The Highwayman: A Longmire Story (3 page)

She nodded. “The two passengers did, but the driver was dead on scene when I got there.”

The Bear held up the other silver dollar. “And this one?”

“About a month ago I found it at mile marker 115 at the same time of day, right when the light gets really perpendicular, you know? That last little bit of light that hits everything and makes it stand out? I was driving
along, and I saw something flash in the middle of the road so I stop, and sure as anything that coin is laying out there shining like a beacon.”

I traded Morgans with the Cheyenne Nation and studied the second for any signs of wear, but there were none, and the silver dollar looked as if it had just been double-minted down in New Orleans. “Then what?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I check back there less than an hour later—nothing. I sit there for another hour, and it starts raining, so I call myself every stupid name in the book and head north. I catch this idiot on a Harley about twenty miles over, up near the fly shop, and pull a quick U-ey, run him down, both of us standing there in the pouring rain; some lawyer from Colorado and he’s all Do-You-Know-Who-I-Am, so I give him the citation. I turn around and head north, you know, finishing my loop, but I get this funny feeling.”

“Yep.”

“So, I flip around and head back down, but there’s nothing there, so I pull up and park. It was a slow night and nobody was out, so I just sat there for a few hours
waiting to see if anything was going to happen.” She glanced out the side window. “Nothing.”

“Well, that proves that it was just—”

“The next day at around noon there’s a message on my cell phone from Captain Thomas saying some kayakers found this guy and his Harley over the cliff, smashed up by the water.” She continued gazing out the window into the darkness. “The medical examiner said he probably survived the fall but was broken all to pieces, laying down there on the rocks all night while I was sitting right above him, you know, watching the road and looking for ghosts.” She finally turned her head, and I could see the small reflection in her eyes. “Mile marker 115, right where I found the second coin.”

There was a blip on the radio as another patrolman reported in from Shoshoni.

Static. “Unit three, 10-7.”

“That’s Parker, out of Riverton. He’s got a bladder the size of a grape.”

I considered the coin. “You know the story about Womack and the Central Bank & Trust theft?”

She studied me. “You think I haven’t looked up everything there is to know about him?”

“Then you tell me.”

She unzipped her jacket and took off her hat and tossed it on the seat beside her. “I haven’t read the official transcript, but I checked out all the newspaper articles in Thermop and Riverton. It was a righteous shooting. He pulled these renegade WYDOT guys over just north of the tunnels and one of them had a shotgun, blew out the windshield of Womack’s cruiser. He planted in a one-two position and shot the guy in the chest before he could reload the 12-gauge. The passenger was out by then and fired over the top of the car with a snub-nose; now, you know as well as I do that unless you’re locked in a phone booth with a perp those things are pretty useless, but the guy hits Bobby in the side, busting a rib. Womack returns fire—one shot, right in the head. Two assailants, two men dead on scene.”

“And no bag of Hot Lips Morgan silver dollars?”

“Nowhere to be found.”

“They go through the car?”

“Took it completely apart in a garage in Worland. Nothing.”

“Did they search the canyon?”

She laughed. “It’s twenty miles long, Walt. You could hide an entire town up in here and nobody would ever find it.”

“Yep, but you said the shooting took place just north of the tunnels, as did the two coin incidents.”

“So?”

“So, that means that if they were heading north, they would’ve only been in the canyon a couple of miles before they met Womack.”

“Yeah, but everybody’s been scouring that end of the canyon with metal detectors since 1979. Again, nothing.”

The Cheyenne Nation asked in a low voice, “Do you think Womack took it?”

“No idea.” She studied him. “I mean, it’s convenient, you know?”

“But none of the silver dollars have ever been recovered?”

“Not till about two and a half months ago.”

We both looked at her.

“One at a time.”

Henry handed his Morgans back to her. “Womack was killed about six months later?”

“Yeah, how did you know that?”

“Kimama, the Shoshone/Arapaho medicine woman, told me.”

“He tried to stop an eighteen-wheeler that had lost its
brakes. The driver was having a heart attack, and Bobby pulled out in front of the guy, I guess trying to slow him down as he went into the tunnels. Nobody knows why he decided to do something crazy like that, but the truck hit him sideways and drove him into the opening, punched him all the way through to the other side.”

