People Of Darkness Part 8

"We haven't recovered it yet," Martin said. "We think it was rented from Hertz at the Albuquerque airport." He fished a folder from his briefcase and extracted a copy of Hunt's sketch.

"Your man look like this?"

"Pretty close," Chee said.

"The Hertz people identified him as the man who rented a green-and-white Plymouth sedan. Now the car's overdue. He gave his name as McRae and an Indiana address. It doesn't check out."

Chee didn't comment. Talking to Hunt had tired him. His chest hurt. His ears were ringing. He wanted Martin to go away.

"When you get out of here, we want you to come down to the office," Martin said. "We want you to look at mug shots and give us more details on the identification if you can."

"Mug shots? You think you have a record on him?"

"Not really," Martin said. "We think we have a ten-year acc.u.mulation of suspicions. We want you to look just in case. And we want you to spend a lot of time remembering everything you can about him. Everything."

Chee said nothing. He just closed his eyes.

"It's important," Martin said. "This guy's slick. That little pistol he used must be really silent. And he gets it in places where n.o.body sees anything. Apparently he scouts everything out very methodically, and then he likes to catch them alone for one quick close shot at the head. In the john is a favorite of his. We know of four found sitting on the john with the stall door closed. And a couple in telephone booths. Places like that. A quick shot and he just walks away. Never any witnesses. Not until the bombing. And now you and Miss Landon."

Chee opened his eyes. "We're the first witnesses?"

Martin was staring at him. "The first he knows about. He didn't know anyone saw him putting the bomb in Charley's truck. Medium-sized. Blond. So forth. You're the only two who actually got a look at him and who could pin him to a killing."

Chee's head ached. He closed his eyes again.

"You know," Martin said, "I think I'd be careful if I were you."

Chee had already had that thought.

16.

When Martin left, Chee spent the next ten minutes on the telephone. He got Mary Landon's number from information, but no one answered when he called it. He remembered then that it was a school day and called the school. Miss Landon had taken the day off. He called his own office, explained the situation, and told Officer Dodge to see if she could find Mary and do what she could do to keep an eye on her. The doctor came in then-a young man with red hair and freckles. He inspected Chee's ribs, replaced the dressing, said, "Take it easy," and left. The nurse arrived, took his temperature, gave him two pills, watched while he took them, said, "This isn't a police station. You're supposed to be resting," and left. Chee rearranged himself on the pillow and gazed out across the university campus. He thought about Mary, and about the peyote religion, and B. J. Vines' keepsake box, and the ways of white men, and drifted off into an uneasy sleep. When he awoke it was late afternoon. The sun was slanting through his window and Mary sat in the bedside chair.

"h.e.l.lo," she said. "How're you feeling?"

"Fine," Chee said. He did feel fine. Vastly relieved.

"Boy," she said. "You sure scared me. I thought you were dead. I waved down a truck, and he got that state policeman on his CB radio. And when we got back to you, you were just lying there." She grimaced at him. "Like dead."

Chee told her what he'd learned about the blond man. "You see the problem? There's a chance he's going to decide he needs to get rid of us."

Even as he was saying them, the words sounded melodramatic to him. In this quiet, antiseptic room, the idea of anyone wanting to kill Jim Chee and Mary Landon seemed foolish.

"Don't you think what he'd really do is just run?" Mary asked. "That's what I'd do."

"But you're not a professional gunman," Chee said.

"If that remark's a reflection on my shooting, I want to remind you that it was you who screwed up the rear sight."

"Be serious," Chee said. "This guy kills people."

The humor left Mary's face. "I know," she said. "But what can you do? It's sort of like being struck by lightning. You can't go around all the time hiding from clouds."

"But you don't stand under trees while it's raining, either," Chee said. "Why don't you take a leave and go off and visit some relatives somewhere for a while and don't tell anyone where you're going?"

Mary's expression s.h.i.+fted from somber to skeptical. "Is that what you're going to do?"

"I would if I could," Chee said. "But I'm a policeman. It's my business."

"No, it's not," Mary said. "You don't even have jurisdiction. That's what you told me. It's FBI business. Or maybe the sheriff's."

