Dry Bones: A Walt Longmire Mystery (13 page)

She stood in front of my desk. “What does Cady want you to do?”

“She hasn’t said.”

“Then you have to do the hardest thing and wait.”

I nodded and scrubbed my hands across my face. “I’m tired, Ruby.”

“Why don’t you take a nap before everyone gets here?”

I laughed. “Oh, that’d look good: me in here sleeping on the taxpayer’s dollar.”

She studied me, the picture of empathy. “Dime—the taxpayer’s dime. They don’t pay you enough for it to be a dollar.” She folded her arms. “Walter, considering the circumstance, I don’t think anyone would fault you in anything you do.”

I sat there for a long time, but she wouldn’t go away. “I wish Martha were here.”

She broke a sob and then stifled it quickly. “Oh, Walter.”

“It just seems like I made this deal with the universe to serve and protect, and in return, little by little, I get everything I care about taken away from me.”

“You need to stop this talk now.”

I stood and walked to the window, clenching fists, the sound like studded tires on a roadway. “That’s fine if the fates want to monkey around with me—but there my daughter is with a brand-new baby and no husband.” I turned toward her. “I’ll tell you, if I knew which cosmic office out there to go to, I’d do it and grab some winged or horned son-of-a-bitch by his throat and throw him out his window.”

She smiled a sad smile. “My money’s on you.”

I tried to stretch my shoulders, feeling like one massive, tangled knot.

We could both hear a couple of people entering from outside and then trooping up the steps. Ruby turned toward the door. “I better go do my job.”

“Earn your dime’s worth?”

She nodded. “Yes.” She started to go but stopped, and I could see the tears in her eyes. “Please try and keep your sense of humor, Walter, for all of us, but especially for yourself. You become most frightening when you misplace it.”

I turned back to the window, all at once seeing the ghostly image of myself. “Yes, ma’am.”

I could hear people talking in the outside office and felt someone watching me at the doorway. I turned to see the Bobs, looking like very large, forged-steel andirons.

“Hey, because we’re getting toward the end of our forty-and-found, the commandant keeps givin’ us these babysitting jobs, and we’re getting kind of bored with it.” Robert cleared his throat. “Let’s go to Hardin, Montana, Sheriff.”

Bob interrupted him. “And let’s go there at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.”

Boy howdy.

 • • • 

At a hundred and twenty, the sweeping hillsides of the Little Big Horn country seemed like the banked turns on a fictional Montana International Speedway. I glanced over and could see Robert’s hands relaxed on the wheel as the motor on the big utility Interceptor roared like a treed cat.

I spoke through the steel grating from the back of the vehicle. “What kind of motor does this thing have?”

“Hell if I know. Bob?”

His partner turned to look at me. “I don’t know—you open the hood and all you see is plumbing and electronics. Not as sweet as that ’66 LeMans of mine, but she by-gawd moves, doesn’t she?”

“Yep.” Both men were studiously avoiding the subject of my daughter or of Michael’s death. “Did either of you guys call Montana to tell them we were on their turf?”

They looked at each other and then Bob glanced back at me. “We really didn’t see any reason for bothering them.”

“Right.”

Traveling at high speed across the Crow Reservation, I thought about the truncated conversation I’d had with Cady and thought about calling her back but figured there wasn’t any reception even if the HPs had a phone I could borrow. My daughter was with Henry, the best person I knew to be with when in a tight spot, and I figured it might be best to give her a little time to make arrangements without me hovering over her.

I thought about Lena, Cady’s mother-in-law and Lola’s grandmother, and Vic and Michael’s mother, and the hardship she must be going through—the loss of a child. I couldn’t think of anything worse.

“So, who is this jaybird, anyway?”

I looked at Bob. “His name is Joseph Free Bird, a supposed doctor, but involved with illegal drugs associated with the Tre Tre Nomads, an Indian gang up here and over on Pine Ridge. Henry says he’s NN.”

“What’s NN?”

“Non-Native, but all I’m interested in is his connection to Danny Lone Elk.”

Robert passed an eighteen-wheeler like a Saturn rocket. “The rancher who owned the
T. rex
?”

Bob made a face. “That’s an odd connection.”

