Cold Dish wl-1

by Craig Johnson

  Cold Dish

  ( Walt Longmire - 1 )

  Craig Johnson

  Cold Dish

  Craig Johnson

  Revenge is a dish best served cold.

  — Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de La Clos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses

  1

  “Bob Barnes says they got a dead body out on BLM land. He’s on line one.”

  She might have knocked, but I didn’t hear it because I was watching the geese. I watch the geese a lot in the fall, when the days get shorter and the ice traces the rocky edges of Clear Creek. The sheriff ’s office in our county is an old Carnegie building that my department inherited when the Absaroka County Library got so many books they had to go live somewhere else. We’ve still got the painting of Andy out in the landing of the entryway. Every time the previous sheriff left the building he used to salute the old robber baron. I’ve got the large office in the south side bay, which allows me an unobstructed view of the Big Horn Mountains to my right and the Powder River Valley to my left. The geese fly down the valley south, with their backs to me, and I usually sit with my back to the window, but occasionally I get caught with my chair turned; this seems to be happening more and more, lately.

  I looked at her, looking being one of my better law-enforcement techniques. Ruby’s a tall woman, slim, with a direct manner and clear blue eyes that tend to make people nervous. I like that in a receptionist /dispatcher, keeps the riffraff out of the office. She leaned against the doorjamb and went to shorthand, “Bob Barnes, dead body, line one.”

  I looked at the blinking red light on my desk and wondered vaguely if there was a way I could get out of this. “Did he sound drunk?”

  “I am not aware that I’ve ever heard him sound sober.”

  I flipped the file and pictures that I’d been studying onto my chest and punched line one and the speakerphone button. “Hey, Bob. What’s up?”

  “Hey, Walt. You ain’t gonna believe this shit…” He didn’t sound particularly drunk, but Bob’s a professional, so you never can tell. He was silent for a moment. “Hey, no shit, we got us a cool one out here.”

  I winked at Ruby. “Just one, huh?”

  “Hey, I ain’t shittin’ you. Billy was movin’ some of Tom Chatham’s sheep down off the BLM section to winter pasture, and them little bastards clustered around somethin’ in one of the draws… We got a cool one.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “No. Billy did.”

  “Put him on.”

  There was a brief jostling of the phone, and a younger version of Bob’s voice answered, “Hey, Shuuriff.”

  Slurred speech. Great. “Billy, you say you saw this body?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “What’d it look like?”

  Silence for a moment. “Looked like a body.”

  I thought about resting my head on my desk. “Anybody we know?”

  “Oh, I didn’t get that close.”

  Instead, I pushed my hat farther up on my head and sighed. “How close did you get?”

  “Couple hundred yards. It gets steep in the draws where the water flow cuts through that little valley. The sheep stayed all clustered around whatever it is. I didn’t want to take my truck up there ’cause I just got it washed.”

  I studied the little red light on the phone until I realized he was not going to go on. “No chance of this being a dead ewe or lamb?” Wouldn’t be a coyote, with the other sheep milling around. “Where are you guys?”

  “ ’Bout a mile past the old Hudson Bridge on 137.”

  “All right, you hang on. I’ll get somebody out there in a half hour or so.”

  “Yes sir… Hey, Shuuriff?” I waited. “Dad says for you to bring beer, we’re almost out.”

  “You bet.” I punched the button and looked at Ruby. “Where’s Vic?”

  “Well, she’s not sitting in her office looking at old reports.”

  “Where is she, please?” Her turn to sigh and, never looking at me directly, she walked over, took the worn manila folder from my chest, and returned it to the filing cabinet where she always returns it when she catches me studying it.

  “Don’t you think you should get out of the office sometime today?” She continued to look at the windows.

  I thought about it. “I am not going out 137 to look at dead sheep.”

  “Vic’s down the street, directing traffic.”

  “We’ve only got one street. What’s she doing that for?”

  “Electricals for the Christmas decorations.”

  “It’s not even Thanksgiving.”

