As the crow flies wl-8

by Craig Johnson

  The body struck a cornice once on the way down, then splayed from the side of the cliff and landed at the bottom where the grass-covered slope rose to meet the rocks. The liquid thump of the body striking the ground was horrific, and we continued to watch as whoever it was rolled down the hillside with a cascading jumble of scree and tumbling rock.

  We were both running, the Cheyenne Nation ahead of me and moving at an astounding pace. Dog followed as we thundered down the hillside between the rock walls and back up the other side.

  It was so surreal that I couldn’t believe it had actually happened, but the adrenaline dumping high octane into my bloodstream and the Bear’s reaction told me that it must’ve been true.

  By the time I got to the last hill leading to the base of the cliffs, I could see Henry looking from side to side, trying to find where the person that had fallen might be. There was a copse of juniper to the left, and I watched as he started and then ran toward it. I was there in an instant, and what I saw was like some surrealistic painting. I felt as if the world had been pulled out from under me, too.

  Her right leg was contorted to the extreme with her foot up above her shoulder, and there were deep lacerations on one side of her body. The eyes were unfocused as she stared at the rocks above, and her head lunged involuntarily, the brain attempting to send signals through the broken spine.

  Henry kneeled beside her and cupped the side of her head in his hands, attempting to provide some kind of support without adjusting her. “Do not move.”

  A breath escaped her lips as a fresh flow of tears drained down her cheeks. She gulped air into her bleeding mouth three times, then turned her head toward the Bear’s hand-and died.

  I kneeled beside him and looked at her, reached up to her throat, and placed my fingers where her pulse had been. “Do you know her?”

  He lowered her head and brushed back his hair with bloody fingers, the smears trailing from the corner of his eye to the clamped jaw like macabre Kabuki makeup. “No.”

  Dog began barking behind us, and I yelled at him, “Shut up!”

  Henry and I must’ve had the same thought at precisely the same time, because we both looked up simultaneously. From this angle, we couldn’t see anything at the top of the cliff-only a few pebbles that rained down on us that must’ve become dislodged during her fall.

  I went ahead and yelled, “Hey, is there anybody up there?” My voice echoed off the rocks above and below, along with Dog’s incessant barking. “Shut up!”

  I threw my head back and yelled louder this time. “Hey, is there anybody up there?” I took a deep breath and shouted again, “We’ve got a woman who’s fallen!”

  Nothing, just Dog’s continued barking.

  I turned and saw him standing down the hillside. “I said, shut up!”

  The big beast’s head rose and cocked in a quizzical cant. After a moment, the huge muzzle dipped and nosed at something-and it was only when he gently pawed at the blanketed bundle in front of him in the high stalks of buffalo grass that I finally saw the tiny hand and heard a baby cry.

  2

  It was a boy. I kept dipping my little finger into the water bottle so that he could drink the drops; I wasn’t much of an expert, but I estimated his age at about six months. He’d stopped crying and, amazingly enough, seemed to have survived the fall with not much visible damage.

  He’d had help.

  In a perversity of timing and luck, we’d once again blown through the intersection of BIA 4 and state Route 212 in Lame Deer just as the rear end of a black Yukon headed east.

  When we got to the Indian Health Services building on the north end of town, Henry slid Rezdawg into the parking lot with a ferocity of which I hadn’t thought the vehicle capable. Under the canopy of the entrance, I handed the child off to the Cheyenne Nation, pretty sure that he was more adept at negotiating the bureaucracy of federal health care than I.

  I watched as he held the child close to his chest and rushed into the eleven-year-old building with the alacrity of the All-American running back he’d been at Cal in the sixties-before Vietnam had changed his life and him.

  There was a story about Henry’s first days at Berkeley. It seemed that four California boys from Stockton had taken it upon themselves to give Geronimo a haircut during the two-a-day practices, but after three broken fingers, a broken nose, a dislocated shoulder, and a concussion, they’d decided to go seek entertainment elsewhere.

