Walt Longmire 05 - The Dark Horse

by Craig Johnson

  I stared at her. “What was the message?”

  “She said that some guy named Michael asked her to marry him.”

  9

  October 28, 8:45 P.M.

  “How am I supposed to know you’re undercover; you’re never undercover!”

  Cady emphasized the word like I was playing spy.

  Ruby, unaware that my activities in Absalom were of a covert nature, had given my daughter the number of the motel office, which was also the one for The AR. Luckily, Juana had been the one who had answered. “It’s okay. I trust the person who got the phone.”

  “The man or the young woman?”

  I took a breath. “Who answered the phone when you called?”

  “Some guy, sounded like a real piece of work. Funny name, like something you’d hear in a bad television show.”

  “Cliff Cly?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “Nothing. I just told him I was looking for my father and then asked if he worked there. Then he handed me over to the woman.”

  “Juana.”

  “Who is she?”

  “You’re sure that’s all you said to him?”

  Long sigh. “Yes, Man From U.N.C.L.E., that’s all I said. Now, who is she?”

  I looked down the bar at the young bandita who’d allowed me to use the wall phone in the hallway of the empty establishment. “She works here.”

  “She sounds foreign.”

  I cupped the receiver against my face. “She’s Guatemalan. She’s an illegal—”

  “She said her name is Juana.”

  “It is.”

  “She said she worked for you.”

  “She doesn’t work for me.”

  “She said she did.”

  I sighed. “She has an overly active imagination and a potential two-year degree in criminology from Sheridan College. You know what they say about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing?”

  “Speaking of—you’re a sheriff. What are you doing working undercover?” She continued to say it as though I were in the school play.

  “Sandy Sandberg called and needed a little help.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “What?”

  “Daddy, you know he is such a character.” She and Sandy went way back. When she was a toddler, he had taken the time to play with her at the law enforcement academy in Douglas, and they had become fast friends. Even through her protests, I could hear the admiration she had for the man. “He could get you killed.”

  “It’s not that dangerous a case.” I leaned a shoulder against the wall and tucked the big Bakelite receiver against the side of my head. “What is this about you getting married?”

  There was a pause, the first in the conversation. “Michael asked me to marry him.”

  The second pause. “When?”

  The third pause. “Yesterday.”

  The fourth pause. “What’d you say?”

  “I told him I needed to think about it.”

  I nodded at the wall and rested my forehead there. “I think that’s smart.” I waited for the critique of my response.

  “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

  I cleared my throat. “For thinking about it?”

  “For being asked.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  I listened to her breathing and could tell she was holding the phone close to her mouth. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s awfully soon.”

  “I knew you were going to say that.”

  I paused again; if only I could find a way to parent undercover . “You’ve had a lot of things in your life lately.”

  “I know.”

  I thought about the Philadelphia patrolman, Vic’s younger brother. It wasn’t that I had reservations about him, but it had only been five months since they’d met and a tumultuous five months at that. And even though it wasn’t fair, I thought about her previous relationship and how that had left her unconscious on the steps of the Franklin Institute. “Why do you think he asked?”

  “Well, I think it has something to do with him loving me.”

  “I mean now.”

  Silence. “I don’t know.”

  I nodded at the wall. “Have you guys discussed this?”

  “A little, just talking about what we could do. . . . Just pie-in-the-sky stuff.”

  “I guess he’s decided he wants his dessert now.”

  “Daddy.”

  I stared at the army-green wall. People had written and scratched things so deeply that re-paintings had only heightened the sentiment. I wondered if Custer really wore Arrow shirts, if DD still loved NT, if the eleven kids that got left at the parking lot were still beating the Broncos twenty-four to three, or if 758-4331 was still a good time. I thought about the love, heartbreaks, and desperate passions that had been played out through the phone in my hand and wondered if emotion held like the scent of honeysuckle in late August—sad and sweet, hopeful and tragic. “I think he loves you. I think he’s crazy about you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not hard to do, you know.” I could hear the smile.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I ran my fingertips over the wall. “I think you need to follow your heart, kiddo.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, allowing my emotions to join all the others that had sighed through the pattern of black holes in the mouthpiece. My heart, which was two thousand miles distant, pulled away a little bit farther. “Is he okay with you taking your time?”

  There was a sniff. “He says he’ll wait forever.”

  I nodded at the wall again, aware that something had changed in me a few months ago and that now I seemed to be battling a sort of grief aversion—the emotional backwash of Cady’s narrow escape. During her crisis, I had been in a kind of present-tense, protective mode that got me through the danger without wasting energy or emotional resources, but now it was past tense and I was uneasy.

  We do everything we can to protect those we love, whatever it takes, and it’s not enough. Unlike bone, once that illusionary magic circle of safety is broken, it can never be completely repaired and it is not stronger at the break. When Cady had left to go back to Philadelphia, I had hours and days to think and feel. I was supposed to be happy, but I wasn’t, and I hadn’t been sleeping well—having Mary Barsad in my jail hadn’t helped. Like an addict, I was taking it one day at a time.

