Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty

by Craig Johnson

  “I’d like to report a storm in Maybruary.”

  She practically screamed. “Where are you!?”

  “Nestled in the heart of the Bighorn Mountains.”

  Ruby calmed a little but was adamant. “Where exactly?”

  “Deer Haven Lodge at the cutoff to West Tensleep Lake.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

  “Have you found them?”

  “One down, four to go.” I held the phone out. “Say hello, Hector.”

  He lurched forward, the handcuffs rattling against the pipe. “Hey, this guy’s crazy, and there’s a fucking tiger up here!”

  I returned the phone to my ear and lodged it against my shoulder as I buckled up the main cavity of the pack. “Hector’s a little excitable, but he’ll be at the main lodge when they get here. Speaking of which, where’s my backup?”

  “They’re on their way from both sides of the mountain. Joe Iron Cloud, Tommy Wayman, and about a division of Highway Patrol and search and rescue are on their way from the west, but the switchbacks in Tensleep Canyon are filled with drifts. Henry and Vic with an even larger contingency are on their way up from our side, but I haven’t heard anything from them in over an hour. I’d imagine they’re encountering the same conditions.”

  “Maybe worse. Hey, you didn’t say over.”

  She sighed, but I could still tell my dispatcher was slightly amused. “It’s a phone, Walter. You don’t use radio procedures on a phone.”

  “Ruby, the remaining convicts stole a snowcat from the lodge here and are headed up West Tensleep Road; give a call to everybody and let them know what’s going on.”

  “They went up the trailhead road?”

  “Yep. Maybe they think it comes out somewhere. Boy, are they going to be surprised when all they find is a parking lot and some Porta Potties.” I shifted the receiver to my other ear as Hector watched. “Sancho loaned me his cell, but there’s no service.” I read her the number in case she didn’t have it handy. “He says that if I get one of the Fed satellite phones, it should work; I would imagine they’re sequential, so just add a digit to the end of the one he called you on, and you’ll probably have the number. Read me his, and I’ll put it in Sancho’s mobile.” I leaned against the wall and shared a look with Otero as I repeated the number she read to me. “Sancho’s still back at Meadowlark with McGroder; the convicts took Pfaff and one of the Ameri-Trans personnel. All the rest of the federal agents and marshals are dead.”

  There was a long pause as I waited for the lecture that was coming. “Walter, if they’ve gone north on that road, there’s no way for them to escape. You should wait until someone gets there.”

  I thought about the private cabins up here and the hostages. “I think it’s better to keep close to them and know where they are.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yep, well . . . Manpower seems to be pretty much at a shortage up here.”

  There was an even longer pause. “Do you have your radio with you?”

  It would only be helpful if there was line of sight, and if they got within thirty miles of me, sans weather conditions, but I figured I’d keep that little nugget of information to myself. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It’ll only be good if they get within thirty miles, but it makes me feel better knowing that you’ve got it.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I’ll give the cell and the potential satellite number to everyone.”

  I listened to her breathing on the other end. “I gotta head out . . .”

  “You do realize it’s two o’clock in the morning?”

  “That’s okay—it’s a weekend, and I’m becoming something of a night owl.”

  Ruby, aware of the Northern Cheyenne belief that owls were messengers from the great beyond, didn’t take mention of them lightly. “Don’t talk about owls.”

  “What, you’re starting to believe the heathen-red-man’s sorcery?”

  “Let’s just say I’m playing it safe.”

  “Good night, Ruby.” I hung up the pay phone and then palmed open Saizarbitoria’s cell to check again—still nothing. I looked at the screen saver of Sancho’s wife Marie holding their son Antonio. I sighed, turned it off, and slipped the device into the Ziploc. Then I tried to put it into the outside compartment of the Basquo’s pack, but it wouldn’t fit. I unzipped the compartment, pulled out a paperback, and turned it over.

