“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk with your mouth full?”

I tried to focus on one of my favorite skies—the silver-dollar one with the peach-colored banding that seriates into a paler frosty blue the old-timers said was an omen of bad times ahead—as I stuffed a third of a bacon cheeseburger into Marcel Popp’s mouth in an attempt to silence the most recent of his promises that he was, indeed, going to kill me.

At last count he’d made this statement twenty-seven times to me, eight to other members of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department, and seventeen to Santiago “Sancho” Saizarbitoria, who was dragging a few french fries through his ketchup as his eyes stayed trained on a paperback in his left hand.

I looked at Sancho. “That was twenty-eight.”

The sun reflected through the western window and struck my face like a ray gun. I was tempted to close my eyes and soak in the warmth of the early afternoon, but I couldn’t afford the luxury. I hadn’t allowed any silverware at the table and Marcel Popp was manacled, but I still warned him that if he bit either Sancho or me he’d go without food.

The Basquo tilted his head from the book. “Do dirty looks count?”

Popp glanced at Santiago, who was watching the other two convicts quietly eating their lunches, and we could only guess what his words would’ve been as he chewed.

“No.” I placed the rest of the convict’s burger on his plate and looked back out the window as the sunshine took another dying shot at my face.

Sancho and I had been amusing ourselves by keeping score, and even though the Basquo was down by eleven, he had made a fourth-quarter comeback with a tirade he’d received as we’d unloaded the transported prisoners at South Fork Lodge in the heart of the Bighorn Mountains. The Basquo’d apologized for handling Marcel’s head into the top of the door while getting him out of the vehicle; I still wasn’t sure if it had been entirely innocent.

I glanced at Santiago and then risked closing my eyes for just a second. Even with present company, I had enjoyed my own Absaroka burger and fries. South Fork was my favorite of the lodges, with the best menu and a river-stone fireplace in the dining room that owners Holli and Wayne Jones kept roaring when the temperature was under fifty degrees. It was a year-round, full-service lodge nestled away in one of the southside canyons, with snowmobiling, cross-country skiing, horseback riding, trout fishing, and hunting in season.

It was early May, and the summer crowds hadn’t arrived yet. With the outside temperature in the high thirties not including windchill, I was afraid we still had a few shots of winter left.

Despite the weather, there was a comfortable, close quality to the lodge, and I fantasized about reserving one of the rustic cabins by the partially ice-covered creek and calling Victoria Moretti, another of my deputies, to see what she was up to this weekend. Vic had just bought a new house, and she’d invited me and my best friend, Henry Standing Bear, over for dinner tonight. I was still thinking about the cabin when Popp spoke again.

“I’m going to kill every single one of you motherfuckers.”

It was a general statement, but he’d been looking at me. “Twenty-nine.”

Currently, Marcel wasn’t a happy camper. I hadn’t released either him or the other two murderers from their traveling chains in order to eat. Marcel had already killed two Winnemucca, Nevada, city policemen and a South Dakota highway patrolman in an attempt to escape a year back. That and his limited vocabulary had endeared him to the entire Absaroka County staff. We would be just as happy to be rid of him when we met up with the Big Horn and Washakie counties’ sheriff’s departments, the FBI, and the Ameri-Trans van near Meadowlark Lodge in less than an hour.

Ameri-Trans was a private firm that contracted with law enforcement to transport prisoners, but they had no contract with us; I didn’t like the fact that they had a record high percentage of escapees and wouldn’t allow them in my jurisdiction, so we’d made a little jaunt into the mountains this afternoon with the prisoners.

I’d asked the FBI agent in charge over the phone what all this was about but had been told that the details would be made clear when we delivered the convicts to the multiagency task force that awaited us a little farther up the road. I didn’t like his answer, but for now that was my problem.

I glanced at Raynaud Shade, the prisoner who worried me most, the one who continued to look at his plate as he chewed. I didn’t know why the Crow-adopted Canadian Indian was being transported but would be just as glad when he was no longer my responsibility. He hardly ever spoke, but in my estimation it was the quiet ones you really had to worry about. I’d been distracted by my thoughts for only a second, but when I paid attention again his pale eyes were studying me from under the dark hair. He had this unnerving ability that whenever you refocused your eyes on him, he was there with you—like a cat in a cage.

