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

handle. It had probably been a smoke house at some point, which would explain the faint odor of charred wood—that and the rusted points in the rafters that were stained from the places where some kind of meat hook had been attached.
    There was a small 2.5 horsepower irrigation pump feeding water from the creek to a system with pipes that rose up through the dirt floor and then returned in two-inch diameters. I walked around the pump, placed my hand on the outgoing line, and felt the surge of cold water as it flowed through.
    As my eyes settled in the gloom, I could see that there was a steel, fold-up bunk running along the wall on the other side—the kind people used to use for guests. There was an old military blanket on the twin mattress, tucked in so tight you could have bounced a roll of quarters off of it.
    When I got to the bed, I heard a different sound under my boots and stepped back, revealing the vague outline of something square buried in the floor. I kneeled down and brushed away some of the dust. There was a small hook on one side, so I moved it and lifted the lid of what appeared to be an old milk jug container buried in the dry dirt. It was dark in the hole, and I wished I was wearing my duty belt with my trusty Maglite attached, but instead, I just stuck my hand in the submerged box.
    The first thing I found was a magazine—
Gun Buyer’s Annual
, this year’s date. It was an encyclopedic guide to all the weapons available on the private market. The illustrations on the glossy cover, starring a collection of rifles, shotguns, semiautomatics, and radical carbines, had been thumbed away at the center where someone had spent hours studying the thing. I opened the magazine—practically every page was dog-eared.
    I set it aside and reached into the hole again, this time coming up with a copy of
Playboy
, January 1972. The magazine was as worn as the gun almanac, and I had to admit that Marilyn Cole, leaning against a bookcase with a novel in her hands and little else, was still looking good considering her photo was over a quarter of a century old and folded into three equal parts.
    I rested what hardly seemed to be even mild porn anymore on the stack with the gun porn and reached into the hole again, this time pulling out a moldy-looking tome—threadbare black with gold lettering—the Book of Mormon. When I carefully opened the cover, I noticed that it was published in 1859, and the handwritten inscription on the title page read “For my son Orrin, Man of God, Son of Thunder—your loving mother, Sara.”
    I tucked the antiquarian book under my arm and stuck my hand back in the container in the floor but couldn’t feel anything else. I looked around the place for something, anything, but there was nothing. I returned everything except the book back to the hole, closed the lid, and kicked a little dirt back over it. I stood, keeping the book with me, and walked around the pump to give the dirt-floored room one more going-over. I stepped through the door, closed it, and hooked the clasp of the lock back through the loop, careful to leave it as I’d found it.
    When I got back to Barbara Thomas’s home, I rapped my knuckles on the screen door and waited until Barbara appeared on the other side of the tiny squares, her image pixelated into a thousand parts. I held up the book and asked, “Who’s Orrin?”
    She placed a hand against the doorjamb for support and silently put her other hand to her mouth.
    •   •   •
    “I don’t know where he’s from.”
    I watched as Double Tough took another cookie from the plate on the kitchen counter. Barbara, Vic, and I and the Book of Mormon sat at the kitchen table trying to sort things out. “Well, when was the first time you saw him?”
    “Like I said, about two weeks ago.”
    “You also said he was an angel.”
    She blinked and looked out the kitchen window leading toward Clear Creek and the pump house. “I . . . I might have been confused about