There was another radio call from Shoshoni.

Static. “Unit three, 10-8.”

The trooper looked through the windshield, her eyes steady. “12:34 a.m. I hope he died quick and didn’t burn to death. . . . You know, they say you could feel the concussion all the way across Boysen Reservoir.”

“So, you didn’t hear anything?”

I adjusted the Bear’s cell phone on my ear and spoke to Jim Thomas again. “You’ve got a trooper with an irregular bladder.”

“Yeah, Parker. We try and keep the duty meetings short when he’s in attendance.” There was a pause. “You sticking around or heading home?”

“We thought we’d stay one more night just to see if there’s anything to it. Hey, Jim, do you know anything about the Central Bank & Trust Hot Lips silver dollar heist?”

There was a pause. “The Hot Lips what?”

“Just some ancient history. We’ll get back to you if we find anything.”

“Right.”

I hit the red button on the screen and handed the phone back to its owner. “Never heard of it, so you can tell Sam Little Soldier’s grandson Joey to take a powder.”

Henry pursed his lips. “As you wish.”

I studied him. “Something?”

“The young man is very angry.”

“We used to be angry, too.”

“I suppose so.” He looked up at me. “What are you doing today?”

“Don’t you mean ‘we’?”

“No.” He pointed at a blue van that was pulling up beside us in the Paintbrush Inn parking lot. “I am going rafting, and knowing your aversion to white water, I assumed I was going without you.”

“Well, you’re right about that.”

I slid out and shook hands with a wide man in the driver’s seat of the van. “Walt Longmire.”

He smiled broadly, a grin so wide that I thought he might swallow his ears. “Dave Calhoun.”

“You Shoshone or Arapaho?”

“I’m a Sho-Rap.” He grinned again.

I turned back to the Cheyenne Nation. “He’ll be too busy fighting with himself to drown you.”

The Bear made his way around the front of the van. “What are you going to do?”

I saluted in a jaunty fashion. “Have a Marine Corps reunion.”

“Be careful.” He climbed in the van, which was towing a bright yellow inflatable raft, and they sped away to their fate.

I leisurely circled Thermopolis to take in the town, then swept back onto Route 20 and headed south, tacking through the switchbacks, just enjoying the drive. It was one of those crisp Wyoming spring mornings that made you feel sorry for anyone who lived anywhere else. There were a few snowdrifts up high where last night’s low-flying clouds must’ve unladed themselves, but the pastures were still showing bright green, the juniper trees almost black in the morning light.

I’d asked Rosey if she’d heard the radio calls the two nights she’d found the coins, and she’d said that she had, but that she’d heard them on numerous other nights too with no coins attached.

I’d asked her why she hadn’t tried to record the calls,
but she’d said she had tried with an old cassette recorder, but all that came through was static.

 • • • 

Jim Thomas was right; it wasn’t particularly hard to find Mike Harlow’s place at the southern end of the canyon with the eagle, globe, and anchor on full display.

The Marine Corps flag carried ashore by Captain Samuel Nicholas onto New Providence Island in the Bahamas in 1776 was likely the British/American hybrid Grand Union Flag, but it’s also possible that it was the G
ADSDEN
D
ON’T
T
READ
O
N
M
E
. A more indicative version arrived in the 1830s with the anchor and eagle and the words T
O
T
HE
S
HORES
O
F
T
RIPOLI
, which changed to F
ROM
T
RIPOLI
T
O
T
HE
H
ALLS
O
F
M
ONTEZUMA
after the Mexican-American War.

I parked the Bullet in a spot to the side of the driveway, which was blocked by a reinforced gate locked into two concrete pillars. On each side of the gravel road, a steel fence with three-inch pipes stretched as far as I could see in both directions.

I stepped up onto the second rail of the gate and swung a leg over, landing on the other side.

By the time the Corps hit the beach in Vera Cruz in
1914, the flag was blue, with a wreath encircling the globe and an anchor emblem at the center with two scarlet ribbons and the words U
.
S
.
M
ARINE
C
ORPS
above and the motto S
EMPER
F
IDELIS
below.

