A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery (5 page)

“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.”

“They threatened a bunch of people with a shotgun, and we’re about to go out there and do a little threatening ourselves.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want that. I’ll send a deputy to have a word, but for the time being I’d appreciate it if you would just avoid them.”

The harrumph carried across the county. “That’s going to be a little tough since they own twelve thousand acres around here.”

“I’ll speak with them myself, if need be. In the meantime, I was wondering if you’d ever heard of a young woman by the name of Sarah Tisdale?”

There was a long pause, and the woman’s voice changed. “My daughter. You’ve heard from my daughter?”

Vic reached over and turned on the heater as I took the exit at Powder Junction and followed 192 southeast across the Powder River, leaving the sun as it lingered along the mountains to the west, and drove on toward Surrey/Short Drop. In the perversity of western geography, the poetic-sounding locale of Surrey had pretty much dropped off the map, but the town of Short Drop had, in a small-town way, thrived.

The rolling hills were a khaki brown even with the wet summer and shimmered bronze against the snowfields at the southern tip of the Bighorn Mountains, but everywhere you looked there were oil derricks rhythmically heaving the crude petroleum from the earth. I’d worked as a roughneck on an oil crew for an entire summer in my youth, part of my father’s plan that I should see what a life without a proper education meant. Though only a half hour from the interstate highway, the suburbs of Short Drop might as well have been on the moon.

“No fucking way.”

I glanced at my undersheriff’s Technicolor eyes and felt another twinge of sympathy. “What?”

She gestured at the surrounding landscape. “Who the hell travels two-thirds of the way across the country and stops here thinking this is it, this is where I want to spend the rest of my life?” She shook her head. “No fucking way.”

I glanced around at the stark shadows being thrown from the sharp angle of the sun, causing everything to suddenly glimmer the way only dying things can. “It’s a lot like Nebraska down here.”

“If that’s supposed to recommend it, it doesn’t.” We drove along, and she remained unimpressed. “So, how come I haven’t ever been down here?”

“Because you didn’t receive the traditional hazing that all the other deputies get when they sign on.”

She smirked. “As it should be.”

The radio crackled, and the voice of one of the said deputies resounded through the tinny speaker. Static. “Sheriff, this is base, come in.”

Vic pulled my mic from the dash and keyed the button. “What do you want?”

Static. “The kid’s back over from working at the Busy Bee, and I was wondering if I had to lock him up or was it okay if I just let him sleep in the cell with the door open?”

“Is Dorothy still trying to get that spot above the garage behind her squared away for him?”

Vic asked the question, and Double Tough took a minute, probably asking the kid.

Static. “Yup, but he says it’s not ready yet.”

“Fine by me if the door is open.”

Static. “And Ruby left Dog here; you want me to feed him?”

Vic spoke into the mic in a pretty good impersonation. “Yup, and when Saizarbitoria gets in you can head back to Powder Junction.”

Static. “Roger that.”

She flipped the mic up onto my dash and propped a boot against the transmission hump again. “He doesn’t sound too happy about coming back down here, does he?”

We drove on, watching the grass sway in the wind like the waves of some lost ocean, the landscape remaining pretty much the same as it had for the last fifteen minutes. I looked at Vic again. “Let me guess. . . .”

“No fucking way.”

I grunted. “My family settled here.”

“No, your family settled about an hour north up against the mountains where it’s pretty.”

“Define pretty.”

“Green with a variation in altitude.”

Victoria Moretti and I had a running argument about what, exactly, constituted aesthetic beauty in the American West, and I couldn’t help but point out that her view always included green grass and trees—or the American East.

I glanced around. “It has a more subtle beauty.”

The response was nothing if not predictable.

•   •   •

We came over the rolling hills of the Pine Ridge and could see the ancient, still-leafy cottonwood that was supposedly over a hundred years old at the bottom of the valley. “There, a tree. I hope you’re happy.”

We pulled along the turnoff, and I dropped the three-quarter-ton into the town of Short Drop proper, where a wooden sign with burnt-in lettering proclaimed
SHORT DROP, THE PLACE WHERE “LAUGHING” SAM CAREY, THE LAST OF BUTCH CASSIDY’S HOLE IN THE WALL, TOOK A SHORT DROP ON A LONG ROPE.

Along one of the gigantic limbs of the old tree hung a noose of thick hemp, swaying in the breeze, monument to a violent act over a century old. Vic slumped back in her seat. “Leave it to you assholes; you finally grow a tree tall enough, and you hang somebody from it.”

