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

I’ve been thinking about turning over my pillow for three weeks.”
    “I know . . .” She looked away. “How’s Cady?”
    Here I was floating in the white-capped Pacific of self-pity, and Vonnie threw me a lifeline to keep me from embarrassing myself. Three fingers, bartender . . . “She’s great.” I looked at Vonnie to see if she was really interested. She was. “She’s doing so well in Philadelphia.”
    “She always has been special.”
    “Yes, she is.” We sat there for a moment, allowing the crackle and roar of my parental self-satisfaction to fade into the soft glow of friendly conversation. Her hand was still on my arm when the phone rang.
    “Looks like she’s tracked you down.” The hand went away.
    I watched as Henry allowed it to ring the second time, his tele-signature, then snatched it from the cradle. “It is another beautiful evening here at the Red Pony bar and continual soirée, how can I help you?” His face pulled up on one side as if the receiver had just smacked him. “Yes, he is here.” He stretched the cord across the expanse of the bar and handed me the phone. His eyes stayed on mine.
    I nudged it between my chin and shoulder with one hand, took a sip of beer with the other, and swallowed. “Hello, Sugar Blossom . . .”
    “Hello, shithead,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s not a dead sheep.”
    I stood there, letting the world shift at quarter points and then got a bearing and dropped my voice. “What’ve we got?” Every eye in the bar was on me.
    Vic’s voice held an edge that I had never heard before, approaching an excitement under the grave suppression of businesslike boredom. “Male, Caucasian, approximately twenty-one years of age . . . one entry wound characteristic of, maybe, a .30-06.”
    I started to rub my eyes, noticed that my hand was shaking, and put it in my pocket. “All right . . . call the Store and tell them to send the Little Lady.”
    There was a brief pause, and I listened to the static from a radio on 137 patched through to a landline in Durant. “You don’t want any Cashiers?”
    “No, just the Bag Boys. I’ve got a highly dependable staff.”
    She laughed. “Wait till you get out here. These fucking sheep have been marching around on everything; I think the little bastards actually ate some of his clothes. And they shit on him.”
    “Great . . . Past the Hudson Bridge; you got your lights on?”
    “Yep.” She paused for a moment, and I listened to the static. “Walt?”
    I had started to hang up the phone. “Yeah?”
    “You better bring some beer to quiet Bob and Billy down.”
    This was a first. “You bet.” I started to hang up again.
    “Walt?”
    “Yep?”
    “It’s Cody Pritchard.”

2
    There’s nothing like a dead body to make you feel, well, removed. I guess the big city boys, cataloguing forty or fifty homicides a year, get used to it, but I never have. I’ve been around enough wildlife and stock that it’s pretty commonplace, the mechanics of death. There’s a religion worthy of this right of passage, of taking that final step from being a vertical creature to a horizontal one. Yesterday you were just some nobody, today you’re the honored dead with bread bags rubber-banded over your hands. I secure what’s left of my dwindling humanity with the false confidence of the living, the deceitful wit of the eight-foot tall and bulletproof. Yea, verily, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will live forever. If I don’t, I sure as hell won’t become an unattended death in the state of Wyoming with sheep shit all over me.
    We had pretty much done our work, secured the area, lit it up, and finished taking pictures. There’s a kind of cocksure attitude that overtakes a man in the presence of the dearly departed, a you’re-dead-and-I’m-not kind of perspective. There’s something about a carcass of an animal like oneself, the post-shuffled, mortal coil that brings out the worst in me, and I