A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery (28 page)

Edgar Lynear was the first to ask from the other side of the truck bed, “We’re not already arrested?”

“Not yet, but if I do it goes on your permanent record.”

“What’s a permanent record?”

I turned and looked at Henry. “Doesn’t seem to carry the weight it used to.”

He sighed. “No, it does not.”

I glanced back to the wounded young man. “How old are you, Eddy?”

“Seventeen.”

Vic breathed a response. “Jesus . . .”

Eddy considered her. “You know, you shouldn’t blaspheme like that.”

“Kiss my ass, Opie.”

The others laughed as I waved a hand in front of his face to get his attention back on me. “I need some answers or people are going to get hurt.”

He gestured toward his wound with a bloody hand. “I’m already hurt.”

Vic reached up and smacked the side of his head. “Not near enough.”

“Oww . . .”

“I mean really hurt.” I straightened and looked to the left. “I know the main ranch headquarters is up this road, but that’s not where Lockhart and his men are working, is it?”

He remained silent until Vic slapped him again. “Oww . . .”

I looked at her, and she shrugged. “I’m Italian, and I have brothers; I know how this works.”

“Is it the road to the right up here?”

Vic raised her hand again, and the kid winced. “Yeah, to the right. I don’t know what’s there; they never let us go out that way.”

I nodded, looked at the two-track that departed from the main road a good quarter of a mile farther, and then redirected my attention to the weapons I had confiscated. I reached in and plucked out one of the plastic cases, opened it, and looked at the rounds inside, each one as long as a cigar.

Edgar was next to me again. “What do the blue tips mean?”

I pulled one out and studied the deceptive pastel point at the business end of the .50 round. “Incendiary.”

“What’s that mean?”

The Cheyenne Nation’s voice intoned beside me. “It blows things up.”

•   •   •

“You think locking up their shoes with the guns will keep them there?”

“I can hope. Anyway, I didn’t figure you wanted to volunteer for babysitting duty.” We’d triangulated a route that would have us traipsing through the sagebrush and over uneven ground but would intercept the road by angling to the right.

“Are there snakes out here?”

“It’s Wyoming; there are snakes everywhere. If you see one, shoot it with your ray gun.” Vic had taken a spacey-looking desert tan FN carbine and was aiming it at the horizon. “And if you don’t watch where you’re going, you’re going to step on one.”

She turned back to look at me. “You’re just jealous because mine weighs less than an anvil. Why did you decide to pack that thing, anyway?”

Loaded with the McMillan TAC-50 and thirty rounds of ammunition I’d dumped in a canvas satchel, I was bringing up the rear. “If these guys are as well armed as I think they are, I’d just as soon do my fighting from a couple of football fields away.”

Henry glanced back from point, my shotgun hanging from his shoulder and the ArmaLite A4 carbine with two thirty-round magazines in his hand. “More like a couple of miles.”

I called out to him, “If they’d had a flintlock rifle, would you have taken it?”

He walked on. “I like this weapon; it and I have spent a great deal of quality time together.”

“Quality of life?”

“For me; perhaps not for others.”

There was a chill, but maybe it was the cool of the late night.

I thought about the idiocy of what I was doing, pitting the three of us against who knew how many. The proper thing to do would’ve been to call in the Highway Patrol and as many fellow sheriffs and deputies as I could draw on short notice from the surrounding counties, but here I was lugging Ma Deuce across the high plains in a remake of
They Came to Cordura
.

Short notice was still too long, and these characters were too powerful to let slip away; after Double Tough, I thought I couldn’t allow it, but after Frymire, I knew I couldn’t.

It was possible that Lockhart and the others had already vacated to sunnier pastures, but I figured they were concerned with removing anything that might incriminate them. If I opened the conflict to a wider arena, the more opportunities there would be that they might slip through. Maybe I just wanted to mess things up for them myself—get my licks in before anybody else showed up.

I figured that Gloss, the others, the lawyers, and possibly the National Guard couldn’t be too far behind, but I wanted to make sure that none of the nastier players got away and certainly not scot-free.

I stumbled over a berm of loose dirt and noticed that we’d gotten to the road.

Henry was crouched down, running his hands over the hard-packed earth. “Heavy equipment and a lot of it.”

