Lucian sipped his coffee and smiled, watching the two of us talk like it was Wimbledon.
“How was Belize?”
“I got a tan.”
“So I noticed.”
The old sheriff choked, swallowed, and then interrupted. “Got any lines?”
Victoria Moretti pushed a handful of blue-black hair back from her face and sipped her own coffee, sat the mug down, placed an elbow on the table and leaned in, looking back at him with a full load of tarnished gold. “You wanna try and find them, old man?”
He blushed, and I believe it was the first time I’d ever seen him do it. “I don’t know if my heart is up to it.”
“Maybe if you’d stop looking at my tits and look me in the face you could work up the nerve.” She grinned at him, showing the elongated canine tooth. “Don’t feel bad—many are called, but few are chosen.”
“I didn’t take you for a Sunday schooler.”
She reached over and took a piece of my bacon, along with a little bit of my heart. “That’s where the phrase is from—damned if I knew; I’m schooled in other stuff.” She bit into the bacon and narrowed the aperture of the cannons. “Why, you need a little teaching?”
He cocked his head as he slid out of the booth the oil workers had occupied last night and glanced at me for a moment. “I think I’m gonna go walk your dog.”
Vic watched him slip on his coat. “Stay warm out there, thinking about me.”
He pushed through the glass door and then stood still, frozen by her words for an instant. “I believe I’ll do that.”
I watched him head back for what had been our communal room and Dog. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen him scamper.”
“I want to talk to you alone.”
“I figured.”
She slid out and switched over to the other side and took another piece of my bacon, being, after all, a carnivore. As she chewed I took the time to drink her in. She had gotten a tan and the blond streaks in her hair were incongruent in the depth of the Wyoming winter—a look I was more used to in the summer. Studying her was something you had to handle with care; volatile, like nitroglycerine.
“So, miss me?”
“Yep.”
“A lot?”
“Yep.”
She chewed and studied me. “Are you going to say something other than yep?”
“Yep.” She waited, her eyes widening in comic expectation as I finally spoke.
“How are you feeling?”
“I’ve got a great scar.”
“I know; I’ve seen it.”
She nodded with a smile, staring at me in a way that made me think she hadn’t had a really good look at me last night; not a feeling I was comfortable with. “Don’t you think scars make better stories than tattoos?”
I fingered that little piece of my ear that was missing and draped an arm over the back of my seat. “If that’s the case, then I’ve got a whole library on me.”
“I’ve read it.” She continued smiling and chewing. “And I really liked the ending.”
She leaned back in the booth and looked out the fogged window of the Aces & Eights, a corpuscle-colored fingernail coming up and chipping at the frost cornering the edges. “The windows in Belize don’t do this . . . Shit, who am I kidding, they don’t have windows in Belize.”
A quiet spread out over the table between us like a blank page covered with abandoned plates, glasses, and cutlery—but no words. “You stay at Jim Seale’s place?”
She nodded. “Hotel del Rio, yeah. He’s from around here, right?”
“Banner, over in Sheridan County.”
“You ever been to Belize?”
“Nope. I think he’s had that place for twenty years. He keeps asking me down . . . But I just never get away.”
A smirk traced itself across her lips. “Look who I’m asking—you never go anywhere there isn’t snow.”
“I’ve spent some time in tropic climes.”
She dismissed me with another flap of the hand. “The Vietnam War doesn’t count.”
“I spent six weeks on Johnston Atoll.”
She stopped moving and then slowly turned her face toward mine. “After Vietnam?”
“Yep.”
Her eyes sharpened to flints. “Okay . . . That’s a month and a half of the two lost years unaccounted for after Vietnam in the saga that is the life of Walt Longmire. Where the hell is Johnston Atoll?”
I sipped my coffee, enjoying her full attention. “Seven hundred and fifty nautical miles west of Hawaii on a coral reef platform; it’s one of the United States’ minor outlying islands—about 1.3 square miles.”
“A postage stamp in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a single palm tree like you see in those cartoons in the New Yorker?”
“Something like that.”
“What, were you shipwrecked or something?”
“No.”
She glanced around, enjoying the illusion of covert activity. “What’s there?”
I leaned back in my seat and studied her. “An air base, a naval refueling depot, and a weapons testing area, but not anymore.”
“What kinds of weapons?”
“Nuclear, among others.”
She leaned in. “No shit?”
“A dozen thermonuclear weapons were exploded there before the ban in ’63, but they also had a twenty-five-acre landfill full of Agent Orange, PCBs, PAHs, dioxins, and sarin nerve gas from East Germany.”
“Sounds horrible.”
“Nope, it was beautiful . . . Well, not the landfill so much, but the rest of it was an island paradise.”
“What’d you do there?”
“Swam, ate fish, fed the sharks, and sunbathed.”
Her head kicked to one side. “For the government—you must’ve still been working for the military.”
“Security.” I shrugged. “I was on medical leave from the Marines and still attached to the Air Force through the provost marshal, so they shipped me off to a quiet place for the rest of my tour.”
“Was it?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Quiet.”
I thought about it. “For a while.”
She wiggled on her seat. “Okay, let’s hear about it—”
“Maybe some other time.”
“C’mon.”
I laced my hands behind my head. “So, how did Lena like Hotel del Rio?”
She whined. “C’mon.”
“I want to hear about your trip, not mine; I know how mine was, and it didn’t end well.” I glanced out the window at the snow, the ice, and the cold, which was seeping through the windows in an attempt to freeze us solid. “I need a break from the winter; tell me about the sand, the surf, and how you got your tan . . .”
“Okay, but this isn’t over.” I sat there not looking at her and listened as she settled into her seat. “Mom stayed for a week but then got tired of watching me drink and went home.” I turned back, and her eyes were now drawn to the frozen wasteland of the parking lot and the glaciers of snow piled against the building by the plows. “It was incredible; we had this cabana on the second floor where you could look at the ocean between the mangrove trees—the water was all shades of turquoise.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “After the stitches healed up, I’d go lie in the salt water at the end of the pier and just soak in the warmth.”
I thought back about a conversation I had had with her uncle Alphonse and his description of the teenage Vic who, walking down Christian Street in a one-piece bathing suit, had enticed most of the men back in her native Philadelphia onto the stoops when she’d sauntered by. “Sounds pretty great.”
Her eyes remained closed. “These guys would come by with conch fritters and cashews, so you didn’t even have to get up for lunch—just roll over and hand them some of that Belizean Monopoly money.”
“And drink.”
Her eyes opened with an ore wagon full of tarnished gold. “You weren’t around and most people bore the shit out of me, so don’t make it an issue.”
“Right.”
“I got enough of that crap from my mother.”
“Right.”
“I dove the Great Blue Hole.”