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

border. When he accepted the new position a little less than two years ago, she gave it all up and came out with him. She listened to the wind, played housewife for about two weeks, and then came into the office to apply for a job.
    She didn’t look like a cop, least not like the ones we have out here. I figured she was one of those artists who had received a grant from the Crossroads Foundation, the ones that lope up and down the county roads in their $150 running shoes and their New York Yankee ball caps. I’d lost one of my regular deputies, Lenny Rowell, to the Highway Patrol. I could have brought Turk up from Powder Junction but that had appealed to me as much as gargling razor blades. It wasn’t that Turk was a bad deputy; it’s just that all that rodeo-cowboy bullshit wore me out, and I didn’t like his juvenile temper. Nobody else from in county had applied for the job, so I had done her a favor and let her fill out an application.
    I read the Durant Courant while she sat out in the reception room scribbling on the front and back of the damn form for half an hour. Her writing fist began to shake and by the time she was done, her face had turned a lively shade of granite. She flipped the page onto Ruby’s desk, hissed “Fuck this shit,” and walked out. We called all her references, from field investigators in ballistics to the Philadelphia Chief of Police. Her credentials were hard to argue with: top 5 percent out of the academy, bachelor’s in law enforcement from Temple University with nineteen credit hours toward her master’s, a specialty in ballistics, two citations, and four years street duty. She was on the fast track, and next year she would’ve made detective. I’d have been pissed, too.
    I had driven out to the address that she’d given me, a little house trailer near the intersection of both highways with nothing but bare dirt and scrub sage all around it. There was a Subaru with Pennsylvania plates and a GO OWLS bumper sticker, so I figured I was in the right place. When I got up to the steps, she already had the door open and was looking at me through the screen. “Yeah?”
    I was married for a quarter century and I’ve got a lawyer for a daughter, so I knew how to deal with these situations: Stay close to the bone, nothing but the facts, ma’am. I crossed my arms, leaned on her railing, and listened to it squeal as the sheet metal screws tried to pull loose from the doublewide’s aluminum skin. “You want this job?”
    “No.” She looked past me toward the highway. She didn’t have any shoes on, and her toes were clutching the threadbare carpet like cat’s claws in an attempt to keep her from spinning off into the ether. She was a little below average height and weight, olive complexion, with short black hair that kind of stood up in pure indignity. She’d been crying, and her eyes were the color of tarnished gold, and the only thing I could think of doing was to open the screen door and hold her. I had had a lot of problems of my own of late, and I figured we could both just stand there and cry for a while.
    I looked down at my brown rough-outs and watched the dirt glide across the porch in underlining streaks. “Nice wind we’ve been having.” She didn’t say a word. “Hey, you want my job?”
    She laughed. “Maybe.”
    We both smiled. “Well, you can have it in about four years, but right now I need a deputy.” She looked out at the highway again. “But I need a deputy who isn’t going to run off to Pittsburgh in two weeks.” That got her attention.
    “Philadelphia.”
    “Whatever.” With that, I got all the tarnished gold I could handle.
    “Do I have to wear one of those goofy cowboy hats like you?”
    I glanced up at the brim of my hat and then back down to her for effect. “Not unless you want to.”
    She cocked her head past me, nodding to the Bullet. “Do I get a Batmobile like that to drive around in?”
    “You bet.”
    That had been the first dissemblance