“Nope.”
She turned to look at me, seemingly irritated. “Really?”
“Really.”
She stayed with me for a second, and then, fading into disappointment, glanced at her wine glass. “So, you don’t think they feel pain.”
“No, I said I don’t think they feel pain like us.”
“Oh.” The smile slowly returned. “For a minute there I thought you had become a jerk.”
“No, a blacksmith’s son.”
She continued to smile and then nodded. “You used to come out to our place with your father . . . Lloyd.”
I watched her. “Nobody remembers his name.”
“I think my mother had a little crush on him.”
“Just another Longmire, plying his wiles. When I was real little, I used to make the shoeing rounds with him. It looked painful to me, so I asked him.”
“What did he say?”
“Pop used to speak in biblical terms, but what he said was that the brutes of the field don’t feel pain like humans. That that’s the price we pay for thinking.”
She took another sip of her wine. “Comforting to know that we’re the species that feels the most pain.”
I half-closed an eye and looked at her for a second. “Is that East Coast sarcasm I’m hearing?”
“No, that’s East Coast self-pity.”
“Oh.” I was getting in way over my head. I can do the bull about as well as it can be done, but that edgy buzz-talk makes me weary in a heartbeat. I try and keep up, but after a while I start to drag.
She placed a hand on mine, and I think it was the hottest hand I had ever felt. “Walter, are you all right?”
It always started like this, a touch and a kind word. I used to feel heat behind my eyes and a shortness of breath, but now I just feel the emptiness. The fuses of desire are blown black windows, and I’m gone with no pennies to save me. “Oh, you mean you really want to talk?”
Her eyes were so sad, so honest. “Yeah, I figured since we didn’t have anything else to do.”
So I leaned in and told her the truth. “I just . . . I’m just numb most of the time.”
She blinked. “Me too.”
I felt like one of those guys in the movies, there in the foxhole asking how much ammo your buddy’s got. I got two more clips, how ’bout you? “I know the things I’m supposed to do, but I just don’t seem to have the energy. I mean, I’ve been thinking about turning over my pillow for three weeks.”
“I know . . .” She looked away. “How’s Cady?”
Here I was floating in the white-capped Pacific of self-pity, and Vonnie threw me a lifeline to keep me from embarrassing myself. Three fingers, bartender . . . “She’s great.” I looked at Vonnie to see if she was really interested. She was. “She’s doing so well in Philadelphia.”
“She always has been special.”
“Yes, she is.” We sat there for a moment, allowing the crackle and roar of my parental self-satisfaction to fade into the soft glow of friendly conversation. Her hand was still on my arm when the phone rang.
“Looks like she’s tracked you down.” The hand went away.
I watched as Henry allowed it to ring the second time, his tele-signature, then snatched it from the cradle. “It is another beautiful evening here at the Red Pony bar and continual soirée, how can I help you?” His face pulled up on one side as if the receiver had just smacked him. “Yes, he is here.” He stretched the cord across the expanse of the bar and handed me the phone. His eyes stayed on mine.
I nudged it between my chin and shoulder with one hand, took a sip of beer with the other, and swallowed. “Hello, Sugar Blossom . . .”
“Hello, shithead,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s not a dead sheep.”
I stood there, letting the world shift at quarter points and then got a bearing and dropped my voice. “What’ve we got?” Every eye in the bar was on me.
Vic’s voice held an edge that I had never heard before, approaching an excitement under the grave suppression of businesslike boredom. “Male, Caucasian, approximately twenty-one years of age . . . one entry wound characteristic of, maybe, a .30-06.”
I started to rub my eyes, noticed that my hand was shaking, and put it in my pocket. “All right . . . call the Store and tell them to send the Little Lady.”
There was a brief pause, and I listened to the static from a radio on 137 patched through to a landline in Durant. “You don’t want any Cashiers?”
“No, just the Bag Boys. I’ve got a highly dependable staff.”
She laughed. “Wait till you get out here. These fucking sheep have been marching around on everything; I think the little bastards actually ate some of his clothes. And they shit on him.”
“Great . . . Past the Hudson Bridge; you got your lights on?”
