Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery

by Craig Johnson

  “Excuse me?”

  Her head dropped, and the tears collected in her eyes. “I’m coming to the end of my rope, and I need something to hold on to, something to give me hope—tell me you’re going to find my sister.”

  “I, well . . .”

  She sobbed. “Tell me you’re going to find her alive.”

  “I . . .”

  Her face grew fierce and then slowly lost all emotion. “Please.”

  Usually capable of reading a dangerous situation, recent activity excluded, I stood there like a tower of crumbling stone, the only strong keystone in me, the two words I knew were the wrong ones to say. “I will.”

  She watched me to see if I was telling the truth and then wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. “You wanna come in?”

  I stood there, making sure I was hearing what I was hearing. “Um, thanks but no . . . My head hurts, and I’m pretty tired.”

  “That’s okay, it’s an open invitation.” She stepped back in, closing the door behind her.

  As I stepped over to room 5, I noticed a handwritten note taped to the door that read You have been changed to room 4. The writing looked familiar, especially the emphasis on the period, which had stabbed a small hole in the paper, but I was too tired to analyze it, figuring Lucian and Dog had grown weary of my night-owl tendencies and had given me the boot.

  It was just a few steps to number 4, and I found it conveniently cracked open.

  I pushed the door the rest of the way in but then, fumbling for the light switch, I had my right hand caught in a reverse wristlock that turned me around and pulled me into the darkened room. A Browning tactical boot slammed the door closed behind us as my assailant dragged me back onto the bed, wrapped her legs around me, and bit my ear from behind, releasing it only long enough to whisper, “Good thing you fucking said no.”

  Boy howdy.

  5

  Lucian sipped his coffee and smiled, watching the two of us talk like it was Wimbledon.

  “How was Belize?”

  “I got a tan.”

  “So I noticed.”

  The old sheriff choked, swallowed, and then interrupted. “Got any lines?”

  Victoria Moretti pushed a handful of blue-black hair back from her face and sipped her own coffee, sat the mug down, placed an elbow on the table and leaned in, looking back at him with a full load of tarnished gold. “You wanna try and find them, old man?”

  He blushed, and I believe it was the first time I’d ever seen him do it. “I don’t know if my heart is up to it.”

  “Maybe if you’d stop looking at my tits and look me in the face you could work up the nerve.” She grinned at him, showing the elongated canine tooth. “Don’t feel bad—many are called, but few are chosen.”

  “I didn’t take you for a Sunday schooler.”

  She reached over and took a piece of my bacon, along with a little bit of my heart. “That’s where the phrase is from—damned if I knew; I’m schooled in other stuff.” She bit into the bacon and narrowed the aperture of the cannons. “Why, you need a little teaching?”

  He cocked his head as he slid out of the booth the oil workers had occupied last night and glanced at me for a moment. “I think I’m gonna go walk your dog.”

  Vic watched him slip on his coat. “Stay warm out there, thinking about me.”

  He pushed through the glass door and then stood still, frozen by her words for an instant. “I believe I’ll do that.”

  I watched him head back for what had been our communal room and Dog. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen him scamper.”

  “I want to talk to you alone.”

  “I figured.”

  She slid out and switched over to the other side and took another piece of my bacon, being, after all, a carnivore. As she chewed I took the time to drink her in. She had gotten a tan and the blond streaks in her hair were incongruent in the depth of the Wyoming winter—a look I was more used to in the summer. Studying her was something you had to handle with care; volatile, like nitroglycerine.

  “So, miss me?”

  “Yep.”

  “A lot?”

  “Yep.”

  She chewed and studied me. “Are you going to say something other than yep?”

  “Yep.” She waited, her eyes widening in comic expectation as I finally spoke.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve got a great scar.”

  “I know; I’ve seen it.”

  She nodded with a smile, staring at me in a way that made me think she hadn’t had a really good look at me last night; not a feeling I was comfortable with. “Don’t you think scars make better stories than tattoos?”

  I fingered that little piece of my ear that was missing and draped an arm over the back of my seat. “If that’s the case, then I’ve got a whole library on me.”

  “I’ve read it.” She continued smiling and chewing. “And I really liked the ending.”

  She leaned back in the booth and looked out the fogged window of the Aces & Eights, a corpuscle-colored fingernail coming up and chipping at the frost cornering the edges. “The windows in Belize don’t do this . . . Shit, who am I kidding, they don’t have windows in Belize.”

  A quiet spread out over the table between us like a blank page covered with abandoned plates, glasses, and cutlery—but no words. “You stay at Jim Seale’s place?”

  She nodded. “Hotel del Rio, yeah. He’s from around here, right?”

  “Banner, over in Sheridan County.”

  “You ever been to Belize?”

  “Nope. I think he’s had that place for twenty years. He keeps asking me down . . . But I just never get away.”

  A smirk traced itself across her lips. “Look who I’m asking—you never go anywhere there isn’t snow.”

  “I’ve spent some time in tropic climes.”

