A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery Read Free Page A

looked amused. “You’re kidding.”
    “Nope. Henry’s, too.”
    “I wanna go.”
    “No.”
    “C’mon, I never got to do that crap when I was a teenager.” She thought about it. “I never dated any football guys in high school.”
    I was momentarily distracted. “What kind of guys did you date?”
    “Thirty-seven-year-olds named Rudy with mustaches and vans—guys that would give my parents heart attacks.” She studied me. “I wanna go, and I want a corsage, just like Babs.” I didn’t respond and slumped in my guest chair. “Please tell me we’re not going to canvas the neighborhood in the short bus with have-you-seen-this-half-naked-retard posters?”
    “I thought we’d knock on a few doors.”
    “That or we just bait a few Havahart traps with Double Stuf Oreos.” She struggled to her feet. “But I don’t think we have to do that here.” She reached down and held up the inside band of the pants toward me. It read CITY OF BELLE FOURCHE DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION .
    •   •   •
    I made a few more phone calls to the services in Butte County, South Dakota, that were open on a Sunday afternoon, but they didn’t know anything about a runaway, so we met Double Tough at the gravel turnout above the T Bar T. “Nothing?”
    The ex–oil rig jockey was built like a brick pillar. When I first met him he’d been shot, something he’d neglected to mention until later in the conversation; hence, his nickname. “Nope, and I asked at every house within a quarter mile of the place.”
    “Nobody’s seen him or heard of him?”
    “Nope.”
    I glanced down the driveway toward the little white house with the red shutters. “I’ll go down and tell Barbara that I’m going to have a look. Why don’t you two just hang around up here in the shade and watch Dog?”
    As I walked off, I heard Double Tough ask about Vic’s nose. Just because he was double tough didn’t mean he was double smart. I made my way to the front porch and told Mrs. Thomas about my intentions. “You don’t have to do that, Walter.”
    “I’d feel better if I had a look around. If you don’t know this young man or anything about him, it might be best if we at least spoke with him.”
    She nodded but there wasn’t much enthusiasm in it.
    As she closed the door, I made my way across the front of the house to the small garage and entered from the side door, which was adjacent to the walkway alongside the house. There was a scary-looking 1969 Mustang convertible with badges on the side that read COBRA JET . It was semihidden underneath a car cover and was a testament to Bill Thomas’s last vehicular purchase before his death in ’71. The thing probably had a thousand miles on the odometer and was the lust of every driving-age male in the county.
    There was a workbench to my right with an assortment of baby food jars filled with screws and nails that probably dated back to Fort Fetterman, but there were a lot of hand tools that looked as though they’d been used recently, as well as spare lumber that had been placed in the rafters, along with a hidden stack of vintage
Playboy
magazines. Other than that, the place looked undisturbed.
    I closed the door behind me and remembered something Barbara had said about a pump house. We live in the high desert, and considering that the yard was very green and the flower beds abundant with blooms, I figured the water had to come from somewhere.
    Following my boots down a path overgrown with wild morning glories toward the bank of Clear Creek, I veered in the direction of the bridge. I could see the pitched roof of the outbuilding that had had its shingles repaired recently and could even make out the restored patch.
    The grass was higher as I cut off from the walkway, and I waded through the stalks to the small pad at the front. There was a clasp screwed into the surface of the door, but the rusted Master Lock was loose, and I unhooked it from the loop and pulled the door open with the wooden