Hell Is Empty (Walt Longmire, #7)

by Craig Johnson

It was possible that they’d dropped off the two women and that one of them was wearing the boots of the Ameri-Trans guard. It was also possible, as Vic would say, that flying monkeys were soon to appear out of my ass.

I leaned back in the sofa, and it was so soft I thought I might die there.

“What is it with you white people and morals? Maybe it’s just a story about what happened.”

I couldn’t die—I had too many women who would kill me.

I thought about all the recently lost lives, of all the current destruction, and could feel a stirring deep in a place where my ears wouldn’t have heard it harden even if they’d still worked. The ringing continued, bells of warning along with the continuing tattoo of distant drums, but the one sound that rustled over the others was the sound of the blackened, leathery wings of wrathful vengeance folding themselves around me.

Maybe it was like Virgil’s statements about the Inferno, that all horrors are horrors of the mind. We summon up the devils we need to punish us for the things that we’ve done.

I wanted to laugh. If I could have formed the words, if my lips could have moved or my tongue cooperated, I would have laughed and told them that sometimes it helps to be dead to confront your demons, and that I had been dead a long time.