Messenger: A Walt Longmire Story

by Craig Johnson

  “He’s a ’tard?”

  I sighed and felt the bridge of my own nose. “Just . . . odd.”

  “Health Services?”

  I dialed the number and listened as it transferred me to the answering machine; Nancy Griffith asked me to record a message. I declined and placed the receiver on the cradle.

  I pulled the phone book from the top drawer of my desk and leafed through to the G’s. “This stuff is a lot easier when Ruby’s around.” I pinned Nancy with a forefinger and dialed. On the third ring she answered, and I described a young man she’d never seen. “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. The description doesn’t match up with any of our current clients. Have you tried the Wyoming Boys’ School?”

  “In Worland?”

  “Stranger things have happened.” I listened as she chuckled and was reminded that she had sung in the church choir with Martha. “Hey, are you going to the football game on Friday?”

  “Why, is there a problem?”

  She waited a moment before responding. “Does there always have to be a problem when you’re invited somewhere?”

  “Generally.”

  “It’s homecoming, and they’re retiring your number.”

  “Oh.”

  “They’re retiring Henry Standing Bear’s number, too. Didn’t anyone get ahold of you?” There was another pause, but it wasn’t long enough for me to come up with an answer or an excuse. “I think everybody up at the high school would appreciate it if the two of you showed up at halftime for the celebration.”

  “Friday. Um . . . I’ll see what I can do. Thanks, Nance.”

  I hung up the phone and watched as Vic reapplied the now-not-so-frozen peas to her nose. “What was all that about?”

  “What?”

  “Friday.”

  “Nothing.” I continued to think about the odd young man as I looked at the Durant Dogies annual on my desk. “He’s got to live in the neighborhood.”

  “Was she just asking you out on a date?”

  “What?” I glanced back up at her. “No.”

  Her tone became a little sharper. “Then what’s Friday?”

  “A football thing; they’re going to retire my number.”

  She looked amused. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Henry’s, too.”

  “I wanna go.”

  “No.”

  “C’mon, I never got to do that crap when I was a teenager.” She thought about it. “I never dated any football guys in high school.”

  I was momentarily distracted. “What kind of guys did you date?”

  “Thirty-seven-year-olds named Rudy with mustaches and vans—guys that would give my parents heart attacks.” She studied me. “I wanna go, and I want a corsage, just like Babs.” I didn’t respond and slumped in my guest chair. “Please tell me we’re not going to canvas the neighborhood in the short bus with have-you-seen-this-half-naked-retard posters?”

  “I thought we’d knock on a few doors.”

  “That or we just bait a few Havahart traps with Double Stuf Oreos.” She struggled to her feet. “But I don’t think we have to do that here.” She reached down and held up the inside band of the pants toward me. It read CITY OF BELLE FOURCHE DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION.

  • • •

  I made a few more phone calls to the services in Butte County, South Dakota, that were open on a Sunday afternoon, but they didn’t know anything about a runaway, so we met Double Tough at the gravel turnout above the T Bar T. “Nothing?”

  The ex–oil rig jockey was built like a brick pillar. When I first met him he’d been shot, something he’d neglected to mention until later in the conversation; hence, his nickname. “Nope, and I asked at every house within a quarter mile of the place.”

  “Nobody’s seen him or heard of him?”

  “Nope.”

  I glanced down the driveway toward the little white house with the red shutters. “I’ll go down and tell Barbara that I’m going to have a look. Why don’t you two just hang around up here in the shade and watch Dog?”

  As I walked off, I heard Double Tough ask about Vic’s nose. Just because he was double tough didn’t mean he was double smart. I made my way to the front porch and told Mrs. Thomas about my intentions. “You don’t have to do that, Walter.”

  “I’d feel better if I had a look around. If you don’t know this young man or anything about him, it might be best if we at least spoke with him.”

  She nodded but there wasn’t much enthusiasm in it.

  As she closed the door, I made my way across the front of the house to the small garage and entered from the side door, which was adjacent to the walkway alongside the house. There was a scary-looking 1969 Mustang convertible with badges on the side that read COBRA JET. It was semihidden underneath a car cover and was a testament to Bill Thomas’s last vehicular purchase before his death in ’71. The thing probably had a thousand miles on the odometer and was the lust of every driving-age male in the county.

  There was a workbench to my right with an assortment of baby food jars filled with screws and nails that probably dated back to Fort Fetterman, but there were a lot of hand tools that looked as though they’d been used recently, as well as spare lumber that had been placed in the rafters, along with a hidden stack of vintage Playboy magazines. Other than that, the place looked undisturbed.

  I closed the door behind me and remembered something Barbara had said about a pump house. We live in the high desert, and considering that the yard was very green and the flower beds abundant with blooms, I figured the water had to come from somewhere.

  Following my boots down a path overgrown with wild morning glories toward the bank of Clear Creek, I veered in the direction of the bridge. I could see the pitched roof of the outbuilding that had had its shingles repaired recently and could even make out the restored patch.

