Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 04] (17 page)

Chee pulled the pickup to a stop against an outcrop of cliff. He clipped on his holster and hung his binocular case around his neck. "Be prepared," he said, and stepped out into the wind.

The doorway of the hogan was closed with planks nailed across the lintel logs. The only opening now was on the north side—a hole knocked through the stone wall to provide an exit for the ghost and to warn strangers that this was a death hogan. Chee stood looking into the hole. The evening light that filtered through the latticework of roof showed nothing but odds and ends of junk too worthless to carry away even by an impoverished family. Dirt had blown in and tumbleweeds had bounced through the ghost hole, but the danger posed by the
chindi
had made the place secure from scavengers.

"If Tsossie didn't die here, someone did," Chee said. "Let's find the place the old lady said they put him."

Mary was staring at the hogan. "I've heard about this," she said, "about Navajos not using buildings after somebody dies in them. It seems awfully wasteful."

"Unless maybe they died of something contagious," Chee said. "When the custom started, I guess that was the purpose."

"They carry the body out the hole? Is that right? Always on the north side?"

Chee didn't want to talk about it now. The wind gusted again, carrying around a light load of dry, feathery snowflakes. "North is the direction of evil," he said.

Mrs. Musket had told them the blowhole was in the mesa wall, west of the hogan. The butte was formed of layers of geological formations, capped with a gray erosion-resistant granite. Below that was a stratum of red sandstone perhaps thirty feet deep, which covered porous, whitish volcanic tuft that had been riddled with wind pockets and seepage holes. Only two of these near the hogan were large enough for a burial. Chee examined both through the binoculars and saw nothing conclusive. They climbed the talus slope toward the nearest one. Against the perpendicular walls of the butte, sections of the soft perlite had been worn away, undermining the sandstone. A section of it had fallen in a clutter of blocks, each as large as a freight car. Chee scrambled up the sloping side of one of the blocks and looked into the blowhole. Rocks had been piled on its floor. From beneath one of them a ragged fragment of blue cloth protruded. The wind eddied into the hole. The cloth fluttered.

"Come on up," Chee said. "I guess we found Windy Tsossie."

Sometimes the dry cold of a desert winter will protect a corpse from decay and turn it into a desiccated mummy. Since the placement in the cliff and the covering of rocks had protected Tsossie from both animal predators and scavenger birds, this might have happened to him. But Tsossie, apparently, had died in the summer, and thirty years of insects had reduced what he had been to a clean white skeleton.

With the last rocks removed, Chee squatted in the low opening and looked at what remained. The skeleton was still wearing moccasins, put on the wrong feet to confuse any
chindi
that might follow the spirit into the darkness of the afterworld. The denim trousers Tsossie had worn had been reduced to scraps of decayed rags, but for some reason the shirt was about half intact. Two buttons still held it across the empty cage of ribs. Chee checked the skeleton's left hand. A finger was missing. Mrs. Musket had said Tsossie had lost a finger. The wind caught the shirttail and blew it against the ribs, revealing the dull silver of leather-strung conchas. The heavy belt that had once encircled a waistline now encircled only a row of whitened vertebrae. Under the concha buckle Chee saw a leather string, the thong of a medicine pouch. Pouch and belt lay just above the socket where the ball joint of Tsossie's thigh bone connected to the pelvic socket. The thigh bone was distorted by a heavy, unnatural growth of scar tissue, an ugly lesion which ran from the joint almost halfway down the heavy bone. It looked very much like the illustration Dr. Huff had pointed out to them in his medical text. Bone cancer. The sort of crazy growth that happens in bone tissue with the metastasis of cell malignancy.

Chee picked up the pouch and pried open the brittle leather.

"It's snowing again," Mary Landon said. She was sitting on the slab outside the cave entrance inspecting the landscape through the binoculars. "And it's getting dark."

"Just another minute or two," Chee said.

The leather broke apart under his fingernail. Inside there was a coating of yellow dust—what once had been sacred pollen. The pollen coated four small fragments of abalone shell, a gallstone taken from some small animal, two feathers, a withered bit of root, and the small stone shape of a mole.