  The cover art was a detail, The Damned of the Last Judgement , from the fourteenth-century cupola mosaic in the Baptistery in Florence. A very large blue devil appeared to be munching on the unfortunate next to a sticker that proclaimed a “New Translation” by Robin Kirkpatrick. I peeled through the pages, Italian on the left, English translation on the right.

  That Basquo.

  The first page caught my eye:

  At one point midway on our path in life,

  I came around and found myself now searching

  through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost.

  Boy howdy. I walked over and stood there looking out the windows for a second, then closed the Penguin Classic and popped it back in the pack. I picked up the Sig semiautomatic from the table, palming the clip and thumbing the remaining rounds into my pocket—body and soul, crime and punishment, law and order.

  “How ’bout you give me that gun.”

  I’d all but forgotten about him. I turned and gave my attention to Hector as I buttoned my sheepskin coat and slapped the mag back in the grip. “I’m not sure how they do things down Texas way, but we try to keep guns out of the hands of convicted killers up here in Wyoming.”

  I came back over, sat in one of the chairs, and tossed the Sig onto the counter between us. He immediately snatched it up and pointed it at me.

  “Besides, it’s empty.”

  He pulled the action and then dropped the clip just to make sure. He tossed it back onto the counter. “What if that tiger comes back?”

  I rubbed my face with my hands. “Hector, I don’t think a mountain lion is going to be bold enough to break down the door to get in here even if she feels like a little Mexican.”

  “Fuck you.” He looked past me toward the fireplace. “Hey, give me that stick from over there, huh?”

  I glanced behind me, and sure enough there was a walking staff with a leather loop on one end and tacked on the shaft a number of tiny, metal plates commending the places the stick and its owner had gone. I walked over and took it from the freestanding coat rack, behind which were hung an old pair of strung-gut willow snowshoes. There was also the outline of something that must have been hanging next to them, like a rug, maybe, or a skin of some sort.

  “There was a buffalo thing or something hanging up there. Shade took it with him.”

  Now, why would he do that? I looked at the bear-paw-pattern snowshoes again: waste not, want not. I pulled them off the wall and stuffed them under my arm, walked back, and handed the stick to Hector. “There you go.”

  He slapped the thicker end of the five-foot staff against the flattened palm of his cuffed hand to test the weight and seemed satisfied. “Cool.” His eyes came back up to the antique snowshoes under my arm. “Are you really going after them in this friggin’ blizzard?”

  “Yep.”

  He paused but then blurted out. “You should wait for some help. I’m jus’ sayin’.”

  I pulled the brim of my hat down to set it against the wind and started examining the buckles and leather straps on the snowshoes. “That seems to be the consensus.”

  His voice became flat. “No, really. I seen some guys in my life, Sheriff, but that Shade—he’s crazy bad.”

  I nodded and sat in the chair in an attempt to get the straps over my boots. As I rested my chest against one of my knees, I thought about just staying there like that and maybe taking a nap. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t in any shape to head out into a blizzard in the middle of the night after a bunch of homicidal maniacs. Th
en the other voice in my head got me to thinking that they wouldn’t make it very far, probably would choose to hole up in one of the cabins farther up the road or possibly at the Tyrell Ranger Station. I’d try not to be as conspicuous as I had been. I’d just keep an eye on them till the troops arrived, just keep an eye on them—at least that’s what I was telling myself.

  I got up, smiling at his concern. “Thanks, Hector.”

  Just for laughs, I hit the remote on the Suburban—the horn tooted and the lights flashed from under the collapsed porch. The left rear tire was flat, and the quarter panel had been pushed up into the wheel well. I could probably get it going if I had the Jaws of Life, parts, and a day to work on it.

  I loped along on the surface of the snow against the blowing wind. It was a little tough, but I got the front of the snowshoe in the open back doorway of the DOC van and pulled myself up, glancing more than once at the alcove on the adjacent cabin where the cougar had appeared.

  Nothing, just more snow.

  I scrambled my hand around on the top of the Dodge till I found my 1911 and pulled it toward me, banging the collected snow off and returning it to my holster as I hung on to the back drip rail. My eyes clung to the mountain lion print closest to me, and I was reminded of just how big she was.

