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

by Craig Johnson

  I stepped forward and placed a hand on George’s chest, pushing him out of the way and speaking to Tomás. “I’m really sorry, but I need to ask you some questions that are of a personal nature. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to step outside?”

  George slapped my hand away. “You talk to him here, where we can all hear what it is you’ve got to say. The last one of us that talked to you . . .”

  “That’s it.” I stepped in and watched his mouth freeze in an open position as my nose stopped about two inches from his forehead. “You utter one more word in this conversation, and I will consider it an obstruction and place you under arrest—not one word.”

  I turned back and took Bidarte by the arm, leading him toward the opening where we would be out of earshot, if not sight. Rockwell followed me and then turned to look at the group, George Lynear in the front, his face as red as a blister.

  In the half-light of the open doorway, I could see Tomás’s eyes shining. I tried to reassure him. “She’s fine.”

  It took a while for him to reply. “Yes.”

  “Is there any reason you can think of as to why your mother would have run from us like she did?”

  He swallowed and scrubbed his eyes with the balls of his thumbs, his face growing stony. “She is a simple woman from the provinces. She had been abused by some soldado back in Mexico when she was a girl and my brother was killed by some security men from PEMEX; it’s possible that she . . . That when she saw the uniforms . . .”

  I nodded. “That might’ve been a mitigating factor, but what seemed to set her off was my mentioning Sarah Tisdale.” He said nothing. “She reacted as if she knew the name and possibly the woman.”

  His jaw clinched, and I knew we were done.

  I watched as he crossed his arms over his chest and then spoke softly to him. “I’m sure you’ll want to come up to Durant and see about your mother.”

  “Certainly.”

  I walked him back into the shop and something strange happened—Rockwell extended his hand, and Bidarte, who paused for only a moment, shook it. He then reapproached the big truck, not speaking to any of the men, climbed back onto the running board, and submerged himself in the work.

  I took the extra steps into the group and turned to look at Roy Lynear. “I noticed the number of children’s clothes on the wash lines, Mr. Lynear. I trust that if those children are not going to the public schools here in Absaroka County, they’ll be registered with Child Services so that county officials can see to their needs?”

  He sighed. “I suppose that’s a final and parting shot?”

  I hitched a hand up onto my sidearm. “I wouldn’t say final.”

  Rockwell followed me as I turned to go, and it might’ve been the look that he gave George Lynear that caused the loudmouth to break the rules I’d laid down.

  “I still wanna know where our car is and how you got in here.”

  I could’ve ignored him, I could’ve let it go, but I didn’t. Instead, I grabbed his nearest hand and drew his arm up into a reverse wristlock that placed him firmly against the facing of the shop opening, his chin pressed against the tin, forcing him to look skyward. I snapped the cuffs on him and yanked him next to me. “You’re under arrest.”

  The others stood there looking at us but made no move to stop me, and that’s when I noticed they weren’t even looking at me but at Orrin Porter Rockwell. I glanced at the old man and could now see he casually held a .38 revolver at his side.

  I walked George over to where I could see his father, fished the religious fob and ring of keys from my pocket, and tossed them onto his lap. “Wanda’s keys, one of which is missing as the car has been impounded for evidence; you can come and get the groceries.” I hefted his son’s arm, so that he had to stand on tiptoe. “And this you can pick up anytime after the judge sets bail.”

  With George’s cuff chained to the D-ring on the floor of the Bullet, I drove us out of the compound and up the canyon road until we got to the flat above. A glimmer of light was starting to cast a pinkish glow across the horizon to the east and the high spots of the rolling hills were just starting to blush with the growing day.

  Still in a huff, I turned to look at Rockwell. “What are you, the Houdini of guns?”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Give me that pistol.”

  He looked unhappy about it but pulled the .38 from his inside coat pocket and handed it to me. “Careful, it’s loaded.”

