they’d just tear us apart. Near as I could make out, an officer in the Kempeitai pulled ’em off us and claimed us as prisoners of Tojo, and they shipped us off to Shanghai in occupied China.”

“They got ten of you, right?”

He worked his jaw, moved his other bishop, and then leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. It was like he’d been compacted there by the memories of his war. His sleeves were rolled up on his thin snap-front shirt, and I watched his Adam’s apple as it bobbed the top button a few times before he said anything. “They beat the shit out of us on a regular basis with them little bamboo, kendo swords, shinai. . . . Then they finally got around to shipping us off to Tokyo where they interrogated us for a couple more weeks.”

He reached down and picked up his bottle of Rainier, turning it so that the label faced him. It was quiet again, and I wasn’t sure if he wanted to go any further. “We don’t have to talk about this, if you don’t want to.”

“I’m trying to tell you something, so shut up and listen.”

I smiled at him and watched as the jaw worked some more. He sipped his beer and rested it on his prosthetic knee. “They wanted us to sign these statements sayin’ we’d committed crimes against Japo citizens—you know, bombed hospitals, strafed schoolchildren, and shit like that.” His mahogany eyes came up and met mine. “... Which we didn’t.”

I moved my queen again. “I’d imagine they asked with all due courtesy?”

“Oh, hell yeah.” He leaned back in and examined the board. “They started out pretty easy, you know, not lettin’ ya sleep for a couple days, no food, hardly any water. . . .” He took another sip of his beer and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Get you good and loopy and then they’d start in with the hard stuff.” He took a deep breath and held it, finally letting it out with the words. “They had this one trick where they’d tie a wire around your head and twist it with one of them little kendo swords and they finally did it to Frank for so long that his jaw broke.”

I studied the hardness in the old man’s eyes as they reflected the light like tiny drops of crude oil.

“Any man that ever tells you that he won’t break no matter what they do to him?” We both remained silent until his black eyes blinked. “They shipped us back to Shanghai and decided they were gonna have a trial, not a trial in any sense of justice, since they’d already found us guilty, but they needed to determine what kind of punishment was called for. Frank’s jaw was infected, and he was pretty weak by that time, so they’d take the two of us in together. We were in this solitary confinement compound at Kiangwan Prison, and they’d come get me and I’d lead Frank up these concrete steps into this shitty little wooden-slat building and they’d scream and yell about us and at us for a couple of hours, us not understandin’ a single word; then they’d take us back out and throw us in our cells until they’d come and get us the next day and do it all over again.” A tight little curve appeared at the corner of his mouth. “With the obvious limitations of not bein’ able to speak or write Japanese, we threw up a brilliant defense, and do you know them sons-of-bitches still found us guilty?”

“Hard to believe.”

He moved a rook, and his hand stayed on the little wooden piece. “October 15, 1942. They gave us pencil and paper to write good-bye notes to our family, and I wrote mine to my mother and asked her to please ask Franklin Delano Roosevelt to bomb these little yellow bastards back into the Stone Age with all due speed.” He drank some more. “She never got it, so I guess it got lost in the mail. . . .” The short-lived smile faded again.

“What happened?”

He stared at the chessboard and withdrew his hand from the rook. “They put us all in this concrete bunker with these narrow slit openings and come and got the first three. They took ’em outside and made ’em kneel and tied ’em off to these stubby little crosses, and then they just shot ’em in the back of the head, one by one.”

I moved my queen in a disinterested fashion. “They let you live.”

He watched me move and then nodded. “I guess they felt like they’d made their point, so the rest of us got life imprisonment. ”

“What happened to Frank?”

“Died in a camp in occupied China.” He reached over to straighten the angle of the wooden board on the trashcan. “So, you asked me if I thought about the war much—an’ I guess the honest answer would be, yes, I still think about it a lot. At least I think about Frank....”

“Check.”

I’d been watching Lucian’s face but hadn’t seen his lips move. I looked down at the board, and it was true that I’d accidentally positioned my queen for an impending and final victory over Lucian’s king. I looked up at the same time he did, a questioning expression on his face as he asked, “Did you just say check?”

I shook my head. “No, I thought you did.”

We both turned and looked at the big Indian, seated on the bunk and pointing a finger as big as a bratwurst toward the chessboard. The resonance of Virgil’s voice rattled through the damage in his throat like a very large and singular exhaust.

“Check.”

10

“What the fuck.” She sipped her coffee and then added another sugar to the four she’d already dumped in her mug. “He didn’t say anything else?”

I kept my volume low, even though she was still talking in full voice. There were a gaggle of tourists at the other end of the Busy Bee counter, and I saw no reason why they should be privy to the finer points of Virgil White Buffalo’s life. “No, but he and Lucian played until about three this morning. Prison chess, fast-moving; twenty-seven games, and Lucian only won five.”

“That’s why the old pervert’s asleep on the floor; he’s gathering his strength for another assault.” I nodded and took a sip of my own coffee; Dorothy refilled my mug as it touched the counter.

The proprietor of the café put the pot back on the warmer and parked herself within easy ear reach. “Michael make it in okay?”

I nodded. “Yep. Cady picked him up last night, and I haven’t heard from them since.”

She studied me, then Vic, and then changed the subject. “Any word from up on the Rez?”

Dorothy generally knew more of what was going on in the county than I did, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have her in on this part of the conversation. “Henry left a message that he and Brandon White Buffalo would be back from South Dakota this morning with a special guest.”

They both looked at me, but Vic was the first to respond. “A what?”

“A special guest.” I shrugged. “It’s Henry.”

Vic slipped her hair behind an ear and palmed her chin; evidently, it was a good hair day. "And...?”

“And what?”

My deputy spoke through her muffling hand, the only filter she had. “You said you read the report at the VA over in Sheridan. So, what’s the story on the jolly red giant?”

I glanced up at the chief cook and bottle washer. “How’s the usual coming?”

She glanced at the manila envelope resting on the counter between Vic and me and then studied my face. “Does this mean you’re dismissing me?”

I sighed. “I’m just not so sure that you’re going to want to hear all of this.”

She nodded and smiled. “Well, it’s good enough for me that you’d rather I didn’t.” She picked up both coffee pots, decaf and regular, from the warmers and retreated toward the tourists. “How are you folks doing?”

I took a deep breath and turned to my undersheriff. “You want the whole dog-and-pony show?” I pushed my elbows on the counter and looked out the doorway toward Clear Creek. Dorothy had the glass door propped open, and I was enjoying the cool from the screen door at my back before the heat of the day. “Virgil was misdiagnosed as mentally deficient by Big Horn County Health because of a speech impediment, but he graduated from Lodge Grass High School in ’68 anyway and got culled into Project 100,000.”

“What was that?”

“It was supposedly a program for social uplift. Every year, a percentage that scored at the bottom of the military aptitude test were inducted and then shipped off to Vietnam. Some uplift.”

I held my mug there, a little away from my mouth. I thought about the file and tried to remember the details. “He showed an aptitude for the art of war and got transferred to the 101st Airborne Division’s reconnaissance patrol. They were up in the central highlands north of Dak To looking for VC alongside this river, and they found them. . . .” I sipped my coffee. “About two regiments of ’em.”

I placed my mug down and looked at her. “Small-arms fire pinned them down for about eight hours, thirteen dead and twenty-three wounded. Air support finally arrived, and they started driving the North Vietnamese back enough for them to medevac the wounded out with a T-bar.” She started to raise her hand like she was in school. “It’s a harness and winch system dropped about a hundred feet from a helicopter.”

I leaned in, studying the collection of porcelain, plastic, glass, and wooden bees along the shelf above the range hood. “The VC saw that everybody’s concentrating on getting the wounded out, so they mounted a counteroffensive. The rest of the platoon hugged dirt and prayed for more support and suddenly this giant came up out of the ditch beside the road and started moving up and down the line firing his 16 in single shots, moving from the high spots to the low, each shot taking out a hostile as he went, firing with absolute purpose and never saying a word.”

“Fuck me.”

“The report says he went through three clips.” I took a breath and continued. “There were less than twenty men left in the platoon, but the battalion commander, safe in one of the helicopters, radioed back for them to attack again and believe it or not, they did. This Lieutenant Shields raised his rifle arm up like he’s in some bad Audie Murphy movie and screamed, ‘Follow me.’ The whole platoon, including Virgil, broke rank and followed this lieutenant straight into an ambush, where six seconds later, twelve more were dead, three were critically wounded, and they’re left with only three effectives. . . .”

“One of them being Virgil White Buffalo.”

I nodded at the marbled surface of the Formica counter. “The wounded were stuck in this gully, where Virgil made all three trips and dragged each one of them back to the original landing zone, including the lieutenant, who got on the horn and called for extraction but was told by this colonel in the helicopter that they needed to charge this machine gun nest to their right instead.”

She ran her fingers through her hair and looked at me in disbelief. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“This lieutenant started to get up.”

“No way.”

“And Virgil smacked him alongside the head with the butt of his M16, knocking him out cold.” I watched as she bit her lip to keep from laughing. “Then, just for good measure, Virgil rolled over and threw a few rounds at the battalion commander’s helicopter.”

She laughed, and the tourists looked at us.

“The colonel said, ‘I’ve got incoming, I’ve got incoming...’ and flew off.”

I nudged the handle on my mug and noticed the little half-ring on the counter that it left behind. “So there they were without any air support or EVAC, and this lieutenant, Tim Shields, the one that wrote up the report, came to and leaned over to Virgil to say, ‘We are going to die.’ Virgil told him that they could slip down in the river; that it’s only about knee-deep with a four-foot berm on either side so that they could retreat. This lieutenant told Virgil that’s a good idea and gave him the M60 and ordered him to provide rear guard as the rest of them retreated a little farther down the river, where they’ll wait.”

She groaned.

“They left him. So there he sat, alone, with a half-empty M60 machine gun and the better part of a North Vietnamese regiment on the way. The shooting began, and he returned fire and started working his way back down the river for the next three hours, alternately dealing with the mosquitoes, leeches, and the North Vietnamese. He got to an embankment that led to a roadway, where he tossed the empty M60 into the river, pulled out his sidearm, and started jogging into the night. Three clicks down the road, he ran into a patrol.”

“Ours?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Thank God.”

“They called in an EVAC, and an hour later Virgil was standing tall in front of the same lieutenant and battalion commander, who were screaming at him for getting lost and losing the M60. Virgil, after enduring sixteen hours of close combat, most of it single-handed, told them to stop yelling at him and that he’s going to go take a nap. The lieutenant grabbed Virgil’s arm, and Virgil swung around and punched him in the face, breaking his nose and driving the bone shards into his brain, which killed him instantly.”

She didn’t move. “Manslaughter, at worst.”

I looked out the windows at the flickering leaves alternating their light and dark sides. “Not in this man’s army. The colonel pushed and got a premeditated murder charge stemming from Virgil having struck his commanding officer while under fire in the field. Nobody stepped forward to say anything, and Virgil gets convicted of second-degree murder with a twenty-two-year hard-labor sentence in Leavenworth.”

Vic leaned in. “Twenty-two years?”

“With good behavior, he got out in seventeen.” I tapped the manila envelope that I had put on the counter. “I had Ruby check the database and she came up with the rest.” I opened the folder and read the small print on the faxed sheets. “On the walk home . . .”

“From Leavenworth, Kansas?”

I nodded. “He was picked up by the Troop E highway patrol and told that he can’t hitchhike on the interstate. They dropped him off just outside of Abilene where he got a ride from a fellow by the name of Peter Moore and a young girl, Betty Coleman, who said that they’re on their way from East St. Louis and could give him a lift as far as Rapid City. They got up near North Platte, Nebraska, that night, where this Moore says he’s tired. Virgil offered to drive, but this guy said that they’ll just sleep in the car, the two of them in the front and Virgil in the back. The next morning, Peter Moore was found with his head caved in, and Betty Coleman was picked up by the North Platte Police Department and swore that Virgil did it.”

"Drugs?”

I nodded. “Cocaine found on Betty’s person and in Peter Moore’s bloodstream. Virgil got picked up by the Nebraska Highway Patrol and had one wicked-looking blunt trauma and skull fracture.”

“That would explain the scar.”

“Virgil stated that Moore attacked him in the night with a claw hammer and that he fought the guy off, but that Moore was alive when he left with Betty Coleman.”

"They test Virgil?”

"No, but with an eyewitness and Virgil’s record . . .”

“They print the hammer?”

I sipped my coffee. “Missing.”

“She did it, finished this Moore guy off after Virgil split, and then took the drugs.”

“Yep, but she was a petite little blonde, and Virgil was a seven-foot Indian, dishonorably discharged and a convicted murderer.” I set my empty mug back on the counter. “Ten to twelve.”

Dorothy sidled over and motioned with the regular coffee; she knew that the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department ran on heavy fuel. “Can I interrupt long enough for a refifill?”

We both slid our mugs forward, and I smiled up at her. “How’s the usual coming?”

She studied me some more and then turned toward the grill.

I looked down at the file and, once again, lowered my voice. “The prison psychologist, this Jim McKee at the Nebraska State Pen, got the Native American Defense League to check Virgil’s records and neither of them thought he did it, so they started an investigation. Turned out Peter Moore had a record as long as my arm, and they found that there was a warrant on a homicide that occurred back in East St. Louis six weeks before.”

She leaned in closer, and I could see the faded freckles at the base of her throat. “Don’t spoil it for me. Some other ass-clown was beat to death with a hammer?”

I swallowed, this time without the assistance of coffee. “You got it. The NADL fought the good fight, but Betty Coleman stuck to her story even after being sentenced to fourteen months for possession, after which she commited suicide.” I flipped the folder shut. “Virgil did ten, with good behavior, and went to the VA when he got out.” I sighed. “Where he just disappeared. No tax records, DMV, nothing. I asked Quincy, but he says it happens a lot with the Indians—they just disappear into the Rez and are never heard from again.”

“Seventeen and ten . . .” She crossed her arms and turned her stool toward me. “You think he’s been living under the highway for nine years?”

“I don’t know.”

Dorothy turned back and put two Denver omelets in front of us. I considered my plate. “This the usual?”

She wrote up a check for the tourists and walked away without looking at me. “Usually.”

* * *

I am a big man, but with current company I was feeling a little measly. I’m maybe an inch taller than Henry, but the other two men standing in my reception area barely missed hitting their heads on the trim above the entryway as they came up the steps.

The first giant leaned over to pull me in for a one-arm hug, for which I was grateful, since I’d seen Brandon White Buffalo lift Henry Standing Bear with both arms and hold him off the ground till the Bear’s face had gone redder. “Lawman, how are you?”

“Still stuck with myself.”

The other giant, and Henry’s special guest, was maybe in his forties and looked strangely familiar. I smiled and extended my hand. “Walt Longmire; have we met?”

"Eli ... Eli White Buffalo.” He shook my hand and then stepped back. His hands were large and soft, but capable. “No, we haven’t.”

He was perhaps a shade shorter than Brandon, but not by much, and wore a freshly starched white dress shirt, jeans with a cowboy crease, a hand-tooled belt with a large turquoise belt buckle, and black alligator boots. His glossy black hair was pulled back in a single ponytail that was held with an elaborate silver and turquoise clasp.

Artist; had to be.

Eli seemed a little nervous, placed his hands in his back pockets, and then glanced toward Ruby, who sat quietly watching the two giants from behind the reception desk. Dog was with her; he stared at us, seemingly noncommittal. Vic studied both men from her perch on Ruby’s desk.

Brandon placed a hand on my shoulder, covering it. “You think you have some of my family, lawman?”

“It’s possible.”

He smiled the great smile and inclined his head. “Let’s go see?”

* * *

They were on game nine for the morning and, from the look on Lucian’s face, I assumed he had yet to beat the colossus. I walked over to the board. “You win one yet?”

He muttered and pulled his unlit pipe from his mouth. “No, and I’m about to get my ass kicked again.” He looked at his king on the border, which was completely surrounded by other pieces and a smothered mate. He kept his finger on the black sovereign, finally tipping him over.

The old sheriff turned and looked at the collected force, including the gigantic Indians. “Jesus, just what he needs— reinforcements.”

I scooped up the board and transferred it to the counter of the kitchenette. I noticed that Eli remained near the doorway and around the corner with Vic. Lucian stood to the side, but his chair remained in front of the cell. Brandon ignored it and stood in front of the bars. He looked down at Virgil, who was still seated on the bunk. “Na-ho e-ho ohtse.”

The giant in the cell remained silent, lowering the hand that had held his hair back, the hair once again covering his face and both enormous hands hanging limp over his knees.

Brandon stooped down and looked through the bars. He was speaking Cheyenne. "Ne-tsehese-nestse-he?”

Virgil breathed in deeply and let out with a sigh, still saying nothing.

Brandon leaned in and placed a hand on the bars, smoothly shifting from Cheyenne to Lakota. “Nituwe hwo?”

The giant’s head rose to look at Brandon, but he still said nothing.

“Tokiya yaunhan hwo? ” Still nothing. “Taku eniciyapi hwo?”

The voice erupted, hoarse from no practice, and he spoke in a deep bass. “Tatankaska . . .”

Brandon touched his chest and smiled. “Lila Tatankaska.”

Virgil’s head inclined, and he leaned forward, just a little. “Niyate kin tanyan icage. . . . Canhanp hanska etan maku wo-ptecela onzoge?”

Brandon choked out a laugh, finally turning to look at us. “This is my uncle, who used to call me Begs-for-Candy-in-Short-Pants. ” His eyes strayed from Henry and me, and he looked toward Eli, motioning him to step forward so that he could introduce him as he stood and spoke to Virgil again, but this time in Crow. “Hená de dalockbajak, Eli?”

As Eli stepped around the corner, Virgil slowly rose, standing almost a full head above the other two. Eli stepped to the bars and looked up into the face of the giant and, to our utter amazement, he spit.

I’ve been spit on—it’s a part of law enforcement that you never get used to, but it hardly ever comes completely unexpectedly. This did, and it was a mouthful.

I stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, there’s no need . . .”

He shrugged me off and lunged at the bars where he got a hold of Virgil’s hair and pulled his face into the metal. Virgil offered no resistance, but Brandon grabbed Eli’s other arm and pulled it, as the younger man yanked Virgil’s head into the bars again. He screamed at him. “Vasica! Tuktetanhan yau hwo?! Tokel oniglakin kta hwo?! Taku ehe kin, ecel ecanu sni! ”

With Henry and Lucian’s help, we got Eli away, but the effort threw all of us off balance and onto the floor in an agitated version of Twister. Eli was the first to stand, and he spit on Virgil again, whose face was bleeding from a busted lip.

Eli stopped as we all scrambled to get up and made a dismissive gesture. “Le tuwa ta sunka hwo?!” He slammed his fists against the bars, then turned and strode out of the room and down the hallway. He pushed Vic back as he went. I was the first of the pile to the door and loped after Vic down the hall after Eli.

We found him on the hardwood floor at the bottom of the stairs in a reverse wristlock with Tran Van Tuyen’s knee lodged at the small of the Indian’s back. Dog was barking from behind Ruby’s desk, and she stood with her open mouth covered with her hand.

I looked at the man in the black leather jacket and black slacks, who looked particularly small in comparison with Eli White Buffalo. He smiled a flat smile up at me. “Is this the man who killed my granddaughter?”

I shook my head. “No, it isn’t.”

The sickly smile faded, and his eyes turned back to the large man he’d incapacitated. “Then, perhaps, I should let him go?”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

Baranski and Mendoza stood away from the bars and watched me impassively. “Why don’t you tell us what you were doing out there near the old fort with a dead girl?”

I could feel a cooling in my face, and my hands steadied. The security police had put a pretty good set of lumps on my head and evidently somebody had stood on my hand while they’d cuffed me, because most of the skin on the back of my fingers was gone. There was a metal desk by the doorway leading to the brig, where I was being held. “Let me out of here.”

Mendoza sat on the edge of the desk and thumbed the crease in his uniform pants. “Near as we can tell, you left the lounge a little after Mai Kim, and the APs at Gate 055 said you came by there.”

“Open. This. Damn. Door.” My eyes stayed on them as they looked at each other.

“They said you weren’t alone, man.”

“Now.”

Mendoza sighed and reached behind him and picked up my sidearm, wrapped in the Sam Browne holster, and handed a large ring of keys to Baranski. “The major is getting your papers together; looks like you’re headed back, pronto.”

I didn’t say anything but just stood there looking at them with my hands chiseled into fists; Baranski shook his head and stepped forward, unlocking the bars and stepping back and out of the way as I pushed the cell door open. They followed me out, down the hallway, and through the front door of the security headquarters onto the sunny streets of Tan Son Nhut’s miniature city. Mendoza hung back but handed my holstered Colt to Baranski, who quickened his pace to pull up beside me.

“The CO says they would have shipped your ass out today, but with the heightened security and the holiday, they couldn’t make arrangements to transport you back to BHQ.”

The CID man reached up and grabbed my shoulder, but I slapped his arm away and pulled up short. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and leveraged him across the dirt street and into a corrugated sheet-metal wall. Mendoza grabbed my arm, but I elbowed him and pushed him out of the way.

I turned back to Baranski and, without my even having time to notice, he had pushed the blunt barrel of my sidearm under my chin. He held it there. He smiled, and I heard the unmistakable sound of the .45 being cocked.

Neither of us blinked. “You better pull that trigger, ’cause that’s the only way you’re gonna stop me.”

I saw his eyes shift, and we both heard the safeties go off of more than one M16, behind me and to the right. A voice I didn’t know spoke in a steady and loud tone. “We got a problem here, Lieutenant?”

Baranski’s eyes returned to mine and widened just a little. I slowly released him. I could see four security airmen from the 377th, all of them with their automatic weapons trained on my right eye.

Baranski spoke quickly. “Look, there’s no need.”

One of the security detachment, a captain, swiveled the barrel of his rifle toward the CID man. “You wanna secure that weapon, sir?”

Baranski lowered the .45 just a bit and then carefully used both hands to aim the barrel at the dirt and lowered the hammer, and slowly glided the Colt back into my loose holster, which was wound around his fist. “We’re clear.”

