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

I gestured for her to take the passenger side as I took a few steps around the back, looking at all the groceries that were now lying on the headliner. “Mrs. Lynear?”

There was no answer over the sound of the motor.

Vic had made pretty good progress on the far side, crouching so as to not reveal too much of herself but getting close enough to see the woman. She paused and aimed the 9mm toward the car, taking a moment to raise her other hand and mimic an outstretched thumb and forefinger gesture that could only mean gun .

With a sigh, I pulled the .45 from my holster and called out again, raising my voice so she would be sure to hear me over the idling car—evidently the vehicle preferred upside down. “Wanda, you’re not in any real trouble yet. If you’ll just toss that pistol out the window, I’m sure we’d all feel a lot better!”

No response, but Vic continued forward.

It was about that time that the snub-nosed revolver fell from the driver’s-side window.

When I rushed forward, I could see Big Wanda clearly choking to death hanging from the seat of the Plymouth, her face purple and even more bloated. I grabbed the door handle, but the window rail was lodged in the dirt. Her hand reached out to me, and she grabbed my arm as I drove a hand in my back pocket to yank out my old Case knife. I reached up past her shoulder to get at the belt, but she must’ve misinterpreted my intentions and evidently thought I was trying to cut her throat because she began slapping at my hands. I forced myself in the window in an attempt to get a better angle on the webbing but still avoid her neck. She continued to choke and beat at me as I pushed her arms aside, reached past her head, and slit the belt, her entire three hundred pounds falling—on me.

She coughed, choked, and gasped a few breaths, and it was all I could do to catch mine in that a particularly large breast covered half my face. Her eyes turned to mine and she whispered, “ Lo lamento . . . Lo siento, por favor. ”

Vic had opened the other door and some of the groceries slid out onto the ground. She reached across the car with a smile on her face, shoved the gear selector into park, and switched off the ignition, the big Satellite giving up the ghost with a shudder, an elongated wheeze, and finally a hiss. Pulling the keys from the ignition, Vic tossed them near my face. “I guess she really didn’t want to kill the motor.”

8

“Have I told you lately how much I hate mauve?”

“Not lately, no.” We were in our usual spot in the Durant Memorial Hospital lobby, waiting for the medical musketeers Isaac Bloomfield, his understudy David “Boy Wonder” Nickerson, and Bill McDermott. I listened to the clock ticking and took in the carpet and matching walls. “It’s probably supposed to be soothing.”

“Like a bowel movement.”

“Better than scours.”

She stood and walked across to the hallway leading past the receptionist desk where Ruby’s granddaughter, Janine Reynolds, was filling out paperwork and trying to stay awake.

I was having the same problem and was even thinking about stretching out on the sofa for a few winks when my undersheriff returned with hands on hips and looked down at me over her still-multicolored eyes. “We didn’t lean on her that badly.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“She kept looking at me when we were asking her about Sarah out on the road; did you notice that?”

“I did.”

She reached down and took the photo from my shirt pocket, her familiarity with my person and clothes breeding indifference. She studied the photograph. “I don’t look anything like this woman.”

“No.”

“So why was she looking at me?”

“I don’t know.” I studied the question. “You had a gun, she had a gun. . . .”

“You had a gun, but she hardly looked at you.”

“Maybe it’s a cultural thing—she wasn’t used to seeing a policewoman.”

She snorted. “A Mexican in Texas? She’s probably on a first-name basis with the entire law-enforcement community.”

I pleaded exhaustion and slumped deeper into the worn sofa molded into the shape of sorrowful anxiety. “I don’t know and I’m dead tired.”

“How are we supposed to inform them that we’ve got her—hang a note on the razor wire?” It was quiet again, and I could feel the tension in her body as she sat on the sofa next to me. Two minutes later, she was sound asleep.

Clear conscience.

I must’ve nodded off, too, but uneasy and half awake, I listen to my parents arguing about religion. My mother, a devout Methodist, is seated at the breakfast table with my father. She looks the way she always does in my dreams, backlit, the sunshine in the kitchen window striking the sides of her pupils, making her blue eyes that much more transparent, like her blue willow china, overwashed, but never broken. She is like that, more beautiful with each passing year. We are all surprised by it, but for her it is her life and she accepts it; nothing astonishing, just a honing of her appearance. Never a small woman, she has retained her tall figure and her face remains unwrinkled, the hollow of her cheeks and the sculpting of her brows defining the strongest of her features—those eyes.

She rests her coffee cup in the saucer, and the only sound in the warm, springtime room that Sunday morning is the click of ceramic against ceramic.

My father whispers, but his voice carries to the stairs where I sit in my pajamas. “You force him to continue going and he’ll hate you for it.” There is a silence, and I strain to hear their voices. “He’s of an age where he needs to make decisions like this for himself.”

“He’s too young to be making decisions like this for himself.”

“Older than you think.”

I tuck my naked heels against my rear and wait on the wooden steps my father had made in the house he had built.

“He’ll grow to hate you for it.”

The tick of the china again, indicative of a poise neither he nor I have. “He doesn’t hate.”

“Resent, then.”

A silence. “You’re sure this isn’t a theological difference. . . .”

“I don’t have a theology.”

“Oh . . . Yes, you do.”

• • •

My head snapped back at the sound of somebody swallowing and awakened to find Saizarbitoria standing over me while sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

“Hey, boss.”

I yawned, careful not to jostle Vic’s still-sleeping head on my shoulder. “Hey.”

“You were talking in your sleep.”

“I say anything interesting?”

“Something about blue willow.”

He sipped his coffee again, and I glanced at the clock, still dragging its hands around the wee hours of the night. “What are you doing here this late?”

“News from the rabbit-choker state.”

“Yep?”

“Tim Berg said to tell you that some guy named Vann Ross Lynear died.”

That was a bit of a shock, even if he was approaching a hundred years old. “That’s a surprise.”

“Fell off his roof without any clothes on.”

Vic’s voice sounded against my shoulder and then she snuggled in deeper. “That’s not a surprise.”

I glanced at her and then back up to my deputy. “Anything suspicious?”

“You mean other than he fell off a roof without any clothes on?” He glanced down at me. “He didn’t say, but he intimated that you shouldn’t return to Belle Fourche anytime soon, that there’s a warrant for your arrest.” He finished his coffee. “You roughing up the church folk over in the Black Hills, boss?”

“It was a misunderstanding about soda pop.”

He glanced toward the reception area where Janine had succumbed and now rested her head on her folded arms. “Remind me to not get in your way at the water cooler.”