  Dog was still seated at the end of the bar, and Juana was feeding him the remainder of my cheeseburger now. “I figured you didn’t want the rest?”

  “No.”

  She studied me. “Are you okay?”

  I took a deep breath, cleared my throat, and swallowed. “Yep.” I extended my hand. “Walt Longmire, sheriff, Absaroka County.”

  She wiped her hand on her jeans, took mine, and smiled. “I know. I looked you up on the Internet at the library in Gillette. There was a big article about you in the Billings Gazette and the Denver Post—something about you breaking up a human trafficking syndicate in California?”

  “I had a very small part in an investigation.”

  “There was a photograph of you on the steps of some big building, but your hat covered up a lot of your face.”

  “That’s my best side.” I reached down to pet Dog. “Was Cliff Cly the first to answer when Cady called?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, but I grabbed it away from him pretty quick. He was in here drinking his lunch and got to it faster than I could.” She thought about it. “It was like he was waiting for a call.”

  She seemed pretty sure of the situation, so I decided to let it drop. The undercover thing was wearing me out. “Is there anything else I can do to help you?”

  “Nah, I’m just going to arrange some of the food in the freezer out back to make it easier for tonight, but I think we’re ready.”

  I reached over and took one last sip of the me
lted ice in my tea. “Then I think Dog and I are going to go to our room and take a nap.”

  She let Dog lick the plate. “Is that Indian friend of yours really going to fight?”

  I shook my head at the absurdity of it all. “Yep, I suppose he is.”

  “He looks like he can take care of himself.”

  “He can.”

  She nodded. “Watch out for Cliff Cly. He hasn’t been around here very long, but I bet he cheats.”

  I patted my leg for Dog to follow. “I bet he does, too.”

  I get asked sometimes about what it is that makes a good cop. Of course, typing is handy, but really it’s as simple as noticing things. Ask a good cop into your house once, and a year later he’ll be able to tell you the layout of the furniture, what pictures are on which walls, and whether the toaster is white or stainless steel.

  Somebody had gone through my room.

  Juana had cleaned and straightened it, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t the one who had gone through my things; it was a professional job and, if you hadn’t thought to notice, you wouldn’t have. Everything had been put back exactly the same way, except that my sidearm was now unlocked. I couldn’t detect any smudges without high-powered assistance and whoever had searched had probably worn gloves, but I know the Colt’s slide-action had been pulled when I’d put it away.

  I made a quick search and found that the paint had been pulled apart where the bathroom window had been pried open. There was an open lot behind the motel with a couple of ramshackle houses facing the other way and a weedy, overgrown hillside that would have provided easy ingress to my room without exposing the intruder to a great deal of public scrutiny.

  Who would have been interested and professional enough to leave almost everything as though it had not been touched? Couldn’t have been Benjamin, and I didn’t think that Pat had the dexterity to slip through the high window, especially after last night’s altercation. There was that mystery man who had been driving Bill Nolan’s truck or one that was remarkably similar.

  Cliff Cly didn’t match the stranger’s profile—maybe Mike Niall and possibly Bill Nolan himself, despite his assurance that he had been asleep. If Bill was involved, you would have thought that he would want to keep away from me, not take me to my father’s house. Besides, all his motivations seemed pure and what would he have had to gain in Wade Barsad’s death? Mary? Possibly, but he would have to have figured that she would be facing a life sentence. Was that something they hadn’t taken into account—that somebody would have to take the fall? And what about her confession to Hershel, Bill, the Campbell County investigators, and just about anybody who would listen?

  I tried to see Mary as a Campbell County jury would see her; it didn’t bode well. She lacked the one quality the populace expected in an accused killer, guilty or not—repentance. I had the feeling that if it came to it, Mary Barsad would be a woman who was tried for a crime but judged for her persona.

  I took my hat off, placed it brim up on the wobbly table, and sat in the only chair. I glanced back at the Bible on the nightstand; I figured I’d had enough religion for one day. Dog leapt onto the bed, curled up, and looked at me. I always wondered if he knew more about what was going on than I did; some sort of innate canine ability to read people and situations.

  “So, who dunnit?”

  October 23: five days earlier, afternoon.

  Mary Barsad had been at her best about the middle of the afternoon and, in an attempt to get her to eat, I’d moved the schedule back about two hours.

  She still wouldn’t eat breakfast, but at least I could get her to nibble on lunch and a nominal amount of dinner as we sparred. She sipped her soup and watched me as though I were the one in jail and not her. I’d uncrossed my legs and put my empty bowl of chicken tomatillo soup on the counter; Dorothy Caldwell’s chicken tomatillo soup took all prisoners. “There’s a difference?”

  “Of course there is.” She shook her head, and she dismissed me with a wave of her hand as she looked out the window and into the opaque sunshine of fall. “How long have you been a sheriff ?”

  I ignored the question. “I guess I see justice as the framework, and right and wrong as the philosophy behind it.”