I glanced around and gazed up the road with a steep terrain that swept to the right and then circled to the left, disappearing in the juniper trees, where I assumed there was a cabin.

There was a period during World War I when fringe and inscribed battle honors were sometimes attached to the flag, but an order in 1925 put an end to such shenanigans, and in 1939 the official colors of scarlet and gold were adopted as the Corps standard, resulting in the flag we have today.

I paused to salute both the Stars and Stripes and the current version of the Marine Corps standard, along with the smaller guidon beneath it. This guy was seriously gung ho.

When I reached the turn, I took a breath and could see a small cabin built out of river rock notched between two very large boulders. Swiping my hat off, I wiped away a little sweat and started up again as a voice barked at me, “That’s close enough.”

I stopped and peered into the shadows of the porch
and two partially open windows and noticed a thickset man with a light-colored cattleman’s crease cowboy hat and Vandyke facial hair the color of coal; he was sitting on a swing with a rifle propped up in his lap.

I raised my hands in mock surrender. “Howdy.”

He didn’t move. “Go away.”

I dropped my hands. “How about a little western hospitality.”

“No.”

“Are you Trooper Mike Harlow?”

He took a few seconds to think about it. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“Walt Longmire, sheriff, Absaroka County. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

“About?”

“It might be a wide-ranging conversation; would you mind letting me come up and sit on that porch while we talk?”

He didn’t say anything, so I took that as an invitation. I approached the house, stepped up on the wide-planked deck, and sat down in an old wicker chair, which was barely big enough to hold me.

He eyed me with the butt of the weapon still resting on his knee. “Careful, I’m armed.”

I nodded. “I can see that. You mind putting the safety on that Red Ryder BB gun?”

He shook his head and studied me through a pair of Ray-Bans. “Cocked and locked, that’s just how I roll.”

“You’ll put your eye out.”

“That’s why I’ve got these safety glasses.” He adjusted the Wayfarers again and pointed the barrel of his weapon at a collection of bird feeders in the junipers between the boulders. “Damn magpies won’t let the little wrens eat, so I’m on watch.”

I smiled. “Third Battalion, 9th Marines?”

“You read my flags.” He cocked his head. “You?”

“1st Marine Division, Military Police.”

“When?”

“Vietnam.”

His head lolled back on his neck. “Good, you were before my time, so you probably didn’t arrest me.”

“Not unless you committed a homicide.”

“Investigator? You must’ve been one of the first.”

“I was.”

“You here because of the magpies?” He gestured with the BB gun. “’Cause I haven’t got a license, but I haven’t hit one yet either.”

“I’m here because of Rosey Wayman.”

“That one of my ex-wives?”

“She’s the patrolman who took your duty in Troop G.”

“The blonde?”

“Yep.”

He slipped off the sunglasses and studied me for a long while with sharp blue eyes. “You made the climb—you want a beer?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

 • • • 

He turned the Morgan silver dollar I had handed to him over in his hands.

“You never found any of these on the road?”

“Nope, wish I had. Hell, this thing is like new.”

“Make you wonder?”

He lowered the coin and sighed. “Why is this important to you?”

“I know Rosey, and I think there must be something to it.” I propped the BB gun on my knee the same way that he had. “You worked this canyon for over thirty years; I find it hard to believe with all the stories flying around that you never had anything strange happen.”

“Did I say that?” He sighed again and then sipped his can of Coors. “That poor bastard ain’t ever gonna find
peace. Every time things die down about Bobby, something else happens.”

“Did you know him?”

“He was my training officer.”

“Was he a good TO?”

“Better than I was as a trainee.” Harlow leveraged himself up from the swing and walked past me to the porch steps. When he leaned on one of the support posts, I watched it give a little. “He was about the best I ever seen; smart, patient, good-hearted but no pushover. He was tough, really tough.” Harlow shook his head. “Inhumanly tough.” He turned his back against the post and rubbed the way a bear would. “One of the first stories I heard after he died was one from these tourists out of Iowa. They came up here in early October in their short pants and T-shirts in this old sedan with bald tires on their way to Yellowstone. People think the thing is open year-round.”

