Cold Dish wl-1

by Craig Johnson

  I started to give her the old Colonel-Mustard-in-the-library-with-the-candlestick routine, but thought better of it. “No, I don’t.”

  When we got back, the Bag Boys had already zipped Cody up and loaded him onto a gurney; some of the others were still processing evidence into freezer bags. One of the boys was dropping a tattered eagle feather into a plastic envelope. He looked up as we approached. “Looks like everything out here’s been making a meal of this poor guy.”

  T.J. turned to me. “Walt, are you going to be the primary on this one?”

  “Do you mean am I going to be riding in one of those Conestoga wagons of yours for five hours down to Cheyenne?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” I pointed to the group of vehicles where Vic was busy putting away the photography equipment. “At the bottom of this hill, you will find my somewhat agitated, but highly skilled, primary investigator.”

  T.J. smiled. She liked Vic. “She have any cases pending?”

  “Well, she’s been hanging Christmas lights in town, but I figure we can let her go for a few days.”

  “It’s not even Thanksgiving.”

  “It’s a city council thing.”

  We followed the body down to where the rest of our little task force had congregated. Someone had brought a number of Thermoses full of hot coffee and a few boxes of donuts. I got a cup of coffee; I don’t eat donuts. I spotted Jim Ferguson, one of my deputies and head of Search and Rescue, across the bed of the truck and asked him if they had turned anything up on their walk around. His mouth was full of cream-filled, but the gist was no. I told him I was going to replace his staff with the sheep.

  “We did a three-hundred-yard perimeter, but the light wasn’t so good. We’ll do another soon as everybody gets a donut and some coffee. You think this guy left brass?”

  “I hope.”

  I took my coffee and moved over to where T.J. and Vic were seated on a tailgate. They were looking at some of the evidence; hopefully, they were discussing something I could understand.

  “Single shot, center, didn’t get too much of the sternum.” Vic held a bag up to the rising sun and looked at the metal fragment inside. “Fuck, I don’t know.” T.J. patted the spot beside her with the palm of her hand, and I sat. Vic continued, “It looks like a slug. I’m thinking 12 gauge or something just a little bigger.”

  “Bazooka?”

  She lowered the bag, and her eyes met mine. “You’re getting rid of me?”

  I nodded my head. “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a big pain in the butt.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “And you talk dirty.”

  She handed the bagged bullet to T.J. “You’re going to be stuck up here with Turk.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe we’ll get the Christmas lights put up together.” Vic snorted and readjusted her gun belt. “Besides, you’ve forgotten more about this space-age stuff than I’ll ever know. You can relay information back to me.” The tarnished gold stared at me, unblinking. “You’ll only be down there for two days. It will take us that long to round up all the usual suspects.” I was the old dog who had learned his fill of new tricks, and it was only logical that I work the county and the people.

  She poked me in the belly. Her finger remained in one of my fat rolls, and she poked each word for emphasis, “If Search and Rescue don’t find anything, you gonna call Omar?”

  “That’s another reason for you to leave, you don’t like Omar.”

  She poked me again. “You be careful, all right?”

  This all sounded very strange coming from Vic’s mouth, but I took it as affection and punched her on the shoulder. “I’m always…” She knocked my hand away.

  “I mean it.” She didn’t have kind eyes, they rarely looked away, and they always told the truth. I could use eyes like that. “I’ve got a funny feeling about all of this.”

  I gazed back up to the patch of sage and scrub weed and watched the sun free itself from the red hills. “Yeah, well you got five hours to talk to T.J. about this woman’s intuition thing.” The next poke hurt.

  I hung around the scene until Search and Rescue had finished their second sweep; I sat in the Bullet and filled out the reports. Ferg strolled up with a cup of coffee and another cream-filled. “Anything?” Fortunately, I caught him between bites.

  “Nothing. We got a lot of sheep shit and tracks.”

  “Any suspicious sheep tracks?”

  “Nope, no suspicious sheep shit, either. It’s like the Denver stock-yards up there.”

