He had finished his meal and carefully pushed his plate back a couple of inches, his thumbs still under the table, his hair still covering his face. “There is an FBI psychologist that I’ve been seeing; her name is Pfaff. I told her about where the body is buried.” He was suddenly silent, aware that everyone had been listening to him, but then stared directly at me. “I just thought you might be curious.”
The waitress interrupted the little breakthrough and squelched my hopes of extending Shade’s confession. “Would you like some more coffee, Sheriff?”
It took me a second to come back; Shade’s dead eye was like that—it drew you into the cold.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I caught her looking at the convicts and figured it was to be expected. If they’re lucky, most people in the private sector never get to meet someone like Marcel Popp, Hector Otero, or especially Raynaud Shade, but with our little road show of recidivism, prurient curiosity was to be expected.
She poured in a distracted manner. “Do you get the check?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I looked at her. “I don’t know you, do I?”
Her eyes slid away. “No, I’m new.”
“Hi, New. I’m Walt Longmire.”
I held out my hand, and she took it as she held the coffee urn out of the way. “Beatrice, Beatrice Linwood.”
I listened to the way she rounded her vowels. “Minnesota?”
She nodded without enthusiasm and took a second to respond. “Yah, Wacouta.”
I smiled. “Well, you don’t have to be ashamed about it. What’s that near?”
“Red Wing.”
“Where they make the work boots?”
“Yah.”
I sipped my coffee in appreciation and studied her for a moment; midforties, she was too thin and a little mousy, but it was a nice smile. Something else there, though, something that reminded me of my late wife. Her hair was thin, and she looked like she might’ve undergone some form of chemotherapy recently.
“What brings you out this way this time of year?”
She shrugged and pushed her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose, and I noticed her rubbing her finger where a wedding ring might’ve once been.
“Snowmobiles.”
I should’ve figured. Most of the flatlanders got tired of doing a hundred miles an hour on the ice of the ten thousand lakes and eventually wanted to try their hand at the mountain trails. A lot of them ended up buried in the snow or running into trees. I’d tried the power sport once with the Ferg, my part-time deputy, but didn’t like the noise or the sensation that my crotch was on fire.
“Holli and Wayne treating you well?”
She glanced toward the opening where the smiling head of flamboyant chef Alfredo Coda had appeared from the kitchen, and then turned back to me. “Yah, they’ve all been great.”
“I don’t mean to break up old home week, but could I get something to fucking eat and drink?”
I tipped my fawn-colored hat back and looked at Marcel, but Saizarbitoria was faster. Holding a portion of The Divine Comedy in one hand and picking up the remainder of the prisoner’s burger in the other, he gave him the last bite. I noticed Sancho was even less gentle than I’d been, and his voice was a little irritated. “Anything to shut you up.”
I reached over to take the coffeepot from Beatrice so that she wouldn’t have to get in arm’s reach of the prisoners. “Here, I’ll take that.”
She pulled away, just slightly. “No, I’ll get it.”
I took the coffeepot anyway and tested the temperature. “That’s all right.” To a desperate man, anything was a weapon. I poured a round for the chain gang and one for the Basquo. “Can’t be too careful.”
She smiled up at me. “They don’t look all that dangerous.”
“Well.” I stood and returned the pot to her. “I’ll take that check now.”
She put it facedown alongside my empty plate.
“Shade? Let’s go.” I glanced at Sancho, making sure we made eye contact, and left him with the other two.
The convict stood and then rounded the table toward me. I glanced at Saizarbitoria one more time. He rested the paperback on the table and nodded. I took Shade’s arm, and he began a shuffling, manacled gait past the front counter, through the gift shop, and around the corner to the communal sink and the two doors that led to the bathrooms.
Shade paused. “Do you need to come in with me?”
I glanced into the small stall that said BUCKS and noted the only egress was a seven-inch vent in the ceiling. “Not unless you’re planning on turning into a field mouse and crawling up that pipe.”
