The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volume 1-4 Read online

  CRAIG

  JOHNSON

  * * *

  THE WALT LONGMIRE MYSTERY SERIES

  The First Four Novels

  * * *

  THE COLD DISH

  —

  DEATH WITHOUT COMPANY

  —

  KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED

  —

  ANOTHER MAN’S MOCCASINS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  Praise for Craig Johnson and the Walt Longmire Mystery Series

  Also by Craig Johnson

  THE WALT LONGMIRE MYSTERY SERIES

  The First Four Novels

  THE COLD DISH

  DEATH WITHOUT COMPANY

  KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED

  ANOTHER MAN’S MOCCASINS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CRAIG JOHNSON is the author of eight novels in the Walt Longmire mystery series, which has garnered popular and critical acclaim. The Cold Dish was a Dilys Award finalist and the French edition won Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/BibliObs. Death Without Company, the Wyoming State Historical Association’s Book of the Year, won France’s Le Prix 813. Another Man’s Moccasins was the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award winner and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers’ Association Book of the Year, and The Dark Horse, the fifth in the series, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Junkyard Dogs won the Watson Award for a mystery novel with the best sidekick, and Hell Is Empty was a New York Times best seller and was named Library Journal’s Best Mystery of the Year. All are available from Penguin. The eighth novel in the series, As the Crow Flies, was a New York Times best seller as well and an Indie Next List pick and will be available in paperback in May 2013. Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire novels have now been adapted for television in the hit series Longmire on A&E. His next novel, A Serpent’s Tooth, will be available from Viking in May 2013. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.

  Praise for Craig Johnson and the Walt Longmire Mystery Series

  “Like the greatest crime novelists, Johnson is a student of human nature. Walt Longmire is strong but fallible, a man whose devil-may-care stoicism masks a heightened sensitivity to the horrors he’s witnessed. Unlike traditional genre novelists who obsess mainly over every hairpin plot turn, Johnson’s books are also preoccupied with the mystery of his characters’ psyches.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Johnson knows the territory, both fictive and geographical, and tells us about it in prose that crackles.” —Robert B. Parker

  “The characters talk straight from the hip and the Wyoming landscape is its own kind of eloquence.” —The New York Times

  “[Walt Longmire] is an easy man to like. . . . Johnson evokes the rugged landscape with reverential prose, lending a heady atmosphere to his story.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Stepping into Walt’s world is like slipping on a favorite pair of slippers, and it’s where those slippers lead that provides a thrill. Johnson pens a series that should become a ‘must’ read, so curl up, get comfortable, and enjoy the ride.” —The Denver Post

  “A winning piece of work . . . There’s a convincing feel to the whole package: a sense that you’re viewing this territory through the eyes of someone who knows it as adoring lover and skeptical onlooker at the same time.” —The Washington Post

  “Johnson’s pacing is tight and his dialogue snaps.” —Entertainment Weekly

  “Truly great. Reading Craig Johnson is a treat. . . . [He] tells great stories, casts wonderful characters and writes in a style that compels the reader forward.” —Wyoming Tribune Eagle

  Also by

  CRAIG JOHNSON

  • • • •

  The Cold Dish

  Death Without Company

  Kindness Goes Unpunished

  Another Man’s Moccasins

  The Dark Horse

  Junkyard Dogs

  Hell Is Empty

  As the Crow Flies

  Christmas in Absaroka County:

  Walt Longmire Christmas Stories

  FORTHCOMING FROM VIKING

  A Serpent’s Tooth

  CRAIG

  JOHNSON

  * * *

  THE COLD DISH

  * * *

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  Copyright © Craig Johnson, 2005

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ISBN 978-1-101-04394-3 (ePub)

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For the dairy princess of Wayne County

  and the crack shot of Cabell . . .

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A writer, like a sheriff, is the embodiment of a group of people and, without their support, both are in a tight spot. I have been fortunate to be blessed with a close order of friends and associates who have made this book possible. They know who they are and, as the tradition goes, you can never thank a good cast too much.

  Thanks to Sheriff Larry Kirkpatrick for a quarter of a century of fighting the good fight, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s Sandy Mays and Harry’s pizza, which isn’t so bad. To Henry Standing Bear for the magic and more, Marcus Red Thunder for the sweat, Charles Little Old Man for the words, Dorothy Caldwell Kisling for the stimulation, Donna Dubrow for the motivation, and Gail Hochman for the belief. To Kathryn Court, Clare Farraro, Sarah Manges, and Ali Bothwell Mancini, my ferocious pride of lionesses at Viking Penguin.

