People Of Darkness Part 14

Mary laughed. "Sure," she said. "Now all you have to do is figure out how."

"I think I have," Chee said. "At least part of it."

The track angled to the right and up the slope of dark-blue shale marbled with reddish impurities. Above it, the top of the b.u.t.te loomed, now no more than a thousand yards away. Chee s.h.i.+fted down. Mary was watching him impatiently.

"I'm waiting," she said.

"Okay," Chee said. "First we agree there has to be a reason. White man or Navajo, you do things for a reason. With a Navajo, something this bad-blowing up people wholesale-would have to be witch business. Irrational. Evil for the sake of evil. No other motive would make sense. For the white man, I think it would be greed." He glanced at her. "All right so far?"

Mary looked puzzled. "I guess so," she said.

"If we're dealing with witchcraft, what's happened since doesn't connect. Maybe a Navajo would want to kill the Charleys if he knew they were witches who'd done him harm. That's happened. But he would do it in the heat of rage, not years later. So let's set that aside."

Mary shrugged.

"So we're dealing with a white man's crime," Chee continued. "The motive's greed. Who gains by blowing up an oil well? You have to remember where that well was. We couldn't find the remains because the Red Deuce has swallowed up the site. So the oil company drilling the well had a mineral rights lease on that piece of land. If the well produces oil, the lease is extended as long as production lasts. That's the standard oil lease form. So let's say somebody knows there's a uranium deposit under the well. Who'd benefit?"

"You mean the Senas? Because it was on their ranch?"

"Maybe the Senas," Chee said. "When it finally did happen, uranium made Gordo Sena rich. But something doesn't fit with thinking Gordo did it."

"You mean like killing his own brother?" Mary asked. "Maybe Robert Sena planned it himself and then something went wrong and he killed himself, too."

"I didn't mean that," Chee said. "I meant the Sena ranch is like most ranches out here. It's a little bit of privately owned land connected to a big spread of federal Bureau of Land Management land. Most of what you own is a permit to graze your cattle on BLM land. That's where the well was drilling. On federal land. The Senas had the grazing lease, but it was about a quarter of a mile from the boundary of their own land. So they wouldn't benefit directly from either an oil strike or a uranium find. Sena got rich because the uranium deposit spread over onto his family property."

"So you rule out Sena," Mary said. "Who then?"

"I don't quite rule out the Senas," Chee said. "There's a piece missing somewhere. I can't think it through."

The pickup tilted abruptly downward into a narrow wash. Chee s.h.i.+fted into his lowest gear, braked to a stop, and inspected the arroyo. The problem would be pulling the truck up the other side. The arroyo carried very little water even after down-pours, and a tall growth of mesquite and rabbit brush on both sides of the track had limited erosion. But still, years of cutting away had made the opposite bank steep enough so that getting traction to the pickup out of it looked chancy.

"Looks like the end of the line," Mary said. "But aren't we close enough to walk?"

"We'll try the pickup," Chee said. "If we don't make it, there's plenty of room down there to turn it around."

The vehicle produced a great shower of flying gravel, lost traction briefly, and skidded sideways. But it made the brief, steep climb. Ahead now, no more than four hundred yards away, they could see three gnarled cottonwoods. In a desert climate they signaled either a spring or a very shallow water sand that could be tapped by a well. And that in turn explained why this track led across the badlands and why the Tsossies had picked the site for their hogan. Chee and Mary could see the hogan now about twenty feet beyond the trees. It was a hexagon of stacked sandstone slabs, roofed with poles which radiated outward from a central smoke hole. The earth that once insulated the roof against cold and heat had long since washed away.

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 chindi had made the place secure from scavengers. 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 b.u.t.te 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 seep-age 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 b.u.t.te, 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 chindi that might follow the spirit into the darkness of the afterworld. The denim trousers Tsossie had worn had been reduced to sc.r.a.ps of decayed rags, but for some reason the s.h.i.+rt was about half intact. Two b.u.t.tons 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 s.h.i.+rttail 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 ill.u.s.tration 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. that might follow the spirit into the darkness of the afterworld. The denim trousers Tsossie had worn had been reduced to sc.r.a.ps of decayed rags, but for some reason the s.h.i.+rt was about half intact. Two b.u.t.tons 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 s.h.i.+rttail 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 wind-breaker 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.

"G.o.d 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 acc.u.mulated 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 b.u.t.t 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 blow-hole 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 pinon 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.