“No.” He stared at me. “Not a mouse.”
“Leave the door ajar.”
He did as I asked, and as he busied himself I remembered how he had stumbled in the dining room as we’d gone past the last table where they had been rolling silverware, bumping it with his hip and pausing for only an instant.
There were small alarms going off in my head as he came out a few moments later, turned his back to me, and began washing his hands. After a few seconds he raised his head, and the eye studied me in the mirror. “I’m sorry if I seem preoccupied, but it is difficult to see you.”
Aware of his disability, I nodded as he lifted his cuffed hands with the traveling chains that led to the manacles at his feet and tore a paper towel from the dispenser. “It’s the snow.” He tossed the towel into a trash can in the corner and stepped toward me. “It’s difficult to see you because of the snow; surely I’m not the first one to tell you that?”
I stared back at him and dropped my hand to the Colt at my hip. “Snow.”
His face was impassive, and he gestured with one hand, the other along for the ride. “There is the outline of you, but inside is only snow—like an old TV.”
I watched as the one hand dragged the other over his shoulder. “You mean static?”
“Yes, but not exactly like that. It’s as if you carry the snow within you.” The pupil in the live eye stretched open while the dead one remained still. “When did this happen?”
I stood there for a long moment, studying him and trying to get a read on whether it was an act or if he was truly insane. I’d been around crazy people before, but none with the dedicated malice that this man seemed to exude. “We should get back to the others.”
He leaned in and whispered as his hands dropped and shifted to his side. “I didn’t have to go to the bathroom but wanted to speak to you alone about the snow and the voices.”
I didn’t say anything, and he stepped in closer.
“You see them and hear them, too.”
I countered and casually brought the large-frame Colt up, holding it loose at my hip. “Shade, you wouldn’t have palmed the steak knife from that table in the dining room?”
He said nothing, but the one eye slit. There was a slight twitch as his motor response was to try for it, but then he smiled with his wide, even-set teeth and brought the knife out, wrapped inside a fist.
I turned so that he could see that the Colt was cocked and the safety was off. “Give it to me.”
He held back and regarded me for a long moment, letting the words settle between us like ash. “You don’t believe that they are near, do you?”
I didn’t move, didn’t even breathe. “Give me the knife.”
His other hand folded around it in a two-fisted grip, the blade pointed directly toward me. “The Seldom Seen; they are with you, but you pretend that they aren’t.”
I still didn’t move.
“When did they first become known to you?” I could feel my breath becoming short as he continued. “They spoke to me infrequently after my first kill, but now it’s constant—they talk to me night and day, many voices as one.” He shifted his shoulders the way you would if you were preparing to move. “Many voices as one.”
I raised the Colt and pointed it at the center of his chest.
“You have also killed, and they speak with you—we have someth
ing in common, Sheriff.”
I raised the sight to his head. “The knife.”
“We are pawns to these spirits, souls they play with for their own satisfaction like hand games.” He didn’t move, and we both knew that the next threatening shift, no matter how slight, would result in his death. He continued to show me his teeth. “It will be interesting to see how they respond to your disbelief, who it is that they will send for you.”
The tension went out of his body as he lowered the knife, and he drew back. Keeping the .45 trained on his face, I reached over with my other hand and took the knife, handle out.
Handle out—I’d never seen him flip it.
I got my breath back and thought about the ghosts slamming about in the particular machine in front of me as I reholstered my sidearm and put the knife in my back pocket. “Let’s go.”
I guided him back through the gift shop, past the counter where Beatrice Linwood watched us.
Shade said nothing more as I seated him at the table, but he looked back up at me and stared as if we had shared something important. I stood there thinking about what he had said, then straightened and found my deputy studying me.
“You all right? ”
It took a second for me to respond. “Yep.” I glanced back at Shade and shot another look at Sancho, who closed his book again, gave me an almost imperceptible nod, and turned to look at the prisoners like a red-tailed hawk regarded field mice. I picked up the check and crossed the twelve steps back to the cash register, peeled off three twenties, and asked Beatrice for a receipt.