  I was glad now that I’d moved one of the benches from the porch in front of the door of the lodge.

  The sound of my snowshoes landing was muffled by the snow, and I turned toward Tensleep Road but froze. The big cat hadn’t gone far and stood in plain view underneath the lone light on the power pole, her eight-foot-long body pale in the halo of the falling snow. She looked at me from over her shoulder, and I was beginning to think that this was extremely odd behavior.

  It was possible that she was just angry with Hector and me for driving her from her temporary lair, but it didn’t seem that way. It was almost as if she was saddened and, even with the reception I’d given her, unhappy to leave.

  It was probably warmer in the little corner of the roof she’d found.

  Pulling the .45 from my holster, I waved it at her, but she just stood there looking at me.

  A gust of snow blew from the collapsed roof, striking my face like sand and, ducking slightly away, I closed my eyes.

  When I reopened them she was gone, and the flakes continued to float down in the circle of light like the spotlight on an empty stage, and it was as if she hadn’t been there at all.

  6

  They’d blown through the piled-up berm at the bridge. The dual tracks of the Thiokol Spryte were almost three feet wide leading up West Tensleep Road, but it was easier to just walk between the tread marks in my borrowed snowshoes.

  That wasn’t why I was standing there, unmoving.

  After they’d busted through, they had stopped. You could see where the snowcat had steered slightly to the right. I pulled my Maglite from my duty belt and shined it on the tracks, hoping I’d see an oil or fuel leak. There were a few drops, but nothing that was going to slow the behemoth. My eyes were drawn to something leading to the snowbank, what looked like a different kind of leak—possibly antifreeze.

  I stood there looking at what was illuminated by my flashlight, which, like the light in the parking lot, provided a center stage spot for a curtain call or maybe a prologue.

  Pissed in the snowbank was a single word.

  ABANDON.

  Raynaud Shade had pretty good handwriting, considering the instrument.

  ABANDON.

  He’d seen the Basquo reading the Inferno. He’d left the message for me and evidently hadn’t had the bladder capacity to finish the stanza: “. . . hope all ye who enter here”—the warning above the gates of hell in Dante’s opus.

  Maybe he’d seen a similarity between our situation and that of the Italian poet. The wind pressed at my back and the flakes swirled around, but the impromptu calling card stayed there as if he’d written it in molten lead.

  It was about a mile up to the Battle Park cutoff, where I assumed they’d turn west and try for the Hyattville Road that led toward the tiny town and eventually to Manderson, which was situated alongside the Big Horn River. Then what—north to Basin or south to Worland? Try as I might, I couldn’t see what they were gaining by going off-road. They, and by they I meant Shade, had to know that there would be an entire law enforcement army waiting for them when they got off the mountain in either direction.

  There were no roads that connected the north side of the Bighorns with the south side, and the only substantial trail that led east was over Florence Pass near Bomber Mountain and Cloud Peak toward the Hunter Corrals. Florence Pass was more than eleven thousand feet, and if they tried that they were likely to solve society’s problems on their own, which was fine for the convicts but not for the two hostages.

  A lot of people made the mistake of heading up West Tensleep in the hopes that it led somewhere besides Cloud Peak, a 13,167-foot glaciated monolith, seventh largest in Wyoming, with a vertical mass of one minor and three major cirques that supported its own weather pattern. The Crow, Cheyenne, and Lakota venerated Cloud Peak as a place to bestow gifts of redemption and to retrieve Eewakee, or the mud-that-heals. In 1887, U.S. Engineer W. S. Stanton, the white mountaineer who claimed to have conquered the mountain’s west slope first, discovered medicine bundles and a bivouac that the Indians had left behind.

  So much for being first.

  ABANDON.

  The message pissed in the snow kept invading my thoughts as I trudged on, my snowshoes keeping me on the surface of the snow, the history of Wyoming alpinism unable to wipe the urinated message from my mind.