  “It’s a city council thing.”

  I had put her on that yesterday and promptly forgot about it. I had a choice: I could either go out to 137, drink beer, and look at dead sheep with a drunk Bob Barnes and his half-wit son or go direct traffic and let Vic show me how displeased she was with me. “We got any beer in the refrigerator?”

  “No.”

  I pulled my hat down straight and told Ruby that if anybody else called about dead bodies, we had already filled the quota for a Friday and they should call back next week. She stopped me by mentioning my daughter, who was my singular ray of sunshine. “Tell Cady I said hello and for her to call me.”

  This was suspicious. “Why?” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. My finely honed detecting skills told me something was up, but I had neither the time nor the energy to pursue it.

  I jumped in the Silver Bullet and rolled through the drive-through at Durant Liquor to pick up a sixer of Rainier. No sense having the county support Bob Barnes’s bad habits with a full six-pack, so I screwed off one of the tops and took a swig. Ah, mountain fresh. I was going to have to drive by Vic and let her let me know how pissed off she was bound to be, so I pulled out onto Main Street, joined the three-car traffic jam, and looked into the outstretched palm of Deputy Victoria Moretti.

  Vic was a career patrol person from an extended family of patrol people back in South Philadelphia. Her father was a cop, her uncles were cops, and her brothers were cops. The problem was that her husband was not a cop. He was a field engineer for Consolidated Coal and had gotten transferred to Wyoming to work at a mine about halfway between here and the Montana border. When he accepted the new position a little less than two years ago, she gave it all up and came out with him. She listened to the wind, played housewife for about two weeks, and then came into the office to apply for a job.

  She didn’t look like a cop, least not like the ones we have out here. I figured she was one of those artists who had received a grant from the Crossroads Foundation, the ones that lope up and down the county roads in their $150 running shoes and their New York Yankee ball caps. I’d lost one of my regular deputies, Lenny Rowell, to the Highway Patrol. I could have brought Turk up from Powder Junction but that had appealed to me as much as gargling razor blades. It wasn’t that Turk was a bad deputy; it’s just that all that rodeo-cowboy bullshit wore me out, and I didn’t like his juvenile temper. Nobody else from in county had applied for the job, so I had done her a favor and let her fill out an application.

  I read the Durant Courant while she sat out in the reception room scribbling on the front and back of the damn form for half an hour. Her writing fist began to shake and by the time she was done, her face had turned a lively shade of granite. She flipped the page onto Ruby’s desk, hissed “Fuck this shit,” and walked out. We called all her references, from field investigators in ballistics to the Philadelphia Chief of Police. Her credentials were hard to argue with: top 5 percent out of the academy, bachelor’s in law enforcement from Temple University with nineteen credit hours toward her master’s, a specialty in ballistics, two citations, and four years street duty. She was on the fast track, and next year she would�
�ve made detective. I’d have been pissed, too.

  I had driven out to the address that she’d given me, a little house trailer near the intersection of both highways with nothing but bare dirt and scrub sage all around it. There was a Subaru with Pennsylvania plates and a GO OWLS bumper sticker, so I figured I was in the right place. When I got up to the steps, she already had the door open and was looking at me through the screen. “Yeah?”

  I was married for a quarter century and I’ve got a lawyer for a daughter, so I knew how to deal with these situations: Stay close to the bone, nothing but the facts, ma’am. I crossed my arms, leaned on her railing, and listened to it squeal as the sheet metal screws tried to pull loose from the doublewide’s aluminum skin. “You want this job?”

  “No.” She looked past me toward the highway. She didn’t have any shoes on, and her toes were clutching the threadbare carpet like cat’s claws in an attempt to keep her from spinning off into the ether. She was a little below average height and weight, olive complexion, with short black hair that kind of stood up in pure indignity. She’d been crying, and her eyes were the color of tarnished gold, and the only thing I could think of doing was to open the screen door and hold her. I had had a lot of problems of my own of late, and I figured we could both just stand there and cry for a while.