  I popped the lid on the center console and thumbed the cylinder open, dropping the shells inside; afterward, I tossed the sidearm in there and closed the lid. “Where did you get it?”

  He nodded his hairy head toward the bed of my truck. “Out of the box in the back of your conveyance; there are shotguns, rifles, and all sort of armaments back there.”

  I’d forgotten about the weapons I’d taken from the youth of South Dakota. “Jesus.”

  Rockwell nodded. “He works in mysterious ways, does He not?”

  When we got to the main gate, I undid the clasps, pushed it open, and drove through. Thinking about what I’d just done, and not being particularly proud of it, I sat there with my hands gripped on the wheel. In a fit of remorse, I opened the suicide door, reached in, and uncuffed George.

  I pulled him from the truck and stood there looking at him, his eyes growing wide with the thought of what might happen next.

  I let him think for a few seconds, watching sweat trickle down from his hairline, then walked him back to the gate, and placed him on the other side. I closed it, the chain-link still rattling as he stood there staring at me.

  He wiped the sweat from his face and took no time in locking the three massive padlocks. I replaced the cuffs in the holder on my belt. He took a step back—I suppose just to make absolutely sure that he was out of reach, the signature smirk returning. “You come around here again, and I’ll be waiting.”

  I sighed and pulled my jacket back to reveal my .45.

  He stood there for a moment, his eyes opening even wider, and then started backing up, finally turning and running down the road.

  I yelled after him, “When you get back, tell them you escaped—they’ll be impressed.”

  9

  “They say that as you get older, you need more sleep.”

  I felt myself coming back as if from death. I was trying to climb out of a hole, but something large and feathery kept landing on my chest and pushing me deeper into the earth. Catching my breath, I’m pretty sure I snorted and then spoke through my hat. “Actually, you need less, which might explain the end result.” I pulled my hat from my face. “I thought I locked that door.”

  “It doesn’t have a doorknob. How could you lock it?”

  She had a point.

  Rolling over, I lay there on my side on the stack of blankets and pillow I’d liberated from the jail. “What time is it?”

  “Daytime.” She sat in my guest chair with a stack of papers under one arm and two mugs in her hands. She looked down at me, and it looked like the multicolor bruises under her eyes were just about gone. “Why didn’t you sleep in the jail—the kid goes to work at five.”

  “There was no room at the inn.” I coughed again, half expecting feathers to fly out of my mouth. “I don’t know, all his stuff is in there. It felt like trespassing.”

  She handed a mug down to me. “Here, mother’s milk.” I sat up and hunched against one of my bookcases, taking the coffee as she smiled. “So, the staff is dying to know how you single-handedly captured public enemy number old.”

  I mainlined the caffeine and tried to clear my mind, buying time with clever repartee. “Huh?”

  She nodded her head toward the holding cells, and I noticed she was wearing a ball cap, which was trouble as it indicated a bad hair day. “Cousin Itt.”

  “Oh . . . Yep.”

  She sipped from her mug and pulled the papers from under her arm. “Where did you find him?”

  I told her she was never going to believe me if I tol
d her and then did.

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  I raised a hand. “As God is my witness.”

  “He was in the truck all afternoon, even when we were down in Short Drop?”

  “Twice.”

  She settled in the chair with the papers in her lap, crossed her legs, and bobbed a tactical boot about a foot from my head. I wondered if she was going to kick me. “You went back?”

  I sipped my coffee. “I did.”

  “Alone.” She looked out the window, and I was pretty sure she was going to kick me now. “In the middle of the night.”

  I gestured with my mug toward the holding cells. “With Cousin Itt.”

  “You took him with you?”

  I yawned, even though it was probably a bad move. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  The tarnished gold focused on me, and I was pretty sure it was the same look pythons give you just before they crush you to death and eat you. “And?”

  “Roy Lynear claims Wanda is one of theirs but not his wife; however, it turns out she is Tomás Bidarte’s mother.”

