Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery (11 page)

“But nothing on Robby?”

“No.”

He leaned against the shooting bench. “Would it be all right if I sat down?”

“Sure.” I took his elbow and seated him. “You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m just . . .”

I glanced at Vic, who made a face and then covered it with a hand. “Sorry about that; we just need to ask a few more questions, knock on a few more doors, just to make sure that nothing was missed in that initial investigation.”

“Yeah, I understand.” He took a few deep breaths. “I just wasn’t ready for that, you know?”

My undersheriff wandered off to a different shooting station, just to give the young man some space as I folded my arms and stood in front of him. “I do.”

He took a moment to collect himself and then spoke into his lap. “Every time I think I’ve come to terms with it, something happens and I feel like . . .” He pulled the Walker back out and began disassembling it by rote in a mindless fashion. It seemed to settle his nerves, and the words started falling from his mouth as he clicked each empty cylinder. “When I was younger and just getting started in period shooting, this guy at a local gun shop told me I should top off every black-powder load with a couple of grains of Bullseye just to keep the fowling down; blew the nipple off and blasted the hammer back to full cock—still can’t hardly hear anything out of my right ear.” He looked up at me. “Three months, and it still feels like that whenever I hear about Robby.”

I nodded and studied my boots. “My wife died a number of years back, and I still start conversations with her in our empty house till I remember that she’s not there anymore.”

He scraped his bottom lip through his teeth. “At least you know what happened to her.”

“I do.”

“That’s the worst part, not knowing.” He shook his head. “Wondering what happened . . . I like to think that she’s okay; that she just decided to go somewhere else, you know? Like Florida or Hawaii. I like to think that she just got tired of her life, of me—and is laying on some beach somewhere.”

Vic had wandered back, and I glanced at her, but she wouldn’t make eye contact with either of us.

The kid kept talking, and I was really glad that the Walker wasn’t loaded. “I mean, we were divorced for about six months, and she even went back to her maiden name, but I kept hoping that we’d get back together.” He glanced around. “That’s why I went in with my dad on the family business, you know, in hopes that
she’d see that I was settling down and getting my shit together . . .” His eyes shot to Vic. “Sorry about my language, ma’am.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She moved in closer. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“At the restaurant, the Flying J. I’d sometimes go in there just so I could look at her—nothing creepy, I just missed her, you know?”

Finally, Vic glanced at me. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“It was lunchtime, so she didn’t have any time to talk, but we made plans to maybe go see a movie later in the week—but then she never called.” He reassembled the pistol and reholstered it. “She’d rented an apartment downtown, and I went by to check on her. Her car wasn’t there, so I went over to the Flying J and her car was sitting in the parking lot, covered with dust, so I knew it hadn’t been moved. I asked the manager to check the schedule, but he said she’d punched out two nights before and hadn’t been back since.”

“So, wherever she went, she went there from work and without her car.”

“Yeah.”

Vic leaned in. “Did she have any new friends, hobbies, or occupations?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“No new people in her life?”

“No. I mean, not that I knew of.” He sighed. “We were divorced, so it’s possible she wasn’t telling me everything.”

Vic cleared her throat. “Was she seeing anybody else?”

“No.”

“You sound pretty certain.”

He stood and walked a little away from us. “I kept a pretty close eye on her after we split up.” He turned and inclined his
head. “Look, I know how that sounds, but I was just worried about her. Robby was good-looking, and you should’ve seen how those guys at the truck stop would hit on her, even when we were married.”

I interrupted. “So you followed her?”

“I did. I know that sounds bad, but I’d just started lightening up on it when she disappeared. Can you imagine how that feels? I mean, if I’d been there the day she . . .”

I waited a moment before asking. “Did she have any friends or family out of town?”

“She had an aunt and uncle in Wisconsin, but she didn’t like them.”

“Nobody else?”

“No.”

Vic interrupted. “What were her hobbies?”

The question surprised the young man, and he took his time answering. “She did plays with the local theater groups—she wasn’t very good but she was pretty and always got cast.” He thought about it. “She worked out and she ran, cooked; she was a really great cook.”

