Junkyard Dogs Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  EPILOGUE

  Also by Craig Johnson

  The Cold Dish

  Death Without Company

  Kindness Goes Unpunished

  Another Man’s Moccasins

  The Dark Horse

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Craig Johnson, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Johnson, Craig, 1961-

  Junkyard dogs : a Walt Longmire mystery / Craig Johnson.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19016-6

  1. Longmire, Walt (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Sheriffs—Fiction.

  3. Wyoming—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.O325J86 2010

  813’.6—dc22 2009047237

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For Ned Tanen (1932-2009), friend, mentor,

  and Cobra (CSX2125) co-pilot

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Around twenty years ago when I arrived back in Wyoming the second time, the only going retail concerns in Ucross were the Ewe-Turn Inn, a dilapidated Sinclair service station turned bar, and Sonny George’s junkyard. His father’s salvage operation had been transplanted to the fork of Clear and Piney Creeks, when the founding fathers of the county seat figured that the first thing you should not be confronted with when you exited the new interstate highway just outside Buffalo was a junkyard.

  Sonny was a legend and a great source of car parts and home-grown philosophy. Other than derelict automobiles, the tiny corner where Wyoming routes 14 and 16 part ways had goats and dogs aplenty, and it was Sonny who was responsible for the addendum hand stenciled at the bottom of the UCROSS POPULATION 25 sign, which read DOG POPULATION 43.

  He was cantankerous, so periodically people would call me and ask if I’d go over and barter with him. I would, because I liked him. He might have been obstreperous to those he considered outsiders, but he was always soft-spoken and dealt with me in an even- handed manner. There was an ongoing battle between Sonny and the Ucross Foundation, who desperately wanted to get the junkyard out of their backyard, but he held on until a massive coronary whisked him away via Flight For Life to Billings and beyond.

  I sometimes stop at the corner, pull my truck over to the side, and look at the beautiful job that Ucross Land & Cattle did in cleaning the place, with the cottonwood trees and high-plains wildflowers—but I miss Sonny’s junkyard. I never envisioned myself as one of those guys nursing a Rainier, sitting around the Ewe-Turn Inn, and starting all my statements with, “You know, back when . . .” Hey, things change, and the bar, like the junkyard, is gone, but I remember.

  People ask where I get the stories for my novels and little do they know—I get them from the memories.

  There are a few timeless models I’d like to thank for making not only this book possible, but all the others to boot. Gail Hochman, the ’61, flat-floor Jaguar XKE, Series 1 of agents; Kathryn Court, the ’59 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud of publishers; and Alexis Washam, the ’66 Ferrari GTB/4 of editors—all of whom continue to check my oil and keep me aligned. A free windshield wash with fill-up for my good friends Maureen Donnelly, the ’59 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz of publicity czars; Ben Petrone, the ’68 Hemi Dodge Charger R/T of senior publicists; and Meghan Fallon, the fuel-injected ’63 split-window Corvette of publicists.

  But most of all, to my wife, Judy, the ’65 Shelby, MKIII 427 Cobra of my life—a true classic, and cherry.

  See ya on the road,

  —C.

  Oh heart! Oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! Earth’s returns

  For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!

  Shut them in,

  With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best.

  “Love Among the Ruins,” Robert Browning, 1885

  1

  I tried to get a straight answer from his grandson and granddaughter-in-law as to why their grandfather had been tied with a hundred feet of nylon rope to the rear bumper of the 1968 Oldsmobile Toronado.

  I stared at the horn pad and rested my forehead on the rim of my steering wheel.

  The old man was all right and being tended to in the EMT van behind us, but that hadn’t prevented me from lowering my face in a dramatic display of bewilderment and despair. I was tired, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the young couple or the season.

  “So, when you hit the brakes at the stop sign he slammed into the back of the car?”

  It had been the kind of winter that tested the souls of even the hardiest; since October, we’d had nothing but blizzards, sifting snowstorms, freezing fogs, and cold snaps that had held the temperature a prisoner at ten below. We’d had relief in only one Chinook that had lasted just long enough to turn everything into a sloppy mess that then encased the county in about six inches of ice with the next freeze.

  It was the kind of winter where if the cattle lay down, they weren’t likely to get back up: frozen in and starved out.

  I lifted my head and stared at Duane and Gina.
/>   “Yeah, when I hit the brakes I heard this loud thump.” She shrank into her stained parka with the matted, acrylic fur of the hood surrounding her face and tried not to light what I assumed was her last Kool Menthol.

