Dry Bones: A Walt Longmire Mystery (22 page)

“All right, we will give Jen a total of two.”

“Eva?” I thought about the psychopharmic cloud surrounding the woman. “Who the heck knows?”

“She would keep her son from Jen, and Enic would side with her on traditionalism.”

“And the two would override Randy?”

“Yes.”

“Give her a three.” I looked out the window but still could see nothing but the rain pelting the glass. “Means?”

“She cooked for him.”

“Yes.” I sighed. “Three.”

“Opportunity?”

“Three.”

He nodded. “We have a new leader at nine.”

I moved on. “Taylor.”

“He would get the ranch eventually, but there are two surviving generations ahead of him.”

“He’d get the girl.”

He shook his head. “Do you think the objections to their May/September relationship were strong enough to kill his grandfather for?”

“Seems like a stretch.”

“Give him a one? I am not giving him a zero.”

“Means?”

“He had access to the alcohol and the turtle feed.”

“He doesn’t drive.”

“True.”

“Two.” He glanced back out the window. “Opportunity?”

“He was around the house all the time, when he wasn’t running away, and he didn’t seem to have too much of a problem shooting at us after we found Danny.”

“Two, which gives us five.”

“Dino-Dave.”

“Killing Danny would only complicate things for him.”

I agreed. “One.”

“Means?”

“He doesn’t live on the ranch; I’d give him another one.”

“Opportunity?”

“Same, so we’ve got an all-time low of three.” Suddenly I could feel the aircraft pull up, and we hovered there in the air, probably a hundred feet or so above the ground. Omar motioned toward his earphones and then gestured toward ours.

Henry and I plucked them from the hooks and put them on, adjusting the microphones in front of our mouths as Omar’s voice sounded in our ears. “You’ve got a call from the FBI.”

“Yep, I left a message for McGroder on his cell phone. Mike?”

His voice was groggy. Static. “I just got the message to call you.”

“Any luck on that computer?”

Static. “No, it’s annihilated; any information on the hard drive is corrupted. Sorry . . .”

“Well, that’s a disappointment, but I’ve still got one ace in the hole. Hey, Mike, do you guys have any kind of whizbang satellite gizmo that can pinpoint the location of some suspects out here on the—”

Static. “Where the hell are you?”

“I’m in a helicopter; we’re looking for the runaways and Enic, and I was hoping to call in a favor and see if the bureau had any way of helping us track them down.”

Static. “Tonight?”

“Well, yep.”

Static. “No.”

“What do you mean no?”

Static. “I mean no as in you’re only going to get satellite reference on a twenty-four-hour basis, and then somebody’s going to have to go through the data. Besides, is it still raining?”

“Yep.”

Static. “Then you’re not going to get anything anyway.” He readjusted the phone. “I can locate a guy in Manhattan using his mobile in a third of a second, but out here in God’s country? You’ve got to be kidding.” He laughed. “If they were using a cell phone we could get an approximate location from the sending towers, and by approximate, I mean a couple hundred square miles, but since there is no cell service almost anywhere here in Wyoming, they won’t be using one—which means we get zippo, nada, zilch.”

“Thanks for your help.”

Static. “Any time.” There was a silence, but then he spoke again. “Look, I’ll contact NSA, but I’m promising less than nothing, okay?”

“Better than nothing, I guess.”

Static. “Over and out.”

I listened to the radio go dead and glanced up at the millionaire pilot. “Omar, how far to the site?”

The nose of the chopper dipped, and we jetted forward. “About two minutes.”

As we skimmed along into the rain and the windswept sky, I rapidly moved down the list. “Randy I’m giving a two on motive simply because he would have to kill his uncle as well to get anything out of it.” I thought about it. “But there was something Enic said about Danny being hard on Randy.”

Henry raised a finger in response. “Also, Enic is a Traditional and possibly more open to the idea of closing out something newfangled like the Cheyenne Conservancy.”

“I just don’t see those two agreeing on much of anything.”

“Around eight million dollars can soothe over a number of differences.”

I shook my head. “I’m still giving him a two.”

“Means?”

“Gotta give him a three on that.”

Opportunity?”

“Three.”

“Second place at eight.”

“Enic.”

“He knew about the relationship, and he’s been trying to help them.” I reached over and fingered the delicate glass of the bud vases, a strange thing to have onboard a twin-engine, light-medium helicopter, but it had come from Neiman Marcus. “He said something about Eva not being happy about the situation.” I sighed. “He gets the ranch, he gets the eight-million-dollar Jen . . . He gets everything.”