She held the money and glanced back as Holli entered behind her through the swinging door that led from the kitchen. The owner/operator paused at the register and looked past me toward the seated men. “What did they do?”
I thought about whether I really wanted to tell her, finally deciding that if she didn’t want to know, she wouldn’t have asked. “They’re murderers, all of them.” I waited a moment to see if the two women wanted me to continue, and they did. “The little guy with all the tattoos, his name is Hector Otero. He’s a credit card hustler and gangbanger from Houston. The big guy with the mouth is Marcel Popp, a methadonian who . . .”
Holli looked puzzled. “A Methodist?”
I cleared my throat. “Sorry, it’s kind of an inside joke—heroin users who use methadone clinics to get high.”
Beatrice stiffened a little. “I don’t think that’s very funny.”
I thought of telling her about the dead officers and Popp’s girlfriend, whom he’d strangled to death with an electrical cord, and how none of them had thought their situation very humorous, either.
I looked at the woman behind the counter. “Yes, ma’am.”
As I turned to go, her whisper came after me. “And that one?”
I stopped and stuffed a portion of the change into a tip jar and the receipt into my wallet without looking back at her. “Beatrice, you don’t want to know.”
2
Our combined breath billowed like steam in a rail yard as our little group made its way out the door and onto the porch of South Fork Lodge. A familiar custom Suburban had parked beside the borrowed Department of Corrections van, and a dapper-looking individual in a full-length lambskin coat with intricate Lakota beading and a 20X black hat with a sterling silver band bearing chunks of turquoise that must’ve taken wheelbarrows to get out of the mines of New Mexico looked up and grinned through his blond Vandyke. But for his height you would’ve thought it was George Armstrong Custer.
“Hey, if it ain’t the long arm of the law.” He glanced at the prisoners in their orange jumpsuits. “You fellas providing taxi service?”
Saizarbitoria held Marcel by the arm as I motioned for Hector and Raynaud to stand by the van. I unlocked it with a chirp from the remote. “Hey, Omar.”
The millionaire big-game hunter rounded the front of his SUV and leaned on the hood. “What’re you doin’ up here, Sheriff?”
I gestured toward the prisoners as they complained about the cold and climbed in. “Federal deal at the county line. What about you?”
He smiled an ingratiating smile and, straightening his collar as if he were in court, glanced up at the colorful sky. “Hoping to get snowed in. I’ve got a few commissioned pieces that I’ve got to get done, and I’m doing the work up at my cabin.”
Omar Rhoades sometimes deigned to do taxidermy for struggling concerns like the Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, and the Autry. I nodded and took my gloves from my coat pocket and pulled them on. “You’ve got a cabin up here?” I could only imagine what Omar would classify as a cabin.
He threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Up on West Tensleep, past 24, near Bear Lake.” I nodded and waited; evidently he had something on his mind. “Hey, I heard Jules Beldon got twenty-one days of community service for that thing at the Rainbow Bar over in Sheridan.”
That thing at the Rainbow Bar that Omar was referring to was an incident in which the jackleg carpenter and cowboy Jules Beldon had tried to climb through the bathroom window in an attempt to evade his tab and had kicked the sink loose, which had then flooded the area near the pool table. Judge Stu “Hang-’em-High” Healy had ordered Beldon to repair the damage and then had sentenced him to three weeks of community service.
“Yep. Why?”
“Well, he was going to do some work for me out at the ranch.”
I looked at my boots, smiled, and looked up at Omar—the condensation from his breath had begun to freeze in his mustache.
“I’m going to need somebody to do some landscaping, Walt, and with the methane stuff, nobody wants to handle a mattock and a shovel around here anymore.”
I thought about it. “You’re not going to do that till June, right?”
