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

“Oh, boy.” Vic coughed a laugh. “Okay, so we’ve got space cadet Vann Ross, the king of all loonies, living down the street, one crazy grandson living on a compound here in Butte County, and the son and another grandson who have taken up residence in our county, with a fifteen-year-old who’s also a grandson, somehow tangled up in all of this?”

I sipped my iced tea. “Yep.”

Henry pulled his dark hair back and captured it in the leather tie he kept in his shirt pocket for just such occasions. “Are all of them as . . . colorful, as Mr. Vann Ross Lynear?”

We all, with the exception of Kate, nodded.

“My question, then, would be what is the crime we are investigating?”

I thought about it. “Right now, I’m focusing on the missing mother, Sarah Tisdale.”

Henry grunted. “Hhnh. And our next step would be?”

I turned to look at him and then Tim. “You say a rancher with a place adjacent saw members of the compound up there fooling around?”

“He did.”

“Was it on his property or theirs?”

“Unfortunately, theirs.”

I leaned back in my chair and listened to it creak in protest. “What are the chances of us getting a warrant?”

“In the greater flourishing of time.”

“That’s the problem with warrants, isn’t it?” I turned and looked at both Vic and the Cheyenne Nation. “Do you know that we are at the geographic center of the entire United States?”

She glanced at Tim and Kate and then back to me. “You’re not having the urge to build spaceships, are you?”

“Belle Fourche, South Dakota, is the geographic center of the United States.”

Vic continued to look doubtful. “I thought that was Kansas.”

“That’s contiguous, but since 1959 . . .”

Tim, who was looking at me a little oddly, too, finished the statement. “Um, yup . . . when they included Alaska and Hawaii. There’s a big visitors center down by the river.”

“But the actual, geographic point is farther north, right?”

He nodded and sighed. “About twenty miles, actually.”

Henry, getting with the plan, joined in. “I have always wanted to see that.”

Tim leaned back and looked at the sun, well past its zenith. “We’ve got the rest of the afternoon to get up there.”

I glanced at Kate and then back to him. “You’re not going.”

He immediately raised his short hairs. “All right now, Walt. Lookie here . . .”

“We’re sightseeing, we got lost, and that’s going to be a heck of a lot harder to sell if we’re in the company of the county sheriff.” I turned back to Vic. “Haven’t you always wanted to see the geographic center of the United States?”

She started shaking her head no, then converted it into a nod and buried her face in her hands. “No fucking way.”

5

The road to Dale Atta’s place was straight up Route 85 and then onto Camp Creek Road. Tim had called ahead, and when we got to Atta’s place the genial rancher had already drawn us a quick map and told us how to get to the outer hay fields where he had been working when he’d seen his neighbor’s truck. He warned us that the road, or what there was of it, was pretty rough leading onto the ridge and that there was only one way up or down.

I navigated the furrows and tried to avoid the areas where there might be irrigation lines and a center pivot as we made our way along a rapidly flowing creek bed. Vic kept an eye out for the pickup in question.

“What the hell are scours?”

Henry was quicker to answer, even though his nose was still in the Book of Mormon. “Calf diarrhea.”

“Oh, gross.” We bumped along in four-wheel-drive low, so as to do the least amount of damage to the rancher’s field. “So, I’m looking for a truck the color of butt butter?”

“You got it.”

“Have I told you how disenchanted I’m becoming with the romantic vision of the American West?”

I gestured toward the limitless vista outside the windshield. “And here you are in the very heart of it.”

I steered us across a bridge that had been made from an old freight car, a common practice in our part of the world, and pulled up to a number of strands of barbed wire with a steel sign affixed, which read KEEP OUT, PRIVATE PROPERTY, followed by TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

I slowed the truck to a stop and looked at the shiners riding shotgun. “Feel like doing something unlawful?”

She cracked the passenger door open and climbed out. “Always, and all ways.”

I was surprised that there was no padlock and watched as she pulled the lever, releasing the pole the fence was attached to and pulling it wide so that I could drive through as the Cheyenne Nation intoned from the back. “So, how did she get the black eyes?”

Vic’s shiners had turned out to be not as bad as I’d thought, but there were still traces of a rainbow underneath her eyes. “The runaway ran over the top of her.”

“And she did not shoot him?”

“She was unarmed at the time.”

The Bear grunted. “Lucky kid.”

I drove through the opening and then watched as she started to reattach the gate, stranding herself on the other side, but then realized her mistake and quickly stepped through, capturing the pole in the loop and leveraging it shut.

She climbed back in. “Don’t say it.”

The trail was rough with more than a few large boulders we had to ease over, but we finally got to the ridge, a desolate spot with only a few copses of Black Hill pines, stunted and bowed from the crippling wind.

I pulled the Bullet to the right, where there was a space between some of the ragged trees, and parked. The wind was blowing so hard that it was difficult to open the door, but once I did I snagged my field glasses from the pocket in the back of my seat. I cranked my hat down tight and stared off through the binoculars to the northwest, the direction from which the gusts seemed to be coming. I could see the fresh-turned earth where the Bakken pipeline Tim had mentioned had been bored along the surface of the land, cutting diagonally from northeast to southwest toward Wyoming. Deceivingly durable, the surface of the high plains held the marks of man almost as long as the land itself marked those same men.

Henry drifted toward the center of the ridge, and Vic joined me at the tailgate. “NFW.”

“It is pretty desolate.”

The Cheyenne Nation had walked toward a small wreath of rocks to the west so I followed a broken path and stopped before entering the bowl of soft earth. From this vantage point, I could see that Henry was staring at one of the towers that Tim had mentioned. It sat at the corner of another county road near the hillside leading to the ridge. There were a few trees in the area that were making believe they were green, and it was painted to blend in. “See anybody?”

“Yes, someone watching us with a pair of binoculars.”

Henry, of course, didn’t need binoculars, but I couldn’t see any movement in the area, aside from a small cloud of dust on the far horizon.

I raised my own and adjusted the eyepieces enough to see an individual at one of the windows of the tower before he darted away. Then my eye was drawn to a vehicle racing down the powdery road, but still too far away to make identification. I handed the binoculars to Vic as she joined us. “Keep an eye on that, and let me know if it’s who I think it is.”

She raised the glasses. “How could they have found out about us so quickly?”

The Bear pointed toward the tower and then turned and approached the dirt bowl we’d walked past. I followed him and then his gaze. There were boot prints in the area, and tire tracks where you could see they had backed in.