I am the Black G.o.d, arising with twilight, a part of the twilight.Out from the West, out from the Darkness Mountain, a buck of dark flint stands out before me.The best male game of darkness, it calls to me, it hears my voice calling.Our calls become one in beauty.

Our prayers become one in beauty.As I, the Black G.o.d, go toward it.

As the male game of darkness comes toward me.With beauty before us, we come together.

With beauty behind us, we come together.That my arrow may free its sacred breath.

That my arrow may bring its death in beauty.

The song ran on and on in Chee's mind, a pattern of repet.i.tions, 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 b.u.t.te, 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, G.o.d knew how, he must have guessed the trail ended at the b.u.t.te 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 b.u.t.te 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 c.o.c.k, 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 p.r.o.ne on the front seat or sitting on the floor. That seemed unlikely. A long willowy wand jutted upward from the back b.u.mper-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.

With that thought came another. What had Chee said when he talked to Crownpoint? Had he mentioned Mary Landon in that call? Had he even said "we"? Had he said anything that would have told the blond man that Mary was with him? Chee squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating, trying to remember. As always, his memory served. He had said "we." "We're going nine miles northwest of the old trading post. We'll be there until after dark." Those had been his words. So the blond man knew Mary was with him.

Chee slouched back on his heels, his eyes still on the truck, and thought. He considered that the blond man-apparently, at least-was not waiting where Chee's good sense told him the blond man should be waiting. So where was the blond man? He was back at the b.u.t.te, hunting Chee and Landon. Or he was back at the b.u.t.te, staked out, watching for them to return to their pickup. Either way he might find Mary, or she might, cold and confused, walk into his trap.

Chee put the pistol carefully on a rock beside his boot. He extracted his billfold, and from the billfold the check Vines had given him. It was perfect for the message. The check itself would tell the blond man that Vines had been in contact with the police. He wrote carefully, trying for legibility in the darkness.

KILLING US WON'T HELP. VINES ISDEALING WITH FBI. HE GETS OFF LIGHT.

Chee pushed his hand back into his warm glove, picked up the pistol, and moved cautiously to the truck. The door on the driver's side was locked. Chee pulled out the wiper blade and wrapped the check around it securely. If the blond man got back to the truck, he couldn't miss seeing it. It appealed to Chee's Navajo sense of balance, order, and harmony-this business of using the check, the witch's own poison, to turn the evil back against its source. It was the way Changing Woman had taught. Chee trotted off in the darkness toward the b.u.t.te.

An hour later there was no light at all left in the west. The snow was falling again, still dry, feathery flakes, now drifting almost vertically downward, now whipped by gusts which whistled and moaned around the cliffs of the b.u.t.te and sent the snow stinging against the skin. Chee had scouted the ground carefully, using his pickup truck as a center and making cautious, time-consuming circles widening around it. He'd moved when the wind blew and crouched motionless, listening, when it dropped into calm. He'd checked every bit of cover that a man in ambush might use to watch the pickup. He'd found nothing. Now he squatted beside a scrubby juniper, thinking. He could see the shape of the pickup against the dark stone of the outcrop. Where could the blond man be? What was he doing? Chee reexamined everything he had been told of the man and everything he had observed himself. He considered the way the man had behaved on the malpais and in the hospital and what Martin had told him of his a.s.sa.s.sinations. Always meticulous care. Always caution. Never a chance taken. That was the key. No unnecessary chances. No overlooked possibilities. That was why Chee hadn't found him in the two places where the man might logically have been. Because the man had thought it through, had realized that he might have been seen, had realized that Chee might be smart enough to expect a trap or an ambush. Chee frowned into the darkness. The blond man would hardly be floundering around the b.u.t.te in darkness. He had to be hiding somewhere, waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting for Mary and Chee to get into the pickup and drive into an ambush somewhere? Not if he suspected he had been seen. Then Chee would simply slip into the pickup and radio Crownpoint for a.s.sistance. The minute such a call was made, the blond man would be hopelessly trapped. Therefore, the blond man must keep him from his radio. Why isn't he doing that? Chee asked himself. What is to keep me from slipping into the front seat and calling for help? Perhaps he doesn't know that police disconnect the switch that turns on the courtesy light when the door opens. Perhaps he is somewhere, waiting for that flash of light. But no, Chee thought. The blond man would know that. Perhaps he is waiting inside the pickup? No. Chee had left the truck locked. Even if the man picked the lock, hiding inside would be risky.

