Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 07] (22 page)
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Authors: jpg] Skinwalkers (v1) [html
The call he had just missed was from Jim Chee.
Lieutenant Leaphorn:
Irma Onesalt came back to Badwater Clinic the day after I picked up Franklin Begay there. She was angry. She found out that Frank Begay had died last October. She asked for a list of patients in the clinic, went to see Dr. Yellowhorse about it, got a turndown, said she could get the names elsewhere. I got a list of the names on list on the date Onesalt was there. The list included both Endocheeney and Wilson Sam. I remember hearing that Endocheeney had been in the clinic about then with a broken leg.
The remainder of the message was a listing of all those who had been patients in the Badwater Clinic that April day. They included the names Dr. Jenks had remembered, the quaint names.
Leaphorn read the note again. Then he let it drop from his fingers and picked up the telephone.
"Call Shiprock and get me Chee," he said.
"Doubt if we can," the dispatcher said. "He was calling from the Badwater Clinic. Said he was just leaving. Going over toward Dinebito Wash and he'd be out of touch for a while."
"Dinebito Wash?" Leaphorn said. What the hell would he be doing there? Even on the reservation, where isolation was the norm, Dinebito country was an empty corner. There the desert rose toward the northern limits of the Black Mesa highlands. Leaphorn told the switchboard to get Captain Largo at Shiprock.
He waited, standing by the window. The entire sky, south and west, was black with storm now. Like all people who live a lot out of doors and whose culture depends upon the weather, Leaphorn was a student of the sky. This one was easy enough to read. This storm wouldn't fade away, as storms had been doing all this summer. This one had water in it, and force. It would be raining hard by now across the Hopi mesas, at Ganado and on the grazing country of his cousins around Klagetoh and Cross Canyons and Burntwater. By tomorrow they'd be hearing of the flash floods down Wide Ruins Wash, and the Lone Tule, and Scattered Willow Draw, and those dusty desert-country drains that converted themselves into roaring torrents when the male rains came. Tomorrow would be a busy day for the 120 men and women of the Navajo Tribal Police.
Leaphorn watched the lightning, and the first cold drops splattering themselves across the glass, and did not think of Emma sleeping in her hospital room. Instead he let the links offered in Chee's message click into place. Onesalt's motivation? Malice, of course. Leaphorn thought about it. It was unproductive thought, but it was better than thinking of Emma. Better than thinking about what he would learn tomorrow when the tests were finished.
The telephone rang.
"I've got Captain Largo," the operator said, with Largo's voice behind him saying something about quitting time.
"This is Leaphorn," Leaphorn said. "Do you know where Jim Chee was going today?"
"Chee?" Largo laughed. "I do. Son-of-a-bitch finally got himself a sing. He was going out to see about it. All excited."
"I need to talk to him," Leaphorn said. "Is he working tomorrow? Could you call in and check for me?"
"I am in," Largo said. "I don't have any better luck getting away from the office than you do. Just a minute."
Leaphorn waited, hearing Largo's breathing and the sounds of papers shuffling. "It raining down there yet?" Largo asked. "Looks like we might finally get some up here."
"Just starting," Leaphorn said. He drummed his fingertips against the desktop. Through the rain-streaked window he saw a triple-flash lightning.
"Tomorrow," Largo said. "No, Chee's off."
"Well, hell," Leaphorn said.
"But let's see now. He was supposed to keep in touch. Because of somebody trying to shoot him. I told him, and sometimes Chee does what he's told. Let's see if there's a note on that."
More rustling of papers. Leaphorn waited.
"Be damned. He did it for once." Largo's tone changed from man talking to man reading. " 'Will go today to the place of Hildegarde Goldtooth out near Dinebito Wash to meet with her and Alice Yazzie about doing a sing for a patient.'" Largo's voice switched back to normal. "He got invited to do that sing last week. Real proud of it. Going around showing everybody the letter."
"Nothing about when he'll be back?"
"With Chee, that'd be asking too much," Largo said.
"I haven't been out there since I worked out of Tuba City," Leaphorn said. "Wouldn't he have to go past Piñon?"
"Unless he's walking," Largo said. "That's the only road."
"Well, thanks," Leaphorn said. "I'll call our man there and get him to catch him going in or out."