  We all sat in the cab of my truck with the light bar revolving to warn passing motorists of the icy roads. The roads, or more specifically the thick coating of ice on the roads, was what probably had saved Geo Stewart and, if it hadn’t been for the numerous 911 calls that my dispatcher, Ruby, had fielded from passing motorists and the stop sign on state route 16, the seventy-two-year-old man would have made the most impromptu arrival into the town of Durant, Wyoming, in its history.

  “I guess he slid into the back.” Gina Stewart nodded the same way she had when she’d told me she’d been after cigarettes, Diet Coke, and a box of tampons from the Kum & Go, where she worked part-time.

  I looked at the bubblegum-pink lipstick that stained her lone smoke. I’d warned her three times not to light up in my truck and tried to ignore the vague scent of marijuana that wafted off the pair. If she was down to her last cigarette, it smelled like they still had plenty of something else.

  “He’s a tough ol’ fucker. That isn’t the first time he’s come off the roof.”

  We all listened to the static and random calls of northern Wyoming law enforcement on my Motorola, and I stopped scribbling in my duty book. “The roof?”

  “Yeah.”

  I looked at Duane, but he’d yet to utter anything more than a grunting agreement to whatever Gina had said. “Yunh-huh.”

  I studied the two of them and thought about resting my head on the steering wheel again. “The roof of the car?”

  She shook her head inside the hood and pulled the unlit cigarette from her mouth. “Roof of the big house.”

  “The big house.”

  “Yeah.”

  It was quiet. I thought about the Stewart family’s compound, comprising a Victorian house and a number of single-and double-wide trailers. “And what was he doing on the roof of the big house?”

  She pulled the hood back from her face; the heater from my truck was just beginning to bring the temperature inside the vehicle to past the ice age. For the first time, I noticed she had enormous brown eyes and a lovely, heart-shaped face. It was spoiled by dirty-blond hair, but she was pretty in a shop-worn way.

  She had learned that to captivate men you must treat them with the utmost attention. I’d only been in the cab with Gina for ten minutes, and I was already dizzy; of course, that could have been from the less-than-legal fumes floating off the two.

  She looked at Duane, and so did I, figuring that the rest of the saga was his to tell.

  Duane Stewart had dropped out of school at the age of fourteen with his parents’ consent, because he was, in an internal combustion sense, gifted; if you had any type of motor-driven vehicle produced before 1972, Duane could fix it. He and his uncle Morris had a ramshackle mechanic’s shop that was on the road to the junkyard, which was the family’s other going concern.

  Thickly built, he had a few pimples scattered across his face that reminded me how young he still was—early twenties at best. His eyes hunted mine, but he ducked away and cleared his throat. “Yunh-huh, we was cleanin’ out the chimney.”

  I watched the blue and red lights from my truck that joined with the yellow ones from the EMT van behind us as they raced across the hillsides. “In February?”

  He looked at his new wife again and then back to me. “Yunh-huh.”

  I took a breath and leaned back in my seat. “Maybe we need to start at the beginning.”

  The young man tipped his grease-stained cap back on his head—it read HEMI. “The chimney of the big house gets stopped up in the winter after you burn it for a few months, so we dip a mop in kerosene and force it down the flue to clean it out.”

  “Kerosene.”

  “Yunh-huh.” He warmed to the story and began gesturing with his hands, the work embedded in the swirls of his fingerprints and nails. “I’d a done it, but I’m afraid of heights and Grampus’s agile. He can climb out that top window on the gable end and get ahold of the gutter and swing a leg up onto the roof.” He made the statement as if it should have settled everything.

  It hadn’t. “So, the rope—”

  “It’s slippery up there with the ice, so he tied it to his waist and slung it over the peak and I tied ’er off to the Classic.”

  It was coming all too clear now.

  He nodded as he studied my face. “Yunh-huh. I was in the backyard watching Grampus when Gina come around the house and said she was going to the store and did we need anything. I told her no, and then she left.”

  I covered the smile that was creeping onto my face with a hand. “The Classic is the car that your grandfather was tied to—the Oldsmobile?”

  “Yunh-huh. We heard the car door slam and the motor catch, and that’s when Grampus and me looked at each other. It was about then that the rope went tight.” His callused hand smacked the palm of his other and leapt forward. “Grampus fell over backward, and then he shot up the roof and over the other side.”

  “Duane, you stupid prick, how’m I supposed to know you’ve got Grampus tied to the back of the car?”

