The Highwayman: A Longmire Story (7 page)

“You’re not crazy.”

She smiled a sad smile. “I used to think I wasn’t, too.” She stood and took a few steps onto the worn rock of the promontory that jutted out into the void. “You know, I’ve been an HP my whole life—I don’t think I know how to be anything else.”

“Nobody says you’re going to have to.”

Her back was still to me when she spoke again. “What would you do if they told you that you couldn’t be a sheriff anymore?”

“Probably dance a jig.” I stepped forward, pressing my legs against the guardrail and holding out a hand. “Hey, it’s getting really cold out here. Why don’t we climb back in that snazzy car of yours and drink the rest of my coffee and talk things over?”

Her head turned just a bit, and her perfect Nordic profile was set off by the whiteness of the fog, her flat-brimmed hat dipping at a dangerous angle. “You’ve been a good friend, Walt, and so has Henry.”

I started to climb over the guardrail. “Rosey . . .”

And then she stepped off the edge.

I stumbled forward, fell over the guardrail, and landed on my hands. I scrambled to my feet and looked into the impenetrable mist. My first thought was to jump after her, but the Bear was a far better swimmer than I was. “Henry!”

No answer. I stood there for a second more and then shucked off my jacket and tossed my hat, sidearm, and pocket watch along with it. Taking one step forward, I shook my head at the absolute insanity of what I was about to do—and leaped.

There was a brief moment of weightlessness, but then all 250 pounds brought their weight to bear and down I went. Heck, for all I knew, there wasn’t any
water below me, and I was just jumping onto the rocks along with an already-dead trooper. I didn’t have to wonder long, however, as I plunged into the Wind River and it seemed as though the 640 muscles in my body contracted to the point of breaking all 206 bones.

The shock of the cold paralyzed me for a moment, and there was an explosion in my chest that caused every bit of air to go out of my lungs, and all I could think was that I had made a very bad decision.

I broke the surface and gasped my way free. The current was unlike anything I’d ever felt, and I’d no sooner gathered a couple of lungfuls of air when the flat of my back struck a boulder and pushed all of it out.

Sputtering, I tried to grab hold of the rock, but its wet surface slipped through my hands and I was shot through a funnel and submerged again. This time my leg struck something solid as the current plowed me forward. I’d heard Henry say that you always wanted to keep your feet up and pointed toward the current so that they wouldn’t get caught and you wouldn’t drown.

Lifting them, I bobbed to the surface just in time to strike another boulder, but not hard enough to completely disorient me. It was black dark, and the only
thing that showed was the phosphorescence of the wave tops being cut by the wind.

Something loomed just to my left that I kept my boots aimed toward, but try as I might, my legs collapsed under me as I struck a much larger rock. I pivoted to the right and again tried to grab onto the thing, but everything was so wet and my hands so frozen that I might as well have been trying to grab hold with flippers.

Another swell caught me, and I rode it forward with a few seconds of visibility, thinking I might’ve seen something to my right. I reached out and made a grab for whatever it was.

A log.

Great, I was going to drown like a waterlogged rat.

Its benefit, though, was that it gave me a little buoyancy, and I was able to see where I was going. It slapped into another boulder and I almost lost my grip, but I held on as the damn thing pivoted, swinging me around and rolling over my head like a giant baseball bat.

I was beginning to question its advantages just as I started short breathing. As near as I could tell, my lungs were seizing up with the rest of me as my core temperature plummeted. I figured I had another couple of
minutes before I would become so immobile that I would likely sink.

The log struck something on both sides this time, forming a bridge of sorts, and I was able to get my arms over it far enough to hold on. Kicking to the left, I caught purchase but then felt my right boot catch on something beneath the surface, something that moved.

I hoped it was Rosey. I shoved my face into the water and reached down between the two rocks that held the log. With my frozen fingers going numb on me, I knew I had only one shot. Hoping it wasn’t just a packing blanket that had flown off a passing truck, I yanked with all my limited abilities.

I flew forward but was able to get my legs spread far enough to hold my position and drag whatever it was up against my chest.

Rosey.

Pulling her in close, I tried to lean toward one of the boulders, but when I did, my footing started to give way, and the fire-hose current attempted to shoot the two of us back into the middle of the turbulent river.

My muscles continued to seize, and I had no feeling anywhere in my body. It was just a matter of time before my legs collapsed and we’d be sucked into the black
water for good—literally stuck between drowning and a hard place.

With the last bit of energy I could summon, I applied all the pressure I could in an attempt to get Rosey above the water onto the boulder to my right. I’d almost made it when my leg slipped through the chute and I could feel myself starting to go.

