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

I walked George over to where I could see his father, fished the religious fob and ring of keys from my pocket, and tossed them onto his lap. “Wanda’s keys, one of which is missing as the car has been impounded for evidence; you can come and get the groceries.” I hefted his son’s arm, so that he had to stand on tiptoe. “And this you can pick up anytime after the judge sets bail.”

With George’s cuff chained to the D-ring on the floor of the Bullet, I drove us out of the compound and up the canyon road until we got to the flat above. A glimmer of light was starting to cast a pinkish glow across the horizon to the east and the high spots of the rolling hills were just starting to blush with the growing day.

Still in a huff, I turned to look at Rockwell. “What are you, the Houdini of guns?”

He looked at me blankly.

“Give me that pistol.”

He looked unhappy about it but pulled the .38 from his inside coat pocket and handed it to me. “Careful, it’s loaded.”

I popped the lid on the center console and thumbed the cylinder open, dropping the shells inside; afterward, I tossed the sidearm in there and closed the lid. “Where did you get it?”

He nodded his hairy head toward the bed of my truck. “Out of the box in the back of your conveyance; there are shotguns, rifles, and all sort of armaments back there.”

I’d forgotten about the weapons I’d taken from the youth of South Dakota. “Jesus.”

Rockwell nodded. “He works in mysterious ways, does He not?”

When we got to the main gate, I undid the clasps, pushed it open, and drove through. Thinking about what I’d just done, and not being particularly proud of it, I sat there with my hands gripped on the wheel. In a fit of remorse, I opened the suicide door, reached in, and uncuffed George.

I pulled him from the truck and stood there looking at him, his eyes growing wide with the thought of what might happen next.

I let him think for a few seconds, watching sweat trickle down from his hairline, then walked him back to the gate, and placed him on the other side. I closed it, the chain-link still rattling as he stood there staring at me.

He wiped the sweat from his face and took no time in locking the three massive padlocks. I replaced the cuffs in the holder on my belt. He took a step back—I suppose just to make absolutely sure that he was out of reach, the signature smirk returning. “You come around here again, and I’ll be waiting.”

I sighed and pulled my jacket back to reveal my .45.

He stood there for a moment, his eyes opening even wider, and then started backing up, finally turning and running down the road.

I yelled after him, “When you get back, tell them you escaped—they’ll be impressed.”

9

“They say that as you get older, you need more sleep.”

I felt myself coming back as if from death. I was trying to climb out of a hole, but something large and feathery kept landing on my chest and pushing me deeper into the earth. Catching my breath, I’m pretty sure I snorted and then spoke through my hat. “Actually, you need less, which might explain the end result.” I pulled my hat from my face. “I thought I locked that door.”

“It doesn’t have a doorknob. How could you lock it?”

She had a point.

Rolling over, I lay there on my side on the stack of blankets and pillow I’d liberated from the jail. “What time is it?”

“Daytime.” She sat in my guest chair with a stack of papers under one arm and two mugs in her hands. She looked down at me, and it looked like the multicolor bruises under her eyes were just about gone. “Why didn’t you sleep in the jail—the kid goes to work at five.”

“There was no room at the inn.” I coughed again, half expecting feathers to fly out of my mouth. “I don’t know, all his stuff is in there. It felt like trespassing.”

She handed a mug down to me. “Here, mother’s milk.” I sat up and hunched against one of my bookcases, taking the coffee as she smiled. “So, the staff is dying to know how you single-handedly captured public enemy number old.”

I mainlined the caffeine and tried to clear my mind, buying time with clever repartee. “Huh?”

She nodded her head toward the holding cells, and I noticed she was wearing a ball cap, which was trouble as it indicated a bad hair day. “Cousin Itt.”

“Oh . . . Yep.”

She sipped from her mug and pulled the papers from under her arm. “Where did you find him?”

I told her she was never going to believe me if I told her and then did.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

I raised a hand. “As God is my witness.”

“He was in the truck all afternoon, even when we were down in Short Drop?”

“Twice.”

She settled in the chair with the papers in her lap, crossed her legs, and bobbed a tactical boot about a foot from my head. I wondered if she was going to kick me. “You went back?”

I sipped my coffee. “I did.”

“Alone.” She looked out the window, and I was pretty sure she was going to kick me now. “In the middle of the night.”

I gestured with my mug toward the holding cells. “With Cousin Itt.”

“You took him with you?”

I yawned, even though it was probably a bad move. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

The tarnished gold focused on me, and I was pretty sure it was the same look pythons give you just before they crush you to death and eat you. “And?”

“Roy Lynear claims Wanda is one of theirs but not his wife; however, it turns out she is Tomás Bidarte’s mother.”

She pursed her lips, and I had to fight to concentrate. “The guy with the knife we met at the bar?”

“Yep.” I sipped my coffee some more. “How ’bout you run a check on Tomás with the Mexican authorities; he made mention of a brother being killed by PEMEX security, and that struck me as being a little strange.”

She continued to study me doubtfully. “Mexican authorities—isn’t that an oxymoron?”

“Oxymoron is a little south of Mexico City, isn’t it?” I smiled for the first time this morning. “How’s your Spanish?”

She yelled over her shoulder. “Sancho, translation!”

I drank my coffee as if my life depended on it, which it did. “That bad, huh?”

She reached down, scooping up the sheaf of papers and handing them to me. “Anything else?”

I stared at them, a complete dossier from the NCIS on the entire Bidarte family. “Did I already ask you to do this?”

She shook her head. “I ran the SOP on Wanda and the rest of the family popped up, kind of like Ancestry.com for criminals.” She sipped her coffee. “They got a lot of little leaves in that family.”

I thumbed through the pages and looked up at her. “Do I have to pay a quarter for the audio presentation?”

She set her mug on the corner of my desk and held out a hand.

It was a habit she’d adopted in getting me to read reports that only worked when I had pocket change. “I think I liked you better when you weren’t making house payments.” I handed her back the papers and then struggled to get two bits out of my jeans, finally depositing the quarter in her open palm.

She poked the change into her shirt pocket—I was pretty sure I’d paid for a third of a living room by now. “The earliest mention of the family is a Philippe Bidarte who was a big deal in the Mexico oil business in the twenties till he climbed in bed with a lot of the big American oil interests. With all the revolutions, Mexico was changing governments every twenty minutes, but the one thing all the revolutionaries could agree on was getting the gringos the fuck out of Mexico. Philippe, on the losing end of one of these wars, found himself guarding the ex–el presidente, some old one-armed fart by the name of Álvaro Obregón. Anyway, the jefe has a price on his head, and Philippe makes a lateral career move, whereupon he and his men shoot the old guy, asleep in his tent, dead.”