A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery

by Craig Johnson

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I’m betting it was that character Tom Lockhart, wasn’t it?”

  He still didn’t say anything.

  “I bet he also filled your head up with a bunch of hooey about him being some kind of big wheel with the CIA, didn’t he?”

  You could see the doubt beginning to chip away at the others, but Eddy was still standing tall before the man and wasn’t giving ground. “He says you’re dirty.”

  “What?”

  “He says you’re planning on getting rid of us, that this is Armageddon.” He motioned with the barrel. “I’m not kidding, Sheriff. If you try to get past us, I’ll kill you.”

  I shook my head. “All right. First off, I’m here to tell you that Tom Lockhart is not CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, FEMA, NASA, the Absaroka County Dog Catcher, or any of the other things he’s been telling you. He’s just a loudmouth with a checkered past—pretty much a never-was. Now I don’t know if he got you guys to go after my deputy Double Tough and get the drill bit out of the Suburban. I don’t know if you guys are the ones who set fire to the sheriff’s substation as a diversion or what, but the important thing for you to know is that my deputy is still alive. I’d like to think that you didn’t mean to hurt him or that you didn’t even know that he was asleep in the back room.”

  The kid poked the shotgun at us with a little more enthusiasm. “Shut up.”

  “The point being that you haven’t done anything that you’re going to have to spend the rest of your life in an eight-by-eight cell paying for—unlike your buddy Tom Lockhart and his friends in there.”

  Eddy’s face was red as he screamed down at me. “Shut up!”

  “He gave you the guns and told you that was just the beginning, didn’t he? Said he’d cut you guys in on the deal? Well, I’ve got news for you—he’s just a money-grubbing lowlife who’s tricking all of you into doing his fighting for him.”

  Eddy jacked the breech of the tactical shotgun.

  Both Henry and I watched the spent unfired shell bounce off the sheet metal of the cab and land at our feet. The Bear looked at me, neither of us all that concerned with Eddy Lynear.

  At that point I heard a roar from behind us and figured Vic must’ve accidentally stepped on the accelerator in trying to get out of the truck, but I should’ve known better. The engine racing had been a warning, kind of like when a bull snorts, paws the ground, and bellows. When Henry and I turned to look at her, she had already reached up and pulled the selector in my truck down into gear.

  More readily able to tell the difference between a potential and absolute threat than I ever could, the Cheyenne Nation pushed me to the side with all his considerable strength and then leapt backward as the three-quarter-ton charged forward into the giant gate. The Bullet slapped the gate backward and in turn broadsided the truck on the other side.

  The young men, not unaccustomed to vehicular assault, leapt from their vehicle, leaving Eddy as the only occupant. Vic pushed the aged Chevrolet down the road sideways, Eddy dropped the shotgun in an attempt to stay on the top the truck, and Henry and I stood at the center of the road as Vic continued to push the entire mess like an icebreaker.

  “When do you think she will stop?”

  “When she finds a cliff to push him off of.” I stooped and picked up the shotgun, noticing that it, too, was a Wilson. “Fancy. They must have a dealership.”

  Vic finally took her foot off the accelerator as she deposited the Chevy into the roadside ditch like some botched Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float.

  One of the kids loped next to me, the others fell in, and pretty soon we looked like some lost platoon in search of transport. I reached down and took an elongated weapon from him. “You mind if I take a look at that, Edgar?”

  He smiled. “Nope. I don’t even know where the safety is, and it weighs a ton.”

  “It doesn’t have a safety.”

  “Oh.” He cantered along. “It was the last one, and nobody wanted it—I mean, it’s a bolt action.”

  “Uh-huh.” I held the exotic weapon up and looked at the barrel as we neared the two-truck pileup. “Fifty-cal BMG.”

  He looked puzzled as we arrived at the Bullet, where the window was still rolled down. “What’s a BMG?”

  Vic threw open the door, climbed out of my damaged vehicle, glanced at us momentarily as she slammed the door with more than a note of finality, and straightened her ball cap. “Big Motherfucking Gun.”

