A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery wl-9

by Craig Johnson

  She nodded with enthusiasm. “Sí, he my son.”

  “Well, you must be proud.” I also remembered Sheriff Berg’s remarks about the two women who had been married to the space jockey, Vann Ross—one of them having been named Big Wanda. “Well, I’m looking for Roy Lynear, and I understand he lives at this address?”

  Her eyes, or what I could make of them, stayed steady. “He be my husband, but he not here.”

  That’s one way of keeping it in the family. “Roy Lynear is your husband?”

  “Sí.”

  “I gather you were married before, then.”

  “Sí.”

  I nodded as I thought about what Tim had said concerning how the women in polygamy cults would file for abandonment to receive social services funding. “This license is almost four years old, ma’am. If you are residing in Wyoming, you’ll have to get a new one.”

  She said nothing but tucked the license back into the billfold and rested it in her lap.

  “Your husband—he’s not at the ranch?”

  “No.”

  I glanced around as if I might spot the man. “Then where is he?”

  “Sur Dakota.”

  I nodded. “Visiting family?”

  “Sí. His father not good.” She shifted her bulk and glanced at the clock in the dash of the old car for a long moment, and I would’ve bet that it wasn’t working. “I got food in the car and need to go.”

  “Would you mind if we followed you in?”

  She stared at the dash, and I could see the agitation in her growing. “You cannot. No.”

  “Then you won’t mind answering a few more questions here, will you?” Her eyes roamed the interior of the car but could find no easy avenue of escape. “Do you mind turning your motor off?”

  She shook her head with a quick motion, still trying to avoid my eyes. “If I kill motor, it no start again.”

  I glanced up at Vic, who had taken a step back to avoid the fumes. “Well, I’ll try and be brief. Wanda, we’re looking for a woman by the name of Sarah Tisdale. Do you know her?”

  Her eyes shifted toward Vic and then refocused on the dash. “No.”

  “No, you don’t know her or no, you’d rather not say?”

  Her breath picked up. “No heard of her.”

  “How about Sarah Lynear?”

  She paused for a second and then glanced back at Vic again, and I was beginning to wonder what the attraction was. “No.”

  “Well, that’s odd, seeing as how she was also married to your husband.” I kneeled down and rested my arm on the sill, pulled the photograph from my shirt pocket, and held it out to her. “You’re both married to the same man and you’ve never heard of her?”

  Wanda glanced at the photo for only an instant and then patted the steering wheel as if urging it to go. “She no married to my husband.”

  I continued to hold the photograph of the blonde woman out to her. “Maybe you should take a closer look.”

  Instead, she moved to tuck the wallet back into her purse, accidentally opening it more than she’d wanted, exposing the Pachmayr grip of an S&W revolver where her hand lingered.

  Still holding the photo in front of her, I gently slipped my hand down on the elk grips of my Colt, unsnapping the safety strap, a motion that did not go unseen by Vic. As I spoke, my undersheriff slipped the Glock from her holster but let it hang at her side, unnoticeable to the woman unless she looked specifically backward. “Mrs. Lynear, I need you to remove your hand from your purse very slowly and place both of them on the steering wheel.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Mrs. Lynear, I need you to do that right now.”

  The beauty and the horror of a life in law enforcement is that you will, in your time, be stupefied at what people will do. I watched in that adrenaline rush of slow motion as Wanda withdrew her hand from the purse and reached up like a foregone conclusion. She threw the Satellite wagon into reverse and floored it.

  I stumbled backward and Vic scrambled to the side, raising her 9mm and leveling it at the Plymouth as it tore backward down the dirt road toward the intersection. “Wait!”

  She held the Glock steady but turned her head slightly to bark at me. “I’m shooting the radiator and/or the wheezing motor.”

  I stood and joined her, watching the retreating car. “I don’t think that’s going to be necessary.” We watched as the majestic beast, still hanging low on its springs, rocketed backward across the macadam and slid off the other side with its prow in the air like an Autumn Bronze whale. “Thar-she-blows.”