The airmen lowered their M16s to their hips, still keeping them generally pointed in our direction. The captain was a goofy-looking guy with eyebrows and a smile that sloped down at the sides of his face. “Not too smart having a riot just outside of security headquarters, sir.”

Mendoza was still sitting on the ground, but Baranski straightened his collar, smoothed the front of his uniform, and tucked my .45 under his arm. “No riot, Captain—just a little interservice miscommunication. ”

The captain continued to study me from under his helmet, and it was like a voice coming from a cave. I got the feeling most of his brains were down in his neck, and he probably had the same thoughts about me. “You the Marine who broke the nose on one of my men last night?”

My breath gummed up my throat, but I still got it out. “Coincidentally. ” I sounded sarcastic, maybe even more than I wanted to.

He watched me and then nodded. “Well, why don’t we just take this little party back inside.”

“There’s no need for that, Captain.” Baranski took a step forward and flipped out his ID. “We’re with security, too.” The captain studied the Central Intelligence Detachment card and badge, looked at Baranski, then at me. He took a step back and fully lowered his weapon. They all did.

“All right, sir.”

Baranski smiled, showing the gaps in his front teeth, and stuffed his wallet back in his pants. “Thanks, Cap. I owe you one.”

The security detachment backed away from us and continued down the street. Baranski spoke in a soft, friendly voice and continued to smile as the captain glanced back at us one last time. “That’s right, keep going, you stupid motherfuckers.” One final wave, and he turned to look at me.

I met his eye and thought about how calm he’d been with my pistol under my chin. “I’m not leaving until I find out who killed her.” He shook his head and bumped up a smoke from the Camels in his breast pocket. He bit the cigarette and extended the pack to me. “I don’t smoke.”

He flipped open his Zippo and lit up with a deep inhale, the streams of smoke continuing into his nostrils as he pulled the cigarette away from his mouth. “Maybe you should—it might help calm you down.”

* * *

“I was hoping that you could assist me in making the arrangements for my granddaughter’s body to be transported once it’s released?” Tuyen sat in the chair opposite my desk and held the cup of coffee Ruby had given him.

“Certainly.”

Tran Van Tuyen was speaking into the mug and had yet to look up. “You may find this strange, but I was actually thinking of a cremation and scattering her ashes near the place she died.”

I was a little surprised. “You don’t want to take her back to California?”

His head shook slightly. “I don’t think her spirit was ever happy there, and I was thinking that she could, perhaps, find peace here.”

I nodded and tipped the brim of my hat, which was resting crown down on my desk. I watched as it turned slightly to the left. “Well, with a situation like this, it may be a while before they release Ho Thi, so you’ll have a bit of time to think about that.” There was no immediate response, and I hoped that he was coming to terms with the loss. “It’s a standard procedure with an open homicide investigation. We don’t want to miss anything that might lead us to apprehending the individual responsible.”

“Yes. I understand.”

He didn’t say anything else, so I waited. I’d sacrificed lunch with Vic, who had joined Cady and Michael. The Cheyenne Nation and the Crow contingency were having a cooling-off period out on the bench beside the walkway leading to the courthouse. I had told them to wait, that I’d be out as soon as I was through with Tuyen.

I had gotten a washcloth for Virgil, run it under some hot water, and handed it to him. We still had a doctor’s examination to contend with, and I wanted to get a closer look at the big man’s face, but it was all going to have to wait until I was finished with the dead woman’s grandfather.

Tuyen had followed me back to my office, and here we sat. “That was pretty slick out there.” His head rose, and he looked at me blankly. “With Eli?”

There was a sudden look of realization, and he sighed a quick laugh. “It is difficult to forget, once you have been properly trained.”

“Yep.”

After a moment, he spoke again. “Do you think about the war a great deal, Sheriff?”

I touched the brim of my hat with a forefinger in an attempt to straighten it and was relieved that someone else was asking the question. “A lot more, lately, it seems.”

“Because of my granddaughter?”

I looked up at him. “Yep, I believe so.”

He stood and put the untouched cup of coffee on the corner of my desk, and I thought about offering him tea next time. “Would it be possible for me to see my granddaughter’s things?”

It was the third time he’d asked and DCI had returned some of the items, so I nodded and motioned for him to follow me to the basement to our personal belongings cabinets.

Once there, I opened the large drawer and placed the small collection of items on the counter—the purse, the change, the French novel, the scarf, and the keys. The photograph of Mai Kim and me was being held, along with her clothes and herself. “What would you like to do about the car?”

He looked at the small group of objects. “Excuse me?”

“The car she was driving; I was wondering what you’d like to have done with it?”

“I may want to look at it.”

I wondered why. “I can make arrangements for it to be shipped back up here from Cheyenne, if you want.”

“Yes, thank you.” I waited as he looked at the items on the counter. “And the computer?”

“Excuse me?”

He cleared his throat. “Ho Thi had a computer of mine. It was not with her?”

“No.” I studied him, as he continued to look at her things. “Is there something wrong?”

He took a deep breath. “It doesn’t seem like a great deal . . . for a lifetime, does it?”

* * *

I pushed open the door and walked out to the war council. “How’s it going?”

Eli sat on the far side of the bench, his elbows on his knees, and looked as though he was memorizing the cracks in the sidewalk. Brandon stood with his thumbs hitched in the back pockets of his jeans, and Henry watched the side of Eli’s face. The Cheyenne Nation turned and looked up at me. “This may take a while.”

I beat a slow retreat back to my office. Ruby was holding her phone up to me. “Saizarbitoria.”

I came inside and sat on her desk, took the receiver, and reached down to pet Dog. “What’s up, Sancho?”

“Jim Craft wants to know if you have any idea how many credit cards the Flying J truck stop processes in a twenty-four-hour period.”

I ruffled Dog’s ear, and he mouthed my hand with his big teeth. “Tell him I’ll buy him lunch next time I’m through Casper. ” I wiped the slobber off on my jeans. “What’ve you got?”

“The manager says that there was a card left at the counter and that they contacted the company, who in turn contacted Tuyen.”

“Well, it was worth a try.”

“Boss, there’s something else....”

His tone froze me. “What?”

“The manager says that he remembered the incident because he was running an inventory that night and got a glimpse of the car as it pulled away.”

“Yep?”

“He said the card came back declined and reported stolen, so the woman working the register called it in and they told her to confiscate it. She did and got the manager as the girl ran out of the store with two bottles of water and a large bag of chips. The manager said he saw the suspect jump in and back into a concrete spacer before hitting the accelerator and tearing out onto I-25 headed north.”

It was silent on the line, and I noticed I wasn’t breathing.

"Walt...he said there were two girls in the car.”

11

Henry rode with me as we headed south to Powder Junction in an attempt to overtake Tuyen’s Land Rover, but we hadn’t seen it so far. He looked at a nondescript section of the frontage road, just off I-25. “Who died there?”

Most people didn’t like riding with me, and most of my friends and family had learned to not ask when my eyes unfocused on some lonely stretch of prairie or on a desolate part of the road. “Those three kids that turned over that Camaro on the way back up from the Powder Junction Rodeo back in ’98.”

“Have I ever told you how depressing it is to ride in this county with you?”

I switched on the emergency lights and coaxed the Bullet up past eighty-five. “Well, you never look at the place the same way.”

He nodded. “Where is Vic?”

I made a face. “What’s that got to do with anything?” He didn’t answer, and I glanced at the clock on the radio of my truck. “With Cady and Michael, eating lunch.”

He adjusted his signature Fort Smith Big Lip Carp Tournament ball cap and carefully placed his thick ponytail through the adjustable strap. “At the risk of getting my head bitten off, I will ask again. How is that going?”

I watched the road, then readjusted in my seat and propped an elbow on the armrest. “I don’t know.” I was the picture of annoyance and uncertainty.

The Bear laughed. “You do not know?”

I sighed. “We . . . When we . . . When we were back in Philadelphia?”

“Yes.”

“We got really close.”

“Yes.”

“But that was a different context and now we’re back home and it’s different.”

“Yes.”

I started to speak, then stopped, waited another moment, and then continued. “What happened back there between the two of us—I’m not so sure it should’ve happened. Not so much me, but her.” I turned up the air-conditioning as it seemed to be growing even hotter in the cab. Pretty soon, I was going to run out of knobs to play with; maybe it was a family trait. “I just think that she might’ve done it because she felt sorry for me.”

He stared at the side of my face. “There are a multitude of reasons why she might have instigated the ... intimacy between the two of you. A sense of mortality connected with Cady’s accident, strangers in a strange land . . .”

“She was born there.”

He stuck out a hand to silence me. “Let me finish?”

“Sorry.”

“Perhaps even a competitive response to her mother, but the one I would be willing to believe the most readily is that she deeply cares for you. Not about you, but for you, and there is a difference.” He turned back toward the windshield. “That, or it was a mercy fuck.” I turned and looked at him, and he shrugged. “To use her terminology.” The Bear drummed his long fingers on the dash and changed the subject. “So, you think Tuyen knows something?”

I stared at the road. “I’m not talking to you anymore.”

“I was joking.”

“It wasn’t funny.”

He gazed at the rolling prairie. “It was a little funny.”

We both escaped into our separate silences and watched the golden-brown grass sweep patterns in the heated wind. We needed rain, soon, or all of Absaroka County would be a tinderbox.

I knew full well that I’d never outlast him, so I started talking again, anxious to pick up another conversational thread. “I’m thinking Tuyen might know if Ho Thi had any friends, or if anyone else is missing.” We passed a wide load, carrying two halves of a modular home, and navigated back into the righthand lane. “I’ve got calls into the Los Angeles and Orange County Sheriff ’s Departments to see if they can get me anything, but Tuyen is here and he might be useful.”

Henry watched the road. “Did the manager at the Flying J say that the girl was Asian?”

“Jim said the manager was unsure, but that they were both female and had long dark hair.”

He shrugged. “Possibly Native...”

“Wouldn’t be the first time an Indian girl was hitchhiking up I-25, but I’m not betting on it.”

“Why do you want this young woman, if she exists, to be Vietnamese?”

I glanced at him. “It would mean that somebody’s alive who knows what’s going on.” My eyes returned to the road. “Why do you ask that question?”

He continued studying me. “I sometimes wonder if you are trying to come to terms with two mysteries almost four decades apart.”

I drove and stared at another patch of the highway where more lives had come to an abrupt halt. I remembered who they were, their names, their family, their friends; these dead weren’t the ones I worried about—there were people who would remember them. It was the ones who had died truly alone who concerned me most. If no one remembered them, were they ever really here? I took a deep breath and forced my eyes back to the road. “Ruby says I care about dead people more than the living.”

Henry said nothing.

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

I wasn’t letting him go, and there wasn’t anybody else in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge to save him.

They had all run away.

My hand fit well around his throat, and I was surprised at how little effort it took to hold Le Khang against the wall, a good foot and a half off the floor. “I don’t like those answers....”

He squeaked, which I took as an answer of sorts, so I lowered his feet to the plywood. He tried to yank away, but I still had him pinned pretty well. “She no say!”

I started lifting him again, but he shook his head so I put him back down. “She go with customer!”

“Who?”

“No say...” I tightened my hold, but he slapped at my arm and I eased off. “Air force personnel, fly-boy.”

“Gimme a name.”

“No name.” I shrugged and started to pick him up again. “Thunderchief, F-105! He fly F-105 name Jumpin’ Jolene!”

I let go of his throat and then threw an index finger in his face. “This better be the straight dope, because if it’s not—I’m gonna be back, and brother you do not want that.” Mendoza and Baranski stepped aside as I passed between them, and they followed behind me as I headed for Gate 055.

I could hear Baranski’s voice over my shoulder. “Look, it’s just a question of time before you get shipped off to the Long Bin stockade if you keep...” He caught up and pushed me a little to the side with a shove to my shoulder, and I stopped and squared up to him. “Whoa, whoa . . . We’re not going to do that again.” He held his hands up at me. “Just stop for a second, all right?” I waited. “It’s one thing if you wanna brace the Slopes or the wing wipers, but you go over to the flight line and start leaning on air force personnel, they will send you back to Chu Lai if they have to do it in a rickshaw.”

I stood there in the dirt street and felt the heat waves in my lungs. I was tired, hungover, and pissed, but even with my limited experience in law enforcement, I knew he was right.

Baranski smiled a white and wicked grin, and Mendoza came around to stand next to him, but I noticed they both stayed a good arm’s reach away. “You follow us, but you don’t do anything and you don’t say anything. Got it?”

I followed them back to security headquarters, where we commandeered one of the jeeps. We set out with the two of them in the front and me in the back.

We drove along the flight line on the tarmac where the Imperata grass scrapped the undercarriage and the mud puddles splashed khaki on the jeep’s flanks—past the debris and broken fuselages of damaged aircraft. We went by large Quonset hangars, which reminded me of surplus ones that were used by ranchers back in Wyoming. The sight made me homesick and started me thinking about blondes, but I could feel other things overtaking my passions and my hands stilled.

At the flight barracks, I got a clearer view of how the other half lived. On an air force base, pilots are royalty, and fighter pilots are kings.

“He leaves the base all the time.” The duty sergeant didn’t know where Brian Teaberry was and didn’t even look up when we came in. “He’s not scheduled for duty until 0800 tomorrow morning.”

Baranski leaned on the counter and looked at the top of the sergeant’s head. He was an embattled Korean War veteran and was not likely to be overly impressed with our homicide investigation. “This concerns a homicide investigation.”

The overworked man finally looked up from the forms he was stapling. “So?” I came around and rested an arm on the corner of the counter as he put the stapler down. “Look, big man, I don’t know where he is.”

I stapled his right earlobe to his neck.

“Damn it!”

I stapled his left earlobe to his neck.

“Damn it, God...Wait a minute! Christ, get him off me!”

The duty sergeant said that Teaberry was over at passenger service awaiting the arrival of his new fiancée, who was an administrative assistant coming up from Saigon for a visit, and that he was probably playing cards.

There were dark blue buses lined up out front, waiting for passengers from flights in, along with a great number of air force personnel, who were sitting on the ground waiting for both flights in and flights out. I read the two-language sign at the entrance, CLEAR WEAPONS BEFORE ENTERING.

“Stay in the jeep, man.”

I looked up and Mendoza motioned to me, like you would a dog. Stay.

They were inside for only a few minutes, then returned, fired up the utility vehicle, and pulled us around back to where there was an officers’ waiting area on the other side of a wire and lath fence. They got out of the jeep, and the Texican motioned to me again to stay put.

I sat there and watched as they went through a gate to our left and crossed the yard to where three captains and a first lieutenant were playing cards under a makeshift awning. A few C-123s were warming up on the tarmac only a couple of hundred feet away, the racket from their engines literally shaking the ground.

Baranski and Mendoza ambled up to the card players, and I watched above the noise as they introduced themselves and made some small talk to the seated men. A sizable fellow with sandy hair and a vulpine-looking mustache said something to Mendoza.

Teaberry.

Mendoza said something back. Teaberry said something to both Mendoza and Baranski. Baranski said something to Teaberry who said something again, at which the other men at the table laughed. Mendoza nodded, said something, and then gestured toward me. Come.

I stood up.

Teaberry glanced at me and then said something else to the other card players, who laughed. Mendoza smiled and gestured again. Sic ’em.

I got out of the jeep.

Teaberry started to stand, but Mendoza pushed him back in his metal folding chair.

I tore the gate off the fence as I entered.

The other two captains and the first lieutenant threw their cards down and disappeared into the passenger service building. Teaberry yanked away from Mendoza and ran to the far side of the yard.

I caught Teaberry at the fence.

He said he didn’t know anything about Mai Kim. Mendoza and Baranski grabbed me, but I held on to Teaberry and told him he was a liar and that if he didn’t tell me everything I wanted to know, I was going to strangle him with his own intestines. Teaberry said something, but it wasn’t particularly what I wanted to hear, so I threw him into the fence.

Mendoza wrapped his arms around my head and Baranski grabbed my knees, but I was still able to get Teaberry as he tried to scramble away. I fell on him, and the fence collapsed.

Teaberry said that Hollywood Hoang was the one who had set him up, and that for a nominal fee of ten bucks Mai Kim had taken the captain to a sandbag bunker between Gate 055 and Hotel California, where they had had sex, which had been invigorating without being overly lengthy. Then he walked her back to Gate 055, where they parted company. Teaberry said she went toward the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge at about 1:00 A.M. and that that was the last time he’d seen her. The security detail at the gate could vouch for his story.

I let go of him, and Mendoza and Baranski let go of me.

* * *

“What’s the story on Eli?”

He sighed and pulled the seat belt out from his chest with a thumb. “Blooding the medicine . . .” He released the belt and turned his head but continued watching the road.

I vaguely knew about most of the Cheyenne talismans. “The medicine arrows?”

He took a deep breath. “There are three.”

“Arrows?”

“Talismans; the Medicine Arrows, the Sacred Cap, and the Autumn Count are all Cheyenne. I am not sure about the Crow.”

“Autumn Count. Is that the one you mentioned in Philadelphia?”

“Yes. The Tonoeva Wowapi is the only one I have never seen. It is a sacred hide with many symbols that reveals the history of the people and, if read correctly, can tell the future. It is said that this is the smallest of the medicines it possesses.”

These were things that Henry Standing Bear did not take lightly, so I drove silently, waiting for the rest of the explanation. The jaw muscles in his face tightened, but he said nothing, the dark of his eyes reflecting the glare from the windshield. “My half-brother, Lee, has seen it....”

I was curious, not only about the artifact but also about Lee, whom he rarely mentioned. I knew he had just seen him on his way back from Philadelphia, but I hesitated on the personal front, familiar with the frontier between red and white, where there was no pink. “What about the Sacred Cap?”

He seemed pleased to leave the subject of the Autumn Count and Lee. “Matriarchal in nature, the Issiwun typifies the buffalo and harvest.”

“And the arrows?”

His eyes lowered and stared at the space in the floorboards between us. “Four stone-headed arrows wrapped in a coyote skin. I was a small child and brought by my father to a lodge where they were revealed to me; I remember that my mother waited outside and was not allowed to look upon them. Periodically they are renewed with fresh sinew and feathers. They are kept, like the other items, by an individual who holds the office for life or until it is voluntarily relinquished.”

“So, let me guess, the White Buffalo were keepers of the arrows?”

“No, the keeper of the arrows must be full-blood, and to my knowledge the arrows are with the Southern Cheyenne in Oklahoma.”

“What about the Sacred Cap?”

He breathed a short laugh. “The cap is adorned with a Crow scalp; it is unlikely that it would be entrusted to a Crow warrior.” His face stiffened, and I knew he was thinking of his brother Lee. “The Autumn Count’s location is unknown, so the medicine that Eli spoke of must be the medicine bundle that was found with Virgil.”

“The one he had around his neck?”

“Yes.” He stood. “It would appear that Eli feels his father’s actions have tainted his stewardship of a holy item.”

“Hence blooding the medicine?”

His face was still. “Eli has no doubt that his father has committed these acts.”

I sighed. “That’s unfortunate.”

“Yes.”

I thought about the photograph of the boy. “So, Eli is Virgil’s son.”

“Yes.”

I thought about the pink plastic wallet. “What about the rest of the family, the woman and the girl?”

“Sandra and Mara, both dead.”

“How?”

The trials of his people wore heavily on the broad shoulders, but he spoke without emotion. “Head-on with a drunk driver. They died in January of ’71.”

“And Eli survived?”

“I understand there were behavioral problems even then, and he was shuttled off to foster homes. He now has his own gallery over in Hot Springs, South Dakota; Native abstracts, but things are difficult.” I nodded and, after a moment, he turned to watch me. “What?”

I took a deep breath and set the cruise control at ninety. “So blooding the medicine is like a curse?”

The Cheyenne Nation frowned. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

I felt my face tighten. “Well, it appears to be holding.”

I noticed that one of the highway patrolmen had pulled a green vehicle over at the top of a far hill and hit the brakes. I slowed my truck and slid in behind the Dodge as the shapely blonde in mirrored glasses placed a hand on her hip, near the Glock, and looked back at us from the driver’s side door of Tran Van Tuyen’s Land Rover.

Rosey wore short black search gloves, with undone pearl snaps that revealed pale skin at the wrists of her tanned arms. She straightened her campaign hat as she walked toward us with Tuyen’s license, registration, and insurance card in her hand.

I liked how she walked and smiled. “How you doin’, Troop?”

She tipped her sunglasses down and looked at me. “Have we got some kind of Vietnamese migration going on?”

“He’s the grandfather.”

Her demeanor changed immediately. “Oh.”

I glanced up at Tuyen, who was still calmly seated in his vehicle, but who was adjusting his rearview mirror to look at us. “How fast?”

She leaned an elbow on my truck and glanced back at him. “Borderline, eighty-three.”

“Let him go? He’s had a rough couple of days.” Her eyes came back to mine, and the delicate parchment of the skin at her high cheekbones reminded me of someone else who had been beautiful.

She nodded, and the eyes went down only to come up slow. “You owe me one.” She handed me the paperwork and smiled crookedly. I was feeling a little warm, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the temperature.

As she strutted back to the black Dodge and climbed in with one last glance, I turned to Henry. “It’s you, right? I mean . . . it’s not me.”

He frowned. “No, it is you. Some women have very peculiar tastes.”

I climbed out and walked up to Tuyen’s vehicle as Rosey slipped back onto the highway like a glossy panther looking for prey and disappeared over the hill. Tuyen turned to look at me as I leaned on his door. I noticed that the hard case I’d seen at the ghost town had now gravitated to the passenger floor. I handed him his identification and then looked up and down the empty highway. “Headed back to your motel?”

He stuffed the license back into his wallet and flipped the other papers into the center console. “Yes.”

“Mr. Tuyen, would you have any idea if Ho Thi was traveling alone?”

He looked at me, his face unchanged. “What?”

“I got some information that your granddaughter may not have been traveling alone and was wondering if you would have any idea who might’ve been with her in the car.”

I watched as he stared at the steering wheel. “I . . . I have no idea.”

I crouched down and placed both arms on the sill. “Do you think you could contact your organization back in California and see if there’s anyone else missing?”

“Certainly.” He began reaching for his cell phone, which was plugged into his dash.

