A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery (11 page)

I waited until they were next to me, keeping my head in my wallet, pretending to count out bills as I kept my attention on young Edgar and his sister. “Nope, just buying some baked goods.”

Lynear glanced across the road at the stars on my doors, making a point of looking around the Cheyenne Nation, who now stood facing us with his muscled arms folded across his chest. Ronald put out his hand, feminine with long fingers and manicured nails, in an attempt to press down my wallet. “There’s no need for that; I’m sure we’ll be happy to make a donation to . . . the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department.”

He left his hand on mine until I looked up at him. “No need.”

He shot a look at the huge man beside him and stuffed both hands in his pants pockets. “This is my friend and spiritual advisor, Earl Gloss.”

I glanced toward the Bear, still standing in the road with a slight smile on his face. “That’s mine.”

Ronald Lynear waved at Henry and then turned back to me. “He’s Native American?”

“Northern Cheyenne, to be exact.”

He nodded and called out. “We will look forward to Lamanite assistance in the apocalyptic wars to come with the dark-skinned children of Satan.”

Henry’s grin broadened and his voice, even though it was low, carried in the wind like a scythe. “I would not count on it.”

Lynear’s eyes hardened a little, but he disguised it by turning back to me. “Where, exactly, is Absaroka County; if you don’t mind my asking, Sheriff?”

“Wyoming.”

“Oh, and what brings you to our fair state?” He gestured toward the table and the two young people still standing in his presence. “Besides the baked goods?”

“I’m looking for a woman.”

He didn’t look surprised. “And how can I help you?”

“Her name is Sarah Tisdale, and I have reason to believe that she is a member of your group.

He turned to confer with the older man. “Earl, have we heard of this woman?”

Gloss was quick to speak up. “Not that I am aware of, Mr. Lynear.”

I gave the two of them a nice, long stare. “Strange, because she made inquiries at the Butte County Sheriff’s Office concerning her child, Cord. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of that person either?”

Lynear turned again, and I was starting to get the impression that he was a pirate talking to the parrot on his shoulder. “Earl?”

The bearded man shook his head. “No, never heard of him.”

I stared at Gloss. “Funny, I didn’t say anything about it being a him.”

He looked past me at Edgar, who still stood by his sister, now clutching the can of pop to her chest, both of them keeping their eyes to the ground. “Edgar, where have you been and where is your truck?”

I interrupted. “There’s been an accident; no one was hurt, but their truck was dumped in a creek bed up near one of your gun towers.”

It was his turn to pause and then emphasize, “Observation towers.”

I glanced at Edgar, still studying the few sprigs of grass at his feet, and then turned back to Ronald Lynear. “And what is it you’re observing?”

“The Lord rewards those who are prepared.”

“I’m afraid I ran the boys off the bridge, but I’ll be happy to pay for the damages. We were just giving them a ride home.”

“I’m sure that also will be unnecessary, Sheriff.”

I kept my eyes on him but spoke loudly enough for them all to hear. “I am an honest man, Mr. Lynear, and pay for my mistakes. Besides, we’ve got the room for the children, and I’d kind of like to get a look at your place.”

“We’re a private people, Sheriff—I’m sure you’ll understand if we don’t offer you an invitation.” He gestured for Gloss to retrieve the children and, legally, there was little I could do, and he knew it.

The big guy bumping my shoulder as a parting shot smirked as he went around me, but then made a tactical mistake by pushing his luck just a touch too far. He shoved Edgar toward his so-called father and then reached down and viciously slapped the can of soda from the girl’s hands. “We don’t allow our children to drink such trash.”

Henry said later that the man might’ve fared better if he’d had any idea what it was that was about to happen next. The Bear said he might’ve even been able to stay on his feet, but I doubt it. As it happened, when my clenched fist struck the side of his head and sent him reeling into the ditch, he slapped against the ground like a poleaxed steer.

The Cheyenne Nation, always aware of what I was going to do before I did it, had already stepped out to block the other backseater, and I could see that Vic had unsnapped the safety strap on her 9mm and was looking eye to eye with one of the polo shirts before he turned to study me.