  I clarified for the kid. “Browning Machine Gun.”

  Lynear looked at the weapon with renewed respect. “It’s a machine gun?”

  I studied the body of the thing, dark and dangerous. “It’s an antimaterial sniper rifle.”

  “Sniper, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s antimaterial mean?”

  The Cheyenne Nation offered as he came around the other side of the Chevy, “It shoots through walls.”

  “Wow.”

  Eddy Lynear was trying to climb out of the bed of the C-10 where he’d been deposited when the vehicle ditched, and Henry lowered the tailgate to make it easier on him as I surveyed the damage to the Bullet, now steaming and draining vehicular fluids onto the roadway.

  Eddy was holding his head, where a substantial cut was bleeding through his fingers. “You wrecked my truck again.”

  I surveyed the damage to the trucks and to Lynear. “Doesn’t look like it did mine any good either.” I patted the tailgate and had him sit, laying the shotgun and the big .50 in the bed to keep company with the cases and extra ammunition that Lockhart must’ve left.

  Vic was in the process of taking the weapons away from the rest of them as Henry appeared at my side with a confiscated ArmaLite and the first-aid kit from the Bullet.

  I attempted to peel Eddy’s hand away as the other teenagers gathered round, incapable of ignoring gore. “Let me see.”

  Vic was depositing the rest of the automatic weapons in the bed of the Bullet and Eddy, being a male, was drawn to her. His next statement probably had to do more with the braggadocio of having his posse nearby than good sense. “I’d rather she did it.”

  “Oh, you don’t want that.” I sopped up some of the blood and laid the skin flap back over his forehead. “She’s more likely to use it as an excuse to put you out of your misery.”

  “Or ours.” My undersheriff studied my handiwork as I patched the young man up. “You’re going to have a great scar.”

  I sealed the wound with some gauze and tape. “So, you guys were the ones that set fire to the substation?”

  He said nothing until Vic reached up and slapped him in the back of the head. “Hey, that hurts.”

  “Talk, you little shit.”

  He sighed. “We overheard them and thought if we got the bit back that Lockhart would let us in on the deal. We didn’t know anyone was in there. Honest.”

  “What deal?”

  He shrugged, and the sullen look returned to his face as he glanced around at his friends. “We don’t know.”

  “Eddy, playtime is over.” I leaned on the side of the Chevy next to the Cheyenne Nation. “And I need some information.”

  He glanced at his buddies again. “We’re not telling you anything.”

  “Well, then I’m going to arrest you.”

  Edgar Lynear was the first to ask from the other side of the truck bed, “We’re not already arrested?”

  “Not yet, but if I do it goes on your permanent record.”

  “What’s a permanent record?”

  I turned and looked at Henry. “Doesn’t seem to carry the weight it used to.”

  He sighed. “No, it does not.”

  I glanced back to the wounded young man. “How old are you, Eddy?”

  “Seventeen.”

  Vic breathed a response. “Jesus . . .”

  Eddy considered her. “You know, you shouldn’t blaspheme like that.”

  “Kiss my ass, Opie.”

  The others laughed as I wave
d a hand in front of his face to get his attention back on me. “I need some answers or people are going to get hurt.”

  He gestured toward his wound with a bloody hand. “I’m already hurt.”

  Vic reached up and smacked the side of his head. “Not near enough.”

  “Oww . . .”

  “I mean really hurt.” I straightened and looked to the left. “I know the main ranch headquarters is up this road, but that’s not where Lockhart and his men are working, is it?”

  He remained silent until Vic slapped him again. “Oww . . .”

  I looked at her, and she shrugged. “I’m Italian, and I have brothers; I know how this works.”

  “Is it the road to the right up here?”

  Vic raised her hand again, and the kid winced. “Yeah, to the right. I don’t know what’s there; they never let us go out that way.”

  I nodded, looked at the two-track that departed from the main road a good quarter of a mile farther, and then redirected my attention to the weapons I had confiscated. I reached in and plucked out one of the plastic cases, opened it, and looked at the rounds inside, each one as long as a cigar.

