Dry Bones: A Walt Longmire Mystery (2 page)

I walked around it and raised its rear end, placing my hand underneath the plastron and lifting the creature, rather awkwardly, from the ground. Its head swiveled back, and it snapped with the sound of a small firecracker.

Both Omar and my undersheriff stepped back. “He’s going to bite the shit out of you.”

“No, they can’t reach if you’re holding them from the bottom.” A stream of something dribbled down the length of my jeans onto my boot.

They studied me, Vic, of course, the first to speak. “Did that thing just piss on you?”

“I believe it did.” I swung the big beast around, lowered it back into the water, and watched as the creature settled in the mud and looked back at me, apparently now in no great hurry to get away.

“I guess he likes you.”

I shook the water from my hands and studied the round eyes that watched me warily. “Might be a female.”

“Well, anytime you’re through turtle diddling, we’ve got work to do.” She approached the cadaver again and rolled the body over, looked at what remained of Danny Lone Elk’s face, and immediately turned away. “Oh shit, his eyes are gone.”

Omar kneeled by the dead man and turned his chin. “Critters always go for them first.” He sighed. “Those turtles sure did a number on him.” They both turned to look at me as I stared at the body. “Walt?”

It was a man I’d seen before, in my dreams.

“Walt?”

In the dreams, he also had no eyes.

“Walt.”

The man’s words came back, and it was almost as if he were standing beside me, repeating the mantra of warning I’d stowed away:
You will stand and see the good, but you will also stand and see the bad—the dead shall rise and the blind will see.

“Walt.”

I took a deep breath. “You’re sure it’s Danny?”

Omar nodded and looked back at the body. “His belt says Danny.” He paused for a moment. “And I recognize what’s left of him.”

“Does he have a wallet or anything else on him, like a fishing license?”

Checking the pockets of the dead man, Omar shook his head. “Nothing, but he’s on his own property. I don’t carry my wallet with me when I’m fishing—always afraid I’ll dunk it.”

I glanced at Vic. “Did you check his lunch?”

“Might as well; I’m about to lose mine.” She reached down, picked up the brown paper bag, and, rummaging through the sack, called out the items. “Daddy-O had one can of orange soda, one cheese sandwich, one bag of Lay’s potato chips, an assortment of celery and carrot sticks, and . . .” She fumbled in the bag, finally pulling out a withered, handmade billfold. “One wallet.”

“Is it Danny’s?”

She held it up for us to look at. “Well, seeing as how it has
DANNY
engraved on the outside, I’d say yes.” She opened it and studied the Wyoming driver’s license and the face of the elderly Cheyenne man. “He liked putting his name on stuff, didn’t he?”

Omar reached out and straightened the collar of the dead man’s shirt. “He was a good old guy—let me bring clients out here whenever I wanted and even let me fly my helicopter into this place.”

I glanced around. “Where is the ranch house from here?”

He ignored my question. “There’s going to be trouble.” He pointed. “The eyes—the medicine men will have to do something about this or Danny will wander the earth forever.” He looked up, and I could see tears for his old friend. “Lost and blind.”

I nodded, fishing my keys from my jeans so that we could load the man into the truck bed and take him to Doc Bloomfield and room 32, the Durant Memorial Hospital’s ad hoc morgue. “I’ll get in touch with the family, Henry, and the Cheyenne tribal elders.” Walking back to my truck, I thought about my vision and what Virgil White Buffalo and the stranger had said—that stranger, the stranger with no eyes, who ended up being Danny Lone Elk.

 • • • 

The last time I’d seen Danny was at the Moose Lodge at the end of town. It had been a few years back, and he had still been drinking. I’d gotten a radio call that there was a disturbance, but by the time I’d gotten there, no one seemed to remember who had been involved in the altercation.

Asking why he was a Moose and not an Elk, I’d grabbed a Rainier for myself and joined him.

“They got a better bar down here.”

He looked up at me and smiled. Lined with more wrinkles than a flophouse bed, the old man’s face was cragged but still handsome and carried the wisdom of the ages. He reached over to squeeze my shoulder with a hand as large and spidery as a king crab.

Well into his cups, he spoke to me through clinched teeth; Danny Lone Elk always talked as if what he had to say to you was a very important secret, and maybe it was. “You off duty, Sheriff?”

