A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery (15 page)

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.”

“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?”

I rubbed my face with my other hand. “In my line of work—pretty much all the time.”

He didn’t seem too sure as to how to answer. “Oh.”

I looked across the street at Wilcox Abstract, housed in a building that had been driven into twice by drivers not paying attention to where their cars were going. “Do you think the biggest troubles in life are a result of doing or not doing things?”

He edged back just a bit. “I really wouldn’t know.”

“Me either.”

He swallowed. “Hey, Sheriff?”

“Yep?”

“Did you know that there’s somebody in the back of your truck?”

I opened my door, stepped out into the street, and unsnapped the safety strap from my Colt: the tonneau cover was unfastened from the left corner. “You’re sure?”

The trucker nodded. “Yeah, there was this hand sticking out, trying to get that cover shut.”

I resnapped the safety strap on my sidearm and spoke in a loud voice. “Mr. Rockwell?”

A muffled reply came from under the tonneau. “Yes, sir.”

“Would you like to come out now?”

“Not particularly.”

“I’d prefer you did.”

His hand appeared at the corner, and he pushed the cover back further, smiled at me, then turned to the truck driver. “Damn your eyes, sir, as an informer.”

The trucker looked at me. “I should be going.”

He looked both ways to make sure he wasn’t going to get run over, which might have been a trifle cautious in that it was pretty desolate in Durant at three in the morning. Rockwell and I watched as he backed up the big truck and drove around us, took a left, and headed out of town.

The old man marveled at the size of the thing as it passed. “My Lord, big as a house. . . .” Pushing himself up the rest of the way, his long hair and beard looking more unkempt than usual, he turned to look at me. “You, sir, drive a great deal.”

“How long have you been in there?”

“Since this afternoon.”

I undid the rest of the snaps, lowered the tailgate, and reached a hand up to help him down to street level. “I’d imagine you’re hungry.”

He looked at me. “You are one big son of a gun, are you not?” He straightened his pants out and gave a shiver. “A little cold and thirsty, mostly, but I could eat.”

I thought about taking him back to the jail, but in all honesty I didn’t want to awaken Cord. I gestured toward the passenger side. “Climb in.”

He went around the truck as I shut the door behind me and put on my seat belt. When I looked up, he was still standing by the door. I hit the button and stared at him. “Is there a problem?”

He glanced at me and then at the door handle. “Don’t know how.”

We had to find out what booby hatch he’d escaped from. “Just pull sideways on that black thing.

He did as I requested, and the truck door bumped open. He slid in and climbed up on the seat. “Amazing, truly amazing.”

“You drove in the truck on the way back from the Lazy D-W, where you tried to steal the horses.”

He shook his head. “We only intended to borrow them.” He pulled the door closed behind him but not strongly enough for it to latch. “And at that time I never operated the mechanism.”

I sighed. “Well, you’re going to have to open it again and close it harder.”

He stared at the inside of the door.

“It’s the lever toward the front; pull it and push out.”

He finally got the door secured, and I drove us over to the Maverik at the on-ramp to I-25. “You’ll like this place—it’s owned by Mormons.” I got out and reminded him, “Lever on the front.”

I introduced Orrin Porter Rockwell to the wonders of the frozen burrito, microwave oven, and root beer, in that order. We now stood at the cash register, where I slid a fifty across the counter to the pimpled kid working the late shift. “Sorry, all I’ve got.”

Rockwell reached across and laid a few fingers on the bill, studying it. “Ulysses S. Grant on the denomination of the Union?”

“For quite some time now.”

The kid took the bill, studied the portrait of the eighteenth president of the United States, and then the old man. “Friend of yours, pops?”

“He was a drunkard.”

The kid used a marker to identify the bill as genuine. “I wouldn’t know.”

Rockwell got the door shut this time and was happily munching on his burrito as I stared at him. “So, you were in the truck when the woman crashed her car?”

“Which woman was that?”

“Wanda Bidarte Lynear.”

He stared at the dash, and I could tell he was choosing his words carefully. “I don’t know her.” He thought about it. “Sounds Spanish.” Turning, he focused the pale eyes on me and threw a thumb toward the back of my truck. “Nice and warm back there, under the tarp, but not as nice as this.”

“Uh-huh.” I continued to watch him eat. “How about Vann Ross Lynear; have you ever heard of him?”

“No, sir.”

“How about Roy Lynear?”

He continued eating as I watched, but he paused if for only a second and then shook his head. “Don’t know him either.”

I reached over and pinched Rockwell’s arm.

“Ouch.” He looked at me. “And why, may I ask, is it you did that?”

“Just to make sure you’re actually here—I’ve been having a little trouble with that lately.”

He paused and then nodded knowingly. “Visions?”

I thought about Henry Standing Bear and smiled. “That’s what a friend of mine has been calling them.”

“Perhaps you are the One; you certainly seem to have the size for it.”

I stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“The One, Mighty and Strong.”

I laughed. “I’m not a Mormon; I’m barely a Methodist.”

He went back to eating his burrito. “Pity.”

I continued to watch him for a while longer and then pulled the truck into reverse, backed out of the convenience store lot, and took the on-ramp to I-25 South. “Well, let’s go introduce you to Roy Lynear then.”

•   •   •

“Oil?”

The rippling effect of the Powder River set the keynote for the topography of the southern part of my county, where the Bighorn Mountains relaxed their grip and allowed the hills to subside into prairie.

The area had been the source of one of the largest oil holdings in the United States, but that time had passed and now the Teapot Dome reserves were only a testing ground, leased out to numerous oil companies for the development of experimental methods.

I followed Rockwell’s eyes to one of the pump jacks in the distance beside the front gate of the East Spring Ranch. “Yep.”

The nodding donkeys kept time to the geothermal beat, but it was unlikely that they were pumping much oil. The entire area had been put up for sale by the federal government, but there hadn’t been any takers; the other major naval oil reserve in Elk Hills, California, however, had fetched over three and a half billion—the largest privatization of federal property in history.