"Legally," Chee said. "But this sore rib sort of gives me a special interest. And besides, I'm a material witness."

"So am I," Mary said.

They argued about it, an uneasy, tentative sparring of two persons not yet sure of their relations.h.i.+p.

Mary changed the subject to his earlier visitors, to Sheriff Sena, to Sena's obsession with the death of his brother in the oil well explosion. The conversation was oddly strained and uncomfortable.

"When I get out of here," Chee said, "I'm going to dig into the newspaper files and learn everything I can about that oil well accident, and get some names, and see what I can find out."

"I'll go see about it," Mary said. "The university library keeps newspapers on microfilm." She got up and collected her purse. "I'll see if they have the right ones. If I hurry, I can get it done today."

17.

It was 3:11 A.M. A.M. when Chee looked at his watch. He had been awake perhaps fifteen minutes, lying motionless with his eyes closed in the vain hope that sleep would return. Now he gave it up. Sleeping away the afternoon had left him out of tune with time. The nurse had given him another sleeping pill at ten o'clock but he had let it lay. His policy was to take pills only when unavoidable. Having his sleeping habits dislocated was the price he was now paying for that pill at lunch. He sat on the edge of the bed and put on the hospital slippers. Much of the soreness had gone out of his side. Only when he moved was there still pain under the heavy bandages. Through the curtain that now part.i.tioned the room he could hear the heavy breathing of a drugged sleep. They had wheeled a man in from the post-surgery recovery room about midnight-a young Chicano sewn up after some sort of accident earlier in the evening. Chee flicked on his bed light and began to reread the newspaper. Through the curtain he heard his roommate mumble in his sleep. The man s.h.i.+fted his position, groaned. Chee switched off the light. Let him sleep, he thought. This is the time of night for sleeping. But Chee had never felt more wide awake. He put on his robe and walked down to the nurse's station. The nurse was a woman in her middle forties, with a round, placid face and a complexion marred by those ten thousand wrinkles the desert sun inflicts upon white people. She glanced up from her paperwork through bifocal gla.s.ses. when Chee looked at his watch. He had been awake perhaps fifteen minutes, lying motionless with his eyes closed in the vain hope that sleep would return. Now he gave it up. Sleeping away the afternoon had left him out of tune with time. The nurse had given him another sleeping pill at ten o'clock but he had let it lay. His policy was to take pills only when unavoidable. Having his sleeping habits dislocated was the price he was now paying for that pill at lunch. He sat on the edge of the bed and put on the hospital slippers. Much of the soreness had gone out of his side. Only when he moved was there still pain under the heavy bandages. Through the curtain that now part.i.tioned the room he could hear the heavy breathing of a drugged sleep. They had wheeled a man in from the post-surgery recovery room about midnight-a young Chicano sewn up after some sort of accident earlier in the evening. Chee flicked on his bed light and began to reread the newspaper. Through the curtain he heard his roommate mumble in his sleep. The man s.h.i.+fted his position, groaned. Chee switched off the light. Let him sleep, he thought. This is the time of night for sleeping. But Chee had never felt more wide awake. He put on his robe and walked down to the nurse's station. The nurse was a woman in her middle forties, with a round, placid face and a complexion marred by those ten thousand wrinkles the desert sun inflicts upon white people. She glanced up from her paperwork through bifocal gla.s.ses.

"Can't sleep," Chee said.

"Let's see," Bifocals said. "You're Chee?" She found his folder and glanced at it. "You had a pill at ten, but I guess I could give you another one."

"I don't like 'em," Chee said. "They make me drowsy."

Bifocals gave him a double take, detected the irony, and grinned. "Yes," she said. "That's the trouble with sleeping pills."

"A while back this hospital lost a body," Chee said. "Fellow named Emerson Charley. You hear about that?"

"Not officially," Bifocals said. "But I heard." She grinned at the memory. "There was some h.e.l.l raised over it."

"How could it happen? What do you do with bodies?"