  Vic kept her weapon out and followed me as the tires ground on the side of the roadway in an attempt to find traction, the front wheels of the wagon sawing left and right like an upended tortoise.

  After a moment the motor groaned, and the rear tires caught traction, lumbering the Plymouth up onto the road as Vic and I scattered like chickens in an attempt to get out of the way.

  We watched as the car wheezed up to a good forty miles an hour and headed for the horizon. Vic joined me at the centerline and reholstered her weapon. “Are we about to engage in the slowest car chase in cinematic history?”

  I sighed. “I believe so.”

  • • •

  We caught up with the station wagon in about three minutes. I had my light bar on but had left the sirens silent so as not to scare the woman any more than she was already.

  Vic adjusted her seat back and put my hat over her face. “How long before she runs out of gas?”

  “Nebraska.”

  “Don’t bother waking me up.”

  I tooled along behind the Plymouth, a confused rancher pulling his pickup to the side of the road and looking at me with a puzzled expression on his face as we passed him. From underneath my hat, Vic’s voice rose. “So, this would be classified as a low-speed chase?”

  “Any slower and we’re walking.” I studied the road ahead and figured the station wagon would be crossing over into Campbell County before too long. I could call Sandy Sandberg and get him or the Highway Patrol to set up a roadblock and become the laughing stock of the entire Wyoming law enforcement community, or we could go to Nebraska.

  There was a smallish knoll on a dividing ridge where the road took a slight S-curve, which was possibly the only creative feature between here and Scottsbluff. Periodically, Big Wanda would look into her rearview mirror and stare at me. What was she thinking I was going to do, shoot her? Granted, she had a weapon, but I doubted she’d intended to use it.

  I kept my eyes in her rearview mirror, I was that close, and could see her still looking at me as we approached the curve—the only one, I was certain, between here and the Great Plains. I honked my horn and pointed ahead, in an attempt to get her to stop; Vic pushed my hat away and sat up.

  “Did she break down?”

  I honked again, but Big Wanda wasn’t watching the road; instead, paying no attention to what was coming up, her head leaning to the side, she continued to look at me through the rearview mirror as her right front wheel went off the road. I watched as she snapped around and yanked the steering wheel to the left, which would’ve been fine on any other portion of these hundred miles of road, but not this one.

  The left front of the vehicle dipped into the gravel, and she sawed the thing to the right again, but the powder was thick and the slope at the side of the road steep and we watched as the big Plymouth rose up on two wheels. There was that second when I thought she was going to make it, but then the thing started over like a lazy dog into the slowest roll I’ve ever seen. It only went over onto its top, and then slid the rest of the way down the hillside into a slight depression at the bottom of the barrow ditch.

  I pulled my truck over and parked it above the station wagon. Vic was already out of the other side and joined me as we picked our way down the clumps of dry grass and withered sagebrush on the hillside. The Plymouth sputtered a few more times as the carburetor attempted to pump gas skyward, and then miraculously smoothed out and continued to
idle. “She’s going to need some help getting out of there.”

  Vic still held her sidearm at the ready. “You do it.”

  I gestured for her to take the passenger side as I took a few steps around the back, looking at all the groceries that were now lying on the headliner. “Mrs. Lynear?”

  There was no answer over the sound of the motor.

  Vic had made pretty good progress on the far side, crouching so as to not reveal too much of herself but getting close enough to see the woman. She paused and aimed the 9mm toward the car, taking a moment to raise her other hand and mimic an outstretched thumb and forefinger gesture that could only mean gun.

  With a sigh, I pulled the .45 from my holster and called out again, raising my voice so she would be sure to hear me over the idling car—evidently the vehicle preferred upside down. “Wanda, you’re not in any real trouble yet. If you’ll just toss that pistol out the window, I’m sure we’d all feel a lot better!”

