The sky was fading in and out of blue with wide bands of diffused clouds, and it was possible that we’d get a shower or even a blowing skiff of snow from the front that was promised by morning.
“How’s your head?” Hershel, who had allowed me to ease up on his left, thrust his chin forward and peered at the bandage at my cheekbone and the discoloration around my eye.
“Still on.”
He pulled his head back, shook it, and adjusted his reins and his hat. “I sure didn’t take you for the bull-at-the-gate kind of fella.”
“I haven’t been myself lately.”
He nodded and the next words carried a little more weight than perhaps they should have. “That’s what I hear.” I turned in the saddle, enough so that I could see him with my good eye and could watch the shifting shadows disappear in the afternoon sun. Benjamin was hanging back, and I could almost hear him listening to our budding conversation. He wasn’t much of an undercover kind of guy either. Hershel pointed with his chin toward the rocky expanse of the trail ahead. “Ben, why don’t you ride on a little and check things out?”
Recalcitrant even when told to do what he really wanted, Benjamin turned completely in the saddle till both legs draped off one side, his horse continuing to clop forward and paying him no mind. “Why me?”
The older man squinted into the sun and at the boy like some B-movie support player. “Because you’re the Indian. Go scout.”
Without another word, the half-Cheyenne warrior leaned back and rolled his leg over the bulletproof horse’s withers. He nudged him with his heels into a slightly faster pace, snugged up his stampede strings, and left us behind. Dog looked back at me; I gestured with my chin and he trotted after the boy.
I had the feeling I’d just been afforded a glimpse of what the country had been like around a hundred and fifty years ago and turned to look at Vanskike, aware that he’d dismissed the boy for a reason. “What’s on your mind?”
He spat over his horse’s shoulder and looked at me again as he pulled up his canteen and took a deep swig. “Couple’a things. When you dropped me off the other night?”
“Yep?”
He wiped his mouth and hung the canteen back on the saddle horn. “All them pictures on the wall of my trailer?”
“Uh huh?”
I watched him as we rode, and it was as if he and the horse were inseparable, with all the hours, days, and years they had most likely had together. He held the reins in one fist while the other hand, trained to rope or relax when there was no roping to be done, lay limp in his lap. “I just didn’t want you thinkin’ I was some kind of pervert.”
“I don’t, honest.” I stood in the stirrups to stretch my legs. “But if you think your future lies in those little scrolls you buy in the checkout line at Kmart, then I do think you’re crazier than a shit-house rat.”
He shrugged and then patted the stock of his museum-piece rifle. “My fortune is in this rifle.” He glanced over to see if I had a smart-alec remark about that, and when I didn’t have one, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if it were practice for something he was going to have trouble saying. “I got a buddy in the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department-”
I let a moment pass. “Okay.”
“I don’t wanna tell you his name, for obvious reasons, but he told me a few things.”
“Like what?”
He readjusted and leaned forward to counter the rise in the path. “He said there was this sheriff from over in Absaroka County-a big fella that’s supposedly one tough customer, but fair.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He also said he knows for a fact that the powers that be made sure that Cliff Cly didn’t have to take no lie-detector test about killing Wade Barsad.”
12
October 30, 6:50 P.M.
I tried to remember the last time I’d camped out but finally gave up. Then I tried to remember the last time my posterior hurt this bad and couldn’t come up with that, either.
We’d trailed along the northern edge of the plateau and had made camp near the precipice of the stacked shelves of sedimentary rock that had seemed so far away when we were starting out. They formed a sort of natural amphitheater, which is where we set up the tents, careful to keep away from the eight-hundred-foot drop-off that was nearby. We’d put the horses on a picket line, had made and eaten dinner, and were quickly running out of wood to keep the campfire going.
“There’s a couple ’a old truck skids down where that wellhead is, from where they abandoned the methane, along the second ridge southeast.”
The young cowboy tipped his hat back, looked into the gloom of a cloudy sunset, and then back at Hershel as he stoked the few remaining pieces of lit wood. “How do I get ’em apart?”
“They’re old; just break ’em with your boot.” Vanskike watched the boy stand there. “What?”
Benjamin sniffed. “Wouldn’t it be faster if we all went, then we could get it in one trip?”
Hershel tossed the last piece of wood into the fire. “What in the heck is the matter with you?” He nodded toward me. “He took care of the horses, I fixed dinner, now it’s time for you to earn your keep.” The boy remained immobile. “What?”
“I’m goin’.”
The old cowboy shook his head in incredulity as the boy started off. I yelled after him. “You want a flashlight?” The small figure at the very end of the campfire stopped and walked back as I fished in my saddlebag and handed him the five-cell Maglite. “You run into anything, hit it with this.” I turned and looked at my trusty companion, sprawled beside my bedroll. “Dog.”
He raised his oversized head and looked at me.