  I looked down at my brown rough-outs and watched the dirt glide across the porch in underlining streaks. “Nice wind we’ve been having.” She didn’t say a word. “Hey, you want my job?”

  She laughed. “Maybe.”

  We both smiled. “Well, you can have it in about four years, but right now I need a deputy.” She looked out at the highway again. “But I need a deputy who isn’t going to run off to Pittsburgh in two weeks.” That got her attention.

  “Philadelphia.”

  “Whatever.” With that, I got all the tarnished gold I could handle.

  “Do I have to wear one of those goofy cowboy hats like you?”

  I glanced up at the brim of my hat and then back down to her for effect. “Not unless you want to.”

  She cocked her head past me, nodding to the Bullet. “Do I get a Batmobile like that to drive around in?”

  “You bet.”

  That had been the first dissemblance of many to come.

  I took a big swig and finished off the first Rainier beer and popped it back in the carton. I could see the muscles in her jaw flex like biceps. I made her knock on the window before I rolled it down. “What’s the problem, officer?”

  She looked pointedly at her watch. “It’s 4:37, where the hell are you going?”

  I relaxed back into the big bucket seat. “Close enough. I’m going home.” She just stood there, waiting. It was one of her best talents, asking questions and just standing there, waiting for an answer. “Oh, Bob Barnes called, says they got a dead body out between Jim Keller’s place and Bureau of Land Management.”

  She yanked her head back and showed me a canine tooth. “They saw a dead body. Yeah, and I’m a fucking Chinese fighter pilot.”

  “Uh huh, looks like the big sheepocide we’ve all been waiting for.” It was the shank of the afternoon, and the one beer was already helping to improve my mood. The sky was still a VistaVision blue, but there was a large cloud bank to the northwest that was just beginning to obscure the mountains. The nearer clouds were fluffy and white, but the backdrop was a darker, bruised color that promised scattered snow at high altitudes.

  “You look like hammered shit.”

  I gave her a look out of the side of my eye. “You wanna go out there?”

  “It’s on your way home.”

  “No, it’s past there, out on 137.”

  “It’s still a lot closer to you, and seeing as you’re going home early…”

  The wind was beginning to pick up. I was going to have to go long on this one. “Well, if you don’t want to…”

  She gave me another look. “You have done nothing but sit in your office, on your ass, all day.”

  “I’m not feeling real well, think I might be getting the flu or something.”

  “Maybe you should go out and get some exercise. How much do you weigh now? Two-sixty?”

  “You have a mean streak.” She continued to look at me. “Two-fifty-three.” It sounded better than two-fifty-five.

  She stared at my left shoulder in deep concentration, juggling the evening that she must have had planned. “Glen isn’t coming home till late.” She looked at herself in the side-view mirror and instantly looked away. “Where are they?”

  “On 137, about a mile past the old Hudson Bridge.” This was working out pretty well. “They’re in Billy’s truck.” She started to push off and walk away. “They wanted you to pick up some beer on your way out.”

  She turned and tapped a finger on the passenger door. “If I was going to bring them beer, I would take that depleted six-pack in the seat beside you, mister. You know, we have an open container law in this state.”

  I watched her man-walk with the sixteen-shot automatic bouncing on her hip. “Hey, I try and have an open container with me no matter what state I’m in.” She was smiling when she slammed the door of her five-year-old unit. It’s good when you can bring unbridled happiness to your fellow workers. I nosed the three-quarter ton out to the west side of town, and Vic must’ve passed me doing an even eighty, sirens and lights all going full blast. She gave me the finger as she went by.

