Walt Longmire 05 - The Dark Horse

by Craig Johnson

“He left her sitting in the yard with the house burning?”

  He turned to look at me. His voice was strained and was carried away by the wind. “Only the barn was burning when he came to get me, but by the time we got back over there the house had gone up, too. We found her sitting right where he’d left her.”

  “Hershel didn’t go in before and check on Wade, to see if he was dead?”

  “Yeah, now that I think about it, maybe he did.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t have done it.”

  I tossed the container of pills in the air, caught it, and held it up between us. “In the kitchen, you mentioned something about Mary, something you wanted to show me. Was it this?”

  He nodded and smiled. “Yeah, I figured it was the only guaranteed way to get you to come along with me.”

  I nodded. Dog had been sitting on my foot but raised his head to look at me when he noticed that the rider, who had a small child seated with him on the horse, was only a hundred yards off. I looked at the mounted young man in the cowboy hat. Tom Groneberg, to whom I leased the place, and the two-year-old boy who was sharing his saddle both recognized me and began waving. “You mind if I hang on to these?”

  “Not if you think it’ll help, but can I have two for the road?” I walked over, popped the cap, and tapped two of the white, oblong pills imprinted with “S421” into his open palm. “You never know when you might have a rough night.”

  Or a rough day. Boy howdy.

  October 22: six days earlier, night.

  Her eyes had reflected the streetlights that shone through Virgil’s window. She never seemed to really sleep, and I had begun to think she should try it standing up, like a horse.

  I stood, but she didn’t move, so I quietly patted my leg for Dog to follow. We slipped back into the main hallway and walked toward Vic’s office, where I could hear her softly tapping her keyboard.

  Her office was small, with the Wyoming law binders covering the walls, but she liked it crowded. Her legs were stretched out with her naked feet crossed at the ankles on the edge of her desk, the keyboard in her lap. Dog settled on the floor, his big head between his paws, and I occupied the gray plastic chair. “What’s the word, Thunderbird?”

  She waved for me to hold on a second, continued typing an e-mail message, and pressed send. She mumbled in response to my question. “What’s the price, forty-four twice. What’s the joy, nature boy. What’s the reason, grapes are in season.” She turned and sighed—an undersheriff’s work is never done. “The toxicologist in Cheyenne is flirting with me.”

  “On state time?”

  She shrugged an eyebrow. “Hey, I get it where I can.”

  I ignored the comment. “I thought Saizarbitoria was going to research this—”

  She interrupted. “I sent him home.”

  “—medication.”

  “No thanks, I’ve got plenty.” She stared at me as I waited, finally glancing up at the ceiling and reciting, “Eszopiclone is a nonbenzodiazepine, nonimidazopyridine, cyclopyrrolone hypnotic sedative. The stuff was developed in the eighties, refined and tested in the nineties, and is now a widely available prescription drug.”

  She placed the keyboard back on her desk but kept her shapely ankles on display. Her boots and socks were on the floor by the wastebasket. It was a warm night, so she had taken them off, which revealed her perfectly pedicured feet. She had rolled up her jeans to make Wyoming culottes, something she did a lot in the summertime—I guessed this wardrobe decision was her swan song—and her muscled calves showed to perfect advantage.

  “It works by binding to the GABA receptors in the brain, but beyond that connection they’re really not sure how the stuff works.” She glanced at the computer screen, hit another button, and the drug company’s logo and active screen commercial came up. Vic knocked the syrupy music down and looked at me. “Most of these hypnotic and sedative drugs are still a mystery to the companies that produce them—all for people with chronic insomnia like your friend back there.”

  “So, the pills are legit?”

  She nodded. “DCI ran every test they had and guess what?” He waited. “They’re sleeping pills.” She glanced back at the computer screen as a couple frolicked on a beach at sunset. “The only effect that most people notice is a bitter, metallic taste in the mouth called dysgeusia.” She considered me, with her head slightly cocked. “Do you believe they have a fucking scientific term for bitter metallic taste?”

  I nodded. “We used to just call it fear.”