"Well, first the attending physician comes, takes care of the certification," Bifocals said. She looked thoughtful. "Then the body is tagged for identification and moved to the morgue on the second floor. It's held there until relatives get a funeral home to claim it. Or, if there's an autopsy, it's tagged for that, and it's held until the morphology laboratory does the postmortem. The way I heard about this one, it was tagged for an autopsy, but somebody came and took it."

"Tell me about it," Chee said.

"Nothing to tell. He died late in the day. The body was taken down and put in the cooler. In the morning, morphology called for it and the body was gone." Bifocals grinned. "Lots of embarra.s.sment. Lots of red faces."

"Did somebody steal the body?"

"Had to be that," Bifocals said. "Somebody in the family, probably. Indians usually don't want an autopsy made."

Chee didn't correct her. Charley was a Navajo and most Navajos had even less distaste for autopsies than do whites. It was the Pueblo Indians who tended to resist autopsies. Their dead needed to be buried in the same cycle of the sun as their death. They had to begin on time the tightly scheduled four-day journey of the soul into eternity. But for most of the Navajo clans, death produced only a short-lived and evil ghost, and everlasting oblivion for the human consciousness. They had little sentiment for corpses.

"Could somebody just walk in and walk out with a body?" Chee asked.

"I guess they did," Bifocals said. "And with clothing, too." She chuckled. "We had two flaps out of this one. First the body was missing, and then two days later it turned out we'd given this Emerson Charley's clothing to another corpse. Whoever took him took the other man's clothing."

"How could that happen?"

"Easy enough. When a patient comes in, his clothing goes into a red plastic bag-looks sort of like a shopping bag-and it goes to the morgue with the body. Whoever got the body just picked up the wrong bag."

"But don't they keep the place locked?"

"Supposed to be. But somebody probably left it open for some funeral home. That's what I think happened. And somebody from the man's family came, found it unlocked, and just walked out with the body. The morgue's right by the laundry dock. They could go out that way and n.o.body would see them. And you should be back in bed."

"Okay," Chee said. "Good night."

But Chee still wasn't sleepy. At his doorway, he glanced back. Bifocals was immersed in her paper-work. He walked down the hall, around the corner, and out the door to the elevator landing. He took the stairway down to second, and paused there to get his directions. From what Bifocals said, the morgue was near the laundry loading dock. That made sense in terms of logistics. The hospital was built on a slope, a hillside that angled downward from northeast to southwest. Thus if the laundry loading dock was on a second floor, it must be on the northeast side of the hospital. Chee took a hall that led north and made a right turn eastward. As he walked down this empty, echoing corridor he could hear thumping sounds ahead. The sounds, Chee guessed, a laundry would make. On the next door, a sheet of typing paper had been stuck. A legend printed on it with a marking pen declared that the morphology laboratory had been moved to the New Mexico State Laboratory. Just around the corner, Chee found the door to the morgue. It was a wide door, protected by a plywood b.u.mper sheet. Three body-tables-on-wheels were parked beside it. The door was locked. Chee examined the lock. He guessed he could open it with a flexible blade, but there was no way to be sure. The ceiling offered another possibility. He glanced up and down the hall-way and down the connecting hall that led to the laundry dock. All deserted. The only sound was the thumping of the laundry machinery. Chee pushed one of the carts against the door and climbed stiffly atop it. He lifted the acoustical ceiling tile and stuck his head through the opening. There was about four feet of crawl s.p.a.ce between the false ceiling and the floor above. Chee tested the aluminum-alloy grid-work that supported the ceiling tiles. It seemed st.u.r.dy but probably not strong enough to support the full weight of a man. There were, however, other means of support-electrical-cable conduits, water pipes, and the heavily insulated sheet-metal tubes through which the hot and cold air of the heating-cooling system flowed. Chee could see well enough in the darkness now to tell that getting into the morgue wouldn't be difficult even if the door was locked. One could simply climb into the false ceiling, cross the part.i.tion, lift another of the acoustical tiles, and drop into the room. He withdrew his head, and sliding the ceiling section back into place, climbed gingerly down from the body cart. At the elevator he yawned. Suddenly he felt both tired and relaxed. He had answered a question that no one had asked, and that didn't matter anyway. But now he could sleep.

18.

