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

Cord.”
    “Who is the other one?”
    There was a brief scrambling and some conversation in the background, and then the rancher came back on the line. “Old fella, says his name is Orrin Porter Rockwell, though I kinda find that hard to believe.”
    I thought of the Book of Mormon in the young man’s possession. “Orrin the Mormon.”
    “Excuse me, Walt? Darn this cordless.”
    “Nothing.” I readjusted the little cradle on Ruby’s phone against my shoulder. “You say you’ve got them there?”
    “Yeah. Bruce Eldredge is staying with us on his way back to Cody and was coming home from a friend’s house and said there were two idiots out in the north pasture running around trying to catch the horses by hand. Hell, Walt, that’s rough stock. They’re lucky one of those horses didn’t kick their brains out.”
    “Can you hold them till I get there?”
    “Sure. Donna’s got a shotgun on them right now, but the kid came up to my truck and volunteered your number; said you were probably looking for him.”
    “And the other one?”
    “He’s a pretty old, hippie-looking fellow, and he’s still winded from chasing those horses all over the damn place. . . . I thought he was going to have a heart attack.” There was some talking in the background. “What?” More talking. “Yeah, yeah, that’s probably true.”
    “Wally?”
    The rancher came back on the line, but I could hear his hand cupping the receiver to his mouth in an attempt to keep this portion of the conversation between the two of us. “The boy says that it wasn’t anything like
My Friend Flicka
.” His voice dropped even lower. “Walt, I’ve only been around this kid for twenty minutes, but he’s something strange on that movie; I think he’s brought it up about twelve times, and he’s carrying an old VHS tape of the film with him.”
    •   •   •
    When we got to the Lazy D-W, the two outlaws were sitting in the calving shed adjoining the main barn, the place where cowboys stayed on call during the time in the early spring when the cow mothers did their duty. I’d seen all kinds of calving sheds in my life, some just dirt-floor lean-to shanties with a snubbing pole in the middle to heated buildings with entertainment centers and rows of comfortable sofas on which to sit back and while away the half-sleep hours through the nights when most heifers decide to thicken the herd.
    The Lazy D-W was the latter and not the former, and through the glass panel in the breezeway door I could see our two would-be horse thieves watching
My Friend Flicka
in studious rapture.
    I glanced at Wally and especially at Donna, still holding the shotgun.
    There were rumors about Donna Johnson. In my experience you couldn’t swing a dead trench coat without hitting all kinds of folks who claimed to have worked for the CIA, but I’d heard the rumors about Donna, and my suspicions that she had indeed been employed by that organization were based on the fact that she never talked about it.
    Never.
    She shrugged. “It was the only place we had a VCR.”
    I studied the old man seated next to Cord on the edge of one of the leather sofas; he was smallish with silver hair hanging past his shoulders that feathered into a dark brown, and with a beard that stretched to the third button of his old-fashioned tab-collar shirt. Around his neck was a scarf with a pattern that made it look almost like a prayer shawl.
    He was the man who had waved at me on the street in Durant.
    I glanced at the screen and could see Roddy McDowall on the back of a horse racing hell-bent for leather across the green hills of a cinematic Wyoming—read Utah. Rockwell was leaning forward with his wrists resting on his knees and his gnarled hands gripping imaginary reins.
    You didn’t see hands like that much anymore. The fingers were thick, and I could see where the knuckles, especially those of the fore- and middle fingers, had been broken numerous times. There was only one type of