  Dog followed Henry inside at a clip, unwilling to leave the child’s side; only fair, since he’d been the one to find him.

  I circled around the truck and climbed in to move it away from the emergency entrance, but my smile faded as the truck’s engine stumbled and died as soon as I closed the driver’s door behind me. “Oh, you…” I ground the starter and pulled the choke out just the tiniest bit, but the cantankerous V-8 only grumbled and ignored my efforts. Figuring I’d just shove the piece of crap out of the way, I slipped the truck into neutral and threw open the door to start pushing.

  When I brought my face up, there was a black Yukon nudged right against the back bumper and, more important, a very irate tribal police chief Lolo Long staring me in the chin.

  “Hands on the vehicle.”

  “Look…”

  I didn’t get anymore out because when I started to continue speaking, she shoved my shoulder and trapped my right hand in a reverse wristlock that threw me against the scaly side of Rezdawg’s bed. It was a good move and expertly executed, but I was a lot heavier and turned just a little to let her know I still could. “Officer, if you’ll just listen…”

  She put a lot more pressure in the wristlock, and the position of my arm forced me back toward the truck. My immediate response would have been to back pivot and deliver a roundhouse elbow into the side of her head, but I was hoping we weren’t at that point just yet. “We’ve got an emergency.”

  She frisked me with her free hand under my arms and down my back. “Stop talking.”

  I could feel the weight of Rezdawg shift beneath me as the front tires edged toward the slight drop-off where the emergency area had been repaved. “We’ve got a child in there who might be hurt and a dead woman at the base of Painted Warrior cliff.”

  “I said shut up.” Her hand froze at the middle of my back. “What’s this?”

  I sighed. “It’s my duty sidearm, a Colt 1911, both cocked and locked, and I’d appreciate it if you’d handle it with a little care.”

  She fumbled with my canvas jacket, unsnapped the pancake holster, and yanked the semiautomatic from the small of my back, still holding me against the ever-so-slightly moving truck. “You know that carrying a concealed weapon onto semiautonomous federal lands or reservations is illegal unless you happen to be of tribal descent-and you just don’t look like Chief Cleans His Bore Regularly.” She spun me around and stuffed my Colt in the back of her jeans, then pulled her S amp;W. “You’re under arrest.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  She leveled the. 44 at my chest and tossed me her cuffs. “Put those on.”

  I could feel the truck behind me as it picked up just a little bit of momentum, rolling off the asphalt patchwork and starting toward the great, wide parking lot.

  I snapped one of the cuffs on a wrist and turned to watch Rezdawg gain a little speed, Lolo Long’s eyes now looking past me at the unpiloted three-quarter-ton as it continued to slip away.

  Her face now took on a little panic. “You… you need to stop that vehicle.”

  “Sorry, I’ve been arrested.”

  She kept the Magnum on me but started moving past, undecided as to whether her responsibilities lay with her prisoner or the unbridled truck. “I said stop that vehicle.”

  I shrugged and held up my cuffed hand, the other end rattling against my forearm. “Nothing I can do.”

  Rezdawg was now in a full advance toward the car-filled parking lot, and Officer Long suddenly made the lunge to catch it, racing across the distance at an impressive speed-a heck of a
lot faster than I would’ve been able to accomplish. She holstered her weapon and grabbed the door handle, but, as I would have anticipated, the latch didn’t appear to work. She punched at the button and yanked mightily at the handle, even placed a boot against the bed and pulled as she hopped on one foot, pogo-style, all to no avail.

  I leaned to the side and tried to judge the trajectory as the ugliest truck on the high plains took one of the loveliest, if irritating, law enforcement officers for a ride. It looked to me as if the point of impact was going to be a maroon ’86 Cadillac parked at the end of the row.

  Never a fan of spectacle, I turned and walked through the automatic sliding glass doors with one last glance at Lolo Long as she scrambled through the open window of the rolling Rezdawg.

  Henry was standing at the reception desk talking urgently to a very large woman, but he raised his face at the sound of my boots on the tile floor. “Trouble finding a place to park?”

