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

I thought of the Book of Mormon in the young man’s possession. “Orrin the Mormon.”

“Excuse me, Walt? Darn this cordless.”

“Nothing.” I readjusted the little cradle on Ruby’s phone against my shoulder. “You say you’ve got them there?”

“Yeah. Bruce Eldredge is staying with us on his way back to Cody and was coming home from a friend’s house and said there were two idiots out in the north pasture running around trying to catch the horses by hand. Hell, Walt, that’s rough stock. They’re lucky one of those horses didn’t kick their brains out.”

“Can you hold them till I get there?”

“Sure. Donna’s got a shotgun on them right now, but the kid came up to my truck and volunteered your number; said you were probably looking for him.”

“And the other one?”

“He’s a pretty old, hippie-looking fellow, and he’s still winded from chasing those horses all over the damn place. . . . I thought he was going to have a heart attack.” There was some talking in the background. “What?” More talking. “Yeah, yeah, that’s probably true.”

“Wally?”

The rancher came back on the line, but I could hear his hand cupping the receiver to his mouth in an attempt to keep this portion of the conversation between the two of us. “The boy says that it wasn’t anything like My Friend Flicka .” His voice dropped even lower. “Walt, I’ve only been around this kid for twenty minutes, but he’s something strange on that movie; I think he’s brought it up about twelve times, and he’s carrying an old VHS tape of the film with him.”

• • •

When we got to the Lazy D-W, the two outlaws were sitting in the calving shed adjoining the main barn, the place where cowboys stayed on call during the time in the early spring when the cow mothers did their duty. I’d seen all kinds of calving sheds in my life, some just dirt-floor lean-to shanties with a snubbing pole in the middle to heated buildings with entertainment centers and rows of comfortable sofas on which to sit back and while away the half-sleep hours through the nights when most heifers decide to thicken the herd.

The Lazy D-W was the latter and not the former, and through the glass panel in the breezeway door I could see our two would-be horse thieves watching My Friend Flicka in studious rapture.

I glanced at Wally and especially at Donna, still holding the shotgun.

There were rumors about Donna Johnson. In my experience you couldn’t swing a dead trench coat without hitting all kinds of folks who claimed to have worked for the CIA, but I’d heard the rumors about Donna, and my suspicions that she had indeed been employed by that organization were based on the fact that she never talked about it.

Never.

She shrugged. “It was the only place we had a VCR.”

I studied the old man seated next to Cord on the edge of one of the leather sofas; he was smallish with silver hair hanging past his shoulders that feathered into a dark brown, and with a beard that stretched to the third button of his old-fashioned tab-collar shirt. Around his neck was a scarf with a pattern that made it look almost like a prayer shawl.

He was the man who had waved at me on the street in Durant.

I glanced at the screen and could see Roddy McDowall on the back of a horse racing hell-bent for leather across the green hills of a cinematic Wyoming—read Utah. Rockwell was leaning forward with his wrists resting on his knees and his gnarled hands gripping imaginary reins.

You didn’t see hands like that much anymore. The fingers were thick, and I could see where the knuckles, especially those of the fore- and middle fingers, had been broken numerous times. There was only one type of activity that would sustain that kind of mutation; so whatever type of hippie Orrin the Mormon was, he hadn’t been a peace-loving man.

Pushing the door open, I stepped into the room with Double Tough covering the doorway.

Cord immediately stood and smiled at me. “Hi, Sheriff.”

The older man ignored us completely and began imitating the movements of the horseman on the screen, exerting a body English in an attempt to keep young Roddy in the saddle.

Cord looked up at me as I watched the Orrin character. The boy glanced back at the man and then up to me again. “He’s never seen the movie before.”

I smiled. “You mean this movie?”

He started to speak but then stopped. “There are others?”

I stared at the young man’s face just to make sure he wasn’t pulling my leg. “Yep.” I glanced back at Double Tough and watched as he put a thumb and forefinger at the corners of his mouth to keep from smiling as I turned back to the boy. “Thousands of them, probably millions.”

He stood there, looking at me askance, and then gestured toward the television. “Like this?”

“Well, not exactly like this, although I think there are a couple of sequels to this one. . . .”

“What’s a sequel?”

Behind me, Double Tough smothered a laugh.

“Um . . . Look, we’ll talk about that later.” I gestured toward the oblivious man with my chin. “You know this fellow?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He kidnap you?”

“I . . . I guess.”

I rested the web of my thumb on the hammer of my Colt. “He did or he didn’t?”

“Well, he asked me to go with him, but I told him I’d rather stay, and then he said we ought to go. So, I did.”

That probably wasn’t going to hold up in court. “Where were you going?”

“He didn’t say.”

I shook my head. “Are you in the habit of following people just because they tell you to?”

We both turned when the man who called himself Orrin Porter Rockwell made a noise in his throat as the horse on the screen leapt into a corner fence and fell, tangled and kicking. Cord’s eyes turned back to me. “Him I do.”

“He’s a friend of yours?”

“He’s my bodyguard.”

I tipped my hat back on my head and stared at the young man. “You have a bodyguard?”

He shrugged. “I guess; he looks after me.”

“Where’s he been for the last few weeks?”

“Looking for me.”

I sighed and glanced past the boy to the man. “Well, I guess he found you.” I took a few steps, placing myself directly in the man’s line of sight.

He leaned to the side and then shifted over to where he could get a better view, completely ignoring me.

“Sir?”

His face stayed on the screen, so I reached around behind me and punched the button, turning off the set.

A cry escaped him again, and he was immediately on his feet with his hands between us, but it wasn’t a threatening gesture; rather, the fingers were splayed with palms up in a beseeching manner. “Sir, please . . .” Like the boy, his eyes were the amazing thing about him, but whereas the young man’s were like sapphires, his were a pale blue almost to the point of being white. Opals. “The horse is endangered.”

I stood there looking at the irises, unable to help myself, at least until the smell got to me, forcing me to lean back a little. “He’ll be fine; at least he has been the other twenty-seven times I’ve seen it.” I turned and hit STOP, then EJECT, and pulled the tape out, returning it to the cardboard sleeve.

Rockwell’s eyes followed my hands as if I were holding the Hope Diamond.

“Mr. Rockwell, I presume?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Danite, Man of God, Son of Thunder?”

He actually smiled. “Yes. Do you know me, sir?”

“Only by reputation. I’m going to need you to come with us, Mr. Rockwell.”

His grin faded. “Am I under arrest?”

“Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

“I won’t be arrested.” I started to reach toward his shoulder, but he dipped and took a half step back. “I won’t have hands laid upon me neither.”