As the Crow Flies

by Craig Johnson

  She swallowed and retreated from the edge and my touch. “I… I have this urge to jump.”

  Shrugging a shoulder, I stepped past her toward the main part of the grass-covered trail. “That’s normal, too. It can be categorized as a risk impulse; it’s the subjective aspect of our natures that makes rodeo riders strap themselves to Brahma bulls or skydivers jump out of perfectly good airplanes. Freud called that kind of risk-taking behavior the ‘death drive’ and associated it with gambling, sex and, well, a lot of other things.”

  She stayed put and kept looking for signs in the passing clouds. “He connected everything with sex, didn’t he?”

  “Pretty much.”

  She turned and looked at me as her radio crackled. She lifted it out of her belt and looked at the road below. “Roger that, unit 1. We’re at the top, but we’ll be right down.”

  I walked back toward the cliff and could see a white Yukon, a black Expedition, and a highway patrol cruiser. “Looks like they didn’t get lost after all.”

  “Yeah.” She didn’t move after reholstering the two-way.

  “You want to go down and meet them?”

  She nodded and reset her jaw. “Are we through up here?”

  “With the limited resources we have, yes.”

  She still didn’t move, and I could tell there was a lot more she wanted to say. “Look…”

  I waited, but she didn’t say anything else. Then she cleared her throat and coughed up a few words. “I’m… I’m new to this stuff, but I don’t feel like being railroaded by the… I mean, maybe I’m a lousy cop, but I’d like to find out on my own.” She stopped and turned to look at me. “Before we go down there, I’d like to make sure we’re on the same page.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I know more about this case than you or they do; I know the people involved, and I’m not buying it.” Her eyes came down to the edge of the cliff and studied the surface—fractured and dangerous. “It’s not that high.”

  “Most suicides are from approximately five hundred feet—high enough to kill, but low enough to not last too long.” The wind gusted, and I was reminded that this was no longer a good place. “You’re not buying what?”

  Lolo Long stood there like a sentinel. “There’s no way a woman walks out to the edge of a cliff like this with her child in her arms.”

  Bingo.

  I smiled and studied her in a professorial manner. “Maybe you’re not such a lousy cop after all.”

  Her eyes flared and she looked directly at me, and I thought for a moment that she might try and throw me off the cliff. She took a step and turned to the right toward the direct path down, then called over her shoulder. “There’s another reason.”

  I followed along behind her. “Reason for what?”

  I barely heard the words as they drifted back with the breeze that continued to stiffen. “For jumping: just to have it all over with.”

  The Feds were already setting up camp on the same ridge where we’d parked, and a blond-haired young man, who looked like one of the agents, and a highway patrolman were the first to reach us. The FBI agent, in a short-sleeved shirt, held out a hand to me.

  “Bo Benth. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sheriff. I’ve heard and read a lot about you.”

  I shook his hand and introduced Lolo. “This is Chief Long.” I went ahead and threw in the next, just so there wouldn’t be any confusion. “She’ll be the primary investigator.”

  Agent Benth smiled as Long studied her ropers. He glanced up at the cliff. “We understood it was pretty cut and dry.”

  “No, actually, it’s not. There’s a survivor, and a friend of mine and I actually witnessed the fall. Chief Long and I have already done the preliminary crime scene work, here and above.”

  He looked at the gathering thunderclouds building over the cliffs. “Good, ’cause I’ve got a feeling we’re about to get pissed on.” They started past toward the deceased. “As to whose responsibility this is, you can take that up with the new agent in charge.”

  “Where’s he?”

  Benth threw a thumb over his shoulder and gave me a strange smirk. “Trying to get reception on his mobile back in the vehicle. You’re gonna love him.”

  As we walked down the hill, Officer Long hooked her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans. “Great.”

  “What?”

  “A new AIC; just what I need.”

  I nodded. “Did you know the last one?”

  “Only over the phone; I was lucky.” She glanced back at Painted Warrior. “I guess my luck ran out.”

