A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery (32 page)

Henry Standing Bear was right.

I pulled the old unit into gear and drove over to Durant Memorial. Isaac Bloomfield was drinking coffee and leafing listlessly through a five-month-old copy of
Wyoming Wildlife
at the reception area.

“How come you’re not at the game, Doc?”

“Not my idea of a game. Anyway, I’ll be here when the breaks, sprains, strains, and bruises show up.” He studied me and the small white box in my hands. “I want to tell you how sorry I am.”

I nodded but didn’t say anything.

“I suppose it’s an occupational hazard, but you hate to see something like this happen.”

My head nodded of its own volition.

“You’re going to want to see him before they take his body away?”

I nodded some more and watched as he closed the wrinkled magazine and brought the Styrofoam cup of coffee with him. We pushed our way through the double swinging doors of the Emergency Room’s inner sanctum and made our way toward room 31, the makeshift morgue.

Isaac opened the door and ushered me inside but then closed it after me; he knew my practices.

You think you’d get used to it, but you don’t; the lifeless form of an animal not unlike yourself. There is, appropriately enough, an otherworldly stillness to the dead and especially when it is someone young.

I placed a hand on the bare shoulder, feeling the coolness of the flesh, another reminder that the spirit that was here was now gone. I had hired the young man from a good family over in Sheridan, and he had been a fine officer. Next Thursday they would put his body in a grave, another casualty in the war I’d been fighting for almost my whole life.

All for a few gallons of crude oil.

As the saying goes, a cynic is the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Toy soldiers like Gloss and Lockhart would never understand the value of a single human life in comparison with their strident beliefs in geopolitical positioning. They had never been forged in the fire of battle where you learn that the only thing left in those stark and startling moments and the reason you fought in the first place was for the man next to you, your brother in arms.

I wished that I could take Gloss and Lockhart with me when I made what would feel like a long drive to the next county on Thursday, so that I could introduce them both to Chuck Frymire’s family and let them look into the bereaved eyes of the young man’s mother and father and fiancée, in order to see for once where that value lies.

When I came out, Isaac was flipping through some papers on a clipboard. He looked up at me, seeing me for the loosely stacked mess I was, watching for cracks, fissures, and faults. “You still look tired.”

“You mean for the last thirty years?”

A sad smile crept across his lips. “Would you like to read the report?”

“I’ll give you a quarter if you read it to me.”

He stared, unsure. “Excuse me?”

“Sorry, private joke.”

His eyes dropped to the clipboard, and he read, “‘Single, thrusting action wound with a circular defect surrounded with a margin of abrasion with the predictable langer or cleavage lines. . . .’” He paused, and his brows collided together on his face. “It was a very long knife.”

“You still have it?”

“I do.”

I started past him toward the room across the hall. “I’m going to need it.”

The old-world eyes went back to the sheet of paper and then he flipped the copy over, reading again, “‘Muscle and tissue were cut at an oblique angle with the resulting gaping injury with the muscles retracting and eversion at the skin edges; damage to the abdominal viscera and exsanguinations resulting in an internal hemorrhage.’” He slipped the clipboard under his arm and picked up his cup of coffee as I looked back at him. “‘Complications in association with peritonitis, sepsis infection along with damage to the uterus.’”

I withheld comment.

He sipped his coffee. “She’s in remarkable shape, especially considering her condition.”

My hand paused on the handle of the door. “You just said she was in remarkable shape.”

“She is.” He sipped his coffee some more. “For a woman who was seven weeks’ pregnant.”

I stood there, looking at him. “Was?”

“Was.” He pulled the cup away from his face and scrutinized me. “I thought you knew.”

“Um . . .” I could feel the dryness in my mouth as I tried to speak. “Kind of.”

He waited a moment and then rephrased his statement. “You didn’t know.”

I took a breath, in hopes that I wouldn’t pass out. “No.”

He glanced at the door I was about to go through. “I don’t suppose you’d care to return to the blissful state of ignorance in which you were as of a minute ago?”

I leaned against the doorjamb, still feeling more than a little weak in my knees. “So that she can tell me herself.”

The doc nodded. “Yes.”

“What if she doesn’t?”

“It’s very possible that she’s unaware, in which case I will inform her, but either way it’s between the two of you, and I am removed from the equation, which I desire most greatly.”

I gathered my strength and smiled at him as I carefully pushed open the door, finally remembering to mumble some words. “You bet.”

It was dark except for the light coming from the dusk-to-dawns in the parking lot outside. In an attempt to keep the room from being too stuffy, Isaac must’ve raised the window a few inches to let in a little fresh air, a practice of his that drove the nurses crazy.

She was asleep and breathing steadily, the IV at her side set on a steady drip.

I stood there in the middle of the room and listened to the vague sounds of the football game drifting through the space at the bottom of the window.

I looked at her and rubbed my hand over my face; finally, I lifted the guest chair from against the wall and quietly placed it beside the bed. My legs carried me around and seated me before I collapsed.

Her cheek made a small movement, and she swallowed.

I was as quiet as I’d been in the jungles of Vietnam.

She settled against her pillow, and I studied her.

My God, she was beautiful.

I don’t know how long I sat there watching her. I could feel myself nodding off and even went so far as to rest my elbow on the bed, cupping my chin in my hand and studying her some more.

The noise from the ball game reached a distant crescendo and then subsided—the Dogies must be putting a pasting on the Warriors. I thought about what Henry Standing Bear had said when I asked if he thought that those early times in our youth had been simpler. He’d said no, but then had added—but we were.

The crowd roared again, and I opened the white cardboard box and carefully removed the dyed chrysanthemums, tied together with ribbons. I breathed in the scent of her along with that of the black-and-orange corsage that I carefully placed on the pillow beside her head.