“That’s okay, you’re not going to get service till you get down into Powder Junction.”

He tried to smile, but his face remained grim. “Outside the veterinary office?”

“Yep.”

He took a breath. “You think that Ho Thi might have been traveling with someone?”

“It’s possible.” I nudged the brim of my hat back.

He nodded. “I will contact Children of the Dust and see if anyone else is missing.” He glanced at me and then to the rolling hills that seemed to recede in the distance, a terrain so broad it hurt your eyes. “This is most distressing.”

“Yes, it is.” I stood and gestured back toward Henry. “My friend and I are going down to Powder Junction and ask a few more questions. Are you going to be in your room?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll have lunch at around one?” He looked up at me with a questioning expression, and I called back over my shoulder. “There’s only one restaurant in Powder Junction. It’s the one connected to the bar.”

Henry studied the side of my face as I pulled around Tuyen’s vehicle and jetted back up to ninety. I glanced at my best friend in the world as I thought it all through, watching as Tran Van Tuyen pulled out after us and followed at a slower speed. “Do you think I’m prejudiced? Really?”

“Yes.” I glanced at him, and his smile was sad. “We all are, to a certain point—unfortunate, is it not?”

As he watched me, I watched the green Land Rover recede in my rearview mirror. We were both silent the rest of the way to Powder Junction.

* * *

The Dunnigan brothers were easy to find—they were now haying the opposite side of the highway, the giant swathers working like prehistoric insects along the gentle slopes of the barrow ditch. I turned on my light bar emergencies, slowed my truck, and pulled in ahead of the big machines.

Den slowed his swather and stopped only inches from my rear quarter-panel. I got out and looked up at him, but he didn’t move from the glass-enclosed cab of the still-running machine. James was already out of his, had climbed down, and was hustling to get to me. He raised a hand, his thin arm hanging in the frayed cuff of his shirt like a clapper in a bell. I glanced up at Den, who pushed his ball cap back on his head and didn’t look at us. James smiled nervously. “Hey, Walt.”

Figuring it would unsettle him, I leaned on the front blades of Den’s machine. “Hello, James. I’ve got a few more questions for you and your brother, if that’s okay.” I watched as he took off his sweat-soaked straw hat, the red clay trapped in the perspiration on his forehead looking dark as bloodstain. James gestured to Den, who reluctantly shut the swather off, threw open the glass door, and walked toward us on the front frame of the machine. I allowed the Dunnigans to assemble before asking my questions.

Den looked down at us; he had pulled out a small cooler from the cab, sat, and started to eat his lunch. “We haven’t found any more bodies, if that’s why you’re here.”

I ignored him. “James, when you met Ho Thi Paquet, the young woman in the . . .”

“Was that her name?”

I studied him for a moment. “I’m sorry, James. Yes, it was.” He nodded and looked at his scuffed-up ropers, which were wrapped twice with duct tape. “When you met Ho Thi at the bar, was she alone?” They both looked at me, but the only emotion I could read was confusion.

Den unwrapped a sandwich and opened a bottle of Busch, squeezing the cap between his fingers and pitching it into the high grass, before he finally spoke. “In the bar?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Well, yep. I mean the bartender was there.”

“Anybody else?”

They looked at each other, and then James answered in a soft voice. “No.”

“When you came outside, was there anyone else in her car?”

Den squinted into the sun and chewed a bite from his sandwich. “No.”

I nodded. “Guys, the next question is going to be a little personal. Where did you have sex with her?”

James looked worried and glanced at Henry, who had gotten out of the Bullet and had become more interested in farming equipment than I’d ever seen him. “In the truck.”

“Your truck.”

“Yep.”

I nodded. “Parked where?”

“Out near Bailey.”

“She rode with you?”

“Yep.”

“Then what?”

James’s neck was turning red as he glanced back at the Bear. “Well, I went first . . .”

“No, I mean after.” He looked up at me. “After you and Den had sex with her, did you drive her back to her car?”

They replied in unison. “Yes.”

“And you didn’t see anyone in the car with her?”

They replied in unison again. “No.”

“What time was it when you let her off?”

The two brothers looked at each other, and James started to speak before being cut off by Den, who threw the remainder of his sandwich into the open cooler and snapped it shut. “How in the hell should we know what time...”

James silenced him with a hand, the other clutching the brim of his hat as he thought. “We stopped cutting at about three, spent a couple of hours with her in the bar; then a little over an hour with her out at Bailey, and then brought her back to town.”

“So, six, six-thirty?”

“Yeah.”

I nodded. “All right, if you fellas see or hear anything . . .”

James shifted his weight toward me, and I stopped speaking. His eyes welled up. “Walt, there’s somethin’ else.”

Den’s voice exploded as he crouched down between us, still on the front rail of the swather, with the beer bottle dangling from his fingers. “James, God damn it, he don’t want to hear that shit!”

I looked back at James as he cleared his throat. “I been havin’ some strange things happen, seein’ things, I mean.”

Den climbed down. “James.”

The older rancher worried the corner of his mouth with an index finger. “After we found her on the side of the highway . . .”

Den yanked off his ball cap. “God damn it! ”

James leaned in a little, and I got the first whiff of blackberry brandy. “After you talked to us the first time?”

I nodded. “Yes?”

“And we all knew she was dead?” I waited but said nothing. A few cars passed by on the highway, but James’s eyes stayed steady with mine. “Walt . . . do you believe in ghosts?”

Of all the things I was thinking James Dunnigan might reveal, a steadfast belief in the paranormal might’ve been close to last. I ignored Henry, who redirected his gaze from James to me. “I’m not sure I understand.”

James interrupted, and his voice carried an edge. “It’s a pretty simple question—do you think dead people come back?”

I thought about recent circumstances and felt an unease growing in the tightness of my chest. I thought about seeing Indians on the Bighorn Mountains during a blizzard, whose advice was that it was sometimes better to sleep than to wake. I thought about a battered cabin on the breaks of the Powder River, with floating scarves and brittle paint that flaked away from the whorls of cupped wood like sheet music. I thought about Eagle helmets and ceremonies and cloud ponies. “James . . .” My voice caught in my throat like a vapor lock and sounded strange, even to me. “To be honest, no, I don’t think the dead come back.” My voice caught and his head dropped, just a little. “Because I’m not so sure they ever leave.”

He looked back up. “I seen her.”

“Who?”

“I swear I seen her.”

Den erupted again. “God damn it, James! They’re gonna put you in a home! ”

“Ho Thi, I seen her.”

I placed my hand on the old rancher’s bony shoulder. “Where, James?”

“Bailey.” He looked to the left and a little north, as if somebody might be listening. “In the ghost town.”

12

I released the button on the microphone again but still heard nothing. The Cheyenne Nation stepped up on the boardwalk out of the sun and pulled the brim of his ball cap down low on his forehead. “Anything?”

I hung the mic back on the dash and shut the door. “No. It must be the rock walls.”

He leaned against one of the support posts and looked down the ancient ruts of Bailey’s main street and then up to the cliffs hanging over us like red waves. The sun was high, there was no discernible shade, and somehow it seemed even hotter out here. “There are a number of footprints, along with yours, up near the cemetery.”

I had canvassed the town while Henry had headed up the rocky outcropping near the union hall. I nodded and hung my Ray-Bans in my uniform pocket to rest the bridge of my nose. “That’s where I found Tuyen, at the cemetery.”

“There are rattlesnakes up there.”

“I figured.” There was a cross rail between two of the supports, so I walked over and sat on the outside, continuing to look up and down the dusty, dry, and empty street. “James said he saw her out by the road.”

“James says his dead mother makes coffee for him in the morning.”

I looked up at him through a squinted eye and immediately regretted taking off my sunglasses. “There’s that. . . . But just in case this mystery girl does exist, he says he saw her out by the road. Now, where else could she be?”

“Making coffee?” I gave him a longer look. “All right; assuming she does exist, we are assuming that she does not wish to be found?”

I looked to the east and then north at the union hall and the scrub pines and scattered cottonwoods along Beaver Creek. It wasn’t hard to imagine Bailey as the bustling little town it must have been before the disaster. You could almost see the horses tied off to the railings, the draft wagons, and the narrow-gauge locomotive chugging and steaming to a stop at the mine tipple at the end of the street. “Yep. Assuming she exists, she ran off after her friend was killed and dumped alongside the highway.”

He came over and sat on the other end of the railing. “She was not killed in town.”

“No, too much of a chance of being spotted.”

“And away from the highway.”

“Yep.”

He nodded, the wooden-nickel-profile looking off toward the cemetery. “Do you think she witnessed the murder?”

“It would go a long way toward explaining why she’s hiding. ” I watched as a red-tailed hawk was chased by two smaller birds, and wondered how Vic, Cady, and Michael were doing.

The Bear turned back and stared at the side of my face as a slight breeze came up, hotter than the still air. “You know, there is something funny about this town. . . .”

“You mean besides the fact that there are no people?” I could be a smart-ass, too.

“Yes, besides that.”

"What?”

“There is no church.” He glanced up and down the street, perhaps expecting one to appear. “If there was one, it would be up near the cemetery, but there is no foundation, nothing.”

I stood, stepped down, and walked into the street, turning to look up at the old mine. “Did you check the union hall while you were up there?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Henry flipped his legs up on the railing and leaned back against the post. He pulled his ponytail loose from above the adjustable strap of his hat, which he put over his face. “I told you, there are rattlesnakes up there.”

I stared at the embroidered fish on his hat. “Since when are you afraid of rattlesnakes?”

“I am not, but they told me that no one had been up there since Tuyen and you.”

“Oh, right.” I put my sunglasses back on. I noticed he wasn’t moving. “What are you doing, taking a nap?”

“Yes. I assumed it was the only sensible thing to do while you checked the union hall.”

I looked up the street and at the high, razorlike grass leading to the lone building on the hill, past the dark pyramid of the coal tipple—perfect ambush territory for rattlers. “What makes you think I’m gonna go do that?”

The hat remained over his face, muffling his voice. “I knew you would not believe me about the snakes.”

* * *

Rattlesnakes shed in August. Their eyes become cloudy, and they grow uncomfortable, pissed off, and strike out at anything; contrary to popular belief, they do not always rattle before striking.

Part of the trail leading past the cemetery was still visible to the left of the cliffs, with a few rock steps that turned the corners where hard men descended into the ground to bring up soft fuel. I paused at one corner to see if the Cheyenne Nation had moved, and it hadn’t.

Most of the American public had been hoodwinked by the director John Ford in the forties and fifties into believing that the entire West looked exclusively like Monument Valley, where he filmed most of his movies. It was a vista that had become emblematic, and I had to admit that my view of the Hole in the Wall, with its bold crimson palisades and the hazy flux of the horizontal landscape, looked a lot like Monument Valley.

The only tracks were indeed the ones that Tuyen and I had made, but they ended at the cemetery—above that, there were no tracks, no broken grass, nothing to indicate that anyone had been up here in ages. I caught my breath. It was still early, and the heat of the day had yet to push us into triple digits. I didn’t want to be up here in a couple of hours, when the sun reached its zenith and Bailey would feel something like the fifth ring of hell.

The union hall was up and to my right, standing alone like a weathered lighthouse amid the storm toss of the rocks.

I leaned on the iron railing surrounding the cemetery, then immediately regretted it, the dark metal feeling as if it had been just pulled from the smelter. I thought of Saizarbitoria at the jungle gym back in Powder Junction and smiled. Maybe the Basquo was learning fast, or was it that I was learning more slowly?

I found myself reading the tombstones, the names, and the single date on seventeen of them, and thought about the survivors walking the path next to the graveyard. I wondered if they saw those dead miners who had been trapped in the dark tunnels beneath my boots.

I thought about the two bottles of water in my shooting bag, which I had left back at the truck, and turned the corner. I’d taken only a dozen steps into the high weeds when I heard the rattling sound, the one that makes westerners freeze and wonder why they didn’t wear their high-top leggings.

As Lonnie Little Bird would say, he was a big one, um hmm, yes, it is so; twelve buttons at least and only about ten feet away. Again contrary to popular belief, you can’t judge a rattler by his buttons since they shed and accumulate a new pod three or four times a year. It didn’t matter, he was big, and neither of us was in a mood for counting.

He was curling in an "S” and backing away from me, the majority of his body as big as my forearm. He had backed himself up against one of the rises on the stone steps, and there was nowhere else to go. He coiled himself tighter and flicked a dark tongue at me as the vibrating tail shook beside his rectangular-shaped head.

“Howdy.” I figured now was as good a time as any to test Henry’s theory. He didn’t respond and stayed compacted, the dark eyes shining like black beads. “You haven’t seen anybody come by here lately, have you?” His head dropped a little as I began raising my hand very, very slowly. “That’s what I thought.”

I could go for my sidearm, but the thought of what the .45 round might do after hitting the stone step gave me more than a little pause, so I continued raising my hand till I got it to the brim of my hat.

The buzzworm’s head dropped a little again, and I froze.

It was my fault really, disturbing him as he’d peacefully sunned himself after indulging in a brunch of field mouse or sagebrush lizard. I could have introduced myself as the sheriff and told him about the important case I was working on, but he didn’t seem interested and I was more than beginning to doubt Henry’s theories on interspecies communication.

I chucked my hat in a tight curveball, low and outside; he hit it in the sweet spot, then disappeared into the rocks that stuck out in shelves to my right.

I took the two steps and picked up my hat as a few rocks kicked loose and joined the scree at the bottom. He probably wasn’t alone. “Hey, there’s an Indian asleep in front of the dry-goods store, why don’t you go bite him?”

I looked at the crown of my hat—there was a scuff and stain where the rattler had hit it. I was about due a new hat, anyway. I tugged the battered palm leaf back on my head and continued up the steps with a more wary eye.

* * *

The union hall was a masterful piece of early-twentieth-century architecture, with castellated cornices and a unique second story and balcony. The structure had weathered the century better than the ones below as few people were willing to make the rest of the hike up the hill—that, and the rattlesnakes. There was still glass in the windows and, although the transom above the doorway was cracked, it still shone with the high gloss of old lead. There was a chain padlocked through the door handles, but one end had pulled loose and hung below its match. The damage was old, and there were no marks in the dust that covered everything.

The paneled door rested heavily on the sill, but I lifted it and pushed in and it swung wide with a grating noise from the old hinges. There was an entryway leading to the offices in the back and a stairwell to the right, nothing looking as if it had been disturbed in as far back as the dust remembered. I walked through the empty offices and listened to the soft squeals of the wide-plank floor.

There was a counter to one side, and a bundle of broken chairs huddled in the corner, but there wasn’t much else. The stairs to the second floor were about a quarter of the way down and ascended to the middle of a dance hall. When I got up there, I noticed that there was a doorway to the balcony overlooking the cliffs and the town on one side; on the other was a stage and a doorway that led to the wings.

I walked around the railing and stood in the blinding glow of the four windows where the balcony’s half-paned door captured the floating motes that hung in the still air. It was stifling on the second floor, and I could feel the sweat streaking down between my shoulder blades. I took off my hat, hung it on the butt of my Colt, and ran my fingers through my hair as I took the three steps to the stage.

There was an old upright piano, which was pushed against the back wall with the bench tucked underneath. I flipped the dust-laden keyboard cover up and touched a chipped F. It was flat but resonated through the silence, raising the thought of ghostly dance steps where there had been no dancers for almost a century.

I thought about the story Lucian had told me that Red Angus, the sheriff before Lucian, had told him and that the sheriff before that had told him. The double murder had occurred on December 31, 1900—New Year’s Eve, just a few seconds after midnight, to be exact. There had been a big dance to celebrate the incoming year, and I guess Maxfield Holinshed hadn’t liked the unidentified woman who was kissing his father to welcome in 1901, so he pulled a gun right there on the dance floor and shot and killed them both. He was hung in the street below just over two weeks later. Lucian said he still had young Max’s journal that recorded the two weeks that had intervened and that someday he’d let me see it, just to raise my hair.

I pulled the bench out, placed my hat on top of the piano, and sat in front of the yellowed-white and grayed-black keys. I tinkered out a one-fingered version of the old cavalry favorite, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

It was horrible, and any ghosts that might’ve been in the place I had certainly driven out. Most of the soundboard was dead, what was left was remarkably out of tune, and I had a feeling that there was more than one mouse nest inside the ignored instrument.

I could always go get my friend the rattlesnake and put him to work.

I plinked away, trying to find the live portion of the board, and thought about Ho Thi Paquet, and how abandoned her body looked alongside the highway tunnel; about Tran Van Tuyen, and the look on his face when I had questioned him at the cemetery; and, finally, about Mai Kim. I thought about the photo in the lining of the purse, about who I had been in Vietnam, and the way Virgil White Buffalo watched the children on the playground across the street from the jail.

Even in the heat of the midday, I could feel the ghosts crowding in around me, their hands on my shoulders, their feet tapping to the nonexistent beat. I felt a cold wave pass over my back, which made me shiver in the hundred degrees, and I stopped playing. The palpable feeling of company was as oppressive as the heat, and I knew someone was watching me.

I placed a hand on the piano bench and turned.

Nothing.

The windows were hazed with the dust of full daylight, the diffused glow stretching across the whitewashed floor like identities. I sat still and listened.

Nothing.

I watched and waited for the motes to swirl in time with the long-dead ghosts of Maxfield Holinshed, his father Horace, and the mysterious woman who had set their lives in desperate motion, but they didn’t. The dust hung there, almost motionless. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw movement, but every time I looked, there was nothing. I laughed at myself and wondered if maybe the rattlesnake had made me jumpy, or if I was just getting scary in my middle age. I stood up and closed the piano, scooted the bench back underneath it, and thought about Cady in the ballroom of the VA, where there was no music, but there was.

I walked to the edge of the stage, considered what my two-hundred-and-now-forty-pound frame might do to the hundred-year-old floor up here and then to the one downstairs when I crashed through this one, and crossed to the doorway and took the steps down.

On the way back into town, Henry told me that the Dunnigans’ turquoise and white Ford had pulled in at the top of the cut-off leading to Bailey but then had backed out and continued up the road. “Probably looking to get lucky.”

I peered at him from above the shooting guard of my sunglasses while I radioed Saizarbitoria to check in on Tuyen. He sounded only mildly disgruntled that he had been watching the green Land Rover outside the Hole in the Wall Motel for the last hour and a half.

Static. “He’s probably taking a nap; I wish I was.”

I keyed the mic. “We’re on our way into town, and he’s supposed to have lunch with us.”

Static. “You want me to get him?”

“No, just meet us at the bar.”

Static. “Roger that; out.”

I looked at Henry again as we drove the winding road back toward Powder Junction. “I don’t think my staff is completely happy with me.” He shrugged as I keyed the mic again. “Base, this is unit one.” I didn’t wait for a response; instead I sang, “I gotta gal and Ruby is her name. Ruby, Ruby, Ruby baby / She don’t love me but I love her just the same. . . .”

Static. “I told you to stop that.”

“But I haven’t gone through my entire litany of Ruby songs yet.”

Static. “Oh, yes, you have.”

I keyed the mic. “Any word from the young Philadelphians?”

Static. “They just finished lunch.”

“Am I in trouble?”

Static. “Not if you get back up here for dinner.”

“How’s the sleeping giant?”

Static. “Not sleeping. Double Tough made it in to relieve Frymire, but Lucian is back there again playing chess, so he left.” There was a pause. “Please don’t sing again; I don’t know if my ears can take it.”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

He had gotten the staples out of his earlobes, but the duty sergeant wasn’t particularly happy to see us again. He was a lot more helpful this time, however, and much more understanding of the severity of a homicide investigation. He said that Hollywood Hoang had gone into Saigon on a three-day.

Mendoza asked if he could be a little more specific about Hoang’s exact location, and I picked up the stapler.

He said that Hoang was known to frequent a place in the red-light district on Tu-Do Street. I put the stapler back down.

The three of us stood there in the close humidity of the Southeast Asian night. I stared at the two of them as Baranski tried to make up his mind. “This is a bad idea. We don’t have any jurisdiction there, and we’re under maximum alert since 0945 this morning and a security condition red since 1730, and we’ve got just as good a chance of being shot by the good guys as the bad.”

Mendoza nodded. “Yeah, but...”

Baranski shoved his hands in his pants pockets and trapped his mustache with his lower lip. “It’s going to be like looking for a needle-dick in a Vietnamese haystack.”

After a moment, the Texan spoke again. “Yeah, but...”

Baranski pulled out a cigarette without offering one to anybody else and lit up. “Why is this suddenly so fucking important to you?”

Mendoza gestured toward me. “Well, Mother Green here is going to be leavin’ on a jet plane tomorrow morning . . .”

Baranski interrupted him, switching his cigarette to the other hand and sticking out a finger, tapping him in the chest. “No, I said you. Why is this shit so suddenly important to you?”

The shorter man looked up at him, his dark eyes steady. “I don’t know, man.”

“You don’t know?”

I watched the Texican’s jaw moving. “Hey, maybe this is it, man. Maybe this is the one thing we’ll be able to look back on in this great big shitty mess and be proud of.” He turned and studied me. “The cowboy here is short and headed back to the real world—after the shit he’s pulled in the last few hours, he ain’t gonna be making a career out of the Corps.” His eyes stayed on Baranski as he reached under the front seat of the jeep and handed me my sidearm and holster. He finally looked at me. “If we don’t take you, you’re going to walk into the city, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “Yep.”

He sighed and glanced back at Baranski. “I thought the zipper-heads were on a truce?”

The redheaded man nodded, continuing to smoke his cigarette. “They are, but there have been some bullshit attacks up north.”

Mendoza stood there for a minute and then climbed into the jeep, the decision made. “I’m having trouble keeping up with all these damn holidays. What’s this one?”

Baranski threw the rest of his smoke onto the ground and himself into the driver’s seat as I climbed in the back again. “Lunar New Year.”

The Texican looked at the main gate with its guard shack, which would have been more at home at a public pool in Southern California, and down the busy four-and-a-half-mile road that led to Saigon. “Yeah, but what do the Slopes call it?”

Baranski started the jeep. “Tet.”

* * *

Phillip Maynard was MIA.