  “No, no trouble at all.” I glanced around. “Where’s Dog?”

  The Cheyenne Nation smiled. “In the examination room; we tried to hold him back but he gave every indication that he was going to eat all of us alive if we separated him from that child.”

  I nodded, leaned against the counter, and looked at the heavyset Native woman a little younger than Henry and I. “Hello.” I extended a hand, suddenly remembering that it had a handcuff dangling from it. I decided to play it like being cuffed was nothing new for me. “Walt Longmire.”

  She looked a little uncertain. “The sheriff from Absaroka County?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Hazel Long.”

  “Good to meet you, Hazel.” I paused. “Are you related to Chief Long?”

  She glanced at the cuffs again. “Lo is my daughter, yes.”

  “Hmm.” I glanced at Henry as he stared at my hand. “What?”

  He closed his eyes and cleared the expression from his face. “We need to contact the authorities.”

  “Oddly enough, they’ve been contacted.” I threaded the office key chain from my jacket pocket and used the ever-present universal cuff key that dangled from the ring to extricate myself, allowing the hardware to fall onto the counter. “Or, rather, they’ve contacted us.”

  He looked past me and down the hallway, and I could just about bet what was coming. “I believe she is about to make contact again.”

  Long grabbed my shoulder and yanked at me, half-pulling me around to face her. She was sweating, and I was momentarily entranced by the beads of perspiration at the base of her throat. “You are still under arrest.” Her face was now about six inches from my own. “And you’re going to pay for the damages to the cars in the parking lot.”

  Cars, plural. I guess Rezdawg had gotten more than one. Good for her.

  “I was and still am under arrest, and therefore not responsible for the vehicle in question.” She straightened, a little surprised. “I’m pretty knowledgeable about vehicular codes, along with concealed-carry laws within federal jurisdiction.”

  “Lo?”

  It took a second for her to disengage from her primary target, but when she realized that it was her mother speaking to her, she locked on her. “Excuse me?”

  The large woman started to stand. “Lo, there’s been an…”

  She snapped back in the way that only family can. “Is this official business? Because I am engaged in arresting this man and unless you have something pertinent to say concerning…”

  “Lolo Louise Long, stop acting like an ass. There’s been an accident. A child is hurt, and a dead woman, who is going to be a major part of your official business, is lying at the base of Painted Warrior cliff.” She took a deep breath and shot air from her nostrils like a bull. “And, by the way, may I introduce you to Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming.”

  “You’re still under arrest.”

  “Okay.” I braced a hand against the dash as we swerved down BIA 4 at about a hundred miles an hour. “Can I have my gun back?”

  “No.”

  I glanced past the elongated hood of the Yukon as we passed another unsuspecting motorist. “You might want to turn on your siren.”

  She said nothing and continued slicing the wheel.

  “Seriously, if you…”

  She fairly screamed it. “I don’t know where the switch is!”

  I gave her my best double take, but fortunately her attention stayed on the road.

  Reaching across to the upper center console, I flipped down a small door and pulled a switch, flooding the surrounding area with the blooping noise of the hi-tech siren.

  She flashed the amber eyes at me. “Thanks.”

  I nodded and thought about how I was getting myself involved with a federal investigation on reservation land. I’d thought about asking Henry to go with her but came to the conclusion that I was probably a little less of an adversary. The Bear looked just as happy to stay at the hospital with the child, Dog, and no Lolo Long. “Are you new to this?”

  “What?”

  “Law enforcement; I assume that this isn’t what you did over in Iraq, huh?”

  The response was more than a little defensive. “No, it wasn’t.”

  “What did you do over there?”

  “None of your business.” She glanced at me, a sliver of jasper at the corner of one eye. “You serve?”

  “I did.”

  “Union or Confederate?”

  More and more like Vic. I went ahead and smiled; it was funny. “See, up until now you’ve kept that rapier wit sheathed.”

