The Highwayman: A Longmire Story (Walt Longmire #11.5)(23)

“No, because I heard it and so did she.”

Pulling the coin from my pocket, I slumped back in my chair and examined it for burn marks, but there weren’t any. “How do you know that she heard it?”

“Because she was crying.”

“How do you know that’s what she was crying about? She’d just attempted suicide.”

“They were tears of relief—I know the difference. She was crying because we heard it, too.” He stood, stuffing his hands in his jeans and walked toward the hallway to see if anyone happened to be listening. “For the first time, someone besides her heard Bobby Womack’s radio call.”

“I’m not so sure that’s going to count for much.”

He turned to look at me. “What does that mean?”

“It means nobody is going to care, Henry. The only thing they might do is give us all adjoining cells at the psychiatric hospital down in Evanston.”

He kept looking at me, and I watched as his jaw clenched. “Then we have work to do. Now that we know this is happening, we need to find out why.”

Hearing someone coming down the hall, the Bear turned and walked to the window and stood there looking out with his back to the room.

Still clutching the blanket around me like Nanook of the North, I slowly got out of the chair as Cami Slack, the young doctor who had treated both Rosey and me, and Jim Thomas, who was wearing civilian clothes, entered the room. They were chatting between themselves but then broke off when they saw us.

“How’s she doing?”

Dr. Slack ignored my question and came over for a checkup. She took my hands in hers, felt my pulse, and then on tiptoe pried open a lid and stared into my bloodshot eye. “She’s all right, exhibiting secondary drowning symptoms—coughing, shortness of breath, chest pain, and general lethargy from water being in her lungs, preventing oxygenation. She’ll probably be okay in twenty-four hours—well, we hope.” She let go of my eye and put her fists on her hips, looking to me like she was twelve. “So, how are you?”

“Fine, how are you?”

She glanced at Jim. “Is he always like this?”

“Pretty much.”

Turning back to me, she tugged at the front of my blanket. “Why do you still have this?”

“Because I’m cold; I am sure I will be cold till the next gubernatorial election.”

She raised a hand and slipped it between my collar and my neck, and her fingers were nice and warm. “Cold water carries heat from the body twenty-five times faster than air, so once you go in, you immediately begin losing core temperature. Your body attempts to generate heat by shivering, but that’s not enough to combat the monumental loss of heat to the water.” She released me and turned to look at Thomas again, attempting to get an ally in ganging up on me. “What do you think the temperature in that river is tonight?”

“Midthirties, I’d say.”

Shaking her head, she turned back to me. “Loss of dexterity in less than three minutes, exhaustion, disorientation, and unconsciousness in a few more. I’m just guessing, but in another couple of minutes, with the amount of exertion you were putting out, you’d have been dead.”

I opened my arms like some cheap magician, the blanket falling to the floor. “Yet here I am.”

She shook her head and started off. “Having not learned a thing.” Pausing for a moment, she turned. “Mind you, there have been cases up near Seattle, where I was living before. There was a guy who fell off a ferry in British Columbia and was carried thirty miles before they found him near Orcas Island eight hours later. Then there was this woman who fell off a sailboat near the mouth of the Fraser River, and she was out there for seven hours—of course, neither of them were in water as cold as what you were in tonight.” She considered me as I mapped the freckles on her nose. “The woman said she made it because there were mermaids in the water keeping her company the whole time. Did you see anything out of the ordinary tonight?”

I picked up my security blanket. “Nope.”

She nodded and then turned, heading back into the hospital’s inner sanctum, but then stopped to look at me. “Extraordinary, what you did. Extraordinarily stupid or brave, but there’s a woman back here who is alive because of your actions.”

I threw a thumb at the Cheyenne Nation. “More his.”

“Maybe, but he didn’t get wet.”

I shrugged. “Like a cat, he’s smart that way.”

She shook her head, her red hair bouncing in rhythm, and then disappeared as Jim turned to us, putting a hand on my shoulder to guide me back into my seat. “What happened out there?”

“She fell.”

Thomas sat across from me and stared. “She fell?”

“Yep.”

“You want to elaborate or enhance that statement?”

“Not really. She got out of the car and went over to the guardrail to sit on the other side, and the fog was really thick and she slipped.”

There was a long pause. “Slipped.”

“Yep.”

He stared at me a moment more, then, without taking his eyes off me, asked Henry, “She slipped—that your story, too, Bear?”

The Cheyenne Nation’s words vibrated against the plate glass. “Yes.”