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.
I hung around the scene until Search and Rescue had finished their second sweep; I sat in the Bullet and filled out the reports. Ferg strolled up with a cup of coffee and another cream-filled. “Anything?” Fortunately, I caught him between bites.
“Nothing. We got a lot of sheep shit and tracks.”
“Any suspicious sheep tracks?”
“Nope, no suspicious sheep shit, either. It’s like the Denver stock-yards up there.”
I thought about how you could kill a victim only once, but how a crime scene could die a thousand deaths. I hoped that whatever useful information could be deducted from this patch of God’s little acre was traveling safely in plastic bags toward Cheyenne. Motives are all fine and good, but if we could find out the how, we’d have a shooting’s match chance of finding out the who. I had the niggling feeling I was going to have to call Omar.
On the drive over to the Pritchards’ place I thought about the last time I had seen Cody alive. He was a heavyset kid, built like a linebacker, curly blond hair and pale blue eyes. He had his mother’s looks, his father’s temper, and nobody’s brains. I had pulled him out on three occasions, the last being the rape case. Cody had endeared himself to the local Native American community by being quoted in the Sheridan paper as saying, “Yeah, she was a retard redskin, but she was asking for it.”
The Pritchards had a place on the outskirts of Durant and, by the time I got there, there must have been eight or nine cars and trucks in the drive. Word carries fast in open spaces. As I cut off the engine, the full impact of what I was going to have to do hit me like a Burlington Northern. How do you tell parents that their child is dead? Sure, they’d heard it through the grapevine, but I was the official word. I allowed myself a long sigh.
There were field swallows swooping near the Bullet. I was probably disturbing their family, too. Seemed to be my day for it. It had been longer than twenty-four hours since sleep. It’s easy to work all night because the sun doesn’t come up, but when it does, my eyes start to sting and the rest of me gets a little shaky. I’ve always been this way. I was focusing my eyes when I heard the screen door slam and saw John Pritchard walking down the drive. I never cared too much for John; he was one of those guys who always had to be in control. The conversation wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The pertinent information from him was that Cody had left the house twenty- seven hours ago with an extra doe license. The pertinent information from me was that he wasn’t coming home.
I did the best I could, drove the seven miles back to my place, and sat on the porch-well, the front doorway- but not for very long, because it was cold. I had the presence of mind to fall into the house instead of out of it. I drifted in and out of consciousness until the phone rang, and the answering machine my daughter made me buy picked up. “You’ve reached the Longmire residence. No one is available to answer your call right now, ’cause we’re out chasing bad guys or trying on white hats. If you leave a message after the tone, we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can. Happy trails!” She had taken a great deal of joy in recording the message printed in the instructions, with a few minor alterations. I smiled every time I heard it.
“It’s Pancake Day!” The voice resonated through the lines from fourteen miles away. Jim Ferguson was not only head of Search and Rescue and my longest standing part-time deputy, but he was also the man in charge of driving around Durant once a year at dawn in the fire department’s truck, proclaiming through a bullhorn, “It’s Pancake Day, Pancake Day!”
There are only three major vote-getting days in Absaroka County, and I can’t remember the other two. “Oh God, no. It’s Pancake Day.” I thought about shooting myself. I could see the headline: SHERIFF SHOOTS SELF, UNABLE TO FACE PANCAKES.
“It’s Pancake Day!” Ferg really enjoyed his work. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last hour, just thought somebody ought to call and remind you. But if you really are gonna retire next year, then who gives a shit?”
I stumbled to the phone beside the recliner. “Is it really today?”
“If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’.” There was a pause. “Hey, Walt, if you want, I can just tell ’em we were up all night.” Ferg was slightly in the Turk camp for future sheriff, but I had other plans. If Vic was going to be the first female sheriff in Wyoming, I only had a year to pull in all my political markers. I could last an hour of Pancake Day with the Elks, the Eagles, the Lions, the Jaycees, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and, of course, the AARPs.
“I’ll be there in a half hour.”