  The radio interrupted with a call from the Montana Highway Patrol, informing us that the FBI investigator would meet us on scene and would be bringing a team along with him; standard procedure on the Rez. Officer Long plucked the mic from the dash and rogered the call.

  She hung it back up. “I know you. I mean, I know of you.” She glanced at me again. “You were involved with the Melissa Little Bird rape case a few years ago.”

  I pulled the shoulder belt away from me with my thumb, my chest suddenly feeling a little tight. “Yep, I was.”

  “That was a cluster.”

  My chest got even tighter. “Yep.”

  She started to drive more steadily, braking before and accelerating into the curves, although our speed was still way over the limit. “There were a lot of rumors swirling around when those boys started showing up dead.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “One theory was that it was that buddy of yours, Standing Bear.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Another was that you were the one doing it.”

  I still didn’t say anything.

  “You caught somebody, didn’t you?”

  It took a moment, but I found words in my mouth. “We stopped the shootings, if that’s what you mean.” She rocketed past a windmill on the side of the road. “You’re going to want to take a left at the next dirt cutoff.”

  She dutifully slowed the SUV and made the turn at a reasonable speed but accelerated again, still bouncing us against the seat belts. I indicated the spotter road, and she took it as I reached across and turned the dial, putting the GMC in four-wheel-drive, her glance letting me know I’d overstepped my boundaries. “I’ll operate the vehicle from here on out, if you don’t mind.”

  We got to the ridge and parked and, pulling a crime scene pack from behind her seat, she followed me as I retraced the path to the base of the cliffs. Our approach spooked a coyote, and we could hear the buzzing of the flies before we got there.

  Chief Long was to my right as we got closer to the small stand of juniper trees, and I could see that the young woman’s naked leg was still sticking up at an odd angle beside her face.

  I turned to look at Officer Long, but she had stopped and, staring at the dead woman, was simply standing in the grass.

  I waited a moment and then took a step back, blocking her view. “You know her?”

  She looked surprised and then nodded in a distracted way, a
traumatized look I’d seen before. “Yeah, yeah I do.”

  “Gimme the case.”

  She blinked once and then looked up at me. “No, I… no.”

  “Gimme the case and go sit by the creek; if I need you, I’ll call.”

  She didn’t move, even after I took the pack from her loose hand.

  “Go.”

  She stood there for a bit longer and then turned and walked down the hill.

  I moved back to the dead woman and set the case down without actually looking at her. There was a charade I played with myself in these situations, a falsehood that allowed me to do the job-telling myself that it was only an exercise. This woman was not dead to me, not yet. That part would start soon enough: the ferocious desire to find out who she was, why this happened and, if it was a factor, who did it.

  Was it an accident, a suicide, or a homicide?

  I put away my sunglasses and raised my face, getting a clear look at the cliff and watching the clouds race over in bleached streaks, leftovers from the storm that had hovered near Lame Deer. There was another crime scene up there where the majority of the questions would probably be answered, but that could wait.

  I judged the distance and did a quick calculation of the physics, which were not unlike the deceleration and impact forces found in automobile accidents in which the occupants neglect to wear seat belts. In the tenth to twelfth second of free fall, terminal velocity is obtained-terminal velocity being one hundred and ten miles an hour. She wouldn’t have made that, but she’d gone fast enough. There would be fractured bones and lacerated damage to internal organs as well as to the head and spine. She had told me that in those last few seconds-I only wish she could’ve told me more.

  I felt the falsehood of ritual flow over me, insulating me from the lingering results of death, humanity’s ultimate adversary. I unzipped the crime scene case and was immediately faced with another adversary, a camera. All these years and I still hadn’t mastered the art of anything except the IPH model.

  This reminded me that we had left Henry’s camera on the ridge near where we had parked the Yukon, and I made the mental note to pick it up on the way back to the vehicle. The camera from the kit was large-bodied like Henry’s but of a simpler design, which I appreciated. I switched it on and began the photographic procedure of shooting the entire scene-the relationship area, distance of fall, and the point where she had struck the cornice.