The Dark Horse (24 page)

“What’d he say?”

The old cowboy rolled to one side and drew up a knee on which to rest his hand, flipping his ashes into the fire. “He asked about that shiny new truck, and I told him it was mine. He said that was bullshit, so I told him about the trip we were taking; told him about you, and he described you right back, down to that chewed-on part of your ear.”

The bandage under my eye was distracting, so I started peeling it off. “Mike Smith?” I studied the bit of blood seepage on the gauze and tossed it into the fire.

He smiled and didn’t look at me. “I can neither confirm or deny—”

I figured that Hershel hadn’t learned the neither/nor rule. “What about Cli Cly?”

He took another deep inhale from the cigarette cupped in his hand. “Said they called him in on a Sunday morning, real early, and told him to get set up. He said pretty soon they brought Cly in and sat him down, so he hooked him up to the machine and started askin’ him what they call—”

“Control questions.”

“That’s it.” He nodded and looked into the fire. “Well, after he verifies that the lights are on in the room, his name is Cliff Cly, and that yes, the smirking son-of-a-bitch has lied to people that are close to him, the sheriff comes in with some guy in a suit and has Mike unhook Cly.”

I tried not to smile, since without the bandage my cheek hurt even more.

“I just said Mike, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

“God damn it.” He shook his head and took another drag from his cigarette. “I’m not really good at this undercover stuff.”

“Welcome to the club.”

“Well, they unhook Cliff, and Sandy Sandberg tells Mike that the three of them weren’t ever there.”

I sat up a little. “Sandy?”

“Yep.”

“What about the guy in the suit; Mike have any idea who he was or who he was with?”

“Nope.” I looked at him and thought about it just as a scattered beam of light wavered from behind us and then down the rocky path. Benjamin dropped an armload of gray, splintered lumber beside the fire, and Hershel looked up at the lad as Dog came over and sat. “That’d be about a third of what we need for the night.”

“A third?”

The old puncher’s voice was certain as he flicked more ashes into the fire. “A third.”

His thin shoulders slumped, and the miniature cowboy trudged away only to stop and look back at Dog. “You comin’?”

Dog lay down and placed his head on his massive paws. I nudged him with my boot. “C’mon, earn your keep.”

The boy patted his leg, just as I had. “C’mon.” He slowly got to his paws.

“Good boy.” Dog trotted off after him as I pushed my hat back and came clean. “Not as if you didn’t know, I’m not Eric Boss. My name is Walt Longmire, and I’m sheriff of Absaroka County.”

Hershel turned, and I watched as the flickering light planed off the hard surfaces of his chin and cheekbones. “Longmire did you say?” I nodded. “By God, I think I know your people—your father have a place north of here?”

“He did.”

“Passed?”

“Quite a while back.”

“You got the place leased out to the Gronebergs?”

“Yep.”

He shook his head some more and flipped the butt into the fire. “Well, I’ll be damned . . . you’ve come home.” The old cowboy pulled the second of his cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “So, what are you doin’ out here after so long?”

I thought about how much I wanted to reveal to Hershel, how much the cowboy already knew and, if I trusted him, how far did that trust go? If Cliff Cly didn’t take a polygraph, which Sandy Sandberg said he did, and somebody stepped in to keep it from happening—there were only a few possibilities of what that could mean. It was either Sandy, who wasn’t playing fair, or it was the Feds who had taken a hand. If it was the Feds, then in what capacity? Wade Barsad had been under the auspices of the witness protection program, but why would they have brought an agent in? To pressure Wade on the names and money he’d absconded with from his business associates along the Garden State Parkway and in Ohio?

I figured a good offense was the best defense and decided to try a little lie detecting of my own. Seeing as how clinical psychologists had come to the conclusion that the machines were only correct about 61 percent of the time—only slightly better than random—I took a chance with the police officer’s best friend: instinct. “Hershel, are you involved in any way with this foolishness?”

“No.” He seemed shocked that I’d ask. “No, I’m not.”