“C’mon.” He slowly rose and stretched as I put a little more emphasis in my voice. “C’mon.” He came over, but I didn’t feel too sorry for him since he’d had his dinner and the camp’s collective scraps, followed by a considerable amount of my water ration. I nudged him toward the boy with my leg and watched as Benjamin marveled at the weight of the tactical flashlight, clicked the button, and the two of them followed the beam off and into the night. I watched as the flashlight’s single ray cascaded across the rock shelves and over the next rock-strewn ridge. “I don’t think they’re going to be surprised by anything.”
The old man shook his head and pulled out a small bag of fixings and some papers. “Nope, don’t think so.” He tapped the tobacco into the paper and rolled one and then two cigarettes. A callused and worn hand offered me one. “No, thanks.”
He nodded, then stuffed it into his mouth and lit it with the last of the Blue Tip matches from his hatband. “This friend of mine I was tellin’ you about back at the trailer, he’s an ol’ boy playing out his string as a special officer here in Campbell County-one of the two that runs the lie-detector for ’em. He only works about two days a week.” He scooted back and sat against a slab of rock that leaned at a perfect thirty-degree angle, and smoked. “I run into him at Mona’s, that little Mexican place down by the highway, this morning while I was puttin’ diesel in Bill’s truck.”
“What’d he say?”
The old cowboy rolled to one side and drew up a knee on which to rest his hand, flipping his ashes into the fire. “He asked about that shiny new truck, and I told him it was mine. He said that was bullshit, so I told him about the trip we were taking; told him about you, and he described you right back, down to that chewed-on part of your ear.”
The bandage under my eye was distracting, so I started peeling it off. “Mike Smith?” I studied the bit of blood seepage on the gauze and tossed it into the fire.
He smiled and didn’t look at me. “I can neither confirm or deny-”
I figured that Hershel hadn’t learned the neither/nor rule. “What about Cli Cly?”
He took another deep inhale from the cigarette cupped in his hand. “Said they called him in on a Sunday morning, real early, and told him to get set up. He said pretty soon they brought Cly in and sat him down, so he hooked him up t
o the machine and started askin’ him what they call-”
“Control questions.”
“That’s it.” He nodded and looked into the fire. “Well, after he verifies that the lights are on in the room, his name is Cliff Cly, and that yes, the smirking son-of-a-bitch has lied to people that are close to him, the sheriff comes in with some guy in a suit and has Mike unhook Cly.”
I tried not to smile, since without the bandage my cheek hurt even more.
“I just said Mike, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“God damn it.” He shook his head and took another drag from his cigarette. “I’m not really good at this undercover stuff.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“Well, they unhook Cliff, and Sandy Sandberg tells Mike that the three of them weren’t ever there.”
I sat up a little. “Sandy?”
“Yep.”
“What about the guy in the suit; Mike have any idea who he was or who he was with?”
“Nope.” I looked at him and thought about it just as a scattered beam of light wavered from behind us and then down the rocky path. Benjamin dropped an armload of gray, splintered lumber beside the fire, and Hershel looked up at the lad as Dog came over and sat. “That’d be about a third of what we need for the night.”
“A third?”
The old puncher’s voice was certain as he flicked more ashes into the fire. “A third.”
His thin shoulders slumped, and the miniature cowboy trudged away only to stop and look back at Dog. “You comin’?”
Dog lay down and placed his head on his massive paws. I nudged him with my boot. “C’mon, earn your keep.”
The boy patted his leg, just as I had. “C’mon.” He slowly got to his paws.
“Good boy.” Dog trotted off after him as I pushed my hat back and came clean. “Not as if you didn’t know, I’m not Eric Boss. My name is Walt Longmire, and I’m sheriff of Absaroka County.”
Hershel turned, and I watched as the flickering light planed off the hard surfaces of his chin and cheekbones. “Longmire did you say?” I nodded. “By God, I think I know your people-your father have a place north of here?”
“He did.”
“Passed?”
“Quite a while back.”
“You got the place leased out to the Gronebergs?”
“Yep.”
He shook his head some more and flipped the butt into the fire. “Well, I’ll be damned… you’ve come home.” The old cowboy pulled the second of his cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “So, what are you doin’ out here after so long?”
I thought about how much I wanted to reveal to Hershel, how much the cowboy already knew and, if I trusted him, how far did that trust go? If Cliff Cly didn’t take a polygraph, which Sandy Sandberg said he did, and somebody stepped in to keep it from happening-there were only a few possibilities of what that could mean. It was either Sandy, who wasn’t playing fair, or it was the Feds who had taken a hand. If it was the Feds, then in what capacity? Wade Barsad had been under the auspices of the witness protection program, but why would they have brought an agent in? To pressure Wade on the names and money he’d absconded with from his business associates along the Garden State Parkway and in Ohio?
I figured a good offense was the best defense and decided to try a little lie detecting of my own. Seeing as how clinical psychologists had come to the conclusion that the machines were only correct about 61 percent of the time-only slightly better than random-I took a chance with the police officer’s best friend: instinct. “Hershel, are you involved in any way with this foolishness?”
“No.” He seemed shocked that I’d ask. “No, I’m not.”