Chee held the mole delicately and polished away the pollen dust. It looked just like the one he had found in Emerson Charley's medicine pouch. Almost identical."

"Jimmy. Somebody's coming."

It was as if they were the same mole. The same amulet. The feel under his fingers was the same. The same blunt legs, the same sloping, pointed snout.

The tone of Mary's voice cut through his concentration more than the meaning of the words. The tone was fear.

"What?" he asked. "Where?"

"There." She pointed over the open hogan roof, past the almost bare cottonwoods, down the track they had followed.

At first he saw nothing. Then a man wearing a navy-blue stocking cap and a heavy black windbreaker trotted into sight. He carried a rifle in his right hand and ran easily, in a low crouch. Chee could see just enough of his face to confirm what he instinctively knew. It was the blond man. In his crouching, careful trot, he was skirting Chee's pickup truck.

"Climb in here," Chee whispered. He helped pull Mary into the blowhole. "It's him," Chee said. "But I don't think he's seen us. He's looking for us around the truck."

"How could he have found us here?" Mary whispered.

"God knows," Chee said. The blond man was kneeling behind a growth of rabbit brush, apparently watching the truck. Chee lifted the binoculars and surveyed the landscape down the track. The man must have driven here and left his vehicle parked somewhere. Chee could see no sign of it. It was probably parked out of sight in the bottom of the arroyo they'd crossed.

Mary found a place behind the bones and the rocks that had covered them. She sat pressed against the sloping wall, looking first at Chee and then at the skeleton. The blowhole was an elongated circle perhaps six feet along its longest diameter and flattened at the bottom by fallen debris and accumulated dust. The wind had cut into the soft ash no more than four feet. If the man with the rifle learned they were there, the blowhole offered no safety.

Chee spoke in a very low voice. "We stay absolutely still until it gets dark. No motion. No sound. Nothing to attract attention. I want you to ease yourself down as flat as you can get. You're out of sight from where he is now, but do it slowly and carefully. I'm going to lay flat, too. Then he won't be able to see anything in here, even if he tries. Not without climbing up on the slab."

"And we can't see him, either," Mary said in a very faint voice. "We won't know where he is. We won't be able to do anything to defend ourselves."

"He has the rifle," Chee said. "We don't have any defense against that. Not until it gets dark."

Chee lay on his stomach, his left hand pressed against the tuft beneath him, his right hand gripping the butt of his revolver. Ready to move. There was the smell of dust and ashes in his nostrils. The wind picked up again and hooted through the blowhole opening. Grains of perlite fell against his cheek. The blowhole had become infinitesimally deeper. There was a sound outside. The blond man? The wind? A brushy branch scratching against stone?

Chee struggled against an overwhelming urge to run.

The sound came again. A creaking.

"What was that?" Mary asked. The question had a frantic sound. Panic had come to her a little later than it had to him.

He reached across the bones for her, gripping her leg with his left hand. "The wind," he whispered. "Mary, listen. The way the owl hunts, he sits in a piñon and he hoots. He can't see the rabbits, and they can't see him. And that's the problem for the rabbits. He hoots. And he waits a little to let them think about it, and he hoots again. And the rabbits think. And one of them will think too much. He thinks the owl is getting closer and closer. He thinks the owl has found him. So he makes a run for it, and the owl has her meal for the night."

Mary moved his hand from her leg. "Okay, wise guy," she whispered. "I get your point."

A flurry of snow blew into the hole, the flakes cold against his face. Noises came again and with them a return of panic. He found himself imagining the blond man's face appearing suddenly over the rim of the hole behind the silenced .22 pistol. Chee found his muscles rigid with tension. He forced himself to think of other things. In three weeks he would go to Albuquerque and buy his ticket and report to the
fbi
Academy. Or he would drive out to the place of Hosteen Nakai and tell his uncle that he was ready to work with him—that Hosteen Nakai could count on him this winter when the calls came to conduct his sings. Which one would it be? He couldn't concentrate on the question. Instead he planned what he would do when darkness came. He would move when there was still a little light. He would find the blond man's car. If the blond man was in it, he would kill him. If he wasn't, then Chee would wait. He waited now, hearing the sound of the wind when it gusted and the sound of Mary breathing when it was silent. He had time now to add what Tsossie's bones and Tsossie's mole had told him to what he had already surmised. The People of Darkness had been murdered. Tsossie had been an unpleasant man, perhaps even a witch. But he had been reduced to bone for a motive that had nothing to do with the anger his unpleasantness had provoked. The motive was mathematical, not emotional. A simple matter of improving the odds against the future. A white man's crime.