I believed him. “Good.” I gathered my legs beneath me and stood. I walked a little stiffly to the edge of the precipice and looked out over the Powder River country. The harvest moon was just beginning to stare at the hills, and the long shadows from the rocks and few junipers cascaded through the draws and gulleys toward the Bighorns.

It was a stark beauty, but you can’t come home again, no matter what Hershel said. I could feel an urgency to get back to my proper place in the rolling hills under the mountains. Before I could, though, I was obligated to Mary to find the truth. She had become my trust when Sandy had sent her to my jail, and I was bound to find out what happened the night that Wade Barsad was killed.

Something felt wrong, and that itch without an ability to scratch was needling me from somewhere in my subconscious. “I need you to tell me everything that happened that night.”

“I already did.”

I pulled my hat down against the wind and turned to look at him. “No, you didn’t really, and when we talked, no offense, you were drunk.” He pulled at a long earlobe, stuck the cigarette that he’d been holding into his mouth, and lit it with a piece of smoldering firewood. “I know that Mary was there. I know that you were there, and I know that Bill Nolan was also there. Now, was there anybody else there?”

He looked up at me. “No, nobody.” Then his eyes dropped to the fire as he thought about it. “I mean Wade but he was dead.”

“When you got there, Mary was in the yard with the rifle on her lap?”

“Yep.”

“The breech was open on the .22, and the magazine was empty?”

“Yep.”

“Then what?”

He flipped the half-smoked cigarette into the fire. “I took the rifle away from her and went into the house.” He looked up at me to make sure this is what I wanted to hear, but I said nothing. “He was in there.”

“Where?”

“Layin’ across the bed.”

“He was dead, you’re sure?”

“God, yes. She’d shot him in the head.” He corrected himself. “He’d been shot a half-dozen times, and there was so much blood that it soaked the mattress and poured off onto the floor.”

“Did you touch him or anything in the room?”

He was adamant. “No, I just backed out of that room; I mean, Jesus, the barn was on fire, she was sittin’ out in the yard like it’s all a dream—”

“You had your gun with you, didn’t you say?”

He gestured toward the repeater lying across his saddle. “I had that Henry. When I got woke up by the fire, I brought it along ’cause I didn’t know what the situation was, and I learned a long time ago that unknown situations with a gun are better than unknown situations without one.”

Boy howdy. “What’d you do with the Yellow Boy?”

“Left it in the scabbard on my horse, tied out at the fence; that horse wasn’t goin’ anywhere near that fire.”

I crossed my arms and looked into the flames licking up and around the broken and splintered wood, which reminded me that Benjamin and Dog were due back soon. “So after you left him in there, and her on the lawn, what’d you do?”

“I ran over to Bill Nolan’s and got him.”

“You didn’t think to use the phone at the Barsads?”

He looked genuinely discomforted. “I didn’t—”

I interrupted, saving him the embarrassment. It wasn’t unusual in just such a situation for any of us of a certain age to forget about modern conveniences, or mistrust them, and simply run for help. “You wake Bill up?”

“No. He was in his kitchen.”

I looked up on the ridge at the horses milling about. “Had he been drinking?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yep, why?”

I leveled with him. “I’ve known Bill for an awfully long time, and in this current reincarnation I think it’d take three men and a boy to get a bottle away from him.”

Hershel nodded. “He drinks, there’s no two ways about that.”

“Do you have any idea who might be leaving fifths of whiskey for him on his porch?”

He looked honestly surprised. “Nope, but if you find out, sign me up.”

I looked past our camp and beyond the horses on the picket line, back over the rocky hillside, and spoke mostly to myself. “Why would he be sober that one night?”

I had watched as the words stuck in her bandaged throat, finally tumbling from her half-opened mouth.

“It was as if I wasn’t alone, like somebody was there, leading me to where I needed to be, helping me to do it.”

I got up from the windowsill and approached the hospital bed with my hat in my hands. “Do you remember getting the rifle from the cab of Wade’s truck?”

Her head remained still for a moment and then shook in a hesitant manner. I didn’t think it was her lacerated throat that caused her to be careful. “I remember walking to the truck, but then it was as if the gun just appeared in my hands.”