  His neck stretched in indignation. “We . . . we do it every year.” He turned back to me. “We dump snow beside the driveway, so I figure he landed on that, but with the forward momentum I don’t figure he hit anything solid till he took out the mailbox at the end of the driveway.”

  I went ahead and rested my head on the steering wheel anyway.

  Gina rejoined the conversation. “We always park the car facing forward so you can see both ways when you pull out.” Then there was an accusation, just to even the score. “People drive too fast on that road, Sheriff.”

  Duane reached a hand out and played with the coiled cord that led to the mic clipped to my dash and then gestured toward his partner in crime. “I guess we’re lucky nobody ran over him before she got stopped.”

  I raised my head and nodded. A local sculptor had made the first 911 call when the junkman had slid by him. “Mike Thomas says your grandfather waved as he passed him going the other way.”

  Gina nodded her head. “We like Mike.”

  They both smiled at me. I sighed and placed my pen on the aluminum clipboard. “So, what did you do then, Duane?”

  “I jumped in one of the wreckers, but they ain’t near as fast as that 455 in the Classic, and it’s front-wheel drive so it took a while for me to catch up—especially with the roads bein’ as slippery as they are, and by the time I got here that deputy of yours already had Gina pulled over.”

  Gina nodded. “And she used some really rude language.”

  I brought my face a little forward so that the young woman would know I was addressing her. “Did you hear the thump again, the second time—after Vic stopped you?”

  She fingered the fur around her neck. “No, he kinda swung into the barrow ditch back there after I made the turn.”

  I nodded and slipped the clipboard back into the pocket of the driver’s side door. The Stewarts were a drama waiting in the wings. It seemed as far back as I could remember the clan members had been involved with some form of misadventure or another, usually resulting in a visit to the Durant Memorial emergency room.

  “Duane, didn’t your dad die falling off a roof?” The young couple sat there unmoving, and I didn’t say anything either. It wasn’t like I was accusing him; I just wasn’t perfectly sure. “About five years ago, wasn’t it?”

  Duane’s eyes stayed still, and his head dropped a bit. “Nunh-uh, it was a heart attack.”

  I assumed that Nunh-uh was the opposite of Yunh-huh and nodded at him to encourage the rest. “After he fell off the roof.”

  “Yunh-huh.”

  I was sorry to keep at the boy since it seemed to sadden him, but I figured I had a certain amount of leeway in the interest of public safety. “He wasn’t cleaning the chimney with the kerosene mop, was h
e?”

  The young man took a deep breath. “Nunh-uh.” He cleared his throat. “It was in September, and he was patching a hole. He slipped and fell—then he had the heart attack.”

  Charging any member of the Stewart family with reckless endangerment smacked of delivering coals to Newcastle, or to Moorcroft, for that matter. I nodded and pulled down my new hat, buttoned my sheepskin coat, and flipped the collar up to defend against the bracing February wind that was slicing down the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains.

  I opened the door and lodged myself in the opening just long enough to speak to Duane one more time. “You know, Duane, maybe your family should stay off roofs.”

  We were in the process of enduring our second week of subzero temperatures for the third time; in the day it was no higher than a balmy one, and at night it plummeted to as low as forty below. Everybody was getting tired of it, and I was threatening to move to New Mexico again.

  I passed the ’68 Toronado, which I considered the ugliest car to ever roll out of Detroit on bias-ply tires. It was a gold-colored beast with more than a few rust patches but, as my deputies could testify, the drive train had been modified to the point that it wasn’t your father’s Oldsmobile anymore, and it ran like a raped ape. Ever since they’d gotten married a little less than six months ago, Duane and Gina had taken turns doing public service and going to driving school in attempts to keep their respective licenses.

  I noticed the untied yellow rope still leading to the ditch, felt the onset of another headache, and trudged on.

  I’d broken a bone in my foot back in October, and it was still giving me a little trouble. Struggling against the wind and attempting to get a good footing and a half on the ice, I lurched one of the back doors of the EMT van open. The vehicle was parked in the drive of Deer Haven Campground beside Vic’s unit, and I almost knocked myself out on the vehicle’s headliner.

  Vic stood by the other door. I looked at my undersheriff. Second-generation law enforcement, Victoria Moretti was the personification of the fact that ferocious things come in small packages. After five years in the Philadelphia police department, she’d landed in our high-altitude, currently permafrosted neck of the woods and had slowly begun defrosting my heart. She looked like one of those women you see draped over the hoods at car shows; that is, if you’ve ever seen one with attitude and a seventeen-shot Glock.