The Highwayman: A Longmire Story (5 page)

Silent for a while, we sat there at the end of Canyon Hills Road and listened to the wind. “So, he was the wolf.”

“No, he was the sun.”

“I don’t get it.”

He nodded, thoughtful, his eyes focusing on the distance. “If you were Arapaho or Shoshone, you would.”

“This is shaping up to be a really bad day.”

“Why?” Henry and I were sitting on the tailgate of my truck again, but we’d changed locations and I’d treated the three of us to a pizza and a six-pack of soda.

We were backed in tail to tail, Rosey sitting on her trunk lid with her windows down and her radio turned up. She took a bite, washing it down with a root beer. “My car wouldn’t start.”

The Cheyenne Nation groaned. “Oh, no.”

“Yeah. I got dressed, came out, and hit the starter—nothing. So, I call the service station guy we use, you know, and it takes him an hour to get there, and he jumps it and it fires right up.”

“Battery?”

“That’s what I thought, but he turns the thing off and hits it again and it starts on the first crank.”

The Bear lip-pointed toward the Dodge. “Sounds like some kind of short.”

She nodded as she chewed. “I guess, but you guys aren’t leaving before it starts. The last thing I want to do is spend the night down here, you know?”

I patted the file tucked under my leg. “Thanks for the folder on Bobby.”

She cocked her head. “My pleasure. As you might well imagine, he’s kind of become a preoccupation. Besides, you should have plenty of time to read tonight.”

We hadn’t seen another car in about an hour. “Traffic gets a little sparse after nine o’clock, huh?”

On cue, the monstrous, rusted, dangerous-looking oil truck that had passed us before rattled down the road headed south with no tail or running lights.

“Well, damn.”

“Let it go.”

She placed her slice back in the box, sat the pop next to me, and started for the driver’s-side door of her unit. “No, if somebody slams into the back of Coleman Fuel, it’s not going to be on my watch.”

“You want one of us to ride along?”

She shrugged. “If you want—you don’t get enough traffic stops over in Absaroka County?”

Henry gave me a nod, and I slid off the tailgate and dropped the rest of my slice in the container too, taking my root beer and the file with me. “Don’t eat all the pizza while we’re gone.”

He glanced down at the box as I slid into the cruiser. “What pizza?”

Rosey hit the ignition, and thankfully the Dodge fired up. She slipped it into gear and hit the light bar, swung onto the empty road, and jetted after the unlit truck.

We caught up in a couple of minutes; of course, the driver was reluctant to pull over, though I can’t imagine there were many options for flight in the battered truck. Finally, he turned into the pullout near the first tunnel before you get to the Boysen Reservoir.

Rosey hit her dash cam and radioed in the plate numbers before easing out, slipping on her signature leather search gloves with the pearl buttons. I sat there for a moment but then put my soda can in the holder and got out on the passenger side, unsnapping my Colt and moving along the guardrail opposite her. I figured
better safe than sorry as I approached the old Diamond Rio tanker truck that I pegged as being from the fifties.

The conversation was already getting heated as I looked up into the passenger window of the beater, noticing a padded pistol case on the dash and a certain tang in the air. “You wanna tell me why you pulled me over this time?”

“I need your driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance, sir.”

“You know my name, missy.” He waited and then added, “And what if I don’t have it this time?”

“I’ll have to impound your vehicle, at which point you can call somebody to come and get you.”

“How many times are you and me gonna do this shit, huh?” He grumbled some more, then leaned up on one haunch and pulled his wallet from his back pocket. “You know, this country’s goin’ to hell in a handbasket when you can’t do anything without papers.”

I watched as she studied the card in her hands with the Maglite. “Registration and proof of insurance, Mr. Coleman?”

There was a pause. “Haven’t got it with me.”

She turned the beam of the flashlight on the side of his face and studied him. “Mr. Coleman, have you been drinking?”

“Oh, now, horseshit.”

“Would you mind turning off the ignition and stepping out of the vehicle?”

“Yeah, I mind.” He sniffed and didn’t move. “I’m getting pretty tired of this harassment, you bitch.”

She stepped back, still keeping the flashlight beam on him. “Mr. Coleman, I need you to step out of the vehicle.”

