Free A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson

after I passed the sheriff’s office and took a left on Fort. “You’re taking me home?”
    “I figured that’s where you’d want to go.”
    “Where are you sleeping?”
    “The amazingly affordable and surprisingly comfortable Absaroka County Jail.” I glanced at her. “I figure I better spell Double Tough since he’s been babysitting Cord all evening.”
    “Then what’s he supposed to do?”
    It was true that my deputy’s house was in Powder Junction, a forty-five-minute drive south. “Don’t you think he’d like to go home?”
    “Not particularly, considering that Frymire’s girlfriend is visiting.”
    I thought about it as I took a right onto Desmet. “Yeah, I guess they share a house.”
    She nodded. “A run-down, two-bedroom rental by the creek, from what I hear. What, you think we can all afford houses on what the county pays us?” We drove along in one of those silences only women can produce, a ponderous, heavy quiet. “For your information, I’m aware that you arranged the financing for my house behind my back.”
    I pulled up in front of the little gray craftsman with the red door. “I have no idea what it is you are talking about.”
    “I saw the papers.”
    I sat there for a moment and then tried a reverse in the backfield. “I may have signed something that said you were an employee in good standing with the sheriff’s department—in short, I lied.”
    She didn’t laugh but sat there studying her hands. After a moment she unsnapped her safety belt, nudged her knees up onto the seat, and, slapping my hat into the back, she slid herself across my lap. She grabbed the back of my hair and yanked it, locking her mouth over mine, and I could feel the waves of heat from her body pounding me like surf on a coastal rock.
    •   •   •
    I snuck in the front door of the sheriff’s office like a teenager getting in after curfew and could hear Double Tough snoring on the bench in the reception area. I gave a salute to the painting of Andrew Carnegie, a relic from when our building had been the town library, and quietly climbed the stairs past the 8×10s of all the sheriffs in our county’s history, sure their eyes were watching me as I passed.
    My deputy had dragged out a few pillows and a blanket from the supplies. The noise that he made was horrific, and I figured it was probably for the best that he wasn’t sleeping in the holding cells with Cord—the poor kid would be deaf by morning.
    I also reminded myself that tomorrow was Tuesday and that I would need to call my old boss, Lucian Connally, at the Durant Home for Assisted Living and cancel chess night if I was going to the southern part of the county to loiter with intent.
    All of these things were roiling in my mind as I kicked an empty Mountain Dew can that Double Tough had left on the floor.
    I stood there quietly as his snoring stopped, and he spoke. “You’re grounded.”
    I turned and looked at him, or rather at the lump of gray wool blanket that passed for him. “How’s our charge?”
    “Asleep.” He shucked the blanket and blinked at me. “Chief, you’re not going to believe what we did tonight.”
    “I’m afraid to ask.”
    “You know the old TV and VCR down in the jail?”
    “Yep.”
    He smiled. “I was walking by and saw a box of tapes in that stuff that Ruby’s sending off to the church. I was feeling bad because the kid is just sitting in the cell reading his Bible like he’s in solitary confinement, so I thought, What the heck, I’ll make popcorn in the microwave and we’ll watch a movie.”
    “What did you watch?”
    “Well, it’s not like we had a lot to choose from; I mean it was church lady movies. . . .”
    I leaned against the dispatcher’s counter. “Maybe that was for the best.”
    “
My Friend Flicka
, the one from a million years ago.”
    “Set in Wyoming—Mary O’Hara wrote the book.”
    “Yeah, well they filmed it in Utah. . . . But that’s not the point.” He swung