“I’m going to kill you, you little Basque prick. I’m gonna kill your big boss here—I’m gonna fuckin’ kill all of you.”

I picked up the rest of the burger and pushed another third into Marcel’s mouth.

Sancho stuffed the paperback under his arm, looked at the stack of books at his elbow, and smiled a wayward, electric smile that made the women in the county give him that second look, or even a third. “That was a triple.”

“Almost an in-the-park home run.” I frowned at him. “That was one for you, one for me, and a general score we can share.”

“C’mon.”

I tallied it up. “Thirty to nineteen.”

He sighed and resumed reading Dante’s Inferno as I reached over and slid Les Misérables off the top of the pile to reveal Les Trois Mousquetaires—both in the original French. The Bas-quo, regretting a stint in higher education devoted almost exclusively to criminal justice, was attempting to fill in some of the literary gaps. We had all made lists for him, including Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee from Henry and of all things, Concrete Charlie: The Story of Philatelphia Football Legend Chuck Bednarik from Vic, but my dispatcher Ruby’s list, which included Crime and Punishment and The Pilgrim’s Progress as well as the Inferno, had been the most daunting, so the Basquo had started with it. I, taking pity on the poor kid, had included To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath, and the aforesaid Musketeers.

“How’s it going, troop?”

He peeled a thumb against the sides of the prodigious paperbacks, especially Inferno. “Slow.”

“Hey, I am God-damned starving here.”

Popp was a monster, just the kind of obstacle you didn’t want to meet in a dark or otherwise illuminated alley. Roughly my size, he was already in shape when he’d gone into the South Dakota Maximum Security Facility in Sioux Falls, and four hours of weight lifting a day over the last year hadn’t allowed him to exactly winnow away.

“And fucking dying of thirst, you assholes.”

Or improved his vocabulary.

Hector Otero, the third of our terrible trio, smiled at the latest of Popp’s outbursts, and I wondered what wrong turns had resulted in the scam artist killing two people on Houston’s south side. The ever-smiling Latino had been shocked when Santiago had spoken to him in fluent Spanish. I’d understood only a percentage of the conversation, but the Basquo had rolled his eyes afterward, putting the street hood’s intelligence in question. “Who wrote that anyway?”

Sancho regarded the Latino with one eye. “What?”

The gangbanger seemed actually interested, his eyes like drips of crude oil flicking between Sancho and me. “That book, that Dante’s Inferno; who wrote that?”

The Basquo and I traded a look, and I waited to see how my deputy was going to play it.

“Hector, do you know who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

“Nope.”

Saizarbitoria went back to his Penguin Classic. “Didn’t think so. Just be glad we’re letting you eat at the big-person table.”

Otero, aware that he was being made the butt of a joke, clicked his eyes to me so I’d know that he wasn’t up to anything and then raised in his chair just enough to see the other titles in Saizarbitoria’s pile. “Yeah, well, at least I’m not reading a book by Alexander Dumb-ass.”

Hector was grinning when Raynaud Shade sucked the air out of the room.

“Shut up, Hector.”

If anybody had ever said that to Hector Otero in the outside world, they might’ve gotten more than a couple of ounces of lead in response, but not Shade. The smaller man looked at the Indian but said nothing.

When I looked at Shade, he was staring at me again.

His features were flat, his nose spread across his face like a battering ram had been used one time too many, the bones of his brow and cheeks prominent. He was an average height, but his chest, shoulders, and bull neck let you know that if something were to start, Raynaud Shade would get his share. You wouldn’t have thought him capable at twenty-seven of the rap sheet he carried—but when you looked into his outlandish eyes, it was all there. His irises were the same washed-out blue as the winter Wyoming sky and just as cold.

At least one was. Raynaud’s left eye was a replacement, and whoever had done the work had failed to capture the exact color. The shade, no pun intended, was an elusive one reflecting an altitude where humanity could not survive.