  I thought about how you could kill a victim only once, but how a crime scene could die a thousand deaths. I hoped that whatever useful information could be deducted from this patch of God’s little acre was traveling safely in plastic bags toward Cheyenne. Motives are all fine and good, but if we could find out the how, we’d have a shooting’s match chance of finding out the who. I had the niggling feeling I was going to have to call Omar.

  On the drive over to the Pritchards’ place I thought about the last time I had seen Cody alive. He was a heavyset kid, built like a linebacker, curly blond hair and pale blue eyes. He had his mother’s looks, his father’s temper, and nobody’s brains. I had pulled him out on three occasions, the last being the rape case. Cody had endeared himself to the local Native American community by being quoted in the Sheridan paper as saying, “Yeah, she was a retard redskin, but she was asking for it.”

  The Pritchards had a place on the outskirts of Durant and, by the time I got there, there must have been eight or nine cars and trucks in the drive. Word carries fast in open spaces. As I cut off the engine, the full impact of what I was going to have to do hit me like a Burlington Northern. How do you tell parents that their child is dead? Sure, they’d heard it through the grapevine, but I was the official word. I allowed myself a long sigh.

  There were field swallows swooping near the Bullet. I was probably disturbing their family, too. Seemed to be my day for it. It had been longer than twenty-four hours since sleep. It’s easy to work all night because the sun doesn’t come up, but when it does, my eyes start to sting and the rest of me gets a little shaky. I’ve always been this way. I was focusing my eyes when I heard the screen door slam and saw John Pritchard walking down the drive. I never cared too much for John; he was one of those guys who always had to be in control. The conversation wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The pertinent information from him was that Cody had left the house twenty-seven hours ago with an extra doe license. The pertinent information from me was that he wasn’t coming home.

  I did the best I could, drove the seven miles back to my place, and sat on the porch-well, the front doorway-but not for very long, because it was cold. I had the presence of mind to fall into the house instead of out of it. I drifted in and out of consciousness until the phone rang, and the answering machine my daughter made me buy picked up. “You’ve reached the Longmire residence. No one is available to answer your call right now, ’cause we’re out chasing bad guys or trying on white hats. If you leave a message after the tone, we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can. Happy trails!” She had taken a great deal of joy in recording the message printed in the instructions, with a few minor alterations. I smiled every time I heard it.

  “It’s Pancake Day!” The voice resonated through the lines from fourteen miles away. Jim Ferguson was not only head of Search and Rescue and my longest standing part-time deputy, but he was also the man in charge of driving around Durant once a year at dawn in the fire department’s truck, proclaiming through a bullhorn, “It’s Pancake Day, Pancake Day!”

  There are only three major vote-getting days in Absaroka County, and I can’t remember the other two. “Oh God, no. It’s Pancake Day.” I thought about shooting myself. I could see the headline: SHERIFF SHOOTS SELF, UNABLE TO FACE PANCAKES.

  “It’s Pancake Day!” Ferg really enjoyed his work. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last hour, just thought somebody ought
to call and remind you. But if you really are gonna retire next year, then who gives a shit?”

  I stumbled to the phone beside the recliner. “Is it really today?”

  “If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’.” There was a pause. “Hey, Walt, if you want, I can just tell ’em we were up all night.” Ferg was slightly in the Turk camp for future sheriff, but I had other plans. If Vic was going to be the first female sheriff in Wyoming, I only had a year to pull in all my political markers. I could last an hour of Pancake Day with the Elks, the Eagles, the Lions, the Jaycees, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and, of course, the AARPs.

  “I’ll be there in a half hour.”

  “Remember, it’s at the Catholic church this year.”

  “You bet.” I plugged in the coffeemaker and dumped enough coffee for eight cups into the filter with only enough water for four. I took a shower while it was perking. The plumbing was somewhat makeshift, but the water that came from above went away below. It went away below through a bathtub that Henry had found for me for twenty dollars. Somebody on the Rez had used it for target practice with a. 22 but had only chipped the porcelain. Then there was the shower curtain. I don’t know what the exact physical dynamics are that cause a shower curtain to attach itself to your body when you turn on the water but, since my shower was surrounded on all sides by curtains, I turned on the water and became a vinyl, vacuum-sealed sheriff burrito.