  Finally, to my wife and muse Judy all the love in the world for greeting my daily reappearance from Absaroka County with patience and good humor. I would be Walt without you.

  Revenge is a dish best served cold.

  —Pierre Ambroise François

  Choderlos de La Clos,

  Les Liaisons Dangereuses

 
; 1

  “Bob Barnes says they got a dead body out on BLM land. He’s on line one.”

  She might have knocked, but I didn’t hear it because I was watching the geese. I watch the geese a lot in the fall, when the days get shorter and the ice traces the rocky edges of Clear Creek. The sheriff ’s office in our county is an old Carnegie building that my department inherited when the Absaroka County Library got so many books they had to go live somewhere else. We’ve still got the painting of Andy out in the landing of the entryway. Every time the previous sheriff left the building he used to salute the old robber baron. I’ve got the large office in the south side bay, which allows me an unobstructed view of the Big Horn Mountains to my right and the Powder River Valley to my left. The geese fly down the valley south, with their backs to me, and I usually sit with my back to the window, but occasionally I get caught with my chair turned; this seems to be happening more and more, lately.

  I looked at her, looking being one of my better law-enforcement techniques. Ruby’s a tall woman, slim, with a direct manner and clear blue eyes that tend to make people nervous. I like that in a receptionist /dispatcher, keeps the riffraff out of the office. She leaned against the doorjamb and went to shorthand, “Bob Barnes, dead body, line one.”

  I looked at the blinking red light on my desk and wondered vaguely if there was a way I could get out of this. “Did he sound drunk?”

  “I am not aware that I’ve ever heard him sound sober.”

  I flipped the file and pictures that I’d been studying onto my chest and punched line one and the speakerphone button. “Hey, Bob. What’s up?”

  “Hey, Walt. You ain’t gonna believe this shit. . . .” He didn’t sound particularly drunk, but Bob’s a professional, so you never can tell. He was silent for a moment. “Hey, no shit, we got us a cool one out here.”

  I winked at Ruby. “Just one, huh?”

  “Hey, I ain’t shittin’ you. Billy was movin’ some of Tom Chatham’s sheep down off the BLM section to winter pasture, and them little bastards clustered around somethin’ in one of the draws. . . . We got a cool one.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “No. Billy did.”

  “Put him on.”

  There was a brief jostling of the phone, and a younger version of Bob’s voice answered, “Hey, Shuuriff.”

  Slurred speech. Great. “Billy, you say you saw this body?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “What’d it look like?”

  Silence for a moment. “Looked like a body.”

  I thought about resting my head on my desk. “Anybody we know?”

  “Oh, I didn’t get that close.”

  Instead, I pushed my hat farther up on my head and sighed. “How close did you get?”

  “Couple hundred yards. It gets steep in the draws where the water flow cuts through that little valley. The sheep stayed all clustered around whatever it is. I didn’t want to take my truck up there ’cause I just got it washed.”

  I studied the little red light on the phone until I realized he was not going to go on. “No chance of this being a dead ewe or lamb?” Wouldn’t be a coyote, with the other sheep milling around. “Where are you guys?”

  “ ’Bout a mile past the old Hudson Bridge on 137.”

  “All right, you hang on. I’ll get somebody out there in a half hour or so.”

  “Yes sir. . . . Hey, Shuuriff?” I waited. “Dad says for you to bring beer, we’re almost out.”

  “You bet.” I punched the button and looked at Ruby. “Where’s Vic?”

  “Well, she’s not sitting in her office looking at old reports.”

  “Where is she, please?” Her turn to sigh and, never looking at me directly, she walked over, took the worn manila folder from my chest, and returned it to the filing cabinet where she always returns it when she catches me studying it.

  “Don’t you think you should get out of the office sometime today?” She continued to look at the windows.

  I thought about it. “I am not going out 137 to look at dead sheep.”

  “Vic’s down the street, directing traffic.”

  “We’ve only got one street. What’s she doing that for?”

  “Electricals for the Christmas decorations.”

  “It’s not even Thanksgiving.”

  “It’s a city council thing.”

  I had put her on that yesterday and promptly forgot about it. I had a choice: I could either go out to 137, drink beer, and look at dead sheep with a drunk Bob Barnes and his half-wit son or go direct traffic and let Vic show me how displeased she was with me. “We got any beer in the refrigerator?”