  The trees on either side of the road had sheltered the way so far and I appreciated the protection, but the weight of the snow was already taking its toll, and I could hear heavy branches cracking and falling like severed limbs.

  There was a consistent wind, and I ducked my hat against the gusts as the snow continued to dart down at a thirty-degree angle—at least it wasn’t adhering itself to me like it had in the open spaces back at Deer Haven—but I could tell that the temperature was dropping.

  I figured there wasn’t much need to be concerned about being ambushed, just the steady slog of working my way higher into the range and staying between the wide tracks of the surplus snowcat. If I fell into one of the troughs, I knew I was off course.

  The collar of my sheepskin coat had attached itself to the left side of my face, and the narrow V-shaped aperture that I looked through allowed me only a limited view of the road ahead, so I was more than a little surprised when suddenly there was the glare of a lot of lights and the thrum of internal combustion from a fast-moving, highly lifted 4×4.

  I bounced off the Jeep’s grill and threw myself to the right—the vehicle had slowed and missed rolling over my legs by about a foot as it slid to a stop. I lay there for a moment and then started getting up. The snowshoes were cumbersome, and it took me a while to stand and make my way to the lee side of the Jeep, which was shaking from some kind of thunderous music being played on its stereo. I paused for a second and remembered another time on the mountain when I’d been assaulted by a different kind of music—drums, specifically.

  I waited patiently as the driver rolled down the window about four inches and looked out at me. His voice was agitated. “What the hell are you doing walking in the middle of the damn road?!”

  I breathed a laugh and had a coughing fit from the cold of the high-altitude air. “What the hell are you doing speeding down a mountain in this weather?”

  He was middle-aged, a little chubby, and in his early fifties, with black hair and a black goatee, a Hollywood smile, and a black down jacket with a black Greek fisherman’s hat. On closer inspection, even the Jeep was black, black being the new black. I glanced at the Wrangler—it probably had about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of modifications, and from the decibel level, they were mostly in the stereo.

  “You mind turning your music down?” I hung an arm over his side mirror and
took a few breaths as he did as I requested. He seemed a little worried, and I guess I would’ve been too if I’d found somebody traipsing up West Tensleep Road in the middle of a high-altitude blizzard. “I’m Sheriff . . .” I cleared my throat.

  He rolled the window down a little farther. “What?”

  “Sheriff . . . I’m Sheriff Walt Longmire.”

  “Oh.” He seemed uncertain as to what to do with that information. “Are you okay?”

  “Yep. You haven’t seen a Thiokol Spryte go by here, have you?”

  He looked at me, blank like a freshly wiped chalkboard. “A what?”

  I pointed toward the tracks in which he was driving. “Big snowcat; square like a very large lunchbox.”

  He shook his head. “Nope, we pulled onto the main road from our cabin and started driving out. Haven’t seen anything except you.”

  I shifted the knapsack farther up on my shoulder, crouched against the Jeep for cover, and could see a blonde-haired woman in the passenger seat. “How far up is your cabin?”

  He paused and glanced at the woman before resting his eyes on me again. “Look, Sheriff—if you are a sheriff—I don’t want any trouble . . .”

  I fumbled with the opening of my coat and tried to unbutton the top button so that I could show him my badge, but my gloves made it slow going. I finally got my jacket open enough so that he could see it. “There.”

  He stretched out the next words. “All right.”

  “I need your help.”

  He really looked worried now. “To do what?”

  “Give me a ride back up this road.”

  He looked around, as if to emphasize the point. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He sighed and placed the palms of his gloves on the steering wheel. “Sheriff, we’ve been listening to the radio and they say that they’re . . . that you guys are going to close the roads.”

  “They’re already closed, in both directions on 16. Once you get out of here you’re only going to get as far as Tensleep Canyon to the west and Meadowlark Lodge to the east. If you’ve got food, supplies, and heat, I’d advise you to go back to your cabin till the WYDOT guys can break through.”