The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volumes 1-4 (117 page)

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2008

Published in Penguin Books 2009

Copyright © Craig Johnson, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ISBN 978-1-4406-2985-3 (ePub)

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Bill Bower and all those crazy bastards who flew off
the USS
Hornet
and into those cold, gray skies on the
morning of April 18, 1942—and everybody who ever
threw a salute before and after.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A writer, like a sheriff, is the embodiment of a group of people and without their support both are in a tight spot. I have been blessed with a close order of family, friends, and associates who have made this book possible. This book is a work of fiction, and as such it’s important to point out that the guys at the 377th Security Police Squadron were top-notch law enforcement personnel.

I would like to thank Kara Newcomer, historian for the United States Marine Corps History Division, and the folks down at Willow Creek Ranch. Janet Hubbard-Brown and Astrid Latapie for helping out with handling the French at the Indo-Chinese fire drill, and the staff and doctors at the VA Medical Center over at Fort Mackenzie in Sheridan, including Hollis W. Hackman and Chuck Guilford.

Thanks to my chiefs of staff, Gail Hochman, Kathryn Court, Alexis Washam, and Ali Bothwell Mancini; to my officer in charge of logistics, Sonya Cheuse; and to Susan Fain, my military council. Thanks to Marcus Red Thunder for taking the muffler off the jeep to convince the enemy that we had tanks. Kudos to Eric Boss for requisitioning everything I needed, including the beer. A big thanks to James Crumley for the canteen and to Curt Wendelboe and Rob Kresge for leaning over and pointing out that it was quiet—too quiet.

And to the person I enjoy sharing my foxhole with most, my wife, Judy.

Great Spirit, grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.

O
LD
I
NDIAN
P
RAYER

1

"Two more.”

Cady looked at me but didn’t say anything.

It had been like this for the last week. We’d reached a plateau, and she was satisfied with the progress she’d made. I wasn’t. The physical therapist at University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia had warned me that this might happen. It wasn’t that my daughter was weak or lazy; it was far worse than that—she was bored.

“Two more?”

"I heard you....” She plucked at her shorts and avoided my eyes. “Your voice; it carries.”

I placed an elbow on my knee, chin on fist, sat farther back on the sit-up bench, and glanced around. We weren’t alone. There was a kid in a Durant Quarterback Club T-shirt who was trying to bulk up his 145-pound frame at one of the Universal machines. I’m not sure why he was up here—there were no televisions, and it wasn’t as fancy as the main gym downstairs. I understood all the machines up here—you didn’t have to plug any of them in—but I wondered about him; it could be that he was here because of Cady.

“Two more.”

“Piss off.”

The kid snickered, and I looked at him. I glanced back at my daughter. This was good; anger sometimes got her to finish up, even if it cost me the luxury of conversation for the rest of the evening. It didn’t matter tonight; she had a dinner date and then had to be home for an important phone call. I had zip. I had all the time in the world.

She had cut her auburn hair short to match the spot where they had made the U-shaped incision that had allowed her swelling brain to survive. Only a small scar was visible at the hairline. She was beautiful, and the pain in the ass was that she knew it.

It got her pretty much whatever she wanted. Beauty was life’s E-ZPass. I was lucky I got to ride on the shoulder.

"Two more?”

She picked up her water bottle and squeezed out a gulp, leveling the cool eyes back on me. We sat there looking at each other, both of us dressed in gray. She stretched a finger out and pulled the band of my T-shirt down, grazing a fingernail on my exposed collarbone. “That one?”

Just because she was beautiful didn’t mean she wasn’t smart. Diversion was another of her tactics. I had enough scars to divert the entire First Division. She had known this scar and had seen it on numerous occasions. Her question was a symptom of the memory loss that Dr. Rissman had mentioned.

She continued to poke my shoulder with the finger. “That one.”

“Two more.”

“That one?”

Cady never gave up.

It was a family trait, and in our tiny family, stories were the coinage of choice, a bartering in the aesthetic of information and the athletics of emotion, so I answered her. “Tet.”

She set her water bottle down on the rubber-padded floor. "When?”

“Before you were born.”

She lowered her head and looked at me through her lashes, one cheek pulled up in a half smile. “Things happened before I was born?”

“Well, nothing really important.”

She took a deep breath, gripped the sides of the bench, and put all her effort into straightening the lever action of thirty pounds at her legs. Slowly, the weights lifted to the limit of the movement and then, just as slowly, dropped back. After a moment, she caught her breath. “Marine inspector, right?”

I nodded. “Yep.”

"Why Marines?”

“It was Vietnam, and I was gonna be drafted, so it was a choice.” I was consistently amazed at what her damaged brain chose to remember.

“What was Vietnam like?”

“Confusing, but I got to meet Martha Raye.”

Unsatisfied with my response, she continued to study my scar. “You don’t have any tattoos.”

“No.” I sighed, just to let her know that her tactics weren’t working.

“I have a tattoo.”

“You have two.” I cleared my throat in an attempt to end the conversation. She pulled up the cap sleeve of her Philadelphia City Sports T-shirt, exposing the faded, Cheyenne turtle totem on her shoulder. She was probably unaware that she’d been having treatments to have it removed; it had been the ex-boyfriend’s idea, all before the accident. “The other one’s on your butt, but we don’t have to look for it now.”

