The Highwayman: A Longmire Story (Walt Longmire #11.5)(16)

I smiled and then waved as she pulled out, heading north at a brisk pace. I turned and looked at the tunnels.

It was the twenties when the state started thinking of a serpentine roadway that would replace the rough, steep grade of Bird’s Eye Pass. At over 2,500 feet, the old road was open only part of the year and took several hours to traverse even with good weather.

That winter the mercury touched thirty degrees below zero, which enabled the engineers to cross the frozen river from the railroad tracks so that they could survey the terrain. The roadbed would be twenty-four feet wide, with hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of granite to be moved, culminating in a trio of eighteen-foot-wide, fourteen-foot-tall tunnels with a cumulative length close to a thousand feet.

I walked toward the north one, and it felt like the thing was opening in the darkness like a mouth, even eerier with the road completely vacant.

It was one of the most difficult engineering feats in the entire American West and expensive for the period. Work began June 1, 1922, and it would cost around half a million dollars but, all told, would prove to cost a great deal more than that. Lives were lost, some of the remains recovered after days and some never.

The insides of the tunnels weren’t even in the beam of Rosey’s flashlight, but I knew them to be rough like the surrounding cliffs themselves.

I stood at the narrow, red-painted curb on the right-hand side and looked up and down the winding road for traffic—there was none, so I stepped onto the roadway and walked to the center.

Tracing the beam up the road and then back to the tunnel entrance, I opened the file and looked at the printed copies of the newspaper accounts about Trooper Womack’s last watch.

At 12:22 p.m., Officer Womack received a report that an eighteen-wheel tanker was traveling through the canyon and was carrying nine thousand gallons of aviation fuel to an airport in the southern part of the state. It was reported the driver was experiencing problems with his brakes and that he had already forced a number of other vehicles off the road. It was also noted that the truck driver was possibly experiencing a heart attack at the time.

It wasn’t noted why Womack hadn’t responded to the radio call by heading north and meeting the tanker. Instead he sat in the same spot where Rosey had just stopped Coleman, right outside of the tunnel itself, until the swerving eighteen-wheeler appeared at the far end of the S-curve only a quarter of a mile away.

I shone the light in that direction and couldn’t help but feel a slight shudder at the thought of his seeing all nine thousand gallons of rich-mixture, 130-octane fuel heading for him at breakneck speed, most likely with a dying driver at the wheel.

Why?

Why sit there in the pullout, wait till the thing was almost on top of you, and then casually pull the LTD in the way. Why not just let the thing crash into the tunnel and explode? It just appeared an act of total, utter, hopeless self-destruction.

I walked in, shining the flashlight beam through this tunnel into the gaping maw of the next, which was only about a hundred feet farther.

The report states that with the impact the LTD was driven sideways before being pushed out the southern end and then had lodged itself along with the tanker truck into the solid granite buttress of the northern entrance to the second. The explosion had been tremendous, with fireballs racing from the ends of all three tunnels and the open spaces between. Campers at Boysen Reservoir thought that it must’ve been an earthquake, and legend had it that plate-glass windows had broken in Shoshoni, twenty miles away.

The heat of the blast had melted the road, and very few remains had been found, but the granite tunnels had miraculously held. After the accident, the inside surfaces of the tunnel walls were painted white on either side, but the ceiling was still black, with strange patches of concrete showing at uneven intervals.

I continued walking and ran my hand over the stone, the walls weeping even in this high desert, and I thought that if I were to touch the wetness to my lips it might be salty like tears.

The thrashing of the river was omnipresent, a noise that washed the canyon clean, amplified by the rock walls in front of and behind me. But there was another noise underlying the sound of the Wind, rock against rock where the animals of the night danced out their nocturnal appetites, some lucky enough to survive till daylight and some not.

I was walking the hundred yards in the open between the first and middle tunnel but about halfway became aware of a set of footfalls coming from the tunnel behind me and another coming from the one ahead.

I stopped, standing there in the clear spring air, with the glittering stars peering down on me, and laughed as I tucked the file and flashlight under my arm and thought about a grown man being haunted by his own footsteps echoing from two tunnels. I stood there listening and finally heard a noise to my left, where, as my eyes adjusted, I could see a great horned owl sitting in a stunted and still-leafless cottonwood that was attempting to grow in a fissure of the granite hillside.

“You getting scary in your old age, too?”

His head turned, and he looked at me with those radiant gold eyes as I listened to my words rebound a couple of times and laughed a response. “Well, I guess I am.”

It was a cold night, and I flipped the collar up on my old horsehide jacket, slipped on my shooting gloves, and started off again, listening to the trio of six cowboy boots in cadence.

I stopped at the granite wall where Womack had most certainly died if he hadn’t already been dead on impact. The stone wall traveled up like a keep, the first fourteen feet painted white, the rest stretching to a cold and forbidding darkness that extended into forever.