  I had to smile. It was Friday, I had five beers in attendance, and my daughter was supposed to call this evening. I drove out through Wolf Valley and ignored the scattered, out-of-state vehicles parked illegally along the road. During the latter part of hunting season, my part of the high plains becomes a Disneyland for every overage boy with a high-powered toy. Instead, I watched the clouds slowly eat the Bighorn Mountains. There was a little early snow up there, and the setting sun was fading it from a kind of frozen blue to a subtle glow of purple. I had lived here my entire life, except for college in California and a stint in the marines in Vietnam. I had thought about those mountains the entire time I was gone and swore that a day wouldn’t go by when I got back that I wouldn’t look at them. Most of the time, I remembered.

  By the time I got out to Crossroads there was a fine silting of confectionery snow blowing across the road and falling through the sage and range grass. The shadows were long when I stopped at the mailbox. There was nothing but a Doctor Leonard’s Healthcare sale catalog, which scared me it was so interesting. I navigated the irrigation ditch and drove up to the house.

  Martha had grown up on her family ranch, some couple thousand-odd acres near Powder Junction, and had always hated being a townie. So, three years ago, we bought a little land off the Foundation, got one of those piles of logs they call a kit, drilled a well, and planted a septic tank. We sold the house in town, because Martha was in such a hurry to get out of it, and lived in a trailer I had borrowed from Henry Standing Bear, owner of the Red Pony and my oldest friend. By the fall, we had her all closed in and the heat on. Then Martha died.

  I parked the truck on the gravel, pulled out the beer, and walked on the two-by-twelves over the mud that led up to the door. I’d been meaning to get some grass seed, but the snow kept putting an end to that. I pushed the door open and stepped up from the cinder block onto the plywood floor. The place still needed a little work. There were some interior walls but most were just studs and, when you turned the bare bulbs on, the light slipped through the wooden bars and made patterns on the floor. The electricals weren’t done, so I had two four-ways plugged into the box and everything just ran into them. The plumbing was done, but I used a shower curtain as a bathroom door; consequently, I didn’t get many visitors. There was a prewar, Henry F. Miller baby grand that had belonged to my mother-in-law, on which I had been known to pound out a little boogie-woogie, but I hadn’t played it since Martha had died. I had my books all stacked in beer boxes near the back wall and, the Christmas before last in a fit of holiday optimism, Cady and I had gone out
and bought a floor lamp, an easy chair, and a Sony Trinitron color television. The lamp and easy chair worked really well, whereas the TV did not. Without a dish, the only thing you could pick up was Channel 12 with snow for a picture and a soothing hiss for sound. I watched it religiously.

  I had the phone set up on a cardboard box next to the chair so I wouldn’t have to get up to answer it, and I had a cooler on the other side for the beer. I threw my coat and hat on the boxes, switched on my lamp, and sat down in my chair with Doctor Leonard in my lap. I flipped the catalog open to page three and pondered a genuine artificial sheepskin cover made for all standard recliners. I glanced up at the stacked log walls and tried to decide between the available ivory and the rich chestnut. Didn’t really matter. After four years, I had yet to make any truly decisive steps in interior decor. Perhaps Doctor Leonard’s machine-washable polyester acrylic fleece was my Iliad. This thought was unsettling enough to motivate the fourth beer, which was only slightly warmer than the first three. I screwed off the top, pinching it between thumb and forefinger, and tossed it into the drywall bucket that served as my only trash can. I thought about calling the Doc’s 1-800 number but was afraid that I might block Cady’s call. She had tried to get me to get call waiting, but I figured I got interrupted enough during the course of a day and didn’t need to pay for the privilege at home. I hit the remote and surfed from automatic four to destination twelve: ghost TV. It was my favorite show, the one where the different-sized blobs moved around in a blizzard and didn’t make too much noise. Gave me plenty of time to think.

  I retraced the well-worn path of my thoughts to the report that had been lying on my chest when Ruby had come into the office. I didn’t really need the actual file. I had every scrap of paper in it memorized. There is a black-and-white photograph that I had cropped down, the kind we use to attach a person to a particular brand of misery. Place photo here. The background is a vacant white, broken only by the shadow of an electric conduit, no proper venue for intimacy such as this. In another setting, the portrait might have been a Curtis or a Remington.