I looked down at her profile and pondered the stark difference between the uncertainty of her story and the clarity of the sunshine that made a perfect trapezoid on the tile of the hospital floor on the other side of the bed. “Then what happened?”

“There was a storm, and the wind was blowing.” She paused and cleared her throat with the words that spilled out again. “The door was open, banging against the side panels, and I thought about how it was probably going to break, but that I didn’t care.” She shook her head, a piece of her blond hair getting in her mouth. She tried to wipe it away but the leather restraints at her wrists would only allow her hand to go so far. I leaned over and helped her, my hand looking large next to her fragility. “The fire was reflecting off the glass, and I was tired. I wanted to just drop the rifle, but he kept telling me to keep it in my hands; that I was going to need it.”

“He?”

She lifted her head a bit too quickly, and I could tell the effort was hurting her throat. “It was like somebody was there, keeping me moving.”

“Who?”

“I don’t remember—I mean, they weren’t there, not really.”

“You said
he
.”

She dropped her head and had spoken softly, looking at the sunshine that was still pounding through the window. “A voice, from my dreams . . .”

Hershel glanced over his shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

I continued to allow my eyes to play over the star-sprayed horizon. There weren’t as many as usual and the Milky Way didn’t show its whole stripe, but I felt like I always did when I looked at the night sky, as though I were falling backward. “That boy’s been gone too long.”

Hershel stood and joined me on my side of the fire. “Probably just dawdlin’.”

I raised my fingers to my mouth and whistled long and clear. “Dog!”

Nothing.

I walked over to my saddlebags and pulled out my .45 and a handheld radio. I handed him the radio, and he stared at the walkie-talkie. “You stay here in case he comes wandering in, and if I don’t get back in twenty minutes, dial that thing up and call the Sheriff ’s Department.”

“Which one?”

I called over my shoulder. “Mine!”

I scrambled my sore legs and rear end up the pale, moon-glowed surface of the rocks, thankful I’d worn my rubber-soled boots but wishing I had a flashlight of my own. At the top of the ridgeline, the horses stepped back, reading my mood, but then nosed toward me, eager to be a part of whatever was going on and hoping for treats.

I walked past them, reaching a hand out and steadying the nearest, who was my bay. I stood there for a moment, listening to the soft caress of the high-altitude breeze and then, in the distance, to the unwelcome sound of a great horned owl.

As I made my way to the left, over the first ridge, I thought about the messengers of the dead and the owl feathers on the rifle that Henry Standing Bear had entrusted to me. I remembered how Dena Many Camps had unbraided her hair in the presence of the old Sharps, and another who, for a different reason, didn’t want the old rifle in her home. Owls were supposedly not a sign that death was imminent, but were envoys from beyond, and I sometimes felt as though I was on their regular delivery route.

In the faint moonlight, I could see the boy’s boot prints along with the tracks from Dog, whose paws could’ve easily been mistaken for a wolf’s. Benjamin had followed the draw where a few scraggly stands of sage had valiantly attempted to grow, but where the odds and annual rainfall were against them.

The trail curved further to the left and played out into an open area with a two-track path leading east and, eventually, south and west to join the only road off the mesa. There was an old wellhead on the flat with the usual refuse left from a wildcat operation. There were loose stacks of rusted pipe, lathe, and wire snow fence that gave an indication of the era in which the drilling must have taken place, and a sealed slab where the actual rig must have been.

The truck skids that Hershel had earmarked for firewood were piled against one of the rock walls, a few of them scattered across the chalky ground and broken apart from the boy’s efforts.

No Benjamin.

No Dog.

I slipped a little on the scrabble of the downslope and started toward the broken woodpile where it looked like the boy had been. What if he’d lost his way and fallen over the steep cliffs of the mesa? What if he’d slipped into one of the deep crags or fissures in the surrounding rock? What if he was hurt? Wouldn’t Dog have returned? Shouldn’t I be yelling his name? Why was I holding my sidearm?