  No response, but Vic continued forward.

  It was about that time that the snub-nosed revolver fell from the driver’s-side window.

  When I rushed forward, I could see Big Wanda clearly choking to death hanging from the seat of the Plymouth, her face purple and even more bloated. I grabbed the door handle, but the window rail was lodged in the dirt. Her hand reached out to me, and she grabbed my arm as I drove a hand in my back pocket to yank out my old Case knife. I reached up past her shoulder to get at the belt, but she must’ve misinterpreted my intentions and evidently thought I was trying to cut her throat because she began slapping at my hands. I forced myself in the window in an attempt to get a better angle on the webbing but still avoid her neck. She continued to choke and beat at me as I pushed her arms aside, reached past her head, and slit the belt, her entire three hundred pounds falling—on me.

  She coughed, choked, and gasped a few breaths, and it was all I could do to catch mine in that a particularly large breast covered half my face. Her eyes turned to mine and she whispered, “Lo lamento . . . Lo siento, por favor.”

  Vic had opened the other door and some of the groceries slid out onto the ground. She reached across the car with a smile on her face, shoved the gear selector into park, and switched off the ignition, the big Satellite giving up the ghost with a shudder, an elongated wheeze, and finally a hiss. Pulling the keys from the ignition, Vic tossed them near my face. “I guess she really didn’t want to kill the motor.”

  8

  “Have I told you lately how much I hate mauve?”

  “Not lately, no.” We were in our usual spot in the Durant Memorial Hospital lobby, waiting for the medical musketeers Isaac Bloomfield, his understudy David “Boy Wonder” Nickerson, and Bill McDermott. I listened to the clock ticking and took in the carpet and matching walls. “It’s probably supposed to be soothing.”

  “Like a bowel movement.”

  “Better than scours.”

  She stood and walked across to the hallway leading past the receptionist desk where Ruby’s granddaughter, Janine Reynolds, was filling out paperwork and trying to stay awake.

  I was having the same problem and was even thinking about stretching out on the sofa for a few winks when my undersheriff returned with hands on hips and looked down at me over her still-multicolored eyes. “We didn’t lean on her that badly.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “She kept looking at me when we were asking her about Sarah out on the road; did you notice that?”

  “I did.”

  She reached down and took the photo from my shirt pocket, her familiarity with my person and clothes breeding indifference. She studied the photograph. “I don’t look anything like this woman.”

  “No.”

  “So why was she looking at me?”

  “I don’t know.” I studied the question. “You had a gun, she had a gun. . . .”

  “You had a gun, but she hardly looked at you.”

  “Maybe it’s a cultural thing—she wasn’t used to seeing a policewoman.”

  She snorted. “A Mexican in Texas? She’s probably on a first-name basis with the entire law-enforcement community.”

  I pleaded exhaustion and slumped deeper into the worn sofa molded into the shape of sorrowful anxiety. “I don’t know and I’m dead tired.”

  “How are we supposed to inform them that we’ve got her—hang a note on the razor wire?” It was quiet again, and I could feel the tension in her body as she sat on the sofa next to me. Two minutes later, she was sound asleep.

  Clear conscience.

  I must’ve nodded off, too, but uneasy and half awake, I listen to my parents arguing about religion. My mother, a devout Methodist, is seated at the breakfast table with my father. She looks the way she always does in my dreams, backlit, the sunshine in the kitchen window striking the sides of her pupils, making her blue eyes that much more transparent, like her blue willow china, overwashed, but never broken. She is like that, more beautiful with each passing year. We are all surprised by it, but for her it is her life and she accepts it; nothing astonishing, just a honing of her appearance. Never a small woman, she has retained her tall figure and her face remains unwrinkled, the hollow of her cheeks and the sculpting of her brows defining the strongest of her features—those eyes.

  She rests her coffee cup in the saucer, and the only sound in the warm, springtime room that Sunday morning is the click of ceramic against ceramic.

