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

“Pretty good for a historian, huh?”

She silently watched the scenery, or, in her opinion, the lack thereof, pass by. “Why do you suppose she didn’t mention closing the Merc when we were here before?”

“Seems sudden, doesn’t it?” I admired the profile of her features at once refined and dangerously focused. “Maybe something to do with news of the daughter and the grandson.”

“In what way?”

“Sometimes we spend our lives thinking we’re doing something, when in reality all we’re doing is waiting; maybe what Eleanor’s been waiting for has arrived.”

“Yeah, well . . . I wouldn’t know anything about that mother/daughter relationship thing.”

“Uh-huh.”

She closed the book in her hands carefully and looked at the Roman numerals on the binding. “Twenty-five of them?”

“Yep.”

“Think the ol’ broad’s got all of them?”

“Looks like.”

“So, what are they worth?”

“Thousands.”

“Let’s go back and rob the place.”

I smiled. “That would be against the law.”

She settled in the seat and propped her boots onto the dash. “We’ve done enough for the law—look where that’s got us.”

“Where’s that?”

She opened her arms and gestured to the landscape with dramatic flair. “Nowhere.”

• • •

We’d taken a left just after another of the roadside fatality markers onto a gravel road with a ranch gate hewn from strapped-together logs with an archway that read EAST SPRING RANCH. It wasn’t exactly the end of the earth, but you could send it a telegram from here, not that you’d get an answer.

I ignored the signs warning us that the land was posted and didn’t welcome trespassers and continued down the road toward what looked like one of the towers we’d seen in South Dakota. Once we got to the structure, I could see that the distance in both directions was strung with a ten-foot chain-link fence with three strands of diagonal barbed wire on top.

We stepped out of the Bullet and, looking at the desolate landscape, I got the odd sensation that I was back in the military. A breeze was coming off the mountains, cool and putting a rub in the air that I could feel between my teeth. I sighed the way I always did when I got that feeling, walked over to the large gate seated on a pair of rolling casters, and noticed a small intercom with a plastic shield to protect it from the weather.

On closer inspection of the greenish wooden tower, I could make out a small security camera under the eaves. “We may or may not be on Candid Camera .”

Vic walked to the fence and then across the dirt road. “Not motion activated, and it may not even be hooked up.”

“How can you tell?”

“The unconnected wires hanging off the back.” She returned to the gate and the intercom, flipping up the plastic cover and pushing one of the buttons. “Hello, have you found Jesus Christ as your personal savior? We’re on a mission, and we hear you fuckers are up to some really heinous shit in His name.” After a moment she turned to look at me with an eyebrow raised like a question mark. “I don’t think it’s working.”

“Are there wires hanging out of the back of it, too?”

“No, but it doesn’t make any noise, static, nothing—smart-ass.”

I came over and looked at the intercom and then the three massive padlocks on the gate. “I guess they’re serious about not wanting visitors.”

“You bring your bolt cutters?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

She looked past my shoulder toward the road, where a two-tone brown ’71 Plymouth Satellite station wagon with its leaf springs resting on its axles slowed at the turnoff. “Company.” The car stopped as the dust behind overtook it and blew our way, partially concealing us. “Is that color scours?”

“No, more of an Autumn Bronze Poly, as I recall.”

She glanced at me.

“I had one.”

She continued to stare at me and then muttered to herself, “Family man.”

The driver, an aged, extremely heavyset, Hispanic-looking woman in a powder blue prairie dress got out of the station wagon, went over to the roadside grave marker, and straightened the plastic, floral wreath attached to a makeshift wooden cross. Her hands were clasped at her waist and her head lowered.

Her ministrations continued for quite some time, and Vic finally spoke. “She praying her way to heaven or what?”

I stepped past her toward the newcomer on the dirt road. “Some people need it more than others.”

Probably hearing our voices, the woman’s head rose, and she looked at us through the thin veil of dust. Maybe it was the dress, maybe it was the surroundings, but I had the feeling that it was an old stare—one from a different era, a different time.

I waited as she slowly made her way back to the vehicle and climbed in, shifting the still-running car into gear and turning where we were parked, effectively blocking the road. I raised a hand and motioned for her to move. She paused, even going so far as to look back up the road for traffic, which was absurd considering our environs, but then turned, looked at me, and finally drove forward.

I walked over to her and strung a hand on the fender as I stooped to look inside, Vic walking past me, taking a textbook stance behind the woman’s left shoulder.

Her bloated face was surrounded by straggles of dark hair, gray at the roots, that had escaped from the bun high at the back of her head, and I could barely see her dark eyes. Her voice was surprisingly high and decidedly Spanish. “ Sí? ”

I looked into the station wagon, the backseat covered with an abundance of bulk-food containers, drinks, and home supplies in franchise plastic bags, and finally allowed my eyes to rest on what looked to be two dozen bricks of 12-gauge, .30-06, .357 Mag, and .50 BMG ammunition on the seat beside her. “I didn’t know Sam’s Club in Casper sold ammo, especially .50.”

Her hand dropped down and pulled the plastic back over the ammunition as if that might make it disappear. “ No hablo Inglés. ”

The blue-black smoke of the aged engine bellied out from under the rocker panels, and I just hoped we could get a few answers before dying of asphyxiation. “Well, señora, that’s going to make it hard for you to have a legal driver’s license.”

“Oh, I has license, Officer.”

My undersheriff chimed in. “And evidently more English than at first supposed.”

I smiled. “I’m a sheriff.”

She repeated, “Sheriff.”

I extended my hand, and she shook it with one that was swollen and moist. “I’m Walt Longmire.” I gestured toward my partner in noncrime. “This is my undersheriff, Victoria Moretti. And you are?”

“Big Wanda.”

“Wanda, do you mind if I have a look at that driver’s license?”

She hesitated for a second, then reached down again, dragging a sizable purse onto the transmission hump, and snuck a hand in to pull out a turquoise wallet stuffed with bills. She thumbed through a number of cards, then pulled out a Texas license and handed it to me.

I studied it and then handed it back to her. “Ms. Bidarte.” I thought about the tall, lean man I’d met at the bar and continued to smile, just so she’d know I wasn’t rousting her. “Are you by any chance related to the poet Tomás Bidarte?”

She nodded with enthusiasm. “ Sí , he my son.”

“Well, you must be proud.” I also remembered Sheriff Berg’s remarks about the two women who had been married to the space jockey, Vann Ross—one of them having been named Big Wanda. “Well, I’m looking for Roy Lynear, and I understand he lives at this address?”

Her eyes, or what I could make of them, stayed steady. “He be my husband, but he not here.”