The pleasant man adjusted his glasses and smiled. “Well, you are; I’m his father, Jim.”
I went to badge him, but my new wallet flipped from my grasp and once again fell on my boots as he and Vic watched. I bent over, picked it up, and stood, stretching my star out for him to read. “Absaroka—”
He finished the introduction without looking at the wallet. “County Sheriff’s Department.” He gestured toward some monitors in the back corner. “Saw your truck when you pulled up in front of Jeremiah.”
“Jeremiah?”
“The giant out front.” He squinted his eyes at me. “Are you Walt Longmire?”
“I am.”
“Saw you on the television last month, K2 out of Casper.”
I shrugged. “You want to look at my badge, since I went to all the trouble of pulling it out?”
He nodded. “We’ve got a mirror over there if you want to try your quick draw; looks like you could use some practice.”
“New wallet.”
He gestured toward a leatherworking bench in the next room. “Want me to loosen it up for you?”
I removed the badge and handed it to him. “I’d appreciate that.”
He flipped the piece of leather back and forth. “Cardboard.”
I made a face. “It’s supposed to be leather.”
He held the edges up for me to see. “On the outside, but inside is cardboard; cheap Chinese shit. It’ll fall apart before it breaks in.” He dropped it on the counter. “I can make you a new one, but I’ll need the badge.”
“I’m afraid I’m working and need it.”
He folded his arms and looked at me. “Working on what?”
“Roberta Payne.”
He nodded to himself and then raised his face to look at the two of us. “You find her?”
I studied him back. “No.”
He waited a moment and then responded, sort of. “Twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes?”
He smiled. “I’ll make you another badge wallet in twenty minutes, thirty if you want basketweave. I’ve got dark brown leather on the bench right now that’ll match that holster you’ve got high on that right hip.”
I smiled back at him and handed him my badge, something I rarely did with anybody. “Basketweave.”
He nodded and looked at my star as if he were memorizing it. “Bret’s in the back putting the finishing touches on a holster for a genuine Colt Walker—you can go back there if you want.” As we followed him through the swinging saloon doors in the rear, he called after us, “I can make one to match that Glock that you’ve got, too, young lady.”
—
Texas Ranger and then captain of the United States Mounted Rifles Samuel Hamilton Walker wanted a handgun for the war with Mexico, a weapon that would kill both man and horse at a hundred yards, and as the story goes supposedly sent the specs for just such a pistol to Sam Colt.
He made roughly 1,100 of the famed Colt Walker .44s, which in many ways turned out to be a touch too big, even for the great Captain Walker. End to end it is fifteen and a half inches long and weighs just less than five pounds, smokes a lot when fired, and was even known to blow out the chamber walls when loaded with sixty grains of black powder. The much-vaunted Sharps .45-70, with which I had a long and storied past, has a .45 round loaded with seventy grains of black powder; the Colt Walker has a .44 caliber round holding sixty, and the Walker held six of them.
Full discharge of a round usually resulted in the loading lever dropping and effectively jamming the gun by sending the ram into a chamber’s mouth. You had to check the lever every time you fired the thing, which proved more than cumbersome, but old-timers learned to loop a piece of rawhide around the rod and the barrel to hold it in place.
Later, the pistols were downsized and there were dozens of reproductions, but the one in Bret Bussell’s hand when he turned to meet us was the genuine, unadulterated Shooting Iron.
“Howdy.”
Bret was a small man, kind of a miniature Grizzly Adams, which did nothing but make the big Walker in the custom, four-point shoulder holster look even larger; the fact that he was dressed in buckskins from head to moccasined toe completed the incongruousness. “Can I help you?”
“Bret Bussell?”
He pulled some blond hair from his face and glanced at Vic. “Yes?”
“Undersheriff Victoria Moretti.” She gestured toward me, and I was just glad she’d correctly and legally identified herself this time. “And this is—”
He slowly extended his hand. “Walt Long-Arm-of-the-Law Longmire.”
I shook the hand as I looked through the wooden stands at the walls of stacked tires that protected the tin building’s shooting area. “Have we met?”
“Nope, I saw you shoot once, though. I’ve got an uncle who’s with the Highway Patrol and got to see you qualify for your certification down in Douglas when I was twelve.”
I suddenly felt very old. “How did I do?”
He smiled a sad smile through the fur on his face. “Passable.” With a quick spin, he twirled the big Colt like the protagonist of some Saturday gunslinger serial and slipped it into the patterned holster, complete with matching powder flask and a possibles box.
“Ahh.” I pointed at the Colt Walker. “Is that thing real?”
He slipped it back out and held it toward me, handle first. “The genuine article; had a guy on the Internet offer me $11,400 for it about a month ago.”
“I’m not touching it then.”
He shifted toward Vic and held the big revolver out to her. “Go ahead, it doesn’t bite.”
“Loaded?”
He gestured toward the lubricants, percussion caps, box of lead balls, and bits of deer antler lying on the surface of the shooting bench, comprised mostly of the same weenie-wood as inside. “No, I was just getting ready to run a few rounds through it, but you can have a look first.”