The Cheyenne Nation nodded. “Three.”

“He just doesn’t seem like the type; I get the feeling he wouldn’t kill his brother.”

“He struck you in the back of the head with the stock of a shotgun.”

“He could’ve shot me.” I acquiesced. “Three.”

“Means?”

“Three.”

“Opportunity?”

“Three.”

An eyebrow on the Bear crept up like a black caterpillar. “Need I remind you that the game is not Motive-Means-Opportunity, and Feelings.”

Boy howdy.

“Is it me, or have we stopped?”

The Bear nodded. “I think we are in the process of stopping.”

The Bell 430 eased to a hover over the dig site as the northwest wind buffeted the fuselage and Omar eased us downward, suddenly pivoting to the left, his voice a little too excited for my taste. “Sorry, that ridge was a little closer than I thought. We’re checking the immediate area from the air and then, if we don’t find anything, we begin the circle?”

“I’m open to ideas if you’ve got a better one.”

“Nope—just checking before I turn on the lights.”

Henry glanced at me as we swept the immediate vicinity, our eyes getting used to the sudden glaring light. “Enic is armed?”

I nodded. “With a single-barrel shotgun that looked as if it might’ve come off a Wells Fargo wagon.”

“Do you have an extra firearm, just in case?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“That’s okay, I do.” Omar’s voice assaulted us, along with the butt-end of a tactical shotgun, complete with a black nylon sling. “Benelli M4 with all the bells and whistles—nothing lives in two equal parts, unless you get attacked by earthworms.”

The Cheyenne Nation took the thing from the front passenger seat and held it gently in his hands, more than a little impressed with the sleek, matte-black 12-gauge. His fingers wrapped around the fore stock near the flashlight below the barrel, and he flipped on the high-intensity light.

“Shades of Vietnam?”

His eyes came up to mine, and he smiled as his free hand pulled the hood of the poncho up over the cloak of dark hair. “Just a little.”

“Hey, Omar, nothing moving around here—let’s proceed south by southwest and see if we can find a lineman in a hay shack, or something like that.”

I figured it was pretty much an impossibility that we might stumble onto the shack even with the lights, but I kept my eyes out the windows, as much as I didn’t want to, adjusted the mic, and spoke to Omar. “Follow the drainages; when we found the opening to the mine it was on a hillside with the shack on the ridge above it.” I’d just finished speaking when there was a loud thump, the aircraft shuddered, and the searchlights were entwined in a mass of wet, waving grass. “Did we just hit the ground?”

Omar’s voice sounded completely calm. “Just grazed a hilltop.”

My voice, on the other hand, was not so completely calm. “Let’s not do that again, okay?”

Henry glanced over at me, shook his head, and continued looking out the window.

“I know this area pretty well. I’ve hunted down here and we—”

There was another thump. “Damn it, Omar! Put another twenty feet between us and the ground, would you?” This thump had been different, though. The helicopter shuddered like before, but now there seemed to be an imbalance in the vibrations of the thing. “What the hell was that?”

“Shit.” I watched as Omar struggled with the controls, finally easing the craft back in an attempt to hover, but the chopper was having none of it and pitched to the side.

I slammed my shoulder against the door, clamped a hand onto the seat, and, glancing at Henry, noticed he had lost a little of his nonchalance. “What’s happening?”

“We hit something, or something has hit us.”

I pressed myself even further into the seat, if possible. “Are we going down?” He didn’t answer, but there was another shuddering thump and it seemed as if the helicopter was tipping forward even though we were still moving. “Are we on the ground?”

Omar answered. “We are, but we are sliding—better grab on to something.”

I reached for the seat in front of me, but we hit the side of the hill before I could hold on. I flew forward, taking Henry with me, and we tumbled into the cockpit with Omar, crushing him into the instrument panel as we flipped over the dash and lodged against the glass.

The good news was that we’d stopped moving.

I yanked my arm free as the Bear carefully placed the shotgun on the seat, then pulled himself into the copilot position and looked at Omar, who was piecing together a strip of flesh at the bridge of his nose that was leaking copious amounts of blood.

Henry disengaged himself from the copilot controls. “Are you all right?”