I’d read about him—he must have been the one the Feds were really interested in. He was on the express back to Draper, Utah, to either a lethal injection or a firing squad, which meant that he was a dead man walking and, as long as he walked in my county, he would walk in chains.

He looked at me through the hood his dark hair formed and spoke in an empty, halting voice. “Thank you.”

It was the sixth time he’d communicated since we’d been responsible for him, coming up on seventy-two hours. “For?”

His eye stayed with mine for a second—it was as if he was half paying attention—then panned around the café like a searchlight. “For allowing us to eat in a restaurant.” He smiled as though he didn’t know how, and I figured it was the only one he had—the one with a lot of teeth and no warmth. “I imagine this will be my last time to do something normal.”

He spoke in the cadence of the Yukon Territory where he’d been born, and his voice carried—one of those you could hear from a hundred feet away even when he was whispering. His eye went back to his plate, and his hair fell forward, again covering his face. “I gotta go to the john.”

I studied him. “In a minute.”

He nodded and raised his cuffed hands, putting the fingertips on the table at its edge, his thumbs underneath. I watched as the fingers bent backward with the pressure of his grip.

“Me too, I gotta take a fucking piss.”

Popp made a clicking noise as he spoke, and I could tell he was thinking of spitting again. He’d spit on Sancho as we were unloading him, at which point I’d grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled his face in close to mine, making it clear that if he spat again he’d go without lunch. My fingerprints were still on his neck; I was feeling bad about that.

“I’ve been here before.”

I turned back to Shade. “Excuse me?”

“First kill outside of my family.”

He said it like they didn’t count.

“I gave one of his bones to two other men who sent it back to me in the mail in an attempt to get some money I have put away—that’s why they’re meeting us.”

He had finished his meal and carefully pushed his plate back a couple of inches, his thumbs still under the table, his hair still covering his face. “There is an FBI psychologist that I’ve been seeing; her name is Pfaff. I told her about where the body is buried.” He was suddenly silent, aware that everyone had been listening to him, but then stared directly at me. “I just thought you might be curious.”

The waitress interrupted the little breakthrough and squelched my hopes of extending Shade’s confession. “Would you like some more coffee, Sheriff?”

It took me a second to come back; Shade’s dead eye was like that—it drew you into the cold.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I caught her looking at the convicts and figured it was to be expected. If they’re lucky, most people in the private sector never get to meet someone like Marcel Popp, Hector Otero, or especially Raynaud Shade, but with our little road show of recidivism, prurient curiosity was to be expected.

She poured in a distracted manner. “Do you get the check?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I looked at her. “I don’t know you, do I?”

Her eyes slid away. “No, I’m new.”

“Hi, New. I’m Walt Longmire.”

I held out my hand, and she took it as she held the coffee urn out of the way. “Beatrice, Beatrice Linwood.”

I listened to the way she rounded her vowels. “Minnesota?”

She nodded without enthusiasm and took a second to respond. “Yah, Wacouta.”

I smiled. “Well, you don’t have to be ashamed about it. What’s that near?”

“Red Wing.”

“Where they make the work boots?”

“Yah.”

I sipped my coffee in appreciation and studied her for a moment; midforties, she was too thin and a little mousy, but it was a nice smile. Something else there, though, something that reminded me of my late wife. Her hair was thin, and she looked like she might’ve undergone some form of chemotherapy recently.

“What brings you out this way this time of year?”

She shrugged and pushed her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose, and I noticed her rubbing her finger where a wedding ring might’ve once been.

“Snowmobiles.”

I should’ve figured. Most of the flatlanders got tired of doing a hundred miles an hour on the ice of the ten thousand lakes and eventually wanted to try their hand at the mountain trails. A lot of them ended up buried in the snow or running into trees. I’d tried the power sport once with the Ferg, my part-time deputy, but didn’t like the noise or the sensation that my crotch was on fire.

“Holli and Wayne treating you well?”