  “Five to ten minutes after dosing, you get the taste.” She threw a chin toward the computer screen. “Ten to fifteen minutes and you’re out, REM sleep within the hour.”

  “Can you OD on it?”

  “Oh, yeah. Anything more than about thirty-six milligrams and you’re looking at an activated charcoal cocktail or the pump, and you’re also likely looking at renal or liver damage; then, depending on that damage, you go to operation bank account.”

  “Which is?”

  “Going through pockets for loose change.”

  I sighed.

  “There is one important note concerning our case though, and that is that the medication is for temporary usage.” She stared at me. “Sleeping Beauty’s been using this stuff for almost two years. Who knows how much of this crap is backed up in her system or what effect it has.”

  “Illegal use?”

  “There’s a small niche in the drug culture of addicts that use the stuff since it’s DEA Schedule IV and easy to get. They use it for the come-down phase after cocaine, meth, LSD, MDMA, and all the ‘upper’ drugs. ADD and ADHD patients use the stuff to come down after spending the day on amphetamine variants.” She pointed at the screen as the happy actors collapsed in giant feather beds, surrounded by huge, sleepily floating butterflies hovering over them. All in all, it was kind of creepy. “Do you believe this crap? I mean, if you’re to the point of drugging yourself into a stupor to go to sleep at night, you’re probably not leading an idyllic life.”

  “An extra Rainier usually works for me.”

  I started to get up, but she swung her chair around, hooked the aforementioned naked calves behind my legs, and pulled herself in close, grasping my thighs with her capable hands. “I usually rely on hot, sweaty, jungle monkey sex.” She leaned in, and our noses were about eight inches apart. “Works every time.”

  I didn’t move. “I hear that can be very addictive, too.”

  Her face grew closer, and her voice lowered to a rough whisper. “Oh, yeah.”

  “I’m still thinking about going out to Absalom.”

  She leaned in, even closer than before. “You know, I think we’re developing an unhealthy pattern here. Every time I talk about the job, you talk about sex, and every time I talk about sex, you talk about the job.” I watched as the smile hollowed under her cheekbones and traced her grin.

  “Kind of a passive-aggressive thing?”

  I could feel her hands running up and down my thighs, building heat. “I’m okay with either, and I have my own handcuffs.” I leaned back in my chair and broke the spell as she looked at me. “What?”

  I took a breath. “I’ve got a question for you, a serious one.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want to be sheriff in two years?”

  She leaned back in her own chair and thought about it. “This is a serious offer?”

  “Yep.”

  She took a breath and studied me with a hard look. “Why are you asking me this now?”

  It was a fair question, but I’d been giving the election considerable thought. “Well, the vote is next month and up to now I’ve only put in a halfhearted attempt.”

  She smiled at me with that oversized canine tooth. “Seems to me you’re giving everything a halfhearted attempt.” She dropped her legs. “What, you worried you’re not going to get reelected?”

  It was my turn to take a breath. “We’re not talking about me.” I slowly let it out. “We’re talking about you.”

&nb
sp; Her eyes went down to her hands, which still held my knees. “Look . . . I know my limitations.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m not an administrator.”

  I shrugged. “Neither am I; that’s why I have Ruby.”

  “I won’t have that luxury because as soon as you retire, she’ll leave skid marks.” She looked around the room as if the staff had suddenly assembled and then departed. “They’ll all leave, and I’ll be sitting in this fucking mausoleum alone.”

  “I think you might be underestimating yourself.”

  “Really?” Her head nodded in emphasis, the way it did when she had more to say than one mouth would allow. “The Ferg is, for all intents and purposes, retired. Double Tough will bail as soon as one of these methane outfits offers him sixty thousand a year. Frymire, the international man of mystery—who the fuck knows what Frymire is going to do? And Saizarbitoria? You think he’s going to be happy being a deputy for the rest of his life?”

  “He just switched over from corrections—he’s not ready to be a sheriff.”

  “He will be in two years.”

