A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery (23 page)

I scrambled backward until my shoulders lodged against the skillet-hot ridged surface of one corner; I was trapped like a rat and yelling like a madman.

Double Tough was lying across my legs. The side of his head was badly burned, and I wasn’t even sure that the eye was still there. He wasn’t breathing, and all I could do was pull his body next to me and try to think fast.

I wasn’t sure what was still on the other side, but it had to be better than this.

I hoisted the two of us, shrugging Double Tough’s body against my chest again in a modified fireman’s carry, and prepared for the hunched dash to freedom. All I could think was that I couldn’t stop—no matter what happened, keep going.

I had pulled some of the soaked blankets over me for a little protection, but I couldn’t see because they covered my head. Suddenly it felt like the wall behind me was giving way. I half-expected the remainder of the ceiling to come crashing down and tottered forward still in hopes of finding a way out. About then two great weights slammed onto my shoulders, and the only thing I could think was that the roof had finally let go and the sixteen-inch centered rafters had landed on either side of my neck.

I struggled to pull free, but I could feel myself losing my balance and I fell backward, crashing into the exterior wall. The grip on my shoulders didn’t let up—something was dragging me. I held on to Double Tough’s body as I shot backward, but the smoke was invading the blankets at this height, my brain started to fog, and the grip on my shoulders felt like talons digging into my flesh.

This must have been what it was like to die—a giant messenger of the dead swooping down and carrying me along that hanging road to the camp beyond. The talons had to be from some giant owl, the only bird that eagles steered clear of.

His claws sunk deeper, and I felt the circulation cut off from my arms. I hit the hard ground and just lay there with the weight of the wet bedding and Double Tough’s body on top of me, trying to summon enough energy for another go. Not dead yet.

Suddenly, his body disappeared. I lifted my arms and tried to get hold of him, but there was nothing there. I flopped to my side and tried to pull the blankets off of me, but it was as if I were glued to them. Slowly I backpedaled out from under and finally slid my head clear.

I rolled over on my back and breathed, staring at the star-filled night and feeling the cold just starting to sink its teeth in. I felt around, but still couldn’t find his body anywhere nearby. It would appear that the giant owl, having given up on taking both of us, had dropped me and continued onto the camp of the dead with him alone. The hanging road was there, the thick strip of the Milky Way draped like a hammock from horizon to horizon in icy clarity.

I allowed my head to drop back onto the parking lot pavement and then rolled it the other way, finally seeing what had plucked my deputy and me from the burning building.

The giant owl was beating on Double Tough’s chest. I watched as my deputy’s head bounced against the asphalt. I reached out but couldn’t get to him. I yelled and shouted for the thing to go away, slapped my hand on the ground in an attempt to get his attention, but it ignored me and went back to tearing at Double Tough’s chest in some sort of ceremonial rite.

I raised my voice but could only croak out a warning that if I got my hands around the big owl’s neck he was going to rue the day he had decided to make birdseed out of us.

Finally the owl swiveled its head, shuddered, and took notice of me. I tried to sit up, but it pinned me to the ground. I coughed and choked up some of the soot from my throat and spat it to the side, then turned to grab hold of him in return.

The big bird fell to the side, seemingly as exhausted as I was. I still held on to the legs of the thing but then slowly realized that they were arms. It shook me loose and reached up to pull away its own wet, protective blanket that hung over its head, revealing Henry’s smudged and dirty face.

He sat there looking at me as I sank back to the pavement, but only for a moment, then turned and looked toward the fire, the wetness in his eyes reflecting the flames as they consumed the rest of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Substation.

I said something, but he wouldn’t look at me.

Feeling the weight of my head as it slipped sideways, I could see another set of eyes looking at me from a short distance away.

Double Tough.

I dragged myself across the asphalt through a couple of puddles and began to shake from the cold. My hand reached his face, the scorched glove touching his chin, but he didn’t blink.

I sat on the tailgate of my truck, sipped at a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and pulled the dry blanket a little closer around me, attempting to quell the constant shivering.