  “No.”

  I pulled my hat down straight and told Ruby that if anybody else called about dead bodies, we had already filled the quota for a Friday and they should call back next week. She stopped me by mentioning my daughter, who was my singular ray of sunshine. “Tell Cady I said hello and for her to call me.”

  This was suspicious. “Why?” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. My finely honed detecting skills told me something was up, but I had neither the time nor the energy to pursue it.

  I jumped in the Silver Bullet and rolled through the drive-through at Durant Liquor to pick up a sixer of Rainier. No sense having the county support Bob Barnes’s bad habits with a full six-pack, so I screwed off one of the tops and took a swig. Ah, mountain fresh. I was going to have to drive by Vic and let her let me know how pissed off she was bound to be, so I pulled out onto Main Street, joined the three-car traffic jam, and looked into the outstretched palm of Deputy Victoria Moretti.

  * * *

  Vic was a career patrol person from an extended family of patrol people back in South Philadelphia. Her father was a cop, her uncles were cops, and her brothers were cops. The problem was that her husband was not a cop. He was a field engineer for Consolidated Coal and had gotten transferred to Wyoming to work at a mine about halfway between here and the Montana border. When he accepted the new position a little less than two years ago, she gave it all up and came out with him. She listened to the wind, played housewife for about two weeks, and then came into the office to apply for a job.

  She didn’t look like a cop, least not like the ones we have out here. I figured she was one of those artists who had received a grant from the Crossroads Foundation, the ones that lope up and down the county roads in their $150 running shoes and their New York Yankee ball caps. I’d lost one of my regular deputies, Lenny Rowell, to the Highway Patrol. I could have brought Turk up from Powder Junction but that had appealed to me as much as gargling razor blades. It wasn’t that Turk was a bad deputy; it’s just that all that rodeo-cowboy bullshit wore me out, and I didn’t like his juvenile temper. Nobody else from in county had applied for the job, so I had done her a favor and let her fill out an application.

  I read the Durant Courant while she sat out in the reception room scribbling on the front and back of the damn form for half an hour. Her writing fist began to shake and by the time she was done, her face had turned a lively shade of granite. She flipped the page onto Ruby’s desk, hissed “Fuck this shit,” and walked out. We called all her references, from field investigators in ballistics to the Philadelphia Chief of Police. Her credentials were hard to argue with: top 5 percent out of the academy, bachelor’s in law enforcement from Temple University with nineteen credit hours toward her master’s, a specialty in ballistics, two citations, and four years street duty. She was on the fast track, and next year she would’ve made detective. I’d have been pissed, too.

  I had driven out to the address that she’d given me, a little house trailer near the intersection of both highways with nothing but bare dirt and scrub sage all around it. There was a Subaru with Pennsylvania plates and a GO OWLS bumper sticker, so I figured I was in the right place. When I got up to the steps, she already had the door open and was looking at me through the screen. “Yeah?”

  I was married for a quarter century and I’ve got a lawyer for a daug
hter, so I knew how to deal with these situations: Stay close to the bone, nothing but the facts, ma’am. I crossed my arms, leaned on her railing, and listened to it squeal as the sheet metal screws tried to pull loose from the doublewide’s aluminum skin. “You want this job?”

  “No.” She looked past me toward the highway. She didn’t have any shoes on, and her toes were clutching the threadbare carpet like cat’s claws in an attempt to keep her from spinning off into the ether. She was a little below average height and weight, olive complexion, with short black hair that kind of stood up in pure indignity. She’d been crying, and her eyes were the color of tarnished gold, and the only thing I could think of doing was to open the screen door and hold her. I had had a lot of problems of my own of late, and I figured we could both just stand there and cry for a while.

  I looked down at my brown rough-outs and watched the dirt glide across the porch in underlining streaks. “Nice wind we’ve been having.” She didn’t say a word. “Hey, you want my job?”

  She laughed. “Maybe.”

  We both smiled. “Well, you can have it in about four years, but right now I need a deputy.” She looked out at the highway again. “But I need a deputy who isn’t going to run off to Pittsburgh in two weeks.” That got her attention.

  “Philadelphia.”

  “Whatever.” With that, I got all the tarnished gold I could handle.

  “Do I have to wear one of those goofy cowboy hats like you?”

  I glanced up at the brim of my hat and then back down to her for effect. “Not unless you want to.”

  She cocked her head past me, nodding to the Bullet. “Do I get a Batmobile like that to drive around in?”