We were sitting in the café section of the Wild Bunch Bar, waiting on Tuyen, sipping iced tea, and studying the menus. “He didn’t show up for work?”

“No, and this is only his sixth day, so he may end up getting his ass fired.” Thinner than the rattler I’d encountered earlier and just about as tolerant, Roberta Porter had bought the bar back in ’98 and had had trouble keeping staff ever since. “No call or nothing. I was by his place and didn’t see his motorcycle but could hear the TV. I beat on the door, but he didn’t answer.”

I looked at Henry as he perused the menu, his voice smoothly modulating from behind the single sheet. “Did he work last night?”

“If you’d call it that.”

She pulled a pencil from somewhere in the suspiciously blonde tangle of her sixty-two-year-old hair and yanked a pad from the back pocket of her jeans as I ventured an opinion. “Maybe he’s hungover?”

“He has been sampling an awful lot of the product the last couple of days.”

“We’ll roll by and check in on him.” I handed her my menu and followed the Cheyenne Nation’s lead, ordering a Butch Cassidy Burger Deluxe with cheese, bacon, grilled onions, and fries.

She scribbled on the pad, glancing at Henry and then back to me. “I heard you picked up that big Indian.”

I looked up at her. “Virgil White Buffalo.”

“Is that his name?” I nodded. “He’s been around here since I had the café. He used to watch the kids play out at Bailey School; made some people nervous.” She adjusted the menus under her arm. “You think he killed that girl?”

“Roberta, you got some Tabasco around here somewhere?” She disappeared into the back, not particularly satisfied with the title of chief cook and bottle washer. I turned to Henry. “This Maynard thing seem suspicious to you?”

He leaned back in his metal bentwood chair, which squealed its disapproval. “Not enough to miss lunch.”

I watched as Saizarbitoria’s unit pulled up. The handsome Basquo got out, slapping his hat at the dust on his jeans in an attempt to freshen himself—riding around with the windows down had its disadvantages. He swung the glass door open and came over to stand by our table, his left thumb tucked in his gun belt.

“What’s up, Sancho?”

“I waited till one and then went and knocked on Tuyen’s door at the motel, but he didn’t answer.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“I thought I’d give him a ride.”

I looked up at my young dandy of a deputy. “It’s only a half a block.” He shrugged and folded his arms. “You trying to make up for my picking on him?” He didn’t say anything more, so I stood and motioned for him to sit. “When Roberta comes back, order up another burger and you take mine.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going over to check on Tuyen.”

“I’ll go with you.”

I took one last sip of my iced tea. “No, you eat, and I’ll go get him. Chances are he’s asleep or in the shower.” Santiago continued to stand and study me as I scooted my chair back under the table. I stood there looking at him, fighting the urge to laugh. “I promise I won’t rough him up.”

He kept watching me until Henry pulled out a chair.

It was even hotter, but I decided to walk to the motel. It was just easier. I flipped on my antique sunglasses and started up the boardwalk. The main street was paved, but the side streets and alleyways were dry reddish dirt, with dust as fine as talcum.

We needed rain.

By the time I got to the motel, there was a wide slick of perspiration holding my uniform shirt to my back, and I’d taken my palm-leaf hat off twice to wipe away some of the sweat that continued to flood down and behind my glasses. I was regretting my decision to walk.

The Land Rover was parked out front. As I crossed the dirt and gravel parking strip between the motel rooms and the street, I noticed a set of motorcycle tracks, the mark from the kickstand where it had been parked, and the tracks where it had been backed up and ridden off.

I thought about Phillip Maynard and knocked on the door. “Mr. Tuyen?”

Nothing.

I knocked again, but there was no sound. “Mr. Tuyen, it’s Sheriff Longmire.”

One kick would do it, but I figured the management might appreciate a more subtle approach. As I walked past the Land Rover, I noticed the doors were locked, but the hard case was missing from the front seat.

* * *

“You got a key for room number five?”

A young woman I didn’t know—with one earphone connected to a small device in her shirt pocket, the other dangling at her chest—handed me the fob from a hook behind the counter. “Is there some kind of trouble, Sheriff?”

“No, I’m just checking to see if all the mattresses still have their tags.” She continued to look at me, and I could hear what passed for music to her in the one loose earbud. “I’m kidding.”

She blinked. “Oh.”

I palmed the key in my hand and stood there for a moment, enjoying the air-conditioning. “Have you seen Mr. Tuyen this morning?”

She nodded. “Yes, he left pretty early and then came back a couple of hours ago. Is he in trouble?”

I tossed the key in the air and caught it as I swung open the door and faced the wall of heat. “Only if he’s taken the labels off.” I left her there to wonder if I really was serious this time.

I knocked again and waited, thinking about the missing hard case. “Mr. Tuyen, this is Sheriff Longmire. I got the key from the front desk, and I’m unlocking this door.”

I turned the key and swung the door open. There was an entryway to the bathroom on the left, and I could see an open closet where a number of expensive suits hung along with plastic-covered and freshly laundered shirts.

I took a step inside and allowed my eyes to adjust. Tuyen’s toiletry and personal items were on the bathroom counter, along with a hand towel, which was saturated with blood, that hung from the lip of the sink, the excess dripping to the tile floor.

I unsnapped the strap from my Colt and pulled it from my holster. I clicked off the safety, looked at the dark spots on the carpeting, and took another step inside.

I raised my sidearm and heard a noise to my left. There were two double beds, with a kidney-shaped pool of blood at the foot of one, and there was more on the far side of the room.

Even with the clattering of the aged air conditioner, I could tell the noise was coming from another room on the far side; it sounded like someone walking and possibly dragging something. I extended the large-frame semiautomatic.

There were some clothes lying on the unslept-in bed and another pair of shoes, but what caught my attention was the phone cord that was stretched taut and led from the night-stand, across the wall, and out the adjoining doorway.

I took another step and silently cursed the creaking floorboards under my boots. The noise from the other room stopped, and the phone cord grew slack and drooped to the carpet.

I held the .45 toward the open doorway and took a deep silent breath before taking another step. I took another and could hear a slight creak and saw a flicker of movement. I swung the Colt around, pointing it at whatever had made the noise. Tran Van Tuyen was holding a tan push-button phone in one hand and a blood-soaked towel to his head in the other.

Even from this distance, I could hear Ruby’s voice coming from the receiver of the telephone. “Mr. Tuyen? Mr. Tuyen . . . are you still there?”

The blood from the wound at the side of his head had drained down to his face and stained his smile that half-beamed from across the room. “Sheriff?”

The smile remained as his eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped against the jamb, streaking a handwide smear of blood down the door and collapsing unconscious onto the carpet.

13

“Saizarbitoria thinks you did it.”

I listened to the squeal from under the hood as we turned the corner and figured the staff vehicle from the Powder Junction detachment of the Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department was going to need a power steering unit and soon. “Really?”

“No, but we had a long talk about race relations.” I drove the faded red Suburban to the address Phillip Maynard had given us, as the Bear fiddled with the nonfunctioning vents, finally settling on rolling down his window, which stuck about halfway. “Santiago is a very intelligent young man.”

I’d given Sancho my truck after we’d gotten Tuyen stabilized and sent them rocketing off to the hospital back in Durant; I figured a one-way trip in the Bullet was faster than a two-way trip with the EMTs. Even with the vast loss of blood, Tuyen had come to and said that he had no idea what had happened other than that he had entered the motel room and someone had struck him from behind.

“So, we are basing our suspicions on a single set of motorcycle tracks outside the motel?”

“Sort of.”

“How sort of?”

I shrugged. “Exclusively.”

He sighed. “Why would Phillip Maynard kill Ho Thi Paquet and then try to kill Tuyen?”

“I don’t know, but he seems our most likely suspect.”

Henry pulled his shoulder belt out, where it hung loose across his chest. “Drive carefully. I question the ability of this belt to keep me from slamming face-first into the dash should we find ourselves in a crash.” We were headed for the south side of town near the rodeo grounds. “He is our only suspect.” He thought about it some more. “Sometimes living in Wyoming has unexpected benefits.”

“Vic says that most of the benefits of living in Wyoming are unexpected.”

“She is a modern woman and expects a great deal.” I could feel him watching me before he turned back to the road and smiled.

* * *

Phillip Maynard’s house wasn’t really a house; it was more like an upscale chicken shack, which meant that in comparison to the other shacks that sat a little farther toward the banks of the middle fork of the Powder River, it seemed even more uninhabitable.

Henry placed his hands on his hips and stood at the gate. “Where do you suppose the door is?”

“Drawing from my ranch upbringing, I’d say it’s on the side.” I followed him as he walked around the end of the ramshackle building where we found a hollow-core door that had a tin sign tacked to the surface that read KEEP OUT.

We could hear commercials squawking from a television inside, and I knocked on the door. We waited and listened but heard nothing but the TV. This was getting reminiscent of Tran Van Tuyen’s motel room. “Phillip Maynard, this is Sheriff Longmire. Would you mind opening the door?”

Nothing.

We listened and learned how white our teeth and how fresh our breath could be if we would only use Brand-X toothpaste, but nothing from Phillip Maynard. I tried the knob, but the door was locked. I glanced at Henry. “I hope we’re not seeing a pattern here.”

“Do you want me to kick it down, or do you want to?”

I studied the scaly and cupped surface of the interior door, which had spent at least a winter in the high plains exterior. “I think if we breathe on it, it’ll collapse.” Testing the theory, I grasped the knob and pressed. The door popped open, taking a little of the jamb with it.

We shrugged at each other. The television was a tiny thirteen-inch sitting on a beanbag chair, and clothes were scattered across the dirty yellow linoleum-tiled floor and exploded from a large backpack that rested on a built-in bunk. Unlike Tuyen’s room, it didn’t look like anybody had been killed here, anybody besides Mister Clean.

The Bear walked past me, watched Suzanne Rico anchor the news out of Channel 13 in Casper, and then clicked off the TV. There was an open paperback lying on the bed, along with what looked like an old horsehide motorcycle jacket and a number of empty Budweiser bottles, and a full ashtray with a few joints mixed in with the butts. There was another collection of bottles beside the only chair.

Henry crossed back and flipped over the book. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

“Appropriate.”

He showed me the cover as proof and then gestured toward the bottles by the chair. “It would appear that Phillip has been entertaining.”

I kneeled down and looked at the empties, plucked a pen from my shirt pocket, and tipped one over enough to lift it by the neck. Something rattled at the base, and I saw it was the cap, which had been bent in half. I set the bottle back down and looked up at the Cheyenne Nation. “I guess I’ll go check with the owner.”

* * *

Gladys Dietz had rented her swank chicken shed to Phillip Maynard for the lofty sum of a hundred dollars a month, including utilities, but she was beginning to have second thoughts. I was having second thoughts as she smoked a cigarette with the oxygen tube attached just under her nose, expecting any moment to be blown off the porch.

“The TV is going all the time, and that damn motorcycle makes such a racket.” She leaned on her walker one-handed and held the screen door back with the other.

I knew Gladys. She and her husband had owned a commercial fishing lake that my father and I had frequented, and she had gladly told anybody then that she was intent on dying soon.

I had passed more than a half century and was the chief law enforcer in the land, but she still addressed me as if I were eight. I held my hat in my hands. “Mrs. Dietz...”

“Your shirt needs ironing, Walter.”

I self-consciously smoothed the pockets of my uniform and desperately tried to remember her husband’s name. “Yes, ma’am. How’s George?”

“Dead.”

That’s what you got for asking about old people. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

She shrugged her silver head and studied my unpolished boots. “I’m not. He was getting pretty cranky toward the end.”

I decided to try to keep on track. “Mrs. Dietz, have you seen Phillip Maynard today?”

She glanced toward the shack, where Henry was standing by the gate. “What’s that Indian doing out near my chicken shed?”

“He’s with me.”

She looked up through lenses as thick as the windshield on my truck. “I heard your wife died?”

“Yes, ma’am, a number of years back.”

“Was she cranky?”

“No, ma’am.”

She nodded her head. “They get like that, you know.”

“Yes, ma’am, so they tell me. Now, about Phillip Maynard?”

“Is he in trouble?”

“We just need to talk to him. Have you seen him?”

She continued watching Henry. “I usually don’t rent to those motorcycle types.”

I sighed and hung my hat on the grip of my sidearm and held the screen door for her. “It’s pretty important.”

“What is?”

“Phillip Maynard.”

“What about him?”

I took that extra second that usually keeps me from strangling my constituency, always important in an election year. “Have you seen him today?”

“No.”

I glanced back at Henry. “Well, his motorcycle isn’t here.”

“He keeps it in the barn.”

I turned and looked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“That fancy new one that he doesn’t want to get rained on.” She glanced past me and at the cloudless sky, the smoldering cigarette still frighteningly close to the oxygen nozzle under her nose. “Not that it’s ever going to do that again.”

She watched us as we turned the corner and walked past a corral toward the Dietz barn with a Dutch-style hip roof. “She thinks you’re going to steal her chickens.”

“There are no chickens.”

“See?”

* * *

It was a standard structure, with the roof supported by a number of big, rough-cut eight-by-eights, which had been sided with raw lumber that had long faded to gray. There was a metal handle with a wooden latch on the door, which I pulled, and we stepped back as the big door swung toward us. Up in the loft there was a flutter of barn swallows, sounding like angel’s wings might. The Harley sat parked on its side stand, swathed with the same cover that I had seen at the bar. Henry lifted the vinyl shroud and whistled. “What?”

“FLHRS Road King, custom job.”

I vaguely remembered Henry having a bike, but he had rarely ridden it. “What’s that mean?”

“Expensive. Close to twenty thousand.”

I thought about the chicken shed. “Well, he hasn’t been spending his money on lodging.” I reached down and felt the chrome-bedecked engine, only vaguely warm. “And he hasn’t ridden it lately.”

I took a step into the barn proper, and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. There was a smell, one that I knew.

I unsnapped the safety strap on my .45, pulled the Colt from my holster, and glanced back over my shoulder at Henry. The main breezeway of the barn was empty except for the motorcycle, but there were two other passageways through the stock stalls. I motioned for the Bear to head right, and I would take the left.

The stalls hadn’t been used for their initial purpose for quite some time but had instead been filled with used lumber, broken equipment, and aged firewood. I worked my way through the four of them and met Henry at the far end of the center breezeway.

“Well, he’s not hiding in the corn crib.”

There was more fluttering, and I noticed the scar tissue under Henry’s chin as he studied the rafters. “No, not in the corn crib.” He turned in a circle until he was facing back toward the opening where we’d come in. “But it appears he has received a suspended sentence.”

I turned and followed his eyes up to the rafters where, from a stout length of hemp rope, hung the dangling body of Phillip Maynard.

* * *

“How long?”

T. J. Sherwin was on another call in Otto, so we had Bill McDermott, who was the medical examiner from Billings, Montana. I hadn’t seen him since he and Lana Baroja had gone to Guernica together, but it was good to have him back. "Hard to say with the heat, but with rigor and approximate temperature, I’d say it was possibly early this morning or maybe very late last night.”

“Suicide?”

“I hate to guess, but if I was a betting man . . .” He looked at Maynard’s body. The pressure from the base of Phillip’s neck and from the area where the tongue attaches had forced his lower jaw open, and his tongue stuck out from between his teeth like the parody of a naughty child. “There’s some additional contusion alongside the trapezoidal muscle, but that could easily be explained by the force of the drop.”

I looked back up at the roof beams, which were at least eighteen feet high. “He did a number, didn’t he?”

“It takes surprisingly little; you don’t even have to be suspended.”

“What would you suspect?”

Bill looked like a choirboy, which belied his occupation. He peered up and calculated. “From the loft, I’d say about six-and-a-half feet.” He pulled back the body bag to reveal a V-shaped abrasion and furrow at the back of Phillip Maynard’s neck, which had been caused by the rope that had slipped up past the thyroid cartilage. “Incomplete circle where the rope pulled away from the subject.” He looked at the dead man some more. “He didn’t change his mind after the fact.”

“Why?”

“No fingernail marks at the neck. I’ve even seen cases where the fingers are trapped under the rope, but this guy dropped the exact distance, which resulted in a fractured neck, and we’ll probably find the break between the third and fourth or fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae.” Bill looked up at me. “Was he a bad guy?”

I took a breath and felt the closeness of the barn. The light glowing through the spaces between the slats made stripes as if it were shining through bars. I looked at Phillip Maynard’s sightless eyes and at the spot where a blood vessel had burst, clouding and unbalancing the pupil, which was ragged at the edge, unlike you’d expect. “I’m not sure yet.”

Saigon, Vietnam: 1968

I watched all the people who crammed into the few tiny blocks around Tu-Do Street and thought about all the bars we’d already checked, including the Flower Brothel, Rose’s, the assorted steam baths, massage parlors, boom boom rooms, and an honest-to-God Dairy Queen. Even this early in the morning, the street was in full swing, and I suspected it stayed that way for the full twenty-four hours of the day. It was leaning toward early morning, and I took a deep breath and felt like I was leaking time.

Mendoza laughed. “Oh, come on now, it’s not that bad.”

Baranski had pulled the jeep half onto the sidewalk, but no one had seemed to notice, not even the two ARVN QCs that we’d almost run over. With their oversized white helmet liners, the Vietnamese military policemen looked like those bobble-headed sports dolls. One of them tried to beg a cigarette from Mendoza, who shook his head and replied, “Toi khong hut thuoc lo.”

Baranski, however, sat on the hood of the jeep and handed the two Mice cigarettes, lighting one for himself and then theirs. He paused for a moment and gestured. “Quels sont vos noms?”

The two introduced themselves as Bui Tin and Van Bo.

Baranski pointed at me. “Je suis venu avec quelqu’un d’important, il s’appelle Sammy Davis Jr.”

The two QCs looked up, so I smiled and raised a fist. “Black power.”

Baranski continued. “Il veut passer un bon moment. Tu vois ce que je veux dire.”

Bui Tin gestured toward the bustling street. “Choisissez une des portes.”

Baranski nodded his head and gestured helplessly with both hands. “Ouais, mais il aime les cowboys et il voudrait quelque chose qui fasse un peu western.”

Tin, who seemed to be in charge, pointed to a side street. “Il y a un club qui s’appelle Western Town un peu plus bas sur ce trottoir.”

As we walked past them, Van Bo grasped my hand and shook it. “Je suis tellement heureux de vous rencontrer, Monsieur Davis. J’ai tous vos disques.”

I followed after Baranski and Mendoza and nodded, completing the conversation with two of the twelve French words I knew. “Merci beaucoup.”

I caught up with them as they turned the corner. “What’d he say?”

Baranski stopped and looked across the street to where a neon cowgirl’s leg kicked up and down in a more than provocative manner and gestured to a hand-painted sign that read WESTERN TOWN. “He said he’s got all your albums.”

* * *

Static. “There are no records with the Chicago Police Department, other than the ones from the reports we’ve already received.”

“No next of kin?”

Static. “There was a mother in Evanston, but that number’s been disconnected.”

I sighed and stared at the mic in my hand. “All right, pending any further information from the great state of Illinois, we’ll file Phillip Maynard with the boys up in Billings. Anybody comes looking for him, and we’ll defer to that other great state.”

Static. “And what are we?”

I keyed the mic. “Somewhere between. What’s the word on Tran Van Tuyen?”

Static. “He lost a lot of blood, but it looks like he’ll make it. Isaac Bloomfield says it’s a pretty good blunt trauma from a not-so-blunt instrument.”

“Meaning?”

Static. “He said something like an angle iron.”

“Or a motorcycle part?”

Static. “Possibly, but why didn’t he kill Tuyen?”

“Remorse.”

Static. “That would explain both crimes, wouldn’t it?”

“Roger that.” I started to hang up the mic.

Static. “Walt?”

I keyed it again. “Yep?”

Static. “Anything you’d like me to tell Cady?”

“Where are they?”

Static. “They were talking about coming down there.”

“Tell them not to. I’ll be in Durant soon. I need to talk to Tuyen, but I have to make another stop before I head back.”

Static. “Roger that.... Hey, you didn’t sing.”

I watched Phillip Maynard’s body being loaded into a step van. “I guess my heart isn’t in it.”

Bill came over and joined us as I backed out of the open door of the unit, propped my forearms on the top of the window, and looked at Henry, who had just rolled up the sleeves of his faded blue chambray shirt. He still looked cool and crisp, even in the heat. “Is this what they call an open-and-shut case?”

I nudged my hat back and rested my chin on my forearms. I didn’t look cool—didn’t feel it, either. “As far as Phillip is concerned, it is.” I stared at the shiny glare of chromed reflection in the Harley’s air cleaner, wondering where somebody like Maynard would get the money for a twenty-thousand-dollar motorcycle, and then voiced my real concern. “I’m wondering why he would want to kill Ho Thi Paquet, let alone Tuyen.”

Henry wrapped his arms over his chest, and I watched the muscles bunch under the dark skin, reminding me of the coiled rattler in the ghost town. “Perhaps she came back into the bar, and things got a little rough.”

“There are the charges from Chicago, but I’m just not sure . . .” I stopped suddenly and thought of the woman on the fax. “Damn.” I leaned back in the vehicle and keyed the mic. “Ruby, you there?”

Static. “You ready with your reprise?”

“Find the name of the woman who had the restraining order on Maynard, and see if you can get me a phone number?”

Static. “Roger that.”

I straightened back up, and the Cheyenne Nation was beside the door, along with McDermott. “What charges?”

“There was a domestic disturbance, an assault charge, and a restraining order concerning a woman in Chicago—Karol Griffith, I think her name was.”

McDermott looked between the two of us. “So this Maynard fellow had a record?”

“Yep, but something about all of this doesn’t seem right, and I’d like to talk to somebody who actually knew him before I tag him posthumously with murder in the first and attempted homicide.”

Static. “Walt?”

“I’m here.”

Static. “It’s a work number.” I copied it down. “Tattoo You.”

“Thanks.” I tossed the mic back on the seat as the Bear reached down and pulled out his cell phone from a nifty little leather holster at his belt. “So, do you want to go make a phone call?”

I nodded. “Yep, then we’ll go get Tuyen’s Land Rover. I figure he’ll appreciate us picking up his stuff and bringing his car to him.”