So how was the blond man protecting himself against the radio call? Chee went over what he knew of the blond man again, incident by incident, from the hospital to the very beginning and the bombing of Emerson Charley's truck in the parking lot. When he reached that, he knew exactly what the blond man had done and what he was waiting for.

He had put a bomb in Chee's pickup. Now he was off somewhere in the darkness, out of the wind and totally unfindable, waiting patiently for Jim Chee and Mary Landon to blow themselves to pieces.

It took Chee only a few minutes to climb the outcrop. From atop that table of stone, he could look directly down into the bed of the truck thirty feet below. It was too dark to be sure, but he could see nothing in the pickup bed that hadn't been there before. If the blond man had placed a bomb, it wasn't likely he had put it in the same place he had used in his effort to kill Emerson Charley. Here, most likely, he would have placed it on the truck frame under the body. If the FBI knew what it was talking about, his bombs detonated when they were moved. Driving over the first b.u.mp would do the job. Under the cab, the effects would be certain.

The point where the outcrop jutted from the face of the b.u.t.te was littered with chunks of fallen stone. Chee picked up one that weighed perhaps twenty pounds and carried it to the edge. He placed himself carefully, over the center of the truck bed. In the same motion he tossed the boulder and jumped backward away from the edge.

The crash of the boulder striking metal was engulfed a minisecond later by a great flash of light and sound. Chee, already off balance, found himself sprawling on hands and knees, his ears ringing and his eyes seeing only the red and white circles imprinted on his retinas by the flash. He lowered himself on the surface of the stone, waiting for sight and hearing to recover.

Soon he could hear a second sound through the receding ringing and see a flickering light through the flash blindness. The truck was burning. At first the flames from the burning gasoline flared above the rim of the outcrop, but they quickly lost their force. Now Chee lay in the darkness looking out across a landscape illuminated by the fire. It was the ideal place to be. When the blond man came to make sure of his victims, Chee would shoot him. Chee lay on his stomach, the c.o.c.ked pistol held in front of him, waiting.

The wind rose, fanned the flames into a roar, and then died away. The snow drifted straight down again, still dry and feathery. The rock around Chee, blown clear by the most recent gusts, collected another thin layer of snowflakes. Gasoline and oil were almost exhausted now, and the fire fed itself on rubber and upholstery. Chee could smell the rancid black smoke of burning tires and plastic. The landscape the blond man would be crossing was white now. He would be easy to see in the firelight. But the blond man did not come. Through the sound of the fire below him, Chee heard the sound of a starter, and then of a motor, grinding in low gear. Across the ridge where the blond man's pickup had been parked, there appeared a fan of light reflecting in the falling snow. Chee jumped to his feet. The light tilted upward, two visible beams jutting into the snowy sky. The truck was climbing out of the arroyo bottom. But the headlights were pointed away from the b.u.t.te. The blond man was driving away.

31.

They built the fire in the creva.s.se between two of the great fallen slabs in a sheltered cul-de-sac protected from the wind. Chee had picked the spot carefully and then had made a walking circuit, a.s.suring himself that no light, even dimly reflected, was visible. The blond man had driven away toward the Bisti road. Chee had watched the truck lights moving eastward until finally they no longer reappeared through the falling snow. The blond man probably wouldn't return. There was no reason for him to do so. But he might.

Now, finally, they were out of the wind. Mary Landon sat across from him, back against the vertical stone, her denimed legs stretched straight in front of her. Above them the wind gusted past the b.u.t.te top with a hooting noise. Between these walls of fallen stone, it only caused the fire to flicker. But Mary s.h.i.+vered and hugged herself.

"I think it was a mistake," she said, "leaving that note about Mr. Vines."

"Why?"

"Because," Mary said. "Because maybe he'll go and shoot Vines-and you don't know for sure Vines killed anyone. You don't have any proof."

"I know for sure," Chee said.

"You don't have anything to prove it with. You're not a judge."

Chee thought about that. The firelight was red, burning the rosin of dead pinon. It reflected on Mary Landon's face, casting deep shadows where her hair fell across her forehead.

"Yes," Chee said, "I am a judge. If the blond man kills Vines, then that's justice. But he's not going to kill Vines. He won't have time. He can't get there tonight because of the weather. If we get three inches of snow down here, there'll be two feet of it up on Mount Taylor. The road won't be open until they get a snowplow on it-and that won't be until tomorrow morning. They'll be using the snowplows where there's more traffic."

"Still, you don't have any right to..."