Henry squared off quickly, lowered his arms, and waited.
The Kelly Joe Burns character was about ten feet away when he raised his head and saw what it was he was up against. Burns was thin with the obligatory tattoo of flames creeping up his neck, and he swung the belt from the buckle, but you could see his enthusiasm was waning. “You… you, you tell those fuckin’ kids to keep it down.”
“No, I do not think I will.” Henry gestured toward the impromptu weapon in the man’s hand. “And you better put your belt back on before you lose those pants.”
Kelly Joe took a step back. “Fuck you!”
The Bear took a few, easy steps toward him.
I looked around the Cheyenne Nation and made eye contact with the skinny guy, and saw no reason not to throw a scare into the probable drug dealer, who was a cliche walking. “Hey, is that your Dodge over there?”
He drew the belt back, and I wondered what it was going to taste like when Henry shoved the thing down his throat. “Who wants to know?”
“Sheriff Walt Longmire.”
He looked confused for a moment, probably trying to remember who was sheriff of the adjoining county. “This is the Reservation; you’ve got no jurisdiction here.”
I stepped up to the Bear’s shoulder. “I’m working with Tribal Chief Long on a case.”
He took another step back and then turned quickly to get to the steps of his trailer. “Yeah, well, I don’t know anything about anything.”
“Of that, I have no doubt.”
Henry continued to follow him until the man barricaded himself behind the aluminum screen door. “You better get off of my property.”
The Bear’s voice was low. “You better not come after these children with anything but a smile. Do you understand me?” Kelly Joe slammed the inside door between them, and I waited the long moment it took for Henry to turn and walk back. “Do you think he took me seriously?”
“I do.”
The Cheyenne Nation returned to the children, leaned his hands on the rails of the boat, and then dipped a finger in and tasted the water. “No pee pee.”
They immediately began roaring with laughter again, Kelly Joe Burns forgotten.
Henry turned serious. “I am looking for a man; a man driving a yellow Jeep.”
The three talked among themselves in Cheyenne, and then Wiggins looked at me and back to Henry. “Les says she saw one go by last night.”
The Bear pursed his lips. “What time?”
There was another flurry of Cheyenne, and I had to admit that I was impressed that the tykes were fluent in their native language; so few children were these days. Wiggins, the official spokesman, turned back to Henry. “’Bout nine-thirty-two men.”
The Cheyenne Nation and I shot glances at each other before Henry spoke. “Two men?”
Wiggins questioned them again, focusing on the girl. “She says they were long-hairs, but she thought they were men; they had the top down, but it was a long way away.”
“Which direction?”
The boy threw a thumb over his shoulder, southeast. “Off the Rez.”
Henry nodded, thumped his chest with his fist, and extended it to bump with the smaller ones. “Nestaevahosevoomatse.” His gaze drifted to the single-wide and Kelly Joe. “You have anymore trouble with him, you let me know.” He turned, and I followed him toward Rezdawg as Wiggins called after us.
“Hey, when are you going to give me that truck of yours?”
He waved the kid away. “When I am through with it!”
We slammed the doors, and I listened as he ground the starter. On the fifth try, it caught and shuddered a cloud of bluish smoke that we had to back through.
“He can have it now as far as I’m concerned.”
We turned south on 566 and took a right on Hanging Woman Drive, the washboard surface of the gravel road attempting to rattle loose the fillings in my teeth. “Two men.”
The Bear nodded. “Two men.”
“That’s not good.”
Henry shrugged. “For one of them at least.”
I braced a hand against the dash in an attempt to augment the three-quarter-ton’s lack of suspension. “You think it’s Artie?”
“Who else would it be?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question now, isn’t it?” I shook my head. “So they rolled through here last night, stopped at the boot maker’s, and continued south, which means that it’s possible that Erma knows who was with Clarence?”
“Stoltzfus’s children said nothing about another man.”
“Would they have told you?”
“Yes.”
I smiled. “Don’t tell me they’re part of the Birney Road Irregulars?”
There was a pause. “They are now.”
“That means that Clarence picked up the mystery man somewhere down here.” I glanced out the open window at Hanging Woman Creek, which was little more than a dried-out trough. “How far are we from Painted Warrior?”
“As the crow flies?”
I looked out the window, sad for the Crow who hadn’t flown straight.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He gave me a look. “From Birney, about four miles.”
“Close.”
“Yes.”
I pulled my hat down over my eyes. “Wake me up when we get to the lookout.”
Henry had stopped Rezdawg alongside the vault toilet on the dirt parking lot. I captured my hat before it fell to the floorboards and rubbed my eyes with one hand in an attempt to get them to focus.
Diamond Butte Lookout is situated precisely in the middle of nowhere. Just off the Rez and about a mile from Sonnette Road, near, appropriately, Diamond Butte, it was a two-story, thirty-foot masonry fire tower built on not so much of a butte as a hill. Diamond is the high point in the surrounding terrain and glowed gold in the horizontal light of the setting sun.
The point had first been used as a fire lookout after World War II, and the makeshift structure that was erected in 1956 was rebuilt in 1968 with its own tower. It was abandoned almost a decade ago when the Forest Service had discovered it was cheaper, easier, and more efficient to scout for fires with airplanes rather than manning lookouts all over the high plains. As far as I knew, Poker Jim Butte was the only surviving manned lookout in the area. This meant that the tower at Diamond Butte was up for grabs at the remarkably reasonable price of twenty-five bucks a night, firewood provided.
“This must be the place.”
He looked around the parking lot. “No other vehicles.”
“You see any Jeep tracks?”
He pointed to the left-the wide tires of the CJ-5 had left plainly visible tracks where it had pulled in, reversed, and then circled back out. “There.”
“So, one of them got dropped off?”
The Cheyenne Nation nodded and pointed some more. “Yes, departed from the vehicle there.”
“Pretty lonely spot.” I glanced around, reaffirming the obvious as he peered through the blue tint at the top of the windshield. “What?”
He indicated the lookout. “Someone is still up there.”
I crouched down and followed his line of sight; sure enough, an individual seemed framed in the corner