My undersheriff leaned against the shooting stand beside me. “Are there any family members here in town that we could talk to?”

“Her mom—Sadie’s got a place on East Eighth Street, next to the Mount Pisgah Cemetery, which is where the old she-devil belongs.”

I smiled at the age-old war of son-in-law and mother-in-law; surprisingly, I’d gotten along famously with mine. “I take it you two don’t get along?”

“Robby and her mother didn’t get along.”

Vic added. “Father?”

He looked at her and smiled. “Dead; that, or hiding out from Sadie. The old bat got hold of me about a month ago, trying to get a petition together for a . . . I don’t know what they call it—one of those things where they declare you dead without finding your body?”

“Death in absentia?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“The state of Wyoming usually calls for the individual to be missing for five years before you’re allowed to petition for a declaration of death.”

“It didn’t seem right to me, either. Anyway, she wanted me to sign a bunch of stuff and I wouldn’t do it and I haven’t heard from her since.”

Vic pulled her duty notebook and a pen from inside her coat and mumbled to herself. “Sadie Payne? Sounds like a character from
Damn Yankees
 . . .”

“What’s that?”

Vic snorted as she wrote. “A musical where people sell their souls to the devil.”

He nodded. “That’s Sadie, all right.”

“We’ll go talk to her.”

“Is there anything else you can think of that might help us, anything at all?”

“No.” His voice broke. “I wish I could.”

Vic handed him one of her cards. “If you do think of something, give me a call, okay? Unlike some other members of the Absaroka County law enforcement community, I have what they call a cell phone, a bastion of modern technology.”

We stood there for a moment more, and it was as if he didn’t want us to go, his hand dropping to the Colt Walker at his side. “You sure you don’t want to try it?”

I stared at him for a second and then raised both hands. “I’m not going to be responsible if that thing blows up.”

He turned toward Vic. “You?”

She shrugged and looked at me and then back to him. “Fuck it, why not?”

Shooting a black-powder pistol is a process that can’t be rushed, which is why a lot of the old hands in the day carried five or six cap-and-ball revolvers so that as soon as they emptied one they could grab another or another in the face of a couple thousand Indians.

We watched as Bret dumped three nozzles’ worth of powder into the cylinders and then stuffed each with a .457 round ball, before adjusting each cylinder to use the loading ram and pressing each round home. He thumbed off the tiny ring of lead from each chamber, indicating an airtight seal, and then applied some lubricant to each round to grease it up but also, he said, to guard against a chain fire.

“What’s a chain fire?”

I continued to watch the young man work. “A loose spark that causes all six rounds to go off at once.”

“I bet that’s exciting.” She watched as he picked up some of the smaller pieces of antler. “What the hell is that for?”

“Using it to press the percussion caps onto the nipples.”

“I am all about nipples.”

“If you don’t get them seated tight, you get that chain fire.”

“I am all about getting the nipples seated right.” She pivoted toward me. “These chain fires, they happen a lot?”

I shrugged. “Not only will you have crippled your shooting hand, but you’ll also have blown up an eleven-thousand-dollar piece of frontier history.”

She spoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Bill me, chicken shit.”

Bret held out the Walker to her again, handle first. “You ready?”

About fifty yards away was a standard 7-8-9-X silhouette target hanging from a guide wire and anchored at the bottom with clip-on fishing weights. Holding the revolver with the barrel in the air, she sidled into the stall, raised it, and held it up close to her face. “Born ready.”

I mumbled to myself. “Boy howdy.”

Bret and I, keeping a watchful distance, looked on as she reached down and moved the ear protection headset on the counter away. The mountain man called out to her. “You sure you don’t want to use those?”

I had to smile, being familiar with my undersheriff’s shooting tendencies.

She shook her head and called out over her shoulder. “I always like to hear the first one.”

It was like thunder—very long, loud thunder. Black-powder guns don’t tend to snap or jerk like modern weapons, but rather they give a strong and sustained push that resonates from your shoulders down through your spine and into your solid organs like a mortar.

