Free Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson Page B

enough and they move on.”
    This was squaring with everything everybody was saying. “No contact then—no idea where she might’ve gone?”
    “Nope. I still owe her a hundred and sixty-three dollars, so if you hear from her, let me know, will you?”
    I thought about it as I studied the sign down the road and could see another coal train heading our way. “Don’t you find it funny that a person with financial troubles would light out overnight without waiting for the money owed to them?”
    “Honey, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m in a funny business.”
    “I’m getting that. What about Gerald Holman?”
    “Who?”
    I started writing again.
    She stretched a leg out and bumped my knee with a gold boot. “C’mon, I honestly don’t know who the hell you’re talking about.”
    “The sheriff’s investigator who came around asking about Jone, the one who killed himself.”
    “Oh, him.” She nodded. “Thor talked to him once, I guess. I wasn’t there.” She studied me. “Are you thinking . . . ?”
    I ripped the blue warning ticket from the docket and handed it to her as the train sounded its air horns while passing through the crossing. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m in a funny business, too.”
    —
    The bartender at the Sixteen Tons had never seen anybody eat one of the pickled eggs from the bar in the three years he’d owned the place, and neither the postmaster nor the BNSF high-line driver said they’d ever seen anybody eat one in the thirty years before that.
    “Slow movers, huh?”
    The thickset railroad employee with the shaved head and tattoos nodded. “You could say that.”
    I glanced at the bartender. “What else have you got?”
    “Frozen pizza.”
    I studied the off-color ivory orbs floating in the reddish liquid. “I’ll go with the pizza.”
    He glanced over his shoulder at the illuminated Olympia clock on the wall. “Happy Hour, you wanna beer?”
    “Rainier.”
    The cheery man glanced down at Dog—the monster was lying next to my feet. “Something for your dog?”
    “No thank you, he just had a ham.”
    He extended a hand. “Neil Pilano.”
    “Walt Longmire. Nice to meet you, Neil.” We shook. “So, you live around here?”
    “I live over on South Douglas Highway.” He glanced down at Dog. “What’s his name?”
    “Dog.”
    “Easy to remember.”
    The high-line driver stretched a hand out as he finished his beer. “Greg Fry.”
    “Good to meet you, Fry; you work the spur into Arrosa?”
    He adjusted his American flag do-rag. “For a while now. You want a tour of the Black Diamond Mine sometime, just mention my name.”
    I watched as he walked out the door; the bartender searched through the coolers for my beverage of choice, and the postmaster moved down to the stool next to me. “You gave Tommi Sandburg a ticket?”
    “A warning; her brother seemed to think she’d bite me if I gave her a real ticket.”
    “That or fall down out there on the road and start biting herself—she’s had a rough life.” He sipped his beer and nodded. “About a half-dozen marriages and counting.”
    The bartender sat a bottle of Rainier in front of me and lowered a plastic bowl of water down to Dog, who immediately stood and began lapping it up.
    “The ham must’ve been salty.” I turned back to the postmaster and took a sip of my beer. “Anyone next in the lineup?”
    “Me, I hope.”
    I swallowed carefully, so as not to spray the beer all over the bar. “You’re a very lucky man.”
    “I know. Crazy, huh?”
    “Have you ever been married before?”
    “A short period of time back, but I don’t think either one of us took it very seriously—like my great grandfather used to say, nobody misses a slice off an already-cut cake.”
    I sat my beer back on a coaster that advertised Dirty Shirley’s down the road and spread my fingers across the smooth wooden surface of the bar. “I think Tommi might be the kind that counts her slices.”
    He nodded as he