Depth of Winter-A Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson

Author:Craig Johnson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-04T07:00:00+00:00

10

My face hurt.

My head hurt.

Pretty much everything hurt.

I tried to raise my head, but my neck muscles weren’t cooperating; besides, it was dark, and my left eye was pretty well swollen shut, the skin scraped off down to the end of my nose, which was clogged with congealed blood.

I lifted my left hand, but there were heavy chains attached to it, and it was almost more effort than I could summon to get a finger to my nostril to do a farmer’s blow, which I immediately regretted. I cleared half my nose, but it felt as if I might have lost a quarter of my brain along with it.

I waited till the throbbing faded and tried raising my head again, this time getting a little farther so that I could see my boots at the end of my legs. A foot was dangling off to one side, and I thought it might be broken, but I moved my leg and it straightened out.

My right hand was not so lucky and as I stared at it resting on my thigh, I could see the forefinger was bent at an extreme angle—no way that wasn’t dislocated.

So I guess they had my gun.

I started reaching for the wayward finger with my left hand but a wave of nausea welled up, and I decided to wait a minute.

I looked around. To my surprise, it was not a suite at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, Colorado; instead it was a stone floor, stone walls, and a heavy door with a tiny window covered with bars which was the only source of light.

I took a deep breath. The room was even smaller than the others we had been in, with a thick coating of dust and cobwebs. I guess this particular cartel didn’t go to great pains to incarcerate their prisoners—just took them out back and shot them.

I was honored.

I cleared my throat, not particularly because I wanted to say something, but because there was something in it. A few seconds later someone’s head, backlit by the hall light, appeared in the door’s small window and then disappeared just as quickly.

I could hear some people talking in the distance and waited but didn’t hear anything more.

Deciding to while away the time by getting my finger back in its socket, I reached across and took hold of the tip, feeling a familiar albeit excruciating pain. I’d dislocated a finger or two in my time, and sometimes it wasn’t convenient to get medical assistance. I had learned the technique from Coach Cagle Curtis back in my offensive lineman years as a Durant Dogie.

Folding the digit in a hyperextension, I pulled and it popped back in place, just as I was about to puke or pass out. I took a big breath and just sat there letting the waves of pain travel up my arm and into my head, which, already overloaded with pain, refused delivery. “Ouch.”

I looked over my shoulder and could see that the manacles were attached to each other with a heavy chain that ran through an iron ring in back of me.

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