Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson Page A

summer. Studying her was something you had to handle with care; volatile, like nitroglycerine.
    “So, miss me?”
    “Yep.”
    “A lot?”
    “Yep.”
    She chewed and studied me. “Are you going to say something other than yep?”
    “Yep.” She waited, her eyes widening in comic expectation as I finally spoke.
    “How are you feeling?”
    “I’ve got a great scar.”
    “I know; I’ve seen it.”
    She nodded with a smile, staring at me in a way that made me think she hadn’t had a really good look at me last night; not a feeling I was comfortable with. “Don’t you think scars make better stories than tattoos?”
    I fingered that little piece of my ear that was missing and draped an arm over the back of my seat. “If that’s the case, then I’ve got a whole library on me.”
    “I’ve read it.” She continued smiling and chewing. “And I really liked the ending.”
    She leaned back in the booth and looked out the fogged window of the Aces & Eights, a corpuscle-colored fingernail coming up and chipping at the frost cornering the edges. “The windows in Belize don’t do this . . . Shit, who am I kidding, they don’t have windows in Belize.”
    A quiet spread out over the table between us like a blank page covered with abandoned plates, glasses, and cutlery—but no words. “You stay at Jim Seale’s place?”
    She nodded. “Hotel del Rio, yeah. He’s from around here, right?”
    “Banner, over in Sheridan County.”
    “You ever been to Belize?”
    “Nope. I think he’s had that place for twenty years. He keeps asking me down . . . But I just never get away.”
    A smirk traced itself across her lips. “Look who I’m asking—you never go anywhere there isn’t snow.”
    “I’ve spent some time in tropic climes.”
    She dismissed me with another flap of the hand. “The Vietnam War doesn’t count.”
    “I spent six weeks on Johnston Atoll.”
    She stopped moving and then slowly turned her face toward mine. “After Vietnam?”
    “Yep.”
    Her eyes sharpened to flints. “Okay . . . That’s a month and a half of the two lost years unaccounted for after Vietnam in the saga that is the life of Walt Longmire. Where the hell is Johnston Atoll?”
    I sipped my coffee, enjoying her full attention. “Seven hundred and fifty nautical miles west of Hawaii on a coral reef platform; it’s one of the United States’ minor outlying islands—about 1.3 square miles.”
    “A postage stamp in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a single palm tree like you see in those cartoons in the
New Yorker
?”
    “Something like that.”
    “What, were you shipwrecked or something?”
    “No.”
    She glanced around, enjoying the illusion of covert activity. “What’s there?”
    I leaned back in my seat and studied her. “An air base, a naval refueling depot, and a weapons testing area, but not anymore.”
    “What kinds of weapons?”
    “Nuclear, among others.”
    She leaned in. “No shit?”
    “A dozen thermonuclear weapons were exploded there before the ban in ’63, but they also had a twenty-five-acre landfill full of Agent Orange, PCBs, PAHs, dioxins, and sarin nerve gas from East Germany.”
    “Sounds horrible.”
    “Nope, it was beautiful . . . Well, not the landfill so much, but the rest of it was an island paradise.”
    “What’d you do there?”
    “Swam, ate fish, fed the sharks, and sunbathed.”
    Her head kicked to one side. “For the government—you must’ve still been working for the military.”
    “Security.” I shrugged. “I was on medical leave from the Marines and still attached to the Air Force through the provost marshal, so they shipped me off to a quiet place for the rest of my tour.”
    “Was it?”
    I blinked. “What?”
    “Quiet.”
    I thought about it. “For a while.”
    She wiggled on her seat. “Okay, let’s hear about it—”
    “Maybe some other time.”
    “C’mon.”
    I laced my hands behind my head. “So, how did Lena like Hotel del Rio?”
    She