She glanced toward the opening where the smiling head of flamboyant chef Alfredo Coda had appeared from the kitchen, and then turned back to me. “Yah, they’ve all been great.”

“I don’t mean to break up old home week, but could I get something to fucking eat and drink?”

I tipped my fawn-colored hat back and looked at Marcel, but Saizarbitoria was faster. Holding a portion of The Divine Comedy in one hand and picking up the remainder of the prisoner’s burger in the other, he gave him the last bite. I noticed Sancho was even less gentle than I’d been, and his voice was a little irritated. “Anything to shut you up.”

I reached over to take the coffeepot from Beatrice so that she wouldn’t have to get in arm’s reach of the prisoners. “Here, I’ll take that.”

She pulled away, just slightly. “No, I’ll get it.”

I took the coffeepot anyway and tested the temperature. “That’s all right.” To a desperate man, anything was a weapon. I poured a round for the chain gang and one for the Basquo. “Can’t be too careful.”

She smiled up at me. “They don’t look all that dangerous.”

“Well.” I stood and returned the pot to her. “I’ll take that check now.”

She put it facedown alongside my empty plate.

“Shade? Let’s go.” I glanced at Sancho, making sure we made eye contact, and left him with the other two.

The convict stood and then rounded the table toward me. I glanced at Saizarbitoria one more time. He rested the paperback on the table and nodded. I took Shade’s arm, and he began a shuffling, manacled gait past the front counter, through the gift shop, and around the corner to the communal sink and the

two doors that led to the bathrooms.

Shade paused. “Do you need to come in with me?”

I glanced into the small stall that said BUCKS and noted the only egress was a seven-inch vent in the ceiling. “Not unless you’re planning on turning into a field mouse and crawling up that pipe.”

“No.” He stared at me. “Not a mouse.”

“Leave the door ajar.”

He did as I asked, and as he busied himself I remembered how he had stumbled in the dining room as we’d gone past the last table where they had been rolling silverware, bumping it with his hip and pausing for only an instant.

There were small alarms going off in my head as he came out a few moments later, turned his back to me, and began washing his hands. After a few seconds he raised his head, and the eye studied me in the mirror. “I’m sorry if I seem preoccupied, but it is difficult to see you.”

Aware of his disability, I nodded as he lifted his cuffed hands with the traveling chains that led to the manacles at his feet and tore a paper towel from the dispenser. “It’s the snow.” He tossed the towel into a trash can in the corner and stepped toward me. “It’s difficult to see you because of the snow; surely I’m not the first one to tell you that?”

I stared back at him and dropped my hand to the Colt at my hip. “Snow.”

His face was impassive, and he gestured with one hand, the other along for the ride. “There is the outline of you, but inside is only snow—like an old TV.”

I watched as the one hand dragged the other over his shoulder. “You mean static?”

“Yes, but not exactly like that. It’s as if you carry the snow within you.” The pupil in the live eye stretched open while the dead one remained still. “When did this happen?”

I stood there for a long moment, studying him and trying to get a read on whether it was an act or if he was truly insane. I’d been around crazy people before, but none with the dedicated malice that this man seemed to exude. “We should get back to the others.”

He leaned in and whispered as his hands dropped and shifted to his side. “I didn’t have to go to the bathroom but wanted to speak to you alone about the snow and the voices.”

I didn’t say anything, and he stepped in closer.

“You see them and hear them, too.”

I countered and casually brought the large-frame Colt up, holding it loose at my hip. “Shade, you wouldn’t have palmed the steak knife from that table in the dining room?”

He said nothing, but the one eye slit. There was a slight twitch as his motor response was to try for it, but then he smiled with his wide, even-set teeth and brought the knife out, wrapped inside a fist.

I turned so that he could see that the Colt was cocked and the safety was off. “Give it to me.”

He held back and regarded me for a long moment, letting the words settle between us like ash. “You don’t believe that they are near, do you?”

I didn’t move, didn’t even breathe. “Give me the knife.”

His other hand folded around it in a two-fisted grip, the blade pointed directly toward me. “The Seldom Seen; they are

with you, but you pretend that they aren’t.”