The kid snickered again. I turned and stared at him with a little more emphasis this time.

“Bear was in Vietnam with you, right?”

She was smiling as I turned back to her. All the women in my life smiled when they talked about Henry Standing Bear. It was a bit annoying, but Henry was my best and lifelong friend, so I got over it. He owned the Red Pony, a bar on the edge of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, only a mile from my cabin, and he was the one who was taking Cady to dinner. I wasn’t invited. He and my daughter were in cahoots. They had pretty much been in cahoots since she had been born.

“Henry was in-country, Special Operations Group; we didn’t serve together.”

"What was he like back then?”

I thought about it. “He’s mellowed, a little.” It was a frightening thought. “Two more?”

Her gray eyes flashed. “One more.”

I smiled. “One more.”

Cady’s slender hands returned to the sides of the bench, and I watched as the toned legs once again levitated and lowered the thirty pounds. I waited a moment, then lumbered up and placed a kiss at the horseshoe-shaped scar and helped her stand. The physical progress was moving ahead swimmingly, mostly due to the advantages of her stellar conditioning and youth, but the afternoon workouts took their toll, and she was usually a little unsteady by the time we finished.

I held her hand and picked up her water and tried not to concentrate on the fact that my daughter had been a fast-track, hotshot lawyer back in Philly only two months earlier and that now she was here in Wyoming and was trying to remember that she had tattoos and how to walk without assistance.

We made our way toward the stairwell and the downstairs showers. As we passed the kid at the machine, he looked at Cady admiringly and then at me. “Hey, Sheriff?”

I paused for a moment and steadied Cady on my arm. "Yep?”

"J.P. said you once bench-pressed six plates.”

I continued looking down at him. “What?”

He gestured toward the steel plates on the rack at the wall. “Jerry Pilch? The football coach? He said senior year, before you went to USC, you bench-pressed six plates.” He continued to stare at me. “That’s over three hundred pounds.”

“Yep, well.” I winked. “Jerry’s always had a tendency to exaggerate.”

“I thought so.”

I nodded to the kid and helped Cady down the steps. It’d been eight plates, actually, but that had been a long time ago.

* * *

My shower was less complicated than Cady’s, so I usually got out before her and waited on the bench beside the Clear Creek bridge. I placed my summer-wear palm-leaf hat on my head, slipped on my ten-year-old Ray-Bans, and shrugged the workout bag’s strap farther onto my shoulder so that it didn’t press my Absaroka County sheriff’s star into my chest. I pushed open the glass door and stepped into the perfect fading glory of a high plains summer afternoon. It was vacation season, creeping up on rodeo weekend, and the streets were full of people from somewhere else.

I took a left and started toward the bridge and the bench. I sat next to the large man with the ponytail and placed the gym bag between us. “How come I wasn’t invited to dinner?”

The Cheyenne Nation kept his head tilted back, eyes closed, taking in the last warmth of the afternoon sun. “We have discussed this.”

“It’s Saturday night, and I don’t have anything to do.”

“You will find something.” He took a deep breath, the only sign that he wasn’t made of wood and selling cigars. “Where is Vic?”

“Firearms recertification in Douglas.”

“Damn.”

I thought about my scary undersheriff from Philadelphia; how she could outshoot, outdrink, and outswear every cop I knew, and how she was now representing the county at the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy. I was unsure if that was a positive thing. “Yep, not a safe weekend to be in Douglas.”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “How is all that going?”

I took a moment to discern what “all that” might mean. “I’m not really sure.” He raised an eyelid and studied me in a myopic fashion. “We seem to be having a problem getting in sync.” The eyelid closed, and we sat there as a silence passed. "Where are you going to dinner?”

“I am not going to tell you.”

"C’mon.”

His face remained impassive. “We have discussed this.”

We had, it was true. The Bear had expressed the opinion that for both of our mental healths, it might be best if Cady and I didn’t spend every waking hour in each other’s company. It was difficult, but I was going to have to let her out of my sight sometime. “In town or over in Sheridan?”

“I am not going to tell you.”

I was disconcerted by the flash of a camera and turned to see a woman from somewhere else smile and continue down the sidewalk toward the Busy Bee Café, where I would likely be having my dinner, alone. I turned to look at Henry Standing Bear’s striking profile. “You should sit with me more often; I’m photogenic.”

“They were taking photographs with a greater frequency before you arrived.”

I ignored him. “She’s allergic to plums.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure if she’ll remember that.”

“I do.”

“No alcohol.”

“Yes.”

I thought about that advisory and came clean. “I let her have a glass of red wine last weekend.”

“I know.”

I turned and looked at him. “She told you?”

“Yes.”

Cahoots. I had a jealous inkling that the Bear was making more progress in drawing all of Cady back to us than I was.

I stretched my legs and crossed my boots; they were still badly in need of a little attention. I adjusted my gun belt so that the hammer of my .45 wasn’t digging into my side. “We still on for the Rotary thing, Friday?”

“Yes.”

Rotary was sponsoring a debate between me and prosecuting attorney Kyle Straub; we were the two candidates for the position of Absaroka County sheriff. After five elections and twenty-four sworn years, I usually did pretty well at debates but felt a little hometown support might be handy, so I had asked Henry to come. “Think of it as a public service—most Rotarians have never even met a Native American.”

That finally got the one eye to open again, and he turned toward me. “Would you like me to wear a feather?”