“End of watch. I came here looking for trouble, but there isn’t any.”

“Can I buy you a beer?”

I gestured with the full can. “Got one.”

He closed one eye and looked at me. “You too good to drink with an Indian?”

“No. I—”

“’Cause you gotta have a reservation.” He kept his eye on me like a spotlight, guffawed uproariously at his own joke, and then leaned in close. “You wanna know why they called you?” He gestured down the bar where a small contingency of men did their level best to ignore us. “You see that sharp-faced man with the ball cap? That fella in the cowboy hat beside him asked him what he was gonna do on his vacation and he said he was gonna go to Montana and go fishing. Well, cowboy hat told sharp-face he couldn’t understand why he was going fishing in Montana ’cause there was nothing but a bunch of damned Indians up there.” Danny sipped his beer and looked past me toward the men. “Then sharp-face asked cowboy hat what he was gonna do on his vacation and cowboy hat said he’s goin’ hunting down in Arizona and sharp-face said he couldn’t understand why he was going hunting down in Arizona ’cause there was nothing but a bunch of damned Indians down there.”

I nodded. “Was that all there was to it?”

“No.” He grinned the secret smile again. “That was when I told them both to go to hell, ’cause there sure wasn’t any Indians there.”

His voice rose. “Bartender.” He looked back at me, again smiling through the ill-fitting dentures. “I think that’s when this guy called you.”

The man approached somewhat warily. “Can I help you?”

He lip-pointed at sharp-face and cowboy hat. “Yeah; I think I better buy those guys down there a beer; I’m afraid I might’ve spooked ’em.”

As the barkeep went about distributing the conciliatory beverages, Danny leaned in again. “I knew your daddy.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, made the mistake of tryin’ to get him to go to Indian church one time.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah.” He grinned again and nodded. “I was working down at Fort Keogh and lived out your way—had this wife that thought since your family lived so close we should go and invite them to go to church with us.” He leaned in again. “Well, just my luck, your father answered the door, and boy did he give me an earful.”

“I’m sorry; my mother was the religious one.”

“He said he figured I was just tradin’ one superstition for another.”

I took a sip of my beer. “He wasn’t a big one for churches.”

“They still have that place out near Buffalo Creek?”

“I have it now—they’ve both passed.”

He nodded. “I am sorry to hear that—they were good people.” He was silent for a moment and looked down at his lap. “Do you ever see them?”

I turned and looked at him, thinking that I hadn’t made myself clear. “They’re dead.”

He nodded again and then stared at the can in his hands. “Yeah, but do you ever see them?”

“Umm, I don’t . . .”

“When I am alone, hunting or fishing . . .” He breathed a laugh. “. . . And that is the only time I’m alone, by the way . . .” He looked at me. “. . . I see my ancestors, the ones who have walked the Hanging Road to the Camp of the Dead. When I see them, they are far away but watching me like the eyes of the stars.”

Not quite sure what to say to that, I nodded. “That’s nice . . . that they’re looking out for you.”

“I don’t know if that’s what it is.” He took out some antacids, shook a few of the chunky tablets into his hand, and washed them down with some beer. “Mmm, peppermint, my favorite.” He started humming the theme to
Dragnet
, which was also the jingle for the pills. “Tum, tum, tum, tum . . .” Then he opened a prescription bottle that he took from the pocket of his shirt, shook out a few pills, and swallowed them, too. He looked at me blankly. “What was I talking about?”

“Family.”

“Oh, right . . . I am old, and I know I am standing on the brink of the life nobody knows about, and I am anxious to go to my Father,
Ma-h ay oh.
To live again as men were intended to live, even on this world, but I fear for the remains of my family.”

I knew that his ranch was vast and there had been talk of gas, oil, and fossil deposits, but I still couldn’t understand Lone Elk’s concerns. “You’ve got children, right? I’m sure your family will look after those things after you’re gone, Danny.”

It was a long time before he spoke again. “Maybe that’s true, but I would take some things back if I could.”

 • • • 

“
I said . . .” My undersheriff raised an eyebrow and sighed, still holding her end of the now blanket-wrapped body. “Did you hear that?”

With Danny Lone Elk’s voice still resonating in my head, I turned and looked around, fully expecting to see the man and his ancestors. “Hear what?”