  Edgar was next to me again. “What do the blue tips mean?”

  I pulled one out and studied the deceptive pastel point at the business end of the .50 round. “Incendiary.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  The Cheyenne Nation’s voice intoned beside me. “It blows things up.”

  • • •

  “You think locking up their shoes with the guns will keep them there?”

  “I can hope. Anyway, I didn’t figure you wanted to volunteer for babysitting duty.” We’d triangulated a route that would have us traipsing through the sagebrush and over uneven ground but would intercept the road by angling to the right.

  “Are there snakes out here?”

  “It’s Wyoming; there are snakes everywhere. If you see one, shoot it with your ray gun.” Vic had taken a spacey-looking desert tan FN carbine and was aiming it at the horizon. “And if you don’t watch where you’re going, you’re going to step on one.”

  She turned back to look at me. “You’re just jealous because mine weighs less than an anvil. Why did you decide to pack that thing, anyway?”

  Loaded with the McMillan TAC-50 and thirty rounds of ammunition I’d dumped in a canvas satchel, I was bringing up the rear. “If these guys are as well armed as I think they are, I’d just as soon do my fighting from a couple of football fields away.”

  Henry glanced back from point, my shotgun hanging from his shoulder and the ArmaLite A4 carbine with two thirty-round magazines in his hand. “More like a couple of miles.”

  I called out to him, “If they’d had a flintlock rifle, would you have taken it?”

  He walked on. “I like this weapon; it and I have spent a great deal of quality time together.”

  “Quality of life?”

  “For me; perhaps not for others.”

  There was a chill, but maybe it was the cool of the late night.

  I thought about the idiocy of what I was doing, pitting the three of us against who knew how many. The proper thing to do would’ve been to call in the Highway Patrol and as many fellow sheriffs and deputies as I could draw on short notice from the surrounding counties, but here I was lugging Ma Deuce across the high plains in a remake of They Came to Cordura.

  Short notice was still too long, and these characters were too powerful to let slip away; after Double Tough, I thought I couldn’t allow it, but after Frymire, I knew I couldn’t.

  It was possible that Lockhart and the others had already vacated to sunnier pastures, but I figured they were concerned with removing anything that might incriminate them. If I opened the conflict to a wider arena, the more opportunities there would be that they might slip through. Maybe I just wanted to mess things up for them myself—get my licks in before anybody else showed up.

  I figured that Gloss, the others, the lawyers, and possibly the National Guard couldn’t be too far behind, but I wanted to make sure that none of the nastier players got away and certainly not scot-free.

  I stumbled over a berm of loose dirt and noticed that we’d gotten to the road.

  Henry was crouched down, running his hands over the hard-packed earth. “Heavy equipment and a lot of it.”

  I nodded and sat the butt end of the TAC-50 on the road and sloughed off the satchel full of brass. “I wish we had a truck.”

  “People in hell want ice water.” Vic propped the FN on her hip and glanced around. “I wish we had air support.”

  The Cheyenne Nation continued to look down the dirt road, where it rounded off at the flats and disappeared into a small valley. His face pivoted to the mountains and the morning star, likely thinking the same thing I was, that out here on the flat was a bad place to be without food, water, or much of anything else besides guns. He gestured toward the big rifle I carried, and, more important, the Nightforce NXS 8-32×56 Mil-Dot telescopic sight.

  “Something?”

  He nodded and pointed down the dusty road, stretching like the hypotenuse of an extended triangle that disappeared at the vanishing point.

  I brought the burley rifle up and adjusted the optics till a man vaulted into clear view, a lean bundle of muscle with dark hair who sat in a lawn chair with an umbrella and a cooler behind a Jeep Rubicon, an autoloader rifle lying across his lap.

  Lowering the .50, I handed it to Henry and watched as he scoped the individual almost a mile away.

  “How the hell did you see him?”

  He sighed and handed the weapon back to me. “Cheyenne radar.”

  Then he lifted the binoculars that I hadn’t seen hanging at his chest and handed them to Vic. “And these.”