“Remember, it’s at the Catholic church this year.”
“You bet.” I plugged in the coffeemaker and dumped enough coffee for eight cups into the filter with only enough water for four. I took a shower while it was perking. The plumbing was somewhat makeshift, but the water that came from above went away below. It went away below through a bathtub that Henry had found for me for twenty dollars. Somebody on the Rez had used it for target practice with a. 22 but had only chipped the porcelain. Then there was the shower curtain. I don’t know what the exact physical dynamics are that cause a shower curtain to attach itself to your body when you turn on the water but, since my shower was surrounded on all sides by curtains, I turned on the water and became a vinyl, vacuum-sealed sheriff burrito.
I slid behind the wheel of the Bullet and started driving the fourteen miles to town. Durant is situated along the Bighorn Mountains and, because there is abundant fish and game, it’s become the retiree capitol of Wyoming. In Absaroka County, to ignore the octogenarian vote is to pump gas at the Sinclair station for a living. Service jobs are about all there are in Durant, somewhat stunting the younger generation and forcing the majority out by age nineteen; but the retirees keep coming from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa, with the odd Texan and Californian thrown in for spice. They come looking for the romance of the west that they had paid shiny quarters to view on Saturday afternoons in flickering black and white. They waited half a century of stamping out automobile bumpers to get their western dream; they paid for it and, by God, they were going to have it. Most ended up picking up and moving out, headed for Florida, Arizona, or wherever the weather was easier. I liked the ones who stayed. You’d see them out after the blizzards, shoveling away, and waving at the Bullet like it was the circus come to town. Hell, I’d stop and talk to them. Sheriffs have to get elected in Wyoming, so we have to be liked. I imagine that, if you had to elect the average police force, the turnover rate would spin your Rolodex.
When I first started out, it was the part of the job that I enjoyed the least, courting the public. But as time wore on, it got to be the part that I enjoyed the most. Martha was right when she said that I needed a bumper sticker that said BORN TO BULLSHIT. The debates were the best part. In ’81, old Sheriff Connally planned a peaceful takeover. He ran against me so no one else could and had lofted softballs to me so that I felt like Harmon Killabrew by the time the debate was over. I was elected. Lucian retired and was now living the high life in room 32 at the Durant Home for Assisted Living. I still went over on Tuesday nights to play chess, and he still kicked my ass, to his unending delight.
I looked at the inch of snow that dappled the sagebrush. It looked like a Morse code of white dots and dashes leading down the road. If I could read the message, would it tell me the story I wanted to hear? The truth still stood that I was a sheriff who had survived by the cult of personality, and that, if the trend were to continue, my heir-apparent would not be elected. Was I just trying to force Vic down the throats of the county because I could? No, she was the best person for the job and that was the reason I was going to have to keep pushing. Pancake Day, Pancake Day.
I idled down into second gear at the corner of Main and Big Horn and looked down the street to see Turk’s Trans Am parked at the office. Just seeing his car made my ass hurt. I didn’t feel like facing him on an empty stomach. I hoped he would have already contacted Lavanda Running Horse over at Game and Fish for any information we could get about last night’s incident. I circled quickly around the courthouse to avoid being seen and made a beeline for the Catholic church. The place was mobbed, and there was no parking. I wheeled the Bullet onto the concrete pad beside the HVAC unit and cut the engine. I figured the Pope wasn’t coming today.
“Well, if it isn’t the long arm of the law.” It was an old joke, but one I didn’t mind. “Longmire, pull up a chair and sit yourself down.” Steve Brandt was the mayor of Durant and the de facto president of the Business Associates Committee, a loosely affiliated group of warring tribes that made up the commercial facet of the downtown. He also owned the screen-printing place on Main and had done the T-shirts for the annual Sheriff’s Department vs. Fire Department softball game, but the less said about this the better. Next to him was David Fielding of the Sportshop, Elaine Gearey who had the Art Gallery, Joe of Joe Benham’s Hardware and Lumber, Dan Crawford from the IGA, and Ruby.
