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

“You read my mind.” I watched as the truck lurched from across the road and pulled alongside us. The driver rolled his window down, and I recognized him—Powder Junction’s mayor. “Brian, what’s the matter with you. Are you drunk?”

Kinnison, who was usually smiling, looked very serious for a change and perplexed. “What?”

“Why were you just sitting there?”

“I thought you might want to get by—Walt, the sheriff’s substation is on fire.”

• • •

The Powder River Fire District truck was pouring water onto the Quonset hut with four different high-powered hoses, but with the flames rippling through the broken windows, it looked to me as if the building was well on its way to melting.

I forced my way through the volunteer firemen—Double Tough’s Suburban was parked a little ways away in the lot, and I remembered how he had said he was sleeping in the back of the office to give Frymire and his fiancée a little privacy. I turned back to the inferno. “I’ve got a man in there.”

The fire chief, a fellow by the name of Gilbert, wearing full gear with the rubber coat and leather helmet with face shield, threw a hand on my chest. “We checked; there’s nobody in there, Sheriff.”

“How about the back room?” The look on his face told me he wasn’t sure, and I started pushing past him, the cool coming over my face along with the stillness in my hands. “One of my deputies—he was sleeping in the back.”

He grabbed hold of me. “Walt, you can’t go in there.” Another man joined him, but my momentum carried all of us forward through the pools of water reflecting fire at our feet; it was like the world was in flames, but I’d seen fire up on the mountain and was unafraid. “Walt, if he’s in there, he’s dead.”

I shrugged them off and continued toward the closed front door. “Not this guy.”

Gilbert made a last grab, dragging my jacket down my arm. “Walt, there are chemicals from the bus barn that this building lodges up against—that whole back area is going to go up any minute.” His last grasp had turned me just a little. “You can’t go in there!”

I stared at him for an instant and then yanked my arm completely free, sending him falling backward toward a group of men holding one of the hoses.

My boots slipped on the puddled asphalt, but I got my footing back and, feeling the intensity of the heat on my face, lurched toward the door and pulled my gloves out of my coat pockets. Holding one of my gloved hands up to protect my face as I planted a staggering shoulder into the door, I exploded it inward, the glass with the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department seal shattering as my hand struck the middle of the pane, the shards cascading out like a broken spider’s web.

The flames rushed toward me as I tripped, like something alive in pursuit of the fresh, cool oxygen of the night. It was lucky that I’d fallen, because there was a ceiling of black smoke about waist high with flames licking at the corrugated steel of the perimeter, all of them making for the door I just came through. The desk and chairs to my left were on fire, along with the stacks of newspapers that had concerned me earlier. To my right, the decrepit sofa burned, the smoldering edges of the carpet remnant were curling upward into flames, and the paint was peeling off the walls in burning strips that slid toward the floor,

Suddenly, something with the force of a buffalo pushed me forward, smashing my face against the glass and flattening me against the door on the floor. Whatever it was it stayed there, and it took every measure of strength I had to press up onto my hands and knees. It was only when my hat skidded forward toward the inner doorway and I felt the rivulets of water falling down the sides of my face that I realized the pressure was from the hoses Gilbert and the volunteer firemen were directing on me to keep me from becoming barbeque.

It shot around me, making a prismatic outline of my bulk in a mist that evaporated instantaneously. I staggered up only to be knocked down again by the hundreds of gallons that were propelling me forward. My hand hit the soaked surface of the sodden carpet, and I crouched, deciding that, between the fire and the high-pressure water, I damn well better stay low.

I watched as my hat hit the door where I had seen Double Tough’s cot and I felt the heat just above the top of my head even as the water attempted to beat back the carnivorous flames, and heaving my shoulders forward, I drove with my knees, which made me feel like I was back at USC pushing blocking sleds; I tried to breathe through the fingers of my glove, but the water poured off me like a forking river and I felt like I might drown before I got there.

Widening my eyes and trying to keep my bearings along with my balance, I stared ahead. The door was closed and the brim of my hat, lodged under its edge, was slapping up and down like some seabird attempting to take flight. I reached out and pulled it back toward me, figuring a little dripping beaver-fur protection was better than no protection at all.

There was a whooshing sound above me to my right and the quad sheet map came floating through the smoke to land on top of me. I could see the ink on the thing blackened from the heat tracing a straight line toward the door.

Using both hands, I pushed myself up from the carpet and the inch-deep puddle and skimmed forward into the wall beside the back door; the plywood the map had been mounted on was on my back, deflecting the two blasting jets of water up into the rounded top of the corrugated ceiling, driving the smoke long enough for me to partially stand.

Some idiot voice in the back of my head told me to feel the door before opening it, but I barked back at it, fully tasting the smoke, ash, and moisture in my spoken words. “I know there’s a fire behind the damn thing—there’s fire everywhere.”

I reached down with my saturated gloved hand and watched the water drain from my grip, the knob not turning. Who knew why—possibly because the boards were warped from the heat, possibly because Double Tough was afraid of monsters; it didn’t matter, nothing mattered except getting through the door and getting him out of there.

I knew what was going to happen when I shouldered the thing open, so I bumped the cheap, two-panel door, just to get prepared, figuring I’d blow through and fall onto the concrete floor as the flames came out.

I put everything I had into the crouching bull rush and felt my feet come right off the ground as the pressure from inside the superheated room escaped, carrying the two neatly halved portions of the door and my hunched body backward into the main office. The sound stuffed my ears and stayed there as I lay on the soaked rug for a moment trying to clear my head.

My hat was bumping against my face, and I caught it with one hand before it could attempt a repeat performance and run away with the force of the water. I jammed it on again, dumping a good gallon onto my face in the process, and then half-crawled, half-slithered toward the door, the pressurized jet stream still hitting me as I hand and kneed it across the floor.

The doorway was glowing, and I was sure the flames were ingesting the old wood and then vomiting the coats of leaded paint that made up the lean-to, not to mention the unknown horrors in the fifty-five-gallon drums in the bus barn at the other side of the exterior wall.

No one could be alive in there.

No one. Not even Double Tough.

I pitched forward again, but the smoke was like a shroud and hung even lower than before, instantly gritting my eyes, nose, and mouth. I shifted the wet glove in front of my face again and breathed as shallowly as I could, coughed, and tried to get the stuff out of some passage or another but only succeeded in clearing my ears, the only sensory organ I didn’t particularly need.