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 pull
ed 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 u
p 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?”
The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volume 1-4 Page 111