The scouring of wingtips grazed the inside of my lungs and the coolness overtook my face as my hands grew still. I faced the two remaining men with my knuckles resting on the card table and thought about how Edgar’s sister had been sitting out here all day without supplies, and how she was likely to be left behind until there was nothing more to sell.

“I haven’t bought my baked goods.”

One of the best ways I have discovered to get back in the good graces of your staff is to show up with a couple of boxloads of desserts and deposit them in the communal area near Ruby’s desk. I had done so and was now brooding in my office over a tepid cup of coffee that resided in my old-school Denver Broncos mug with the chip on the rim.

It was resting on a couple of magazines, and my forearm was lying flat on the desk with my chin propped on it as I slowly turned the mug by the handle and studied the chip, stained and grimy-looking from coffee residue.

“You could get a new one.”

I continued staring at my sole piece of office drinkware. “I don’t want a new one.”

The Cheyenne Nation leaned in my doorway, drinking a mugful himself. “Then what do you want?” He noticed the magazines under my arm. “Do you mind if I ask why you have the 1972 January edition of
Playboy
magazine on your desk?”

“I’m thinking of taking up airbrushing.” I waited a moment and then asked a favor. “Hey, do you think you could take Mr. Rockwell out for a walk long enough for me to talk to Cord about his mother?”

“Yes.” He waited and watched me continue to contemplate my mug awhile before asking, “Are you depressed because you missed chess with Lucian last night?”

“No.”

“Are you depressed because the Durant Dogies are retiring your number?”

“No.”

He nudged his sizable shoulder off the doorjamb and loitered. “Are you mad at yourself for that roundhouse punch that planted that farmer like seed corn?”

I thought about it. “I suppose.”

“Some seeds need planting.”

“It’s not going to make that boy and his sister’s lives any easier.”

He sipped his coffee. “How do you know that? It’s possible that now that he has been manhandled, he is less likely to manhandle.”

“That’s not how it works, and you know it.”

He considered his own mug, which obviously belonged to Vic and read in bold script
PHROM PHILLY AND
PHUCKING PROUD OF IT.
“You could arrest them.”

“Tim Berg could arrest them.”

“Yes.”

I rose up and leaned back in my chair, hooking my foot under my desk again in an attempt to not imitate Buster Keaton. I listened to the geese honking and glanced out the window in time to see the tail end of a large V-pattern headed due south.

His smile lingered. “They are complex, those chambers of the human heart.”

“Yep, they are.” Henry stood there for a while, both of us saying nothing.

“You do realize that it is simply a myogenic muscular organ, right?”

I sighed and stood, leaving the copy of
Playboy
on my desk but folding and stuffing the gun magazine underneath in my back pocket. “I know it can carry a lot of weight.”

The Bear followed as I walked out of my lair and into the Turkish bazaar that had become my sheriff’s office. From somewhere, Ruby had procured paper plates and plastic utensils and even a triangular spatula that she was now using to divide up a pecan pie.

“How are the goods?”

The newly returned Saizarbitoria and Vic were sharing a bag of cookies and were seated on the bench beside the stairs; the Basquo was excited. “We should go back and buy more.”

“I bought them out.” I turned to Ruby. “Need I ask where our two lodgers are?”

She glanced at the old Seth Thomas on the wall above the stairwell. “Well, it’s 8:43, and I’d say they are downstairs watching the 8:43 showing of
My Friend Flicka
.”

“As opposed to the 7:13 or the 10:03 presentation?”

“Exactly.”

When Henry, Vic, Sancho, and I arrived at the base of the steps, the pair was still transfixed by the television on the rolling cart. I thanked the lucky star on my chest that Frymire had been able to find a dual-deck player that accommodated both DVDs and VHS tapes. A lot of our certification and training classes were still on videotapes, which I tried hard not to think about. “How’s the horse?”

We’d timed our entrance pretty well in that the end credit music was swelling, and the two looked over at us. Rockwell stood, the way he always did when Vic entered the room, to her unending puzzlement. “It is interesting that the story only changes in small ways each time the machine tells it.”

“I think you’ll find it’s exactly the same.”

The old man disagreed. “No; subtle but definitely different.”