“That’s why we’re going to Hardin.”

Robert called over his shoulder, “Surprise, we’re there.”

Slowing the vehicle to a somewhat reasonable speed, the HP ducked the nose of the thing with a touch of the brakes and made a left, heading into the town of Chi-jew-ja, as the Crow called it.

We cruised down old Highway 87, then took a right on North Center Avenue and then another right as we slowed down and arrived at the industrial section of town, the Three Rivers prison facility looming straight ahead.

Hardin had already hit hard times when a for-profit prison management corporation out of Texas convinced the powers that be that a high-security facility would be a good idea for the town’s economy and could employ a hundred locals in an area already saddled with 10 percent unemployment.

It sounded too good to be true.

It was.

Sitting on grazing land usually inhabited only by pronghorn antelope, Three Rivers was a ghost facility, 96,000 square feet of state-of-the-art prison capable of holding 464 inmates, the glinting razor-wire spirals guarding only the animals, the thing sitting empty for more than ten years.

Hardin sued the state of Montana for its legislative mixed message of support, given even though it is against Montana law to incarcerate prisoners from out of state. Amazingly, the tiny town won the case, but not so amazingly, the settlement didn’t cover the $27 million worth of bonds that had gone defunct.

There was a glimmer of hope that the project would be resurrected when the federal government announced that the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba was to be closed, but the three-man Montana congressional delegation was pretty quick to put the kibosh on bringing al-Qaeda to Big Sky Country.

Reading the address from the slip of paper that Isaac Bloomfield had given me, I told Robert to stop at what looked to be an abandoned trucking port, probably built as part of the prison complex, complete with loading bays, ramps, and a few abandoned vehicles in assorted states of disrepair.

He wheeled into the parking lot next to a black, lifted half-ton with heavily tinted windows. “This the place?”

Bob swiveled the computer on the center console and began typing in the plate number; after a moment, the information ran across the screen, along with a picture of a severe-looking individual with long hair and a thin face and neck. “Ladies and germs, may I present Joseph Free Bird.” He turned to look at me. “What the hell kind of bullshit name is that?”

Robert laughed. “Must be a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan.”

I stared at the two comics through the steel grate. “You guys want to let me out?”

The Bobs looked at each other again. “Robert, I think he’s trying to keep all the fun to himself.”

“Say it ain’t so, Bob.”

“Open the door.”

They both turned and looked at me, Robert nudging his partner in noncrime. “He’s kind of cranky; I’m thinking we shouldn’t let him out of the unit—he’s likely to do damage to the citizenry.”

“I’m liable to do damage to this shiny new Interceptor with this .45 I’ve got on my hip if you two jackboots don’t let me out of this damn car.”

They got out, and Bob opened the rear passenger-side door.

“I don’t suppose I could convince you guys to stay out here?”

Bob looked at his buddy across the shiny black sheet metal. “I’m beginning to think he doesn’t enjoy our company, Robert.”

“I think you’re right, Bob.”

I glanced at the loading dock and the wire-covered glass in the office door. “Gimme five minutes and then you guys can come in.”

Robert shook his head at his partner and then at me. “Why?”

“Because I think I’m likely to exercise a little badass, and I’d just as soon there be as few witnesses as possible.”

Bob lifted his space-age chronograph and punched a few buttons on his wrist. “You got five minutes and twenty seconds since I think it’ll take you that long to get to the door.”

I started walking.

If the place had ever been a thriving trucking port, it had fallen on hard times. There wasn’t any sign that indicated there was a business present, but the number matched the one on the paper, so I checked the knob—it was locked. Ignoring the hidebound ideas of breaking and entering, inadmissible evidence, and the forty-odd civil restrictions on what I was doing, I used the ever-handy 13-D search warrant.

The door bounced off the wall, but I caught it on the rebound, palming it back open and walking into what must’ve once been a reception or dispatching area. There was no equipment, not even a phone, and there was trash in ruptured bags sitting along the walls and spilling onto the floor.

If Free Bird Enterprises was a going concern, it wasn’t evident here.