Henry smiled. “That, and it will give you another chance to look over his room and the vehicle?”

“There’s that.”

He nodded. “I’ll drive the Land Rover.”

* * *

We parked by the veterinarian’s office, and Henry dialed the number and handed me the phone. Ms. Griffith answered on the second ring—she sounded personable and precise. I told her why I was calling, and she became less personable, but still precise. “He beat up my car.”

The reception, even in this key part of Powder Junction, was spotty at best. “He what?”

“He beat up my Charger with a baseball bat, but he paid to have it fixed the next day.” There was a pause. I had learned from years of experience to never interrupt the flow. “I’m sorry to hear he’s dead. Was it that piece of shit motorcycle?”

“The new one?”

“New, hell; he could hardly keep that ancient piece of crap running.”

“We’re not really sure.” I decided to keep the details to myself. “Ms. Griffith, would you say Mr. Maynard was given to acts of physical violence as a matter of course?”

“No, not really.”

I thought about it. “But you say he beat up your car?”

I listened to the silence on the line. “Well, that was kind of my fault.”

“In what way?”

“I beat up his motorcycle first.” It was quiet on the line again, and I listened to or imagined the thousands of relays, switches, and electric impulses within the cellular system. “He wasn’t particularly devoted to our relationship. He had this thing for Asian girls.”

* * *

It was only a block and a half from anywhere to anywhere in Powder Junction, so rather than suffer the tin can of a Suburban, we parked at the office and walked to the Hole in the Wall Motel. “So, she said he had this constant stream of Asian women he brought in from Canada?”

“Suspicious, considering the circumstances.”

“Yes.” We walked past Ethan and Devin, the two young boys who had identified Tuyen’s Land Rover. They were dressed in another set of automotive T-shirts. I waved, and they waved back. “And what about Virgil White Buffalo? With the most recent developments, you cannot still be seriously considering him as a suspect.”

I took a deep breath and felt the hot afternoon air burnish my lungs. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about Virgil.”

Henry stepped in front of me. “Let him go.”

I pulled up and stared at the dirt street. “I can’t do that, and you know it.”

His eyes stayed steady on me. “Why not?”

“He’s a potential witness to a homicide, and I don’t think he can be released on his own recognizance.” I took another breath but still found it hard to look at him. “Henry, he fought two highway patrolmen and two deputies to a standstill.”

“Trying to stay out of jail for a crime he didn’t commit.”

I sighed. “Look, we can’t be sure . . .”

“He has spent enough time behind bars for one life.”

I finally looked at him, because I was getting a little angry. “If he is a potential danger to himself or anyone else, he becomes my responsibility.”

He shifted his eyes, and they shone like shards of obsidian. “And where does that responsibility end?”

“It doesn’t.” We stood there, the echo of my voice coming back at us from the empty street, louder than I’d intended. “It doesn’t ever end. Ever.” I spoke softly now. “As long as he’s in my county, he’s my responsibility, and that puts me in line with a lot of other people who might consider leaving a seven-foot sociopath in a culvert under the highway a serious dereliction of duty.”

“So, you are going to keep him incarcerated for the common good?”

“Until I can find somewhere for him to go, yes.” I started to walk around him and then stopped. “Henry, I can’t let him continue to live under the highway. It’s not humane.”

“Neither is keeping him caged like an animal.”

I took another breath, this one even hotter than the ones before, and held it for a moment. “I am aware of that.” I continued on a few steps before turning and looking back at him. "What?”

He stood there for a moment and studied me. “I know you.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” He didn’t move. “What?”

“I know that the real reason you are holding Virgil is in an attempt to fix his life, and that is beyond your abilities. You look at him and see experiences and directions similar to yours, but badly taken.” He walked toward me. “You cannot correct the path he has chosen; it is his path. The only thing you can do is not punish him for something he has not done.”

“I’m not looking to punish him, Henry, but there’s got to be something better for the man than living under I-25.”

His face remained impassive as he answered. “Perhaps, but that is something for him to discover, not for you to give him.”

We walked along. “Well, maybe I can help.”

The Bear smiled. “I know. This is not the first set of moccasins in which you have walked.”

14

The Bear stood up from his hunter’s crouch where he’d been studying the motorcycle tracks. “They are the same.”

I took the key I’d gotten from the office and unlocked the door to room number 5 and ducked under the SHERIFF’S LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape we’d festooned across the door. At the front desk, I had asked the girl who had one headphone in her ear if she’d heard any motorcycles this morning, but she’d said no.

I asked her if she usually wore both headphones while cleaning.

She said yes, she did.

I asked her if she’d cleaned Tuyen’s room this morning.

She said that she would have cleaned the room, but that he hadn’t been around and they never entered a room without the occupant’s expressed permission.

I asked her if she was kidding.

She said she wasn’t.

I asked about the previous night, but she said that they pretty much closed up at nine and always left a number that would reach the owners if there were any problems, that they lived only three-quarters of a mile away.

I told her she could put the other headphone back in now.

* * *

I had turned Bill McDermott and his crew loose. I figured that the more important crime scene was the Dietz barn and that Henry and I could go over Tuyen’s room as a preliminary before calling in the cavalry.

The place was as I’d left it hours before. There was a large bloodstain at the foot of the bed, a smaller one further in, and an intermittent trail that led to the adjoining room and bathroom.

I turned and looked at Henry, who was still standing in the doorway. “If you came through that door and someone was waiting to hit you, where would they stand?”

He looked around the entryway and to his right. “Behind the door.”

“Okay, you want to come in and close that?” He did as requested and then joined me in looking at the distance from the door to the first bloodstain. “What’d he do, jump when he got hit?”

“Perhaps the assailant waited until he was farther inside?”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t make sense. I mean, if you were planning on getting somebody, would you wait until he closed the door and took three or four steps before you hit him? Especially someone as physically capable as Tuyen?”

“So, you think he knew him?”

I walked toward the bed and kneeled beside the larger of the two stains. “I didn’t get much out of him, but he said that someone had struck him from behind, that he had hit the ground, started to get up, failed, and then hit the floor again.”

Henry stood by the dresser. “That would explain the first pool of blood, and then he tries to get up and falls where the smaller one is. Did he say he was unconscious before you got there?”

"Off and on.”

He squatted down beside me. “Where was the wound?”

“Right side of the head and toward the back, just at the crown.”

“Just one?”

“I’m not sure.”

Henry looked back toward the door. “Is it possible that he was struck once, and then, when he started to rise, the assailant hit him again? That would explain the two stains.”

“It’s possible.” I studied the spread that had been flung back from the corner of the bed, revealing the end of the angle-iron bed rail and the corner of the mattress, stained with blood.

Henry studied the corner of the bed frame. “So he was struck and then hit the corner?”

“Maybe.”

The Cheyenne Nation studied me. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I want to talk to Tuyen.” I stood and noticed that the metal case that was in Tuyen’s car was on the dresser. “Under the strictest sense of the law, I’m not really supposed to be going through his personal items.”

“No.”

I walked over to the bureau and flipped the leather-wrapped handle. “He didn’t say anything about missing his wallet and nothing else in the room seems disturbed, which leads me to believe that it wasn’t a robbery attempt.” I nudged the corner of the case with my finger. “Heavy; possibly a computer. If I was going to steal something in this room, I think I’d start with this.”

“Yes.”

"That makes this a suspicious item.”

"Yes.”

“And as a duly appointed law-enforcement official, it would be my responsibility to open it.”

“Yes.”

“There’s only one problem.”

“Yes?”

“It’s locked.”

With a sigh of exasperation, Henry slid the case toward him and flipped it up, looking at the four-digit combination. He paused for a moment and then rolled the thumbwheels until it read 1975. “Fall of Saigon.”

Click.

Saigon, Vietnam: 1968

I heard the safety go off but wasn’t sure where. The bouncer still stood in front of us, big, too big to be Vietnamese—probably Samoan. Our noses were about six inches apart—I was a couple of inches taller, but he probably had me by a good forty pounds. The really disconcerting part was that he was the one wearing a cowboy hat.

Baranski held his badge over my shoulder into the giant’s face. “Look, Babu, Criminal Investigation Detachment. We’re on a homicide investigation.”

That much was true.

“We’re working with your own ARVN intelligence sector...”

Not particularly true.

"... And if you don’t step aside, I’m going to tell USMC specialist Longmire here to drag you over to the Long Bin stockade and specialize in stomping a puddle in your chest and walkin’ the motherfucker dry.”

Hopefully true.

He didn’t move, but after a few seconds, he turned toward a slick-looking little fellow standing to the side, who disappeared behind the giant and then reappeared. He nodded his head, and the bouncer slipped to the left. I took a step forward but kept my face to him as Baranski and Mendoza passed behind me.

“Fuck you, son-of-bitch.”

I slowly smiled my best Powder River grin, the one that would’ve made Owen Wister proud. “Smile when you call me that.”

Western Town’s theme was western, but whose was anybody’s guess. The ubiquitous dancing girls wore white go-go cowgirl boots and either cheap costume cowboy hats or multicolored war bonnets, the kind that came from the Woolworth’s back home. In the dim light, I could see the walls were raggedly festooned with western movie posters that were hand-painted with Vietnamese print or maybe Japanese. I could hardly move with the amount of people in the place; nearly all were locals, but the few servicemen who were mixed in with the mass of civilians were mostly enlisted. It looked like we were the brass, for better and probably worse. Mendoza and Baranski were already scouting the crowd but, from their continued craning, it was pretty clear that they hadn’t spotted Hollywood Hoang yet.

Mendoza leaned in and spoke above the music. “You stay here, man, and we’ll walk through and see if we can’t flush him out.”

“What about the back?”

He shook his head. “This your first time to the rodeo? There ain’t no back door.”

I watched as they disappeared into the crowd. There was a dance floor where Jim Ed Brown’s “Pop a Top” warbled through the narrow building and made me homesick. I planted myself against a newel post leading to a stairwell to the basement and a beaded door. I was tired and all I wanted to do was sleep, so I closed my eyes for only a second. When I opened them, there was a teensy Vietnamese woman in a brightly feathered child’s war bonnet who was standing on tiptoes to get my attention. “You like dance?”

“No, thanks.”

“I give special plice?”

“No, that’s okay.” It was easy to see over her; only the tips of the feathers were in my line of sight. With the constant flux of people going in and out, it was hard to keep track, but if Hoang was wearing his trademark powder-blue jumpsuit and white silk scarf, I figured he’d be easy to pick out of the crowd.

She stepped in closer and put her hands on my uniform. “Special plivate dance?”

I blew on the feathers to get them away from my face. “No, really . . .”

“You look for fliend?”

“No...” I glanced down, and her eyes carried a greater intensity than they should have. “What?”

Her voice lowered but still held the same urgency. “You look for fliend?”

I was glancing over her head for either Baranski or Mendoza, neither of whom were in sight. “No, really, I’m a monk.”

She stared at me for a moment, looked back into the main part of the room, and then glanced down the stairs leading to the basement. “Onree you.”

I stood there looking at the sheen of the Southeast Asian night on her skin and thought of Mai Kim. I was assaulted by the hokey music, and the tumblers fell into place. “Do you know Hoang? Hollywood Hoang?”

Her eyes flicked back over her shoulder and then down the stairs again. “Onree you.”

“Is Hoang down there?” Her face remained immobile. “I’m not going to hurt him, but I can’t leave this spot unless he’s down there.”

The feathers bobbed imperceptibly as she nodded. My nod was just as slight. I slipped around the railing and started down the steps and thought about Hoang—how much he’d thanked me for saving his life in Khe Sanh, and how, if he’d really wanted to kill me, he probably would have already. He’d certainly had a bunch of opportunities.

But you never knew.

I unsnapped the strap on my .45 and pulled the hammer back. There was no door, just the beaded curtain, and it was dark. I thought about what a great backlit target I was making, parted the curtain, and stepped through.

The basement was even narrower than the bar. I walked past a dirt shelf that held a bunch of tiny compressors that looked more like gerbil wheels than coolers as they valiantly attempted to keep the upstairs, well, cool. There were boxes to my left, stacked to the ceiling as far as the light from the doorway would allow me to see. Jim Ed Brown had given way to Buck Owens and the Buckaroos upstairs, so I raised my voice a little and rolled the loaded but still holstered dice. “Hoang?”

I thought I could make out the sound of a movement behind me and to my right. I turned slowly and looked into the beer-can barrel of a Walther PPK silenced pistol.

His eyes were wide, and sweat had saturated the powder-blue jumpsuit to a sopped navy. I raised my hands without being bidden. “How are you, Hoang?” He didn’t say anything and scanned to the right for anybody who might’ve been following me. “I’m alone.”

His eyes couldn’t remain still, and I could see the barrel of the pistol shaking in his hands. “Mai Kim...”

“She’s dead.”

His eyes welled, and he half swallowed, like there was something in his throat that wouldn’t go down. He looked at the ground between us, but the pistol stayed where it was. After a few seconds, his voice wavered. “You know who kill her?”

I lowered my hands a little and he didn’t seem to take exception, so I let them drop to my sides and slowly placed the .45 in my duty holster but left the safety off and the leather strap unsnapped. “You know, that’s funny—we had a little discussion about that; your name came up.”

He shook his head vehemently. “I no kill Mai Kim.”

I was developing a hard-fought talent in Vietnam for being able to tell if people were lying to me. He was convincing, and I let the weight of it settle and drift us toward more conversation. “Well, then, who did?”

“I no kill Mai Kim!” The fat barrel faltered a moment then came closer to my face; I turned my palms out and took a half-step back, dropped my gun hand down, and gestured with the other. “All right, all right.” He switched the gun to his other hand. “If you didn’t kill her, then why are you holding a pistol on me?”

His lips compressed, and he swallowed again, the barrel not moving. “You on up?”

“What?”

“You on up?”

I inclined my head. “You mean the up-and-up?”

He nodded. “Up-up.”

I took a breath and sighed. “Yep, I’m on the up-up or else why would I be in a bar basement off Tu-Do Street with my sidearm back in its holster?”

He paused for a moment, took a deep breath that caused his whole body to shudder, and then lowered the Walther. I took another half-step back to show him I’d meant what I’d said, leaned against the dirt shelf, and listened to the rickety compressors and Buck and the Buckaroos. “Hoang, if I wanted you dead, I’d have left you in the mud at Khe Sanh.”

His eyes were steadier now, even with the sweat coursing down his face. “No mortar.”

“What?”

“No mortar.” He said it again, emphasizing each word.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“At Khe Sanh, no mortar.”

I felt cold, and it had nothing to do with the temperature. “You mean the round that hit the helicopter?”

He gestured with the pistol, the barrel coming up and to my left. “No mortar. Timer was . . .”

The shot compressed the confined space, and the spray of blood splattered in my eyes, making me blink. It didn’t feel like I was hit, but something was falling against me and I caught it. It was Hoang, choking on his own blood with a sucking wound that made ghastly noises in his chest. He was already covered with blood, and his eyes looked up at me, imploringly. I lowered him to the dirt floor as Baranski and Mendoza approached with their guns drawn.

I unzipped the flight suit and looked at the wound, blowing air with his breath, the bubbles flowing with the blood as it drained down Hoang’s side. I gently pulled the silk scarf from around his neck and raised him up, wrapping the length of cloth around and under his shoulder to secure the front and rear wounds as best I could.

I looked up at the security officer and the CID investigator. “God damn it, why did you fire?”

Baranski looked incredulous. “Hey, new guy, I just saved your fucking life.”

“He wasn’t going to shoot.”

He looked at Mendoza and then back to me. “He was pointing that bazooka at your head and why do you think he was using a silencer, dumb ass? You were about to become the honored dead.”

I ignored him and began picking Hoang up.

“What’re you doing?”

I pulled the tiny man against my shoulder, careful to avoid the entry and exit wounds. “I’m taking him to a hospital.”

Baranski snorted; the Texan remained silent. “He’s dead.”

“He’s not dead.” I glanced down at the little man’s eyes and watched as he blinked but didn’t seem to be able to focus on my face. “You’re not dead, do you hear me? You’re hurt pretty bad, but we’re gonna get you to a hospital and they’ll patch you up. Do you hear me?”

His eyes clinched like they were capturing my words, and I knew he understood. I stepped forward, moving the two men back. “And you can either help me or get out of my way.”

It’s amazing how fast you can clear a path in a crowded club with guns and a mortally wounded man. I climbed into the back of the jeep and carefully placed Hoang on my lap. His pupils were a little constricted, and I was beginning to suspect that the pilot/drug dealer might’ve sampled a little of his own product and that it was the only thing that was keeping him alive.

Baranski backed the jeep into the crowded street, swung it in a tight circle, and took a left at the next block. I knew the nearest hospital was in the other direction. I yelled above the shifting gears as the M-1A1A veered around traffic and started north on Highway 1. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

He yelled back at me over his shoulder. “I’m not taking that little dink to a civilian hospital here in Saigon where he can conveniently disappear. I’m taking him back to Tan Son Nhut.”

I looked at Mendoza, who stared straight ahead with an arm braced against the dash.

I looked down at Hoang. “He’ll die.”

“We’ve got the best medical care in Southeast Asia only five minutes away, so hold on and shut the hell up.” Baranski shifted into third, and the jeep slipped from the traffic and followed its headlights into the glowing dawn at the edge of the war-torn town.

* * *

“How are you feeling?”

He smiled and shrugged. “Rather foolish, actually. That, and I have a headache.”

“I bet you do.” I sat in the mauve-colored chair Durant Memorial provided for visitors and took off my hat, placing it on Tuyen’s metal case at my boots. Santiago Saizarbitoria stood by the door and, like all good flies on the wall, was doing his best to remain inconspicuous. “I hope you’re feeling up to answering some questions.”

“Oh, yes.” He used the electric control to push himself further up on the bed and pulled a pillow down lower. “They’re keeping me here overnight for observation, but other than the headache, I feel fine.”

“That was quite a hit you took.”

“I’ve had worse.” He glanced at the floor. “Is that my case?”

“Yes, it is. I was thinking that you might like to have it.”

“Thank you.”

We were both aware that I was making no attempt at giving it to him. “Mr. Tuyen, are you sure you don’t have any idea who might’ve attacked you?”

He looked up. “None whatsoever.”

“Were you visited by anyone today? I mean before the attack?”

He didn’t hesitate in responding. “No.”

“You’re sure?”

He waited for a moment, perhaps weighing the old adage that when law enforcement officials ask questions, they usually know the answers. He looked down at his hands. “There was someone who came to visit me early this morning.”

“And who was that?”

His eyes returned to mine. “The bartender.”

“Phillip Maynard?”

“Yes.”

I leaned in, placing my elbows on my knees and casually flipping my hat around by the brim. “Do you mind telling me why you lied to me just now?”

“He wanted more money, and I didn’t want to get him into trouble. It was a bad thing I did, paying him to be silent, and I did not wish to make the same mistake again.”

“Mr. Tuyen, that’s twice that you’ve dissembled when I’ve asked you a direct question. I’m going to advise you in the strongest terms, no matter what the circumstances, to not do it again.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry, I . . .”

“What did he say?”

He seemed startled at my abruptness.

"He...he said that he could make my life difficult unless I gave him more money.”

“Difficult in what way?”

“The conversation didn’t go much further than that. I told him that if he threatened me again, I would contact you.”

I looked into my hat, knowing full well that none of the answers to my questions were there. “But you didn’t. You didn’t tell me about Maynard’s visit, his attempts at extortion, or anything.” It was quiet, and we all listened to the thrum of the air-conditioning. “Did it ever occur to you that Phillip Maynard might’ve been the one who killed your granddaughter and that withholding this kind of evidence could be seen as an obstruction of justice?”

“I’m very sorry.”

I looked at the worn label in the hatband of my hat and then back up to Tuyen’s face. “Maynard left?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

The questioning look returned. “I’m afraid I don’t...”

“When he left, how did he leave, on a pogo stick?”

“On his motorcycle.” I continued to watch him and could just see the little bits of anger at the corners of his mouth. “He came and left on his motorcycle.”

I nodded. “Mr. Tuyen, were you struck once or twice in your motel room?”

“I believe once, but I could be wrong.”

“Mr. Tuyen, I’m getting really tired of your inexactitude.”

He clutched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Sheriff, my granddaughter is dead. . . .”

“Mr. Tuyen, you have yet to provide me with any documentation proving that she was your granddaughter.”

He took a breath but kept his eyes shut. “You don’t believe that . . .”

“I’m not sure exactly what I believe, but you’re not making it any easier for me.” I stood, placed my hat back on my head, and picked up his case. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you for a birth certificate, either Vietnamese or American.”

He started to interrupt. “Sheriff, surely you understand the red tape involved.”

“Papers such as baptismal, school records, or anything that will lead me to believe that Ho Thi was your granddaughter.” I continued to hold the case, and we were both very aware of it. “Now, you can provide me with this information or I can contact the probate courts in California and have a deputy from the Orange County Sheriff ’s Department expedite the information.”

He looked up at me and then spoke slowly. “Ho Thi was not adopted; she was my blood granddaughter.”

“Then I’ll have them contact the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Sacramento.”

He nodded, and his lips tightened. “Sheriff, I did not expect to find Ho Thi dead. Any and all of her official papers, including a visa and birth documentation, are in the safe in my office, back in Los Angeles.”

“Then you better contact someone and have that information faxed to us, and then I want the originals overnighted, now.” I pulled the small 9 mm from the back pocket of my jeans. “And you better have a license for this.”

* * *

Saizarbitoria followed me to the old Suburban parked next to my truck. I figured I’d take it and give him the Bullet. He deserved a few perks if I was going to make him work Powder Junction—that, and I wasn’t sure if the aged vehicle would make it back and forth too many more times. According to how the election turned out this fall, somebody was going to have to requisition the county for a new or relatively new vehicle for the Powder Junction substation.

When I looked up, Santiago stood there by my open window. “Why did you bring the laptop to the hospital?”

I noted the 173,472 miles on the odometer and knew just how it felt. “I thought he might want to know it was being attended to.” He kept watching me, the dark of his eyes deepening. “What, Sancho?”

“You mentioned that case a couple of times. Are you sure you didn’t just want to see his reaction?”