It was at that precise instant that I felt a talon grip the collar of my shirt and pull me against the current like some giant bird of prey, and I saw Rosey being draped on the boulder, where Henry Standing Bear held on for a couple of dear lives.

He held Rosey with his right arm, his left fully extended in an attempt to hold on to me, and I could see the exertion it was taking just to keep me from slipping away.

“Grab my arm!”

I fumbled my hands toward him, but they were too numb to be of any use. “Save her!”

“Walt, grab my arm!”

I tried to grip his sleeve but couldn’t. “Get her out of here and then come back for me!”

His dark hair fell around his face only inches from mine, and he yelled back with his black eyes blazing,
“You will not be here!” I felt the tug as his muscles bunched and, pulling me to the side with inhuman strength, he inched me against the current. It felt like a crane with steel cables was wrapped around my collar, dragging me toward safety.

I summoned the last vestige of energy to stumble forward, landing in knee-deep water. On my hands and knees, I coughed a couple of pints out of my lungs and crawled toward the rocky bank, finally collapsing on the hillside. Lying there and looking sideways through the high weeds still holding on to their pale winter color, I watched as the Cheyenne Nation lifted Rosey onto his shoulder and trudged up the embankment, his duster coattails flowing out as if taking flight just before the two of them disappeared over the guardrail.

I rolled over onto my back and turned my head to cough up more water.

I lay there for a moment, feeling the intense cold of the fog. Finally finding a small pocket of reserve, I leveraged up on one elbow and gripped the stalks of grass in an attempt to get upright. Half making it, I stumbled up the hill, mostly on my hands and knees.

When I got to the guardrail, it seemed to soar over me like a landscape. Putting a shoulder against it, I
pushed myself over, falling onto the other side, and just lay there like a drowned albatross. I rested my head on the back of a hand and saw the opening of the north tunnel in the distance.

We hadn’t gone that far in the river, but it sure had felt like we had.

Raising my head and turning it a bit, I could see Henry about fifty feet away trying to resuscitate Rosey, his powerful hands laced over her chest.

I crawled toward them. It wasn’t that I thought I could do much, but lending some moral support might make the difference. I made it about halfway there when everything gave out, and my nose hit the pavement like a pickax, the blinding flash of concussion almost enough to put me out.

Stretching my right arm, I kind of side-stroked like some half-assed hermit crab, making about eight inches a minute until I got near the rear of her cruiser. I think I blacked out, but I can’t be sure. The back corner of the Dodge hung over me, but my eyes traveled down across the road to the entrance of the north tunnel.

Where a man stood looking at me.

He was dressed in some sort of uniform, and as he limped directly toward me, his fists at his sides, I could
see he wore a flat-brimmed hat. The badges and decorations pinned to his dark jacket flashed underneath the black, rubber-coated canvas slicker. He wore dark slacks and highly polished boots that shone like mercury on the macadam.

He hobbled toward me, one boot forward, the other dragging behind, but Henry’s ministrations on Rosey’s behalf must have caught his attention, and he moved toward the front of the cruiser to look over the hood.

I watched him, trying to discern what his intentions might be, but then I got annoyed and yelled, my words mangled by my frozen lips. “Stay away from her!”

He turned.

“Stay away from her, damn it!”

He stayed like that for a couple of seconds, his profile burnished by the cruiser’s interior lights, and then turned to look directly at me. It was the same face I’d seen in the photographs, only harder. I couldn’t make out his eyes but was rapidly getting the feeling that I’d gotten the attention of something I might not live to regret.

“Bobby Womack.”

He stared at me.

“You can’t have her.”

With one last glance at Rosey, he trailed a gloved hand over the sill of the open door of the cruiser and stepped out to stare at me. His head canted and, dragging one boot, he began to move.

“Go away.” I automatically tried to reach to my side, but even if my hands would have worked, I remembered I’d disarmed myself before the jump.

In a couple of halting steps, he was standing over me. I tried to back away on my elbows, but he kept up and knelt down, bringing his face in close to mine.

The eyes were black, no white at all, just twin tunnels leading nowhere. He crouched there, just as he had on the road, and began working the glove from his fingers a tug at a time.

“What do you want?”

He paused for the shortest of moments and finally freed his hand. He held it to his face and blew into it just as Rosey had when she’d gotten back in the cruiser earlier tonight, but his breath was like a blast furnace.

Casually, he turned his palm and started reaching for my face.

I tried to draw back, but with no energy to defend myself, I flopped to the side and just lay there looking up at him.

He was about to reach out again when one of the Morgan silver dollars fell out of my shirt pocket and dropped onto the surface of the road. It rolled forward, circled once, and then, glinting between us, fell over flat with a metallic sound.