Omar nodded and started shutting the helicopter down. He gestured toward me. “Yeah, I guess. I was fine until Bigfoot planted a boot in my face as you two went over.” He reached down and hit a few more buttons and then spoke into the mic. “Absaroka County Control, we are down. Requesting assistance.” He keyed the mic again. “Absaroka County Control?” He listened for a moment and then pulled his trademark black hat from his head and ceremoniously dropped the headset to the floorboards. “Either we’re out of range, there is no reception, or the radio is FUBAR.”

Lying on the leather-covered dash, I dropped my head back and looked at the rain striking the Plexiglas. “What did we hit—or what hit us?”

Omar gave the flap of flesh one more quick pinch and wiped the blood away with a GORE-TEX sleeve. He put his hat back on, then grabbed a high-intensity flashlight from a console and pulled the lever on the door. “Let’s go find out.”

The Cheyenne Nation piled out his side with the Benelli, and as comfortable as I was just lying there, my sense of duty called and I dragged myself off the comfy shelf, fell into Omar’s seat, and slid out after them. They were looking at the chopper, but, like them, I couldn’t see anything beyond the bending of the runners and a little cosmetic damage to the front of the fuselage.

“It looks fine.” I glanced at the multimillionaire but noticed he was pointing up.

“Not really.”

Henry and I followed his eyes and the beam of the flashlight and could see large chunks broken from the rotors. “I’m no aviation engineer, but that looks bad.”

“It is.”

“I don’t think the county can cover this.”

“I’ve got insurance.” Omar walked behind me around the stabilizers as the Bear and I, saying nothing, looked at each other in the rain. After a few seconds, our pilot came back and held out a shredded piece of what looked like rubber-coated cable.

“Power line?”

He nodded. “An old one, copper.” He glanced around. “Probably a rural electrification feed from back in the thirties.

“Who the hell would be running electric lines all the way out here back then?”

“Let’s go ask them.”

“I was thinking you should stay here with the helicopter.”

“Like hell.”

I turned to look at Henry as he pulled up the hood of his poncho again. I watched as he studied the rotors and then looked over our heads toward the hillside behind us where there was a square outline of a lit, framed window that could be seen on the ridge above us, in what I could only assume was the lineman shack.

“Good job.” I punched Omar’s shoulder with my fist. “You found it.”

He reached back into a storage section of the Bell and pulled out another shotgun exactly like the one he’d given the Cheyenne Nation. “Indeed.”

We walked toward the light. “So, how many of those things do you have onboard?”

Omar tucked the second Benelli under his arm and wiped the rain and more blood from his face. “In my experience, you can never have enough AsomBroso tequila or shotguns.”

The Bear held back as the pilot stopped for a moment, holding his nose. “The Reserva Del Porto?”

Omar shrugged. “Of course.”

Henry called back to him, “The bottle looks like a penis.”

He looked up and sniffed. “At eleven hundred dollars a bottle it’s fucked me up enough times.”

As I pulled up beside him, Henry placed a hand on my chest. “Just as a precaution, I think you should know that I believe someone may have been shooting at the helicopter.”

“You see something in the rotors?”

“Maybe.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I am still not sure; it is possible that it was ball bearings, but since the engines are bearingless, I am thinking it could have been a shotgun.”

“Sure about what?” Omar had caught up with us.

“Henry thinks we might’ve been shot at.”

He shook his head. “Bullshit—it was the power line.”

The Bear didn’t say anything.

“Could it have been both?”

Omar shook his head. “I’ve been shot at before, and the results are similar but different.”

I knew Rhoades’s background and was pretty sure he hadn’t been in the military. “Where?”

“Kyrgyzstan, hunting Argali sheep. We were in the Batken Oblast near the Kyrgyz-Tajik border where the land mines are like paving stones. The only way you can get the sheep is with a helicopter, but with all the political and ethnic violence, you’re constantly flying into one tribe’s or another’s airspace—so they shoot at you, and sometimes they get lucky and score a hit.” Omar started climbing, and we followed. “Really sucks getting shot down in a minefield.”

“I bet.”

“Saved my life one time with a bag of bite-size Snickers bars.” He paused, tipping his head down and letting the rain run off the brim as I had done numerous times in the last seventy-two hours. “We were able to land this piece of shit Hind and avoid the land mines and what happens? This patrol of Issyk-Kul partisans came marching up to us like the minefield doesn’t exist.” He shook his head. “I swear, there wasn’t a one of them with hair between their legs. They were gonna shoot us, but I happened to have that bag of candy and I swear that’s what saved our lives.” He laughed and moved ahead. “There was a guy at the Transit Center in Manas near the airport close to Bishkek who gave me the tip. Spooky fucker, but he said you could offer these teenage soldiers your Rolex and they’d look at you like you were an idiot, but pull out candy or soda and you had friends for life.”