Colton Wolf had left the car parked in the darkness about fifty yards from the laundry loading dock. He tested the dock entrance door. It was unlocked. Then he circled the hospital, checking the parking lots. He found no police cars. His plan was simple. He would use the front entrance of the hospital. He would take the stairs to the fifth-floor post-surgical wing, find room 572, and kill the Indian policeman. The next steps would depend on the circ.u.mstances-whether there was any sort of disturbance. Colton expected none. The Indian policeman would be sleeping the heavy sleep that hospitals impose upon their patients. He should present no problem. If there was a nurse on duty, Colton would evade her if he could and kill her quietly if he couldn't. And then he would walk downstairs, take the hall past the morgue, go out the laundry loading dock exit, and drive away in a common, nondescript two-year-old Chevy. He had taken the Chevy from the low-rate, long-term parking lot at the airport; the ticket on the dashboard of the one he picked showed it had already been left overnight. It might not be missed for days. But in the event it was missed, he had stopped in the parking lot of an all-night grocery store and switched license plates.

It was cold. Colton hated cold. He felt exposed and vulnerable. Overhead, as he walked across the almost empty front-entrance parking lot, the sky was a dazzle of strange stars. Unlike the soft, warm protecting darkness of his California boyhood, the night here was hostile. He could hear the soft sound of his crepe-rubber soles on the asphalt, the sound of his trouser legs rubbing, cloth on cloth. Behind him a truck moved up Lomas Avenue. Except for that, the night was silent. Colton squeezed the pistol in his coat pocket. It had a solid, rea.s.suring feel. It was a good piece. Long-barreled and unhandy to look at, but efficient. He had made most of it himself to exactly fit his needs. The grip was walnut, roughed to eliminate the possibility of fingerprints, as was every metal surface. The barrel was threaded at both ends so that a half turn removed the silencer from its muzzle and a turn and a half detached barrel from firing chamber. Only the barrel-with its telltale ballistic tracks left on the lethal bullet-was directly incriminating. Within minutes after a job, the barrel was disposed of and a new barrel screwed into place-apparent proof that the pistol Colton carried had never been fired.

The automatic door sighed open in front of him and closed behind him. Inside, the air was stuffy. The young woman at the reception desk was reading what looked like a textbook. She didn't glance at Colton. From somewhere out of sight down a hallway came the sound of a cart being pushed. No problems. Colton adjusted his plans. He walked past the stairwell door to the elevators. Entering a lift, he pushed the sixth-floor b.u.t.ton. The elevator rose silently, a new machine in a new wing. Colton took out the pistol, quickly checked the round in the chamber and the c.o.c.king mechanism. Perfect. Some would have said the caliber was too small for killing humans. A .22, they would say, was for rabbits. But Colton believed in silence. With a silencer on, a .22 made no more sound than a finger makes thumping on a skull. Small but sufficient, and for Colton's purposes, it was perfect. He had studied the skull and the brain within it in the Baylor University library when he was living in Waco. He understood the skull's bone thickness, and the tissue forms behind the bone, and where a small lead pellet could be placed above the hairline so that it would kill instantly and inevitably.

Colton put his hand, with the pistol gripped in it, back into his coat pocket before the elevator stopped at the sixth floor. The door slid open. He listened. He moved to the front of the elevator, pushed the door hold b.u.t.ton, and listened again. Nothing. No one was in the hall. He walked to the stairwell door and moved quietly downward.

The policeman's name was Jimmy Chee. The newspaper said he had suffered a bullet wound in the chest and had undergone surgery. The woman with him was named Mary Landon, a schoolteacher at Crownpoint elementary school. The woman could wait. She had not seen him as closely as had the policeman. The policeman had stared at him at the rug auction, and policemen were trained to remember faces. At the bottom of the stairs, Colton reviewed his plan.

Room 572 was a double room. At 6:00 P.M. P.M., when Colton had called to ask about Chee, the nurse had said he had no roommate. Probably he would still be alone. That would make it simpler. A roommate would probably not awaken. If he did awaken, his bed would doubtless be screened from the target's bed. Keep the killing to an absolute minimum, that was Colton's rule. The less killing, the shorter the manhunt it provoked.

