The Highwayman: A Longmire Story (Walt Longmire #11.5)(11)

Another magpie lit on the feeder, and I re-aimed. “Twelve years after his death.” I pulled the trigger and fared better this time, knocking the big bird from the perch as he shrieked at us and disappeared over the porch roof.

“Nice shooting there, Tex.”

“Could’ve been carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Yeah, it could’ve been.” He crossed back over and took his seat in the swing again and rested the beer on the railing. “Then there was this hitchhiker, hippie kid out of Benicia, California, who was heading north and got picked up by a trooper in the canyon really early one morning and said he gave him a ride all the way up to Canyon Hills Road and dropped him off. The kid wanted to buy him a meal to thank him, but the trooper said there was something he had to take care of but if the kid wanted to buy him lunch, he knew a place and would meet him at the end of the road in about an hour.”

“So?”

“The kid does what the trooper tells him to do and goes out to the end of Canyon Hills.”

“And?”

“There’s nothing out there but Monument Hill Cemetery.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Where Bobby’s buried.”

I rested the Red Ryder in my lap for lack of targets. “You ever have anything strange happen to you?”

He thought about it for a while, watching the smaller birds come in and take advantage of the magpies’ absence. “Back in 2000, WYDOT was painting the center strips, and we had to ride along in front of them, straddling the line so some idiot didn’t come around a corner and run into their trucks. Well, I’m pulling the duty, and we stop at the Tipi Camp about halfway for lunch, and one of the crew comes up and asks me to say something to the trooper who’s running behind us. According to this guy, he’s got his windows down and has been playing the same song over and over and would I please do something about it.”

I sipped my beer. “And?”

“Well, I tell this idiot that there isn’t any other trooper, that I’m the only one on duty in the canyon, but he keeps complaining, so we walk back there and of course there’s no other patrol car. Now, normally I would’ve just let it drop, but I was curious, so I asked him what the song was.”

“Yep?”

“Said it was that old Rolling Stones tune ‘It’s All Over Now,’ and that he must’ve heard it about forty-seven times.”

“So?”

“You know who wrote that song?”

“Nope.”

“Bobby’s namesake—Bobby Womack.” There was a long pause as he looked out to his right toward the byway. “Strange stuff, I shit thee not. I used to let it prey on my mind a great deal, but I just got to the point where I stopped. I figure things are going to happen, and a lot of them are going to be unexplainable.”

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

“Meaning?”

“There might be a lot more going on around us in this world than we’re aware of.”

He handed me back the coin. “Amen to that, brother.”

I pocketed it. “Do you think he did it?”

“Stole that money?” His eyes unfocused, and he sat there looking at nothing. “Hell, no.”

“Then why did he do it?”

“Do what?”

“Pull out in front of that runaway tanker truck and kill himself?”

He got up again and walked back over to the same post, leaning against it, and I noticed it was rubbed smooth. He must’ve spent a lot of time standing there, looking at the road below, the opening of the north tunnel just visible in the distance. “Bobby drove this big ol’ LTD with a 460 Police Interceptor motor in it; he used to turn the lid on the air cleaner upside down, you know, high-school shit. . . . Man, you would hear the wump of that thing when he got on it—sounded like a rocket ship.” He drank some more beer. “There isn’t a month that goes by that I don’t swear I hear that damn thing goin’ up or down my canyon.”





4




“I was born here.”

“In the canyon?”

Rosey took her eyes from the road and turned to look at me. “Riverton.”

“I never knew that. I thought you were from near Cheyenne.”

“We moved there when I was four.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, my father worked for the phone company, and they kept switching him around all over the country. Mom’s mind is starting to go and I’m not sure how much she remembers is real, but she says I had a nanny in Riverton that I used to call Butterfly, but I don’t remember anything like that—don’t remember any of the time we spent there, but I was four. I guess when we moved to the big city, I just forgot about the place.”

It was a slow afternoon, and it seemed strange that she was in civilian clothes. We’d gone out for a late lunch but had been drawn back to the canyon. She wasn’t on shift for another couple of hours, so we sat in my truck and stared at the turbulence, hoping to get a glance of Henry and the other crazy man in the rubber raft as they white-watered by.

I was reluctant to bring up the subject of why Henry and I were here, but knowing that unless something miraculous happened tonight we’d be heading back over the mountain tomorrow morning, I spoke up. “I had an interesting conversation with Mike Harlow this morning.”