  “Maybe not.” I wanted to put a little more distance between us, so I contemplated the books on her shelves and the one space left for the light switch. “Does the Basquo seem a little odd to you lately?”

  Her head inclined. “In what way?”

  “Since he got stabbed?”

  She thought about it. “Maybe a little. He’s quieter—why?” “I’ve been trying to work him back on the duty roster, but he’s not showing a great deal of enthusiasm.”

  She sighed. “Well, he lost a kidney, so maybe he’s got a right to a little bullet fever.” She leaned back, cocked an elbow on her armrest, and placed a fingernail that matched her toes between her teeth. “And you?”

  “What about me?”

  “I’m going back to the original subject of this fucking conversation. Are you going to be my deputy if I’m sheriff?”

  I leaned forward and took her finger out of her mouth and put my hands over hers. “Like I said before, we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you.”

  “I asked you a very simple question.”

  I didn’t answer, and she’d nodded some more. “That’s what I thought.”

  October 28, 7:25 P.M.

  Bill dropped Dog and me off at my rental car and said he’d see us later this evening at the fights. I drove the lonely gravel road back toward Absalom. A fantail of ochre dust plumed twenty feet tall behind me before it was lifted by the prevalent wind and carried off toward Twentymile Butte and the Battlement. The two-hundred-foot front face of the topographical landmark stood like some sort of Powder River Monte Cassino along the wide valley of Wild Horse Creek, which reflected the autumnal glow as the scoria shone like carved platinum.

  When I was about Benjamin’s age, I’d read Edgar Rice Bur-roughs’s Lost World in the back bedroom of the ranch house we’d just been surveying and had secretly suspected that dinosaurs roamed the elevated and unapproachable twenty square miles that I saw almost every day. I was right in a sense but wrong in a chronology that was off by a couple of million years.

  The college in Sheridan had had a dig up on the butte where they had found the intact, fossilized skeleton of not a dinosaur but a birdlike creature about eight feet tall. I’d seen the Diatryma in the museum over there and had dutifully read the little brass plaque that had labeled it as one of the dominant predators of the Eocene period, when Wyoming had been a dense jungle of subtropical climate at the edge of a western interior seaway.

  Geologically, I’m sure there was a lot that had gone on there since then, but socially I don’t think much had happened. There were the occasional antelope and plenty of modern birds that made their homes in the rock, but the plateau was too high and the wind too forceful to allow for cattle grazing, and there wasn’t much to hunt, so not many people made the trip.

  There was a new road where an energy exploration firm had tested for gas and oil, and which might have provoked more exploration, but in keeping with the Battlement’s inhospitality, all of the seventeen-thousand-foot wells had come up empty.

  Secretly, I was glad. I still had hopes that there might be a few dinosaurs up there lingering about.

  Just outside of town, I pulled the rental car to a stop at the railroad crossing and watched a fully loaded Burlington Northern & Santa Fe coal train rumble over the dark, shiny rails that gleamed like quicksilver in the twilight. My mind matched the pace of the train, each thought snagging the next and hauling it in tow.

  I had explained to Tom Groneberg and his son, Carter, that we were just out for a ride and had taken the old ranch road by habit. He’d asked if I’d gotten this month’s check, and I assured him that I had. He said that he and his wife, Jennifer, had purchased the property to the west and still had hopes of having a place of their own someday. I assured them that my place was theirs as long as they liked.

  I glanced back up the hill toward the cemetery and thought about two of the graves that were up there.

  I reached over and scratched Dog’s ears as the last railcar passed and snaked its way in a gradual arc along Clear Creek south toward the Bighorn Mountains. “Thomas Wolfe says you can’t go home again.” He watched me with his big, soulful eyes and then glanced back down the gravel road to the hills beyond, perhaps looking for his own long-dead ancestors.

  There was a great deal of bustle in The AR in anticipation of the big fight, and I was hoping that Juana would be working so I could get Dog and me some dinner. It was as she’d said, and Pat had rehired her; then, after giving her all the work, he had gone home to take a nap before this evening’s festivities. She was loading auxiliary coolers behind the bar, and there were sixteen more cases to carry in from the porch. I volunteered to stock the beer if she would grill up a few hamburgers for us.

