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

“Who did you talk to?”

“Some jaybird named Ronald Lynear. I get the feeling he’s the grand imperial Pooh-Bah around the place—him and another fella by the name of Lockhart and some severe-looking individual by the name of Bidarte.”

I leaned forward. “And they say they never heard of either of them?”

“Yeah, and I know that’s bullshit, because I’ve still got the slip of paper she gave me with directions on how to get to the place.”

“Did you get any ID from her?” I raised my head as Vic came in and sat in her usual chair, propping her usual boots up on my usual desk.

“Walt, these people don’t carry any ID. I got a name from her, Sarah Tisdale. The funny thing is, there was a phone number down here at the bottom that I didn’t pay any attention to ’cause it was out of state. Walt—it’s Wyoming.”

“307?”

“You bet.”

“Give it to me.”

“I already tried calling it, but there wasn’t any answer and no answering machine, of course.”

“Give it to me anyway.” He read me the number, and I scribbled it down on the paper blotter on my desk, tore it off, and handed it to my undersheriff. “We’ll get the reverse registry and find out where it is.” Listening to the troubled man on the other end of the line, I dropped my pen and enjoyed the view as Vic left in search of the information I needed. “Tim . . . ?”

“Yeah.”

He sighed again, and I waited, then asked, “What’s really troubling you?”

“Walt, you know me; I’m for freedom, folks’ rights to bear arms and all. . . . I mean that Waco shit needed to be handled better, but it needed to be handled.”

“Yep.”

“Well, what’s going on up there near Castle Rock is wrong. I was up there the first time about a year ago when we started getting complaints about abuse and Child Services wanted to know how many kids were up there and whether they were getting a proper education.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We found out about ’em because a few of ’em came in filing for welfare benefits, claiming that their husbands had run off and left when their damn husbands are sitting out there in the pickups waiting for ’em.” There was another pause as he caught his breath. “Those kids aren’t going anywhere but the school of hard knocks, and the funny thing is that the majority of ’em are young men about the same age as the one you’ve got. They have all this heavy equipment, I mean more than you’d need in a ranching or farming operation, but they’d sunk lines into the river for water and didn’t have any irrigation rights—and you know as well as I do that there’s more men died over ditches than bitches in this country.”

I leaned back in my chair. “True.”

“Well, the local ranchers got in an uproar, and we went up there with warrants and got in the place.” There was another pause. “Walt, my grandfolks come up in the dirty thirties, hard times when you had to do whatever it took to survive. I’ve looked at the pictures and heard the stories, but I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s one thing to read about this stuff in the news, but it’s something else to come up against it face to face. People up there are just living in sheds—women and children. . . . Thirteen-year-old girls married to fifty-year-old men—I mean, they’re not married in the legal sense—that’s how they try and get away with the support checks. They marry these girls off to these men, seal ’em, they call it, in private ceremonies.” There was another pause, and when he spoke again, there was a catch in his voice. “There was a little girl. . . . She didn’t look right—birth defects. There was this one little girl that comes up to me. . . . Right. We’re busting up these irrigation pipes they’ve got going in the river, and she pulls on my pant leg, wanting to know why it is we’re taking away their water so that they can’t water the cows that they’re gonna milk to make enough money to have something to eat. I kneeled down and took her little hand, and Walt . . . she didn’t have any fingernails.”

“I don’t know what to say, Tim.”

“How’s that boy, the one you found?”

“He says his name is Cord.” Vic reentered and sat in her chair with a massive computer file, her index finger stuffed in the middle. “Normal, or appears to be. I had the school psychologist give him a going-over, and she seems to think that he’s all right.”

“Lucky you.”

I fingered the brim of my hat, spinning it on the crown and thinking how the simple gesture was sometimes indicative of the job as a whole. “I’ll keep you informed as to what’s going on over here—and you’ll do the same for me?”

“Sure will.”

I hung up my phone and looked past the bruises that looked like crow’s wings spread beneath the Terror’s tarnished gold eyes. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

She dropped the book onto my desk and opened it. “Trouble in rabbit-choker land?”

“That polygamy group up in the north of Tim’s county; he doesn’t know what to do about it.”

“It’s a cult; they’re fucking cults. The fact that they’re trying to cover this shit up under the auspices of actual religion only makes it that much worse.”

“I thought you thought all religions were cults.”

“Some are worse than others—I should know, I grew up Catholic.” She heaved the book around, her finger pointing to a number about a third of the way down the page. “Surrey/Short Drop General Mercantile.”

I read the exchange and picked up my phone. “A commercial number?”

“Surrey/Short Drop—they’re in-county, and I don’t even know where either of them are.”

Surrey and Short Drop were tiny towns in the southeast corner of the county. Surrey had been named after a remittance man, born the fourth son of four. In the late eighteenth century, the first son of a British nobleman inherited the family fortune, the second went into the military, the third into the clergy, leaving the fourth to ride into Powder Junction every month for his remittance check so that he could drink himself to death on the high plains. Short Drop, which was a stone’s throw away, was where a member of Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall gang had been caught and lynched—hence the name referring to a short drop on a long rope.

The other point of interest in the area was the infamous Teapot Dome of Teapot Dome scandal fame, named for a tiny rock formation on top of the U.S. Naval oil reserves, which had brought rightful disgrace upon the administration of Warren G. Harding in the twenties. The illegal sale of the Teapot Dome to Sinclair Oil had been the biggest national scandal in the country until a few guys back in the seventies had gotten caught burgling an office in a place called Watergate.

I dialed the number and waited, not particularly expecting anyone to answer. Imagine my surprise when someone did.

“Short Drop Merc.”

The voice was older, female, and didn’t sound like it would brook much nonsense.

“This is Sheriff Walt Longmire—”

“Well, it’s about time.”

I made a face for the benefit of nobody in particular. “Excuse me?”

“Is this the so-called sheriff of our county?”

“Well, yes it is—and who is this?”

She ignored my question and launched into a tirade. “Look, I talked to that moron you’ve got posted over in Powder Junction, and he said you were going to send somebody around to talk to those idiots over near East Spring Draw down near Sulphur Creek.”

I remembered Double Tough mentioning something about disagreements in the area but that he wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Yep, I’m kind of following up on that and was hoping you could give me a little more information.”