“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 resume. 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?”
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