“My dishwasher quit again, and I’m tired from working the Basque Festival.”
“How about a couple of egg sandwiches?”
“No.”
“The usual?”
“No, Walt. I’m pooped.” She shut the door in my face.
“Jeez.” I turned to Vic. “Dash Inn?”
“Looks like.” She turned and started down the sidewalk. “I’m parked on Main.”
I caught up with her, and a scorching U-turn and five minutes later we were waiting at the drive-through window at the locally owned fast food restaurant. “Are you going to tell me about the running of the sheep?”
“No.”
“Well, who were you drinking with?”
“Why? You jealous?” I didn’t rise to the bait, so she answered. “Sancho, Marie, and the Critter.” The Critter was the name Vic had given to Antonio, their son.
“I thought Saizarbitoria was in Rawlins.”
“They left that lovely town Saturday morning; he said he might take a day or two off.” She shrugged. “They’re the only Basquos I know, and the Critter is getting kind of cute.”
“I didn’t know little kids drink Patxaran.”
“He should have; it would’ve kept me from drinking all of it.”
The radio on the transmission hump of Vic’s twelve-year-old unit sputtered and coughed Ruby’s voice, and we both looked at it.
Static. “I’ve got Sheriff Berg on the landline; do you want me to patch him through?”
I unclipped the mic from the dash and hit the button as Tim’s voice sounded through the tinny speakers. Static. “What do you want, redneck?”
I keyed the mic. “Hippie.”
He continued unabated. Static. “You got the hot little deputy with you?”
I held the mic out to Vic. “You still got that psychedelic VW bus with the tinted windows you park outside the schools?”
The voice continued. Static. “Only for you, darlin’.”
I returned the mic to my own mouth, which was generally a little cleaner. “Hey, Tim, have you got a group in the county called the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God?”
Static. “Amen, heaven help me.”
“What’s the story?”
Static. “Oh, they owed about quarter million in property taxes that they suddenly made current here about a month ago. They’re putting together a little compound, trying to start a dairy up in the northwest corner of the county and the state. Why?”
“I’ve got a boy down here; might be one of their castoffs.”
Static. “Blond-haired, blue-eyed, slight, and fidgety—about driving age?”
“Yes, he says his name is Cord.”
Static. “The mother was in here about three weeks ago asking for him.”
“Well, I’ve got him.”
Static. “Hold on to him till I can get hold of her—she’s up in that part of the county that’s kind of hard to get to.”
Vic interrupted as she took our bag of sandwiches through the drive-through window. “Hey, Tim?”
Static. “Yeah?”
She set the bag on the center console and continued. “I heard you got the guy that did that motel arson last week.”
Static. “What?”
She started up the engine and pulled the unit down into drive. “I heard you got DNA on the perp and broke open the case.”
Static. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, that’s right, genetic evidence isn’t permissible in South Dakota—everybody’s got the same DNA.”
I reattached the mic as his laughter rang through the speakers. Vic turned to look at me. “There, mystery solved.”
“I guess.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not sure. Anyway, what are we supposed to do with him in the meantime?” I watched the morning traffic, what there was of it, drifting by as a man with very long hair and an extravagant beard stood on the corner and raised his hand to us.
Vic’s eyes followed mine as I tipped my hat at the man with the rucksack on his back. “Another friend of yours?”
I slumped in my seat as we rolled past the individual who continued to hold his palm out to us. “Nope, but it’s coming up on fall and time for all the hitchers to disappear south.”
• • •
When we pulled into the parking lot, Dorothy’s familiar Subaru was parked in the spot closest to the door, and, when we got inside, there was a large cardboard box full of pastries from Baroja’s, the Basque shop, on the dispatcher’s desk. The repentant café owner was sipping coffee with the dispatcher herself.
Dorothy turned and looked at me. “I started feeling bad about turning you away, so I went over to Lana’s and got some treats.” She pointed at the paper bags we carried from one of her competitors. “My being closed doesn’t appear to have slowed you down.”
I rested the bags on the counter and nudged Dog out of the place where he had put himself in case anybody got careless with the pastries. “A man’s got to eat, and I hope you got something more than donuts ’cause you know I don’t like them.”
“You don’t like donuts?” Cord was sitting next to Nancy, a maple cruller in his hand.
I shrugged. “I know it’s against type. . . .”
“I don’t understand.”
My undersheriff gestured to the office at large in an exasperated fashion. “Cops, donuts . . .”
He looked at her questioningly and then back to me. “Is it because you’re big?”
Vic snickered, and there was a long silence. Dorothy, in an attempt to deflect, spoke up. “Walt, if you don’t have any objections, I’ve offered the boy a job.”
I turned and looked at her. “What?”
She nodded. “Washing dishes.”
The incredulity wrote itself on my face. “Dorothy, could I speak with you and Nancy in my office?” I took one of the bags of food with me as I made my way around the dispatcher’s desk and gestured from Ruby to the young man so that she knew to keep an eye on him. “Now, if you would.”