  My father whispers, but his voice carries to the stairs where I sit in my pajamas. “You force him to continue going and he’ll hate you for it.” There is a silence, and I strain to hear their voices. “He’s of an age where he needs to make decisions like this for himself.”

  “He’s too young to be making decisions like this for himself.”

  “Older than you think.”

  I tuck my naked heels against my rear and wait on the wooden steps my father had made in the house he had built.

  “He’ll grow to hate you for it.”

  The tick of the china again, indicative of a poise neither he nor I have. “He doesn’t hate.”

  “Resent, then.”

  A silence. “You’re sure this isn’t a theological difference. . . .”

  “I don’t have a theology.”

  “Oh . . . Yes, you do.”

  • • •

  My head snapped back at the sound of somebody swallowing and awakened to find Saizarbitoria standing over me while sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

  “Hey, boss.”

  I yawned, careful not to jostle Vic’s still-sleeping head on my shoulder. “Hey.”

  “You were talking in your sleep.”

  “I say anything interesting?”

  “Something about blue willow.”

  He sipped his coffee again, and I glanced at the clock, still dragging its hands around the wee hours of the night. “What are you doing here this late?”

  “News from the rabbit-choker state.”

  “Yep?”

  “Tim Berg said to tell you that some guy named Vann Ross Lynear died.”

  That was a bit of a shock, even if he was approaching a hundred years old. “That’s a surprise.”

  “Fell off his roof without any clothes on.”

  Vic’s voice sounded against my shoulder and then she snuggled in deeper. “That’s not a surprise.”

  I glanced at her and then back up to my deputy. “Anything suspicious?”

  “You mean other than he fell off a roof without any clothes on?” He glanced down at me. “He didn’t say, but he intimated that you shouldn’t return to Belle Fourche anytime soon, that there’s a warrant for your arrest.” He finished his coffee. “You roughing up the church folk over in the Black Hills, boss?”

  “It was a misunderstanding about soda pop.”

  He glanced toward the reception area where Janine had succumbed and now rested her head on her folded arms. “Remind me to not get in your way at the water cooler.”

  I thought about what Wanda had
said before things had gotten interesting down at the entrance to East Spring Ranch. “Does Tim know that Roy Lynear and his bunch were in South Dakota yesterday?”

  “Not that I am aware.”

  “Would you like to make him aware?”

  He looked around for a trash can. “Not at two in the morning.”

  “Any sign of Orrin Porter Rockwell?”

  “Faded into the pages of history so far.”

  “Cord?”

  He had found the trash and chucked his cup. “Locked up in protective custody with Dog, a copy of My Friend Flicka lying on his sleeping chest.”

  “How was the coffee?”

  His eyes narrowed, the muscles in his jaw bulging like the hocks on a horse. “Wretched. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  • • •

  Wanda, as I’d suspected, would be fine. She’d sustained a little damage to her shoulder and throat, but other than that she’d only had a mild concussion and would be held overnight for observation purposes.

  I was restless and didn’t feel like going home or to the office; it was past the middle of the night, and I was driving around town like a teenager. Staring at the blinking red light, I sat there at Fort and Main and thought about my life. I guessed that’s what people did at three in the morning—thought about their lives. Parents—gone; wife—gone; and a freshly married daughter who might as well have been gone, too.

  Five o’clock in Philadelphia; too early to call.

  I missed Dog.

  There was an ambient light in the cab now, and I was starting to think I was having a visitation when I noticed it was the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler in my rearview; he was probably intimidated by the stars and bars into not honking his horn at the crazy sheriff who had been sitting at the blinking stoplight for the last three minutes.

  I was startled by a knock and looked out to see a man standing in the road in an IGA ball cap.

  Rolling down the window, I placed an elbow on the door. “Howdy.”

  He looked a little uncertain. “Hi?” He glanced back at his truck, idling behind us, and the vacant streets of the county seat. “Is there some kind of trouble?”