Read Online Messenger: A Walt Longmire Story by Craig Johnson - Free Book Online Page A

to do any good. “Wardens must be busy . . .”
    The Cheyenne Nation nodded and looked at me again. “Hunting season and the last of the tourists.”
    I pointed toward the road, or the lack thereof. “If you’d pay more attention to where we’re going, you might save some of these trees.” He ignored me, and I continued to fiddle with the knobs on the police radio, the only concession I made to my full-time job when fishing—in my line of work it’s sometimes important for people to get in touch with me; not too often, but sometimes.
    I could feel his eyes on me as he looked past Vic, grooving in her own world. “What?”
    He did his best to sound innocent, something at which he wasn’t particularly good. “What?”
    “Why are you behaving strangely?”
    He turned back to the road. “Define strangely.”
    “You keep watching me and asking me if I’m all right.”
    He didn’t turn to look at me this time. “Are you?”
    “Yep.” I sighed. “You didn’t answer my question.”
    “As a good friend . . ” He sounded annoyed now. “Can I not simply be interested in your general well-being?”
    “No, not really.” I picked up and played with the radio again and thought about what this kind of inordinate attention usually meant. “Have you been talking to Cady?” My daughter, The Greatest Legal Mind of Our Time, was a lawyer in Philadelphia. Newly married to Michael, my undersheriff Vic’s brother, she was pregnant with her first child but sometimes treated me as if I were one. “What’ve the two of you been cahooting about now?”
    He shook his head. “I know you are in the suspicion business, but your paranoia may be getting the best of you.”
    “Are you saying you haven’t been talking with her?”
    “No.”
    “No what?”
    He shook his head solemnly. “No, I did not say that.”
    “No, you haven’t been talking to Cady or no you didn’t say that?”
    “Exactly.”
    I shook my head and watched the passing scenery as we bumped along.
    After a few moments, he spoke again, just as I knew he would. “I am supposed to broach a subject with you.”
    “Ahh . . .” This is the way it usually worked; Cady, unwilling to ask me questions on more sensitive issues, would sometimes ask the Bear to intercede and bring the subject up, floating a topic for response before the real familial debate began. “What’s this about?”
    “Your granddaughter.”
    I took a breath, realizing the subject matter was of true import. “Okay.”
    “She is going to need a name.”
    I nodded. “Tell my daughter I agree, the child should have a name.”
    He quickly added, ignoring the humor. “It is a question of
what
name.”
    I smiled; Henry had been friends with both my deceased wife and me long before we’d gotten married. “We discussed that when she was here for rodeo—she’s going to name her Martha.”
    There was a long pause as the Cheyenne Nation fought the wheel, the road, and possibly me.
    I turned and looked at him. “She’s not going to name her daughter after her mother?” He shrugged. “We talked about this; we sat there in the bleachers at rodeo and she brought up her mother’s name and I seconded it.”
    “She says you are the one who brought up Martha’s name.”
    “I wasn’t.”
    “She said she mentioned something about the baby’s name and that you brought up Martha.”
    “I just brought her mother’s name up casually in conversation, and then she said she was going to name the baby after her.”
    He shook his head some more. “When you bring Martha’s name up in conversation, it is never casual.”
    We drove in silence, hearing only the music in Vic’s ears.
    “I might’ve brought it up uncasually.” He continued to say nothing, which spoke volumes. “So, she doesn’t want to name the baby after her mother?”
    “She is not sure.”
    “Fine.”
    “Obviously, it is not.”
    “I just  . . .” My voice sounded a little confrontational even to me, so I