Vic joined the two women and, sticking her finger in the hole where the doorknob to my office used to be, closed the door behind us. I set my breakfast on my desk and took off my hat, hooking it onto the hammer of my sidearm, crossing my arms over my chest. “What are you two up to?”
Nancy was the first to speak. “Walt, it was my idea. I didn’t think it would be a bad thing for—”
“I just got off the phone with Tim Berg over in South Dakota. He says that the boy’s mother was in the sheriff’s office three weeks ago.” I noticed they were looking at me a little funny. “What?”
Dorothy spoke this time. “Walt, Cord seemed to intimate that his mother might’ve passed away.”
I thought about it. “Since when?”
They looked at each other and then back to me as Nancy spoke in a low voice. “It sounded quite recent.” She stepped in closer to my desk. “Walt, this boy shows all the classic symptoms of being a polygamy kid. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him, psychologically speaking, but . . .”
“Well, Tim said the mother was from some compound over there, and as soon as he gets back to me we’ll start getting some answers.”
“What can it hurt?” Dorothy placed her fists on her hips and looked at me. “I need the help, and what else is he going to do, sit in one of your cells?”
I glanced at Nancy, who jumped in quickly. “It would take me a day or two to come up with a foster home for him, so if Dorothy’s got a place . . . ?”
“He’ll skip town like a Kansas City paperhanger.”
Dorothy shook her head. “He won’t.”
Vic joined in the conversation, and I was glad of another sane voice in the room. “Who the hell says?”
“He does.” Dorothy crossed her own arms. “I made him promise.” We stood there looking at each other, the immovable object meeting the irresistible force. “He can stay here and work over at my place till
we get him settled out.”
Nancy joined Dorothy at the other side of my desk. “Walt, if it’s true that his mother is dead or has run off, then he’s lost his advocate within that group and they’re probably not going to want him anymore.”
Throwing my hat onto my desk, I sighed and sat in my chair. “All right, but if he bolts, I’m holding the two of you responsible.” I glanced at the chief cook and used-to-be bottle washer of the Busy Bee. “And I’m going to want free lunch for a week.”
Dorothy leaned in and looked down at me. “Oh, Walt, you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
I guess after the Kansas City paperhanger remark, she thought I deserved it.
• • •
It was five after five when Tim called, and he was none too happy. “They say they never heard of the boy or the mother.”
I leaned back in my chair and slipped a foot under my desk to keep from doing my usual sheriff backflip with a full twist. “Are you sure that’s where she said she was from?”
“Yes, damn it.”
I stared at the receiver for a moment. “You seem a little agitated, Tim.”
There was silence on the phone, and then he spoke. “I damn well am.”
“Mind if I ask why?”
“I don’t like having guns pointed at me in my own county.”
“What happened?”
He breathed a deep sigh, blowing some of the agitation through his teeth, and I could hear him easing himself into a chair. “I drove out that way, and mind you, this is the first time in a long while that I’ve been up in that Castle Rock territory near the South Fork of the Moreau except for that pipeline they got going through there.” He swallowed. “It’s a fort is what it is, Walt. I mean to tell you that they’ve got walls and fences up all over the place and gun towers—honest-to-God gun towers. Now they call ’em observation posts, but they’re gun towers is what they are. I saw individuals up there with deer rifles, and I gotta tell you I am not happy about this happening in my county.”
“Who did you talk to?”
“Some jaybird named Ronald Lynear. I get the feeling he’s the grand imperial Pooh-Bah around the place—him and another fella by the name of Lockhart and some severe-looking individual by the name of Bidarte.”
I leaned forward. “And they say they never heard of either of them?”
“Yeah, and I know that’s bullshit, because I’ve still got the slip of paper she gave me with directions on how to get to the place.”
“Did you get any ID from her?” I raised my head as Vic came in and sat in her usual chair, propping her usual boots up on my usual desk.
“Walt, these people don’t carry any ID. I got a name from her, Sarah Tisdale. The funny thing is, there was a phone number down here at the bottom that I didn’t pay any attention to ’cause it was out of state. Walt—it’s Wyoming.”
“307?”
“You bet.”
“Give it to me.”
“I already tried calling it, but there wasn’t any answer and no answering machine, of course.”
“Give it to me anyway.” He read me the number, and I scribbled it down on the paper blotter on my desk, tore it off, and handed it to my undersheriff. “We’ll get the reverse registry and find out where it is.” Listening to the troubled man on the other end of the line, I dropped my pen and enjoyed the view as Vic left in search of the information I needed. “Tim . . . ?”
“Yeah.”
He sighed again, and I waited, then asked, “What’s really troubling you?”
“Walt, you know me; I’m for freedom, folks’ rights to bear arms and all. . . . I mean that Waco shit needed to be handled better, but it needed to be handled.”
“Yep.”