  We passed a few more crime lab infantry, but not my good friend Bill McDermott, who must’ve been working another part of the state.

  The white Fed Yukon, which was the AIC vehicle, was parked the farthest away, and a tall man with a goatee and wild-looking hair dressed in a pink shirt and blue blazer hung an arm over the sill of the open door. He held his cell phone at the other arm’s length and was looking at it with an expression of disgust, his sunglasses perched on his forehead.

  Lolo Long glanced back at me. “I’ll handle it this time.”

  The federal agent tossed the mobile into the backseat of the Yukon. “Is there any cell reception in fucking Montana?” He glanced at me. “I mean, I know there isn’t any in fucking Wyoming, but fucking Montana, too?”

  He turned to study Chief Long. “Hey, things are looking up.”

  Long ignored the remark, adjusted the crime scene pack strap on her shoulder, and held out her hand. “Lolo Long, Cheyenne tribal chief of police. I’m the primary investigator on this case.”

  He kicked his face sideways and smirked with even more enthusiasm than had the younger agent—evidently it was a bureau thing. He looked at her hand but didn’t shake it. “You don’t say?”

  She was showing remarkable patience and ignored that remark, too—but her voice was now carrying that edge. “I am intimate with the subjects involved and have information that may lead to an early arrest.”

  He shook his head as if to clear it, glanced at me, and then back to her. “Early arrest, huh?”

  She took a breath and finally lowered the hand. “Sheriff Longmire and I—”

  He interrupted her carefully planned speech and glanced at me again with a more than knowing look. “Uh huh?”

  She stumbled but then regained her footing; she was getting angrier. “We… I have reason to believe that this may be more than a simple case of misadventure.”

  “You do?”

  Full on angry now. “Yes.”

  He took the sunglasses off his forehead, tossed them after the phone, and massaged the sockets of his eyes on either side of his elongated nose with thumb and forefinger. “Sounds like I don’t have a thing to worry about.” He raised his face—and this time it was a grin, the kind hyenas have—then reached out a fist and actually punched her shoulder; then he spoke in the singsong pattern of bad TV. “Well, how ’bout I introduce myself—Cliff Cly of the FBI.”

  3

  “You could’ve told me that you knew him.”

  She banked the turns at ninety, and I was beginning to think that this was just the way Lolo Long drove, kind of like A. J. Foyt.

  “And when was I supposed to have done that?”

  “You could’ve jumped in at any time.”

  I braced a hand against the dash and checked my seat belt. “You said you wanted to handle it, in a tone of voice, I might add, which told me that I must’ve done a bad job previously.” She didn’t say anything. “You got what you wanted; you’re the primary investigator on the case.”

  “No, you got what I wanted.” She shot a look at me. “What makes you so cozy with the FBI that they just roll over and ask you to scratch their bellies?”

  I took my hat off and rested it on my lap. “Not the entire FBI, just that one agent. And, as point of fact, I’m the one who patched up his belly.”

  Her voice took on the melodic quality that his had, but with more of an edge. “So how do you know
‘Cliff Cly of the FBI’?”

  I grimaced at the thought. “Well, first I broke his jaw.”

  “You what?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  She nodded her head. “We’ve got plenty of time—you’re still under arrest.”

  I sighed and thought about a horse that had been trapped on the Battlement… and the woman who loved her. “He was working on a case we were both involved with, ended up gutshot down on the Powder River, and I was lucky enough to get him help.”

  “By breaking his jaw.”

  “That came earlier.”

  She took another curve as the V-8 in the GMC strained under her foot. “Lucky enough to help him, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “So, you’re a lucky guy?”

  We shot through another straightaway and barely missed a logging truck going in the other direction.

  “Sometimes. Hey, speaking of—do you mind if we proceed somewhat under the speed of sound? My daughter’s getting married next week, and I’d like to be there to see the wedding.”

