A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery

by Craig Johnson

  “Where is he now?”

  “Back in holding.”

  I yawned. “I’ll check on him, and then I’m going to hit the hay in the other holding cell.” I pushed off. “Seeing as there’s no room at the inn.”

  I checked my office on the pass by but didn’t see Dog and assumed that he must’ve been in the back keeping an eye on the young man. I tried to remember what the first movie was that I might’ve seen but could come up with nothing. I’d grown up on a northern Wyoming ranch about as far from everything as was possible in what seemed like a different century, but I watched TV and couldn’t imagine the kind of lifestyle where young Cord had never seen one.

  I turned the corner in the dark room, quietly slipped along the wall to where I could see into the holding cell, and was immediately greeted with a rumbling half bark.

  “Shhh . . .” I moved over to the bars and noticed that Double Tough must’ve changed his mind and decided to close the door. I pulled on it gently but discovered that it was locked. I glanced around and then reached over and flipped on the light; the only occupant in the cell was Dog.

  4

  “How long do you think?”

  Double Tough was as flapped as I’d ever seen his unflappable self. “An hour at the most.”

  I thought about it. “He’s on foot. Couldn’t have gotten very far; the question is—did he go south or east?”

  “You go one way and I’ll go the other, but the highway or surface roads? The little idiot’s so uninformed that he could be walking along the center stripe of I-25.” We were moving toward the doors now, passing the reception area where I’d found Double Tough asleep only minutes ago. “Do you want to call in more staff?”

  “No, we’ll . . .”

  The phone on Ruby’s desk rang, and the two of us looked at each other, my deputy the first to vote. “We could ignore it.”

  I sighed. “That’s not the sheriffing thing to do.” I strode back to the desk and snatched it up. “Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department.”

  The line buzzed and then became clear. “Walt?”

  “Yep?”

  More buzzing, and then the voice again. “This is Wally Johnson down here on the Lazy D-W.”

  I recognized his voice—I had heard Wally many times at the National Cattlemen’s Association, where he served as counsel. “How can I help you, Wally?”

  Buzzing. “I’m sorry, I’m on this damn cordless down at the barn. You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve got a couple horse thieves down here.”

  I waited a few seconds and then attempted to establish some priorities. “Wally, is this something we could discuss tomorrow?”

  His turn to pause. “You mean you want me to let them go?”

  I thought about the location of Wally and Donna’s ranch, just a little south of town on the secondary road. “You mean you’ve got them got them?”

  “Yes.”

  I glanced over at Double Tough and marveled at our good fortune; five more seconds and we would’ve been out the door. “Is one of them a skinny kid, blond with blue eyes?”

  “Yeah, says his name is Cord.”

  “Who is the other one?”

  There was a brief scrambling and some conversation in the background, and then the rancher came back on the line. “Old fella, says his name is Orrin Porter Rockwell, though I kinda find that hard to believe.”

  I thought of the Book of Mormon in the young man’s possession. “Orrin the Mormon.”

  “Excuse me, Walt? Darn this cordless.”

  “Nothing.” I readjusted the little cradle on Ruby’s phone against my shoulder. “You say you’ve got them there?”

  “Yeah. Bruce Eldredge is staying with us on his way back to Cody and was coming home from a friend’s house and said there were two idiots out in the north pasture running around trying to catch the horses by hand. Hell, Walt, that’s rough stock. They’re lucky one of those horses didn’t kick their brains out.”

  “Can you hold them till I get there?”

  “Sure. Donna’s got a shotgun on them right now, but the kid came up to my truck and volunteered your number; said you were probably looking for him.”

  “And the other one?”

  “He’s a pretty old, hippie-looking fellow, and he’s still winded from chasing those horses all over the damn place. . . . I thought he was going to have a heart attack.” There was some talking in the background. “What?” More talking. “Yeah, yeah, that’s probably true.”

  “Wally?”