  The food was ready by the time I finished setting up the coolers, and she even allowed Dog to come in and sit at the end of the bar. She broke up his two hamburgers and started to carefully feed them to him. I guess her opinion of the species was softening. “He likes me.”

  I ate my one cheeseburger and suspected that it might’ve been a little larger than The AR usually served. “So, you called the cops last night?”

  She fed another bite to Dog, and I could tell she was surprised at how gentle he was. “Yeah, even as an illegal I figured that was too much gunfire to not call in. Anyway, I was incognito.” She glanced at me. “How come they arrested you?”

  I swallowed and took a sip of my iced tea. “They didn’t.”

  “Why’d they put you in the cruiser?”

  I plucked a fry that had fallen from my plate onto the surface of the bar, dragged it through my puddle of ketchup, and gave it to Dog—waste not, want not. “They just said they wanted to go over a few things.”

  She gestured a graceful chin toward the now-boarded-up window. “Like who blew out the front of the bar?”

  I nodded. “Things like that.”

  “Pat’s got a pretty wicked scuff on his chin, and he says his jaw isn’t working so hot.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” She continued to watch me as I ate. “He says that he was closing up and that somebody came in the back and surprised him.”

  I turned to look at her as she fed Dog another bite. “Somebody was breaking in the back while somebody was shooting up the front?”

  “That’s what he said.” She shrugged with one shoulder and again with just a bit of attitude. “What do you think happened?”

  I had to smile at her two-year, textbook procedure. “I really wouldn’t know.”

  “I found about fourteen nine-millimeter casings scattered all over the floor, and a twenty-gauge shell behind the bar with wadding out on the porch.”

  I ate a fry. “Really?”

  “Yeah.” She fed the last of the burger to Dog and wiped her hands on a dishtowel hanging from her back jeans pocket. “You wanna know what I t
hink?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think there were three people involved. I think Pat and somebody else were meeting here in the bar, and then somebody came in the back. I think whoever it was that came in surprised Pat, hit him with his own gun, and then went toward the front.” Her face grew flushed, and I could tell she was very excited about giving me her account of the story. “Then, whoever was out here didn’t really want to see whoever it was that took Pat out and started shooting at them.”

  I nodded. “Took Pat out?”

  Her smile bunched to one side as she considered me. “It’s cop-talk. Don’t you ever go to the movies?”

  “Not since 1974. It was a double feature—Ulzana’s Raid and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.”

  She swatted my words away. “Evidently, nobody got shot since there isn’t any blood.”

  “Evidently.”

  She folded her arms and looked at me. “There’s just one thing I can’t figure out, and that’s why the guy with the shotgun didn’t just shoot the guy in the pickup truck?”

  I took a sip of my tea and sat there watching her in the silence. “And what pickup truck was that?”

  It was silent some more. “I didn’t tell you about the red Dodge pickup truck?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Oh.” She reached down and petted Dog’s head. “After I called 911, I ran down the road by the church and saw a truck back away from the bar and take off down Wild Horse Road.” As an afterthought, she added. “It didn’t have any plates.”

  “Uh huh.”

  She leaned in on the bar, conspiratorially, and stole a fry. She chewed and watched me. “Bill Nolan’s got a truck like that.” She made a face and shook her head. “But he’s not the one you’re looking for.”

  “Oh?”

  “No, he might be a law bender, but he’s not a lawbreaker.”

  I sighed and finished my tea. “I wasn’t aware that I was looking for anybody.”

  She leaned in even closer, and her voice was barely a whisper. “Okay, but a lawyer from Philadelphia by the name of Cady Longmire called looking for her father, the sheriff of Absaroka County, and described a guy who sounded an awful lot like you.” She stole the last fry and looked very satisfied with herself. “I told her that I was working for you, and I could deliver a message.” She put her elbows on the bar and looked to the right and to the left for dramatic effect, then at me directly. “I told her you were undercover.”