The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volumes 1-4 Read Online Free PDF Page A

wore a frayed jean jacket and had strong Cheyenne features. He must’ve been from out of county, because I didn’t know him.
    Next was Roger Russell, an electrician out of Powder Junction in the southern part of the county who had come up here to expand his business. Turk said that he was kind of the black sheep of the family and that he had little bastards scattered all up and down the Basin: “Powder River, let’r buck, a mile wide and an inch deep.” I wondered mildly why Henry and I had just been gambling with our lives while an expert nursed a C and C in the next room.
    Sitting next to him was probably the reason why Roger happened to be here. Vonnie Hayes was old school Wyoming; her grandfather had had a spread of thirty thousand acres of good land. Vonnie and I had kind of known each other when we were children but, after her father had committed suicide, she was sent to boarding school and her art life had taken her east for a number of years, where she had become an accomplished sculptress. Much later, she returned to take care of her aging mother. Vonnie and Martha had worked together on the library board and a number of other community projects in the county, and my daughter had worked for Vonnie as a housekeeper one summer. After Martha died, Cady tried to fix us up, an endeavor that Vonnie and I both viewed with equal parts humor and open-handed flirtation. Even in the dim light I could make out Vonnie’s features, strong, with a lupine slant to the eyes, sandy hair pulled back in a casual bun.
    I leaned against the bar beside her, bumping into Roger and giving him my substantial rear. “Jeez, Rog.” I looked around in the darkness. “Don’t you know we’ve got an electrical emergency on our hands here?”
    He carefully placed his drink back and nudged it with his fingers. “I am . . . retired.”
    Henry appeared on the other side of the bar, slid a Rainier to me, and leaned into Roger. “What about this penny thing?”
    Roger looked at him, attempting to gather himself for an answer. As he did, I looked over to Vonnie. “Boy, the things you find in the dark.”
    She took a sip of her chenin blanc. Henry kept a special bottle of the white wine in the cooler for her. I had always wanted to ask her for a sip but had never gotten up the nerve. Her eyes glowed softly, and the corner of her lips curved into a warm, sad smile. “Hello, Walter.”
    Undaunted by conversing with drunks, Henry continued. “Those old fuses, the big ones, you put pennies in them to get them to work?”
    Roger laughed. “Yes you can, and you can also fuse every bit of the substandard wiring in this shit-hole and burn us all up alive.” I kind of leaned Roger against the bar, stabilizing the listing that had begun as he spoke, and pulled a loose stool from the far side, placing it and myself, between Roger and Vonnie.
    “Vonnie . . .” Her eyes had a way of opening a little wider when you spoke to her, then closing a little like they were capturing what you were saying and holding on to it. I was starting to remember why I had had a crush on her and continued. “You see this heathen, devil red man across the bar here?” Her eyes glanced at Henry for a moment, then returned to mine. “He and Cady are plotting some sort of intrigue against me.”
    Her eyes widened again, and she returned her gaze to Henry. “Is that true, Bear?” It irritated me that every woman I knew was on a cuddly first-name basis with the man.
    Henry nodded toward me. “White man full of shit.”
    We were on a Technicolor roll now. I was Randolph Scott to his . . . I don’t know, one of those bigger than life Indians that either got beat up or killed by the end of the third reel. “It’s true, he’s government trained to be involved in these kinds of covert operations.” I pointed to the framed boxes on the wall behind the bar that contained a burnt map of North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. On this map were Henry’s Special Forces