  The rancher came back on the line, but I could hear his hand cupping the receiver to his mouth in an attempt to keep this portion of the conversation between the two of us. “The boy says that it wasn’t anything like My Friend Flicka.” His voice dropped even lower. “Walt, I’ve only been around this kid for twenty minutes, but he’s something strange on that movie; I think he’s brought it up about twelve times, and he’s carrying an old VHS tape of the film with him.”

  • • •

  When we got to the Lazy D-W, the two outlaws were sitting in the calving shed adjoining the main barn, the place where cowboys stayed on call during the time in the early spring when the cow mothers did their duty. I’d seen all kinds of calving sheds in my life, some just dirt-floor lean-to shanties with a snubbing pole in the middle to heated buildings with entertainment centers and rows of comfortable sofas on which to sit back and while away the half-sleep hours through the nights when most heifers decide to thicken the herd.

  The Lazy D-W was the latter and not the former, and through the glass panel in the breezeway door I could see our two would-be horse thieves watching My Friend Flicka in studious rapture.

  I glanced at Wally and especially at Donna, still holding the shotgun.

  There were rumors about Donna Johnson. In my experience you couldn’t swing a dead trench coat without hitting all kinds of folks who claimed to have worked for the CIA, but I’d heard the rumors about Donna, and my suspicions that she had indeed been employed by that organization were based on the fact that she never talked about it.

  Never.

  She shrugged. “It was the only place we had a VCR.”

  I studied the old man seated next to Cord on the edge of one of the leather sofas; he was smallish with silver hair hanging past his shoulders that feathered into a dark brown, and with a beard that stretched to the third button of his old-fashioned tab-collar shirt. Around his neck was a scarf with a pattern that made it look almost like a prayer shawl.

  He was the man who had waved at me on the street in Durant.

  I glanced at the screen and could see Roddy McDowall on the back of a horse racing hell-bent for leather across the green hills of a cinematic Wyoming—read Utah. Rockwell was leaning forward with his wrists resting on his knees and his gnarled hands gripping imaginary reins.

  You didn’t see hands like that much anymore. The fingers were thick, and I could see where the knuckles, especially those of the fore- and middle fingers, had been broken numerous times. There was only one type of activity that would sustain that kind of mutation; so whatever type of hippie Orrin the Mormon was, he hadn’t been a peace-loving man.

  Pushing the door open, I stepped into the room with Double Tough covering the doorway.

  Cord immediately stood and smiled at me. “Hi, Sheriff.”

  The older man ignored us completely and began imitating the movements of the horseman on the screen, exerting a body English in an attempt to keep young Roddy in the saddle.

  Cord looked up at me as I watched the Orrin character. The boy glanced back at the man and then up to me again. “He’s never seen the movie before.”

  I smiled. “You mean this movie?”

  He started to speak but then stopped. “There are others?”

  I stared at the young man’s face just to make sure he wasn’t pulling my leg. “Yep.” I glanced back at Double Tough and watched as he put a thumb and forefinger at the corners of his mouth to keep from smiling as I turned back to the
boy. “Thousands of them, probably millions.”

  He stood there, looking at me askance, and then gestured toward the television. “Like this?”

  “Well, not exactly like this, although I think there are a couple of sequels to this one. . . .”

  “What’s a sequel?”

  Behind me, Double Tough smothered a laugh.

  “Um . . . Look, we’ll talk about that later.” I gestured toward the oblivious man with my chin. “You know this fellow?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He kidnap you?”

  “I . . . I guess.”

  I rested the web of my thumb on the hammer of my Colt. “He did or he didn’t?”

  “Well, he asked me to go with him, but I told him I’d rather stay, and then he said we ought to go. So, I did.”

  That probably wasn’t going to hold up in court. “Where were you going?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  I shook my head. “Are you in the habit of following people just because they tell you to?”

  We both turned when the man who called himself Orrin Porter Rockwell made a noise in his throat as the horse on the screen leapt into a corner fence and fell, tangled and kicking. Cord’s eyes turned back to me. “Him I do.”