I shook my head. “You have a sordid and suspicious mind.” I sat there continuing to stare at the odometer and wondered what the mileage really might be, since it hadn’t worked in years. “We couldn’t get past the security software, so I figured I’d just hang on to the case for safekeeping.”

“How about not telling him that Maynard was dead?”

I put on the loose seat belt and ground the starter. “He has his little secrets, and I have mine.”

His turn to nod. “You really want me to stick around and keep an eye on him?”

The Suburban finally caught and roared. “Yep. Call up Frymire or Double Tough over at the jail and get a replacement for midnight.”

He looked at the sun, which was attempting to escape over the Bighorn Mountains, and I didn’t blame it or him for wanting to put a little distance between them and what appeared to be going on. “What’re you going to do?”

“I’m going to go have dinner with my daughter, her new boyfriend and his sister, and Henry, and then I’m going to sleep at the jail.”

His arms rested on the sill of the Suburban. “You really think Tuyen’s liable to do something?”

I mused for a moment on how quickly the Basquo was developing and how long he was likely to be satisfied with the job of deputy. “I don’t know, but according to you, somebody tried to kill him and you never can tell if they might come back and try to finish the job.”

“So you don’t think Maynard hit him or murdered the girl?”

I slipped the truck into reverse and waited a full five seconds for it to engage. “At this point in the investigation, I’m not ruling out anyone.”

15

“Daddy.”

It was possible that Tuyen had been attacked, but had he been hit twice or was it a setup?

“Daddy?”

I had pushed him, but had I pushed him enough? Was I pushing the wrong guy?

“Daddy! ”

I focused on my daughter, who was giving me hard looks as Henry chuckled and the collective Morettis smiled and continued eating the hors d’oeuvres. “Sorry.”

I picked up a stuffed mushroom from the appetizer tray and glanced at Michael for a little backup as he helped himself to another Rocky Mountain oyster. The Philadelphia beat cop came in like a champ with a little mind reading. “So you don’ think this Tuyen is on the level?”

I chewed the mushroom, not tasting much of anything, and looked around at the interior of the Winchester Restaurant and the replica antique firearms over the fireplace. “I’m not sure how, or how deep he’s involved, but something just doesn’t ring true with the guy.” I looked at Henry, who I’m sure was reading my mind; for him it had been a lifetime avocation. “What do you think?”

The Cheyenne Nation sighed. “He is spooky; once a spook, always a spook.”

I thought about the old term for spies, nodded, and looked at Vic; I was still trying to get used to her in a white, ribbed tank top and a tight, short skirt. “What do you think?” She munched on a fried cheese stick and extended a hand, holding the palm down flat, shaking the turquoise bracelets at her wrist as her manicured hand wavered. Then I watched as she took another breaded steer testicle from the center platter and placed it onto Michael’s plate.

I still wasn’t sure if he knew what he was eating.

“One of the things that keeps snagging me is the preciseness of the hanging.” I caught the eye of an elderly woman at the next table, and Cady glared at me, causing me to lower my voice and lean in. “The hanging was textbook—the drop according to height and weight, and there’s only a limited number of people in the common populace who would know how to pull something like that off.”

Vic played with the silver dancestick earrings I had gotten her up on the Crow reservation for her birthday. “Would Tuyen?”

“It’s possible. Some of the organizations he was cozy with were known to perform these types of executions.”

“Who else would know?”

I turned my glass of Rainier in the water ring. “I am loath to say it, but Den Dunnigan did a stint as a corrections officer up in Deer Lodge, Montana, back in the old days when they used to hang people. That and we just saw the Dunnigans’ truck pull into the turnoff to Bailey but then continue on.”

Michael dipped the high-plains delicacy in cocktail sauce. “He got any kind of record?”

“He has a temper, and once came close to beating a guy to death with a shovel.”

Despite her reservations, Cady joined the conversation. “Is that the crazy rancher?”

“He’s not crazy.”

Henry chimed in. “I am not sure that confusing your mother with the timer on the electric coffeemaker denotes a great deal of mental stability.”

I turned back to Cady. “Not James, his brother Den.”

My daughter leaned in even more. “He thinks his mother is a coffeepot?”

I looked at all of them. “It’s complicated....”

The waitress interrupted. “Are you folks all right?”

Michael looked up at her, still munching on the Rocky Mountain oysters. “These are great; can we get another round?”

I thought about the girl, the missing one. Who was she? More important, where was she? The only thing I could think we might do is knock on doors from ranch to ranch and see if anybody had seen her. It was a long shot but all I could come up with in the rough and expansive country of the Hole in the Wall.

“What about the second girl?” The Bear was mind reading again, and I wasn’t sure if I was happy that he had just made my internal monologue the topic of conversation for the group.

“What second girl?” I hadn’t had a chance to fill Vic in.

“The manager of the Flying J down in Casper said there were two girls in the car and that both had long dark hair, but I asked Maynard and the Dunnigans, and they all said Ho Thi was traveling alone.” I nodded at Henry. “James said that he was having . . . I don’t know. What would you call them?”

He smiled. “Visions.”

“Anyway, we went out to the ghost town and took a look around but couldn’t find anything.”

Michael took the last Rocky Mountain oyster. He hadn’t noticed that he was the only one eating them. “Ghost town?”

“There’s an old settlement to the west of Powder Junction, a mining town that dried up.”

Michael stopped chewing and looked at Vic. “You have to take me there.”

I looked at them. “There are snakes.”

Vic blew a breath between her lipsticked lips. “Fuck that.”

Cady smiled and reached a hand out for Michael, who took it. They both turned back to look at me. Cady seemed concerned. “What kind of visions?”

The elderly couple at the next table were leaning in, too, so I lowered my voice. “He said he saw the girl who had been murdered out there in Bailey.”

“You mean when they found the body?” Cady’s voice was a little too loud, so I gave her a look back.

“After that. James said he was driving home one night— this was after finding Ho Thi’s body—and there she was standing on the side of the road.”

Cady’s voice was just as loud as before. “What’d he do?”

I shrugged. “He said he stopped his truck, but by the time he got out, she was gone.”

Henry leaned back and sipped his wine and stared at the elderly couple who suddenly took less interest in our conversation. The Cheyenne Nation returned the glass of red to the surface of the table and, after a moment, spoke. “Den was a prison guard?”

“Yep.”

“He seemed defensive.”

Cady looked uncertain. “This is the crazy one?”

“His brother, but obviously a certain amount of eccentricity runs in the family.” I looked at my neglected beer on the table and continued to lose my taste for it. “However, Den is very protective of James.”

Henry nodded. “Yes, but why would Den, or for that matter James, kill Ho Thi, kill Maynard, and attempt to kill Tuyen?”

They were all silent, and this was when my job sucked.

Cady sipped her wine and smiled; always the optimist, she was trying to find the upside to my predicament. “So that means that Virgil White Buffalo is innocent.”

“Yep.” I watched the tiny bubbles rising in my glass, avoided all their eyes, but especially Henry’s.

* * *

“So, you’re sleeping at the jail again?”

I pulled the Suburban up to Vic’s single-wide and slipped the decrepit thing into park. “It’s my turn.”

“You relieving Frymire?”

“Yep. Then Frymire is supposed to relieve Saizarbitoria at the hospital, because Double Tough didn’t look good.” Henry had disappeared in the Thunderbird, giving Cady and Michael a lift out to my place, so I had given Vic a ride home. I watched as she pulled a leg onto the bench seat, exposing a little thigh well above her boots.

“What are you going to do about Virgil, Walt?”

“I don’t know, maybe call Human Services or try and get hold of somebody in charge of the social programs up on the Rez.” She unsnapped her seat belt, turned, and carefully placed the black leather boots that were embroidered with blue roses in my lap. I thumbed the stitching. "Pleurosis....”

"What?”

“Blue roses; it’s what Tennessee Williams used to call his sister’s pleurosis.”

She shook her head, sighed, and considered me. “You are so fucking weird.” She crossed her ankles and made herself comfortable. “You have to let him go.”

I thought about the big Indian and placed a hand above the boots on her well-shaped calf, marveling at the smoothness of her skin. “Yep.”

She stretched and pushed her heels further into my lap. She curled an arm and propped up her head. The slight breeze from the open window stirred her hair. “What are you going to do about Tuyen?”

I stroked her calf, my hand pausing at the back of her knee as she drew it up, parting the short skirt further. “I figure I’ll keep him under house arrest until I get some validation from California.”

“The Dunnigans?”

“Well, considering the circumstances, I really don’t have any choice but to bring them in for a formal questioning.”

She smiled one of her more carnivoristic smiles, the one that displayed the oversize canine tooth to its best advantage. “And what are you going to do about me?”

I tipped my hat back, sighed, and looked at the analog clock—it was practically the only thing on the dash that worked. “I have to be at the jail in ten minutes.”

Her golden eyes were enormous, and I tried to focus on them as her skirt slipped even higher. “Your loss.”

Boy howdy.

“I’d ask for a rain check, but it doesn’t seem to want to rain around here lately.”

My handsome deputy shook her head and shifted her body. Like a dervish, she swung her boots down and kneeled on the seat, enjoying her height advantage as she turned, tilted my head back with both hands, and captured my mouth with her own. It was a bandit kiss, hard and fast—designed to leave the victim with a lingering feeling of what could have just been.

She straightened her lipstick with her third finger, slid out, closed the truck door, and turned, strutting away without bothering to pull her skirt down. She called over her shoulder. “You’re telling me.”

I felt like I’d been hit and run.

* * *

Virgil White Buffalo was the only one awake by the time I got to the jail. After snatching a few Post-its off my door facing, I discovered Frymire with Tuyen’s computer still in his lap, and snoring again. It was possibly the reason the big Indian wasn’t sleeping. He still didn’t talk much, but I’d begun making a habit of speaking to him whenever possible, hoping that I could get him in practice. “Hey, Virgil.”

He didn’t say anything but nodded toward my deputy.

I carefully lifted the computer from Chuck’s lap and nudged the young man, and he looked up at me. I put the computer back in the case that was open on the counter and read Ruby’s latest missives.

“I guess I dozed off again, huh?”

“Yep, but if Virgil here won’t hold up his end of the conversation and you don’t play chess, it’s to be expected. Anything new?”

“I was playing around with the computer, but the security systems are tough.”

“You know about those things?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a degree in computer science.”

“You do?” I thought about it. “I don’t remember seeing that on your application.”

“I didn’t think it mattered—we don’t have any computers in Powder Junction.” He had a point.

I held one of the Post-its in my hand and read the designation. “ACSS-BPS.” I looked up at him. “What the hell is BPS?" ”

“I have no idea.”

I read the yellow square in my hand. “WiFi?”

“Wireless connections for computers; most people use it for laptops. Haven’t you seen the signs on the motels out by the highway?”

The next note was about some stolen drilling equipment east of town. “Yep.”

He yawned. “It means you can run your computer without hooking to a landline; just open it up and it acquires a signal.”

I thought about it. “But what does WiFi actually stand for?”

“Wi is for wireless, and . . .” He paused. “I’m not sure what the Fi stands for.”

I stuffed the Post-its in my shirt pocket. "Semper...” I wasn’t so sure he got it and watched him yawn again.

He caught me glancing at him, and he gestured toward Tuyen’s computer. “You want me to take that thing and see what I can come up with?”

It was personal property, but if everything checked out with the Vietnamese man’s story, I’d just be hauling it over to the hospital for him anyway. “Sure; maybe it’ll help you to stay awake.”

I sent him off with his homework and sat in the chair opposite Virgil. I slid the upside-down trash can with the chessboard between us. Virgil White Buffalo, Bad War Honors, Crazy Dog Clan, studied me.

“I’m afraid I’m not going to be much of a challenge in comparison to Lucian.”

His voice was still rough but carried like a bass viola, vibrating the air between us. He turned the board, and I ignored the symbolism as he gave me white and the first move. “Maybe you’re better than you think.”

I froze my finger on a pawn. “I doubt it.”

“You must be worthy. Short-pants told me the Old Ones speak with you.” I looked up, and his eyes stayed on mine as we listened to the old Seth Thomas on the wall tick. He gestured through the bars and toward the game. I brought the pawn out to G4 and he countered with another to B5. There was a pause, and I listened to him breathe along with the ticking of the clock. “The Old Ones have never spoken to me.”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

“He’s dead.” I looked at Hoang’s eyes and watched as they stared indifferently, his mouth slack in silence and the bubbles no longer struggling through the blood that saturated his chest. I held his head up and supported it against me.

Baranski laid an arm over Mendoza’s seat and threw a look back. “What?”

The sunrise oranged the sky, and I desperately tried to contain my anger. “You can slow down now, he’s dead.”

The CID man peered back at the road and returned his eyes to me through the rearview. “What’d you just say?”

“I said that he’s dead, and you can slow down. You accomplished what it was you set out to do.”

He looked at Mendoza, who was in the passenger seat and was still staring ahead. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have sworn that there were two dead men in the jeep. “Are you accusing me...?”

“He told me about the satchel, the one you gave him to take in the helicopter when we were on our way to Khe Sanh.” Even in the gloom of early morning, I could see his eyes as they flicked to the side. “He told me, and I saw you do it. Pretty slick, getting rid of all your bad eggs in one basket.”

“Hey, fucking new guy, do you have any idea the shit that you’re getting yourself into?”

I ignored him and continued. “It didn’t make any sense when the chopper blew to the northeast with Charlie attacking from the same direction. Anything they would have shot at us would’ve blown the other way.” I gestured with the body in my arms. “I guess Hoang didn’t know you intended to kill him, too. And then, since that didn’t work, you tried to get him to kill me. If I’ve got it right, Hoang was supposed to get me good and drunk and then take me out to the bunker where you’d already killed Mai Kim and finish me off.” I swallowed, my spit catching in my throat. “But I saved Hoang’s life in Khe Sanh, and he couldn’t shoot me himself or pick me up and drag me over to the murder site where you could finish the job. He didn’t even tell you where I was.” I looked down at Hoang’s dead face. “Turns out, he was a pretty good guy, huh?”

He kept the jeep at close to sixty. “Fuck you, you fucking asshole.”

My hand slipped below Hoang’s legs, where the safety strap from my .45 was still unsnapped and the safety was not on. “The acceleration in drug trafficking roughly coincided with your arrival here at Tan Son Nhut, and the only thing I’m wondering is whether you knew about the investigation beforehand and were trying to protect your interests, or if you just stumbled onto this mess and made it your own little cottage industry.”

He looked at the road through the windshield as if there were something up there. “You don’t know shit.”

Mendoza suddenly spoke. "Hey...”

I looked over at Baranski. “I think I’ve got it all pretty much figured out, except for one thing.” I studied the back of Mendoza’s head. “Is he in on it, too?”

The Texan raised a hand, pointing toward the road. “Hey!”

Baranski looked at the side of his partner’s face, and I cleared the big Colt from under Hoang’s legs as the Texan grabbed at the steering wheel. Baranski swung back around as we struck something in the road, which sent the jeep in a two-wheeled spiral off to the left. “What the ... !”

The vehicle didn’t quite flip, but the jolt tore Hoang’s body from my grip, and I tumbled out the back with the .45 still thankfully in my hands. I hit a dirt pile and carried a lot of it with me into the barrow ditch beside the road. I lay there for a moment, trying to get my breath back, and looked around for Mendoza and Baranski, but the only body visible was Hoang’s, lying askew about twenty yards in front of me.

I shook my head and felt some blood dripping down my cheek. I must have picked up road rash from the pavement. I rose up on my skinned elbows and shook my head again in an attempt to clear my vision; it seemed as though the surrounding bushes were approaching Hoang’s body and the jeep, which was still lying on its side on the elevated highway. Birnam Wood marching on Dunsinane.

I listened to the pounding that sounded like tanks firing in the back of my brain and wiped some of the dirt and blood from my face with my free hand. I took a deep breath and stood, thinking that I’d better find the CID man and his chum before they found me.

Then the bushes turned and looked at me.

They were wearing black pajamas and flat hats and stood there with gleaming AK-47s. One of the bushes toward the back held a Soviet-made RPG grenade launcher and gestured for the others to help him haul a light machine gun that Hoang’s body must have hit when it had been thrown from the jeep.

I raised the .45 as the closest soldier, the one with the RPG, began screaming. I fired, and he slumped backward into a sitting position, the bush camouflage falling to his side. I ran toward the others. It was a dicey proposition, but the range on the Colt was useless against the AKs unless I could get in close. I ran forward as the next bush swung his weapon toward me. I blocked the barrel by grabbing the fore stock, and he fired into the hillside. I pressed the .45 into his midriff, pulled the trigger, and held on to his gun as he fell away.

A spray of gunfire ripped up from the ditch, and I fell to the side of the man I’d just shot, yanked the automatic rifle up, and took a bead on the VC soldier who was shooting. The kick was a little harder than an M16, or maybe it was just the uncomfortable wooden stock, but the other fellow dropped anyway, and I lit up a few more VC as the rest disappeared into the high grass.

Do what you’re trained to do and you might get out of this alive. Make the right decisions as if your life depended on them, because it does. Hesitate and you hesitate forever.

I lay there trying not to focus on the multitude of ways I could’ve died in the last few minutes and listened to the pounding in the back of my head instead. I stretched my jaw muscles and looked down the road where the sappers and Viet Cong squad had been headed. I knew we weren’t very far from the west gate of the air base, but the few hooches in the area appeared deserted and there were no civilians on the highway, which was something I’d never seen before. It was then that I noticed the wreckage of an M48 tank. There were bodies sticking out from all the hatches, and it was obvious that the machine was out of action. Beyond it was an M113 armored personnel carrier—the battle-taxi must have run into the back of the Patton when it’d gotten shelled—and there was another body slumped over the .50 caliber machine gun at its commander seat.

Farther down the line, I could see more wreckage where a few more of the APCs had been likewise shelled and were out of commission. Along with the remaining tank, five vehicles were herringboned off the road and firing into an old textile manufacturing building to the west.

It was obvious what had happened. With boots and saddles, the cavalry force must have been dispatched from further north, possibly from Cu Chi, in defense of Tan Son Nhut, and been dry-gulched on Highway 1.

A buddy who had been at the Fort Knox armor training school said they’d shown them what a real firefight was supposed to look like in a display known only as the Mad Minute, but where the tank and machine-gun fire was directed at a target in the display, here and now the thousands of green tracers that were lighting up the quasi-darkness were traveling toward me.

A few streaming bolts of fire from a bazooka caromed off a billboard at the roadside until one found a trajectory that hit the armored personnel carrier that had been the source of the nearest friendly fire. It blew to pieces with a thundering shudder.

A few of the Viet Cong squad that had been disguised as bushes were now throwing hand grenades over the arch of the highway about a hundred yards away. I was unfamiliar with the AK-47, but I finally found the single-shot switch and aimed at the nearest VC. My shot was a little low and to the right, but he fell and the grenade he held exploded, taking him and the two men nearest him.

I stepped back into the bamboo for cover, counted five seconds, then leaned back out and fired again. I had a clean miss on the next, and he began running the other way to join another squad that had come out of the civilian hooches.

There were hundreds of them.

I started rethinking my tactics and thought that perhaps I should try to find somebody on my side who wasn’t dead. With a glance at Hoang’s body, I struggled to get up the embankment to the burnt-outM48. The footing was pretty good, and I got to one of the dirt berms that had blocked the road. A few enemy rounds ricocheted off the surface. I took some deep breaths and slid around to the east behind another dirt pile to get to the personnel carrier’s forward track. The driver was the closest, and it was obvious that he was dead. I glanced up at the commander’s cupola and could see that he was dead, too. I decided to check the next APC.

No one was firing from the vehicle, but I could still hear noises from inside. The main hatch was open, and it looked like the majority of the personnel had escaped with only a few dead. I could smell the blood, so sweet it was almost sour, and was about to move on when I noticed a sergeant who was still breathing sitting with his back against the engine housing. I yelled at him. “Gunny, you all right!?”

His head wavered a moment, then he raised his face. His left eye was gone.

I scrambled through the hatch and grabbed his arm, pulling him toward me as another round of AK fire ricocheted off the tough hide of the armored vehicle and flew around the area where I’d just been standing. I had a flickering of anger at the men who had deserted the damaged sergeant as I staggered into the vehicle and placed him against the bulkhead. “On second thought, it might be a little safer in here.”

I grabbed a first-aid kit from the steel-plated interior and pulled out a pad and a box of gauze, carefully wrapping it around his head to stanch the bleeding. The round must’ve entered his eye and then exited at his closest ear, a miracle in itself. Then I slipped out one of the syrettes of morphine and stabbed the one-hitter into his chest.

He started and looked at me with the one eye. “Do you know what day it is?”

He had a thick Appalachian accent, and I studied him, stunned that he could still talk or hear. “What?”

I watched as he tried to speak with one side of his mouth. “Do you know what day it is?”

I swallowed in an attempt to work up some spit, but my tongue still felt like one of those fly strips. “I think it’s a Tuesday.”

He nodded. “It feels like a Tuesday.”

I smiled back at him and placed the sticker from the syrette on his lapel so that the medics would know he’d been dosed. “Yes, it does.” He mumbled something else as I checked the rifle’s banana-style magazine and found it had only two rounds left.

The attacking soldiers were getting closer, and it was only a short question of time before they hit us with another screaming antitank round or dropped a grenade in the hatch. I laid the almost-spent AK in the sergeant’s lap. “Sarge, I need you to sit tight, because if I don’t start laying down a little suppression fire, we’re about to be overrun.”

I saw that one of the M60s had exploded its barrel and that the other one didn’t look much better. I was trying to avoid the dead commander, but the .50 caliber machine gun looked like our last chance. I reached up and gently pulled the captain down from his position and set him beside the sergeant. He’d caught at least three rounds in the chest, and his expression was one of profound interest; he didn’t look surprised, and it was as if he’d known exactly what was happening to him as it had happened. I looked at the sergeant, who appeared to sink back a little as his one eye closed, and I hoped I could get us a little breathing room before he stopped breathing.