I watched as the Powder River Fire District volunteers recoiled their hoses and gathered their gear to beat a tired retreat back to the firehouse and their beds. The EMTs had loaded Double Tough into their van and had left.

Henry’s voice sounded distant. “One of the neighbors from across the street says he saw the light from inside but just thought it was the reflection from a wood-burning stove; the next time he looked, he said, the entire building was going up.”

I lowered the cup and looked at the pool of illumination from the dusk-to-dawn light on the other side of the parking lot, the halogen spilling onto the faded red Suburban, pink and unearthly. The truck sat there like some bashful ingénue at center stage, backed against a copse of fledgling aspens leaning in like a parted curtain.

I remembered how much better the thing had run after Double Tough had taken it under his mechanical wing; how numerous times when I had made the drive down to deliver paychecks, I would find his hillbilly ass under the hood of the thirty-year-old unit, reveling in the big-block, carbureted, dual-exhausted monstrosity.

“There were some other individuals at the periphery behind the sawhorses. I interviewed them, but none of them appeared to have seen anything.”

I remember Double Tough telling me he was from someplace back East, some hollow in the middle of the Appalachian mountains; about how he’d gotten a degree in geology or mineralogy or something. I thought about how I’d wished I’d listened more closely to his story.

“Walter.”

I stared at the truck and thought about what a dinosaur it was, and how it was a lot like him—unsophisticated, honest, and durable.

“There is nothing more you could have done.”

I stood, dumping the rest of the coffee from the cup and tossing the container into a bucket that served as a trash receptacle, and, pulling the blanket up higher, squished my way toward the large SUV with the Cheyenne Nation in tow.

“I heard you yelling, punched through the wall, grabbed you by your shoulders, and pulled you out. He probably did not know what happened, Walt.”

The sun would be up in a few hours—the dawn of a new day. From the flats of the Powder River country, a gaseous ball of hydrogen billions of degrees in heat would brighten the mountains behind me. I would meet that day with a serious degree of heat myself, a smoldering little ember that would become the size of a man, I’d say—most certainly more than one—which I would tinder until I could find just the right fuel.

“Walter?”

I fumed like the fuse on a bundle of dynamite and looked at my best friend in the world, the man who had just saved my life again.

The Bear stared into my face and didn’t like what he found there, but knowing me as he did, he didn’t say anything, just kept pace.

I took the last few steps and stopped at the corner of the official vehicle of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department, my department, and stared through the back window of the Suburban. Double Tough’s clothes were piled in the back, and it looked as if nothing had been disturbed.

I hitched the old army blanket higher to cover my neck, turned, the tail end of the thing flaring with my effort, and walked toward the crumpled husk of the substation with the Bear trailing after me. He moved a little to the right in an attempt to see the side of my face with those dark eyes of his, seemingly darker than before, his eyes always growing deeper and more liquid as these crucial, emotional moments became a part of his soul.

At what used to be the front door, I looked straight at him to assure him that I wasn’t just wandering, sidestepped in, and went over to the scorched empty key rack. I stepped on something and stooped to pick up a set of keys that were under a couple of inches of dirty water. They were on a funny ring I’d never noticed before from some second- or maybe third-tier amusement park with an image of a giant character who looked a little like Bozo, leaning on a structure that read
CAMDEN PARK—AT THE
SIGN OF THE HAPPY CLOWN
.

There was something else, too, that I noticed as I bent over—the vague scent of kerosene.

I turned around and started back toward the Suburban. I flipped to the second key and attempted to get it somewhere in the vicinity of the keyhole that unlocked the tailgate. My hands continued to shake, and the damn thing fell. I started to lean down, but the Cheyenne Nation was quicker, as usual, even catching them before they struck the pavement.

He stood and slipped in front of me, and I listened to the unctuous whir of the window descending. He reached inside, pulled the latch, flipping down the tailgate, and glanced back at me, standing there quaking. “You need to get out of those clothes.”

