Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty Read Online Free PDF Page B

missing.”
    There was a long pause, and while I thought that one over, I heard a few frigid drops of sleet, sounding like pebbles, hit the top of the Chevrolet. I gestured toward the other Suburban.
    “And those two?”
    “Just your garden variety psychotic scumbags; Calvin ‘Fingers’ Moser is the one with the stringy hair, and Freddie ‘Junk-food Junkie’ Borland is the one who can’t keep still. A couple of fun-loving drug abusers from Arizona who liked to get high, kill people, and then sell the body parts.”
    “Charming.”
    “Isn’t it though? Through Shade they had a medical connection in Mexico to which they gave a running supply of kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts, and eyes. Years back, on some PCP-induced binge, they killed an elderly couple near Sedona and buried their bodies out in the desert. Borland was working at a livestock dismemberment plant when Shade turned them on to the guys in Central America. They pretty much drove around killing people and selling the parts.” He sipped his coffee some more and then waxed financial. “You can get forty to fifty thousand dollars for a healthy kidney on the open market. Some guy had one for sale on eBay.”
    I interrupted, mostly so that I wouldn’t have to hear more. “Is that your specialty, organ trafficking?”
    “No.” We continued to watch as the working class finished shoveling around the boulder, and we were faced with the eventuality of getting out of the SUV. “Pfaff’s the specialist—psychotic schizophrenia—and Ray ‘No’ Shade is the textbook for psy-schiz. No-Shade’s first American homicide was this Native American child abduction across state lines; then there’s the supposed missing 1.4 million dollars . . .” He grew silent but finally spoke again. “You pull up the file?”
    “Only part of it. What I did read sounds like a horror movie.”
    He finished off his coffee and placed the travel mug back in the holder. “That it does.”
    I swallowed the rest from my thermos top and did the same, closing the doors behind us and tromping across the trampled snow to where the crew was working. They had produced a pry bar, were laboring around the edges of the rock to unfreeze it from its surroundings, and had connected a tow strap to the back of one of the Suburbans as well. There was a nudging sound, and with one more spot of leverage the boulder broke free and shifted a few inches.
    “That’s enough.” McGroder produced a Maglite from his breast pocket and, shining the beam behind the rock, slipped between the other men. “Difficult to see; we’re going to have to move it further.”
    A large man in one of the tactical uniforms moved to one side of the rock while another went to the opposite side. They braced themselves and heaved mightily as the tires of the Suburban spun and the distant thunder echoed off the surrounding peaks.
    Nothing happened.
    With a quick estimation, I figured the boulder weighed close to five thousand pounds.
    They tried again but with the same results.
    I glanced at McGroder. “Shade supposedly moved this by himself?” I spoke to the nearest agent. “Climb up on top and push with your legs, and I’ll try this side.” I stepped past the Fed on the left, planted a foot against the embankment, and worked my hands behind the cold surface of the rock as the agent braced his boots against it. “On three. One. Two. Three.”
    Same result.
    I looked up at McGroder’s arched eyebrow. “Well, even Atlas shrugged.”
    I worked my hands in deeper than before, and on the count of three the rock shifted and revealed its egglike shape, with the more narrow portion being the part we’d been pushing on. We hadn’t so much moved the boulder as repositioned it, and if we were planning on doing any more, we were going to have to break out a hydraulic jack and pray we got it done before the sleet began in earnest.
    McGroder leaned over the boulder with the flashlight. “That’s all we need for