I checked the .50 and could see that it had never been fired. I racked the charging handle, braced my boots, and carefully raised my head up through the hatch. I could hear voices to my left and pivoted to see a number of VC crawling all over the M48 that I had abandoned.

I swung the barrel of the heavy machine gun around and tried to remember the numbers from basic and recalled that the air-cooled M2 would cycle 550 rpm if you let it, but that if you did, it would shoot out the barrel; so I pulled the trigger with just a little restraint— sprayed and prayed.

The weapon did everything it was designed to do, and I hoped that I would never have to see anything like it again.

I pivoted back to the ditch and laid suppression fire along the embankment; those who could crawl or run scattered into the hooches and grass like Wyoming wild turkeys on the third Thursday of November.

If I was going to get the sergeant and myself out of there, now was the time.

I jumped down from the commander’s platform and turned around in time to see Baranski. He was perfectly framed in the open back hatch of the armored personnel carrier, and he was smiling.

I stood there for one of those slow-motion frozen seconds as he raised Hoang’s silenced Walther PPK directly at my face and fired.

* * *

“Do you want to answer that?” His voice was coarse with enough gravel to fill a five-yard dump truck.

I looked up at Virgil’s eyes and tried not to focus on the damage to his left brow. “What?”

He exhaled a slight laugh. “You’re playing a very good game, but the phone is ringing.”

I looked down at the half-finished chess match and then up to the phone on the holding cell wall. “Thanks. You’ll let me know if I win, right?” I walked over and picked up the receiver. “Absaroka County Sheriff’s Offifice?"” I didn’t sound like I was sure.

“Walt?”

I came back fully when I realized it was Frymire. “Yep?”

“I’m over here at the hospital, but Sancho’s not here.”

That wasn’t like the Basquo. “What about Tuyen?”

“Sleeping like a baby.”

"Maybe he went to the bathroom or to get something to eat."”

Chuck was sounding a little rattled. “Sheriff, I’ve been here for a half an hour, and he hasn’t shown up. I asked the on-duty nurse, but she said she hadn’t seen him since she’d made her rounds at eleven forty-five.” I looked up at the clock—forty-five minutes. “You want me to call him at home?”

I thought about Marie and their expected child, and her reaction to a one o’clock in the morning call from the Sheriff’s Department concerning the whereabouts of her husband. “No, I’ll take the beeper and come over.”

I glanced back at Virgil White Buffalo as I hung up the phone and thought about what he would do to the jail when I left him alone. I was going to let him go tomorrow anyway— today, technically, so what could it hurt? I handed him his personal effects from the drawer, including the photo wallet, jacket, and knife. “Virgil, how would you like to go on a little field trip?”

By the time we’d driven through the sulky, high-plains night and gotten to the hospital emergency entrance, the duty nurse, Janine Reynolds, was waiting for us.

She looked up worriedly at Virgil, no doubt remembering his last visit. I glanced up at him. “You’re not going to trash the place again, are you?”

His face remained impassive. “No.”

Frymire was standing in the hallway next to his chair at Tuyen’s door when we approached. He stood, a little unsteadily, and readjusted his shoulder with Tuyen’s computer still under his arm. “I haven’t seen him, and I’ve been here for almost an hour.”

I turned to Ruby’s granddaughter. "Janine?”

She pointed. “When I made my rounds before midnight, he was sitting in that chair.”

Frymire tried to interrupt, but I was still looking at Janine. "Tuyen?”

She nodded toward the closed door. “I took his dinner tray away. He was looking out the window when I told him it would be a good idea to turn off the light and rest.”

I shrugged as I turned the handle and opened the door. “Well, at least he hasn’t been asleep long.” Frymire held it open as I entered and flipped on the light. “Mr. Tuyen?” He was rolled up in the sheets and a single polyester blanket and was turned away from us toward the windows. “Mr. Tuyen, I’m sorry to bother you, but...”

He didn’t answer and, as I got closer, I could see that there was a dark stain on the covers. I leaned over and carefully pulled the sheet back from his face.

“Oh, Sancho.”

16

He wasn’t dead, but damn near.

Tuyen had used the serrated dinner knife from his hospital tray and had utilized the flimsy blade to its worst advantage, planting it deep while twisting it upward and into Saizarbitoria’s kidney, then breaking it off, resulting in massive internal hemorrhage and partial paralysis. Fortunately, he had been attacked in the hospital, and we had him in surgery in less than ten minutes. “I’ll call Marie, you call everybody else and get an APB out on my truck. He’s got Sancho’s gun, so make sure they know he’s armed, then get over to the office and coordinate. ”

“Who’s everybody else?”

We stood by the swinging doors. “Vic, the Ferg, Ruby, Double Tough, the highway patrol, Natrona County, Campbell County, Sheridan County.... And if there’s a Canadian Mountie on duty, I want him on it, too.”

“What about Henry?" ”

I looked up at Frymire, at his battered face and broken arm, still cradling Tuyen’s computer. “Especially Henry.”

I started toward the emergency room exit and noticed that something continued to block the fluorescent light in the hallway over my shoulder. I turned and looked at Virgil; how had I forgotten about a seven-foot Indian? I pointed at Frymire, who was making his calls from the nursing station. “Virgil, could you go with him?”

He didn’t move but studied me and then strained to get the words out. “You need help...”

I stared at him. “I’m about to get a lot of it.”

I looked into the haloed reflections in his pupils and could tell that it cost a lot for him to speak. “You need help now.”

Other than shoot him, there wasn’t a lot I could do to stop him, and maybe I was ashamed that I had him locked up for almost a week with barely any cause, but I didn’t have time for this. “Look, I appreciate the offer, but...”

“I know that country.”

I looked up and felt like a child arguing with an adult, the medicine bag on his chest at my eye level. “What?”

“You are going to Bailey, the ghost town. I know it better than anyone.”

“What makes you think that I’m going...”

“The silver-haired woman, she said the electric messages were coming from the school.”

It took me a second to make the connection. “The e-mails?”

“Yes.”

I thought about it. “They were coming from the wireless-whatever-it-is of the county school system.”

He nodded. “The electric messages from the BPS.” His eyes darkened; reflecting everything, showing nothing. “It is the same abbreviation that is on a plaque they have on the outside of the building. I have seen it while watching the children . . . BPS. Bailey Public School.”

It was like I was falling from the earth. It all fit; the random e-mails, the missing computer that was of such interest to Tuyen, the appearance of the second girl—the fact that Ho Thi didn’t bear much of a resemblance to Mai Kim. The real great-granddaughter of the woman I knew in Tan Son Nhut was in Bailey and had been desperately trying to get in touch with me the only safe way she knew how.

“She is there, and we must find her before he does.”

* * *

Once I’d called Marie and asked Doc Bloomfield to update me on Santiago’s condition, Virgil and I were in the old Suburban and on the road. I radioed in to give everyone an indication as to our location and destination, and it was Rosey who responded.

Static. “Damn it, I’m I-90, east of Durant, but I’m turning around now. I’ll call ahead to the Casper detachment and send them north.”

I keyed the mic. “Roger that.” Virgil continued to watch the road ahead. I flattened my foot on the accelerator and listened as the big block made like Big Daddy Don Garlits; she was old, but in a straight line the 454 cubic inches was some kind of fierce.

Thirty minutes later, we took the exit at Powder Junction and shot west toward the south tail of the Bighorns and Bailey. Virgil braced a hand that nearly covered the dash as I made the corner before dropping over the hill to where we had a clear view of the abandoned town.

I was hoping to see my truck parked on the main and only drag of the old mining community or at the school just over the hill, but the only vehicle I saw was the turquoise and white Ford that belonged to the Dunnigan brothers.

I stopped the truck and tried to decide if I should continue to the school or head down and see what was up with Den and James. I decided to check on the brothers and turned the wheel.

I pulled up alongside their truck and got out. Virgil opened the passenger-side door and stood in the middle of the street as I looked inside the pickup.

The rifle rack was empty. Otherwise, everything seemed normal, and the keys were dangling from the ignition. I felt the hood, and the warmth from the engine was still there, but could see no signs of my truck, the brothers, Tuyen, or the missing girl.

It didn’t make sense—the Dunnigans, but no Tuyen?

It was obvious that Virgil was reading my mind as he circled around and joined me. “You check the school, and I’ll stay here.”

I thought about it and then looked up and down the deserted street. “Virgil, I can’t...”

“You must find the girl.”

“They’re liable to shoot you.”

He opened the driver-side door and pushed me into the Suburban before I could voice any further objections. He stood there looking down at me and smiled as he shut the door. He rested his giant hand on the knife at his belt. “I have been shot before.”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

I lay there on the floor of the personnel carrier and thought that it sure hurt a lot to be dead. I stared up through the open hatchway and watched the sickly lemon color of the sky as the sun fought to bring more heat to the Southeast Asian morning. I could hear helicopter support coming in from Tan Son Nhut and watched as the Huey gunships shot in and through the sky above.

The 9 mm slug had taken part of the clavicle and a lot of meat with it, and it was all I could do to stay aware and watch as Baranski climbed through the opening of the APC. He continued to point the Walther at my face. My head was lodged against the bulkhead and the driver’s station, with my left arm pinned behind me. I made a futile kick at him as he stood over me.

The CID man watched the helicopters fly overhead. “Re-gas, bypass, and haul ass. That’d be the Troop D gunships, and I’d say that means the end of Charlie’s little Tet surprise.” Baranski propped a foot up on the seat and studied me with an indifferent look on his face. “Damn, you can’t hit shit with these homemade silencers.”

I choked out a response, figuring the more time I took, the more of a chance there was that somebody would show up. “You hit me.”

“Yeah, but I was aiming between your eyes.” He laughed. “You should have stayed at BHQ, dumb ass; it would have been a lot safer there.”

I grimaced as another stab from my shoulder caught my breath in my throat. “So, it was your operation?”

He pulled the pack of Camels from his shirt pocket and bumped one, placing it between his lips. “It became mine.” He redeposited the pack and pulled out the Zippo and lit up. “It was kind of a ragtag operation, but it held promise.” He inhaled deeply and looked down at me again. “I’m pulling in almost a hundred thousand dollars a month, and I was going to cut you in, but you were so fucking gung-ho.”

“Hoang was your partner?”

He sniffed and cleared his throat before taking another long drag on the cigarette. “Yeah, and he’s going to be hard to replace. The satchels were a hell of an operation; I could get anything—hashish, opium.... Whatever anyone wanted, I could get it, and even better, I could get it out and back to the land of the great PX. I’ll have to get another pilot for this route, but that really shouldn’t be that much of a problem.” He studied me and laughed. “All the trouble started when that stupid bitch decided to tell you about the deal. Do you believe that? All this because of some fucking putain.” He took another drag and considered me. “We can talk as long as you want, ’cause there’s nobody coming. Charlie Troop is over at the Ville shooting prisoners right now.” His eyes were uncaring, and he palmed the 9 mm as he spoke. “You see, Mr. Marine Investigator, nobody gives a shit.”

I tried to readjust my position, but wedged in the walkway there wasn’t anywhere to go. “What about Mendoza?”

“The beaner? What about him?”

It hurt just to breathe, but I had to keep talking. “Was he in on it?”

“Nah, I had him pretty much trained to look the other way. The only thing was I figured he’d get suspicious if I fragged you.” He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and spit out a piece of tobacco from his tongue. “He was pretty torn up from the wreck, so I just walked over and put one in the back of his head. Put him out of my misery. Kind of like I’m going to do to you. I’m glad that I didn’t kill you the first time. It’s nice that I get to see you, see your expression when I shoot you in the face.” The Walther came back up and leveled at my eyes. “Look at me, not a scratch. You know, they say that George Washington was like that; Patton, too; there’d be a battle with bullets zipping around all over the place and they’d never get touched.” He smiled again, and I watched as his finger tightened on the trigger. “Like them, I guess I’m just fucking lucky that way.”

The blast of the gun sounded like two, and the blood sprayed everywhere.

I lay there for a moment thinking that I shouldn’t be thinking.

I blinked and looked up through the blood on Baranski’s face, at his lips where the cigarette continued to hang, just before he toppled over and landed on top of me. He shuddered once and then lay still. I looked up at the one-eyed sergeant who was seated against the bulkhead and still holding the AK-47 with the thin trailing of smoke drifting from the barrel.

His voice had a singsong quality to it, just before his single eye closed again. “I guess your fucking luck just ran out, asshole.”

* * *

There was no one at the school.

I pulled into the driveway and got out, pulling the Mag-Lite from the pocket in the door along with the handheld two-way radio. The batteries were weak in the flashlight, but it provided more illumination than the listless moon that was just rising. I listened to the soft tinging of the hardware against the flagpole and remembered the school on the Powder River that I’d attended. I walked up to the front door of the single-story, concrete-block building and saw that it was padlocked. I peered through the window and could see a couple of desks and a computer on a side table. Abandoned for summer, it looked like no one had been in the place in a couple of months.

I sighed and glanced around, hoping to see a Vietnamese girl somewhere in the high-plains night. I was disappointed.

I punched the button on the radio and looked up at the red cliffs that seemed to soak up the light of the moon. “Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department, this is unit one. Is anybody out there?”

Static.

Damn cliffs.

I drove over the hill back to Bailey and parked the Suburban in front of the Dunnigans’ old Ford. I climbed out with the flashlight in my hand again—this time, someone was sitting in the driver’s seat. I pulled my .45 and shined the dimming flashlight into the cab; I recognized the profile and spoke through the open passenger-side window. "James?"”

He turned to look at me as I trailed my sidearm below the window where he couldn’t see it. “Hey, Walt.”

I waited a second and then lowered the beam of the Mag-Lite, but he didn’t continue. “What’re you doing here, James?”

He took a deep breath, pushed his straw hat back, and sipped from a tarnished flask. I could see the .30-30 lever-action propped up next to the door. “Oh, I was headin’ back from the bar and come lookin’ for that girl...the dead one.”

I studied him and then rested an elbow on the door to strike a more conversational posture. “What’s the Winchester for?”

He smiled and looked embarrassed. “This place, it kind of worries me.... I guess I’m gettin’ scary.”

“You mind if I take it?”

He studied the rifle, then me. “Sure, sure . . . nothin’ to be afraid of if you’re here.”

I carefully reached in and pulled the Winchester through the window, threw the lever a couple of times to empty it, and then shuttled it and the loose rounds onto the floorboard of the Suburban. I locked the truck and watched James, who hadn’t moved except to drink from the flask. “You find her?”

He took a breath to give himself time to think and then shook his head. “No, no, no...” He stared at the dash as we listened to the soft tick of the big-block cooling on my vehicle. He extended the flask toward me, and I could smell the trademark brandy. “Care for some?”

“No thanks.” I shook my head. “James, have you seen anybody else around here?”

He brought the flask back to his lips and took a swallow, then brought a finger up and touched the shift knob on the old truck. “You know, most people don’t believe the things I tell ’em. . . .” He turned his head and looked at me. “So I just stop tellin’ ’em.” His eyes wavered a little, and I noticed he was looking past me and to the right—I turned and followed his gaze, but there was no one there. “Do you know you’re bein’ followed?”

I turned and looked again but still couldn’t see anyone. “Now?”

“All the time.” He took another sip from the flask, and his eyes returned to the dash. “They’re with you all the time, or all the times I’ve ever seen you.” I continued to study him, but he didn’t move. “... Met a giant.”

It took me a second to respond. “You did?”

“Yep, real big Indian fella.”

“And where was that?”

He leaned forward and peered through the top of the windshield. I followed his gaze past the graveyard and above the rock shelf at the end of town. “Up there.”

I pushed off with the Colt still camouflaged beside my leg. “Thanks, James.”

“That big Indian, he brought me back down here, took my keys, and told me to stay in my truck.” His look trailed up toward the union hall. “I offered him my saddle-gun, but he said he liked to work quiet.” I nodded and turned to continue up the street, where the edge of the moon was just beginning to clear the cliffs. They looked black, the way blood does in moonlight. “Hey, Walt?”

I stopped and looked back at him through the reflection of the vent window. “Yep?”

“Is that big Indian a friend of yours?”

I thought about it. “Yes. He is.”

He cast a glance up the street and then back to me. “Is he...?”

I waited, but the drunken man who saw things that nobody else saw just continued studying me. “Is he what?”

He took another slug of the brandy and then turned to look back up the hill. “Is he dead, too?”

“I sure hope not.” I started to grin, but it wouldn’t take. “Stay in the truck, James.”

He nodded. “I will.”

* * *

I walked up the street with those feathers of anxiety scouring the insides of my lungs as I checked each dilapidated building. I still saw no sign of Virgil, Tuyen, or the girl. A ghost town and, except for James and me, deserted.

It was like the place was swallowing souls.

I saw a glimmer of something beside the collapsed wall of the saloon and eased myself down the wooden boardwalk far enough to see the nose of my truck. I took a breath and raised my Colt. Staying next to the crumbling wall, I slipped in behind the Bullet and saw that the doors were locked and the keys were gone.

I pulled the two-way from my belt and gave it another try. “Unit one, anybody copy?”

Static.

I looked up past the cemetery to the union hall, at the castellated cornices and second-story outcropping that gave it the appearance of a fortress standing on the hill. The still listless moon was at a full quarter, and I could see that the sicklelike point had just cleared the cliffs.

I started the climb, keeping the .45 in front of me. I was unconcerned about the rattlesnakes since the evening was cool and they’d likely be sleeping in the crevices of the stone outcroppings off to the right, attempting to glean the last bit of the day’s warmth that was still held by the rocks.

I paused at the cemetery and laid a hand on the steel railing, looked up at the dark windows, and then peered up at the path. In the darkness it would be difficult to see if anyone had passed. The steps appeared the same but, as I tipped my hat back for a better view, I could see the door to the union hall was open. I knew that I had closed it.

The sweat at the middle of my back had adhered my uniform shirt to my spine, and I shivered in the cooling breeze.

It was a steep climb, and I took a few deep inhales to steady my breathing. I stood at the doorway and looked down the shotgun hall, past what used to be offices and into the gloom of the back rooms. I could see the size 13 swirls my rubber-soled ropers had left in the heavy dust from my previous visit, and there was an obvious trail where I’d gone farther into the building and then doubled back to go up the stairs to the dance hall.

Barely visible inside my boot prints were a set of well-defined, high-arched, tiny footprints exactly tracing my tracks.

I stepped into the entryway and led with the .45. She had continued up, carefully placing her bare feet inside mine. I shifted my weight, clicked off my radio, and stared up the stairs, then climbed as quietly as I could. It was useless—I sounded like a collection of squeals and creaks, ascending.

I paused at the landing and looked at the dance hall floor. The wavering moonlight cast across the flat surface and illuminated our joined tracks like pools of liquid mercury. I eased myself further up the steps and took hold of the railing at the top. The old upright piano sat on the stage, alone.

Standing room only and nobody there.

The moon suddenly decided to take an interest, and the full force of its shine spread through the bay windows at the front of the hall, through the half-glass doorway that led to the balcony beyond, and across the dance floor in a blue light of growing rectangular proportions.

I stepped up onto the floor, my eyes following the tiny footprints that had continued in mine as they crossed the room, up the three steps to the right, and across the stage.

I trained the Colt from corner to corner and then approached the proscenium arch. She had stopped at the piano. I placed my empty hand on the lip of the elevated area and hoisted a boot onto the edge, effectively, if not gracefully, taking the stage.

There were no more footprints. It was as if she’d walked there and then not so simply had disappeared.

The cover was open, and I could see the dust on the hammers of the keys that I hadn’t played and a new accumulation on the ones that I had. She hadn’t touched the keys.

The bench was still under the piano. There were no fingerprints on it, no sign that she had sat there. I nudged it out a little bit, put the .45 next to me, and sat, half facing the dance floor. I extended a forefinger and touched an F, the offkey sound almost reverent in the empty hall. I thought “Moonglow” would be appropriate, but changed my mind, thinking that I should play “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” for Mai Kim’s great-granddaughter.

I played an octave lower than it was written in an attempt to stay within the narrow confines of the soundboard. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but after playing a few stanzas, I heard a noise to my left. I picked up the Colt and turned with it extended to see that a small trapdoor had risen about four inches at center stage.

I stopped playing, and my breathing was the only sound in the room. The door in the floor slowly and silently shut.

I noticed that the footprints leading past the trapdoor were slightly smudged; she must have retraced them and retreated exactly upon them. I lowered my sidearm to my knee, turned back toward the piano, and placed my free hand back over the keyboard, plinking the F again as a starting point. I played the melody this time with one hand, and after a few seconds, the trapdoor rose again, allowing me a view of the small fingers that had pushed it.

I continued to play one-handed, then turned back, set the .45 on the bench, and allowed my left to join my right. I thought about Vietnam, and about how I’d filled the empty evenings at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge with Fats Waller.

Like a snake charmer, I played the song that Mai Kim must have told her daughter about and about which she must have told her daughter in turn. I played a smooth and steady version that left off with a trilling finish. I sat there, unmoving, until I couldn’t stand it any longer and turned.

She stood beside the trapdoor that was in the stage floor. She was tiny, and she wore a cheap slip dress that perversely made her look even more like a child. Her black hair was long and tangled, and it covered part of her face so that I could only see one of her dark eyes. She held a laptop close to her chest. Her thin arms crossed its lid, and she looked like a computer with a head and legs.

She didn’t move, and I found a word sliding up my throat and filling my mouth. "Hello...”

She still didn’t move, but her head inclined just a little. “Hi.”

I smiled and steadied the .45 on my knee. She stepped back, and I raised the other hand in reassurance. “Wait, I’m not going to hurt you.” She stood there, silent again. “I’ve been looking for you, and I think you’ve been looking for me.”

Her weight shifted, but that was all. She looked like Mai Kim. “What’s your name?”

“Her name is Ngo Loi Kim.”

I snatched up the Colt and leveled it at Tuyen’s half-hidden face as he stood there on the last step of the stairs with his own arm extended. In his hand was Saizarbitoria’s Glock, and it was pointed directly at the girl. I’d neither seen nor heard him.

Ngo Loi Kim dove for the trapdoor and scratched for the inset handle, but when it wouldn’t open she scrambled to the back wall and crouched against the floorboards. She held the computer like a shield in front of her and whimpered, terrified. I was off the piano bench and had taken a step toward the edge of the stage. “You’re under arrest.”