  The grass was higher as I cut off from the walkway, and I waded through the stalks to the small pad at the front. There was a clasp screwed into the surface of the door, but the rusted Master Lock was loose, and I unhooked it from the loop and pulled the door open with the wooden handle. It had probably been a smoke house at some point, which would explain the faint odor of charred wood—that and the rusted points in the rafters that were stained from the places where some kind of meat hook had been attached.

  There was a small 2.5 horsepower irrigation pump feeding water from the creek to a system with pipes that rose up through the dirt floor and then returned in two-inch diameters. I walked around the pump, placed my hand on the outgoing line, and felt the surge of cold water as it flowed through.

  As my eyes settled in the gloom, I could see that there was a steel, fold-up bunk running along the wall on the other side—the kind people used to use for guests. There was an old military blanket on the twin mattress, tucked in so tight you could have bounced a roll of quarters off of it.

  When I got to the bed, I heard a different sound under my boots and stepped back, revealing the vague outline of something square buried in the floor. I kneeled down and brushed away some of the dust. There was a small hook on one side, so I moved it and lifted the lid of what appeared to be an old milk jug container buried in the dry dirt. It was dark in the hole, and I wished I was wearing my duty belt with my trusty Maglite attached, but instead, I just stuck my hand in the submerged box.

  The first thing I found was a magazine—Gun Buyer’s Annual, this year’s date. It was an encyclopedic guide to all the weapons available on the private market. The illustrations on the glossy cover, starring a collection of rifles, shotguns, semiautomatics, and radical carbines, had been thumbed away at the center where someone had spent hours studying the thing. I opened the magazine—practically every page was dog-eared.

  I set it aside and reached into the hole again, this time coming up with a copy of Playboy, January
1972. The magazine was as worn as the gun almanac, and I had to admit that Marilyn Cole, leaning against a bookcase with a novel in her hands and little else, was still looking good considering her photo was over a quarter of a century old and folded into three equal parts.

  I rested what hardly seemed to be even mild porn anymore on the stack with the gun porn and reached into the hole again, this time pulling out a moldy-looking tome—threadbare black with gold lettering—the Book of Mormon. When I carefully opened the cover, I noticed that it was published in 1859, and the handwritten inscription on the title page read “For my son Orrin, Man of God, Son of Thunder—your loving mother, Sara.”

  I tucked the antiquarian book under my arm and stuck my hand back in the container in the floor but couldn’t feel anything else. I looked around the place for something, anything, but there was nothing. I returned everything except the book back to the hole, closed the lid, and kicked a little dirt back over it. I stood, keeping the book with me, and walked around the pump to give the dirt-floored room one more going-over. I stepped through the door, closed it, and hooked the clasp of the lock back through the loop, careful to leave it as I’d found it.

  When I got back to Barbara Thomas’s home, I rapped my knuckles on the screen door and waited until Barbara appeared on the other side of the tiny squares, her image pixelated into a thousand parts. I held up the book and asked, “Who’s Orrin?”

  She placed a hand against the doorjamb for support and silently put her other hand to her mouth.

  • • •

  “I don’t know where he’s from.”

  I watched as Double Tough took another cookie from the plate on the kitchen counter. Barbara, Vic, and I and the Book of Mormon sat at the kitchen table trying to sort things out. “Well, when was the first time you saw him?”

  “Like I said, about two weeks ago.”

  “You also said he was an angel.”

  She blinked and looked out the kitchen window leading toward Clear Creek and the pump house. “I . . . I might have been confused about that.”

  Vic had discarded the now-thawed peas for a cold pack, and her voice was thankfully muffled through the dish towel. “Amen, sister.”

  “Have you spoken with him?”

  “No.”

  “Where did he get the cot and blanket?”

  She thought, as she continued to look out the window. “There were things in the garage that I noticed were missing, but I didn’t really connect the two.” Her eyes came back to me. “Do you really think he’s been living in the pump house these last few weeks?”

  “I’d say it’s a safe assumption; how, exactly, have you been feeding him?”

  She looked at Double Tough, still munching on a cookie. “I just leave the food on the counter.”

  My deputy, feeling a little self-conscious, threw out a review as he chewed. “Oatmeal–Chocolate chip, they’re really good.”

  The older woman’s eyes returned to mine. “Can’t we just leave him alone?”

  I cleared my throat. “Um, no, we can’t. . . . He’s not a stray cat, Mrs. Thomas; we’ve got to find out who he is and where he belongs. There might be people out there looking for him. You understand.”

  “I do.”

  I picked up the book and opened it to the title page. “A couple of assumptions I’m making are that he’s Mormon and that his name is Orrin.”

  Vic couldn’t resist. “Orrin the Mormon?”

  I ignored her and continued. “I’m going to place my deputy here in your house this evening, if you don’t mind, in hopes that the boy will return.”

  She nodded, first looking at Vic and then settling on Double Tough. “That’ll be fine.”

  I stood and gave my Powder Junction deputy his command. “I’ll come by at around eleven to spell you, if that sounds good.”

  He picked up another cookie and nodded. “Yup.”

  “And try not to eat all the cookies.”

  He didn’t answer as he took a seat by the kitchen window, lifted his tactical binoculars to his eyes to view the pump house, and chewed.