The policeman assigned to work out of the Piñon Chapter House was a Sleep Rock Dinee named Leonard Skeet. Leaphorn had worked with him in his younger days at Tuba City and remembered him as reliable if you weren't in a hurry. The voice that said "Hello" was feminine—Mrs. Skeet. Leaphorn identified himself.
"He's gone over to Rough Rock," the woman said.
"When you expect him?"
"I don't know." She laughed, but the storm, or the distance, or the way the telephone line was tied to miles of fence posts to reach this outpost, made it difficult to tell whether the sound was amused or ironic. "He's a policeman, you know."
"I'd like to leave a message for him," Leaphorn said. "Would you tell him Officer Jim Chee will be driving through there. I need your husband to stop Chee and tell him to call me." He supplied his home telephone number. It would be better to wait there until it was time to go back to Gallup.
"About when you think he'll come by? Lenny's going to ask me that."
"It's just a guess," Leaphorn said. "He's gone out somewhere around Dinebito Wash. Out to see Hildegarde Goldtooth. I don't know how far that is."
There was something as close to silence as the crackling of the poorly insulated line allowed.
"You there?" Leaphorn asked.
"That was my father's sister," Mrs. Skeet said. "She's dead. Died last month."
And now it was Leaphorn's turn to produce the long silence. "Who lives out there now?"
"Nobody," Mrs. Skeet said. "The water was bad, anyway. Alkaline. And when she died, there was nobody left but her daughter and her son-in-law. They just moved away."
"The place is empty, then."
"That's right. If anybody moved in, I'd know it."
"Can you tell me exactly how to get there from Piñon?"
Mrs. Skeet could. As Leaphorn sketched out her instructions on his notepad, his mind was checking off other Navajo Police subagency offices that might be able to get someone to Piñon quicker than he could get there himself from Window Rock. Many Farms would be closer. Kayenta would be closer. But who would be working at this hour? And he could think of nothing he could tell them—nothing specific—that would instill in them the terrible sense of urgency that he felt himself.
He could be there in two hours, he thought. Perhaps a little less. And find Chee, and be back here in time to get to Gallup by midnight or so. Emma would be asleep, anyway. He had no choice.
"You taking off for home?" the desk officer asked him when he came down the stairs.
"Going to Piñon," Leaphorn said.
in albuquerque
, in the studio of KOAT-TV, Howard Morgan was explaining it. The newscast was picked up and relayed by drone repeater stations to blanket the Checkerboard Reservation and reach into the Four Corners country and into the eastern fringes of the Navajo Big Reservation. Had Jim Chee been at home in his trailer with his battery-powered TV turned on, he would have been seeing Morgan standing in front of a projection of a satellite photograph, explaining how the jet stream had finally shifted south, pulling cool, wet air with it, and this mass was meeting more moisture. The moisture coming up from the south was serious stuff, being pushed across Baja California and the deserts of northwest Mexico by Hurricane Evelyn. "Rains at last," said Morgan. "Good news if you're growing rhubarb. Bad news if you're planning picnics. And remember, the flash flood warnings are out for all of the southern and western parts of the Colorado plateau tonight, and for tomorrow all across northern New Mexico."
But Chee was not at home watching the weathercast. He was more or less racing the storm front—driving through the cloud-induced early twilight with his lights on. Just past Piñon he had run into a quick and heavy flurry of rain-drops the size of peach stones kicking up spurts of dust as they struck the dirt road ahead of him. Then came a bombardment of popcorn snow which moved like a curtain across the road, reflecting his headlights like a rhinestone curtain. That lasted no more than a hundred yards. Then he was in dry air again. But rain loomed over him. It hung over the northeast slopes of Black Mesa like a wall—illuminated to light gray now and then by sheet lightning. The smell of it came through the pickup vents, mixed with the smell of dust. In Chee's desert-trained nostrils it was heady perfume—the smell of good grazing, easy water, heavy crops of piñon nuts. The smell of good times, the smell of Sky Father blessing Mother Earth.
Chee drove with the map Alice Yazzie had drawn on the back of her letter spread on his lap. The volcanic outcrop rising like four giant clenched fingers just ahead must be the place she'd marked to watch for a left turn. It was. Just beyond it, two ruts branched from the dirt road he'd been following.