I followed Main Street’s dirt road and took a right onto Jackson as Vic gazed at Short Drop’s country school whose teams had the likely nickname, “The Hangmen.” “Why do they bother?”

I misunderstood. “Go to school?”

She pointed. “With signs—there are only four streets.”

I nudged my truck across the red-dirt roadway and parked in front of one of the commercial buildings, the Short Drop Mercantile, and killed the engine. “This is it.”

She leaned forward and craned her neck, looking back and forth at the Merc, a bar, and a trailer with a sign out front. “The library is a singlewide?”

“At least they’ve got one.” I unbuckled my seat belt and cracked the door open. With the fading sun, the air was growing sharp, and I was glad that I’d brought my leather jacket. “C’mon.”

There was a wooden walkway that connected the four buildings that made up downtown Short Drop, but the overhead porch reached only across the front of the mercantile and the bar, the only buildings of any historical repute. They were the old types with the false fronts, and the color scheme appeared to be shades of gray with white trim. The paint was peeling a little, but they were both in pretty good shape, and I have to admit that my trajectory swayed just a touch when I saw the
RAINIER BEER
sign in the next-door watering hole—again aptly named The Noose.

Vic joined me on the walkway, our boots ringing in the silence of the town like some Anthony Mann Western. She lingered for a moment, and as if on cue, a slight wind came up and powdered its way through town. Her voice was low, but I could still hear it: “No fucking way.”

Old-fashioned lettering spiraled across the bottom of the windows, offering up quilting supplies, books, ammunition, and gunsmithing. I ignored the hand-scripted
CLOSED HAPPY TRAILS
sign, pushed open the door, and walked onto swaled and cupped pine flooring with no board less than a foot wide. The ceilings were high, at least twenty feet, tiled with pressed tin. Black fans with wooden propellers spun idly and track lighting spotted us as we entered the establishment.

Rows of bookshelves staggered against the wall to my right, sagging with the weight of antiquarian tomes and thumbed paperbacks that appeared to be organized in no particular order. There was a counter to my right with an old cash register and a few glass cases that held groceries—bread, canned goods, boxes of cereal, and stick candy that I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. There was a long counter at a forty-five-degree angle with a few rifles on stands, some pistols in a case, and above that the better part of a wall full of ammunition. Myriad taxidermy heads were on the wall, some from far-flung reaches like Africa and South America; they would’ve made my big-game hunter friend Omar Rhoades proud.

My eyes focused on a massive water buffalo whose head was slightly turned and who looked out into the street as if he might pull the rest of himself from the wall and make a break for it.

“Sheriff?”

I turned to see a woman coming down from a mezzanine at the back of the main room. She was in her sixties and holding in her hands what appeared to be a Crock-Pot, using a set of dish towels as oven mitts as she came. Handsome with a good spread to her shoulders, light brown hair streaked with gray, and, partially hidden behind a pair of cat’s-eye glasses, direct, blue eyes—almost cobalt. She glanced at my deputy, who had stalled out by the case of books to the right, and then at me.

“Expected you earlier.”

I tipped my hat. “We got here as quick as we could.” With a curt nod, she walked past me around the center counter, where she used a hip to try and slide open a large, iron-trimmed door. “Can I help you with that?”

Without waiting, I gripped the steel handle and pulled the door open, revealing a short hallway between the Merc and the bar next door.

Her voice echoed after her as she walked through. “Come along, and I’ll buy you a beer.”

Seeing no reason to loiter, I glanced at Vic, who shelved her book and followed with an eyebrow arched, as usual, like a cat’s back.

The doorway from the Merc opened up to the left of the bar, and it appeared as if I was going to get my Rainier. I ducked under a large rattlesnake skin tacked to a board and continued around the coolers on one end of a bar made from old barn siding. The surface had been sealed with polyurethane, entombing what looked to be close to fifty more snake skins. “Lot of rattlers around this place?”

She set the Crock-Pot onto the flat surface, reached into the cooler, and placed two ice-cold, longneck bottles of Rainier beer in front of us. “Not anymore.”

I glanced at the labels. “You know my flavor.”

“Everybody in this county knows your flavor, Walt Longmire.” She stuck a hand across the bar and winked. “Eleanor Tisdale. I used to be on the library board with your wife. Sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.” I shook her hand and nudged one of the wooden stools out with my boot for my undersheriff. “My deputy, Victoria Moretti.” They shook, and I asked, “You own both places?”