I believed him. “Good.” I gathered my legs beneath me and stood. I walked a little stiffly to the edge of the precipice and looked out over the Powder River country. The harvest moon was just beginning to stare at the hills, and the long shadows from the rocks and few junipers cascaded through the draws and gulleys toward the Bighorns.
It was a stark beauty, but you can’t come home again, no matter what Hershel said. I could feel an urgency to get back to my proper place in the rolling hills under the mountains. Before I could, though, I was obligated to Mary to find the truth. She had become my trust when Sandy had sent her to my jail, and I was bound to find out what happened the night that Wade Barsad was killed.
Something felt wrong, and that itch without an ability to scratch was needling me from somewhere in my subconscious. “I need you to tell me everything that happened that night.”
“I already did.”
I pulled my hat down against the wind and turned to look at him. “No, you didn’t really, and when we talked, no offense, you were drunk.” He pulled at a long earlobe, stuck the cigarette that he’d been holding into his mouth, and lit it with a piece of smoldering firewood. “I know that Mary was there. I know that you were there, and I know that Bill Nolan was also there. Now, was there anybody else there?”
He looked up at me. “No, nobody.” Then his eyes dropped to the fire as he thought about it. “I mean Wade but he was dead.”
“When you got there, Mary was in the yard with the rifle on her lap?”
“Yep.”
“The breech was open on the. 22, and the magazine was empty?”
“Yep.”
“Then what?”
He flipped the half-smoked cigarette into the fire. “I took the rifle away from her and went into the house.” He looked up at me to make sure this is what I wanted to hear, but I said nothing. “He was in there.”
“Where?”
“Layin’ across the bed.”
“He was dead, you’re sure?”
“God, yes. She’d shot him in the head.” He corrected himself. “He’d been shot a half-dozen times, and there was so much blood that it soaked the mattress and poured off onto the floor.”
“Did you touch him or anything in the room?”
He was adamant. “No, I just backed out of that room; I mean, Jesus, the barn was on fire, she was sittin’ out in the yard like it’s all a dream-”
“You had your gun with you, didn’t you say?”
He gestured toward the repeater lying across his saddle. “I had that Henry. When I got woke up by the fire, I brought it along ’cause I didn’t know what the situation was, and I learned a long time ago that unknown situations with a gun are better than unknown situations without one.”
Boy howdy. “What’d you do with the Yellow Boy?”
“Left it in the scabbard on my horse, tied out at the fence; that horse wasn’t goin’ anywhere near that fire.”
I crossed my arms and looked into the flames licking up and around the broken and splintered wood, which reminded me that Benjamin and Dog were due back soon. “So after you left him in there, and her on the lawn, what’d you do?”
“I ran over to Bill Nolan’s and got him.”
“You didn’t think to use the phone at the Barsads?”
He looked genuinely discomforted. “I didn’t-”
I interrupted, saving him the embarrassment. It wasn’t unusual in just such a situation for any of us of a certain age to forget about modern conveniences, or mistrust them, and simply run for help. “You wake Bill up?”
“No. He was in his kitchen.”
I looked up on the ridge at the horses milling about. “Had he been drinking?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yep, why?”
I leveled with him. “I’ve known Bill for an awfully long time, and in this current reincarnation I think it’d take three men and a boy to get a bottle away from him.”
Hershel nodded. “He drinks, there’s no two ways about that.”
“Do you have any idea who might be leaving fifths of whiskey for him on his porch?”
He looked honestly surprised. “Nope, but if you find out, sign me up.”
I looked past our camp and beyond the horses on the picket line, back over t
he rocky hillside, and spoke mostly to myself. “Why would he be sober that one night?”
October 26: four days earlier, afternoon.
I had watched as the words stuck in her bandaged throat, finally tumbling from her half-opened mouth.
“It was as if I wasn’t alone, like somebody was there, leading me to where I needed to be, helping me to do it.”
I got up from the windowsill and approached the hospital bed with my hat in my hands. “Do you remember getting the rifle from the cab of Wade’s truck?”
Her head remained still for a moment and then shook in a hesitant manner. I didn’t think it was her lacerated throat that caused her to be careful. “I remember walking to the truck, but then it was as if the gun just appeared in my hands.”
I looked down at her profile and pondered the stark difference between the uncertainty of her story and the clarity of the sunshine that made a perfect trapezoid on the tile of the hospital floor on the other side of the bed. “Then what happened?”
“There was a storm, and the wind was blowing.” She paused and cleared her throat with the words that spilled out again. “The door was open, banging against the side panels, and I thought about how it was probably going to break, but that I didn’t care.” She shook her head, a piece of her blond hair getting in her mouth. She tried to wipe it away but the leather restraints at her wrists would only allow her hand to go so far. I leaned over and helped her, my hand looking large next to her fragility. “The fire was reflecting off the glass, and I was tired. I wanted to just drop the rifle, but he kept telling me to keep it in my hands; that I was going to need it.”
“He?”
She lifted her head a bit too quickly, and I could tell the effort was hurting her throat. “It was like somebody was there, keeping me moving.”
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