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

“Oh, my.” I sipped the last of my coffee and rolled my hand to prompt the history lesson.

“Bidarte Sr. and his men, mostly family, are seen to be viable muscle in certain quarters unimpeded by such a useless appendage as a conscience. They hire out as a kind of private army through the decades, and then in the eighties, they become the strong arm for the most powerful drug cartel, Familia Escobar in Chihuahua.”

“Where the dogs come from.”

She stared at me. “Did you wake up on the funny side of your pile of blankets or what?”

“So Tomás and his mother are connected to the drug trade?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. Eduardo and Wanda shipped Tomás, their baby boy, off to—get this—Universidad de Salamanca in Spain.”

She glanced at the file to freshen her memory. “There’s a vacant time period for Tomás after college where there are reports of his involvement with the Basque terrorist group, something called the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA for short, but about twenty years ago Tomás’s father, Eduardo, splits from the Escobar family because he sees what drugs are doing to an otherwise virtuous business like the Mexican mafia; he walks away and joins the Church of the Little Lambsy-Divey or whatever it’s called.”

“The Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God.”

“Whatever.”

I looked in my empty cup. “I thought all the mafiosos, no matter what their nationality, frowned on that—it’s the in-for-life kind of thing.”

“Evidently Eduardo had the juice to do it for six months, and move to los Estados Unidos; Hudspeth County, Texas, to be exact.”

“Six months; why do I not like the sound of that?”

“Because the sheriff down there said the story goes that they filled him so full of holes you could’ve used him for a colander.”

“Hmm.”

“Wait, it gets better. Our man Tomás Bidarte shows up in northern Mexico like the Shadow, and suddenly Escobar personnel start disappearing wholesale, by the carload, by the houseload—until every single member of the family is dead: men, women, and children. Now there’s nothing to connect Bidarte to any of this, but in good old Mexican tradition, enough people are paid enough bribes to get Tomás thrown into Penal del Altiplano, the worst prison in all of Mexico, for what turns out to be twelve years. Just as a side note, the life span of the average prisoner in that place is only five.”

“He got out?”

“Yes, and reestablished his ties with the Apoplectic Church of Sheepskin, which had a compound on both sides of the Rio Grande near a little town called Bosque. Whenever they got in trouble for the polygamy thing in the U.S., they would run over to the Mexican side, and whenever they got in trouble with the Mexicans, they would come back.”

“Who did you talk to in Texas?”

“The new sheriff, a guy by the name of Crutchley.”

I hoisted myself off the floor and stretched my back in an attempt to get it somewhat in line, and noticed Santiago standing in the doorway of my office. “What are you looking at?”

His grin displayed the trademark dimple in his right cheek. “Jeez, I’ve seen buffalo get up more gracefully than that.”

I ambled to my chair and sat down. “Just wait, your day is coming.”

He leaned against the facing. “Somebody need a translator?”

“Do you want Crutchley’s number?” Vic laid the papers on my desk, pointing at a number she’d scrawled in the margin, including her signature period she added to everything; it looked like somebody had stabbed the sheet of paper with an ice pick. I dialed and glanced up at her and Sancho. “Bidarte—that doesn’t sound Spanish.”

Without looking at him, Vic snapped a finger and pointed at Saizarbitoria’s face, and he responded. “Basque, it means ‘Between the Ways.’”

“He’s Basque?”

“Vasco,” Santiago nodded. “At least part; Basque heritage makes up about twenty percent of the bloodlines in Mexico.”

She looked up at Sancho. “Dismissed.”

He didn’t move.

The phone rang twice and then a female voice with enough twang to string a mandolin answered. “Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Hey, I’m looking for Michael Crutchley. This is Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming. Who’s this?”

“Buffy, his wife. I think I talked to an eye-talian woman from your department this morning about those cuckoos down near Bosque.” There was a pause as she rearranged the phone against her ear. “I’m sorry, but our damned dispatcher/receptionist is pregnant again and out of the office.”

I hit the speakerphone and rested the receiver back in the cradle. “Sorry about that.”

“Nowhere near as sorry as I am—I married into Team Crutchley for better or worse but not for lunch.” None of us were quite sure what to say to that and listened as she talked to someone in the background. “Maybe he doesn’t want to talk to you—maybe he wants to talk to me.”

We could hear a man speaking: “Buffy, gimme the phone, God-damnit.” More jostling. “Hey, Sheriff, I apologize for my wife; she thinks she’s funny.” There was a pause, and I assumed he was walking into his office with the phone. “How can I help you?”

“I believe you had a conversation with my undersheriff about the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God folks who were down in the southern part of your county?”

“Yeah, they used to be here, up until about a year ago.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, back taxes, but from what I remember they got paid in full here a couple of months ago. And there were some problems with the Department of Child Services, who got all over ’em about not having some of their adolescent boys properly educated. They claimed they had a school for them, but these teenagers couldn’t even tell you the capital of Texas.”

“Hmm.”

“It’s Austin, by the way.”

I grunted. “Thanks.”

“Bosque’s in the southern part of the county; I’ve got a shoestring budget and 4,572 square miles of sidewinders, sand, sagebrush, and sons-a-bitches trying to make it to the promised land. I guess you don’t have those problems with the Canadians up there?”

“They would have to go through Montana first.” I waited a moment. “That’s north of us.”

He grunted back. “Thanks.”

“What’s the story on Eduardo Bidarte?”

“Ancient history, like I told your deputy. He’s about twenty years dead; the cartel over in Chihuahua decided to use him for target practice, and by the time they were finished their marksmanship got really good.”

“I understand there was some wholesale retribution?”

“It’s common knowledge that the son, Tomás, killed everything that crawled, walked, or flew with the name Escobar.”

“No proof, though?”

Crutchley laughed. “It’s Mexico; proof doesn’t enter into it.”

“Any drug ties to the ACLG church?”

“Nope. I’ve got drug problems on every point of the compass, but I didn’t with the Mormons.” He waited a moment, and when I didn’t say anything, he asked, “What’s the problem up there, Sheriff?”

“For now, just a traffic accident.”

“Name?”

“Wanda Bidarte, lately Lynear.”

“Big Wanda?”

I stared at the tiny red light on my phone. “You know her?”

“She was Eduardo’s wife and Tomás’s mother and was pretty much involved with every charity in the county. She even started going to the Catholic Church up here in San Marcos; thought she was going to revert, but I think they put the clamps on her.” He sighed. “Traffic stop, you say?”

“Yep. We had her pulled over and she tried to make a run for it.”

“Jesus.” A pause. “She was jumpy that way.”