Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

“There aren’t.” He picked up a wooden spoon and dipped it in the concoction, moving the crustier parts at the side back into the center of the pot. “Anymore.”

Virgil White Buffalo was a legend, and last summer I’d had him in my jail when I’d mistakenly arrested him for the murder of a young Asian woman. He’d assisted me in apprehending the actual culprit but then had melted into the Bighorn Mountains. I hadn’t had any contact with him since then but had suspicions that the Cheyenne Nation might have.

“Where did you get the head and cape, Virgil?”

He stopped stirring the formerly freeze-dried concoction and nodded, mostly to himself. “He was a neighbor, but we ended up not getting along.”

I filed away the thought that it might behoove me to do everything within my power to get along with the very large Crow Indian. I rubbed my head where the handlebars had struck it; the goose-egg lump made me feel like I was growing a horn. “You heard my SOS?”

“No.”

I sat up a little, careful to keep the sleeping bag around my legs, especially the bruised one. “The gunfire.”

“Yes.”

Virgil’s rocky abode wasn’t very far from where I’d overturned the vehicle, and with a little verbal assistance he’d retrieved my. 45, had gotten the Cat running, and had parked it underneath a tree. The cave was a ledge that Virgil had closed off with a multitude of rocks, almost a Bighorn cliff dwelling. Thirty feet in the air and sheltered by the towering fir trees, there was no way you’d ever notice it if you hadn’t known it was there.

The elk hide that was draped across the only opening blew inward, the powdered snow skimming across the granite floor. “Still crappy out there?”

“Yes.” He gazed toward the opening and then crouched over to rest a few rocks at the bottom of the hide to keep it from blowing. “It will likely continue through the night and maybe for a few days after.” He went back to the fire but glanced at me. “Why, you’re in a hurry?”

I shrugged. “On the job.”

“Always with you people.” He nodded again, occupying himself with the stirring. “The shoebox.”

“Yep.”

“Have they done something bad?”

“Escaped convicts.”

“Oh.” For the first time, he smiled, and it was a sly one. “Like me.”

“Well-” I glanced at the surrounding rock and noticed that Virgil had gone so far as to decorate his walls with some ledger drawings, the one nearest me showing the epic battle between Virgil and the grizzly. “Not exactly.” Strangely enough, the figure of Virgil seemed to be turned with his back toward the bear so that he was driving the spear behind him.

He carefully spooned the rehydrated dehydrated-de-jour into two metal bowls and brought me some. Virgil’s entire cooking kit was in an olive drab army surplus box, probably from WWII, complete with pots, pans, plates, utensils, and cups carefully held in place by narrow leather straps and small brass rivets that reflected the fire. He reached behind him, brought over an old percolator, and poured us both cups of coffee. “I have some powdered cream, but I think it might be left over from the Ardennes Offensive.”

“I’ll pass.” I wondered how many other people in the Bighorns knew the German term for the Battle of the Bulge. When I’d first met Virgil, I’d attempted to crush his larynx, and our relationship had been verbally one-sided. To my shame, I hadn’t thought he was all that intelligent-a judgment I’d soon amended upon discovering beneath the heavy brow the fine mind capable of playing chess on a grand-master level. I spooned a few mouthfuls and sipped my coffee. “The beef stroganoff is always a good freeze-dried bet.”

“Yes, it is. Thank you for including it.” He sipped his own coffee and studied the expedition pack and beaded leather gun sheath lying next to me. “You have a lot of supplies and are well-armed.”

“They’re bad guys.”

He finished the stroganoff in his usual record time and sat the tin bowl back by the fire; then he gestured toward the opening with his lips the way Indians have a peculiar tendency to do. “They have a woman with them.”

We studied each other, and I had to concentrate so that I would not keep making eye contact with the grizzly’s features that hovered over his own. The bear’s jaws were separated into two pieces on the headdress and hung alongside the open maw along with beads, eagle feathers, abalone shell discs, and strands of rawhide with tiny, cone-shaped bells made from snuff container lids that made a faint tinkling sound when he moved his head.

“You’ve seen them outside the vehicle?”

“Yes.”

Virgil didn’t exactly offer a lot of information, so I primed the pump. “Where?”

“Near the falls, about a quarter-mile from here.”

I blew a breath. “Why’d they stop?”

He gestured toward my bowl with a forefinger as thick as a broom handle. “Are you going to eat that?”

I handed it to him, waited until he was through, and then asked again.

He placed my bowl on top of his own and reached across to pull a bottle from my pack. “Can I have some of your whiskey?”

“It’s not mine, but I think Omar loaned it to me for the long term; he’s the one that loaded the pack.”

“The hunter.” He pulled the cap from the bottle of the Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve and leveraged a dollop into his coffee. “You have good friends, Lawman. We’ll drink Omar’s whiskey then.”

“Bourbon.” He held the neck of the bottle out to me, but I shook my head. “Working.”

He shrugged and twisted the top back on. “The trail narrows at the falls, and with the timberline, the shoebox can’t go any farther.”

“When did you see them last?”

He thought about it. “An hour before I found the dead man and you.”

“Then they heard the shots, too?”

“Oh, yes.” He sipped his high-octane coffee and smiled. “Don’t worry. They are bedded down, and it will be an uneasy night for them. They’ll wait till the morning if they move, but the weather will break sooner and we can catch them unawares before that if you would like.”

I sipped my own leaded coffee. “I would like.”

He stretched his back, and it was as if the grizzly was rearing behind him. “So, you wanna play some chess, Lawman?”

Virgil had cleaned up from dinner, and we were into our third match and waiting for the weather to settle to make our move. The big Indian had placed a fat candle on one of the rocks and was using the light from it and the fire to examine the fourteenth-century giant blue devil on the cover of the Inferno.

His eyes came up to mine. “Looks scary.”

I studied the makeshift chessboard and tried to remember if the larger stone with the smaller one sinewed together was the king or queen.

“It’s got a Virgil in it; he was a Roman poet.”

He flipped through a few pages. “Dead, huh?”

“More than two thousand years ago. Maybe you were named after him.”

“No-I was named after my great uncle; he was an irrigation ditch digger.” He opened the book about halfway. “What’s it about?”

I moved what I thought was my queen diagonally on the checkerboard that was made from the remains of a Purina feed bag. “It’s a poem, an allegory.”

“Ah, something that’s about something else. Does it rhyme?”

“Only in Italian, not in English.”

His large fingers moved a small, singular rock that I assumed was a pawn, as he continued to study the paperback. “So, that is Italian on one page with English on the other?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “What’s the first thing it’s about?”

“A guided tour through hell.”

He considered the cover again and then tossed the book onto my legs. “I was in Vietnam and federal prison.” He shifted his haunches and looked at me. “I don’t need to go through that again.” Something made a noise outside, a long, piercing cry that mixed with the wind and then died. He glanced toward the opening. “Cougar, female.”