Colton paused just inside the stairwell door, listening again. Here was a crucial point. With a policeman wounded under these circ.u.mstances, there was a chance a guard would be posted. This was why Colton hadn't risked arriving in an elevator. He peered through the gla.s.s panel of the stairwell door. No one visible. He slipped silently out of the stair-well to the ward door. He listened again. Nothing. Things had gone perfectly so far. Now the risk must be taken.

He pushed through the swinging doors. A nurse was walking directly toward him. She was a medium-sized woman, perhaps forty-five, with dark hair covered by a nursing cap. Behind hornrimmed gla.s.ses, her face registered surprise. "Yes?" she said.

"I'm Dr. Duncan," Colton Wolf said. "You have a patient named Jimmy Chee. I think we have him down for the wrong medication." He said it without hesitation, walking directly toward the nursing station, where the charts would be kept. Dealing with the nurse was the sort of contingency Colton was always prepared for. There was no guard in sight. But one might be sitting in the room with Chee.

"I think it's just a broad-spectrum antibiotic and a pain-killer," the nurse said.

"Let's take a look," Colton said. "I heard they were going to have a guard up here for one of the patients. What's the story?"

"n.o.body told me anything about it," the nurse said. Behind the nursing station desk, she flipped quickly through the medication order slips. "I'm almost sure it was Achromycin and Empirin number three," she said, intent on the forms. "Who wanted it changed?"

"The surgeon," Colton said. He extracted the pistol, c.o.c.king it as it left his pocket. He raised it, muzzle a half inch from the tip of the white cap.

"Here it is," she said. "Let's see..."

Colton squeezed the trigger. The pistol thumped and produced a thin spurt of blue smoke. The nurse's head fell forward onto the desktop. Colton held her with his free left hand on her shoulder until he was sure she wouldn't slip from the chair. Then he felt under her ear. The pulse fluttered, and fluttered, and died. If anyone looked in, the nurse appeared to be asleep at her desk. Now he would find room 572, finish the policeman, and leave.

19.

Jim Chee had been in the bathroom, getting himself a pre-bed drink. Then, from the doorway, he had watched the nurse get up from her desk and walk toward the swinging doors. He had seen them open, and the man enter. The man wore a blue cotton hospital coat. He was blond, with pale skin and pale-blue eyes, and Chee recognized him instantly. The recognition was a two-staged affair. First came the thought that he had seen the blond doctor now walking toward him at the Crownpoint rug auction; a millisecond later came the gut-wrenching realization that the blond doctor was the man who had killed Tomas Charley and was no doctor at all but had come here to kill him. Chee stepped back from the doorway. He felt a desperate panic. The window! It didn't open, and it led to nothing but a lethal drop. The man was between him and the only exit from the wing. Chee forced himself to think. A weapon? There was nothing that would work against this marksman's pistol. Could he hide?

He swung himself quickly onto the bed and stood pus.h.i.+ng the acoustical tile overhead. The s.p.a.ce here was like that on the second floor, and here, too, the s.p.a.ce between the false ceiling and the floor above was crisscrossed with electrical wiring, pipes, and the rectangular sheet-metal conduits that carried hot and cold air. Chee had no time to check weight-carrying capacity. He pushed the tile aside, grasped the brace that held the air-return conduit, and pulled himself painfully into the ceiling s.p.a.ce.

The conduit was perhaps two feet wide and wrapped in a white insulation material. Chee maneuvered himself on top of it, reached frantically back, and pushed the tile into place. He found he was panting, partly from the sudden violent exertion and partly, he guessed, from fear. He controlled his breathing. Even with the tiles pushed back into place, the darkness was not absolute. He lay face down on the conduit insulation, smelling dust. He could hear the sounds buildings make at night, a ticking from somewhere in the darkness to his left, the noise of the elevator motor, and a faint hiss which might be nothing more than air pa.s.sing through the metal tube under his ear. There were no voices. The conversation between the blond man and the nurse had stopped. Chee raised his head and stared down the conduit into the darkness. If he crawled along it, it would take him over the elevator foyer. But could he reach it without noise? The conduit braces supported it about six inches above the ceiling tiles, which left about two feet of s.p.a.ce above it-enough for crawling but not enough for any rapid hands-and-knees scrambling. Chee gripped the insulation and pulled himself cautiously forward. The movement was almost soundless, but it turned the throbbing pain in his ribs to a sharp dagger thrust of agony. He suppressed his gasp by holding his breath. As he released it, he heard a metallic noise just below him.