She took the magnificent weapon and held it up, marveling at the patina on the thing. Hog Leg, Horse Pistol, and Smoke Wagon are some of the names coined for the 1847 Colt Walker, the first commercially produced large-caliber revolver that then gave birth to the Colt Dragoon, named for the famed French dragon guns, and the 1873 Peacemaker—a couple of relatives of the semiautomatic I had high and tight on my right side.
Mexican soldiers, mistranslating the meaning of the word revolver, believed that the rounds fired from the weapon could actually turn corners and change directions, following the intended target as he ran.
“You actually fire this fucking thing?”
He nodded. “That’s what it’s for.”
My undersheriff handed it to me. “Where in the world did you get it?”
“An old cowboy my dad knew out on the Powder River called him up one day and then brought it in. I told him I couldn’t pay him what it was worth, but he insisted that he wanted to sell it to me, so my dad made me a loan for about half of what it was worth, and I bought it off him.” I handed the Colt back; he twirled it again and placed it in the holster. “So, you needing some leather or hardware?”
“Actually, we’re here to talk to you about Roberta Payne.”
He looked like he could’ve been tipped over with ten grains of black powder. “You found her?”
The exact thing his father had said. “No, I’m afraid we haven’t, but there are some other women who may have gone missing, so—”
“But nothing on Robby?”
“No.”
He leaned against the shooting bench. “Would it be all right if I sat down?”
“Sure.” I took his elbow and seated him. “You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m just . . .”
I glanced at Vic, who made a face and then covered it with a hand. “Sorry about that; we just need to ask a few more questions, knock on a few more doors,
just to make sure that nothing was missed in that initial investigation.”
“Yeah, I understand.” He took a few deep breaths. “I just wasn’t ready for that, you know?”
My undersheriff wandered off to a different shooting station, just to give the young man some space as I folded my arms and stood in front of him. “I do.”
He took a moment to collect himself and then spoke into his lap. “Every time I think I’ve come to terms with it, something happens and I feel like . . .” He pulled the Walker back out and began disassembling it by rote in a mindless fashion. It seemed to settle his nerves, and the words started falling from his mouth as he clicked each empty cylinder. “When I was younger and just getting started in period shooting, this guy at a local gun shop told me I should top off every black-powder load with a couple of grains of Bullseye just to keep the fowling down; blew the nipple off and blasted the hammer back to full cock—still can’t hardly hear anything out of my right ear.” He looked up at me. “Three months, and it still feels like that whenever I hear about Robby.”
I nodded and studied my boots. “My wife died a number of years back, and I still start conversations with her in our empty house till I remember that she’s not there anymore.”
He scraped his bottom lip through his teeth. “At least you know what happened to her.”
“I do.”
“That’s the worst part, not knowing.” He shook his head. “Wondering what happened . . . I like to think that she’s okay; that she just decided to go somewhere else, you know? Like Florida or Hawaii. I like to think that she just got tired of her life, of me—and is laying on some beach somewhere.”
Vic had wandered back, and I glanced at her, but she wouldn’t make eye contact with either of us.
The kid kept talking, and I was really glad that the Walker wasn’t loaded. “I mean, we were divorced for about six months, and she even went back to her maiden name, but I kept hoping that we’d get back together.” He glanced around. “That’s why I went in with my dad on the family business, you know, in hopes that she’d see that I was settling down and getting my shit together . . .” His eyes shot to Vic. “Sorry about my language, ma’am.”
“Don’t worry about it.” She moved in closer. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“At the restaurant, the Flying J. I’d sometimes go in there just so I could look at her—nothing creepy, I just missed her, you know?”
Finally, Vic glanced at me. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“It was lunchtime, so she didn’t have any time to talk, but we made plans to maybe go see a movie later in the week—but then she never called.” He reassembled the pistol and reholstered it. “She’d rented an apartment downtown, and I went by to check on her. Her car wasn’t there, so I went over to the Flying J and her car was sitting in the parking lot, covered with dust, so I knew it hadn’t been moved. I asked the manager to check the schedule, but he said she’d punched out two nights before and hadn’t been back since.”
“So, wherever she went, she went there from work and without her car.”
“Yeah.”
Vic leaned in. “Did she have any new friends, hobbies, or occupations?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“No new people in her life?”
“No. I mean, not that I knew of.” He sighed. “We were divorced, so it’s possible she wasn’t telling me everything.”
Vic cleared her throat. “Was she seeing anybody else?”
“No.”
“You sound pretty certain.”
He stood and walked a little away from us. “I kept a pretty close eye on her after we split up.” He turned and inclined his head. “Look, I know how that sounds, but I was just worried about her. Robby was good-looking, and you should’ve seen how those guys at the truck stop would hit on her, even when we were married.”
I interrupted. “So you followed her?”
“I did. I know that sounds bad, but I’d just started lightening up on it when she disappeared. Can you imagine how that feels? I mean, if I’d been there the day she . . .”
