Craig Johnson - Cold Dish

T.J. turned to me. “Walt, are you going to be the primary on this one?”

“Do you mean am I going to be riding in one of those Conestoga wagons of yours for five hours down to Cheyenne?”

“Yes.”

“No.” I pointed to the group of vehicles where Vic was busy putting away the photography equipment. “At the bottom of this hill, you will find my somewhat agitated, but highly skilled, primary investigator.”

T.J. smiled. She liked Vic. “She have any cases pending?”

“Well, she’s been hanging Christmas lights in town, but I figure we can let her go for a few days.”

“It’s not even Thanksgiving.”

“It’s a city council thing.”

We followed the body down to where the rest of our little task force had congregated. Someone had brought a number of Thermoses full of hot coffee and a few boxes of donuts. I got a cup of coffee; I don’t eat donuts. I spotted Jim Ferguson, one of my deputies and head of Search and Rescue, across the bed of the truck and asked him if they had turned anything up on their walk around. His mouth was full of cream-filled, but the gist was no. I told him I was going to replace his staff with the sheep.

“We did a three-hundred-yard perimeter, but the light wasn’t so good. We’ll do another soon as everybody gets a donut and some coffee. You think this guy left brass?”

“I hope.”

I took my coffee and moved over to where T.J. and Vic were seated on a tailgate. They were looking at some of the evidence; hopefully, they were discussing something I could understand.

“Single shot, center, didn’t get too much of the sternum.” Vic held a bag up to the rising sun and looked at the metal fragment inside. “Fuck, I don’t know.” T.J. patted the spot beside her with the palm of her hand, and I sat. Vic continued, “It looks like a slug. I’m thinking 12 gauge or something just a little bigger.”

“Bazooka?”

She lowered the bag, and her eyes met mine. “You’re getting rid of me?”

I nodded my head. “Yep.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a big pain in the butt.”

“Fuck you.”

“And you talk dirty.”

She handed the bagged bullet to T.J. “You’re going to be stuck up here with Turk.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we’ll get the Christmas lights put up together.” Vic snorted and readjusted her gun belt. “Besides, you’ve forgotten more about this space-age stuff than I’ll ever know. You can relay information back to me.” The tarnished gold stared at me, unblinking. “You’ll only be down there for two days. It will take us that long to round up all the usual suspects.” I was the old dog who had learned his fill of new tricks, and it was only logical that I work the county and the people.

She poked me in the belly. Her finger remained in one of my fat rolls, and she poked each word for emphasis, “If Search and Rescue don’t find anything, you gonna call Omar?”

“That’s another reason for you to leave, you don’t like Omar.”

She poked me again. “You be careful, all right?”

This all sounded very strange coming from Vic’s mouth, but I took it as affection and punched her on the shoulder. “I’m always…” She knocked my hand away.

“I mean it.” She didn’t have kind eyes, they rarely looked away, and they always told the truth. I could use eyes like that. “I’ve got a funny feeling about all of this.”

I gazed back up to the patch of sage and scrub weed and watched the sun free itself from the red hills. “Yeah, well you got five hours to talk to T.J. about this woman’s intuition thing.” The next poke hurt.

I hung around the scene until Search and Rescue had finished their second sweep; I sat in the Bullet and filled out the reports. Ferg strolled up with a cup of coffee and another cream-filled. “Anything?” Fortunately, I caught him between bites.

“Nothing. We got a lot of sheep shit and tracks.”

“Any suspicious sheep tracks?”

“Nope, no suspicious sheep shit, either. It’s like the Denver stock-yards up there.”

I thought about how you could kill a victim only once, but how a crime scene could die a thousand deaths. I hoped that whatever useful information could be deducted from this patch of God’s little acre was traveling safely in plastic bags toward Cheyenne. Motives are all fine and good, but if we could find out the how, we’d have a shooting’s match chance of finding out the who. I had the niggling feeling I was going to have to call Omar.

On the drive over to the Pritchards’ place I thought about the last time I had seen Cody alive. He was a heavyset kid, built like a linebacker, curly blond hair and pale blue eyes. He had his mother’s looks, his father’s temper, and nobody’s brains. I had pulled him out on three occasions, the last being the rape case. Cody had endeared himself to the local Native American community by being quoted in the Sheridan paper as saying, “Yeah, she was a retard redskin, but she was asking for it.”

The Pritchards had a place on the outskirts of Durant and, by the time I got there, there must have been eight or nine cars and trucks in the drive. Word carries fast in open spaces. As I cut off the engine, the full impact of what I was going to have to do hit me like a Burlington Northern. How do you tell parents that their child is dead? Sure, they’d heard it through the grapevine, but I was the official word. I allowed myself a long sigh.

There were field swallows swooping near the Bullet. I was probably disturbing their family, too. Seemed to be my day for it. It had been longer than twenty-four hours since sleep. It’s easy to work all night because the sun doesn’t come up, but when it does, my eyes start to sting and the rest of me gets a little shaky. I’ve always been this way. I was focusing my eyes when I heard the screen door slam and saw John Pritchard walking down the drive. I never cared too much for John; he was one of those guys who always had to be in control. The conversation wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The pertinent information from him was that Cody had left the house twenty-seven hours ago with an extra doe license. The pertinent information from me was that he wasn’t coming home.

I did the best I could, drove the seven miles back to my place, and sat on the porch-well, the front doorway-but not for very long, because it was cold. I had the presence of mind to fall into the house instead of out of it. I drifted in and out of consciousness until the phone rang, and the answering machine my daughter made me buy picked up. “You’ve reached the Longmire residence. No one is available to answer your call right now, ’cause we’re out chasing bad guys or trying on white hats. If you leave a message after the tone, we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can. Happy trails!” She had taken a great deal of joy in recording the message printed in the instructions, with a few minor alterations. I smiled every time I heard it.

“It’s Pancake Day!” The voice resonated through the lines from fourteen miles away. Jim Ferguson was not only head of Search and Rescue and my longest standing part-time deputy, but he was also the man in charge of driving around Durant once a year at dawn in the fire department’s truck, proclaiming through a bullhorn, “It’s Pancake Day, Pancake Day!”

There are only three major vote-getting days in Absaroka County, and I can’t remember the other two. “Oh God, no. It’s Pancake Day.” I thought about shooting myself. I could see the headline: SHERIFF SHOOTS SELF, UNABLE TO FACE PANCAKES.

“It’s Pancake Day!” Ferg really enjoyed his work. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last hour, just thought somebody ought to call and remind you. But if you really are gonna retire next year, then who gives a shit?”