  Mary turned, and I had the feeling I’d just stepped into a theoretical quagmire. She smiled a thin, hard smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Can’t you do justice by doing wrong?”

  “No, because then it becomes an injustice in itself.”

  She looked doubtful. “And who judges that?”

  “We all do.”

  “Easy for you to say from that side of the bars.” It was a bitter laugh. “Some judgments, it would appear, carry more weight than others.”

  I wanted to work the conversation around to her particular situation again. Previously, whenever I’d tried she’d clammed up; here was another opportunity, and I was going to have to go at it gently. “It’s a collective framework, and I’m not saying that it’s perfect by any means—but considering the alternative—”

  “And what’s that?”

  I shrugged. “Chaos.”

  She looked at me intently. “And you’ve seen chaos?”

  “I have.”

  “Where?”

  “Vietnam . . . and a few other places.” She took another spoonful of soup, but it paused at her mouth. “Mary, I need you to tell me what happened that night. I need you to tell me everything you remember or else I’m not going to be able to help you.”

  She had looked at me, quietly put the rest of her soup at the opening at the base of the bars, and placed the can of diet pop beside the bowl. She had slipped off her sandals, curled her knees up, and rolled over to lie on the bunk to face the concrete block wall.

  October 28, 9:00 P.M.

  When the gladiators died in the Coliseum, men in costumes came out and sprinkled sand to soak up the blood between bouts. The word for sand in Latin is harena—hence, arena. It’s thoughts like this that occupy my mind when I probably should be thinking about more pressing matters. It was a five-hundred-dollar buy-in for each contender, and I was surprised at the number of individuals who had the financial resources to sign up. I was not surprised at the number who had the lack of judgment to fight, including the Bear.

  Henry Standing Bear was resplendent in a white T-shirt with the logo FIGHTIN’ WHITIES on it and below, in smaller script, EVERY THANG’S GONNA BE ALL WHITE. Somewhere, he’d scrounged a pair of actual boxing shorts, red silk with gold piping. The bar owner I’d coldcocked last night had acquired a few new mouthpieces and had boiled the ones left over from the previous bout. It was a free-for-all grabfest, but Henry was one of the quickest, so he’d gotten a new one.

  I tried to think of the last time I’d seen gloves on the Bear, let alone seen him in a ring, and was coming up with eras when cars first started having seat belts. It was during a Rosebud County fair in Forsyth, when a traveling show had brought in the largest black bear we’d ever seen, and for five bucks you could climb over the ropes and “box” with Buster. Buster was muzzled, had had his claws removed, and was attached to a harness that could be pulled by two very large men so that he could be separated from the human contestant after he’d won, which Buster did every time that velvety Montana night.

  Buster the Bear’s technique had been pretty simple—he’d lumber out and straightforwardly envelop his opponent in his giant arms and smother him to the canvas. He was only about six feet tall on his hind legs but held the weight advantage in that he tipped the scales at close to seven hundred pounds. Henry and I had consumed several Grain Belt Premium beers and had rapidly risen to the sporting life, as only drunken teenagers can.

  We watched about a dozen denizens of the high plains get crushed before it was Henry’s turn. He had a strategy, which utilized the little-known fact that bears had notoriously crappy eyesight, and that, with the added weight, this one was a tad slow. He figured the thing to do was come out quick, give Buster everything he had in one punch, and then tackle
him before he had a chance to see and recover.

  It didn’t work.

  Buster the Bear’s head snapped with a roundhouse punch to the muzzle that would’ve killed any man, but by the time Henry Standing Bear tried to grab Buster by the middle, the black bear had already lifted him from the canvas and flung him aside, at which point he pounced on him with a verve yet unseen that night. It took four men, one of whom was me, to pull the chains to get the bear loose from the Bear, and by the time I got to Henry, he was the whitest I’d ever seen him. He said another little known fact about black bears was that they had forty-two teeth—he said he counted them as the muzzle pressed against his face.

  I’d done a little Golden-Gloves work in my youth and had risen to the top of interplatoon competition in the Corps by virtue of size, youth, and skill—one of which I still had, one of which I didn’t, and one on which the jury was still out. I’d competed well enough at Camp Pendleton to continue boxing at Camp Lejeune and then at the Armed Forces Boxing Championships at Lackland Air Force Base, where “Jacksonville Jake,” a bundle of bailing wire from Florida with skin the color and toughness of tanned saddle leather, had bounced me like a Super Ball. Those three minutes had taught me a special and lasting respect for chief petty officers with middle names from the cities where they’d been born.

  I was older now and looked back at those episodes as if they had been a part of some other man’s life. I’d engaged in earnest only a few times, sinking to that primordial depth of instinct to destroy and then call it a game. I’d seen and sworn to never look upon that kind of savagery in myself ever again.

  In the history of bad ideas, however, this had to be the thesis statement. The first indication that you’re in the midst of a bad idea is that people stop making eye contact with you and you with them. When I saw him entering the standing-room-only bar, Henry Standing Bear didn’t make eye contact with me. Juana served him a canned iced tea and also avoided his eye.