“Yep.” She paused for a moment, and I listened to the static. “Walt?”
I had started to hang up the phone. “Yeah?”
“You better bring some beer to quiet Bob and Billy down.”
This was a first. “You bet.” I started to hang up again.
“Walt?”
“Yep?”
“It’s Cody Pritchard.”
2
There’s nothing like a dead body to make you feel, well, removed. I guess the big city boys, cataloguing forty or fifty homicides a year, get used to it, but I never have. I’ve been around enough wildlife and stock that it’s pretty commonplace, the mechanics of death. There’s a religion worthy of this right of passage, of taking that final step from being a vertical creature to a horizontal one. Yesterday you were just some nobody, today you’re the honored dead with bread bags rubber-banded over your hands. I secure what’s left of my dwindling humanity with the false confidence of the living, the deceitful wit of the eight-foot tall and bulletproof. Yea, verily, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will live forever. If I don’t, I sure as hell won’t become an unattended death in the state of Wyoming with sheep shit all over me.
We had pretty much done our work, secured the area, lit it up, and finished taking pictures. There’s a kind of cocksure attitude that overtakes a man in the presence of the dearly departed, a you’re-dead-and-I’m-not kind of perspective. There’s something about a carcass of an animal like oneself, the post-shuffled, mortal coil that brings out the worst in me, and I start thinking that I’m funny.
“I’ve been thinking about a search-and-rescue sheep squad.” I picked some of the dried shit from my pants and flicked it from my fingernails. “The way I figure it, the sheep would work up a damn storm and never raise any hell about working conditions. Might even get rid of some of this leafy spurge.” I looked around at the frosted milky-yellow plants that had been half eaten by the baahing attending witnesses we had corralled at the base of the hill. I had been here for nine hours, and the sun was beginning to scatter the gray blocks that made up the eastern horizon. The crime scene was a slight depression at the middle of a wreath-shaped ridge. “What do you think?”
T.J. raised an eyebrow from her clipboard. “Cody Allen Pritchard.” She returned the eyebrow to the hunting license and wallet that were clipped to the official forms. “DOB, 8/1/81. Kind of has a ring to it.”
Cody had looked better. Whoever had dispatched the young man had done so with a smooth and consistent pull-off as center shot. From the back, it looked as though someone had drilled a perfectly round hole between Cody’s shoulder blades; from the front, it looked as though someone had driven a stagecoach through him. The body was lying facedown, all the limbs arranged in a normal fashion, arms at the sides with palms turned to the lemon-colored sky. I was tempted to see if Cody’s lifeline was abnormally short, but his hands had already been bagged. A green John Deere hat with an adjustable strap in the back had been carted off with the unfired Model 94 Winchester 30-30 that had been found at his side. His clothes were in bad shape, even for a person who had had more than ten cc’s of lead pushed through him at approximately twenty-five hundred feet per second. The sheep had done a number on him. The orange vest was torn where they had tried to eat it, the sleeves of his flannel shirt were shredded, and even his work boots looked as though they had been nibbled on. They had slept on him, gleaning the last energies of the late Cody Pritchard as his body cooled. Finally, much to the dissatisfaction of the crime lab people, they had shit on him.
I gestured to the sheep down the hill. “I’m assuming that you’re going to want to question all the witnesses.”
T.J. Sherwin had been the director of the Division of Criminal Investigation’s lab unit for seventeen odd years. I had always called her the Little Lady, as opposed to many of the other nicknames that periodically circulated through Wyoming’s law enforcement community: Bitch on Wheels, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Bag Lady. The last referred to the Division of Criminal Investigation’s home away from home, a converted grocery in Cheyenne, commonly tagged as the Store. Hence, DCI lab personnel were routinely called Bag Boys, and criminal investigators were Cashiers.
When I first met T.J., she had informed me that I was just the kind of dinosaur she was going to make a personal career of eradicating. As the years passed and we worked numerous cases together, I remained a dinosaur, but I was her favorite dinosaur. “So, what do you think?” She had finally lowered the clipboard.
“He doesn’t look like a deer.” I gave Cody another study.