He stepped in a little closer. “Yeah, but I want to get somebody lined out to . . .”
“You’re not just trying to get Jules out of his community service, are you?” Omar and Jules were cowboys, and the locals had their own mafia.
“No. No, no.”
I folded my arms and waited as Saizarbitoria finished loading the prisoners and stood on the other side of the passenger door.
The millionaire smoothed his mustache and wiped his gloves on his black jeans. “All right, you got me.” He took another breath. “He’s seventy-four years old, and you know what it means if he’s doin’ his community service in May; he’ll be out there shoveling every parking lot in town with that cheap, plastic snow shovel he’s got.”
“Well, he was spry enough to try and climb out the bathroom window of the Rainbow Bar.”
“He didn’t make it.”
“It wasn’t for lack of trying.” We stood there looking at each other, and I thawed a little, knowing the big-game hunter was right. “Throw Stu a letter and mention my name—say I said it’d be all right to suspend Jules’s sentence till the end of May so that he can help you out at your place.”
He offered his hand, and I took it. “Thanks, Walt.”
“Keep him out of those bars in Sheridan; they aren’t as forgiving as we are.”
“I’ll try.”
Omar mounted the steps, and I assisted Sancho in securing the ankle manacles on Hector, Shade, and Marcel Popp to the floor of the van. The three knew the drill and leaned forward as I made sure the chains going through the iron floor loops were secure and the padlock was shut. Next I attached the handcuffs to the locks on the seat, but as I started to stand, Shade leaned forward and murmured in my ear, “Who will they send for you, Sheriff?”
I stood up the rest of the way, my hand on the sliding door as Saizarbitoria started around to the driver’s side. I inclined my head to get a clear look into the prisoner’s eye. “Raynaud, you do know that anything you say to me is admissible evidence?”
“Yes, I understand that, but do you understand me?” His lips compressed, but he spoke through them, his powerful hands firmly clasped, his neck muscles bunched. “They have spoken to me since the first one, which is how I kn
ew my mission was the only way to stop them.”
I started to slide the door closed. “Uh huh.”
His voice stopped me. “Do you think you’re a good man, Sheriff?”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, especially within context, so I just nodded and fell back on the lessons my mother had taught me. “I hope so.”
He grew still, and his eyes looked like nails driven into his face.
I stood there studying him for a second. “Don’t test me again.”
“But I will, Sheriff—I will.” He continued to regard me with the one eye, and his breath traced across a corner of his mouth like a wisp of steam escaping from a kettle.
I closed the door. Normally I drove, but the Basquo got bored riding, so I had given him the option when we’d left Durant and he’d taken it. As I got in the passenger side, I remembered I’d put Shade’s stolen blade in my pocket.
Sancho started the used van and glanced at me. “Route 422 toward Baby Wagon?”
I pulled the errant steak knife from my jeans and threw it onto the dash. “Yep.” The Basquo, more than a little curious, looked at the knife and then me. I pointed toward the road ahead. “Good thing this piece of crap is full-time two-wheel drive . . .”
Twenty miles down the road there was a gravel cutoff that led to the right and a slight upgrade. There were two black Chevy Suburbans with government plates, what looked to be about a half-dozen Feds, a heavily armored Ameri-Trans van with two men seated inside, one uniformed man on the outside, a Big Horn County Sheriff’s Department truck, and another from Washakie County—it was a regular cop convention. Sancho wheeled the van in among the parked vehicles next to the large cluster of men.
Before I could get my seat belt off, Joseph Iron Cloud, the Arapaho sheriff of Washakie County, banged on my door. “Hey, hey, we got too many cops out here; you got any bad guys in there?”
Joe was newly elected in the county west of us. A handsome veteran from the first Gulf War, he had model good looks only slightly reduced by a scar that ran from the corner of his mouth to his hairline. He was about Saizarbitoria’s age and cut quite a swath at the Wyoming Sheriff’s Association meetings.
Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty Page 2