Craig Johnson: A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery

“They threatened a bunch of people with a shotgun, and we’re about to go out there and do a little threatening ourselves.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want that. I’ll send a deputy to have a word, but for the time being I’d appreciate it if you would just avoid them.”

The harrumph carried across the county. “That’s going to be a little tough since they own twelve thousand acres around here.”

“I’ll speak with them myself, if need be. In the meantime, I was wondering if you’d ever heard of a young woman by the name of Sarah Tisdale?”

There was a long pause, and the woman’s voice changed. “My daughter. You’ve heard from my daughter?”

3

Vic reached over and turned on the heater as I took the exit at Powder Junction and followed 192 southeast across the Powder River, leaving the sun as it lingered along the mountains to the west, and drove on toward Surrey/Short Drop. In the perversity of western geography, the poetic-sounding locale of Surrey had pretty much dropped off the map, but the town of Short Drop had, in a small-town way, thrived.

The rolling hills were a khaki brown even with the wet summer and shimmered bronze against the snowfields at the southern tip of the Bighorn Mountains, but everywhere you looked there were oil derricks rhythmically heaving the crude petroleum from the earth. I’d worked as a roughneck on an oil crew for an entire summer in my youth, part of my father’s plan that I should see what a life without a proper education meant. Though only a half hour from the interstate highway, the suburbs of Short Drop might as well have been on the moon.

“No fucking way.”

I glanced at my undersheriff’s Technicolor eyes and felt another twinge of sympathy. “What?”

She gestured at the surrounding landscape. “Who the hell travels two-thirds of the way across the country and stops here thinking this is it, this is where I want to spend the rest of my life?” She shook her head. “No fucking way.”

I glanced around at the stark shadows being thrown from the sharp angle of the sun, causing everything to suddenly glimmer the way only dying things can. “It’s a lot like Nebraska down here.”

“If that’s supposed to recommend it, it doesn’t.” We drove along, and she remained unimpressed. “So, how come I haven’t ever been down here?”

“Because you didn’t receive the traditional hazing that all the other deputies get when they sign on.”

She smirked. “As it should be.”

The radio crackled, and the voice of one of the said deputies resounded through the tinny speaker. Static. “Sheriff, this is base, come in.”

Vic pulled my mic from the dash and keyed the button. “What do you want?”

Static. “The kid’s back over from working at the Busy Bee, and I was wondering if I had to lock him up or was it okay if I just let him sleep in the cell with the door open?”

“Is Dorothy still trying to get that spot above the garage behind her squared away for him?”

Vic asked the question, and Double Tough took a minute, probably asking the kid.

Static. “Yup, but he says it’s not ready yet.”

“Fine by me if the door is open.”

Static. “And Ruby left Dog here; you want me to feed him?”

Vic spoke into the mic in a pretty good impersonation. “Yup, and when Saizarbitoria gets in you can head back to Powder Junction.”

Static. “Roger that.”

She flipped the mic up onto my dash and propped a boot against the transmission hump again. “He doesn’t sound too happy about coming back down here, does he?”

We drove on, watching the grass sway in the wind like the waves of some lost ocean, the landscape remaining pretty much the same as it had for the last fifteen minutes. I looked at Vic again. “Let me guess. . . .”

“No fucking way.”

I grunted. “My family settled here.”

“No, your family settled about an hour north up against the mountains where it’s pretty.”

“Define pretty.”

“Green with a variation in altitude.”

Victoria Moretti and I had a running argument about what, exactly, constituted aesthetic beauty in the American West, and I couldn’t help but point out that her view always included green grass and trees—or the American East.

I glanced around. “It has a more subtle beauty.”

The response was nothing if not predictable.

• • •

We came over the rolling hills of the Pine Ridge and could see the ancient, still-leafy cottonwood that was supposedly over a hundred years old at the bottom of the valley. “There, a tree. I hope you’re happy.”

We pulled along the turnoff, and I dropped the three-quarter-ton into the town of Short Drop proper, where a wooden sign with burnt-in lettering proclaimed SHORT DROP, THE PLACE WHERE “LAUGHING” SAM CAREY, THE LAST OF BUTCH CASSIDY’S HOLE IN THE WALL, TOOK A SHORT DROP ON A LONG ROPE.

Along one of the gigantic limbs of the old tree hung a noose of thick hemp, swaying in the breeze, monument to a violent act over a century old. Vic slumped back in her seat. “Leave it to you assholes; you finally grow a tree tall enough, and you hang somebody from it.”

I followed Main Street’s dirt road and took a right onto Jackson as Vic gazed at Short Drop’s country school whose teams had the likely nickname, “The Hangmen.” “Why do they bother?”

I misunderstood. “Go to school?”

She pointed. “With signs—there are only four streets.”

I nudged my truck across the red-dirt roadway and parked in front of one of the commercial buildings, the Short Drop Mercantile, and killed the engine. “This is it.”

She leaned forward and craned her neck, looking back and forth at the Merc, a bar, and a trailer with a sign out front. “The library is a singlewide?”

“At least they’ve got one.” I unbuckled my seat belt and cracked the door open. With the fading sun, the air was growing sharp, and I was glad that I’d brought my leather jacket. “C’mon.”

There was a wooden walkway that connected the four buildings that made up downtown Short Drop, but the overhead porch reached only across the front of the mercantile and the bar, the only buildings of any historical repute. They were the old types with the false fronts, and the color scheme appeared to be shades of gray with white trim. The paint was peeling a little, but they were both in pretty good shape, and I have to admit that my trajectory swayed just a touch when I saw the RAINIER BEERsign in the next-door watering hole—again aptly named The Noose.

Vic joined me on the walkway, our boots ringing in the silence of the town like some Anthony Mann Western. She lingered for a moment, and as if on cue, a slight wind came up and powdered its way through town. Her voice was low, but I could still hear it: “No fucking way.”

Old-fashioned lettering spiraled across the bottom of the windows, offering up quilting supplies, books, ammunition, and gunsmithing. I ignored the hand-scripted CLOSED HAPPY TRAILSsign, pushed open the door, and walked onto swaled and cupped pine flooring with no board less than a foot wide. The ceilings were high, at least twenty feet, tiled with pressed tin. Black fans with wooden propellers spun idly and track lighting spotted us as we entered the establishment.

Rows of bookshelves staggered against the wall to my right, sagging with the weight of antiquarian tomes and thumbed paperbacks that appeared to be organized in no particular order. There was a counter to my right with an old cash register and a few glass cases that held groceries—bread, canned goods, boxes of cereal, and stick candy that I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. There was a long counter at a forty-five-degree angle with a few rifles on stands, some pistols in a case, and above that the better part of a wall full of ammunition. Myriad taxidermy heads were on the wall, some from far-flung reaches like Africa and South America; they would’ve made my big-game hunter friend Omar Rhoades proud.