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

“I think you are.” I reached behind me and pulled the gun almanac from my back pocket. “Is this yours?” He nodded as I leafed through the dog-eared pages. “You’ve got a lot of high-powered weaponry circled—any idea who you might want to use them on?”

His eyes went back to the TV, blank as the screen. “I get angry sometimes.”

“That’s normal; everybody gets angry.” I waited, but it didn’t seem as if he was willing to come forward with anything more. “Cord, if someone has done something bad to your mother, then I’m in a position to do something about it.”

We sat there in the silence for a while, and then he spoke again. “Those horses down at that ranch . . . They weren’t friendly like Flicka.”

I smiled at the change of subject. “No, those are loose range ponies and they don’t have that much interaction with human beings.”

His mouth moved, but no words came out for a moment. “Do . . . Do you think they can smell it?”

“Smell what?”

“The killing; do you think they can smell the killing on us?”

I was at a loss as to how to respond to that and discovered my hand had crept up to grip the lower part of my jaw. “What do you mean by killing?”

His eyes shifted to the floor, and but for the subject I could’ve sworn he was discussing the weather. “When we misbehaved one day, they took us out to one of the cattle ranches back in Texas, Mr. Lockhart’s ranch.”

“And who is Mr. Lockhart?”

“One of the elders of the church; he’s tall like you but with bristly hair.”

The man on the road with the black polo shirt and the crew cut.

“It was one of the places they took you if you were bad.” The intake of breath rattled in his lungs like tin siding in a high wind. “There was a metal rack that held the cattle. . . .”

“A squeeze chute?”

His eyes rose to mine but then sank again, and his voice grew quiet and almost inaudible. “It held the cattle still with their heads sticking out.” His cobalt eyes stared at the concrete floor. “They had a chain saw there, and they made us cut the heads off the cows.” He swallowed, but his voice was dry like a rasp. “While they were still alive—said it would toughen us up.”

• • •

I’d never met Bishop Goodman from the Church of Latter-day Saints and had never even darkened the doors of the church that made its home in the now-defunct carpet store at the south corner of the Durant bypass that reconnected with the interstate highway.

“He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the Mormon church and its teachings.”

Henry Standing Bear and I were having lunch with the bishop at the Busy Bee Café, and I was watching Cord through the sometimes swinging door as he washed dishes in the kitchen like a madman. The madman we were discussing at present, Orrin Porter Rockwell, was asleep on a bunk in my holding cell. “So, he is a Mormon.”

“More than that.” Goodman glanced at the Bear. “When your friend came walking into the church, I thought I was having a vision. Not only is he the living embodiment of the historical figure physically, his understanding of the church is absolutely period as well.”

“Meaning?”

The tall, thickset man with an unruly head of hair adjusted his glasses and leaned forward. “The Mormon Church of Latter-day Saints has gone through a number of reformations, including disavowing polygamy in 1890 with the threat of excommunication, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of any of these things. His knowledge of the church seems to have had an arrested development and stops at around 1880. Also, his personal knowledge of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Ina Coolbrith . . . He even told me of a personal conversation he’d had with the explorer Richard Francis Burton when he was staying with Bishop Lysander Dayton in a village near the City of Salt Lake, and how, over the bishop’s objections, he had sent for a bottle of Valley Tan Whiskey. The two of them sat there all night, shot for shot, and Rockwell advised the Ohioan to sleep with a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun and to make a dry camp miles from any campfire and to avoid the main trail because they were choked with White Indians. No offense, but you know . . .” He looked at Henry. “Individuals who passed themselves off as real Indians so that they could prey on travelers on the roads to California.”

The Bear looked back at him. “None taken.”

He straightened in his chair and shook his head. “The man is a veritable storehouse of historical knowledge.”

I sipped my coffee. “Bishop Goodman, you don’t really believe that . . .”

“No, of course not, but if the man’s dementia has caused him to research the real Orrin Porter Rockwell to the point where he may be one of the world’s foremost experts, then he needs desperately to write a biography of the man.” He smiled. “If not an autobiography.”

“Maybe you should write it.”

“I might.” He thought about it. “Any idea how long he’s going to be around?”

I shrugged. “Oh, seventy-eight to ninety-seven months if the government has anything to say about it.” The bishop looked confused. “Kidnapping of any sort is a column-one federal offense.”

“Are you going to turn him in?”

“Not if he behaves himself; I mean he’s obviously as nutty as a pecan log, but he seems to dote on Cord and the kid calls him his bodyguard, so I don’t think he’s any real danger.”

Henry raised a hand to get Dorothy’s attention and a possible refill. “What did you find out from the IAFIS?”

I glanced at the puzzled look on Goodman’s face. “The Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.”

“Ah.”

I looked back to the Bear and shrugged. “Nothing.”

He looked surprised. “Really.”

“I don’t know why you’re so amazed; it happens on the Rez all the time.”

“Yes, but this is a white guy.” He turned to Goodman. “No offense.”

The bishop nodded, still preoccupied with the thought of cowriting a historical religious epic. “None taken.”

• • •

We walked along the two blocks that were downtown Durant before the Cheyenne Nation broke the silence. “Is that the old jacket your parents bought you?”

I’d made a nod to the fact that the weather was cooling off and deigned to wear the thing. “Yep.”

We walked on. “I was trying to remember if I ever saw your father in a church.”

“You didn’t.”

“Ever?”

I shook my head. “Ever.”

“Why?”

“He just didn’t believe in organized religion.” I thought about it. “I don’t think he believed in much of organized anything.”

“Your mother did.”

“Yep.”

He studied me. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“This case appears to be concerning you, perhaps more than others, and I was just wondering if it has something to do with the religious aspect?”

“I don’t know.” I breathed a sigh. “I haven’t been in a church since Martha died, you know that. I’ve been in more sweat lodges than churches in the last five years.” He nodded but said nothing. “Like anything else, I think organized religion, like most human endeavors, is good when it’s doing good and I think it’s bad when it’s doing bad.”

“And you think these people are bad?”

“I think the people in charge are, yes.” The wind blew up Main, and I watched as the leaves trembled. “I’ve always been taught that religion is supposed to be a comfort to people, not a threat. I think these people have perverted something that’s supposed to be holy and turned it into a weapon.” I pulled in a lungful of the crisp air. “I think there’s a hierarchy at work here and quite a bit of megalomaniacal madness. I mean, the patriarch is climbing on his roof naked and building spaceships in his backyard.”