  • • •

  Vic fed her uneaten pizza crust to Dog as she picked up a can from my Rainier stash and gulped. “Shit, I just wish someone around here would do decent pizza.” She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and the front on Dog’s head. “I checked the National Crime Information Center for info on Orrin the Mormon but so far he’s about as available as the Holy Ghost. I left a message at the local Church of Latter-day Saints—who knew there was one here—with Bishop Drew Goodman and even checked with social services over in Utah, but so far nobody’s ever heard of the kid.”

  I sipped my own beer and flipped through the pages of the Mormon bible. “This thing is probably worth a fortune.”

  “What about the City of Belle Fourche’s traveling pants?”

  I set my beer down. “I’ll call over to Tim Berg—the sheriff over there—and see if he has any ideas about the pants or the kid.”

  She held her beer close to her lips and smiled the crocodile smile. “The human pencil holder?”

  “Yep.” During classes at the National Sheriffs’ Association, Tim was famous for placing numerous pens and pencils in his prodigious beard and then forgetting them.

  She looked up at the old Seth Thomas hanging on the wall of my office, the hands gesturing toward 10:45 like Carol Merrill from Let’s Make a Deal. “I was thinking about hanging around and seducing you, but my nose hurts, so I might take it home and go to bed.” She took another sip of her beer and then held the cool of the can to the spot between her eyes. “How do I look?”

  I studied the two small wings of purple unfurling beneath her lower lids. “Like you coulda been a contendah.”

  “Yeah, well, if I catch Orrin the Mormon I’m going to pound his head like a friggin’ bongo.” She stood and stretched, the dress hem riding up her thighs as she sang in a thick Italian accent, à la Rosemary Clooney, “Come on-a my house, my house. I’m-a gonna give you candy.”

  I smiled up at her. “I thought your nose hurt.”

  She backed into my office doorway and attempted to draw me forward by crooking an index finger. “It does, but I just remembered a great way to take my mind off it.”

  I gathered up the detritus of our impromptu feast, crushed a few of the cans, and tossed them into the empty box—I knew I’d catch hell from Ruby if I left beer cans in the office trash. “I’ve got to relieve Double Tough in twenty-five minutes.”

  “We could make it a quickie.”

  I closed the box, picked it up, and walked around my desk to meet her. “What do you hear from the newlyweds?” Her face darkened beyond the black eyes, and I suddenly realized that clouds were gathering and lightning was flashing in the tarnished gold pupils. “What?”

  “I’ve warned you about that.”

  “What?”

  She leaned against the door frame and downed the last of her beer. “Every time I talk about us, you talk about them.” She pushed off the frame and looked up at me, placing the empty can on the flat surface of my box like a smokestack. “I’m not going to get all Freudian and try and figure that out, so just stop. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She turned, walked past Ruby’s desk, and paused to curtsy, her hair, which she had grown out, striped with highlights. “By the way, you lost your shot at a quickie.”

  She disappeared down the steps, and I heard the heavy glass doors swing shut as I called after her, “I kind of figured that.”

  Dog, probably hoping for another crust, appeared at my leg as I took a few steps down the hall toward the holding cells and the back door. “C’mon, you want to go to the Dumpster?” I glanced over my shoulder and noticed he’d sat. “I’ll take that as a no?” He didn’t move, so I continued on my own. “Well, you’re going over to Barbara Thomas’s place here i
n a few minutes whether you like it or not.”

  I pushed open the heavy metal and carefully nudged the broken portion of concrete block that we all used to prop open the door, which saved the staff the ignominious march around the building to the front entrance that Vic had deemed “the walk of shame and ignorance.”

  In the distance I could hear my undersheriff ignoring our two red-blinking traffic lights as she sped through town.

  Balancing the empty Rainier on the box, I started toward the Dumpster just as a sudden breeze kicked up, which spun the can off the cardboard surface like an aluminum tumbleweed. It skittered across the street toward the fence at Meadowlark Elementary.

  “Well, hell.”

  I continued on my way, slipped the trash under the plastic lid, and then started the trek across the street; I figured that if beer cans weren’t allowed in the sheriff’s office trash, they probably shouldn’t linger next to the elementary school fence either.

  The little bugger was continuing to bump against the chain-link, and it took two tries before I got hold of the thing. Feeling the weight of the day, I placed an elbow on the top bar of the fence and stood there enjoying the temperature drop of the evening. It was getting late in the season, and the nights were getting cooler. I thought about what Nancy had said about the weekend, tried to remember what my number had been, and then reminded myself to call the Bear and tell him about the honors that were being bestowed on us Friday night.

  I shivered just a little and figured the first frost would be pretty soon and I’d be switching over to my felt hat. I let my mind wander again, this time to what Vic had said, wondering if it was true. Her youngest brother had married my daughter a few months back, and I was hearing from Cady less and less. Delving into a little Freudian slip of my own, I wondered if that anxiety had intertwined with my worries about being even more involved with my undersheriff lately. I didn’t consider myself a prude, but the difference in our ages and the fact that I was her boss continued to intrude on my thoughts.