  She dismissed me with another flap of the hand. “The Vietnam War doesn’t count.”

  “I spent six weeks on Johnston Atoll.”

  She stopped moving and then slowly turned her face toward mine. “After Vietnam?”

  “Yep.”

  Her eyes sharpened to flints. “Okay . . . That’s a month and a half of the two lost years unaccounted for after Vietnam in the saga that is the life of Walt Longmire. Where the hell is Johnston Atoll?”

  I sipped my coffee, enjoying her full attention. “Seven hundred and fifty nautical miles west of Hawaii on a coral reef platform; it’s one of the United States’ minor outlying islands—about 1.3 square miles.”

  “A postage stamp in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a single palm tree like you see in those cartoons in the New Yorker?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What, were you shipwrecked or something?”

  “No.”

  She glanced around, enjoying the illusion of covert activity. “What’s there?”

  I leaned back in my seat and studied her. “An air base, a naval refueling depot, and a weapons testing area, but not anymore.”

  “What kinds of weapons?”

  “Nuclear, among others.”

  She leaned in. “No shit?”

  “A dozen thermonuclear weapons were exploded there before the ban in ’63, but they also had a twenty-five-acre landfill full of Agent Orange, PCBs, PAHs, dioxins, and sarin nerve gas from East Germany.”

  “Sounds horrible.”

  “Nope, it was beautiful . . . Well, not the landfill so much, but the rest of it was an island paradise.”

  “What’d you do there?”

  “Swam, ate fish, fed the sharks, and sunbathed.”

  Her head kicked to one side. “For the government—you must’ve still been working for the military.”

  “Security.” I shrugged. “I was on medical leave from th
e Marines and still attached to the Air Force through the provost marshal, so they shipped me off to a quiet place for the rest of my tour.”

  “Was it?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Quiet.”

  I thought about it. “For a while.”

  She wiggled on her seat. “Okay, let’s hear about it—”

  “Maybe some other time.”

  “C’mon.”

  I laced my hands behind my head. “So, how did Lena like Hotel del Rio?”

  She whined. “C’mon.”

  “I want to hear about your trip, not mine; I know how mine was, and it didn’t end well.” I glanced out the window at the snow, the ice, and the cold, which was seeping through the windows in an attempt to freeze us solid. “I need a break from the winter; tell me about the sand, the surf, and how you got your tan . . .”

  “Okay, but this isn’t over.” I sat there not looking at her and listened as she settled into her seat. “Mom stayed for a week but then got tired of watching me drink and went home.” I turned back, and her eyes were now drawn to the frozen wasteland of the parking lot and the glaciers of snow piled against the building by the plows. “It was incredible; we had this cabana on the second floor where you could look at the ocean between the mangrove trees—the water was all shades of turquoise.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “After the stitches healed up, I’d go lie in the salt water at the end of the pier and just soak in the warmth.”

  I thought back about a conversation I had had with her uncle Alphonse and his description of the teenage Vic who, walking down Christian Street in a one-piece bathing suit, had enticed most of the men back in her native Philadelphia onto the stoops when she’d sauntered by. “Sounds pretty great.”

  Her eyes remained closed. “These guys would come by with conch fritters and cashews, so you didn’t even have to get up for lunch—just roll over and hand them some of that Belizean Monopoly money.”

  “And drink.”

  Her eyes opened with an ore wagon full of tarnished gold. “You weren’t around and most people bore the shit out of me, so don’t make it an issue.”

  “Right.”

  “I got enough of that crap from my mother.”

  “Right.”

  “I dove the Great Blue Hole.”

  I was surprised by the revelation. “You scuba dive?”

  After a brief warning look, the eyes closed again. “They have this beer, Belikin, that comes in these really heavy, recyclable bottles—I did my part.” Her head cocked to one side. “There was a little place about a quarter mile down the beach in San Pedro, The Sandbar—best pizza south of South Street . . . I’d go down there in the evenings and eat and drink. Sometimes I’d have mai tais, but mostly I drank the beer.” Her eyes opened, and she reached down, gathering our plates and stacking them at the end of the table where Haji could retrieve them. “I’d get toasted, and then Brittney and David, the owners, would drive me back up to the hotel in a golf cart and carry me up the steps.”

  “Sounds pretty nice.”

  “Yeah, I only had one rough spot.”

  I reached out and enclosed one of her hands, but her eyes remained closed. “What was that?”

  “Well, like I said, they’d drive me home most nights, but they warned me that I needed to be careful walking home that late because there were a few bad characters around.”

  I squeezed the hand. “What happened?”

  “Oh, they had a wedding at the restaurant, so I stumbled up the beach on my own; some guy got fresh and I told him to buzz off, but he got physical . . .” The eyes opened again, and she pulled her hand away as she slumped back into the bench seat. “I told you how thick those beer bottles were, didn’t I?” She shrugged. “Turns out he was the police chief’s nephew.”

  I nodded and then waited a permissible amount of time before bringing the subject up. “I’ll ask again, how are you feeling?”