  I slid behind the wheel of the Bullet and started driving the fourteen miles to town. Durant is situated along the Bighorn Mountains and, because there is abundant fish and game, it’s become the retiree capitol of Wyoming. In Absaroka County, to ignore the octogenarian vote is to pump gas at the Sinclair station for a living. Service jobs are about all there are in Durant, somewhat stunting the younger generation and forcing the majority out by age nineteen; but the retirees keep coming from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa, with the odd Texan and Californian thrown in for spice. They come looking for the romance of the west that they had paid shiny quarters to view on Saturday afternoons in flickering black and white. They waited half a century of stamping out automobile bumpers to get their western dream; they paid for it and, by God, they were going to have it. Most ended up picking up and moving out, headed for Florida, Arizona, or wherever the weather was easier. I liked the ones who stayed. You’d see them out after the blizzards, shoveling away, and waving at the Bullet like it was the circus come to town. Hell, I’d stop and talk to them. Sheriffs have to get elected in Wyoming, so we have to be liked. I imagine that, if you had to elect the average police force, the turnover rate would spin your Rolodex.

  When I first started out, it was the part of the job that I enjoyed the least, courting the public. But as time wore on, it got to be the part that I enjoyed the most. Martha was right when she said that I needed a bumper sticker that said BORN TO BULLSHIT. The debates were the best part. In ’81, old Sheriff Connally planned a peaceful takeover. He ran against me so no one else could and had lofted softballs to me so that I felt like Harmon Killabrew by the time the debate was over. I was elected. Lucian retired and was now living the high life in room 32 at the Durant Home for Assisted Living. I still went over on Tuesday nights to play chess, and he still kicked my ass, to his unending delight.

  I looked at the inch of snow that dappled the sagebrush. It looked like a Morse code of white dots and dashes leading down the road. If I could read the message, would it tell me the story I wanted to hear? The truth still stood that I was a sheriff who had survived by the cult of personality, and that, if the trend were to continue, my heir-apparent would not be elected. Was I just trying to force Vic down the throats of the county because I could? No, she was the best person for the job and that was the reason I was going to have to keep pushing. Pancake Day, Pancake Day.

  I idled down into second gear at the corner of Main and Big Horn and looked down the street to see Turk’s Trans Am parked at the office. Just seeing his car made my ass hurt. I didn’t feel like facing him on an empty stomach. I hoped he would have already contacted Lavanda Running Horse over at Game and Fish for any information we could get about last night’s incident. I circled quickly around the courthouse to avoid being seen and made a beeline for the Catholic church. The place was mobbed, and there was no parking. I wheeled the Bullet onto the concrete pad beside the HVAC unit and cut the engine. I figured the Pope wasn’t coming today.

  “Well, if it isn’t the long arm of the law.” It was an old joke, but one I didn’t mind. “Longmire, pull up a chair and sit yourself down.” Steve Brandt was the mayor of Durant and the de facto president of the Business Associates Committee, a loosely affiliated group of warring tribes that made up the commercial facet of the downtown. He also owned the screen-printing place on Main and had done the T-shirts for the annual Sheriff’s Department vs. Fire Department softball game, but the less said about this the better. Next to him was David Fielding of the Sportshop, Elaine Gearey who had the Art Gallery, Joe of Joe Benham’s Hardware and Lumber, Dan Crawford from the IGA, and Ruby.

  “What are you doing here?” Ruby’s chin rested on her palm, fingers trailing into the hollow below her cheekbones. I figured cheekbones were one of those things you gained from speed walking five miles a day.

  I slipped off my coat and sat on it. “Well, I’m here to support the courageous Durant Volunteer Fire Department’s men in nonflammable nylon… Do you think their hats are cooler than ours?”

  “Shouldn’t you be home, in bed?”

  I took my hat and perched it on her head. It looked jaunty. I turned to the others at the table. “This is the problem I have with all the women I know, they’re always trying to get me into bed.” There was a derisive chuckle around the table, and Ruby took my hat off, sitting it on the table brim up-good Wyoming girl. “It’s ’cause I look so much like Gary Cooper.” General opinion at the table projected their cinematic consensus to more like Hoot Gibson, whereupon I changed the subject. “So, how are the pancakes?”