Chee was early. He stopped and got out to stretch his muscles and kill a little time, partly to check if the track was still in use and partly for the sheer joy of standing under this huge, violent sky. Once, the track had been used fairly heavily, but not recently. Now the scanty weeds and grass of a dry summer had grown on the hump between the ruts. But someone had driven here today. In fact, very recently. The tires were worn, but what little tread marks they left were fresh. Jagged lightning streaked through the cloud and repeated itself—producing a thunderclap loud as a cannon blast. A damp breeze moved past, pressing the denim of his trousers against his legs and carrying the smell of ozone and wet sage and piñon needles. Then he heard the muted roar of the falling water. It moved toward him like a gray wall. Chee climbed back into the cab, as an icy drop splashed against the back of his wrist.
He drove the final 2.3 miles that Alice Yazzie had indicated on her map with his windshield wipers lashing and the rain pounding on the roof. The track wandered up a wide valley, rising toward the Black Mesa highlands, becoming increasingly rocky. Chee had been worried a little, despite the mud chains he always carried. The rockiness eliminated that worry. He wouldn't get stuck on this. Abruptly, the sky lightened. The rain eased—one of those brief respites common to high-altitude storms. The tracks climbed a ridge lined with eroded granite boulders, followed it briefly, and then turned sharply downward. Below him Chee saw the Goldtooth place.
A round stone hogan with a domed dirt roof, a peak-roofed frame house, a pole corral, a storage shed, and a lean-to of poles, planks, and tar-paper, built against the wall of a low cliff. Smoke was coming from the hogan, hanging in the wet air and creating a blue smudge across the narrow cul-de-sac where the Goldtooth outfit had built its place. An old truck was parked beside the plank house. From behind the house, the back end of an ancient Ford sedan was visible. Chee could see a dim light, probably a kerosene lamp, illuminating one of the side windows of the house. Except for that, and the smoke, the place had an abandoned look.
He parked a polite distance from the house and sat for a moment with his headlights on it, waiting. The front door opened and the light outlined a shape, wearing the voluminous long skirt and long-sleeved blouse of the traditional Navajo woman. She stared out into Chee's headlights, then made the traditional welcoming motion and disappeared into the house.
Chee switched off the lights, opened the door, and stepped out into the resuming rain. He walked toward the house, past the parked truck. He could see now that the Ford had no rear wheels. The damp air carried the thousand smells aroused by rain. But something was missing. The acrid smell that fills the air when rain wets the still-fresh manure of corrals and sheep pens. Where was that? Chee's intelligence had its various strengths and its weaknesses—a superb memory, a tendency to exclude new input while it focused too narrowly on a single thought, a tendency to be distracted by beauty, and so forth. One of the strengths was an ability to process new information and collate it with old unusually fast. In a millisecond, Chee identified the missing odor, extracted its meaning, and homogenized it with what he had already noticed about the place of the Goldtooth outfit. No animals. The place was little used. Why use it now? Chee's brain identified an assortment of possible explanations. But all this changed him, midstride, from a man happily walking through the rain toward a long-anticipated meeting, to a slightly uneasy man with a memory of being shot at.
It was just then that Chee noticed the oil.
What he saw was a reflection in the twilight, a slick blue-green sheen where rainwater had washed under the truck and picked up an oil emulsion. It stopped him. He looked at the oily spot, then back at the house. The door was open a few inches. He felt all those odd, intense sensations caused when intense fear triggers the adrenaline glands. Maybe nothing, one corner of his brain said. A coincidence. Leaky oil pans are usual enough among the old trucks so common on the reservation. But he had been foolish. Careless. And he turned back toward his pickup, walking at first, then breaking into a trot. His pistol was locked in the glove compartment.
He was not conscious of any separation between the boom of the shotgun and the impact that staggered him. He stumbled against the hogan, catching the edge of the door lintel for support. Then the second shot hit him, higher this time, the feel of claws tearing against his upper back and neck muscles and the back of his head. It knocked him off balance and he found himself on his knees, his hands in the cold mud. Three shots, he remembered. An automatic shotgun legally choked holds three shells. Three holes torn through the aluminum skin of his trailer. Another shot would be coming. He slammed against the hogan door, pushed his way through it, just as he heard the shotgun again.
