Kindness Goes Unpunished (Walt Longmire, #3)

by Craig Johnson

Cady didn’t have a car and generally walked the thirty-two blocks back and forth to work. I wondered if she ever had the time to see this picture-postcard view of her neighborhood. I worried about her walking home at night, but I worried about her brushing her teeth and breathing. Like most parents, I just worried.

“We call it mugging. Out where I’m from, if you’ve got a horse with too much spirit, you just tie it to a mule for the night. When you come back the next morning, you’ll have a different horse.”

I stood there for a while, holding onto the railing, and tried to think of what Cady would want me to do. Like me, she couldn’t abide mystery. Even as a young child, she asked questions—questions as statements, questions as answers, and questions as endless inquiry. She wanted to know everything and, if you told her to go look it up, she would and then come back with even more questions. Even then, she could interview a stump.

“You? What’s not to like?” It was an innocent question, but it hit something along the way, glancing off and taking a lot with it.

Out of my element, it was possible that the deductive process I had always relied on was now leading me astray, or maybe it was just that I couldn’t stop thinking about Cady. I thought about walking over to the other side of the building to look out one of the windows so that I could find her. It felt like up here, with our ships anchored in the sky, I might be able to catch a glimpse of her as she used to be.

“But you must realize that you have no jurisdiction here in the city of Philadelphia or the state of Pennsylvania.” “I am aware of that.” I was also aware that we were in Wilmington, Delaware, but figured now was a bad time to argue geographic discrepancies.

He smiled and bobbed his head. “I guess you’re pretty good, too, huh?” Good enough to know I was cocked and locked with a full clip and one in the pipe; good enough to know he was empty.

“Alphonse, what do you know about Vince Osgood?” “The assistant DA on suspension?” He tightened his lips under his mustache. “He would burn his mother to stay warm.”

…Walks the quiet rushes of the Mni Shoshe, then moves north, to higher ground. He motions toward the ponies as they rise up and release their tears, large drops the size of ripe apples. They dance then, as my mother and father shift in sleep, dreaming to the rhythm of horses’ hooves.

The horses were large and potent, the muscles of their limbs reaching out like the flexing of fingers, gobbling up the distance and reaching out for more.

There was no change, and I could feel my heart cannon-balling into my bowels, taking my lungs along for the ride. I took a deep breath and listened to it clatter in my throat like a rattler in shedding season when it is blind, pissed, and strikes out at everything.

I hung back at the turn, but it’s hard to go unnoticed when you are a powder blue vintage convertible with a cowboy, an Indian, a brunette, and a dog inside.