Read Online Christmas in Absaroka County: Walt Longmire Christmas Stories by Craig Johnson - Free Book Online

one, huh?”
    “Hey, I ain’t shittin’ you. Billy was movin’ some of Tom Chatham’s sheep down off the BLM section to winter pasture, and them little bastards clustered around somethin’ in one of the draws. . . . We got a cool one.”
    “You didn’t see it?”
    “No. Billy did.”
    “Put him on.”
    There was a brief jostling of the phone, and a younger version of Bob’s voice answered, “Hey, Shuuriff.”
    Slurred speech. Great. “Billy, you say you saw this body?”
    “Yeah, I did.”
    “What’d it look like?”
    Silence for a moment. “Looked like a body.”
    I thought about resting my head on my desk. “Anybody we know?”
    “Oh, I didn’t get that close.”
    Instead, I pushed my hat farther up on my head and sighed. “How close did you get?”
    “Couple hundred yards. It gets steep in the draws where the water flow cuts through that little valley. The sheep stayed all clustered around whatever it is. I didn’t want to take my truck up there ’cause I just got it washed.”
    I studied the little red light on the phone until I realized he was not going to go on. “No chance of this being a dead ewe or lamb?” Wouldn’t be a coyote, with the other sheep milling around. “Where are you guys?”
    “’Bout a mile past the old Hudson Bridge on 137.”
    “All right, you hang on. I’ll get somebody out there in a half hour or so.”
    “Yes sir. . . . Hey, Shuuriff?” I waited. “Dad says for you to bring beer, we’re almost out.”
    “You bet.” I punched the button and looked at Ruby. “Where’s Vic?”
    “Well, she’s not sitting in her office looking at old reports.”
    “Where is she, please?” Her turn to sigh and, never looking at me directly, she walked over, took the worn manila folder from my chest, and returned it to the filing cabinet where she always returns it when she catches me studying it.
    “Don’t you think you should get out of the office sometime today?” She continued to look at the windows.
    I thought about it. “I am not going out 137 to look at dead sheep.”
    “Vic’s down the street, directing traffic.”
    “We’ve only got one street. What’s she doing that for?”
    “Electricals for the Christmas decorations.”
    “It’s not even Thanksgiving.”
    “It’s a city council thing.”
    I had put her on that yesterday and promptly forgot about it. I had a choice: I could either go out to 137, drink beer, and look at dead sheep with a drunk Bob Barnes and his half-wit son or go direct traffic and let Vic show me how displeased she was with me. “We got any beer in the refrigerator?”
    “No.”
    I pulled my hat down straight and told Ruby that if anybody else called about dead bodies, we had already filled the quota for a Friday and they should call back next week. She stopped me by mentioning my daughter, who was my singular ray of sunshine. “Tell Cady I said hello and for her to call me.”
    This was suspicious. “Why?” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. My finely honed detecting skills told me something was up, but I had neither the time nor the energy to pursue it.
    I jumped in the Silver Bullet and rolled through the drive-through at Durant Liquor to pick up a sixer of Rainier. No sense having the county support Bob Barnes’s bad habits with a full six-pack, so I screwed off one of the tops and took a swig. Ah, mountain fresh. I was going to have to drive by Vic and let her let me know how pissed off she was bound to be, so I pulled out onto Main Street, joined the three-car traffic jam, and looked into the outstretched palm of Deputy Victoria Moretti.
    * * *
    Vic was a career patrol person from an extended family of patrol people back in South Philadelphia. Her father was a cop, her uncles were cops, and her brothers were cops. The problem was that her husband was not a cop. He was a field engineer for Consolidated Coal and had gotten transferred to Wyoming to work at a mine about halfway between here and the Montana