  “We don’t know. We been here for twenty minutes and ain’t seen a damn pancake yet.” Joe Benham was in a lean and hungry mood.

  “Might be for the best. They aren’t letting the firemen cook again, are they?”

  “You think they’d learn to not trust ’em with fire.” David’s comment referred to the infamous Stove Oil Incident wherein the firemen had set fire to the old wood-burning stove at the Future Farmers of America hall, resulting in that year’s pancakes tasting roughly like roofing shingles.

  “The best was when they almost burned their truck up at that grass fire out near you.” Elaine, being a patron of the arts, always appreciated spectacle.

  Ruby placed a steaming Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of me. I hadn’t even seen her get up. “Thank you, ma’am.” I took a sip and listened to the rumble as it joined the other four cups in my stomach. I was hungry and that was not a good thing on Pancake Day.

  “We were just discussing the city Christmas decorations, Walt. Do you think they’re the ugliest in Wyoming?” Elaine had a twinkle in her eye. As part of the city council, she had been lobbying for new decorations for about six years now. The problem was that Joe’s father had designed and executed the offending artistry of Santa, elves, reindeer, bells, wreaths, candles, trees, mistletoe, holly, stars, and toys twenty-five years ago. Say what you want about three-quarter inch exterior ply, it holds ugly for a long time.

  “Gillette’s are uglier,” I ventured.

  “We heard you had a busy night.” Dan Crawford picked up his coffee and blew into it, watching the swirls of cream separate at the rip-tide on the other side of his cup. It got quiet.

  This was going to be the prime topic of conversation for the morning, so I might as well develop an official line. “Nothing big. We had a hunting accident out near 137 on BLM land.” I tried to make it sound like the end of the story.

  “We heard there was a boy dead.” Dan continued to look at his coffee.

  “Well, what else have you
heard?” It got even quieter. “No offense, Dan, but I’m not gonna sit here and play guessing games with you. Why don’t you just tell me what you know, and I’ll either confirm or deny it or not.” His face reddened, which was not what I was after.

  “I didn’t mean anything, Walt. Just curious.”

  He meant it. I rubbed my face with my hands and looked at all of them. “I hope you’ll all excuse me, but it’s been a long night.” I sighed. “With all due respect to the ongoing investigation, it would appear that, on the night past, one Cody Pritchard departed for the far country from which no traveler born returns.”

  The allusion was not lost on Elaine. “Have you narrowed it down to a couple of hundred thousand suspects, as in something rotten in the state of Denmark or Iowa?”

  Joe nodded. “Well, I don’t figure there’ll be any public outcries of mourning…” Elaine ventured that there might be a parade, then saved me by asking if I was willing to play the Ghost of Christmas Future in the civic theatre’s upcoming production of A Christmas Carol. I was pretty sure that she wanted me for my height and not my dramatic skills. This was confirmed when she assured me that I wouldn’t have to learn any lines and that all I had to do was point.

  I excused myself to see a man about a horse and made for the boy’s room at the far end of the hall. On the way, I got a peek through the kitchen service opening and was startled to see Vonnie Hayes sliding a stacked platter of pancakes to a waiting fireman. She looked much as she did last evening, which seemed like another life. Her hand came up and swiped back a stray wisp of hair that had escaped from the loose bun. It’s funny how the little movements that a woman makes seem so individualized, like a signature. It was the rotation of the wrist with a two-finger pull. I gave it a ten and was aroused. I waved and thought she had seen me, but maybe I was wrong. She smiled at the young fireman and disappeared into the kitchen. Those firemen, they make out like bandits.

  In the boy’s room, I attended to business, washed my hands, hit the button on the hand dryer, and wiped my hands off on my pants to the quiet hum of modern technology. It was then that I realized I was wearing my weapon. I don’t wear my gun to community functions, and I don’t wear it on weekends. I was actually famous for taking it off and leaving it places. Periodically, Vic would bring it back to me from the bathroom in the office or out of the seat of the Bullet. She liked to make fun of my antique armament by calling it the blunderbuss. Heavy, hard to aim, slow rate of fire, it was the weapon I had used in Vietnam for four years, and I’d gotten used to it.