  “He’s a friend of yours?”

  “He’s my bodyguard.”

  I tipped my hat back on my head and stared at the young man. “You have a bodyguard?”

  He shrugged. “I guess; he looks after me.”

  “Where’s he been for the last few weeks?”

  “Looking for me.”

  I sighed and glanced past the boy to the man. “Well, I guess he found you.” I took a few steps, placing myself directly in the man’s line of sight.

  He leaned to the side and then shifted over to where he could get a better view, completely ignoring me.

  “Sir?”

  His face stayed on the screen, so I reached around behind me and punched the button, turning off the set.

  A cry escaped him again, and he was immediately on his feet with his hands between us, but it wasn’t a threatening gesture; rather, the fingers were splayed with palms up in a beseeching manner. “Sir, please . . .” Like the boy, his eyes were the amazing thing about him, but whereas the young man’s were like sapphires, his were a pale blue almost to the point of being white. Opals. “The horse is endangered.”

  I stood there looking at the irises, unable to help myself, at least until the smell got to me, forcing me to lean back a little. “He’ll be fine; at least he has been the other twenty-seven times I’ve seen it.” I turned and hit STOP, then EJECT, and pulled the tape out, returning it to the cardboard sleeve.

  Rockwell’s eyes followed my hands as if I were holding the Hope Diamond.

  “Mr. Rockwell, I presume?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Danite, Man of God, Son of Thunder?”

  He actually smiled. “Yes. Do you know me, sir?”

  “Only by reputation. I’m going to need you to come with us, Mr. Rockwell.”

  His grin faded. “Am I under arrest?”

  “Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

  “I won’t be arrested.” I started to reach toward his shoulder, but he dipped and took a half step back. “I won’t have hands laid upon me neither.”

  We stood there looking at each other, the age-old standoff between arrestor and arrestee, the moment where everybody both inside and outside the law had to commit. I smiled, pretty sure I could take him; anyway, I didn’t think I wanted to expose the boy to a wrestling match, so instead I leaned down a little and gazed into the luminescent eyes as I brought the videotape up between us. “I’ll let you watch the rest of Flicka.”

  • • •

  “Orrin Porter Rockwell.”

  Double Tough’s voice carried across the room to my ears, muffled under the blanket that covered my face. It was my turn on the wooden bench. “Find anything?”

  I smiled as he continued to punch buttons on the keyboard of Ruby’s computer like a monkey trying to find a way to fit the square pegs in round holes. “Well, yeah. . . .”

  “Still having fun?”

  I listened as he leaned back in the desk chair. “He’s a murderer.”

  “I know. According to history, about a hundred people and the attempted assassination of the governor of Missouri, for one.”

  I joined him at the computer, where there was a photo of a man who appeared to be a forty-year-old version of the one watching My Friend Flicka in the basement. Double Tough leaned back in his chair and pointed. “That’s him; he’s younger there, but that’s him.”

  “Well, that would figure.” I looked over his shoulder. “Since according to this, he’s two hundred years old.”

  The similarity was uncanny and patently impossible.

  “When I read the name in the book some warning bells went off, but not loud enough to really catch my attention; then when Cord referred to him the way he did, I started putting two and two together.” I gestured with a hand, introducing Double Tough to one of the most intriguing and mythical historical figures of the American West. “Meet Orrin Porter Rockwell, Danite, Man of God, Son of Thunder, and the strong right arm of the prophets of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons, Joseph Smith Jr., and Brigham Young.”

  “No shit.”

  “The Danites were kind of a Mormon vigilante arm that exacted what they called Blood Atonements, and he was one of the chieftains, but he was also a mountain man, a gunfighter, and even a deputy marshal at one point.” I leaned in even further and read the description. “‘He was that most terrible instrument that can be handled by fanaticism; a powerful physical nature welded to a mind of very narrow perceptions, intense convictions, and changeless tenacity. In his build he was a gladiator; in his humor a Yankee lumberman; in his memory a Bourbon; in his vengeance an Indian. A strange mixture, only to be found on the American continent.’”