  She pursed her lips, and I had to fight to concentrate. “The guy with the knife we met at the bar?”

  “Yep.” I sipped my coffee some more. “How ’bout you run a check on Tomás with the Mexican authorities; he made mention of a brother being killed by PEMEX security, and that struck me as being a little strange.”

  She continued to study me doubtfully. “Mexican authorities—isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  “Oxymoron is a little south of Mexico City, isn’t it?” I smiled for the first time this morning. “How’s your Spanish?”

  She yelled over her shoulder. “Sancho, translation!”

  I drank my coffee as if my life depended on it, which it did. “That bad, huh?”

  She reached down, scooping up the sheaf of papers and handing them to me. “Anything else?”

  I stared at them, a complete dossier from the NCIS on the entire Bidarte family. “Did I already ask you to do this?”

  She shook her head. “I ran the SOP on Wanda and the rest of the family popped up, kind of like Ancestry.com for criminals.” She sipped her coffee. “They got a lot of little leaves in that family.”

  I thumbed through the pages and looked up at her. “Do I have to pay a quarter for the audio presentation?”

  She set her mug on the corner of my desk and held out a hand.

  It was a habit she’d adopted in getting me to read reports that only worked when I had pocket change. “I think I liked you better when you weren’t making house payments.” I handed her back the papers and then struggled to get two bits out of my jeans, finally depositing the quarter in her open palm.

  She poked the change into her shirt pocket—I was pretty sure I’d paid for a third of a living room by now. “The earliest mention of the family is a Philippe Bidarte who was a big deal in the Mexico oil business in the twenties till he climbed in bed with a lot of the big American oil interests. With all the revolutions, Mexico was changing governments every twenty minutes, but the one thing all the revolutionaries could agree on was getting the gringos the fuck out of Mexico. Philippe, on the losing end of one of these wars, found himself guarding the ex–el presidente, some old one-armed fart by the name of Álvaro Obregón. Anyway, the jefe has a price on his head, and Philippe makes a lateral career move, whereupon he and his men shoot the old guy, asleep in his tent, dead.”

  “Oh, my.” I sipped the last of my coffee and rolled my hand to prompt the history lesson.

  “Bidarte Sr. and his men, mostly family, are seen to be viable muscle in certain quarters unimpeded by such a useless appendage as a conscience. They hire out as a kind of private army through the decades, and then in the eighties, they become the strong arm for the most powerful drug cartel, Familia Escobar in Chihuahua.”

  “Where the dogs come from.”

  She stared at me. “Did you wake up on the funny side of your pile of blankets or what?”

  “So Tomás and his mother are connected to the drug trade?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. Eduardo and Wanda shipped Tomás, their baby boy, off to—get this—Universidad de Salamanca in Spain.”

  She glanced at the file to freshen her memory. “There’s a vacant time period for Tomás after college where there are reports of his involvement with the Basque terrorist group, something called the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA for short, but about twenty years ago Tomás’s father, Eduardo, splits from the Escobar family because he sees what drugs are doing to an otherwise virtuous business like the Mexican mafia; he walks away and joins the Church of the Little Lambsy-Divey or whatever it’s called.”

  “The Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God.”

  “Whatever.”

  I looked in my empty cup. “I thought all the mafiosos, no matter what their nationality, frowned on that—it’s the in-for-life kind of thing.”

  “Evidently Eduardo had the juice to do it for six months, and move to los Estados Unidos; Hudspeth County, Texas, to be exact.”

  “Six months; why do I not like the sound of that?”

  “Because the sheriff down there said the story goes that they filled him so full of holes you could’ve used him for a colander.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Wait, it gets better. Our man Tomás Bidarte shows up in northern Mexico like the Shadow, and suddenly Escobar personnel start disappearing wholesale, by the carload, by the houseload—until every single member of the family is dead: men, women, and children. Now there’s nothing to connect Bidarte to any of this, but in good old Mexican tradition, enough people are paid enough bribes to get Tomás thrown into Penal del Altiplano, the worst prison in all of Mexico, for what turns out to be twelve years. Just as a side note, the life span of the average prisoner in that place is only five.”

