Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery (18 page)

“Something tells me you don’t really make a living as a gambler.”

“Oh, I do back in Vegas . . . But I also do a little work on the side.”

“Why are you here?”

“To do what I do best.” He smiled and leaned on the railing. “Killing two birds with one stone. I figured it’d be tougher than this—killing you.” He let that one settle in before speaking again, and the only other sound was the delicate Chinese water torture. “I didn’t suspect I could just waltz down those steps and find you in here all alone, talking to yourself like a loony.”

I shifted my eyes across the table, but the legendary Crow Indian, as I’d suspected, was missing. I turned my head a little, just to make sure, but there was no one there—no woman, no raccoon, no pheasants, no table settings, and even the piano was gone.

“Did you know there was a contract out on you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, somebody pretty important wants you dead.” He smiled and gestured toward Roberta. “She was Willie’s, but I took her when I found out about the trust and because I could. Besides, I figured if I kept pumping the money, it would be you that came after her.” He paused and added, “Well, the guy that hired me did.”

“Who was that?”

“Yeah, I heard you talking to someone and figured there must be more than one of you down here; I figured maybe the Indian.”

I continued to stare around at the now unfamiliar room. “I . . . I guess I got distracted.”

“I guess you did, and it’s going to cost you, but first I’ve got some business to attend to.” And with that, he raised the small-caliber pistol and fired it into the back of Roberta Payne’s head.
The woman bounced off the paneled divider between the stairs and then her head and a shoulder went through the railing, and she hung there with an arm hanging straight out.

I lurched from behind the table, and it tipped and fell over as I brought my .45 from under the missing napkin and leveled it at him just as he fired the rifle at me.

The shot tore through the hem of my coat and grazed my leg as seven of my 230-grain rounds blew eleven inches into his chest at 835 feet per second, bouncing him off the back wall hard enough to push him through the railing to land on top of me.

We fell backward onto another table, collapsing it with a tremendous crash of splintering wood and dead weight.

He lay there on my chest, his face turned to mine. “You didn’t study me well enough.” His eyes flickered, and I knew he could still hear me. “My father was left-handed; all his guns were left-handed stocks and grips, so he taught me how to shoot with both hands.” His eyes dimmed and clouded and I looked past him to where Roberta stared at me, a rivulet of blood trailing down her alabaster arm through her upturned hand where it pooled and dripped through her fingers onto the polished hardwood floor like Chinese water torture.

“It’s my one saving . . .” My head lolled to the side, and I stared at a framed black-and-white photograph on the wall, a large portrait of the woman from the lobby, in the same clothes, hat, and pensive, handsome expression. She was holding a raccoon. Just below it, on the frame, was a small brass plaque that read
FIRST LADY, MRS. COOLIDGE—1927.

“. . . Grace.”

They were sustained visions and with having dreamed them so recently, it was easy to summon them and try to make sense of the message they carried. I’d lain there on the dining room floor of the State Game Lodge, the images growing more and more real as the cold crept into me in tiny waves.

In the dream it was night and I was standing just below a frozen ridge surrounded by herds of white buffalo that had circled and watched me, their breath filling the air and warming it. The snow was deep, and from the tracks I’d left, I could see that I had come a long way; my legs were tired, and the cuffs of snow piled up against my thighs had stopped me in my tracks.

At the top of the ridge, at a place I couldn’t seem to reach, a man was standing with his back to me, a tall man, broad, with silver hair to his waist. Independent of the conditions, he was in his shirtsleeves and stood there singing—a Cheyenne song.

I pushed off, but my boots slipped in the deep snow and I fell, finally satisfied, along with the buffalo, to just hear his song.

It was a clear night, the kind that freezes the air in your lungs with the advantage of nothing standing between your upturned face and the glittering cold of those pinpricks in the endless
darkness, the wash of stars constructing the hanging road as it arced toward the Camp of the Dead.

The man had stopped singing and now half turned toward me, speaking from the side of his mouth. “You will stand and see the bad; the dead shall rise, and the blind will see.”

It was a voice I’d heard before, even though I couldn’t exactly place it. “Virgil?”

He half-turned toward me, his profile sharp, and I could see that it was not Virgil White Buffalo as he studied me from the corner of one eye. “You are bleeding?”

I looked down at the blood saturating the snow around me and the neck and chest of my sheepskin coat. “Um, yep . . . I think I am.”

He turned toward me fully and walked easily over the deep snow, kneeling and taking my face in his hands, and I could see that he had no eyes. The empty sockets looked almost as if they shot through his head like twin telescopes magnifying the black, infinite space with only a few aberrant sparks of warmth from dying stars. “Good, we can use the humidity.”

—

“I tracked the blood, and there you were, under the pile of bodies.”

I started and looked at the both of them staring holes into me—as if I didn’t already have enough extras. I watched my IVs drip and took a sip of my orange juice to gather myself until the quiet in the room became unbearable. “The two of you let me sleep away an entire day?”

My undersheriff’s voice keened with an edge. “You were shot near the external jugular alongside the sternocleidomastoid muscle in your neck—the doctor said it was a slow-bleed, but without the pressure from your coat you might’ve bled to death.”