I nodded and sat the butt end of the TAC-50 on the road and sloughed off the satchel full of brass. “I wish we had a truck.”

“People in hell want ice water.” Vic propped the FN on her hip and glanced around. “I wish we had air support.”

The Cheyenne Nation continued to look down the dirt road, where it rounded off at the flats and disappeared into a small valley. His face pivoted to the mountains and the morning star, likely thinking the same thing I was, that out here on the flat was a bad place to be without food, water, or much of anything else besides guns. He gestured toward the big rifle I carried, and, more important, the Nightforce NXS 8-32×56 Mil-Dot telescopic sight.

“Something?”

He nodded and pointed down the dusty road, stretching like the hypotenuse of an extended triangle that disappeared at the vanishing point.

I brought the burley rifle up and adjusted the optics till a man vaulted into clear view, a lean bundle of muscle with dark hair who sat in a lawn chair with an umbrella and a cooler behind a Jeep Rubicon, an autoloader rifle lying across his lap.

Lowering the .50, I handed it to Henry and watched as he scoped the individual almost a mile away.

“How the hell did you see him?”

He sighed and handed the weapon back to me. “Cheyenne radar.”

Then he lifted the binoculars that I hadn’t seen hanging at his chest and handed them to Vic. “And these.”

“Advance guard.”

“Yes.”

I glanced around at the infinite space, at the sagebrush and the moon shadows of the few large rocks studding the landscape. “Too long to go around him; any ideas?”

The Bear nodded. “Yes. Shoot him.”

“He might just be some roughneck they’ve got working for them.”

“All the more reason.”

I looked down at the howitzer in my hands. “Too much noise.”

Vic handed me the FN before taking off her duty belt and uniform shirt. Underneath she was wearing a white wife-beater T-shirt which highlighted portions of her anatomy. She ripped the front to show a little more cleavage and, adjusting her attributes, she flipped me her cap. She shook her head, and her exquisite face was haloed with her hair—presto, instant print model.

She tucked the Glock in the back of her jeans and started off with a swagger. “Watch and learn, fuckers.”

I had every intention.

A few yards down the road, she latched a hand onto her hip and turned to look back at us, en vogue. “Not that I’m a sore loser, but if he should happen to shoot me, take his head off.”

We watched as she continued walking down the middle of the road in a heart-jarring strut.

I looked at Henry, now standing beside me. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You do not have the legs for it.”

We moved in a little closer and then set the TAC-50 up on a flat rock the size of a toppled refrigerator; I pulled the bolt action, replaced the incendiary round with a regular one, and handed the blue-tip to the Cheyenne Nation. “Don’t lose that; I’ve only got twelve of them.”

He raised an eyebrow and dropped the .50 in his shirt pocket.

I brought the bolt forward and set the round, lowered my face to the scope as he sat on the edge of the rust-colored, lichen-covered rock, and raised the night-vision binoculars. “Twenty bucks says she takes him without a shot.”

He snorted. “No bet.”

Through the crosshairs I watched as the makeshift sentry stood at her approach, still holding the FN, not unlike Vic’s except this one was olive drab. I also noticed he had an autoloader with silencer stuffed in a holster. “Six hundred and thirty yards?”

“Six twenty-five.”

I adjusted the scope and watched the winds blowing dust across the roadway in different directions at different distances.

“Strong latitudinal wind at about four hundred yards.”

“I can see that.”

Vic held her hands up in mock surrender as the man cradled the Spec-Ops rifle in his hands. She stopped at a respectful distance, and I could even see her jaw muscles through the scope as she spoke. He said something back, and she cocked a leg in a provocative manner, her hands going to her hips. He smiled broadly, pushing his ball cap up onto his head, turned, and balanced the rifle on the top of the spare of the Jeep. Cracking open the cooler, he fished out a bottle of water for her. The smile was even broader when he turned but quickly faded when confronted with the 9mm in his face.

•   •   •

“Does it work every time?”

She tucked her uniform shirt back into her jeans. “Not with homosexuals.”

I had unbolted the spare from the Wrangler and had handcuffed the dark-haired guy to it and to the chair. He still watched Vic with considerable interest. “Please tell me she’s really a deputy.”