Chee felt an impatience to move, to begin the contest. It was much darker, but not quite dark enough. Words from the Stalking Way ran through his memory, his uncle's husky voice singing them, his uncle's stubby fingers tapping rhythm on the pot drum.

The song ran on and on in Chee's mind, a pattern of repetitions, of slightly varied sounds and slightly varied meanings, exorcising the primal dread of death and preparing man and animal for the sacred hunt.

Jimmy Chee was ready. The wind gusted again, sucking into the blowhole, eroding away another thousand infinitesimal grains of ash and moving icy air up Chee's pant leg.

"I'm going now," Chee said. "Stay quiet for a few more minutes, until it's darker, and then slip out and find a sheltered place. But stay within shouting range. When it's safe, I'll call you."

He raised himself to a crouch, surprised at how stiff his muscles had already become.

"I've got a better idea," Mary whispered. "Give me the pistol, and I'll go out and see what I can do. I don't like this being the only one out here who can't shoot back."

Chee grinned. "No; it's my gun. I bought it with my own money."

And with that, he slipped quickly out of the hole, dropped to the slab, and from the slab to the brushy ground behind it. If the blond man had seen the motion, he hadn't seen it quickly enough to react.

Chee moved as fast as caution allowed. He made a wide circle away from the butte, angling on a course that would cross the little arroyo they'd had trouble traversing. That's where the blond man's vehicle would be and that's where Chee would find the blond man. Somehow, God knew how, he must have guessed the trail ended at the butte and that Chee would be there, and he hadn't risked the noise of trying to grind up the steep arroyo slope. He had parked and come for Chee on foot.

Chee had thought it through very carefully. The blond man had found Chee's pickup truck, but he hadn't found Chee. Hunting him in the brush and boulders around the butte would have been like searching the white man's proverbial haystack for a dangerous needle. So the blond man would opt for another solution. He'd return to his own vehicle and simply wait. When he heard the engine on Chee's pickup start and saw the reflection from Chee's headlights, he would have plenty of time to set up his ambush. The arroyo would be a perfect place for it. Chee's truck creeping down the steep arroyo bank. The blond man shooting Chee through the truck door. Shooting at point-blank range and with plenty of time for as many more shots as were needed if the first one didn't get the job done.

Where Chee reached the arroyo it was much shallower and broader. He hurried up it, moving silently on the sand. Wind and snow had almost stopped, but now the wind rose again, blowing in icy gusts against his face. The right direction for the hunter. Blowing scent and sound away from the prey. Even so, when the arroyo deepened, and when the dim light told him he was within a hundred yards of the point where the track dipped into it, he left the open bottom and moved slowly through the brush.

The vehicle was almost exactly where he'd thought it would be. The blond man had simply nosed it down the arroyo and left it far enough off the track to be out of sight. Chee moved carefully along the extreme edge of the arroyo bottom, slipping from one bit of brush cover to the next. He held the pistol in his right hand at full cock, so that a touch of his thumb to the safety would make it ready to fire.

The eastern sky was totally black now, but the west still filtered a dim twilight through the cloud cover. The blond man's vehicle was a dark-blue
gmc
pickup truck. From halfway up the arroyo bank where he was crouched, Chee could see the right front and side and look slightly downward into the cab. The cab seemed to be empty. It was empty unless the blond man was prone on the front seat or sitting on the floor. That seemed unlikely. A long willowy wand jutted upward from the back bumper—the antenna of a two-way radio. That was how the blond man had known he could find Chee at Bisti. He had monitored the Navajo Police radio calls.