“Well, what’s going on up there near Castle Rock is wrong. I was up there the first time about a year ago when we started getting complaints about abuse and Child Services wanted to know how many kids were up there and whether they were getting a proper education.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We found out about ’em because a few of ’em came in filing for welfare benefits, claiming that their husbands had run off and left when their damn husbands are sitting out there in the pickups waiting for ’em.” There was another pause as he caught his breath. “Those kids aren’t going anywhere but the school of hard knocks, and the funny thing is that the majority of ’em are young men about the same age as the one you’ve got. They have all this heavy equipment, I mean more than you’d need in a ranching or farming operation, but they’d sunk lines into the river for water and didn’t have any irrigation rights—and you know as well as I do that there’s more men died over ditches than bitches in this country.”
I leaned back in my chair. “True.”
“Well, the local ranchers got in an uproar, and we went up there with warrants and got in the place.” There was another pause. “Walt, my grandfolks come up in the dirty thirties, hard times when you had to do whatever it took to survive. I’ve looked at the pictures and heard the stories, but I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s one thing to read about this stuff in the news, but it’s something else to come up against it face to face. People up there are just living in sheds—women and children. . . . Thirteen-year-old girls married to fifty-year-old men—I mean, they’re not married in the legal sense—that’s how they try and get away with the support checks. They marry these girls off to these men, seal ’em, they call it, in private ceremonies.” There was another pause, and when he spoke again, there was a catch in his voice. “There was a little girl. . . . She didn’t look right—birth defects. There was this one little girl that comes up to me. . . . Right. We’re busting up these irrigation pipes they’ve got going in the river, and she pulls on my pant leg, wanting to know why it is we’re taking away their water so that they can’t water the cows that they’re gonna milk to make enough money to have something to eat. I kneeled down and took her little hand, and Walt . . . she didn’t have any fingernails.”
“I don’t know what to say, Tim.”
“How’s that boy, the one you found?”
“He says his name is Cord.” Vic reentered and sat in her chair with a massive computer file, her index finger stuffed in the middle. “Normal, or appears to be. I had the school psychologist give him a going-over, and she seems to think that he’s all right.”
“Lucky you.”
I fingered the brim of my hat, spinning it on the crown and thinking how the simple gesture was sometimes indicative of the job as a whole. “I’ll keep you informed as to what’s going on over here—and you’ll do the same for me?”
“Sure will.”
I hung up my phone and looked past the bruises that looked like crow’s wings spread beneath the Terror’s tarnished gold eyes. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
She dropped the book onto my desk and opened it. “Trouble in rabbit-choker land?”
“That polygamy group up in the north of Tim’s county; he doesn’t know what to do about it.”
“It’s a cult; they’re fucking cults. The fact that they’re trying to cover this shit up under the auspices of actual religion only makes it that much worse.”
“I thought you thought all religions were cults.”
“Some are worse than others—I should know, I grew up Catholic.” She heaved the book around, her finger pointing to a number about a third of the way down the page. “Surrey/Short Drop General Mercantile.”
I read the exchange and picked up my phone. “A commercial number?”
“Surrey/Short Drop—they’re in-county, and I don’t even know where either of them are.”
Surrey and Short Drop were tiny towns in the southeast corner of the county. Surrey had been named after a remittance man, born the fourth son of four. In the late eighteenth century, the first son of a British nobleman inherited the family fortune, the second went into the military, the third into the clergy, leaving the fourth to ride into Powder Junction every month for
his remittance check so that he could drink himself to death on the high plains. Short Drop, which was a stone’s throw away, was where a member of Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall gang had been caught and lynched—hence the name referring to a short drop on a long rope.
The other point of interest in the area was the infamous Teapot Dome of Teapot Dome scandal fame, named for a tiny rock formation on top of the U.S. Naval oil reserves, which had brought rightful disgrace upon the administration of Warren G. Harding in the twenties. The illegal sale of the Teapot Dome to Sinclair Oil had been the biggest national scandal in the country until a few guys back in the seventies had gotten caught burgling an office in a place called Watergate.
I dialed the number and waited, not particularly expecting anyone to answer. Imagine my surprise when someone did.
“Short Drop Merc.”
The voice was older, female, and didn’t sound like it would brook much nonsense.
“This is Sheriff Walt Longmire—”
“Well, it’s about time.”
I made a face for the benefit of nobody in particular. “Excuse me?”
“Is this the so-called sheriff of our county?”
“Well, yes it is—and who is this?”
She ignored my question and launched into a tirade. “Look, I talked to that moron you’ve got posted over in Powder Junction, and he said you were going to send somebody around to talk to those idiots over near East Spring Draw down near Sulphur Creek.”
I remembered Double Tough mentioning something about disagreements in the area but that he wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Yep, I’m kind of following up on that and was hoping you could give me a little more information.”
“They threatened a bunch of people with a shotgun, and we’re about to go out there and do a little threatening ourselves.”
“Well, we wouldn’t want that. I’ll send a deputy to have a word, but for the time being I’d appreciate it if you would just avoid them.”
The harrumph carried across the county. “That’s going to be a little tough since they own twelve thousand acres around here.”
“I’ll speak with them myself, if need be. In the meantime, I was wondering if you’d ever heard of a young woman by the name of Sarah Tisdale?”
A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery wl-9 Page 4