He stared at the coin with ebony eyes and then, extending a forefinger, he placed it on the coin, whereupon the surrounding asphalt began smoking with the stench of burning oil and tar. The coin glowed red and slowly sank into the pavement, and I’m sure it would’ve gone all the way to hell if he hadn’t lifted the tip of his finger, blowing on it like the barrel of a fired pistol.

He glanced at Henry and Rosey. My eyes followed his, and I could see the Bear had her on her side as she retched the river water from her body.

When I turned back, his face was close, and I could feel the heat waves emanating from him.

He stayed like that for a few seconds, and then I became aware of his lips moving. The words were faint but powerful, like the canyon wind, and a smile traced itself to the corners of his eight-ball eyes. “Unit 3, 10-78, officer needs assistance.”

I narrowed my eyes at him and tried to sit up but wavered a little, not wanting to get too close. “What
officer needs assistance?” I scrubbed my hands over my face, but when I started to ask again, he was gone. Nudging an elbow beneath me, I sidled up and caught sight of the silver dollar that had fallen from my pocket. It was resting on the surface of the pavement—not seared into the melted asphalt, no burns, nothing.

Static. “Unit 3, 10-78, officer needs assistance.”

I looked around for him again, but he wasn’t there, just Henry holding Rosey up against his chest as she sobbed, the two of them looking into the cruiser, where the same voice that had just haunted me came from the radio, loud and clear.

Static. “Unit 3, 10-78, officer needs assistance.”

I stared at the hands on my pocket watch. “The time was wrong in her cruiser—they never adjusted it after they jumped it, and that’s why the clock was an hour slow.”

“That is not the point.”

I sat there, still trying to get warm after a shower and clean, dry clothes. “No, I suppose it isn’t.”

“You heard it, the same as I did.”

Hot Springs County Memorial Hospital was a lot like the hospital back in Durant, especially the mauve waiting room with the mauve walls, mauve carpet, mauve drapes, and off-mauve furniture.

“It was exactly one hour late.”

Leaning back on the mauve sofa, he attempted to get me to answer. “You are not addressing the question.”

“Bear with me for a moment.” I sat forward in my chair with the thankfully not-mauve blanket still wrapped around me, resting my elbows on my knees. “That means that the electrics on the cruiser went out exactly one hour before the service guy got there.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly sixty minutes to the second. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

He laughed a gruff bark. “Yes, in the sea of odd that does strike me as a strange wave.”

I gave him a dirty look, but it didn’t appear to have any effect. “Yep, I heard it.” He circled the sofa and sat facing me, willing to engage in conversation now that I had answered the question. “Does the fact that I was half drowned, delirious, and occasionally unconscious limit my credibility in this?”

“No, because I heard it and so did she.”

Pulling the coin from my pocket, I slumped back in my chair and examined it for burn marks, but there weren’t any. “How do you know that she heard it?”

“Because she was crying.”

“How do you know that’s what she was crying about? She’d just attempted suicide.”

“They were tears of relief—I know the difference. She was crying because we heard it, too.” He stood, stuffing his hands in his jeans and walked toward the hallway to see if anyone happened to be listening. “For the first time, someone besides her heard Bobby Womack’s radio call.”

“I’m not so sure that’s going to count for much.”

He turned to look at me. “What does that mean?”

“It means nobody is going to care, Henry. The only thing they might do is give us all adjoining cells at the psychiatric hospital down in Evanston.”

He kept looking at me, and I watched as his jaw clenched. “Then we have work to do. Now that we know this is happening, we need to find out why.”

Hearing someone coming down the hall, the Bear turned and walked to the window and stood there looking out with his back to the room.

Still clutching the blanket around me like Nanook of the North, I slowly got out of the chair as Cami Slack, the young doctor who had treated both Rosey and me, and Jim Thomas, who was wearing civilian clothes,
entered the room. They were chatting between themselves but then broke off when they saw us.

“How’s she doing?”

Dr. Slack ignored my question and came over for a checkup. She took my hands in hers, felt my pulse, and then on tiptoe pried open a lid and stared into my bloodshot eye. “She’s all right, exhibiting secondary drowning symptoms—coughing, shortness of breath, chest pain, and general lethargy from water being in her lungs, preventing oxygenation. She’ll probably be okay in twenty-four hours—well, we hope.” She let go of my eye and put her fists on her hips, looking to me like she was twelve. “So, how are you?”

“Fine, how are you?”

She glanced at Jim. “Is he always like this?”

“Pretty much.”

Turning back to me, she tugged at the front of my blanket. “Why do you still have this?”