I stepped back on the shelf a little, remembering the light in the shack’s window. “If we cut the power line, how come they still have electricity?”

Henry nodded and started after Omar. “From the quality of the illumination, I would say propane.”

I trudged in the mud after them. “From that distance in these conditions you could tell that?”

“Yes.”

Omar laughed and called over his shoulder. “Bullshit.”

Suddenly, there was an unmistakable blast of a 20-gauge, and shot ricocheted off of everything. I covered my face with an arm as Omar fell onto the ground next to me. “Well, bullshit.”

I asked the question you ask in like situations, which always sounds like bad dialogue in a B war movie: “Are you hit?”

He grimaced and clutched at his leg. “No, I was just tired and thought I’d lie down and take a nap.”

I sat him on the deer trail and examined the wounds, two small holes that appeared to have struck to the left of center on the femur and lodged in the thigh. “You’re lucky—eight inches higher and you’d be singing soprano.”

He gritted his teeth and spit out the words, “Well, it hurts like a bitch.”

I pulled a bandana from the inside pocket of my jacket underneath my slicker and carefully wrapped it around his leg, tight enough to stem some of the bleeding. I helped him up. “Can you walk?”

“I think so . . .” I released him, and he immediately fell. “I guess not.”

Sitting him upright, I looked at the hill, but from this vantage point I couldn’t see where the shack was or where the shooter might be. Henry had moved to the right and was studying the rim of the ridge above us. “See anything?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you want to go ahead and clear the way, and I’ll bring Omar up with me?”

Without answering, he slipped up the side of the hillside like a black ribbon.

I turned back to our wounded comrade. “I’ll help you up the hill and out of the rain.”

“What if they keep shooting at us?”

“They’ll probably hit me first. Anyway, I’ve got faith in the Bear’s abilities in counterinsurgency.” Rhoades strung the shotgun over his shoulder, and we trudged up the trail. “But stop saying bullshit; it’s bad karma.”

“Bullshit.”

I had lost track of Henry and just hoped that the shooter had lost track of us. That hope was short-lived, and pellets ricocheted off a rock outcropping to our left but I was less worried when three consecutive rounds from the Benelli M4 riot gun returned the fire.

“Jesus . . . It sounds like Beirut up there.” Omar’s voice was right in my ear, just as it had been in the chopper.

I kept working us up the path and almost hoped to be shot so that I could take a rest. When we made the small break in the rocks and the flat area at the precipice of the ridge where the shack sat, there was no one around, and light was cascading from the open doorway.

“I don’t see a large Indian with a shotgun, do you?”

“No, and I’m hoping that that’s a good thing.” I was reassured by what sounded like voices and a barking dog coming from inside the shack. We limped to the door and carefully peeked inside. Henry had pinned Enic onto the cot and was attempting to hold him steady as Jennifer’s mastiff stood barking in the corner. I entered and looked at the Coleman lantern sitting and hissing on the small table to our left—of course, Henry had been correct.

Omar had limped in beside me. “Did you shoot the Indian?”

Henry threw the words over his shoulder, “I am an Indian. I am allowed to shoot Indians.”

I noticed the broken shotgun that Enic had hit me in the head with earlier, lying on the floor, and shrugged Omar onto the only available chair. “That seems exclusively racist to me.”

“You can shoot as many white people as you would like.”

Enic had looked better. “How is he?”

The Bear had pulled up the older man’s shirt, and I could see where the pellets had hit just above the kidney, along his side where they appeared to have missed any solid organs.

I moved closer as the Bear pulled a large packet with a first-aid emblem from the folds of his poncho. “There are two more in the underside of the arm; he was turning when I fired.”

The dog continued to bark until I’d finally had enough and yelled at him, “Shut up!” He did and promptly sat and wagged at me. “Good dog.” I watched as Omar filched a Band-Aid and applied it to his nose. “Where did you get the first-aid kit?”

“From the helicopter—it was in the compartment next to the flower vases.” He glanced at me as he began sorting out ointment, gauze pads, and strips of bandage. “Generally, somebody gets shot when we are involved in these types of adventures, so I thought it best to be prepared.”