I looked back at the Botticelli-Venus-with-a-Badge, now buckling her duty belt, reholstering the Glock, and stuffing his pistol with the silencer in her own jeans. “She is.”

“I was just sitting here thinking that this job wasn’t bad, and the only thing I needed was . . .”

I looked at the Minnesota plates on the Jeep. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Chet Carlson.” He started to extend his hand for a shake and then remembered his situation. “Had a buddy get hold of me; said there was a welding job in Wyoming. When I got here, they had enough welders, so I took this.”

“Did you know it was illegal?”

“No.” He thought about it. “Does it matter?”

“Probably not.” I looked down the road less traveled. “Did they tell you to kill anybody that came in?”

He shrugged. “They said stop anybody, and they weren’t real particular about how I was supposed to do it.” He glanced at Henry Standing Bear, holding the TAC-50. “I think I’m glad it didn’t come to that; I don’t think that .223 or .40 of mine would hold up against that antiaircraft weapon.”

“Military?”

“Afghanistan, two tours.”

“Lockhart hire you?”

“He did. Said it was a government job, real hush-hush, but when I got here I could see that that was bullshit, but I stayed. Gotta eat, man.”

My eyes returned to the road. “Down there, what are they doing?”

He made a face and then looked at Henry and Vic, who had both drawn near. “Oil. Black gold. Texas tea. They got that Mexican with ’em, and he’s a damned oil magnet; if he can’t find it, it ain’t there.”

“I thought this area was pumped out.”

He shook his head. “Not with the new technologies with horizontal drilling and fracking; at a hundred dollars a barrel, they’re pulling quite a bit out down there, but it’s just a sideline. I heard one of ’em, that Lockhart guy, he said this is just the tip of the iceberg and that something really big was coming.”

“What’s that?”

“He didn’t say.”

I sighed. “We need the keys to your Jeep.”

He reached across with his free hand and pulled them from his jeans, then tossed them to me. “Here.”

“We’re taking some water. Here’s a couple for you.”

“Take all you want, just make sure you tell them where you left me.”

I smiled. “Don’t worry, we won’t forget about you.”

“That’s not what worries me.” He looked down the road this time. “You go down there, and they’re going to kill your ass.”

I tossed the keys in my hand as I took the .50 from Henry. “My ass takes a lot of killing, but thanks for the vote of confidence.”

The top was down on the Rubicon—only a man from Minnesota would think this was top-down weather—and we didn’t bother with trying to put it up; in my experience it took twelve men, a boy, and a week to do the job. There was just enough light to drive without the headlights, so I did.

Henry stood in the back periodically checking the horizon with the binoculars with his arms draped over the padded roll bar.

“Anything?”

“Just the unfurling and pastoral beauty that is Wyoming.”

I glanced at Vic. “Forever West?”

“No fucking way.”

The slope gradually led to a shallow valley that headed south, so I followed the wide dirt road and tried not to look off the edge that dropped into a tributary of Salt Creek.

Despite Vic’s remarks, it was beautiful country, even the tang of turned earth where they had graded the road couldn’t spoil the environs. There were pillars of rock ahead, and what looked like another canyon that dropped off farther into the narrow aperture to the west like sentinels into an ancient sea—a place from which humidity had departed forever. The moon was setting, pulling at tides that were no longer here, but you could feel the buoyancy of its light as it struck the rocks.

I noticed a batch of sage and tumbleweeds to my right and slowed. It looked like the entrance to a road that they had cut and then abandoned, but it was worth an investigation. I slowed the Jeep and pulled up to the somewhat hidden fork. Henry climbed out with the ArmaLite and looked at the brush alongside the road. Carefully, he reached down and took hold of one of the branches and pulled it; the rest of the vegetation pivoted along with its brethren, evidently wired together.

He looked back and motioned for me to drive through, which I did, and then pulled to the side. He walked over and made a cutting gesture at his throat, and I shut off the engine.

His head was cocked as if he were listening to something. I glanced at Vic, and we both climbed out and followed the Bear down the road toward the sound of heavy equipment. The noise echoed off the rock walls of the steep canyon, and it must’ve been an undertaking to put the road in. Evidently, they had thought it would be worth it.