“Because I’m cold; I am sure I will be cold till the next gubernatorial election.”

She raised a hand and slipped it between my collar and my neck, and her fingers were nice and warm. “Cold water carries heat from the body twenty-five times faster
than air, so once you go in, you immediately begin losing core temperature. Your body attempts to generate heat by shivering, but that’s not enough to combat the monumental loss of heat to the water.” She released me and turned to look at Thomas again, attempting to get an ally in ganging up on me. “What do you think the temperature in that river is tonight?”

“Midthirties, I’d say.”

Shaking her head, she turned back to me. “Loss of dexterity in less than three minutes, exhaustion, disorientation, and unconsciousness in a few more. I’m just guessing, but in another couple of minutes, with the amount of exertion you were putting out, you’d have been dead.”

I opened my arms like some cheap magician, the blanket falling to the floor. “Yet here I am.”

She shook her head and started off. “Having not learned a thing.” Pausing for a moment, she turned. “Mind you, there have been cases up near Seattle, where I was living before. There was a guy who fell off a ferry in British Columbia and was carried thirty miles before they found him near Orcas Island eight hours later. Then there was this woman who fell off a sailboat near the mouth of the Fraser River, and she was out there for
seven hours—of course, neither of them were in water as cold as what you were in tonight.” She considered me as I mapped the freckles on her nose. “The woman said she made it because there were mermaids in the water keeping her company the whole time. Did you see anything out of the ordinary tonight?”

I picked up my security blanket. “Nope.”

She nodded and then turned, heading back into the hospital’s inner sanctum, but then stopped to look at me. “Extraordinary, what you did. Extraordinarily stupid or brave, but there’s a woman back here who is alive because of your actions.”

I threw a thumb at the Cheyenne Nation. “More his.”

“Maybe, but he didn’t get wet.”

I shrugged. “Like a cat, he’s smart that way.”

She shook her head, her red hair bouncing in rhythm, and then disappeared as Jim turned to us, putting a hand on my shoulder to guide me back into my seat. “What happened out there?”

“She fell.”

Thomas sat across from me and stared. “She fell?”

“Yep.”

“You want to elaborate or enhance that statement?”

“Not really. She got out of the car and went over to
the guardrail to sit on the other side, and the fog was really thick and she slipped.”

There was a long pause. “Slipped.”

“Yep.”

He stared at me a moment more, then, without taking his eyes off me, asked Henry, “She slipped—that your story, too, Bear?”

The Cheyenne Nation’s words vibrated against the plate glass. “Yes.”

The big trooper eyed me up and down. “You slip, too?”

“No, I’m genuinely stupid and jumped in.”

He glanced at Henry and then back to me. “That’s your story, huh?”

“Yep.”

“We’ll see what Rosey says when she gets a little more coherent.” He sat in one of the mauve chairs, his hands trailing onto his knees. “So, you heard it?”

Henry turned around. “Yes, we did. We all did.”

“Hmm . . . Well, that certainly puts a new timber on things.” He sighed, suddenly looking very tired. “I guess we’re going to have to start looking for anybody that would have the equipment to break onto our frequency, and it’s certainly localized, seeing as how we can’t even get it on our radios up here. With a little luck we should
be able to triangulate the position of the transmitter and get whoever is doing this. I mean, back in the old days when you just had radio frequency, this stuff would’ve been hard, but now that we’ve got this WYOLINK system, the name, unit number, and everything should come up, even a GPS or last event providing the location of the sender.”

“None of us were in the car to see the radio or the GPS.” I glanced around the room for options, finally coming up with one. “I’m betting you have an expert on radios.”

“In Cheyenne, at our centralized dispatch center, we’ve got a tech person who’s a whiz.”

“How about to the south, could anyone have heard the radio calls down there? In Shoshoni, Riverton?”

“I don’t know, but certainly if someone had heard the repeated calls they would’ve commented on it, and if it’s on our frequency, then it would have to be another HP.”

“Would you mind checking with other law enforcement to see if anybody’s heard anything? I mean, it would help us confirm where the transmissions are coming from.”

“Sure, I’ll check around, and I’ll have the radio expert give you a call.”

I thumbed at the Cheyenne Nation. “Call him—I still don’t have a phone.”

Thomas yawned. “I will, but I think I’ll do it in the morning.”

 • • • 

“A 10-46.”

“And what is a 10-46?”

The Bear was driving my truck as I read the official, circa-1979 Wyoming Highway Patrol report from the file that Jim Thomas had given us. “Assisting motorist.”

The Cheyenne Nation veered down the Wind River Canyon Scenic Byway, enjoying the way the big V-10 pulled out of the curves. “So, he was assisting a motorist before he pulled out in front of the truck?”

