The Cold Dish (Walt Longmire, #1)

by Craig Johnson

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.”

“It’s not Indian anymore, it’s Native American. Right, Bear?” She nodded for confirmation. He looked up and pursed his lips sagely. “That is right.” He turned his head toward me ever so slightly. “You must learn to be more responsive to Native American sensibilities.”

“In the cold, gray dawn of September the twenty-eighth . . .” Dickens. “...The slippery bank where the life of Cody Pritchard came to an ignominious end . . .” Faulkner. “Questioning society with the simple query, why?” Steinbeck. “Dead.” Hemingway.

pig was reported on Crow Street, officer dispatched. No pig was found.”

“Oh, Walt. All the women in town chase around after you now. Can you imagine what it would be like if you were good-looking to boot?”

call the Espers again; I’d just as soon get this all over with in one shot.” “Bad choice of words.”

The fact that he made life and death decisions on peoples’ lives was only slightly diminished by the fact that he never knew what day of the week it was. “Isn’t it Tuesday?” “Monday, Vern.” “I guess I lost a day in there somewhere.”

“It is the owl feathers that are the sign of death, the messengers from the other world. The eagle feather is a sign of life, attached to all the activities of the living: making rain, planting and harvesting crops, success in fishing, protecting homes, and curing illness. The feather is considered the breath of life, processing the power and spirit of the bird of which it was once a living part.”

Scientists say there is a noise that snowflakes make when they land on water, like the wail of a coyote; the sound reaches a climax and then fades away, all in about one ten-thousandth of a second.

“Hey, Chief.” He wasn’t joking; Frank Red Shield was a chief of the Northern Cheyenne. “I pulled you over ’cause you’ve got a couple’a taillights out back here.” He said the old chief’s eyes twinkled, and he patted Lucian’s arm that rested on the car. “Oh, that’s okay. I thought you were pulling me over ’cause I didn’t have no license.” Lucian said he nearly bit his lip to bleeding trying to not laugh until Mrs. Red Shield slapped her husband across the chest and said, “Don’t pay no attention to him, Sheriff. He don’t know what he’s sayin’ when he’s been drinkin’.”

“We get caught in here without any supplies, we are the honored dead.” “Yep, but what a blaze of glory.” I was enjoying being the tough guy for a change. “I am more concerned with the freeze of agony.”

I yelled with everything I had, “Stay down!” He couldn’t hear, or it didn’t matter. I had seen it in Vietnam, and I had seen it here. When you are a standing animal and you suddenly discover that you are not, there is an overriding need to rise and prove to yourself that you are intact.

“Attending officer thought about filing a missing persons bulletin for a sad, overweight, self-deprecating, yet strangely charming sheriff today. The officer thought it might be of interest to the missing person that said officer had turned down not one, but two high-paying, high-profile jobs because she guessed she’d just lost interest in being anywhere else . . .” My eyes welled up a bit, and I waited.