I had a vague sense of the club’s location downtown, took the Twenty-seventh Street exit, and rolled past the Montana Women’s Prison and the wrong side of the railroad tracks, and then sat there watching a hundred coal cars of a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train roll by.
When she finally spoke, her voice was different, perhaps approaching the most sane of the night. “It belonged to my father. When I was leaving for Tennessee, he gave me a choice of those headphones I was telling you about, but I figured I’d have more use for the gun.” She placed her hand on the dash and fingered the vent louvers as the two of us looked at the plastic strip on her wrist. “I got in some trouble down there.” Her voice died in her throat, but after a moment she started again. “I got picked up by a few guys over in South Dakota earlier tonight and they tried stuff. They seemed nice at first. . . .” She gestured with the pistol, still under the blanket. “Anyway, I had to pull it.”
I turned down a side street and took a right, where I could see the multicolored neon of the aforementioned pheasant spreading his tail feathers in a provocative manner. I parked the truck in the first available spot and turned to look at the girl with the strange eyes, the sifting snow providing a surreal backdrop to her darkened and backlit portrait.
“I didn’t shoot anybody.”
“Good.”
She smiled and finished the dregs of her coffee, wiped the cup out on her blanket, and screwed the top back on the thermos. She placed it against the console, but the movement caused the revolver to slip from her leg and onto the seat between us.
We both sat there looking at it, representative of all the things for which it stood.
I leaned forward and picked it up. It had been a nice one once upon a time, but years of negligence had left it scuffed and rusted, emerald corrosion growing from the rounds permanently imbedded in the cylinder. “How ’bout I keep this for you?”
She didn’t say anything for a long time but finally slipped through the open door, pulled the guitar case from the bed of my truck, letting it fall to the sidewalk, and stood there in the opening.
The plaintive words of Haggard’s “A Place to Fall Apart” drifted from the speakers, and she glanced at the radio as if the Okie from wherever might be sitting on my dash. “I’d give a million dollars if he’d go into a studio, just him and a six-string guitar, no backup singers, no harps—and just play.”
I watched her face, trying to not let the eyes distract me. “Maybe you should tell him that sometime, but I wouldn’t look for him in Muskogee.”
The wind pressed the blanket against her, urging departure, and I was struck by the sudden vulnerability in her face as she closed the door, the words barely audible: “Merry Christmas.”
She continued to clutch the blanket around her as she turned, dragging the guitar case and walking away without looking back. She disappeared into the swinging glass doors with swirls of snow devils circling after her, and all I could think was that I was glad I wasn’t in Polson, Montana and in possession of a set of Sennheiser HD414 open-back headphones.
I thought about the things you could do, and the things you couldn’t, even in a season of miracles.
I tossed the decrepit revolver into my glove box, sure that whoever pulled the trigger on the thing had an equal chance of getting hurt as the person at whom it was being pointed.
Twenty minutes later, my daughter climbed in the cab. “Please tell me we’re not staying at the Dude Rancher.”
I smiled, and she pulled the shoulder belt around in a huff as Merle softened his tone with one of my favorites, “If We Make It Through December.”
She ruffled Dog’s hair and kissed his muzzle, and it must’ve taken a good thirty seconds before she remarked, “Did you get a new stereo in the truck? It sounds really good.”
Read on for the first chapter of The Cold Dish, the first novel in the Walt Longmire Mystery Series.
Available from Penguin.
1
“Bob Barnes says they got a dead body out on BLM land. He’s on line one.”
She might have knocked, but I didn’t hear it because I was watching the geese. I watch the geese a lot in the fall, when the days get shorter and the ice traces the rocky edges of Clear Creek. The sheriff’s office in our county is an old Carnegie building that my department inherited when the Absaroka County Library got so many books they had to go live somewhere else. We’ve still got the painting of Andy out in the landing of the entryway. Every time the previous sheriff left the building he used to salute the old robber baron. I’ve got the large office in the south side bay, which allows me an unobstructed view of the Big Horn Mountains to my right and the Powder River Valley to my left. The geese fly down the valley south, with their backs to me, and I usually sit with my back to the window, but occasionally I get caught with my chair turned; this seems to be happening more and more, lately.
I looked at her, looking being one of my better law-enforcement techniques. Ruby’s a tall woman, slim, with a direct manner and clear blue eyes that tend to make people nervous. I like that in a receptionist /dispatcher, keeps the riffraff out of the office. She leaned against the doorjamb and went to shorthand, “Bob Barnes, dead body, line one.”
I looked at the blinking red light on my desk and wondered vaguely if there was a way I could get out of this. “Did he sound drunk?”
“I am not aware that I’ve ever heard him sound sober.”
I flipped the file and pictures that I’d been studying onto my chest and punched line one and the speakerphone button. “Hey, Bob. What’s up?”
“Hey, Walt. You ain’t gonna believe this shit. . . .” He didn’t sound particularly drunk, but Bob’s a professional, so you never can tell. He was silent for a moment. “Hey, no shit, we got us a cool one out here.”
I winked at Ruby. “Just one, huh?”
“Hey, I ain’t shittin’ you. Billy was movin’ some of Tom Chatham’s sheep down off the BLM section to winter pasture, and them little bastards clustered around somethin’ in one of the draws. . . . We got a cool one.”
“You didn’t see it?”
“No. Billy did.”
“Put him on.”
There was a brief jostling of the phone, and a younger version of Bob’s voice answered, “Hey, Shuuriff.”
Slurred speech. Great. “Billy, you say you saw this body?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“What’d it look like?”
Silence for a moment. “Looked like a body.”
I thought about resting my head on my desk. “Anybody we know?”
“Oh, I didn’t get that close.”
Instead, I pushed my hat farther up on my head and sighed. “How close did you get?”
“Couple hundred yards. It gets steep in the draws where the water flow cuts through that little valley. The sheep stayed all clustered around whatever it is. I didn’t want to take my truck up there ’cause I just got it washed.”
I studied the little red light on the phone until I realized he was not going to go on. “No chance of this being a dead ewe or lamb?” Wouldn’t be a coyote, with the other sheep milling around. “Where are you guys?”
“’Bout a mile past the old Hudson Bridge on 137.”
“All right, you hang on. I’ll get somebody out there in a half hour or so.”
“Yes sir. . . . Hey, Shuuriff?” I waited. “Dad says for you to bring beer, we’re almost out.”
“You bet.” I punched the button and looked at Ruby. “Where’s Vic?”
“Well, she’s not sitting in her office looking at old reports.”
“Where is she, please?” Her turn to sigh and, never looking at me directly, she walked over, took the worn manila folder from my chest, and returned it to the filing cabinet where she always returns it when she catches me studying it.