I waited a moment before asking. “Did she have any friends or family out of town?”
“She had an aunt and uncle in Wisconsin, but she didn’t like them.”
“Nobody else?”
“No.”
Vic interrupted. “What were her hobbies?”
The question surprised the young man, and he took his time answering. “She did plays with the local theater groups—she wasn’t very good but she was pretty and always got cast.” He thought about it. “She worked out and she ran, cooked; she was a really great cook.”
My undersheriff leaned against the shooting stand beside me. “Are there any family members here in town that we could talk to?”
“Her mom—Sadie’s got a place on East Eighth Street, next to the Mount Pisgah Cemetery, which is where the old she-devil belongs.”
I smiled at the age-old war of son-in-law and mother-in-law; surprisingly, I’d gotten along famously with mine. “I take it you two don’t get along?”
“Robby and her mother didn’t get along.”
Vic added. “Father?”
He looked at her and smiled. “Dead; that, or hiding out from Sadie. The old bat got hold of me about a month ago, trying to get a petition together for a . . . I don’t know what they call it—one of those things where they declare you dead without finding your body?”
“Death in absentia?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“The state of Wyoming usually calls for the individual to be missing for five years before you’re allowed to petition for a declaration of death.”
“It didn’t seem right to me, either. Anyway, she wanted me to sign a bunch of stuff and I wouldn’t do it and I haven’t heard from her since.”
Vic pulled her duty notebook and a pen from inside her coat and mumbled to herself. “Sadie Payne? Sounds like a character from Damn Yankees . . .”
“What’s that?”
Vic snorted as she wrote. “A musical where people sell their souls to the devil.”
He nodded. “That’s Sadie, all right.”
“We’ll go talk to her.”
“Is there anything else you can think of that might help us, anything at all?”
“No.” His voice broke. “I wish I could.”
Vic handed him one of her cards. “If you do think of something, give me a call, okay? Unlike some other members of the Absaroka County law enforcement community, I have what they call a cell phone, a bastion of modern technology.”
We stood there for a moment more, and it was as if he didn’t want us to go, his hand dropping to the Colt Walker at his side. “You sure you don’t want to try it?”
I stared at him for a second and then raised both hands. “I’m not going to be responsible if that thing blows up.”
He turned toward Vic. “You?”
She shrugged and looked at me and then back to him. “Fuck it, why not?”
Shooting a black-powder pistol is a process that can’t be rushed, which is why a lot of the old hands in the day carried five or six cap-and-ball revolvers so that as soon as they emptied one they could grab another or another in the face of a couple thousand Indians.
We watched as Bret dumped three nozzles’ worth of powder into the cylinders and then stuffed each with a .457 round ball, before adjusting each cylinder to use the loading ram and pressing each round home. He thumbed off the tiny ring of lead from each chamber, indicating an airtight seal, and then applied some lubricant to each round to grease it up but also, he said, to guard against a chain fire.
“What’s a chain fire?”
I continued to watch the young man work. “A loose spark that causes all six rounds to go off at once.”
“I bet that’s exciting.�
�� She watched as he picked up some of the smaller pieces of antler. “What the hell is that for?”
“Using it to press the percussion caps onto the nipples.”
“I am all about nipples.”
“If you don’t get them seated tight, you get that chain fire.”
“I am all about getting the nipples seated right.” She pivoted toward me. “These chain fires, they happen a lot?”
I shrugged. “Not only will you have crippled your shooting hand, but you’ll also have blown up an eleven-thousand-dollar piece of frontier history.”
She spoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Bill me, chicken shit.”
Bret held out the Walker to her again, handle first. “You ready?”
About fifty yards away was a standard 7-8-9-X silhouette target hanging from a guide wire and anchored at the bottom with clip-on fishing weights. Holding the revolver with the barrel in the air, she sidled into the stall, raised it, and held it up close to her face. “Born ready.”
I mumbled to myself. “Boy howdy.”
Bret and I, keeping a watchful distance, looked on as she reached down and moved the ear protection headset on the counter away. The mountain man called out to her. “You sure you don’t want to use those?”
I had to smile, being familiar with my undersheriff’s shooting tendencies.
She shook her head and called out over her shoulder. “I always like to hear the first one.”
It was like thunder—very long, loud thunder. Black-powder guns don’t tend to snap or jerk like modern weapons, but rather they give a strong and sustained push that resonates from your shoulders down through your spine and into your solid organs like a mortar.
I leaned forward enough to spot a rupture in the black silhouette of the paper target at the center of the forehead, and it didn’t take much imagination for me to know that her target was Tomás Bidarte.
My undersheriff turned in the halo of white smoke with an undimmed and dazzling smile, almost as if she’d just arrived as a Faustian apparition—the kind you’d gladly trade your soul to. “Shoots about two inches high; I was going for the mouth.”
—
I carried the Colt back into the gun shop proper, the cross-draw holster hanging from my shoulder. Jim was seated behind the main counter at the leatherworking bench and held out a beautifully crafted badge wallet when he saw me coming.
Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery Page 11