I leaned forward enough to spot a rupture in the black silhouette of the paper target at the center of the forehead, and it didn’t take much imagination for me to know that her target was Tomás Bidarte.

My undersheriff turned in the halo of white smoke with an undimmed and dazzling smile, almost as if she’d just arrived as a Faustian apparition—the kind you’d gladly trade your soul to. “Shoots about two inches high; I was going for the mouth.”

—

I carried the Colt back into the gun shop proper, the cross-draw holster hanging from my shoulder. Jim was seated behind the main counter at the leatherworking bench and held out a beautifully crafted badge wallet when he saw me coming.

Vic stood at my side as I examined the workmanship, opening it up to see my star mounted in the basketweave setting. “It’s beautiful.”

He nodded. “Thank you.”

I slipped the holster from my shoulder and handed it out to him. “Bret said to bring this in and give it to you.”

“Where’s he?”

“He’s out there sitting on one of the benches. He said he wanted a little time to himself.”

Bussell didn’t take the holstered weapon, so I laid it on the counter. He removed his glasses and rubbed the spots where the pads rested on his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “I was afraid of that.” He replaced the glasses and reached out to move the weapon. “You shoot it?”

I glanced down at Vic. “She did.”

He smiled at her. “How’d you like it?”

“A lot.” She looked behind us out the swinging doors that led to the range. “He gonna be okay?”

The leathersmith thumbed the loop off from the hammer and slipped the elegant-looking revolver from the holster. “You don’t clean these things after you shoot ’em, they start corroding and pretty soon they’re useless—I’ve told him that a thousand times.” He disassembled the Walker and began cleaning the weapon very carefully, as befit the museum piece. “Loaned him the money for this thing, and you’d think it was his kid or something . . .”

“It’s quite a weapon.”

“Bret fell in love with it at first sight—kind of like he did with Robby.”

I looked down at Vic as she leaned against the counter and reached out to put a hand on his shoulder.

“He’s never been the same since she’s been gone.” He looked up at us, and it was one of those moments where you wished you did anything else but this for a living, like wash cars maybe. Bussell gestured toward the swinging doors as he cleaned out the barrel of the Colt. “I found him out there about a month ago with this gun in his hands; he’d been drinking . . . He said that he just couldn’t put up with it anymore and that the pain was about to kill him and he’d rather do it himself.” The gunsmith quietly reassembled the revolver, the barely audible clicks of the metal justifying the workmanship of its original manufacture. “He said that if he was going to do it, he might as well do it with the best gun he had . . .”

Neither Vic nor I said anything.

Bussell finished fitting the Walker together, loaded it, and then set after it with a polishing cloth so as to remove every fingerprint from the metal surfaces—almost as if he wanted to remove any traces of a human hand ever touching it. “Gave it back to him this week, and then you two walk in the door; I swear to God the thing is cursed.” He slid it back into the holster, relooped the rawhide hammer retainer, and looked up at me. “Would you do me a favor, Sheriff?”

“Anything.”

He glanced at the big pistol. “Take it.”

I stood there staring at him but thinking about another vintage weapon, another suicide, and another lost and confused soul. Finally, with nothing to say, I laughed, but it was hollow and I desperately strung two words together. “I can’t—”

“A loan; I just want to get it out of the shop and out of his life for a few weeks.”

I glanced at Vic and then back to him. “Look, Mr. Bussell, I can understand your reasoning—”

His head jogged toward the shooting range. “He knows every hiding place, every combination to every safe, and has since he was eleven years old—do me a favor and just take it with you for a few weeks.”

I sighed. “What if I lose it?”

“It’s insured; anyway, you won’t. I didn’t say you had to use it—just lock it away for a while so that he can’t.”

Vic, her hand having slipped from his shoulder, slid the holstered weapon toward me. “That won’t stop him.” She glanced around. “There’s always another way.”

The gunsmith nodded. “Maybe, but it’ll save him from using this one.”

I raised my hand slowly and placed it over the weapon, careful not to touch the spotless metal. “What was the man’s name?”