Uncomfortably ensconced at the Custer Regional Hospital’s ICU, I picked at my robe and lifted the neckline to try and examine my bandages. I’d had a look at the results of the wound when they’d cut the sheepskin coat off me as though it were a monstrous scab. My wife and daughter had bought the jacket almost twenty-five years ago; it was one of the most treasured items in my life, and now it was lying in the bottom of some hospital dumpster. “Why did my arm stop working?”

“Blast effect to the brachial plexus that’s the nerve takeoff for your right arm, kind of like a karate chop.” Vic slapped my hand near the IVs.

“Ouch . . .”

“I hope it hurts, I hope it hurts bad enough that you never do crazy shit like this again, but you and I both know that the only kind of hurt that will do that is a good dose of death.” She stared at me, and I guess she felt a little sorry for the last statement because she added, “Speaking of which, how come you left a round in your gun?”

I glanced at Henry and shrugged, quickly developing the ability to do it with one shoulder. “We’re in Indian Country—always save the last one for yourself.”

The Cheyenne Nation nodded. “Prudent.”

I thought about telling them about Virgil and Grace Coolidge, but they thought I was crazy enough, so I let it slide. “To be honest, I think I was just worn out from pulling the trigger.” I looked back at Vic. “For the sake of the alliterative—Deke’s dead?”

“Definitively.”

“Too bad—I was really enjoying our conversation and was looking forward to talking with him some more.”

She gestured toward my arm. “And letting him shoot at you again for the privilege?”

“When we spoke, he said he was from Las Vegas.”

“Was this a long and wide-reaching conversation?”

“Long enough of one for him to shoot Roberta Payne and for me to shoot him seven times.”

She shook her head. “Well, he was from Las Vegas most recently.”

“You got a file on him?”

She glanced down at the folder in her lap. “A large one.”

“And Roberta Payne?”

She looked up at me. “Dead, and it was textbook—the twenty-two enters the skull but doesn’t have the power to escape and bounces around in there like a Mixmaster.”

I looked back at the Bear. “How’s Tavis?”

“He is fine, no damage to any internal organs.” Henry straightened his coat and grimaced. “And Emil Fredriksen wants to drag Deke out from the morgue, prop him up on the nearest snowbank, and use him for target practice.”

“And your back?”

He grunted and then squinted his eyes. “Spasms. They gave me muscle relaxers and a brace. They said to take the medication before it starts really hurting.”

“Then you should have started taking it around 1967.” I turned back to my undersheriff. “Did you talk to the casino people?”

“I did. The cocktail waitress, name tag
Star
,
said that Willie was secretive about his personal life, but that there was a woman and maybe some other stuff; then the casino manager said that this Deke character showed up and the dynamic changed and the three of them were in there pretty much every night.”

“Roberta was never alone?”

“Never as far as they knew.”

I thought about it. “Deke said that he had taken Roberta from Willie—they all had to stay somewhere.”

The Bear leaned back in his chair and glanced at Vic. “I am assuming you obtained an address for the now-deceased croupier, Willie?”

“Yeah, he’s got, or should I say had, a crummy little house with an attic apartment.”

“You have an address?”

“I do.”

I started to pull the covers away. “Then what are we waiting for?”

The Cheyenne Nation placed a hand on my good arm. “There are four, very large, armed South Dakota highway patrolmen outside the door, who are charged with the responsibility of keeping you here until you have spoken with Special Agent Pivic of the Division of Criminal Investigation.”

Bruce Pivic held a wide and long reputation in western law enforcement from his days as a fraud investigator with the South Dakota attorney general’s office; meticulous and unrelenting, Bruce could boast of having taken down a lieutenant governor, a prosecuting attorney, and a mob boss who had attempted to launder money through an illegal cattle processing plant. I had sat in on one of Pivic’s intense debriefings and swore that before I ever had to sit through another, I would gladly pound eight-penny nails into my head.

I glanced toward the door and scratched where the IV went into my arm. “How big are the troopers?”

“Not as big as you, but they outnumber us, and I think they can call for more, if need be.”

Vic smiled. “Your hospital reputation precedes you.”

“Hell.” I sat back against my pillows and studied the two of them. “All right then, read me the Deke report.”

Vic flipped open the folder and then held her hand out, palm up, in expectation of the two bits.

“I’ll get you later.” I looked around. “Where are my pants anyway?”

She raised an eyebrow, and the tarnished gold glistened. “That’s three dollars and fifty cents you owe me.” She looked down and began reading. “Deke ‘Big Daddy’ Delgatos is originally from San Diego, California, with a long list of run-ins, run-outs, and rundowns with the law. He did a seven spot in High Desert State Prison for kicking a guy’s head in in a bar fight in Inglewood. While inside, it seems he got all giddy with the AWSFB.” She glanced at Henry. “That would be Aryan White Supremacy Founding Brotherhood, or as my fed buddies over in Gangs and Bikers like to call them, Assholes With Shit For Brains.”