I pointed a quivering hand at the dirty laundry and willed my finger to stop shaking—if it didn’t, I silently swore, I was going to bite it off. It must’ve heard me and grew steady.

Henry sighed and pushed the clothing that smelled like my deputy aside till there was nothing but the ribbed surface of the Chevrolet’s floor. He turned to look at me and then walked around the vehicle, systematically unlocking and opening each door, looking inside and then closing it.

He finished his investigation, had circled the vehicle, and, leaning against the quarter-panel, stopped beside me. “Nothing.”

I nodded, still staring at the back of the beat-up truck. “Inside the substation, did you smell kerosene?”

“Yes.”

When I extended my hand, he’d already pulled his cell phone from his shirt pocket and handed it to me with Verne Selby’s number punched in and ringing. I held the device to my ear and waited through five rings before Verne’s wife, Rebecca, answered their phone.

She whispered. “He—hello?”

“Rebecca, it’s Walt. I need to speak with Verne.”

There was a rustling of sheets, and her voice rose. “Walter, do you know what time it is?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t and I don’t mean to be rude, but gimme Verne.”

I heard her talk to the judge, and after a moment I heard his voice. “Hello?”

“I need a warrant.”

He cleared his throat. “Now?”

“Now.”

“I can get the paperwork going in the morning. . . .”

“Right now. I’m going into East Spring Ranch down near Short Drop with or without a warrant—you can back me up with some paperwork or I can just go in there on my own. I’m in Powder Junction right now, and either way I’m headed south in a few minutes.”

I could almost see him nodding into the receiver. “I’ll fax it to the sheriff’s substation.”

I took a breath, staring at the powdery paint of Double Tough’s unit but refusing to look at the burned-out corpse of a structure across the parking lot. “Send it to the town hall instead.”

•   •   •

“We are waiting?”

“We are not.” We were standing at the counter of the Powder Junction Town Hall with Brian Kinnison, in anticipation of the warrant, when the Bear sabotaged me by handing me his cell phone again.

I looked at him, but he gestured for me to talk and walked away.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

I sighed. “I’m going in there and none too friendly.”

“Then what?”

“I’m going to find out what’s going on, and I’m going to get who did this.”

I could hear her struggling to get her boots on. “You need help.”

“I’ve got help.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“I’ll be gone in five.” I walked over to Henry and handed the phone to him. “Here.” Vic was still yelling on the other end. I returned to the counter just as Brian was pulling the papers out of the fax machine. He put them on the flat surface and looked at me.

“You’re sure these people did this?”

“Yep, I am.”

“You want me to alert the militia?”

I half-smiled, in spite of myself. “I didn’t know you had a militia.”

He glanced at the clock on the wall and smiled back. “Seems like a good time to start one up.”

I stuffed the warrant in the inside pocket of my jacket, which wafted the smell of a dead campfire, sat my water-mauled hat on my head a little straighter, and started out the door. Henry was waiting for me as I hit Powder Junction’s one-block boardwalk, and I could see he was thinking. I stepped up even with him and asked. “Why the substation? Why not just take the bit? They had to know this was going to start a war.”

“Yes.”

“But why him? I was the one pushing; I’m the one most likely to go after them.” I patted the papers in my pocket. “This guarantees it.”

“Yes.”

“They thought they could steamroll us out here in the middle of nowhere and get away with it?” I stuck an index finger toward him. “Don’t say yes.”

He grunted. “I am hoping that is not the case.”

I gestured to the tiny street. “Because he was closer?”

The Bear shrugged. “We are only forty minutes away.”

“Twenty, according to Vic.”

He nodded. “We should be going; I think I can keep you from shooting people, but I am not sure I can dissuade her.”

I climbed in on the driver’s side and pulled the door closed behind me as the Bear slung himself in. I watched as he reached over, pulled the Remington Wingmaster from the brace that held it against the dash and transmission hump, and jacked the breech of the twelve-gauge like a sidekick in some bullshit TV show where they did such things a dozen times. The unspent shell went flying into the back, unlike on TV, and I looked at him. “We might need that round.”