  She let off the accelerator just a little, and I eased back in my seat. “Do you mind telling me why it is that you are so angry when you’re dealing with people?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The way you spoke to Agent Cly and—”

  “Did you hear the way he was with me?” Her knuckles bunched on the steering wheel.

  “I did.”

  “Well, then, you know why.” Her head bobbed in time with the words that she bit off. “He. Pissed. Me. Off.”

  “You’ll excuse me for saying so since I’ve only known you for about six hours, but that doesn’t seem particularly difficult to do.” She shut down again and just stared through the windshield. “All I’m saying is that being angry with him didn’t help your situation.”

  “So your suggestion is that I should’ve broken his jaw?”

  I smiled and thought, that’s what you usually get for moralizing. “Not exactly.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a police chief, not a sheriff, so I don’t have to be a politician—I don’t need the votes.”

  I returned my own gaze to the windshield. It was now righteously pouring down rain. “Votes notwithstanding, you keep going at it the way you are now and you won’t be a chief for very long.” We drove in silence, the emergency sirens echoing off the surrounding hills the only sound. “His jurisdiction supersedes yours, and generally when you argue with the federal government, you lose.”

  She turned her lovely Cheyenne face to regard me. “Tell me all about that.”

  I shook my head and tried to enjoy the ride. “Do you mind telling me where it is we’re going?”

  “To see a man about a Jeep.”

  After a hard left on 212, we rocketed a couple of miles west to a cutoff that had a few signs, one of which read WELCOME TO MUDDY CUSTER, HE’OVONEHE-O ’HE ’E. “What does that mean?”

  “Muddy Custer?”

  “No, the Cheyenne part.”

  She shrugged. “Where they gather.”

  We circled a development where all the houses were exactly the same design but painted in assorted vibrant colors.

  She saw me looking. “Remixes. Every summer Ace Hardware comes down here and has a tailgate sale.”

  She pulled into a driveway where an old Volkswagen minibus, bright yellow with the words OLD SKOOL written down the side, was sitting on blocks, and in front of that a midseventies Jeep CJ-5 with a partial convertible top.

  I watched the rain pelting the canvas. “Somebody we know?”

  “I do.”

  I looked up through the rain that was battering the windshield and thought about how wet we were about to become.

  We both got out and, as I tugged my summer palm-leaf hat down tight, I looked past the rivulets of rain dripping from the brim to examine the Jeep’s twin exhaust tips. I stooped to look at the matching differential drips rainbowing on the concrete surface of the driveway. When I stood, she was already around the other vehicle and headed for the porch to our right with her sidearm drawn.

  I spoke loudly, so as to be heard above the sheets of rain. “I don’t suppose I could have my gun back?”

  She ignored me, and I watched as a curtain in the window to the left of the front door slipped back in place.

  Chief Long stepped up and pounded on the frame of the screen, then turned to look at me as I joined her on the step below. “Hopefully, he’s really drunk and passed out—what we don’t want is him just a little drunk.”

  I crossed my arms and tried to make a smaller target for the downpour. “Because?”

  She pounded on the aluminum door again, the saturated portions of her uniform making provocative patterns. “Then he’s dangerous.”

  I thought I could hear somebody moving around in the small house. “What if he’s sober?”

  “Then I’ve got the wrong house.” She reached out, pulled the screen door aside, and banged on the door itself a half-dozen times with the butt of the revolver. “C’mon, you Indian taco, I know you’re home!”

  I joined her on the porch under the remains of a metal awning that sifted the downpour into interesting streams that were hard to avoid, but it was better cover than nothing. “I’m assuming, and only assuming, mind you, that his real name isn’t Indian Taco.”

  “Last Bull, but he’s part Mexican.” She drummed on the door again, leaving horseshoe-shaped indentations on the cheap, interior-grade surface. “Clarence, I know you’re in there—your shitty Jeep is sitting out here leaking onto the driveway!”

  It sounded like someone knocked a bottle off a table inside, and I waited as Long pounded some more. After a moment the door opened about four inches and a red, bleary eye looked past the security chain while the smell of alcohol and vomit breathed out.

