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

“Why doesn’t she just give it to Mike?”

Ray laughed. “She’s afraid he’s going to hurt himself in it. Can you believe that? I mean, he’s what, fifty years old?” He shook his head and placed the drain plug on the top of the barrel. “She thinks he’s seventeen. . . .” He glanced up at the mammoth engine in the small car. “Hell, maybe he would kill himself driving it. I know I would.” He wiped his hands on a red cotton rag. “You looking for the demolition derby?”

“Yep.”

“Next stall over.”

I nodded and walked through the doorway into the chaos of the garage, pieces of Plymouth Satellite scattered everywhere. “Boy howdy.”

Saizarbitoria’s head appeared with an inside door panel in his hands. “There is nothing in this car except car.”

I nodded and walked over to where the backseat sat with some cardboard boxes, and squatted down. “Where’s Vic?”

“Under here.” Her voice echoed off the concrete floor, and she rolled a creeper from underneath the Plymouth with a trouble light in her hand and a black grease smudge on her nose, looking completely at ease. “I want that Mustang.”

“I bet you do; everybody in the county wants that Mustang.” I studied her—she had a rag tied around her head in the front like Rosie the Riveter, and she was wearing a pair of coveralls she must’ve borrowed from Ray—she looked hot, as she always did.

“You’re enjoying this, right?”

“Among my Uncle Alphonse’s numerous, nefarious enterprises, he had a chop shop on Christian Street where I used to do lube jobs.”

“I bet you did.”

She smiled and disappeared under the car again. “I was very good at it.”

“I bet you were.” I caught the Basquo’s eye as he stood with his fists on his hips. “Anything at all?”

He sighed. “Nothing.”

I nodded and fingered the flap on the largest cardboard box beside me. “Well, we need to put it all back together as fast as we can, since I promised Tomás that we’d let him drive it back to East Spring later this afternoon.”

Vic’s head reappeared like a snapping turtle. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.” I flipped the flap open and looked inside. “I’m sure we can get Ray to help us put it back together.” Reaching into the box, I moved some of the newspaper that surrounded a metal housing. “What’s this?”

Saizarbitoria peered over the top of the station wagon. “That’s that differential yoke I was talking about—the one we found in the spare-tire well. I didn’t look at it closely, but it’s huge and weighs a ton, so I don’t think it goes on the Plymouth.”

With both hands, I ripped the cardboard and looked at the massive piece, then turned it over. From this angle, it looked like nothing that could possibly go on any automobile, but especially this one.

Vic rolled the rest of the way out from under the Plymouth. “What is that thing, anyway?”

I looked more closely at the piece of industrial equipment. “This is a polycrystalline diamond Hughes tricone drilling bit.”

10

Before Howard Robard Hughes Jr. became a business magnate, engineer, aviator, film producer, philanthropist, Jane Russell’s bra inventor, and all-around loony, he was the nineteen-year-old inheritor of 75 percent of Howard Robard Hughes Sr.’s empire. Like most billionaires, Howard Hughes was not a self-made man; the backbone of his fortune was built upon the development of the modern oil drilling bit already patented by the family company, Hughes Tool, in 1909. Being a pretty shrewd Texas oilman, H. H. Sr. had made the lucrative decision to lease the bits rather than sell them after he commercialized them.

I’m not sure if Junior ever came to Wyoming, even though Paramount offered to sell him Shane , the film they’d made in Jackson Hole, because it was so far over budget. Hughes turned down the opportunity even though he hadn’t seen it. Rumor had it that Paramount had settled on the loss and was going to turn the movie out to pasture as just another oater when Howard finally viewed the rough cut of the film. He offered to buy it outright, Paramount reconsidered, and the rest, as they say, is cinematic history.

If Hughes never made it to Wyoming, however, his daddy’s invention did; I’d seen it the summer I spent roughnecking after my senior year in high school, which was another part of my father’s campaign to teach me the value of higher education. All the lessons had taken, and I’d spent the next four years as an English major at the University of Southern California in an attempt to never return to the oilfields; so far, it had worked.

The two-cone roller bit—and, more important, its descendant, the three-cone roller bit—looked like the mouth of one of Frank Herbert’s giant sand worms in Dune , and with the addition of diamonds it appeared to have gone gangsta.

Double Tough spelled it out for Vic and me, his Appalachian drawl fitting the description. “One hundred seventy thousand dollars if it’s a penny.”

I studied the toothy-looking piece of heavy equipment that had taken two of us to lift onto the desk of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Office Substation in Powder Junction—our version of the French Foreign Legion and possibly the most depressing place in the world. I glanced up at a massive, yellowed map of the area so old that the interstate highway didn’t even appear on it. I noticed a cot in the back room through the open door and assumed this was where Double Tough was sleeping while Frymire had his fiancée in town. “Do you guys ever think about fixing this place up a little?”

He ignored me, rolled one of the teeth in the device, and picked a thick fingernail at one of the diamonds. “Polycrystalline, but they’re diamonds nonetheless. Hell, I only seen one of these one other time and that was down in Bolivia.”

I sipped coffee from the cracked Hole in the Wall Bar mug. “I’ll kick in some county money if you want to get a rug or something.”

Vic’s voice rose behind me. “Look who’s talking about home décor.”

Double Tough’s shoulder muscles rolled as he took the device and turned it over, looking at the manufacture marks from under the bill of his ball cap. “Hughes Christensen, that’s the real deal.”

“The Cadillac of drill bits?”

He glanced up at Vic, standing by the desk. “More like a damn Lamborghini.”

She smiled. “Did you know they made tractors before they made cars?”

“No shit.” His eyes shone as he visually caressed the bit. “The Chinese are makin’ a bunch of cheap stuff, but that right there is the real deal.” He whistled through his teeth. “Directional drilling and antiwhirl technology; that ol’ boy’ll go just about anywhere you want to point it.”

I set the mug on the corner of his desk. “Water?”

His eyes came up. “Yeah, but it’d be like plowin’ yer field with that Lambo.” He smiled. “The car, not the tractor.” He studied the shaft of the beast. “It’s got a lease mark here. I’ve still got some connections in the biz and I can give ’em a call to try and find out who it was leased to.”

“Why not call Hughes Christensen?”

He shrugged. “Well, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. . . .”

I glanced up at Vic, standing by the desk with her arms folded as she reached over, picked up the receiver, and handed it to him. “Fuck it—get ’em in trouble.”

The ex-roughneck shrugged and began dialing.

I walked over to the window in the door and looked through the sun-faded, peeling decal of our star, past the weather-beaten station wagon at the playground across the street. We hadn’t planned to be looking out the window at a public school from every office we had, but that’s how it had panned out.