Free Dry Bones: A Walt Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson Page A

going to get laid?”
    “I don’t think they occupy themselves with those kinds of thoughts.”
    “Well, fuck them, I do.” She pulled me in closer. “Maybe if the Old Cheyenne got laid every once in a while they wouldn’t have to haunt the only single, smart, sexy guy I know.” She studied me. “What did he say again?”
    “
You will stand and see the good, but you will also stand and see the bad—the dead shall rise and the blind will see.
”
I looked down at her. “Does the fact that I’m haunted like an old house turn you off?”
    “Just the opposite.” She tugged on my gun belt, pulling me in even closer. “I told you, you think too much.” She pushed me away, sat on the crate, and began unbuttoning her uniform shirt, only to pause halfway through the operation to bend one knee over the other in a provocative manner. Then she arched her back, spread her arms, causing her shirt to gape even more, as she assumed a pinup pose. “This is a big crate.”
    I was suddenly having a hard time thinking.

4
    I was at the top of a ridge alongside a man who was standing with his back to me, a tall man, broad, with silver hair to his waist. In his shirtsleeves, despite the weather, he stood there singing a Cheyenne song.
    It was a clear night, the kind that freezes the air in your lungs with nothing standing between your upturned face and the glittering cold of those pinpricks in the endless darkness, the wash of stars constructing the Hanging Road as it arced toward the Camp of the Dead.
    The man next to me had stopped singing and spoke from the side of his mouth. It was a voice I’d heard before, even though I couldn’t exactly place it. I heard me call out to him. “Virgil?”
    He half-turned toward me, his profile sharp, and I could see that it was not Virgil White Buffalo as he studied me from the corner of one eye. “You’re bleeding?”
    I watched myself looking down at the blood soaking through my sheepskin coat and the ground around me. “Um, yep . . . I think I am.”
    He walked effortlessly toward me, his face only a few inches from my own, the empty sockets shooting through his head like twin telescopes magnifying the black, infinite space with only a few aberrant sparks of warmth from dying stars. Slowly he reached up and wiped the tear from my face. “Good—we can use the humidity.”
     • • • 
    I awoke with a start.
    “What?”
    I turned my head and looked at Vic, covered in the blanket I’d brought in from my truck. “What?”
    She yawned and stretched an arm out, then hid her mouth with her hand. “You were talking in your sleep.”
    I rolled over on one shoulder, closer to her. “I know.”
    “It was about the blind guy.” She studied me, the sparks in her eyes still visible even in the dim confines of the High Plains Dinosaur Museum. “Danny Lone Elk.”
    I rested my head on my forearm. “Yep.”
    She waited before finally speaking again. “I mean, you weren’t sure, the last time.”
    “It was him.”
    She put a hand out and rested her cool fingers on my arm, near a small scar that was a leftover from an altercation with two kids out of Casper who had robbed a liquor store and had been on their way to Canada when I had the fortune or misfortune of pulling them over for a burnt-out taillight.
    “Same dream?”
    Drawn back from wounds past, I looked at her. “What?”
    “The same dream?”
    “Yep, pretty much.” I lay there looking at her, and our lives seemed to be swirling just then, circling with orbits that were becoming smaller and smaller. “I know.”
    She looked puzzled. “Know what?”
    She’d been shot defending me a few months back, and while she’d been in the ICU, Doc Bloomfield had made the mistake of telling me she’d been pregnant. She’d lost the child, and up to this moment we’d kept our separate peace about that—something I could no longer withstand. “You were pregnant.”
    She stared at me.
    “Isaac told me. He didn’t mean to,