There was some kind of old-time rock and roll playing from further inside the building, so I went around a battered counter toward another wire-glass-paned door, this time unlocked, and, pushing it open, I stepped into a short hallway with an old punch clock on the wall and two doors marked H
IS
and H
ERS
.

The music was coming from my left where the hallway opened up into a massive room, built large enough to hold the containers of at least a half-dozen eighteen-wheelers. In the nearest bay there was a nonoperable conveyer belt with stacks and stacks of cardboard packing supplies and four young Native teenagers working away, putting what I assumed was the buffalo chip and lawn clipping samplers in boxes.

I took a few more steps and loudly cleared my throat.

One of the young men, wearing a do-rag and a multitude of tattoos, looked up, saw me, and froze, but then nudged the guy working beside him. The second guy disappeared, and suddenly the music stopped and an older man came over and looked at me. He had the ubiquitous pasty face of a white guy, a glazed look, and the ponytail that Lucian would say made it easier to identify a genuine horse’s ass.

“Hey, can I help you?”

I pulled my jacket back to reveal not only my star, but also the Colt on my hip. “I’m looking for Joseph Free Bird.”

He glanced around, and I wasn’t sure if he thought he could make a run for it or was going to try to finger one of the kids. “Um . . . that’s me.”

If I was looking for a tough guy to vent my rage on, he wasn’t it. “I kind of figured.” I took a step forward. “Walt Longmire, sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming.”

It was about that time that the second kid pulled something out of his pants and dropped his hand alongside his leg.

Dipping a hand to my own sidearm, I looked at him with intent. “At the risk of sounding a little dramatic, how about you show me what you just pulled out of your pants.”

He glanced at the others and then back at me.

“If you don’t show me what you’ve got in your hand right now, I’m going to have to pull mine—and I bet mine’s bigger.”

He still didn’t move.

“Did you hear me?” I waited a second more and then leveled the big Colt at him. “Show me your hands.”

He finally spoke, his eyes wide. “It’s not a gun.” He glanced down at his side. “Um, it looks like a gun, but it’s not. Honest, it’s a paintball gun, but it looks real.”

“Bring it up slow with your finger away from the trigger, got me?”

“Yeah.”

He did as I said, and even from this distance, I could see the red plastic trim around the muzzle indicating it wasn’t real. As he held it in front of him, I became aware of two very large men standing behind the group with their own weapons drawn.

“Why in the heck are you carrying that thing?”

“Protection.”

I reholstered my sidearm as the Bobs came up from behind, slipped the toy away from the kid, and tossed it into one of the boxes full of Styrofoam packing peanuts.

“More likely it’ll get you killed.”

“Damn kid. I just about sent what little brains you got to . . .” Robert shook his head as he flipped the flap on one of the boxes. “Alicia Hammonds, Wetumpka, Alabama.”

 • • • 

“Yeah, he’s a patient of mine but most of what I sell him these days is turtle food.”

We were sitting halfway inside a cavernous tractor trailer with the sour smell of fresh-cut truck skids in our nostrils; at least that’s what I hoped the smell was. He was sitting on a stack of them as I stood, glancing out the back where the Bobs patted down the rest of the gang.

“Turtle food?”

He nodded his head. “Yeah, he buys the stuff by the fifty-pound bag.” He gestured toward his accomplices. “One of my guys drives a pickup full down once a month.”

“But he was a patient of yours?”

“Yeah, kind of. I had to close the clinic, but I still have my mail-order business and provide to a few of my regular clients.”

“Provide what?”

He grinned at his work boots. “Whatever they need.”

“So, if I were to contact the Montana Board of Pharmacy, they could provide me with your certification and licensing information?”

He pulled at the collar of his stained T-shirt. “Um, not really . . . I might’ve let that lapse.”

“Uh huh.”

He nodded his head again. “Most of what I provide is holistic, all-natural remedies.” He leaned back against the interior of the trailer and glanced up at me. “Look, man, Danny was having some problems with life and stuff, and I was just trying to help.”

“What kinds of problems, other than those diagnosed by licensed physicians?”

He stared at me. “He was . . . This is going to sound crazy, but he was seeing things.”

I stood there. “Seeing what?”

“People and shit, man.”

I thought about the conversation Danny and I had had all those years ago. “Dead people.”