He took the last step from the darkness and, with the moonlight raising shadows across his legs, his voice seemed disembodied. “I’m willing to make you a deal.”

“I don’t deal. Drop the weapon.”

“Try to shoot me, and I shoot her.” He didn’t move. “The girl for the laptop.”

I stared down at him and could see his muscles straining the sleeve of his leather jacket. I figured the only thing to do was shoot. His weapon was pointed at her chest and chances were he’d hit her, but it was possible that my first shot would be on target and would do more damage than his responding fire.

I could feel the weight of the big Colt in my hand. What if I missed? What if he didn’t? I was willing to take those types of chances with my own life, but not hers. I thought about who she was, and what she’d gone through—all to find me.

Talk. It was the only way.

“Ho Thi wasn’t your granddaughter.”

“No.”

I swallowed and prepared myself for any opening that might present itself. “Did you kill her, or did Maynard?”

He looked at me. “He did.”

I didn’t believe him for a moment. Phillip Maynard hadn’t been the type, but Tran Van Tuyen was. “Okay, let’s say that’s the truth. Then why kill him?”

His gun hand stayed steady, and he was focused on the whimpering girl at the wall. He’d had the better part of a week to get to know me, and he’d done his homework well—he knew that I wouldn’t endanger her. “He committed suicide, as you said.”

“You’re lying.”

He glanced at me. “One of the ranchers, Mr. Dunnigan...”

“You’re still lying.”

“I am to assume from this that the bent bottle caps didn’t succeed in misdirecting you?”

“No.”

“It was a habit Phillip Maynard informed me of.” He actually smiled and finally took a breath. “Phillip was actually blackmailing me. He was supposed to retrieve the girls, and more importantly, the computer. He made a mess of it and killed Ho Thi. I suppose he thought that if he planted the girl near the culvert and threw the purse in with the Indian, there wouldn’t be any questions. I assume he was counting on a preconceived prejudice.”

“So you drugged him, just like Rene Paquet, and hung him?”

He didn’t say anything. The unspoken truth lay there between us like a bad smell, and I started formulating a new plan in hopes that he’d become so agitated with me that he might change his aim. “Paquet wanted to save Ho Thi and get her out of whatever human-trafficking scheme you’ve got going, which is why she got picked up by the undercover detachment in L.A.”

He studied me. “You know, I really am unfortunate to have arrived in your county, Sheriff.”

“So you killed him and, consequently, the forty-two people in Compton.” He took another breath but didn’t move or say anything. “So, under the auspices of Children of the Dust, you retrieved Ho Thi and returned her to the brothel, but once there, she met the sole survivor of the Compton truck massacre. ” I nodded my head very slightly toward the young woman at the wall. “Ngo Loi Kim. She and Ho Thi were desperate, and I’m assuming Paquet was the one who had given them this laptop as an insurance policy in case something happened to him.” His resolve didn’t appear to be weakening, so I kept talking. “The wild card was the photograph of Ngo’s great grandmother, sitting in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge with an unidentified Marine investigator who played Fats Waller, and once told her about a favorite fishing hole in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, USA.”

“You have an overactive imagination, Sheriff.”

“It doesn’t take any imagination at all, and you’re still under arrest.”

There was a long silence, where we both reviewed our options. “My offer still holds—the girl for the laptop.” I was thinking about how I could prolong the conversation, but I was running fresh out of options and he confused my silence with my considering his offer. “You don’t know what is in the computer, nor should you care. It is nothing in comparison with the life of this girl—the great granddaughter of a wartime friend—and you can save her.” He took another step. “You didn’t know I existed last week, and I can assure you that you’ll never know I existed tomorrow.”

“You can’t possibly think you’re going to escape.”

“It is something at which I’m very good.” He smiled again.

He wasn’t going for any of it, and now was the time I would have to choose—fire or give him the computer for Ngo Loi. I took a deep breath, and the darkness shifted. It was as if the entire stairwell was growing behind Tuyen, and a face appeared almost a foot and a half above his.

Something was there.

Somebody.

Virgil.

Apparently, Tuyen was not the only one who had used my piano playing as a cover to ascend the steps, our conversation notwithstanding. My expression must have changed, because the lithe man’s face suddenly stiffened and he spun.

I held my fire in fear of hitting the big Indian but jumped off the stage in an attempt to get to the two of them as I heard the muffled report of the 9 mm. They slammed into me, and I slid backwards on the dusty wooden floor.

The Glock fired again, but the bullet ricocheted into the wall, and I watched as Virgil lifted Tuyen, swung him through the air like an oil-pump jack, and dashed him against the floor. He had to be incredibly tough, because he held on to Virgil’s arm and made the big Indian stagger. I scrambled to get at them just as the smaller man planted two powerful kicks in the giant’s midriff.

Virgil grunted and then closed a hand on Tuyen. The 9 mm fired for the third time, and I heard the round go through the ceiling before the semiautomatic clattered on the hardwood surface. I threw myself forward just as Virgil swung Tuyen again, his legs striking me across the face.

It was silent for less than a second, and I was trying to push off the uneven surface of the broken plaster when Virgil let Tuyen go. It was like some modern dance crack-the-whip, and I saw Tuyen’s body crash through the glass door at the far end of the room and through the railing on the second floor balcony. He froze like that and was a tableau of desperation. His hands grabbed at the broken and rotten wood, and it looked for a moment as if he might just make it, his fingers snapping and curling at the collapsed pieces of railing.

But he didn’t and fell from view without a sound.

I scrambled forward and glanced back at the girl. She hadn’t moved, and I gestured to her with my open hand. “Stay there! ”

It was quiet except for Virgil, who was breathing raggedly in the center of the room like some towering Windigo. I ran past him across the wide planks of the dance floor and stopped just short of the gaping doorway and collapsed balcony. I stared down at the moonlit hillside.

He had hit the rocks twice, first the ledge above and then the bigger one below. Somehow, he was still alive. At first, I thought he was trying to get up or roll over and escape, but that wasn’t it.

I’d been right about where the rattlesnakes had been sleeping. Tuyen slapped at the flat level of the shelf around him to try to keep the snakes off, but there was nowhere for him or the snakes to go. He stopped screaming, he stopped moving, and the night was silent.

EPILOGUE

Lucian studied his part of the file and then looked up from the faxed sheets. “You think this Dick Van Dyke character was the ringleader?”

Jesus.

Vic, Lucian, and I sat by Saizarbitoria’s bed at Durant Memorial. The Basquo was missing a kidney but looked pretty good, considering, as he flipped through the entirety of what we now called the Tuyen File, passing it on sheet-by-sheet to all of us. Ned Tanen had forwarded most of the information from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and, from the look on Santiago’s face, he was having the same sickening response as I had had.

The report from the Immigration and Naturalization Service indicated that in the last few years as many as fifty thousand female illegal immigrants had been brought to the United States exclusively for use in the sex industry. Ho Thi Paquet and Ngo Loi Kim’s story was horrific, but it wasn’t exclusive.

“Children of the Dust was the front for the importation of the young women, and Trung Sisters Distributing distributed them into the brothels worldwide, as far as London. It’s all in the report.” I took a deep breath. “Ngo had a facility with computers and a tenuous connection to Wyoming, and Ho Thi had learned to drive, so...”

Vic looked up from her part of the report. “Ngo doesn’t speak English?”

“No, so the e-mails she was sending were phonetic Vietnamese, which looked to us like a garbled mess.”

Saizarbitoria raised his head and looked at me as he passed the last of the file to Lucian. “So, Phillip Maynard was drugged before he was hung after all?”

“Drugged like Paquet, according to the Yellowstone County coroner.” I plucked at a loose straw in my hat. “Maynard was the advance man Tuyen sent from their Chicago branch. Henry translated, and Ngo filled in the rest of the story. The girls had gotten separated—Ho Thi ended up in Powder Junction and Ngo ran to Bailey. Tuyen came to finish the job, found Ho Thi, but couldn’t find either the computer or Ngo. He killed Ho Thi when she wouldn’t tell him where Ngo had gone. He needed a fall guy, and he needed some time. He had seen Virgil and knew that he lived in the culvert near Murphy Creek, so he planted her body there and threw her purse in the tunnel, but when it didn’t look like I was going to bite, he sacrificed Maynard with the fake suicide.” The Basquo folded his hands on the bed covers, and I played with my hat in an attempt to soften the unease between us. “Tuyen’s wounds looked self-inflicted, and the bottle-cap thing just seemed too obvious—so I started thinking about who would gain from implicating the Dunnigans.”

Saizarbitoria continued to study me as Marie pushed the door open with a tray that I assumed was lunch. “What about the quarters?”

We’d been warned against tiring him, so I plucked my hat from my bent knee, put it back on my head, and stood. “I asked Ned about that. He said that they would bring the girls in, some of them as young as ten, and lock them in a manufacturing building that had been cordoned off into little twelve-by-twelve rooms. Then they were...” I glanced at Marie. “Trained—and told they owed Trung Sisters twenty thousand dollars apiece for their transportation to the U.S. and that they would work off the debt and be released. They were given twenty dollars a week in quarters, so that they could eat and drink from the vending machines in the building.”

The Basquo let out a long slow breath.

Vic handed the rest of the report to me as she and Lucian stood. “What happens to Ngo now?”

“The people from INS picked her up about an hour ago and flew her back to Los Angeles under a Temporary Protected Status. Under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, it looks like she’s going to be granted a T-Visa and citizenship through adoption.”

Saizarbitoria watched as his pregnant wife rolled a stand and tray table over to his bed and removed the stainless covering from his lunch—it looked ghastly. No wonder he was trying to bribe all of us into bringing him food from the Busy Bee. “Adopted by who?”

I stuffed the thick file under my arm. “If I were a betting man, I’d say the sheriff of Los Angeles County has two daughters and is about to acquire a third.” I smiled at Marie as she seated herself as comfortably as she could in the corner chair and gestured for the staff to follow me as I crossed and opened the door. “We’ll leave you to your lunch and your wife.” I smiled at her again. “When, exactly, are you due?”

She rested her hands on the sides of her stomach. “November. ”

I ushered Vic and Lucian out—the old sheriff was having lunch with Isaac Bloomfield, but the rest of us were on our own. I began closing the door behind me.

"Hey, boss?”

I stopped and leaned back in. "Yep?”

Santiago looked down at the boiled meat, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t what he was contemplating. "I...” He stopped, looked up, and then started to say something again.

“Don’t worry about it, Sancho.”

* * *

Vic rolled down the window of her eight-year-old unit in the parking lot of Durant Memorial. “I guess that leaves only one more mystery.”

I opened the door of my truck and watched as Henry moved the bags of groceries to the center and climbed in on the other side; Dog was asleep in the back. “Not really. Mai Kim had given birth to Ngo Loi’s grandmother three years before I ever got to Tan Son Nhut.”

“I guess you’re off the hook.” She flared the canine tooth at me and started her truck. “You’re fast, but not that fast.” She slipped the vehicle into gear. “You do remember that you have a debate tonight.”

I pulled out my pocket watch and checked the time. “Yep, but that should be over by eight.”

"So?”

I tucked my watch back in my pocket and considered the fact that I was about to ask my deputy out on a date in front of Henry. It was enough to curdle my fortitude, but I figured it was time to get the thing out in the open. “I was wondering...?”

She didn’t say anything.

I glanced back at the Cheyenne Nation, who continued to watch us. “Henry has to tend bar and Cady and Michael have plans, since he’s leaving tomorrow, so I was thinking...”

She studied me. I thought I should say something else, but then she started to speak and I stopped. “I’m washing my hair.”

I stood there looking at her drive away, her vehicle barking the rear tires as she turned out of the parking lot. I tried to figure out what I’d done wrong. I knew I was out of practice, but the response seemed a little abrupt. I started the Bullet and put my seat belt on. Henry sat there without saying a word; Dog didn’t speak either. “What?”

He turned his head to look out the windshield. “Nothing.”

"What?”

I watched as he tried not to smile. “Just a small piece of advice.” He turned and looked at me again. “Next time, try not to make it sound like you have nothing better to do.”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

I didn’t have anything better to do, so I figured I might as well get drunk.

My right shoulder still hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, but I found that after a little practice, I could drink with my left hand. I’d been practicing steadily since being released from the base hospital two hours ago. I wasn’t wheels-up till 1820 hours; the flight itself would be only twenty minutes back to BHQ, and then the provost marshal wanted a personal debriefing on my investigation. He wouldn’t be happy that I was drunk, but he wasn’t going to be happy with me anyway, so I figured what the hell. I stared at the empty piece of paper on the piano bench next to me and knocked back another whiskey. It was not my usual weapon of choice, but I was in a hurry. Things were just starting to pick up at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, and the place was getting crowded, but nobody came near me.

If you’re unlucky enough in life, there’s a time when people will start associating you with death.

I had written three letters already, and I was getting depressed writing about dead people. Le Khang promised to deliver this one to a girl who knew someone near the village where Mai Kim’s family supposedly lived. Would the letter actually get there? Would the family care? Did any of it really matter?

I picked up the bottle, refilled my glass, and struggled with the wave of regret, depression, anger, and disgust that continued to churn under the flood of alcohol. I thought that there should be somebody in the place that I should say good-bye to, but there wasn’t anybody left.

Letter number one would go to San Antonio, Texas. Baranski had indeed shot Mendoza in the back of the head along Highway 1.

Letter number two would go to West Hamlin, West Virginia. The one-eyed sergeant’s name had been George Seton, and he’d survived another four days after his two rounds of AK fire had taken most of Baranski’s chest. Before he succumbed to the wounds he’d sustained during what they were now calling the Tet Offensive, he’d made a statement to the 377th Security Investigators that had exonerated me in the death of Baranski. I was probably going to end up getting a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for my efforts in driving back the offensive; I figured that, and a dime, would get me a phone call.

Letter number three would go to the Airwing of ARVN to be delivered to Hoang’s parents in Saigon. I attempted to put a brave and honorable face on why their son had bled to death in the back of a jeep on the way to Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base.

Letter number four was the one I hadn’t written yet. I set the shot glass down and stared at the chipped keys of the piano. There was no other music in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, because I had ripped the electric cord from the bar’s jukebox and thrown it into the bamboo outside. I extended an index finger and hit an F, listening to the tone of it resonating through my life.

In Mai Kim’s memory, I launched into a one-handed version of Fats Waller’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I’d made the bridge and was into the chorus in a dirgelike manner when I noticed that a short soldier was standing by the piano and was singing along.

“A good man is hard to find, you always get the other kind. Just when you think he’s your pal, you find him foolin’ ’round some other gal. Then you rave, you even crave to see him laying in his grave...”

I looked up at the squat but flashy-looking woman with the oversized lips; she couldn’t sing very well, but she was loud. “Marine, you don’t look like 285 pounds of jam, jive, and everything.” She had an enormous smile. “I haven’t heard Fats Waller in quite a while.”

I looked down at my hand and noticed that I’d stopped playing. I swiped my utility hat off and saluted the two Special Forces men who accompanied her. She wore the beret and the uniform but no insignia for rank. She didn’t salute me, so I figured she was the brass and started to stand, but she put out a hand and seated me back on the piano bench. We were just about eye to eye. “Are you Lieutenant Walt Longmire?”

“Ma’am?”

She shook her head and smiled again as she read my nametag. “You are Marine Inspector Walter Longmire from Durant, Wyoming?”

“Ma’am.”

“I’m from Butte, Montana, myself.” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. She pulled a piece of paper from her substantial breast pocket and tried to hand it to me. I sat there looking at her and it, so she picked up the untouched shot glass and rested the note on the piano. “It’s from a friend of yours up north. He knew I was coming through Tan Son Nhut and I promised that I’d hand deliver it.” She studied me for a moment more. “You are Walt Longmire?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She smiled, slugged my shot down, and daintily placed the now empty glass on top of the note. “You take care of yourself, Lieutenant. ” She placed a kiss on the top of my head, and I watched as she made for the open doorway.

An airman came up and looked at me as I picked up the shot glass and plucked the paper that was stuck to its bottom. It was typed in black letters and was obviously written by a two-fingered typist since the pressure was even on all the letters. It was from a mountainous site ten miles inside Laos; a station that wasn’t supposed to even exist. Recon Team Wyoming was assuring me that he was fine and was inquiring as to how I’d made out in the war’s most recent developments in his own special way. I read “Seen your ghost lately?”

The shot glass stayed steady in my hand as I remembered a professor of Shakespeare at USC who read to an uninterested class, “I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o’ the dead men walk again.”

The airman leaned forward and looked in my face. “How do you know her?”

I poured myself another shot. “Who?”

“Colonel Maggie.”

“Who?”

“Martha Raye, Lieutenant. She was on the Steve Allen Show, she was a movie star...”

I slugged the shot down and set it back on the Bear’s note, picked up the pen, and started on the letter to Mai Kim’s family with a renewed vigor. I had to get out of Vietnam, it was getting as strange as Wyoming.

* * *

I dropped Henry at his T-Bird and Dog with Ruby and was late getting to the gym but changed my clothes and quickly climbed the steps to the second floor and the Universal machines. I made the corner at the landing and started the last leg when I heard a smattering of laughter that caused me to slow.

I stopped on the stairs. I could see Cady, who was seated at the leg press, and Vic’s brother, who was standing in front of her with his back to me. Michael’s T-shirt stretched across his broad young shoulders and read PHILADELPHIA HOMICIDE UNIT, OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOURS ENDS. They laughed again, and I listened as he attempted to motivate my daughter into finishing her workout. “Two more...”

I waited to see how the conflict would resolve itself and then fought against the wave of exhaustion that cemented my feet to the concrete steps and forced me to think about the scene that had unfolded only an hour ago. I caught my breath, more than a couple of emotions tearing at me like the mockingbirds had torn into Virgil’s untouched groceries.

* * *

The bag I’d left at the beginning of the week had still been hanging off the Lone Bear Road guardrail.

I had sat with Dog at my side, placed the new grocery bags at my feet, and watched as the sporadic traffic dutifully slowed and swept into the opposite lane. Wyoming was an emergency-lane-change state, after all. I thought about this morning. I thought about Ngo Loi Kim, and how she wouldn’t get out of my truck.

A three-way conversation had lasted for almost an hour with Henry as the translator, but it still seemed that there had been so much more to say and not enough time to say it. I tried to tell her about Mai Kim and about the war.

She had given me a letter. The words had been written in an unsteady hand and poorly. The word choices were simple and sentimental, and the guy who had written it had needed a lot more practice giving condolences. He’d gotten it.

I wondered what I’d have told that baby-faced Marine; and the things I wouldn’t have. I wondered what he would have had to say to me. Would he approve of how we had turned out? Would he think I had done everything I could? Would he think I was a good man?

I hoped so and, as I’d read the tattered letter, fuzzy at the edges where it had been folded and refolded, I remembered how I had written Mai Kim’s family that I had told her about a place on the other side of the world—about an unremarkable pass in a remarkable red rock wall where a number of unsavory characters had found a place through which they could herd stolen livestock, about the fat trout flipping their powerful tails through clear freezing water—about my home, a place where the snow-capped peaks stood guard.

“You did not really expect him to be here, did you?”

I looked up at Henry Standing Bear and then down at the plastic bag from the IGA that had twisted in the wind and cinched itself down to a braided strip. I could still see the outline of the untouched groceries—there were a few apples that the mockingbirds had broken through the plastic and gotten, a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers, and a tin of smoked oysters.

The afternoon sun warmed us and a cooling breeze feathered down from the mountains as I looked at the entrance of the tunnel but could see no tracks in the shallow mud of Murphy Creek. “I guess it’s like a wild birds’ nest, once you touch it, they move on.”

The Bear sat beside me on the guardrail and looked off toward the Bighorns. There were two clouds that hung over Cloud Peak like smoke signals. “Maybe so.”

Virgil had sustained two gunshot wounds, but they hadn’t done much damage—one had grazed his ribs and another had lodged in the meat of his calf. Henry had stayed with the giant until he’d been repaired and then through the following two days and nights. On the third day, the Cheyenne Nation said that he’d gone to take a shower as Virgil slept, but that when he returned, the big man was gone.

That was his story and, so far, he was sticking to it.

I pulled out the crackers from the old bag, then keyed open the oysters, drained the cottonseed oil, and spooned a few onto a Chicken in a Biskit. Under Dog’s close observation, I handed it to the Bear. “Where do you think he went?" ”

He looked rather dubiously at my blue-collar hors d’oeuvres and then popped it in his mouth to keep from having to say anything.

I waited a little, fed Dog a cracker, then made one for myself and joined Henry in viewing the few snowfields left on the mountains. I could feel the sunshine on my face and squinted my eyes in the pleasure of warmth, just happy to be there. “You wouldn’t tell me if you knew, would you?”

* * *

“Two more.”

Michael’s voice interrupted my daydreaming, and I was drawn back to the drama unfolding in the gym at the top of the stairwell. Cady looked up at him and smiled; so beautiful. “One more.”

His voice, in turn, was kind but insistent. “No, two more.”

I smiled at the jealousy I felt and the surge of unsettled anxiety at being replaced, then eased back down the steps. Michael only had another afternoon with her, and I had another month before she would return to Philadelphia. Anyway, he was probably motivating her better than I ever could. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

“One more . . .”

I stood there and listened to their laughter. The Bear had laughed at me for leaving the groceries, for wanting to solve all mysteries, but he had done so gently. Virgil White Buffalo, Crooked Staff, Crazy Dog Society was out there somewhere, and maybe Henry was right in not telling me exactly where.

He knew that our tracks were not that dissimilar. We’d both run as far as we could from the war to the fringes of our separate societies, but Vietnam had overtaken us again: circumstance, two desperate girls, a very bad man, a battered photograph, and a faded letter had seen to that.

Maybe it was not so much that we were haunted, but how and when we chose to deal with these reverberations in our lives that would be the sign of our individuality. Perhaps the battle that I had chosen to fight in Vietnam had marked me. It was a legacy that had tied me to the dead more than the living. It was, as Ruby had said, my failing.

Their voices continued to echo down from above. “No, two more . . .”

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