He smiled, and a line settled alongside the upturned corner of his mouth as he popped the lid on the center console—he knew all my caches and clichés—and pulled out an extra box of shells. “What other weapons do we have?”

I started the Bullet and pulled the gear selector down into drive. “Steadfast resolution.” I turned and looked at him, not as if he would take the option, but it had to be said. “If you want out, now would be the time.”

He actually laughed as he reloaded the round. “I try never to miss an episode of
Steadfast Resolution
—it is my favorite program.”

•   •   •

The Cheyenne Nation was the first to notice that the lights were on at the Short Drop Merc.

I slowed my truck from its sonic speed and pulled to the side of the road just past the turnoff into the pint-sized town. I leaned forward; it seemed as though almost every light in the place was on, especially in the bar, and a few vehicles were parked out front, including a decked-out Ford King Ranch pickup.

The Bear shook his head. “You do not think . . . ?”

“Yes, I do.” I threw the Bullet into reverse, scorching the scoria surface of Route 192 with two black strips of Michelin rubber about ninety feet long. I locked it up and spun the wheel, bouncing the three-quarter-ton over the edge of the pavement and down the slight grade leading into town past the signature hemp noose that swung from the cottonwood.

I kept my brights on as I slid up to the boardwalk hitching post alongside the other vehicles, my headlights directed into the front windows, a copious cloud of dry, ochre-colored dust drifting past us and blowing against the structure like an angry orange smell.

“I take it we are not counting on the element of surprise?”

I threw my door open. “Nope.”

His hand caught mine as I started to exit. “Does not make sense; remember that.”

I looked at him, said nothing, and then nodded.

We mounted the steps, and I didn’t bother with the knob, instead choosing to enter the room boot first. The door bounced off the wall and started back, but I caught it with one hand and stood there holding it.

I noticed my hands had stopped shaking for good.

The only person in the room that I did not want to shoot was standing behind the bar with her hands on her hips, keeping enough collateral damage distance between her and what appeared to be her unwanted patrons—smart woman, that Eleanor Tisdale.

There were three men at the bar and two more playing pool at the table to my left.

I noticed the Cheyenne Nation drifting in the door behind me like casual death, the shotgun trailing behind his leg completely unnoticeable.

“Well, howdy
,
Sheriff. You look like you could use a drink.”

I looked at the three, especially at the one with the mouth whom I recognized as Ronald, Roy Lynear’s oldest son, the one from over in South Dakota. Behind him were Lockhart and the younger strong arm whose acquaintance I’d made from a distance in Butte County.

Gloss and Bidarte were at the pool table, and the Bear had already taken a few steps in that direction. Having cased and set the room, I started toward Ronald and Lockhart and watched as the muscle slid in front of them. I guess they thought they had numbers on their side, but maybe they had never seen an episode of
Steadfast Resolution
, let alone the season finale.

Lockhart was the unstated leader, I was sure of that, but he lingered and made no move to engage me. I hit the younger one a good, solid roundhouse to the side of his head, which sent him into the bar where he made the mistake of trying to catch himself; I took that opportunity to uppercut him and send him back, dragging along a few glasses and more than a few beer bottles with him as he fell.

The favored son and Lockhart didn’t move and stayed there, not lifting a hand from the edge. Ronald Lynear’s eyes widened as I pulled up over him, my nose about an inch or two higher than the top of his head.

His face turned upward as I made a show of breathing in his scent. He appeared to be paralyzed but finally eased out the words in a smoother voice than I would’ve thought him capable of in such a situation. “Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing, Sheriff?”

I breathed in deeply. “They say that guilt has a specific odor, one you can smell from a mile away.”

He waited a moment and then asked, “And what is it that one of us might be guilty of?”

Still sniffing like a bloodhound, I leaned a little to the side. “The willful destruction of county property.”