The Highwayman: A Longmire Story (Walt Longmire #11.5)(29)

She dropped her hand and looked up at me with the icy blue eyes. “You still don’t believe any of this, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Even after hearing it?”

I laid an arm on the roof of her car, leaning in and smiling. “It’s a radio, Rosey, somebody’s on the other end, and it’s not Bobby Womack.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“A feeling.”

“A feeling?”

“Yep.” I glanced around for effect. “Look, I’ve seen some amazing things in this life, some things I can’t explain, but I’m not willing to go with the out-of-this-world supposition until it’s been proven to me that it’s not of this world. That’s part of our job, to find answers, and I’m not willing to throw up my hands and say there are none until I’m sure there aren’t any.” She said nothing, so I continued. “Someone is making those radio calls, and someone is putting those silver dollars on the road.” I pulled the one from my pocket and handed it to her.

The blue ice in her eyes melted, and the whites glistened in the dim light of the cruiser. “Where did you get this?”

I glanced over my right shoulder back down the road. “North entrance of the north tunnel.”

“How?”

“When I took that walk through the tunnels, I heard footsteps behind me and chased after them.”

“Who was it?”

“I didn’t see, but they left that coin on the road for me.”

“Did anything bad happen, because if it didn’t, it’s going to. I told you about the other times when—”

“You tried to kill yourself.”

“What?”

“You attempted to kill yourself—I’d say that’s pretty bad.”

She looked away. “I don’t remember.”

“Jumping?”

“No.”

“Well, you really didn’t jump, you just stepped off.”

Her hand came up, and she grabbed the zipper of my jacket. “I don’t remember any of it, Walt. Nothing. I just remember laying beside this unit and hearing that voice, repeating over and over and over.”

“Well, you missed the exciting part.”

She continued studying the silver dollar. “This one is different, marked up.” She looked at me. “Did anything else happen? I mean anything bad?”

I thought about it. “I almost got run over by not paying attention.” I reached out and tapped the coin in her hand. “Slipped on this thing and then found it, that’s why it’s scratched.”

“Hold on, that was before we waited for the call and before you talked to me?”

“Yep.”

She pushed open the door and then slammed it, careful to pull the tail of her black slicker aside. She stared at me as she held the silver dollar up between us. “You had this on you and didn’t say anything?”

“I wanted to wait until we did or didn’t hear the radio call.”

“If we hadn’t heard anything would you have shown me this?”

“Of course.”

“Then why did you wait?”

“Because I didn’t want to confuse the issue.”

“Which is?”

“Whether or not you were actually hearing the radio calls.”

She held the coin closer to my face. “This is proof.”

I stood there for a moment and then took the thing from her, holding it up into the ghostly pall of the half-hidden moon. “No. This is an 1888 Hot Lips Morgan silver dollar—and that’s all it is. You can buy one in mint condition in any coin shop in the country for about three hundred and fifty dollars and that’s what somebody has done.” I glanced at the winding roadway beside us. “And then they’ve placed them on this road for you and me to find.” I looked back at her. “We have a very clear objective here, Rosey, and that’s finding out who is doing this and why—and that, not all the burning of incense, chanting, and magic words in the world, is going to accomplish it.”

“Just another day on the job, huh?”

I nodded, returned the coin to my pocket, and glanced around at the two-thousand-foot cliffs. My eyes were drawn to the thick belt of the Milky Way galaxy and the dense stream of stars that ran from one end of the canyon to the other, still visible even with the falling flurries—the Hanging Road, as the Cheyenne and Crow called it, the path the owls used to take messages back and forth between the land of the living and the Camp of the Dead.

“You’re wrong about one thing, though.”

I looked down at her. “What’s that?”

She glanced at the road, but then her attention turned south, toward the northern entrance of the north tunnel. “The silver dollars may be warnings of impending disasters, but we have the power to avert them.”

“Excuse me?”

“At least you do. You could’ve been hit by the car, but the coin saved you, and I could’ve drowned, but you saved me. So that means that the silver dollars and therefore the highwayman don’t have absolute sway.”

I thought about it. “Yep, but then again if this dollar saved me and I saved you, then maybe they do.” Draping an arm over her shoulders, I turned her around, steering her toward the Indian ceremony. “C’mon, let’s go listen to some chanting and magical words.”