  “What?” His voice was deep and slurred, and it looked as if the chief had gotten the condition she’d hoped for.

  “Open the door.”

  The eye seemed to consider it. “Wh… Why?”

  “Because I said…” Her response was cut short when she noticed he had slipped the barrel of what appeared to be a shotgun into the opening.

  His movements were slow, and he fumbled with the chain as he repeatedly attempted to undo it with the weapon stuffed under his arm; from my perspective, I could see that the breech was jacked and the thing was unloaded. I started to mention this to Long, but she had already reared a foot back.

  “Chief, wait…”

  Her foot hit the door—from personal experience I knew what the cheap, single-ply doors did in these kinds of situations—and she booted a round hole in it about ten inches in diameter, admitting her foot into the house but little else.

  Clarence Last Bull dropped the shotgun and, predictably, ran—as best he could.

  I reached over and grabbed Long by the collar of her wet uniform shirt and yanked her back to the side in an attempt to get her free from the door. As we fell backward alongside the concrete steps into some grandfather sage, she elbowed me, scrambled off, and charged toward the doorway.

  “Wait a minute!”

  She continued to ignore me and splashed up the steps with the long barrel of her .44 leveled, careful this time to kick the more structurally rigid side.

  I decided it was time to cut Clarence off at the pass.

  There was a sidewalk that led to the back of the house and, after rounding the corner, I slapped open a cyclone fence to find a concrete stoop not unlike the one in the front. There was a wooden-handled garden rake leaning against the painted siding, and I grabbed it. Last Bull was pretty intent on getting to the dirt that constituted the yard, which kept him from noticing the rake handle I slipped between his legs.

  Fortunately for him, he cleared the concrete steps; unfortunately, he then hit the largest puddle in the yard face first.

  I had dropped the landscaping tool and started toward him when Lolo Long blew through the rear screen door and pitched herself on top of Last Bull
just as he had started to get up.

  He was tall but skinny and incredibly inebriated, which gave the chief the upper hand. The air had gone out of him and now they were both covered in mud. He flipped her to the side, but she wrapped her legs around the trunk of his body and pulled him over after her. He tried to reach a feeble hand back, but she struck him a nasty blow to the head with the revolver, and he slumped still.

  She pushed him over and lay there breathing, looking up at me from the detonation of drops that struck the puddle surrounding her. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Thanks for the help.”

  “It was nothing.”

  She kicked at the dead weight of his body, and when his face slumped into the murky water, she holstered the Smith and cuffed his hands behind his back.

  I looped a hand under one of Clarence Last Bull’s arms and dragged him away from the puddle before he drowned.

  It was dry in the Cheyenne Tribal Police Law Enforcement and Detention Center, and the environs were as comfy as could be expected; of course, I couldn’t speak for the man snoring fitfully in the holding cell with a blanket over his head. A stolid-looking patrolman with a pockmarked face, who was gently humming a tune to himself and eating portions of an apple that he carved with a yellow-handled pocketknife, was watching me.

  I twirled the tiny ring on my little finger, glad that it hadn’t fallen off in the backyard melee. “Can I have a piece?”

  He cut off another eighth, shoved it in his mouth, and looked at me, his expression as blank as the walls that surrounded us.

  I leaned back in the chair that Long had told me to sit in and glanced around the empty office at the couple of other tables pushed against the bare walls. After placing the suspect in the holding cell, the chief had deposited me with the quiet man and had repaired to the locker room in the back. From the sound of it, she was taking a shower as the sphinx guarded me. I guess I was still under arrest.

  “So, you barked too much and they cut your vocal cords?”

  I looked out the vertical window next to Long’s desk and watched the wind rock the trees and plaster rain against the double-paned glass. You can learn a lot about a person by examining her desk, even if there’s not anything on it. Chief Long’s was completely vacant, except for an old, push-button line phone and one manila folder.