I continued reading. “He cleared the call, and then it was another ten minutes before the accident with the tanker.”

“Still, it would be interesting to know who and what it was that close to the event of his death.”

“No way to tell—they aren’t going to have records that go back that far, especially if it was just a motorist-assistance call.” I glanced up at the road and then to him. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I am always interested when someone commits an act such as Womack’s as to what their conversation might have been previously.”

I grunted. “Probably something along the lines of ‘That spare should get you to Farson, where they have ice cream’ or ‘I think I’ve given you enough gas to get you to the Shell station in Shoshoni.’”

He glanced at the files in my lap. “Anything else?”

“Not really. They’re pretty cut and dry and match up with the newspaper articles Rosey found.” I closed the file. “Okay, let’s go out on a limb here.”

“In what direction?”

“Let’s pretend that this is Bobby Womack’s . . . um, spirit.”

“Okay.”

“And let’s say he didn’t take the silver dollars from the bank robbers.”

“Yes.”

“Then why is he handing them out now?”

The Bear drove for a while in silence. “Perhaps he is attempting to show us that he now knows where the money is.”

“Why?”

“To clear his name.”

Watching the entrance to the north tunnel approaching, I gestured for the Bear to pull over a little farther than where we’d been parked last night. “Over here, I don’t want to have to walk too far.”

He slowed and stopped next to the guardrail. “Do you want to get out on my side to avoid going near the water?”

“Very funny.”

There was a buzzing noise, and he reached into the inside pocket of his duster. Pulling out his phone, he stared at the screen momentarily before handing it to me. “The Wyoming Highway Patrol Central Dispatch Headquarters in Cheyenne.”

I took the thing. “How do you know it’s for me?”

“Lucky guess.”

I punched the button and stepped out of my truck and sat on the guardrail facing the water just to spite Henry. “Sheriff Walt Longmire.”

“Sheriff, this is Eunice Wallace of the Central Dispatch Headquarters in Cheyenne.”

“You can’t fool me, there’s nothing centralized about Cheyenne.”

She laughed. “Or organized, for that matter. How can I help you, Sheriff?”

“Jim Thomas says you’re the radio guru down there and that you could help us with a problem we’re having.”

“And that’s in Absaroka County?”

I glanced around at the unparalleled beauty of the canyon, looking so different than last night. “I’m actually in the Wind River Canyon even as we speak, and I suppose we’re lucky to be speaking, the reception being what it is.” I explained the situation, leaving out the more incredible parts and focusing on the possibility of someone illegally breaking in on the Highway Patrol frequency.

“Well, it’s possible, but with the trunking systems it would be difficult.”

The Cheyenne Nation came around the corner of my truck, I suppose to check to see if I had fallen in the river, and then waved and disappeared. “Here’s my first question, what’s trunking?”

There was a pause. “Your county has the smallest population in the state, doesn’t it?”

“We’re small but mighty—why do you ask?”

“Well, you’re probably still using a singular frequency?”

“Ever since Marconi sent over that first unit.”

“Well, that’s a luxury that most departments no longer have. As municipalities and organizations grow, they use more and more radio frequencies for operations, consequently free bandwidth has become more difficult to find.”

“Yep, we don’t have that problem.”

“No, I’d imagine not. Anyway, the radio manufacturers came up with a system that works like a trunk telephone line. Let’s use a city like Casper for example—they used to have two or three frequencies for their police department, two or three for the fire department, and then one for public works and one for parks. With the trunking system they have more than fifty user groups on ten radio frequencies.”

“How can you do that?”

“One of the frequencies is the control or data channel that continually broadcasts a computer data stream that sounds like a chainsaw on the air.”

I thought about the noise that Rosey had said preceded the mysterious radio calls. “A chainsaw, huh?”

“Something like that. But to get back to your question, every time an officer or firefighter or anybody presses their microphone button, a simultaneous computer command is sent out to everyone in that person’s
radio group and moves them to one of the nine other available frequencies within the system.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“It is—the channel assignments are completely random, so there’s no way to monitor communications unless you have a computer-assisted trunk-tracker system.”

“So, where could you get something like that?”

“Best Buy or Radio Shack, if they were still in business.”

I removed the phone from my ear to enable a full-force face palm of epic proportions and then returned it. “You’re kidding.”

“’Fraid not—any 800 megahertz scanner with a microphone would work as long as it’s calibrated properly.” She waited a moment, probably sensing my dissatisfaction with that bit of information. “Trunking systems are pretty hard to program for the uninitiated, so you’re probably looking for someone who has a knowledge of radios and computers.”