  “I figure I’m just a hair’s width away from having syndrome attached to the end of my name.” Her eyes came back to me, and she cocked her head. “Now, huh?”

  “Now what?”

  “We’re going to have this conversation now?”

  I shrugged, thinking about the actions that had led us to the now—a very bad man, a knife, revenge, the loss of a child she may or may not know that I was aware of, her inability to ever have children, and a tsunami load of water under the bridge. “Why not?”

  Her voice took on an authoritarian tone as it had with Lucian. “Question.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Tell me Tomás Bidarte is dead as Kelsey’s nuts.”

  The very bad man.

  I reached in the inside pocket of my sheepskin coat and tossed a long horn-handled switchblade knife that I’d been carrying for months with a clatter onto the table between the plates and us.

  The knife.

  She looked at it for a moment and then picked it up, sliding back the safety and pushing the button, the eight-inch blade slapping open with a deadly snik. “Tell me he’s dead.”

  Revenge.

  I said nothing.

  She put a fingertip at the point, something she was wont to do in any circumstance. “If this is when we’re going to have this conversation, you’re going to have to do more in holding up your end.”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone as in to the hereafter and buried by you and Henry in a shallow grave for a coyote buffet and then carried away in tiny, antlike bites, or simply gone?”

  “Simply gone.”

  She stared at me, incredulous. “Henry Standing Bear couldn’t find him?”

  “No.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “There’s no way I missed that son of a bitch with that many rounds.”

  “No.”

  She looked back out the window and set her jaw. “Maybe he is a ghost.” She took a deep breath, and the eyes returned to mine. “So, where do you think he is?”

  “Far, far from here.” I waited a moment before adding, “Isn’t that where you’d be?”

  She laughed a laugh with no joy in it. “I’d like one more shot at him.”

  “Personally, I hope that never happens.”

  She sat forward and placed her hands between her knees, her voice suddenly low. “The doc says I can’t have kids, not that I was looking to have any anyway.” She stared at the leftovers on Lucian’s plate. “I’ve got four brothers, so it’s not like the Moretti name is at stake . . .” Her face came up, and her eyes were washed with salt water. “I just would have liked to have a say in the thing, you know?”

  I slid out and moved around the table to sit beside her. “I know.”

  She wiped her eyes and laughed. “So much for hearth and home, huh?”

  I gently placed an arm over her shoulders and pulled her into me where she pushed the lapel of my jacket away and stuffed her nose into my chest, and we stayed like that for a long time, her muffled voice finally rising up to my ears. “You smell good.”

  “That’s because I smell like you.”

  She laughed.

  “You could always adopt.”

  She laughed again, thank God, and then snorted and hiccupped as she tried to stop, even going so far as to playfully pound my chest with a fist.

  “Heck, seems like you adopted me years ago.”

  She pulled me in closer, and we stayed like that, but nothing more was said about the very bad man, the knife, revenge, her inability to ever have children, the tsunami load of water under the bridge—or the losing of a child I was now sure she thought I knew nothing about.

  —

  She nudged the blue plastic bag at her feet as I pulled from the parking lot. “Tell me again why we went to Kmart?”

  I glanced down at the bundle I’d put on the floor in front of her seat as
she held out a wrist for Dog to lick. “I needed a chess set to distract Lucian so that he stops driving me crazy, and I can’t count on you because he might take you up on one of your offers.”

  “To coin one of your phrases, a dime’s worth of me and a Fresca would kill him.” She slid the files from the center console and began perusing them.

  I cocked my head to one side. “He’d die happy.”

  She propped her boots up onto my dash, and I felt a surge in my heart at having her there. “So, what are we working on?”

  I told her about Gerald Holman, the missing women, and about the sheriff of Campbell County not being particularly informed about the situation, resulting in a predictable summation.

  “Fuck me.” She thought about it. “What’s the Clod Case replacement investigator’s name?”

  “Did you just call it Clod Case?”

  She brushed my question away with a flap of the Dog wrist. “A Philadelphiaism.”

  “Inspector Richard Harvey.”

  “What’s he like?”

  I lowered my voice. “A dick.”

  She seemed preoccupied by the files. “A what?”

  “A dick.”

  Her eyes widened in mock horror as she turned to look at me. “Oh my, Sheriff . . . Did you just call someone a dick?” She placed her chin in her palm. “A dick.” She marveled, pretending to adjust a pair of make-believe glasses. “A dick by your reserved standards means he is some kind of colossal prick of proportions unlike we’ve ever encountered.”

  I shrugged and drove, trying to keep from smiling.

  She glanced through the windshield and postulated in a pseudoscientific voice like some film you watched on a projector in high school. “Perhaps at one time he was a normal cock, but through contact with radioactive material in the deserts of New Mexico—”

  “One of those blue-line guys.”

  Her hands flew up and out, measuring. “He grew to colossal magnitudes of dickdom!”

  Dog barked, and I sighed. “I just think that he’s more concerned with making sure that Holman’s name goes unsullied than finding out why the man might’ve killed himself.”