He raised his oversized head and looked at me.
“C’mon.” He slowly rose and stretched as I put a little more emphasis in my voice. “C’mon.” He came over, but I didn’t feel too sorry for him since he’d had his dinner and the camp’s collective scraps, followed by a considerable amount of my water ration. I nudged him toward the boy with my leg and watched as Benjamin marveled at the weight of the tactical flashlight, clicked the button, and the two of them followed the beam off and into the night. I watched as the flashlight’s single ray cascaded across the rock shelves and over the next rock-strewn ridge. “I don’t think they’re going to be surprised by anything.”
The old man shook his head and pulled out a small bag of fixings and some papers. “Nope, don’t think so.” He tapped the tobacco into the paper and rolled one and then two cigarettes. A callused and worn hand offered me one. “No, thanks.”
He nodded, then stuffed it into his mouth and lit it with the last of the Blue Tip matches from his hatband. “This friend of mine I was tellin’ you about back at the trailer, he’s an ol’ boy playing out his string as a special officer here in Campbell County-one of the two that runs the lie-detector for ’em. He only works about two days a week.” He scooted back and sat against a slab of rock that leaned at a perfect thirty-degree angle, and smoked. “I run into him at Mona’s, that little Mexican place down by the highway, this morning while I was puttin’ diesel in Bill’s truck.”
“What’d he say?”
The old cowboy rolled to one side and drew up a knee on which to rest his hand, flipping his ashes into the fire. “He asked about that shiny new truck, and I told him it was mine. He said that was bullshit, so I told him about the trip we were taking; told him about you, and he described you right back, down to that chewed-on part of your ear.”
The bandage under my eye was distracting, so I started peeling it off. “Mike Smith?” I studied the bit of blood seepage on the gauze and tossed it into the fire.
He smiled and didn’t look at me. “I can neither confirm or deny-”
I figured that Hershel hadn’t learned the neither/nor rule. “What about Cli Cly?”
He took another deep inhale from the cigarette cupped in his hand. “Said they called him in on a Sunday morning, real early, and told him to get set up. He said pretty soon they brought Cly in and sat him down, so he hooked him up to the machine and started askin’ him what they call-”
“Control questions.”
“That’s it.” He nodded and looked into the fire. “Well, after he verifies that the lights are on in the room, his name is Cliff Cly, and that yes, the smirking son-of-a-bitch has lied to people that are close to him, the sheriff comes in with some guy in a suit and has Mike unhook Cly.”
I tried not to smile, since without the bandage my cheek hurt even more.
“I just said Mike, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“God damn it.” He shook his head and took another drag from his cigarette. “I’m not really good at this undercover stuff.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“Well, they unhook Cliff, and Sandy Sandberg tells Mike that the three of them weren’t ever there.”
I sat up a little. “Sandy?”
“Yep.”
“What about the guy in the suit; Mike have any idea who he was or who he was with?”
“Nope.” I looked at him and thought about it just as a scattered beam of light wavered from behind us and then down the rocky path. Benjamin dropped an armload of gray, splintered lumber beside the fire, and Hershel looked up at the lad as Dog came over and sat. “That’d be about a third of what we need for the night.”
“A third?”
The old puncher’s voice was certain as he flicked more ashes into the fire. “A third.”
His thin shoulders slumped, and the miniature cowboy trudged away only to stop and look back at Dog. “You comin’?”
Dog lay down and placed his head on his massive paws. I nudged him with my boot. “C’mon, earn your keep.”
The boy patted his leg, just as I had. “C’mon.” He slowly got to his paws.
“Good boy.” Dog trotted off after him as I pushed my hat back and came clean. “Not as if you didn’t know, I’m not Eric Boss. My name is Walt Longmire, and I’m sheriff of Absaroka County.”
Hershel turned, and I watched as the flickering light planed off the hard surfaces of his chin and cheekbones. “Longmire did you say?” I nodded. “By God, I think I know your people-your father have a place north of here?”
“He did.”
“Passed?”
“Quite a while back.”
“You got the place leased out to the Gronebergs?”
“Yep.”
He shook his head some more and flipped the butt into the fire. “Well, I’ll be damned… you’ve come home.” The old cowboy pulled the second of his cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “So, what are you doin’ out here after so long?”
I thought about how much I wanted to reveal to Hershel, how much the cowboy already knew and, if I trusted him, how far did that trust go? If Cliff Cly didn’t take a polygraph, which Sandy Sandberg said he did, and somebody stepped in to keep it from happening-there were only a few possibilities of what that could mean. It was either Sandy, who wasn’t playing fair, or it was the Feds who had taken a hand. If it was the Feds, then in what capacity? Wade Barsad had been under the auspices of the witness protection program, but why would they have brought an agent in? To pressure Wade on the names and money he’d absconded with from his business associates along the Garden State Parkway and in Ohio?
I figured a good offense was the best defense and decided to try a little lie detecting of my own. Seeing as how clinical psychologists had come to the conclusion that the machines were only correct about 61 percent of the time-only slightly better than random-I took a chance with the police officer’s best friend: instinct. “Hershel, are you involved in any way with this foolishness?”
“No.” He seemed shocked that I’d ask. “No, I’m not.”
I believed him. “Good.” I gathered my legs beneath me and stood. I walked a little stiffly to the edge of the precipice and looked out over the Powder River country. The harvest moon was just beginning to stare at the hills, and the long shadows from the rocks and few junipers cascaded through the draws and gulleys toward the Bighorns.
It was a stark beauty, but you can’t come home again, no matter what Hershel said. I could feel an urgency to get back to my proper place in the rolling hills under the mountains. Before I could, though, I was obligated to Mary to find the truth. She had become my trust when Sandy had sent her to my jail, and I was bound to find out what happened the night that Wade Barsad was killed.
Something felt wrong, and that itch without an ability to scratch was needling me from somewhere in my subconscious. “I need you to tell me everything that happened that night.”
“I already did.”
I pulled my hat down against the wind and turned to look at him. “No, you didn’t really, and when we talked, no offense, you were drunk.” He pulled at a long earlobe, stuck the cigarette that he’d been holding into his mouth, and lit it with a piece of smoldering firewood. “I know that Mary was there. I know that you were there, and I know that Bill Nolan was also there. Now, was there anybody else there?”
He looked up at me. “No, nobody.” Then his eyes dropped to the fire as he thought about it. “I mean Wade but he was dead.”
“When you got there, Mary was in the yard with the rifle on her lap?”
“Yep.”
“The breech was open on the. 22, and the magazine was empty?”
“Yep.”
“Then what?”
He flipped the half-smoked cigarette into the fire. “I took the rifle away from her and went into the house.” He looked up at me to make sure this is what I wanted to hear, but I said nothing. “He was in there.”
“Where?”
“Layin’ across the bed.”
“He was dead, you’re sure?”
“God, yes. She’d shot him in the head.” He corrected himself. “He’d been shot a half-dozen times, and there was so much blood that it soaked the mattress and poured off onto the floor.”