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

He looked puzzled as we arrived at the Bullet, where the window was still rolled down. “What’s a BMG?”

Vic threw open the door, climbed out of my damaged vehicle, glanced at us momentarily as she slammed the door with more than a note of finality, and straightened her ball cap. “Big Motherfucking Gun.”

I clarified for the kid. “Browning Machine Gun.”

Lynear looked at the weapon with renewed respect. “It’s a machine gun?”

I studied the body of the thing, dark and dangerous. “It’s an antimaterial sniper rifle.”

“Sniper, huh?”

“Yep.”

“What’s antimaterial mean?”

The Cheyenne Nation offered as he came around the other side of the Chevy, “It shoots through walls.”

“Wow.”

Eddy Lynear was trying to climb out of the bed of the C-10 where he’d been deposited when the vehicle ditched, and Henry lowered the tailgate to make it easier on him as I surveyed the damage to the Bullet, now steaming and draining vehicular fluids onto the roadway.

Eddy was holding his head, where a substantial cut was bleeding through his fingers. “You wrecked my truck again.”

I surveyed the damage to the trucks and to Lynear. “Doesn’t look like it did mine any good either.” I patted the tailgate and had him sit, laying the shotgun and the big .50 in the bed to keep company with the cases and extra ammunition that Lockhart must’ve left.

Vic was in the process of taking the weapons away from the rest of them as Henry appeared at my side with a confiscated ArmaLite and the first-aid kit from the Bullet.

I attempted to peel Eddy’s hand away as the other teenagers gathered round, incapable of ignoring gore. “Let me see.”

Vic was depositing the rest of the automatic weapons in the bed of the Bullet and Eddy, being a male, was drawn to her. His next statement probably had to do more with the braggadocio of having his posse nearby than good sense. “I’d rather she did it.”

“Oh, you don’t want that.” I sopped up some of the blood and laid the skin flap back over his forehead. “She’s more likely to use it as an excuse to put you out of your misery.”

“Or ours.” My undersheriff studied my handiwork as I patched the young man up. “You’re going to have a great scar.”

I sealed the wound with some gauze and tape. “So, you guys were the ones that set fire to the substation?”

He said nothing until Vic reached up and slapped him in the back of the head. “Hey, that hurts.”

“Talk, you little shit.”

He sighed. “We overheard them and thought if we got the bit back that Lockhart would let us in on the deal. We didn’t know anyone was in there. Honest.”

“What deal?”

He shrugged, and the sullen look returned to his face as he glanced around at his friends. “We don’t know.”

“Eddy, playtime is over.” I leaned on the side of the Chevy next to the Cheyenne Nation. “And I need some information.”

He glanced at his buddies again. “We’re not telling you anything.”

“Well, then I’m going to arrest you.”

Edgar Lynear was the first to ask from the other side of the truck bed, “We’re not already arrested?”

“Not yet, but if I do it goes on your permanent record.”

“What’s a permanent record?”

I turned and looked at Henry. “Doesn’t seem to carry the weight it used to.”

He sighed. “No, it does not.”

I glanced back to the wounded young man. “How old are you, Eddy?”

“Seventeen.”

Vic breathed a response. “Jesus . . .”

Eddy considered her. “You know, you shouldn’t blaspheme like that.”

“Kiss my ass, Opie.”

The others laughed as I waved a hand in front of his face to get his attention back on me. “I need some answers or people are going to get hurt.”

He gestured toward his wound with a bloody hand. “I’m already hurt.”

Vic reached up and smacked the side of his head. “Not near enough.”

“Oww . . .”

“I mean really hurt.” I straightened and looked to the left. “I know the main ranch headquarters is up this road, but that’s not where Lockhart and his men are working, is it?”

He remained silent until Vic slapped him again. “Oww . . .”

I looked at her, and she shrugged. “I’m Italian, and I have brothers; I know how this works.”

“Is it the road to the right up here?”

Vic raised her hand again, and the kid winced. “Yeah, to the right. I don’t know what’s there; they never let us go out that way.”

I nodded, looked at the two-track that departed from the main road a good quarter of a mile farther, and then redirected my attention to the weapons I had confiscated. I reached in and plucked out one of the plastic cases, opened it, and looked at the rounds inside, each one as long as a cigar.

Edgar was next to me again. “What do the blue tips mean?”

I pulled one out and studied the deceptive pastel point at the business end of the .50 round. “Incendiary.”

“What’s that mean?”

The Cheyenne Nation’s voice intoned beside me. “It blows things up.”

• • •

“You think locking up their shoes with the guns will keep them there?”

“I can hope. Anyway, I didn’t figure you wanted to volunteer for babysitting duty.” We’d triangulated a route that would have us traipsing through the sagebrush and over uneven ground but would intercept the road by angling to the right.

“Are there snakes out here?”

“It’s Wyoming; there are snakes everywhere. If you see one, shoot it with your ray gun.” Vic had taken a spacey-looking desert tan FN carbine and was aiming it at the horizon. “And if you don’t watch where you’re going, you’re going to step on one.”

She turned back to look at me. “You’re just jealous because mine weighs less than an anvil. Why did you decide to pack that thing, anyway?”

Loaded with the McMillan TAC-50 and thirty rounds of ammunition I’d dumped in a canvas satchel, I was bringing up the rear. “If these guys are as well armed as I think they are, I’d just as soon do my fighting from a couple of football fields away.”

Henry glanced back from point, my shotgun hanging from his shoulder and the ArmaLite A4 carbine with two thirty-round magazines in his hand. “More like a couple of miles.”

I called out to him, “If they’d had a flintlock rifle, would you have taken it?”

He walked on. “I like this weapon; it and I have spent a great deal of quality time together.”

“Quality of life?”

“For me; perhaps not for others.”

There was a chill, but maybe it was the cool of the late night.

I thought about the idiocy of what I was doing, pitting the three of us against who knew how many. The proper thing to do would’ve been to call in the Highway Patrol and as many fellow sheriffs and deputies as I could draw on short notice from the surrounding counties, but here I was lugging Ma Deuce across the high plains in a remake of They Came to Cordura .

Short notice was still too long, and these characters were too powerful to let slip away; after Double Tough, I thought I couldn’t allow it, but after Frymire, I knew I couldn’t.

It was possible that Lockhart and the others had already vacated to sunnier pastures, but I figured they were concerned with removing anything that might incriminate them. If I opened the conflict to a wider arena, the more opportunities there would be that they might slip through. Maybe I just wanted to mess things up for them myself—get my licks in before anybody else showed up.

I figured that Gloss, the others, the lawyers, and possibly the National Guard couldn’t be too far behind, but I wanted to make sure that none of the nastier players got away and certainly not scot-free.