He sipped his beer as I sighted in on one of the large black and white birds. I pulled the trigger and watched as the BB arced out, falling well short of my target.

“You’ve got to pump that thing four or five times or it won’t make the reach. Hell, I think I can throw a BB harder than it shoots. Doesn’t hurt the damn things, but it teaches ’em respect.”

I pumped the Red Ryder and took up my position again. “What happened with the tourists?”

“Oh, we had one of those high-plains clippers come through and dump a few metric tons of snow in the canyon back in ’91 and they blew a tire and then slid off the road. It was really coming down, and they were in the middle near Windy Point. Well, it wasn’t like they could change the tire or hike out in the clothes they had, so they just sat there.”

I took aim on another magpie. “With the motor running.”

“Yeah, and after a while they all start getting sleepy, but there’s a knock on the window and someone standing there, real close. It’s a trooper in one of the long black slickers with his hat pulled down so that you can’t see his face. The dad rolls down the window, and the fellow asks if they need some help. The dad says yeah, so the trooper goes around, pulls out the spare and jack, changes the tire, and sends ’em on their way.”

Sensing the oncoming shot, the magpie ducked and swooped down the canyon. “Uh-huh.”

“They take a wrong turn and end up in Worland, and the dad sees the Troop G headquarters and decides to stop in and tell ’em what a great guy we’ve got in that
trooper that helped ’em out in the canyon. So the captain asks him which trooper, figuring it was me, and the guy says he doesn’t know ’cause the trooper never introduced himself. Then he remembers that when the patrolman told ’em they could go, he’d seen the name tag on his slicker.” Harlow sipped his Coors and fingered his Wayfarers down on his nose. “Womack, Bobby Womack.”

Another magpie lit on the feeder, and I re-aimed. “Twelve years after his death.” I pulled the trigger and fared better this time, knocking the big bird from the perch as he shrieked at us and disappeared over the porch roof.

“Nice shooting there, Tex.”

“Could’ve been carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Yeah, it could’ve been.” He crossed back over and took his seat in the swing again and rested the beer on the railing. “Then there was this hitchhiker, hippie kid out of Benicia, California, who was heading north and got picked up by a trooper in the canyon really early one morning and said he gave him a ride all the way up to Canyon Hills Road and dropped him off. The kid wanted to buy him a meal to thank him, but the trooper said there was something he had to take care of but if the kid
wanted to buy him lunch, he knew a place and would meet him at the end of the road in about an hour.”

“So?”

“The kid does what the trooper tells him to do and goes out to the end of Canyon Hills.”

“And?”

“There’s nothing out there but Monument Hill Cemetery.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Where Bobby’s buried.”

I rested the Red Ryder in my lap for lack of targets. “You ever have anything strange happen to you?”

He thought about it for a while, watching the smaller birds come in and take advantage of the magpies’ absence. “Back in 2000, WYDOT was painting the center strips, and we had to ride along in front of them, straddling the line so some idiot didn’t come around a corner and run into their trucks. Well, I’m pulling the duty, and we stop at the Tipi Camp about halfway for lunch, and one of the crew comes up and asks me to say something to the trooper who’s running behind us. According to this guy, he’s got his windows down and has been playing the same song over and over and would I please do something about it.”

I sipped my beer. “And?”

“Well, I tell this idiot that there isn’t any other trooper, that I’m the only one on duty in the canyon, but he keeps complaining, so we walk back there and of course there’s no other patrol car. Now, normally I would’ve just let it drop, but I was curious, so I asked him what the song was.”

“Yep?”

“Said it was that old Rolling Stones tune ‘It’s All Over Now,’ and that he must’ve heard it about forty-seven times.”

“So?”

“You know who wrote that song?”

“Nope.”

“Bobby’s namesake—Bobby Womack.” There was a long pause as he looked out to his right toward the byway. “Strange stuff, I shit thee not. I used to let it prey on my mind a great deal, but I just got to the point where I stopped. I figure things are going to happen, and a lot of them are going to be unexplainable.”

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

“Meaning?”

“There might be a lot more going on around us in this world than we’re aware of.”

He handed me back the coin. “Amen to that, brother.”

I pocketed it. “Do you think he did it?”