“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 2 0 CR A I G J O H N S O N
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 wildfl owers 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 fi gured that whoever had killed the young woman had walked back to his vehicle and driven away, but it never hurt to look.
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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 fl otsam and jetsam of Murphy Creek, but I didn’t think the water fl ow 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.
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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 A N OT H ER
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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 fi ngers making headway into the frag-ile, 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.”
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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 stag-A N OT H ER
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gered up 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 fi gured 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 half hearted 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 offi ce.
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 26 CR A I
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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 offi cial 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.
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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 fighting forces?”
Baranski gestured toward me. “This numba one kil er.”
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.”
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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 fi fty-fi ve-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 acquain-tance.” 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 A
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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, fl amboyant.
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