“Look, I’m just going to the dump.”

“At ten o’clock at night?” He jumped at the sound of my voice, and both haunches came off the seat this time as he stared at me with his mouth hanging open. “Turn the ignition off and get out of the vehicle like the trooper told you.”

I watched as his eyes flicked to the unzipped soft case on the dash and then shifted back toward me and my 1911 on the sill.

 • • • 

“Suspended license, still no insurance, a half dozen unanswered citations, and who knows who the truck
belongs to.” With Coleman fuming in the back of her car, Rosey and I sorted through the front seat of his vehicle and collected the empty gin bottle and the S&W 29-10.44 Magnum revolver that was in the soft case. “I’ve pulled him over about a dozen times now on assorted infractions, and he just gets worse each time.”

“How long till the tow truck gets here?”

“They said about an hour, maybe longer since it takes a special wrecker to haul this monster.”

“Same guys who fixed your car?”

She shut the driver’s-side door and continued writing on her aluminum clipboard with the nifty self-lighting pen. “Yeah.”

“An hour seems to be their standard response time.”

She sighed and looked up the road. “I could have him at the Hot Springs County Jail, booked, and be back here in an hour.”

I pulled out my pocket watch and looked at it. “Do it.”

She glanced up at me. “What?”

“Run him in, and I’ll babysit the truck.” I took the Womack file with me, shut the passenger-side door, and leaned on the powder orange front fender of the Diamond Rio. “Stop and tell Henry where I am. If he gets bored he can come down here and get me.”

“I don’t want you to have to do this.”

I pocketed my watch and glanced back toward the first of the narrow canyon entrances, the rough edges of the rock reflecting in the moonlight. “I’ve never been down here on foot—it’ll give me some time to look around and read the reports.”

She tucked the clipboard under her arm, straightened her hat, and handed me her Maglite. “You’ll need a reading light. I’ll be back in an hour.” She pointed a finger at me. “Don’t get run over.”

I smiled and then waved as she pulled out, heading north at a brisk pace. I turned and looked at the tunnels.

It was the twenties when the state started thinking of a serpentine roadway that would replace the rough, steep grade of Bird’s Eye Pass. At over 2,500 feet, the old road was open only part of the year and took several hours to traverse even with good weather.

That winter the mercury touched thirty degrees below zero, which enabled the engineers to cross the frozen river from the railroad tracks so that they could survey the terrain. The roadbed would be twenty-four feet wide, with hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of granite to be moved, culminating in a trio of eighteen-foot-wide,
fourteen-foot-tall tunnels with a cumulative length close to a thousand feet.

I walked toward the north one, and it felt like the thing was opening in the darkness like a mouth, even eerier with the road completely vacant.

It was one of the most difficult engineering feats in the entire American West and expensive for the period. Work began June 1, 1922, and it would cost around half a million dollars but, all told, would prove to cost a great deal more than that. Lives were lost, some of the remains recovered after days and some never.

The insides of the tunnels weren’t even in the beam of Rosey’s flashlight, but I knew them to be rough like the surrounding cliffs themselves.

I stood at the narrow, red-painted curb on the right-hand side and looked up and down the winding road for traffic—there was none, so I stepped onto the roadway and walked to the center.

Tracing the beam up the road and then back to the tunnel entrance, I opened the file and looked at the printed copies of the newspaper accounts about Trooper Womack’s last watch.

At 12:22 p.m., Officer Womack received a report that an eighteen-wheel tanker was traveling through the
canyon and was carrying nine thousand gallons of aviation fuel to an airport in the southern part of the state. It was reported the driver was experiencing problems with his brakes and that he had already forced a number of other vehicles off the road. It was also noted that the truck driver was possibly experiencing a heart attack at the time.

It wasn’t noted why Womack hadn’t responded to the radio call by heading north and meeting the tanker. Instead he sat in the same spot where Rosey had just stopped Coleman, right outside of the tunnel itself, until the swerving eighteen-wheeler appeared at the far end of the S-curve only a quarter of a mile away.

I shone the light in that direction and couldn’t help but feel a slight shudder at the thought of his seeing all nine thousand gallons of rich-mixture, 130-octane fuel heading for him at breakneck speed, most likely with a dying driver at the wheel.