He nodded. “Catchy.”

“Delgatos continued perfecting his craft in Susanville, where he supposedly killed another inmate and had a hand in shanking a guard. Through overcrowding, they let him out, and Big Daddy got himself a brand-new bag in Vegas, where he falsified just about everything about himself down to his DNA and got a license with the Gaming Commission to push cards.” She looked up. “Now, here’s the funny part—Deke had a condo, a brand-new Corvette, a powerboat, a winter home in Puerto Vallarta . . .” She shook her head. “Either this scumbag’s stackin’ the deck, or he’s got a little something on the side, right?”

I sat my empty juice cup on the tray. “He intimated to me he was a hit man—not exactly somebody you find on Craigslist.”

Vic put a finger in to hold her place and closed the folder.
“She goes missing for three months and suddenly turns up two hours away?” She shook her head. “You think he was stupid enough to just keep siphoning money out of Roberta’s account until you showed up?”

“He said he figured that I would be the one—I think he was counting on it.”

Henry poured more juice into my plastic cup and drank it. “And why shoot her in front of you?”

“Just happened that way. I think she had become a liability; she certainly didn’t know what was coming.”

Henry nodded again. “She went to extraordinary lengths to stay with him.”

“He was a hit man, and if I was making a guess, and this is a guess, mind you, I’m betting he told her he’d kill everybody she knew if she tried to escape.”

The door to my room opened slowly and a smiling man with a gray mustache peered around it; seeing he wasn’t disturbing anything, he entered, carrying a large stack of file folders. “Walter, I thought we had an agreement—you can kill as many people as you like in Wyoming but not here in South Dakota.”

“Hi, Bruce.” I watched as he pulled up a chair and sat by my bed. “Anyway, he tried to kill me first.”

He tapped the stack of papers with a forefinger. “Is that how I should start the formal report?”

“You bet.”

He glanced at Henry. “Mr. Bear.”

“Mr. Pivic.”

He smiled at Vic. “Have we met?”

My undersheriff turned on her most ingratiating Mediterranean smile. “Moretti, Victoria Moretti.”

He carefully took her hand and actually kissed it. “Ah, you’re Italian?”

“Udine, the Friuli–Venezia Giulia region.”

He smiled and then smoothed his mustache and stared at the stack of papers in his lap. “Walter, this is going to take a while—”

“Bruce, I’d love to help you, but my neck hurts and my head hurts and I can feel a high-octane nap coming on.”

He watched me, his mustache twitching under his nose. “I just spoke with the head nurse, and she said now would be an opportune time to speak with you.”

I sighed and faked a yawn.

He stood. “I’ll go speak with her again and arrange a more convenient time.”

As he went out, I gave him a little wave and looked at a door to my right. “Where does that one go?”

Vic made a face and then covered it with her hand.

The Bear, figuring our odds, looked toward it. “An adjacent room, which connects to a short hallway leading to the fire escape.”

I nodded. “Now the big question.”

Vic spoke through her fingers. “Who hired him?”

I smiled at her. “Where are my pants?”

—

Lead, South Dakota, is pronounced as is the verb, not as the malleable heavy metal. Once home to one of the most productive gold mines in the Western Hemisphere, Lead now leads the area in twisting, straight-up-and-down, kiss-your-own-butt roads, currently covered with a foot or so of snow.

The address we had for Willie was half a duplex jammed into a hillside leading up to the city proper. There were side streets and a frontage road that ran parallel with Main, but even though it had stopped snowing for a bit, they were so choked with the stuff that there wasn’t anywhere to park.

Vic slipped the Bullet in behind a covered Cadillac with Nevada plates and turned off the ignition, as I reached back with my good arm and ruffled Dog’s ears. “Must be the place.” I slipped off my seat belt shoulder harness, which was killing me anyway, pulled an emergency blanket from under the seat, and draped it over my shoulders.

Vic glanced at my outfit.

“What?”

“We’re really going to do a forced entry into a place with you looking like that?”

“Like what?”

“A fluorescent homeless person.”

I adjusted the optic-orange blanket. “It’s all I’ve got until I can go shopping, all right?”

“You also don’t have a weapon.”

“Hop out, and I’ll get my standby.” I flipped down the center console with my good arm, opened it, and pulled out the holstered Colt Walker.

“You’re kidding.”

I palmed it in my hand. “Well, until the SDDCI gives me mine back, this one will have to do.” I slung the vintage holster over my left shoulder, and we started slogging around the house, tramping a path toward the steps in the foot-deep snow.

Henry took the lead with me following and Vic bringing up the rear. “You know, we could go by the National Guard and get an antitank gun that we could tow around on the back of your
truck; that way we could just set up out there in the street and lob shells in on people.”

I ignored her and followed the Bear up the steps to the first landing, where we changed direction and found ourselves standing at a peeling, glass-panel door with tinfoil taped over the window.

The Cheyenne Nation drew the frightening knife that he always carried from the small of his back, the one with the stag handle and turquoise bear paw inset in the bone, and pointed at the foil with the blade. “In my experience, this is rarely a good sign.”