She glanced at Omar, and then they both looked at me. “A gunshot.”

I took a deep breath to clear my head and my ears. “Close?”

“What, you were having some kind of out-of-body experience?”

“No, I was just remembering when I had seen Danny last.” I thought about adding more, but I hadn’t shared my experiences in Custer Park with anyone. “Probably the hands who worked for Lone Elk, chasing off coyotes or plinking prairie dogs.” I looked around. “Where was the shot?”

Vic looked toward the ridge. “Not far.”

We hurried to get Danny loaded as quickly as we could, having decided to use Omar’s massive SUV since it had better cover for the body than the open bed of the Bullet and, of all things, a slide-out game rack.

He gestured toward the passenger side. “Get in.”

I glanced at my truck. “Maybe we’d better leave Danny in yours and take mine.”

He shook his head. “This thing’s faster—besides, it’s bulletproof.”

Ushering Vic into the front, I climbed in the back and gaped at the leather and burl-wood interior. “Omar, what the heck is this thing?”

He fired up the engine, slapped the transmission in gear, and tore up the two-track toward the ridge, the three of us thrown back into the butter-soft bucket seats. “A Conquest, Knight XV—it’s handcrafted out of Toronto.”

As we flew across the prairie, I glanced up through the skylight. “What does something like this set you back?”

He shrugged. “Couple hundred thousand, I don’t know—the accountant said I needed to spend some money fast, so I did.”

When we made the top of the ridge, Omar wheeled the glossy black fortress to the left and stopped; we rolled down the windows to listen but didn’t hear anything. Vic leaned forward in the passenger seat and pointed down the valley. “There are some vehicles parked at the fence down there through a few cattle guards—you want to go check it out?”

Spinning the wheel, Omar drove down the slope to a better-maintained road and started off toward the area Vic had indicated.

She turned to look at me. “So, you know the deceased?”

Thinking it best to keep the visions to myself, I told her about the Moose Lodge encounter. “I had a couple of beers with him one time a few years ago.” I could feel her looking at the side of my face as I looked out the tinted windows. “There was a disturbance at the bar and when I got there it had settled down, so I had a beer with him. He was worried about some things, so we talked. It took a while for me to remember him.”

She nodded, not buying a word of it. “What was he worried about?”

“Nothing, getting old, the land, family, the usual stuff.”

“He should’ve worried about learning to swim.”

I recognized Dave Baumann’s weathered, light-blue Land Rover, emblazoned with the logo of the High Plains Dinosaur Museum, driving at high speed toward us. He slid to a stop alongside Omar’s rolling fortress. A quarter of a mile away, I could see another gate where two flatbeds were parked nose to nose blocking the entrance, with some people milling about; beyond that was a working backhoe.

I rolled down the window and was about to speak when the paleontologist began yelling to the young blonde-haired woman in the passenger seat. “They’re using a backhoe!”

I stared at Dave, an athletic-looking fellow with glasses, curly light-brown hair and beard, blue eyes, and an easy smile that made him popular with the young female scientists who sometimes came to intern at the private museum—they called him Dino-Dave.

“Excuse me?”

He took a deep breath to calm himself and continued. “They’re digging up one of the most valuable sites in recent history with a backhoe.”

“I’m no expert.” I sighed and glanced at both Vic and Omar. “But that’s probably not good.”

“No.”

“Who’s in charge here?”

“I am.” He studied me and revised his statement. “What do you mean?”

I had been involved in these kinds of conflicts where the university, the colleges, the museums, and the landowners quibbled about the exact location of digs, and I liked to get the full story before mobilizing the troops. “Is this official or something more loosely structured?”

“It’s a straight-ahead deal; I paid thirty-seven thousand dollars last year for the fossil remains.”

I opened the door. “I guess we’d better go over and take a look. Why don’t the two of you jump in here with us, Dave?” They did as I requested, and I thrust a hand toward the blonde. “Walt Longmire.”

She didn’t take my hand or return my smile. “Jennifer Watt.” She raised her small video camera and began filming through Omar’s windshield.

I shrugged and sat opposite the two of them—the behemoth vehicle had limousine-style rear seating—feeling like I was in some sort of executive conference room. “Tell me about the deal.”