I still didn’t move.

“When did they first become known to you?” I could feel my breath becoming short as he continued. “They spoke to me infrequently after my first kill, but now it’s constant—they talk to me night and day, many voices as one.” He shifted his shoulders the way you would if you were preparing to move. “Many voices as one.”

I raised the Colt and pointed it at the center of his chest.

“You have also killed, and they speak with you—we have something in common, Sheriff.”

I raised the sight to his head. “The knife.”

“We are pawns to these spirits, souls they play with for their own satisfaction like hand games.” He didn’t move, and we both knew that the next threatening shift, no matter how slight, would result in his death. He continued to show me his teeth. “It will be interesting to see how they respond to your disbelief, who it is that they will send for you.”

The tension went out of his body as he lowered the knife, and he drew back. Keeping the .45 trained on his face, I reached over with my other hand and took the knife, handle out.

Handle out—I’d never seen him flip it.

I got my breath back and thought about the ghosts slamming about in the particular machine in front of me as I reholstered my sidearm and put the knife in my back pocket. “Let’s go.”

I guided him back through the gift shop, past the counter where Beatrice Linwood watched us.

Shade said nothing more as I seated him at the table, but he looked back up at me and stared as if we had shared something important. I stood there thinking about what he had said, then straightened and found my deputy studying me.

“You all right?”

It took a second for me to respond. “Yep.” I glanced back at Shade and shot another look at Sancho, who closed his book again, gave me an almost imperceptible nod, and turned to look at the prisoners like a red-tailed hawk regarded field mice. I picked up the check and crossed the twelve steps back to the cash register, peeled off three twenties, and asked Beatrice for a receipt.

She held the money and glanced back as Holli entered behind her through the swinging door that led from the kitchen. The owner/operator paused at the register and looked past me toward the seated men. “What did they do?”

I thought about whether I really wanted to tell her, finally deciding that if she didn’t want to know, she wouldn’t have asked. “They’re murderers, all of them.” I waited a moment to see if the two women wanted me to continue, and they did. “The little guy with all the tattoos, his name is Hector Otero. He’s a credit card hustler and gangbanger from Houston. The big guy with the mouth is Marcel Popp, a methadonian who . . .”

Holli looked puzzled. “A Methodist?”

I cleared my throat. “Sorry, it’s kind of an inside joke— heroin users who use methadone clinics to get high.”

Beatrice stiffened a little. “I don’t think that’s very funny.”

I thought of telling her about the dead officers and Popp’s girlfriend, whom he’d strangled to death with an electrical cord, and how none of them had thought their situation very humorous, either.

I looked at the woman behind the counter. “Yes, ma’am.”

As I turned to go, her whisper came after me. “And that one?”

I stopped and stuffed a portion of the change into a tip jar and the receipt into my wallet without looking back at her. “Beatrice, you don’t want to know.”

Why did you decide to make Dante's Inferno such an integral part of Hell Is Empty?

There are certain seminal pieces of literature that haunt you, and Inferno is one of mine. Evidently it preoccupies others as well, since it is listed as one of the top ten Penguin Classics. It's interesting to me that it is Dante's view of hell that most people carry. There is very little description of Hell in the Bible and what there is conjures up a place of fire and brimstone. In Dante's poem, the deepest of Hell's rings aren't lakes of fire but rather frozen, icy, wind-blown places, not unlike the top of Cloud Peak. I knew I wanted there to be a literary metaphor for the novel, and Dante's opus seemed the obvious choice. I'd already introduced my guide, Virgil, a few books back, and Walt became my everyman—my Dante.

Walt is pitted against the elements as much as he is against Raynaud Shade. Why is the setting so crucial in this novel?

The mountains are a place of extremes, and this is a novel about extremes. Place has always been an important character in my novels, and Cloud Peak is an amazing environment, that is located near my ranch; I don't see how folks can live in the shadow of a mountain and not want to climb it. It was also a logical choice in that if you were attempting a manhunt, there are not many places more difficult than an 189,039 acre wilderness area. I've always been a big fan of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, and this was an opportunity to do my take on that type of literature.