“Walt, let’s drop the aw shucks bullshit. This is one of the boys that was involved in that rape case two years ago.” T.J. had held my hand through the Little Bird rape investigation, introducing me to the world of secretors, medical swabs, and gynecological exams.
“Yeah, well, I’ll follow up on the home front; he wasn’t any angel. We’ll go through the licensees, and, hopefully, find some poor, dumb bastard from Minnesota that got a little trigger happy.”
“You don’t think it was an accident?”
I thought about it. “Like I said, he wasn’t an altar boy.”
“You have a feeling about this?”
I started to give her the old Colonel-Mustard-in-the-library-with-the-candlestick routine, but thought better of it. “No, I don’t.”
* * *
When we got back, the Bag Boys had already zipped Cody up and loaded him onto a gurney; some of the others were still processing evidence into freezer bags. One of the boys was dropping a tattered eagle feather into a plastic envelope. He looked up as we approached. “Looks like everything out here’s been making a meal of this poor guy.”
T.J. turned to me. “Walt, are you going to be the primary on this one?”
“Do you mean am I going to be riding in one of those Conestoga wagons of yours for five hours down to Cheyenne?”
“Yes.”
“No.” I pointed to the group of vehicles where Vic was busy putting away the photography equipment. “At the bottom of this hill, you will find my somewhat agitated, but highly skilled, primary investigator.”
T.J. smiled. She liked Vic. “She have any cases pending?”
“Well, she’s been hanging Christmas lights in town, but I figure we can let her go for a few days.”
“It’s not even Thanksgiving.”
“It’s a city council thing.”
We followed the body down to where the rest of our little task force had congregated. Someone had brought a number of Thermoses full of hot coffee and a few boxes of donuts. I got a cup of coffee; I don’t eat donuts. I spotted Jim Ferguson, one of my deputies and head of Search and Rescue, across the bed of the truck and asked him if they had turned anything up on their walk around. His mouth was full of cream-filled, but the gist was no. I told him I was going to replace his staff with the sheep.
“We did a three-hundred-yard perimeter, but the light wasn’t so good. We’ll do another soon as everybody gets a donut and some coffee. You think this guy left brass?”
“I hope.”
I took my coffee and moved over to where T.J. and Vic were seated on a tailgate. They were looking at some of the evidence; hopefully, they were discussing something I could understand.
“Single shot, center, didn’t get too much of the sternum.” Vic held a bag up to the rising sun and looked at the metal fragment inside. “Fuck, I don’t know.” T.J. patted the spot beside her with the palm of her hand, and I sat. Vic continued, “It looks like a slug. I’m thinking 12 gauge or something just a little bigger.”
“Bazooka?”
She lowered the bag, and her eyes met mine. “You’re getting rid of me?”
I nodded my head. “Yep.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a big pain in the butt.”
“Fuck you.”
“And you talk dirty.”
She handed the bagged bullet to T.J. “You’re going to be stuck up here with Turk.”
“Yeah, well, maybe we’ll get the Christmas lights put up together.” Vic snorted and readjusted her gun belt. “Besides, you’ve forgotten more about this space-age stuff than I’ll ever know. You can relay information back to me.” The tarnished gold stared at me, unblinking. “You’ll only be down there for two days. It will take us that long to round up all the usual suspects.” I was the old dog who had learned his fill of new tricks, and it was only logical that I work the county and the people.
She poked me in the belly. Her finger remained in one of my fat rolls, and she poked each word for emphasis, “If Search and Rescue don’t find anything, you gonna call Omar?”
“That’s another reason for you to leave, you don’t like Omar.”
She poked me again. “You be careful, all right?”
This all sounded very strange coming from Vic’s mouth, but I took it as affection and punched her on the shoulder. “I’m always . . .” She knocked my hand away.
“I mean it.” She didn’t have kind eyes, they rarely looked away, and they always told the truth. I could use eyes like that. “I’ve got a funny feeling about all of this.”
I gazed back up to the patch of sage and scrub weed and watched the sun free itself from the red hills. “Yeah, well you got five hours to talk to T.J. about this woman’s intuition thing.” The next poke hurt.