“Avoiding the Mummers.”
“Let me talk to the taxi driver.”
“No.”
There was mumbling in the background and then the voice on the phone changed again. “Daddy?”
I smiled at her voice. “Hey, punk.”
“You’re going to be here, right?”
“Come hell or high water.”
“Do not get involved in any investigations between wherever you are and the hospital.”
“I won’t.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.” The phone went dead, and I repocketed it as we took a right. There was an area of leafless trees, the dark branches reaching up into the metallic sky like veins.
“You are having a grandbaby?”
His voice breaking my reverie, I looked at the one eye I could see in the rearview mirror. “Yep.”
The traffic became more congested, and we slowed. “Congratulations.” We moved a little farther but then stopped again, and he handed me a card with his name on it. “If you have any need for a driver while you are here in Philadelphia, I would be honored to assist you.”
I read it and looked up at him. “You’re a Patel?”
“You know my name?”
“I know the occupation. You’re sure you don’t have any family running a motel in Wyoming?”
“We’re everywhere, a third of all motel owners in the U.S. are called Patel, and it is a surname that indicates that they’re members of a Gujarati Hindu subcaste.”
“I know.” I smiled. “The Patel Motel phenomenon.”
“You actually know this?”
“I do.”
He smiled at me in the mirror. “With your hat, you are a real cowboy?”
“No.” We slowly passed under another highway and into the patchwork of blocks that made up most cities, red brick and buildings a lot older than 1890.
He drummed the steering wheel, venting his frustration with the traffic. “But they let you wear the hat?”
“I’m a sheriff.”
He shrugged. “So you get to do whatever you want.”
I thought about it and watched the landscape change from strip malls to light industry as we passed over the Schuylkill River. “Not exactly.”
He eyed me again. “Looks like somebody did whatever they wanted to you—no offense.”
“None taken.” I felt the stitches on my face, feeling as if I were growing spines through my cheek like a porcupine; the itching had finally gotten so bad that I’d just taken the bandages off. “I’ve had a rough couple of days.”
“Chasing bad guys?”
I smiled even though it hurt, his phrase reminding me of the answering machine message my daughter had recorded for me: This is the Longmire residence, we’re not able to answer your call right now because we’re out chasing bad guys or trying on white hats . . . “Something like that.”
“Train robbers?”
“Nope.” I had slept and dreamed the entire flight from Gillette to Denver, awakened briefly to climb on the second plane, and then had dreamed and slept from Denver to Philadelphia, but the dreams were crowded with white buffaloes and dark prophecies. I was still tired. Maybe it was because I was punchy, but every once in a while you find yourself in a situation where you want to talk, and sometimes it’s to a total stranger, maybe even a stranger who doesn’t know that a faraway place like Wyoming exists. “There was a suicide of a sheriff’s investigator in an adjacent county, and I was called in on the case.”
“Sheriffs have investigators out there?”
I glanced up at the skyline of the fifth-largest city in the United States and the back of William Penn or, at least, the Alexander Milne Calder twenty-seven-ton bronze sculpture of the man, one of two hundred and fifty bronzes that adorn the outside of city hall, with seven hundred rooms, the largest municipal building in the country. “Oh, I bet you’ve got them here, too.”
“This Wyoming sounds like a rough place.”
“Not really, we have about twenty homicides a year in comparison to Philadelphia, which averages about three hundred and twenty.”
“Yes, but we are a big city.”
“And we’re a big state.”
Calder had wanted the statue to face south so that the detail he’d wrought in Penn’s features would be highlighted by the sunshine to better reveal the complexity of the work. There would be no sunshine today, but it didn’t matter; the statue faces northeast toward my daughter’s building in Old City near Fishtown, commemorating the site where Penn signed the treaty with the Lenape tribe to create the city. “Anyway, this suicide put me on the case of three missing women.”
“Did you find them?”
“Yep.”
He shrugged. “That’s good.”
“One is dead.”
“That is bad.”
“Yep.” I sighed. “And I guess there’s somebody out there that’s put a contract on my life.”
“I am sorry for your troubles.”
It was a heartfelt statement. “Me, too.” I spotted a cheese steak joint and felt my stomach growl and tried to think of the last time I’d eaten anything. “One of the women was found in Miami, and we turned all the information over to the FBI—the authorities there located her.”
The phone vibrated in my hand. “Excuse me.” I cupped it to my ear. “I’m ten minutes away.”
“I’m hoping that’s not the case.”
I recognized the voice of the Gillette patrolman. “Dougherty?”
“Yeah, did you make it to Philadelphia?”
“I did, what are you doing working on New Year’s Day?”
“The sheriff offered me the Cold Case position and I took it. He said I had a unique skill set that would be perfect for the job.”
“He fire Richard Harvey?”
“He’s out on dental leave.”
“I bet. What can I do for you?”
“I just thought you’d be interested that the Las Vegas PD did a search on Deke Delgatos’s place and found a bunch of personal correspondence with a guy in Mexico City who they think is the one who put the hit out on you. You ever hear of a guy by the name of Tomás Bidarte?”
I could feel my jaw tightening.
“Sheriff?”
“Yep . . .” I thought about the man who had almost killed Vic, the man who had gotten away. “Yep, I have.”
Dougherty seemed sorry to have brought up the subject. “I just thought it was something you ought to know, you know?”
“Yep. No, thanks, troop. Any word on Jone Urrecha?”
“She’s fine; a little worse for wear due to the concussion and exposure, but they’re only keeping her a few days for observation so I’m having dinner with her sister.”
“Corbin, you dog you.”
“It’s just dinner.”
“Make sure she doesn’t bring her stapler.”
I hit the button and rested the phone on my knee. So, he wasn’t dead, not by a long shot. I thought about how Henry and I had covered all that ground down near Sulphur Creek and hadn’t found a trace of the man.
The driver interrupted my thoughts. “This is your first grandchild?”
“Um, yep.”
“Girl or boy?”
“A . . .” I thought of white buffaloes and Virgil as I listened to the slush of the melted snow rhythmically scour the underside of the Crown Vic; I attempted to collect my wayward thoughts. “A friend of mine says it’s a girl.”
“Good, girls are best.”
“And why is that?”
“Sons, they have their own plans, but a daughter or granddaughter, they will love you forever and take care of you in your old age.” The traffic had slowed to a stop, and I couldn’t help but pull my pocket watch out and check the time as he watched me. “
Don’t worry, we’ll get you there, my man. What time is this daughter of yours scheduled to deliver?”
“Eight-twenty.”
He shook his head. “Nothing to worry about. Take it from a man with five children; they always go later than they say. I will bet you a ten-dollar bill.”
The exhale of my breath clouded the window beside my face. “You haven’t met my daughter.”
The car began moving again, and we’d almost made it to midtown when we lurched to a stop to allow a SEPTA surface trolley to go by. “These damned trolleys, they are so slow, and they take forever.”
“How many cars?”
Not fully understanding my question at first, it took him a few seconds to answer. “Um, two.”
I slipped my hat over my face and smiled, looking forward to seeing all my old friends—and a new one. “You’re on.”
Cady and Michael Moretti
Proudly Announce the Birth of Their Daughter
Lola Longmire Moretti
At 8:20 AM EST
7 Pounds
20.5 Inches
For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit www.penguin.com/johnsonchecklist
Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery Page 28