“Uh-huh.” I made my way into the briefing room, pulled out one of the chairs, and sat. Vic and Santiago followed my lead, but Henry remained at the base of the steps.

Rockwell studied the Cheyenne Nation. “You have a savage with you.”

I glanced over my shoulder. “Actually, he’s the most civilized of all of us.”

Henry made a show of waving at the crazy person.

“I was hoping that you might take a walk with him while I have a chat with Cord.”

Rockwell, probably weighing his odds, studied the Bear. “Where would we be going?”

The Cheyenne Nation spoke from the stairs. “Just down the block.”

The Man of God, Son of Thunder stood, gathered his coat from the chair beside him, and for the first time I noticed that he walked with a slight limp. “The cookies were delicious, but I could stand a real breakfast.”

Henry glanced at me and then back to Rockwell. “Sure.”

We all watched the unlikely pair do an exit dance at the foot of the stairs, with the Cheyenne Nation finally realizing the mountain man wasn’t going to allow the savage to get behind him.

We watched the two of them ascend, and then I turned to look at the young man. He was as earnest as usual but looked a little tired from watching the quadruple-feature of
Flicka
. “How you doin’, kiddo?”

“Good.” He smiled. “I’m hungry, too. Can we get something else to eat?”

“Soon, but I’d like to talk a few minutes if that’s okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

I leaned back in one of the plastic chairs, form-fitted to fit no one’s form. “I think I met some friends of yours over in South Dakota yesterday.”

“Who?”

“Eddy, Edgar, Merrill, and Joe Lynear.”

He smiled some more. “I do know them.”

“I also met some other members of the church—elders, I guess you would call them.” I waited a moment. “Any idea why it is that they would say they didn’t know you?”

His eyes dropped, and, trying to get a read on what was going on in his mind, I studied him.

He spoke slowly. “When you are banished from the First Order, you lose your seat in the celestial realm and are deemed a traitor. If they’ve decided I don’t exist, then that’s the best I can hope for.”

“What’s the worst?”

“Death.”

I glanced at Vic and Sancho. “They would try and kill you for leaving the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God?”

“For testifying against it.”

“Have you . . .” I had to choose my words carefully. “Known of them killing anyone?”

“I’ve never seen it, if that’s what you mean, but people disappear, especially since things changed.”

“People like you?”

He thought about that one. “My situation is different.”

“How?”

“I’m the One.”

“In what way?”

“Through lineage, I am the One of Three.”

I sighed. “Three what?”

“The One, Mighty and Strong.”

I could feel a headache coming on from all the cultspeak. “Who are the other two?”

“My brothers.” He then added, “My half-brothers. George and Ronald.”

I thought about how Eddy had referred to Edgar, and tried not to think about the tangled webs of ancestry within the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God. “And are they still in the church?”

“Yes. You see, my father’s teachings are different from those of the Church of Latter-day Saints; they believe through the proclamation of Joseph Smith Jr. in 1832 that there will be a leader of the church who will come to set the house of God in order, that he will be the One, Mighty and Strong. According to my father, the mistake they make is that it will be one man, when in reality it will be three.”

“So you’re the One, and your brothers George and Ronald go by the titles of Mighty and Strong?”

“Yes.”

I rested my face in a hand and spoke through my fingers. “So, let me get this straight: your father is Roy Lynear?”

“Yes.”

“And does he know where you are?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

I threw a thumb over my shoulder. “Then who sent your bodyguard, Mr. Rockwell, the Danite, Man of God, Son of Thunder?”

“I don’t know.”

I brought my face up to look at him. “Have you discussed this with Mr. Rockwell?”

“Yes, and he won’t say.”

“Well, I’ll take that up with him. In the meantime, do you remember the conversation you had with Nancy Griffith, the school psychologist?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, she told me that you said something about the possibility that your mother might be dead.” He didn’t say anything but looked at the blank screen on the television as if there might be some comfort there. “She mentioned that it might’ve been something that happened recently.”

He cleared his throat, then blinked and nodded with a disconcerting certitude. “She’s dead.”

I let that one settle for a while before continuing. “I’m sorry to have to ask these questions, Cord, but how do you know?”

His eyes glanced off mine for an instant. “She hasn’t come looking for me.”