Chee recognized the sound. It was made when the curtain that surrounded the beds was pulled along its metal track. The man who had come to kill him was standing just below. Only a quarter inch of Celotex insulation and perhaps forty-eight inches of air separated him from the blond man and his pistol. Chee lay utterly still. What would the blond man do? Would he think of the hollow ceiling as a hiding place? Chee turned his thoughts away from that. What was that blond man doing now? Chee imagined him standing, pistol ready, staring with those patient, incurious eyes at Chee's empty bed. He would look behind the bed, and in the bathroom, and behind the curtain that surrounded the bed of Chee's roommate. With that thought another came. Would the blond man mistake the Chicano for a Navajo? He might. The realization brought two contradictory emotions. Pity for the man sleeping a drugged post-surgical sleep below him struggled with a desperate hunger to stay alive.

Something b.u.mped against metal. Then silence. Then a creaking noise. Silence again. His rib stabbed him with pain, and his lungs cried out for air. The curtain rustled. What should he do? What could he do?

Then there was another sound. A thump. A knuckle whacked against wood? And then a sort of sigh and a rasping intake of breath. Silence again, followed finally by the whisper of soft soles on a polished floor. The room door clicked shut.

Chee took in some air as quietly as he could. Relief flooded through him. He felt himself shaking. The man had gone. Not far, perhaps. Perhaps only to check other rooms. Perhaps he would be back. But at least for the moment, death had walked away. Perhaps the blond man wouldn't come back. Perhaps Chee would live. He felt a kind of crazy joy. He would wait. He would lie there motionless forever-until morning came, until he heard the voice of a nurse below him, arriving with his morning medicine. He would take no chance at all that the blond man was waiting somewhere for him to move.

Chee waited, and listened. He heard absolutely nothing but the natural sounds of the night. Time ticked away. Perhaps three minutes. Chee became aware of an odor. It was acrid-faint but unmistakable. The smell of gun smoke. What could have caused it? He knew the answer almost instantly. The thumping sound had been a shot from the blond man's pistol.

Chee reached down from the conduit, carefully moved a ceiling tile aside, and looked down. To eyes adjusted to darkness above the ceiling, the room was comparatively bright. He could see only his bed and an expanse of floor beside it. He gripped the conduit braces and lowered himself. The blond man was gone. Chee pulled back the curtain by his roommate's bed. The man's dark head lay on the pillow, neatly, face toward the ceiling, eyes closed in the profound sleep that follows surgery. But behind the curtain the smell of smoke was stronger. Chee reached out a tentative hand. He touched the sleeping face. His forefinger rested just under the nose. His fingertip felt warm skin. But there was no breath. He moved his hand downward, letting the palm rest over the sheet against the chest, holding it there. The man's face, illuminated dimly by the city night through the window, was young and clean-shaven, a longish face with a slightly sardonic cast. Chee had been training himself away from seeing all non-Navajos as looking very much alike. This one looked mostly Spanish in blood, with a little Pueblo Indian. The chest under Chee's palm moved not at all. No lung stirred, no heartbeat. The mouth Chee saw was a dead mouth. He s.h.i.+fted his eyes away from it and looked for a moment out into the night. Then he walked quickly to the door and pulled it open. There was no fear now. He ran to the nurse's station and picked up the telephone beside the hand of the sleeping nurse, and dialed past the switchboard to the Albuquerque Police Department's number.

While he talked, quickly describing the deed, the man, and the pistol, and suggesting that the gunman was probably in a new green-and-white Plymouth sedan, his free hand touched the hair of the nurse, felt the cap, and found the small round hole burned in the crest of it.

"Make it two homicides," Chee said. "He also shot the fifth-floor nurse."