  “He got out?”

  “Yes, and reestablished his ties with the Apoplectic Church of Sheepskin, which had a compound on both sides of the Rio Grande near a little town called Bosque. Whenever they got in trouble for the polygamy thing in the U.S., they would run over to the Mexican side, and whenever they got in trouble with the Mexicans, they would come back.”

  “Who did you talk to in Texas?”

  “The new sheriff, a guy by the name of Crutchley.”

  I hoisted myself off the floor and stretched my back in an attempt to get it somewhat in line, and noticed Santiago standing in the doorway of my office. “What are you looking at?”

  His grin displayed the trademark dimple in his right cheek. “Jeez, I’ve seen buffalo get up more gracefully than that.”

  I ambled to my chair and sat down. “Just wait, your day is coming.”

  He leaned against the facing. “Somebody need a translator?”

  “Do you want Crutchley’s number?” Vic laid the papers on my desk, pointing at a number she’d scrawled in the margin, including her signature period she added to everything; it looked like somebody had stabbed the sheet of paper with an ice pick. I dialed and glanced up at her and Sancho. “Bidarte—that doesn’t sound Spanish.”

  Without looking at him, Vic snapped a finger and pointed at Saizarbitoria’s face, and he responded. “Basque, it means ‘Between the Ways.’”

  “He’s Basque?”

  “Vasco,” Santiago nodded. “At least part; Basque heritage makes up about twenty percent of the bloodlines in Mexico.”

  She looked up at Sancho. “Dismissed.”

  He didn’t move.

  The phone rang twice and then a female voice with enough twang to string a mandolin answered. “Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “Hey, I’m looking for Michael Crutchley. This is Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming. Who’s this?”

  “Buffy, his wife. I think I talked to an eye-talian woman from your department this morning about those cuckoos down near Bosque.” There was a pause as she rearranged the phone against her ear. “I’m s
orry, but our damned dispatcher/receptionist is pregnant again and out of the office.”

  I hit the speakerphone and rested the receiver back in the cradle. “Sorry about that.”

  “Nowhere near as sorry as I am—I married into Team Crutchley for better or worse but not for lunch.” None of us were quite sure what to say to that and listened as she talked to someone in the background. “Maybe he doesn’t want to talk to you—maybe he wants to talk to me.”

  We could hear a man speaking: “Buffy, gimme the phone, God-damnit.” More jostling. “Hey, Sheriff, I apologize for my wife; she thinks she’s funny.” There was a pause, and I assumed he was walking into his office with the phone. “How can I help you?”

  “I believe you had a conversation with my undersheriff about the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God folks who were down in the southern part of your county?”

  “Yeah, they used to be here, up until about a year ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, back taxes, but from what I remember they got paid in full here a couple of months ago. And there were some problems with the Department of Child Services, who got all over ’em about not having some of their adolescent boys properly educated. They claimed they had a school for them, but these teenagers couldn’t even tell you the capital of Texas.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It’s Austin, by the way.”

  I grunted. “Thanks.”

  “Bosque’s in the southern part of the county; I’ve got a shoestring budget and 4,572 square miles of sidewinders, sand, sagebrush, and sons-a-bitches trying to make it to the promised land. I guess you don’t have those problems with the Canadians up there?”

  “They would have to go through Montana first.” I waited a moment. “That’s north of us.”

  He grunted back. “Thanks.”

  “What’s the story on Eduardo Bidarte?”

  “Ancient history, like I told your deputy. He’s about twenty years dead; the cartel over in Chihuahua decided to use him for target practice, and by the time they were finished their marksmanship got really good.”

  “I understand there was some wholesale retribution?”