She nodded and adjusted her glasses that trailed a set of pearls around the back of her neck. “Run the library, too, but people also borrow books from the Mercantile.” She was classic Wyoming, that indiscriminate age between thirty and a hundred where the women find a comfort for themselves and just settle in. “I keep the door closed to discourage drunken shopping.” She reached up with hands that had seen hard labor and effortlessly twisted the caps off, sliding the pair of Rainiers further our way. “You found my daughter?”

Vic sat beside me, and I turned my eyes to the bartender. “Well . . .”

“She’s in trouble?”

I paused for a moment, took a sip, and tried to decide how I was going to play this. “Possibly.”

“That would follow. It was always her signature.” She leaned her elbows on the business side of the bar and sighed. “My husband was in the oil business.”

“Was?”

“Dale died about three years ago. Light-plane crash down in Mexico.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

She gestured away my condolences with a wave. “Not as much as I was. Sold the majority of the family ranch to those yahoos over at East Spring before he died.” She thought about it. “Sarah was a lot like him. Headstrong to the point of idiocy. He once told her that he wasn’t going to save the ranch for her if she left, so in predictable Tisdale manner, she did and he didn’t.”

I nodded, not quite sure what to say to that. “When was the last time you had contact with her?”

She stared at me as if I’d just joined hands with the point-of-idiocy group myself and then laughed. “Seventeen years ago, come August 6th.” She crossed her arms and settled the cat’s-eye glasses on Vic and then back to me. “Sheriff, maybe you better tell me what you are wanting.”

“Um . . . Eleanor, how about you take a seat?” She looked concerned but remained standing. “We had a young man show up in Durant this weekend; looked like a runaway, about fifteen years old. I tracked him back to Butte County, South Dakota, where the sheriff there informed me that a woman approximately the age of your daughter, who identified herself as Sarah Tisdale, had come into his office and reported that her son was missing.”

The tension in the woman’s back pulled her up a little straighter. “Son?”

“When I called him and told him I had custody of the boy, he drove up to where it is your daughter was supposedly living, but the people there said they’d never heard of her or the boy. Interestingly enough, the map she left with the sheriff had a phone number scribbled at the bottom—your phone number.”

Eleanor Tisdale groped for a stool and pulled it underneath herself. “Do you have any photographs, anything that might . . . ?”

I fingered the Polaroid that we always take to keep track of lodgers from my shirt pocket and held it out to her. “This is the boy.”

She read the single word written in red Magic Marker at the bottom border. “Cord?”

“That’s his name.” She took it gently and held it as if it might vanish. “We don’t have any photographs of your daughter, and to be honest we don’t know where she might be.”

“Oh, my.”

I lowered my head to get in her line of sight. “I take it he looks familiar?”

“The spitting image.” She got up and punched
NO SALE
on the cash register at the end of the bar and walked back to us with a school photo of a pretty young girl with long, blond hair and deep, sapphire eyes. “Where is he now?”

I took the photo and studied it; the resemblance was, as they say, uncanny. “He’s safe in Durant at a friend’s. I didn’t see any reason for him to be shuttled off to a foster home since he has a mother looking for him and relatives in-county.”

“Have you heard any more from Sarah?”

“Unfortunately, no. I was kind of hoping you had.”

She shook her head. “No. Nothing in seventeen years. Dale, when he was around, wouldn’t even say her name; he used to refer to her as ‘that ungrateful child.’” Her eyes unfocused for a moment and she began a familiar verse. “‘Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits . . .’”

She faltered, and I continued the Shakespeare for her. “‘To laughter and contempt, that she may feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.’”

The cobalt eyes stayed distant and then focused on the photo in her trembling hands. “He’s fifteen?”

“Yep.” I watched as she continued to finger the photograph like a holy relic. “The math works out, doesn’t it? How about we trade photos, and I’ll get this one back to you after we find her?”

I was about to add more when the bar door swung open to the accompaniment of an attached jangling bell. The middle-aged man in the doorway was pale and painfully lean, with red hair and a sharp face half-hidden under the bill of a black John Deere ball cap. His clothes, an off-white nylon dress shirt and a powder blue blazer, were rumpled and hung off him like a bad hanger. Slung over his shoulder was an expensive, spacey-looking tactical shotgun with a small flashlight mounted underneath the barrel.