  “Advance guard.”

  “Yes.”

  I glanced around at the infinite space, at the sagebrush and the moon shadows of the few large rocks studding the landscape. “Too long to go around him; any ideas?”

  The Bear nodded. “Yes. Shoot him.”

  “He might just be some roughneck they’ve got working for them.”

  “All the more reason.”

  I looked down at the howitzer in my hands. “Too much noise.”

  Vic handed me the FN before taking off her duty belt and uniform shirt. Underneath she was wearing a white wife-beater T-shirt which highlighted portions of her anatomy. She ripped the front to show a little more cleavage and, adjusting her attributes, she flipped me her cap. She shook her head, and her exquisite face was haloed with her hair—presto, instant print model.

  She tucked the Glock in the back of her jeans and started off with a swagger. “Watch and learn, fuckers.”

  I had every intention.

  A few yards down the road, she latched a hand onto her hip and turned to look back at us, en vogue. “Not that I’m a sore loser, but if he should happen to shoot me, take his head off.”

  We watched as she continued walking down the middle of the road in a heart-jarring strut.

  I looked at Henry, now standing beside me. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “You do not have the legs for it.”

  We moved in a little closer and then set the TAC-50 up on a flat rock the size of a toppled refrigerator; I pulled the bolt action, replaced the incendiary round with a regular one, and handed the blue-tip to the Cheyenne Nation. “Don’t lose that; I’ve only got twelve of them.”

  He raised an eyebrow and dropped the .50 in his shirt pocket.

  I brought the bolt forward and set the round, lowered my face to the scope as he sat on the edge of the rust-colored, lichen-covered rock, and raised the night-vision binoculars. “Twenty bucks says she takes him without a shot.”

  He snorted. “No bet.”

  Through the crosshairs I watched as the makeshift sentry stood at her approach, still holding the FN, not unlike Vic’s except this one was olive drab. I also noticed he had an autoloader with silencer stuffed in a holster. “Six hundred and thirty yards?”
/>
  “Six twenty-five.”

  I adjusted the scope and watched the winds blowing dust across the roadway in different directions at different distances.

  “Strong latitudinal wind at about four hundred yards.”

  “I can see that.”

  Vic held her hands up in mock surrender as the man cradled the Spec-Ops rifle in his hands. She stopped at a respectful distance, and I could even see her jaw muscles through the scope as she spoke. He said something back, and she cocked a leg in a provocative manner, her hands going to her hips. He smiled broadly, pushing his ball cap up onto his head, turned, and balanced the rifle on the top of the spare of the Jeep. Cracking open the cooler, he fished out a bottle of water for her. The smile was even broader when he turned but quickly faded when confronted with the 9mm in his face.

  • • •

  “Does it work every time?”

  She tucked her uniform shirt back into her jeans. “Not with homosexuals.”

  I had unbolted the spare from the Wrangler and had handcuffed the dark-haired guy to it and to the chair. He still watched Vic with considerable interest. “Please tell me she’s really a deputy.”

  I looked back at the Botticelli-Venus-with-a-Badge, now buckling her duty belt, reholstering the Glock, and stuffing his pistol with the silencer in her own jeans. “She is.”

  “I was just sitting here thinking that this job wasn’t bad, and the only thing I needed was . . .”

  I looked at the Minnesota plates on the Jeep. “Who are you?”

  “Name’s Chet Carlson.” He started to extend his hand for a shake and then remembered his situation. “Had a buddy get hold of me; said there was a welding job in Wyoming. When I got here, they had enough welders, so I took this.”

  “Did you know it was illegal?”

  “No.” He thought about it. “Does it matter?”

  “Probably not.” I looked down the road less traveled. “Did they tell you to kill anybody that came in?”

  He shrugged. “They said stop anybody, and they weren’t real particular about how I was supposed to do it.” He glanced at Henry Standing Bear, holding the TAC-50. “I think I’m glad it didn’t come to that; I don’t think that .223 or .40 of mine would hold up against that antiaircraft weapon.”