  Double Tough straightened up and stretched his back. “He’s also very fond of My Friend Flicka.”

  “Yep, a true devotee.”

  “And as Lucian would say, and I would second, crazy as a waltzin’ pissant.”

  “That, too.” I yawned. “I’ll have Vic run his prints through the IAFIS and we’ll find out which bin he escaped from; then we’ll go from there.”

  “What about the kid?”

  “I don’t know. His grandmother wants him, but we’ve got to find the mother.”

  “Wouldn’t that be South Dakota’s job?”

  I folded my hands into church and steeple, burying my nose in the front door. “Strictly speaking.”

  • • •

  “No fucking way.”

  I raised my hat up and looked at my undersheriff, who, despite the landscape, appeared to be enjoying driving my truck, and then shifted around to glance at the Cheyenne Nation studying the ancient copy of the Book of Mormon in the backseat.

  “Let me guess: these sublime surroundings do not meet with your picturesque approval.”

  I’d told Henry Standing Bear that our numbers were being retired at the high school this weekend, and the rambling conversation that ensued had included the jaunt to South Dakota, and the Bear had decided to come along.

  Vic nodded. “What’s the next town in the land that time forgot?”

  I glanced around, getting a reading. “Beulah, at the state line.”

  “Does the scenery change a lot at the border?”

  “Not particularly.” I shook my head and looked at her, noticing how the two black eyes were transmuting to purple and yellow. “Haven’t you ever driven this way?”

  “Not sober.” After a moment of smiling at herself and at Henry in the rearview mirror, she spoke again. “So what’s in Beulah, other than a Shell station?”

  “Ranch A.”

  “What the hell is Ranch A?”

  I raised my hat up to block the full-on sunshine that slanted through the side window and thoug
ht about how the sleeping portion of the trip might be formally over. “A is for Annenberg.”

  She threw me a little tarnished gold over the purple and yellow. “Annenberg as in the Philadelphia Annenbergs?”

  “Yep.” I gestured to the right. “Just over those gently rolling hills is one of the most beautiful ranches in all of Wyoming—evidently the Annenbergs thought it was a nice place to stop.” I placed my hat back over my face as the Bear finished the salvo.

  “Maybe you need to get out more.”

  • • •

  The Butte County Sheriff’s Department is in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, and is right on the main drag of Route 85, but Tim Berg’s house was off that beaten path. A beautiful Craftsman facing Hanson Park, the house was made such mostly due to the ministrations of his red-headed wife, Kate. It was all forest green and oiled wood with hanging baskets and multilayered flower beds that exploded from the rich South Dakota soil like vegetative fireworks.

  As Vic parked the truck, Henry and I stepped over the painted curb, and I raised a hand to the woman in Bermuda shorts and a Sturgis tank top, who ignored me completely, wheeled a barrow around the corner of the house, and disappeared.

  I allowed my hand to drop as Vic joined us on the manicured lawn. “Somebody you don’t know?”

  I shrugged and crossed the sidewalk, climbed the stairs, and knocked on the screen door. “Open up, it’s the law.”

  From inside, a man’s voice answered. “It’s the law in here, too.”

  “Well then, let’s have a convention.”

  “I’ve got beer.”

  The sheriff of Butte County was drinking a Grain Belt Nordeast at his kitchen table and watching a Duck Dynasty marathon on A&E on a tiny black-and-white television that looked like it got the same kind of reception as the one I used to have in my cabin back home before Cady had ordered DIRECTV. “Watching a family reunion, Tim?”

  He reached out and turned off the reality show. “You know, Walt, even the women on this show have beards. Or maybe it’s the reception.” He shook hands with Henry and glanced up and saw Vic. He grinned broadly through the hair on his face, looking all the world like a happy hedgehog and not all that different from Orrin Porter Rockwell or the guys on TV. “Hey, good-lookin’!”