“She was in the Butte County Sheriff’s Office a few weeks ago, asking for you.”

He nodded and continued to stare at the screen.

I glanced back at Vic and Saizarbitoria, sitting on the edge of their seats. “If she was killed, who do you suppose killed her?”

He stammered. “I . . . I’m not sure.”

“I think you are.” I reached behind me and pulled the gun almanac from my back pocket. “Is this yours?” He nodded as I leafed through the dog-eared pages. “You’ve got a lot of high-powered weaponry circled—any idea who you might want to use them on?”

His eyes went back to the TV, blank as the screen. “I get angry sometimes.”

“That’s normal; everybody gets angry.” I waited, but it didn’t seem as if he was willing to come forward with anything more. “Cord, if someone has done something bad to your mother, then I’m in a position to do something about it.”

We sat there in the silence for a while, and then he spoke again. “Those horses down at that ranch . . . They weren’t friendly like Flicka.”

I smiled at the change of subject. “No, those are loose range ponies and they don’t have that much interaction with human beings.”

His mouth moved, but no words came out for a moment. “Do . . . Do you think they can smell it?”

“Smell what?”

“The killing; do you think they can smell the killing on us?”

I was at a loss as to how to respond to that and discovered my hand had crept up to grip the lower part of my jaw. “What do you mean by killing?”

His eyes shifted to the floor, and but for the subject I could’ve sworn he was discussing the weather. “When we misbehaved one day, they took us out to one of the cattle ranches back in Texas, Mr. Lockhart’s ranch.”

“And who is Mr. Lockhart?”

“One of the elders of the church; he’s tall like you but with bristly hair.”

The man on the road with the black polo shirt and the crew cut.

“It was one of the places they took you if you were bad.” The intake of breath rattled in his lungs like tin siding in a high wind. “There was a metal rack that held the cattle. . . .”

“A squeeze chute?”

His eyes rose to mine but then sank again, and his voice grew quiet and almost inaudible. “It held the cattle still with their heads sticking out.” His cobalt eyes stared at the concrete floor. “They had a chain saw there, and they made us cut the heads off the cows.” He swallowed, but his voice was dry like a rasp. “While they were still alive—said it would toughen us up.”

•   •   •

I’d never met Bishop Goodman from the Church of Latter-day Saints and had never even darkened the doors of the church that made its home in the now-defunct carpet store at the south corner of the Durant bypass that reconnected with the interstate highway.

“He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the Mormon church and its teachings.”

Henry Standing Bear and I were having lunch with the bishop at the Busy Bee Café, and I was watching Cord through the sometimes swinging door as he washed dishes in the kitchen like a madman. The madman we were discussing at present, Orrin Porter Rockwell, was asleep on a bunk in my holding cell. “So, he is a Mormon.”

“More than that.” Goodman glanced at the Bear. “When your friend came walking into the church, I thought I was having a vision. Not only is he the living embodiment of the historical figure physically, his understanding of the church is absolutely period as well.”

“Meaning?”

The tall, thickset man with an unruly head of hair adjusted his glasses and leaned forward. “The Mormon Church of Latter-day Saints has gone through a number of reformations, including disavowing polygamy in 1890 with the threat of excommunication, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of any of these things. His knowledge of the church seems to have had an arrested development and stops at around 1880. Also, his personal knowledge of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Ina Coolbrith . . . He even told me of a personal conversation he’d had with the explorer Richard Francis Burton when he was staying with Bishop Lysander Dayton in a village near the City of Salt Lake, and how, over the bishop’s objections, he had sent for a bottle of Valley Tan Whiskey. The two of them sat there all night, shot for shot, and Rockwell advised the Ohioan to sleep with a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun and to make a dry camp miles from any campfire and to avoid the main trail because they were choked with White Indians. No offense, but you know . . .” He looked at Henry. “Individuals who passed themselves off as real Indians so that they could prey on travelers on the roads to California.”

The Bear looked back at him. “None taken.”

He straightened in his chair and shook his head. “The man is a veritable storehouse of historical knowledge.”

I sipped my coffee. “Bishop Goodman, you don’t really believe that . . .”