As in many of your novels, mysticism plays an important role in Hell Is Empty. What interests you about Native American myths?

The lineage of my people in this country is only a couple of hundred years old, but the people up on the Rez have been here for thousands of years and, in my book, that means that they might know a few more things about the area than I do. I never discount anybody's beliefs and that might be something Walt and I have in common. In all honesty, I've been in more sweat lodges than churches in the last twenty years. As far as the spiritualism is concerned, the trick in this particular novel was to not repeat what I'd done in The Cold Dish; I thought that Walt's disbelief in what had happened then was intrinsic to what would happen this time around. If Walt didn't believe in the things that happened to him previously, then how would those same entities attempt to assist him this time? That gave me the tangible reason in the plot for the reintroduction of Virgil. Besides, they are stories, and stories always interest me and I hope my audience.

The fire that Shade sets on Cloud Peak is intensified by the beetle kill that has ravaged parts of Wyoming, and the couple that Walt meets coming down the mountain in their hyper-modified jeep suggest major changes in both the social and physical environment in the Wyoming high country. Could you talk about those changes?

Most of the time I take the ideas for my novels from local newspapers, which keeps the books grounded in the reality of place. There are remarkable changes going on in the American West and to leave those out of the books would be dishonest. Both of the instances you mention, however, are mirror images of Inferno with the Jeep driver playing the role of Charon, the boat driver who takes Walt across the river Styx and the beetle kill forest representing the dead forest of suicide, so maybe things don't change but stay the same.

Walt Longmire's wit is one of his most appealing characteristics. How do you think about the role of humor in your work? How much did you enjoy writing the sentence: "Jesus, Virgil, Dante saved your life"?

Okay, guilty on that one… I think that humor is one of the finest weapons we have in tough situations, and one of the things that keeps us human. Walt needs all the humanity he can gather in this one, and so the humor becomes paramount the more serious things get. In all honesty, Hector, the gangbanger from Houston, died in the first draft of the book, but when my wife read it she said, "You can't kill this guy, he's too funny." Being funny can save your life, even in a fictional sense.

This is your seventh Walt Longmire mystery. Are you still discovering new aspects of his character?

Absolutely; if I weren't I wouldn't be writing the novels. Walt has changed since the first book in the series and continues to change. I think the complexity of character is the life-blood of any series.

You live in Ucross, Wyoming. Could you talk about the writing community there and in Wyoming generally? Do you share your work with other writers in the area?

Ucross has a population of twenty-five, so there really aren't any other writers around, and Wyoming itself is the least populated of the fifty states but ranks ninth in area, so we are too spread out to discuss much, which is fine with me. I'm not a big one for sharing my work in progress. I have very defined ideas about what I'm doing and how I do it, and I don't think I'd really gain anything from discussing my work; I'm a big one for saving it for the page, which drives my wife nuts; there are times she won't feed me unless I tell her who did it.

What are your reading habits like? How much does your reading influence your writing?

I read a lot of everything—fiction, nonfiction, memoir, biography—but a lot of the time it's connected to the work in one way or another. I think that one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to read only within one genre because generally you end up regurgitating the same stuff. Generally, I do all my research reading a year in advance of writing the actual book so that by the time I get to write the novel, I'm chomping at the bit to get going.

Could you talk about your writing process? How do you generally begin your novels? Do you see pretty far ahead in terms of plot, or do you let the story carry you along? How much did you revise Hell Is Empty?

I outline the living daylights out of my books, not only the arc of a singular book but the arc of the series. To write this book, as I mentioned before, I had to have a Virgil so I'm generally thinking a couple of books ahead. I also allow for a certain amount of improvisation in the writing, which I think is important; if I can surprise myself then maybe I can surprise the readers. This novel was particularly difficult since the framework was Dante's and not mine, but I still wanted it to be satisfying for people who hadn't read Inferno. I try to write on as many levels as possible and then hope for the best. And yes, I revised and then revised some more. My books are really never finished—Viking/Penguin just takes them away from me.