Why?

Why sit there in the pullout, wait till the thing was almost on top of you, and then casually pull the LTD in the way. Why not just let the thing crash into the tunnel and explode? It just appeared an act of total, utter, hopeless self-destruction.

I walked in, shining the flashlight beam through this
tunnel into the gaping maw of the next, which was only about a hundred feet farther.

The report states that with the impact the LTD was driven sideways before being pushed out the southern end and then had lodged itself along with the tanker truck into the solid granite buttress of the northern entrance to the second. The explosion had been tremendous, with fireballs racing from the ends of all three tunnels and the open spaces between. Campers at Boysen Reservoir thought that it must’ve been an earthquake, and legend had it that plate-glass windows had broken in Shoshoni, twenty miles away.

The heat of the blast had melted the road, and very few remains had been found, but the granite tunnels had miraculously held. After the accident, the inside surfaces of the tunnel walls were painted white on either side, but the ceiling was still black, with strange patches of concrete showing at uneven intervals.

I continued walking and ran my hand over the stone, the walls weeping even in this high desert, and I thought that if I were to touch the wetness to my lips it might be salty like tears.

The thrashing of the river was omnipresent, a noise that washed the canyon clean, amplified by the rock
walls in front of and behind me. But there was another noise underlying the sound of the Wind, rock against rock where the animals of the night danced out their nocturnal appetites, some lucky enough to survive till daylight and some not.

I was walking the hundred yards in the open between the first and middle tunnel but about halfway became aware of a set of footfalls coming from the tunnel behind me and another coming from the one ahead.

I stopped, standing there in the clear spring air, with the glittering stars peering down on me, and laughed as I tucked the file and flashlight under my arm and thought about a grown man being haunted by his own footsteps echoing from two tunnels. I stood there listening and finally heard a noise to my left, where, as my eyes adjusted, I could see a great horned owl sitting in a stunted and still-leafless cottonwood that was attempting to grow in a fissure of the granite hillside.

“You getting scary in your old age, too?”

His head turned, and he looked at me with those radiant gold eyes as I listened to my words rebound a couple of times and laughed a response. “Well, I guess I am.”

It was a cold night, and I flipped the collar up on my
old horsehide jacket, slipped on my shooting gloves, and started off again, listening to the trio of six cowboy boots in cadence.

I stopped at the granite wall where Womack had most certainly died if he hadn’t already been dead on impact. The stone wall traveled up like a keep, the first fourteen feet painted white, the rest stretching to a cold and forbidding darkness that extended into forever.

I took a deep breath and then billowed the vapor from my lungs like a locomotive gathering steam and pushed off again. The second tunnel was shorter, and a sudden bit of starlight glistened on the macadam roadway on the other side of the darkness. I picked up my pace, figuring I didn’t have much time to get back to the entrance of the first tunnel before Rosey picked me up and we rendezvoused with the Cheyenne Nation to listen for the radio call.

I thought about what I was going to say when it didn’t happen again. Henry and I, like Captain Thomas, had lives and couldn’t spend our nights sitting in patrol cars waiting for phantom calls that never came. Wayman was going to have to talk with someone, someone who understood the things she was going through, and not just a couple of hard rollers like Henry and me.

I sounded tough, especially for a guy who had had his own run-ins with unexplainable phenomena, but I had rationalized all those things to myself and they didn’t bother me near as much as they used to. Nonetheless, I raised my hand and fingered the large silver ring that I wore around my neck on a chain, the one with the turquoise and coral wolves forever chasing each other.

I approached the last tunnel and noticed the curbs on this one were painted yellow, different from the others, and wondered if they had run out of paint. Still listening to my boots echoing off the rock amplifiers in front of and behind me, it was almost as if I could hear a slight disparity in the rhythm, probably because of the difference in distance between the tunnels.

As an experiment, I stopped suddenly, and only a few footfalls echoed after me. Satisfied, I took up walking again and entered the third tunnel. I stopped in the middle, thinking that I should really turn around and get going. It was about then that I heard them again, just within earshot, footsteps my exact tempo—and I hadn’t moved.