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

That’s one way of keeping it in the family. “Roy Lynear is your husband?”

“ Sí .”

“I gather you were married before, then.”

“ Sí. ”

I nodded as I thought about what Tim had said concerning how the women in polygamy cults would file for abandonment to receive social services funding. “This license is almost four years old, ma’am. If you are residing in Wyoming, you’ll have to get a new one.”

She said nothing but tucked the license back into the billfold and rested it in her lap.

“Your husband—he’s not at the ranch?”

“No.”

I glanced around as if I might spot the man. “Then where is he?”

“ Sur Dakota.”

I nodded. “Visiting family?”

“ Sí . His father not good.” She shifted her bulk and glanced at the clock in the dash of the old car for a long moment, and I would’ve bet that it wasn’t working. “I got food in the car and need to go.”

“Would you mind if we followed you in?”

She stared at the dash, and I could see the agitation in her growing. “You cannot. No.”

“Then you won’t mind answering a few more questions here, will you?” Her eyes roamed the interior of the car but could find no easy avenue of escape. “Do you mind turning your motor off?”

She shook her head with a quick motion, still trying to avoid my eyes. “If I kill motor, it no start again.”

I glanced up at Vic, who had taken a step back to avoid the fumes. “Well, I’ll try and be brief. Wanda, we’re looking for a woman by the name of Sarah Tisdale. Do you know her?”

Her eyes shifted toward Vic and then refocused on the dash. “No.”

“No, you don’t know her or no, you’d rather not say?”

Her breath picked up. “No heard of her.”

“How about Sarah Lynear?”

She paused for a second and then glanced back at Vic again, and I was beginning to wonder what the attraction was. “No.”

“Well, that’s odd, seeing as how she was also married to your husband.” I kneeled down and rested my arm on the sill, pulled the photograph from my shirt pocket, and held it out to her. “You’re both married to the same man and you’ve never heard of her?”

Wanda glanced at the photo for only an instant and then patted the steering wheel as if urging it to go. “She no married to my husband.”

I continued to hold the photograph of the blonde woman out to her. “Maybe you should take a closer look.”

Instead, she moved to tuck the wallet back into her purse, accidentally opening it more than she’d wanted, exposing the Pachmayr grip of an S&W revolver where her hand lingered.

Still holding the photo in front of her, I gently slipped my hand down on the elk grips of my Colt, unsnapping the safety strap, a motion that did not go unseen by Vic. As I spoke, my undersheriff slipped the Glock from her holster but let it hang at her side, unnoticeable to the woman unless she looked specifically backward. “Mrs. Lynear, I need you to remove your hand from your purse very slowly and place both of them on the steering wheel.”

She didn’t move.

“Mrs. Lynear, I need you to do that right now.”

The beauty and the horror of a life in law enforcement is that you will, in your time, be stupefied at what people will do. I watched in that adrenaline rush of slow motion as Wanda withdrew her hand from the purse and reached up like a foregone conclusion. She threw the Satellite wagon into reverse and floored it.

I stumbled backward and Vic scrambled to the side, raising her 9mm and leveling it at the Plymouth as it tore backward down the dirt road toward the intersection. “Wait!”

She held the Glock steady but turned her head slightly to bark at me. “I’m shooting the radiator and/or the wheezing motor.”

I stood and joined her, watching the retreating car. “I don’t think that’s going to be necessary.” We watched as the majestic beast, still hanging low on its springs, rocketed backward across the macadam and slid off the other side with its prow in the air like an Autumn Bronze whale. “Thar-she-blows.”

Vic kept her weapon out and followed me as the tires ground on the side of the roadway in an attempt to find traction, the front wheels of the wagon sawing left and right like an upended tortoise.

After a moment the motor groaned, and the rear tires caught traction, lumbering the Plymouth up onto the road as Vic and I scattered like chickens in an attempt to get out of the way.

We watched as the car wheezed up to a good forty miles an hour and headed for the horizon. Vic joined me at the centerline and reholstered her weapon. “Are we about to engage in the slowest car chase in cinematic history?”

I sighed. “I believe so.”

• • •

We caught up with the station wagon in about three minutes. I had my light bar on but had left the sirens silent so as not to scare the woman any more than she was already.

Vic adjusted her seat back and put my hat over her face. “How long before she runs out of gas?”

“Nebraska.”

“Don’t bother waking me up.”

I tooled along behind the Plymouth, a confused rancher pulling his pickup to the side of the road and looking at me with a puzzled expression on his face as we passed him. From underneath my hat, Vic’s voice rose. “So, this would be classified as a low-speed chase?”

“Any slower and we’re walking.” I studied the road ahead and figured the station wagon would be crossing over into Campbell County before too long. I could call Sandy Sandberg and get him or the Highway Patrol to set up a roadblock and become the laughing stock of the entire Wyoming law enforcement community, or we could go to Nebraska.

There was a smallish knoll on a dividing ridge where the road took a slight S-curve, which was possibly the only creative feature between here and Scottsbluff. Periodically, Big Wanda would look into her rearview mirror and stare at me. What was she thinking I was going to do, shoot her? Granted, she had a weapon, but I doubted she’d intended to use it.

I kept my eyes in her rearview mirror, I was that close, and could see her still looking at me as we approached the curve—the only one, I was certain, between here and the Great Plains. I honked my horn and pointed ahead, in an attempt to get her to stop; Vic pushed my hat away and sat up.

“Did she break down?”

I honked again, but Big Wanda wasn’t watching the road; instead, paying no attention to what was coming up, her head leaning to the side, she continued to look at me through the rearview mirror as her right front wheel went off the road. I watched as she snapped around and yanked the steering wheel to the left, which would’ve been fine on any other portion of these hundred miles of road, but not this one.

The left front of the vehicle dipped into the gravel, and she sawed the thing to the right again, but the powder was thick and the slope at the side of the road steep and we watched as the big Plymouth rose up on two wheels. There was that second when I thought she was going to make it, but then the thing started over like a lazy dog into the slowest roll I’ve ever seen. It only went over onto its top, and then slid the rest of the way down the hillside into a slight depression at the bottom of the barrow ditch.

I pulled my truck over and parked it above the station wagon. Vic was already out of the other side and joined me as we picked our way down the clumps of dry grass and withered sagebrush on the hillside. The Plymouth sputtered a few more times as the carburetor attempted to pump gas skyward, and then miraculously smoothed out and continued to idle. “She’s going to need some help getting out of there.”

Vic still held her sidearm at the ready. “You do it.”