Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] (2 page)

The speaker on the radio crackled and growled and said, “Tuba City.”

“Unit Nine,” Joe Leaphorn said. “You got anything for me?”

“Just a minute, Joe.” The radio’s voice was pleasantly feminine. The young man sitting on the passenger side of the Navajo police carryall was staring out the window toward the sunset. The afterglow outlined the rough shape of the San Francisco Peaks on the horizon, and turned a lacy brushwork of high clouds luminescent rose, and reflected down on the desert below and onto the face of the man. It was a flat Mongolian face, with tiny lines around the eyes giving it a sardonic cast. He was wearing a black felt Stetson, a denim jacket and a rodeo-style shirt. On his left wrist was a $12.95 Timex watch held by a heavy sand-cast silver watchband, and his left wrist was fastened to his right one with a pair of standard-issue police handcuffs. He glanced at Leaphorn, caught his eye, and nodded toward the sunset. “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “I noticed it.” The radio crackled again. “Two or three things,” it said. “The captain asked if you got the Begay boy. He said if you got him, don’t let him get away again.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” the young man said. “Tell the captain the Begay boy is in custody.”

“I got him,” Leaphorn said. “Tell her I want the cell with the window this time,” the young man said. “Begay says he wants the cell with the window,” Leaphorn said. “And the waterbed,” Begay said. “And the captain wants to talk to you when you get in,” the radio said. “What about?”

“He didn’t say.”

“But I’ll bet you know.” The radio speaker rattled with laughter. “Well,” it said. “Window Rock called and asked the captain why you weren’t over there helping out with the Boy Scouts. When will you be in?”

“We’re coming down on Navajo Route1 west of Tsegi,” Leaphorn said.

“Be in Tuba City in maybe an hour.” He flicked off the transmit button. “What’s this Boy Scout business?” Begay asked. Leaphorn groaned. “Window Rock got the bright idea of inviting the Boy Scouts of America to have some sort of regional encampment at Canyon de Chelly. Kids swarming in from all over the West. And of course they tell Law and Order Division to make sure nobody gets lost or falls off a cliff or anything.”

“Well,” said Begay. “That’s what we’re paying you for.” Far to the left, perhaps ten miles up the dark Klethla Valley, a pinpoint of light was sliding along Route1 toward them. Begay stopped admiring the sunset and watched the light. He whistled between his teeth. “Here comes a fast Indian.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. He started the carryall rolling down the slope toward the highway and snapped off the headlights. “That’s sneaky,” Begay said. “Saves the battery,” Leaphorn said. “Pretty sneaky the way you got me, too,” Begay said. There was no rancor in his words. “Parkin’ over the hill and walkin’ up to the hogan like that, so nobody figured you was a cop.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “How’d you know I’d be there? You find out the Endischees was my people?”

“That’s right, ” Leaphorn said. “And you found out there was a Kinaalda for the Endischee girl?”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “So maybe you’d come to that.

” Begay laughed. “And even if I didn’t, it beat hell out of running all over looking for me.” He glanced at Leaphorn. “You learn that in college?”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “We had a course on how to catch Begays.” The carryall jolted over a cattle guard and down the steep incline of the borrow ditch bank. Leaphorn parked on the shoulder and cut the ignition. It was almost night now—the afterglow dying on the western horizon and Venus hanging bright halfway up the sky.

The heat had left with the light and now the thin high-altitude air was touched with coolness. A breeze stirred through the windows, carrying the faint sound of insects and the call of a hunting nighthawk. It died away, and when it came again it carried the high whine of engine and tires—still distant. “Son-of-a-bitch is moving, ” Begay said. “Listen to that.” Leaphorn listened. “Hundred miles an hour,” Begay said. He chuckled. “He’s going to tell you his speedometer needs fixing.” The headlights topped the hill, dipped downward and then raced up the slope behind them. Leaphorn started his engine and flicked on his headlights, and then the red warning blinker atop the car. For a moment there was no change in the accelerating whine. Then abruptly the pitch changed, a brief squealing sound of rubber on pavement, and the roar of a car gearing down. It pulled off on the shoulder and stopped some fifty feet behind the carryall. Leaphorn picked his clipboard off the dash and stepped out. At first he could see nothing through the blinding glare of the headlights. Then he made out the circled Mercedes trademark on the hood, and behind the ornament, the windshield.

Every two seconds, the beam of his revolving warning blinker flashed across it. Leaphorn walked down the gravel toward the car, irritated by the rudeness of the high-beam lights. In the flashing red illumination he saw the face of the driver, staring at him through round gold-rimmed glasses. And behind the man, in the back seat, another face, unusually large and oddly shaped. The driver leaned out the window. “Officer,” he shouted. “Your car’s rolling backward.

” The driver was grinning a broad, delighted, anticipatory grin outlined in red by the blinker light. And behind the grinning man, the eyes in the narrow face still stared—dim but somehow avid—from the back seat. Leaphorn spun and, blinded by glare, peered toward his carryall. His mind told him that he had set the handbrake and his eyes registered that the parked car was not rolling toward him.

And then there was the voice of Begay screaming a warning. Leaphorn made a desperate, instinctive lunge for the ditch, hearing the squalling roar of the Mercedes accelerating, and then the thumping, oddly painless sound of the front fender striking his leg and spinning his already flying body into the roadside weeds. A moment later he was trying to get up. The Mercedes had disappeared down the highway, trailing the diminishing scream of rapid acceleration, and Begay was beside him, helping him up. “Watch the leg,” Leaphorn said.

“Let me see how it is.” It was numb, but it bore his weight. What pain he had was mostly in his hands, which had broken his fall on the weeds and dirt of the ditch bank, and his cheek—which somehow had picked up a long, but shallow, cut. It burned. “Son-of-a-bitch tried to run you over,” Begay said. “How about that?” Leaphorn limped to the carryall, slid under the wheel, and flicked on the radio with one bleeding hand and the ignition with the other. By the time he had arranged for a roadblock at Red Lake, the speedometer needle had passed 90. “Always wanted a ride like this,” Begay was shouting over the sound of the siren. “The tribe got a liability policy in case I get hurt?”

“Just burial insurance,” Leaphorn said.

“You’re never going to catch him,” Begay said. “You get a look at that car? That was a rich man’s car.”

“You get a look at the license? Or at that guy in the back seat?”

“It was a dog,” Begay said. “Great big rough-looking dog. I didn’t think about the license.

” The radio cleared its throat. It was Tomas Charley reporting he was set up in a half block at the Red Lake intersection. Charley asked, in precise Navajo, whether to figure the man in the gray car had a gun and how to handle it. “Play it like he’s dangerous,” Leaphorn said. “The bastard tried to run over me. Use the shotgun and if he’s not slowing for you, shoot for the tires. Don’t get hurt.

” Charley said he didn’t intend to and signed off. “He might have a gun, come to think of it,” Begay said. He held his cuffed wrists in front of him. “You oughta take this off in case you need help.”

Leaphorn glanced at him, fished in his pocket for a key ring and tossed it on the seat. “It’s the little shiny one.” Begay unlocked the cuffs and put them in the glove compartment. “Why the hell don’t you stop stealing sheep?” Leaphorn asked. He didn’t want to remember the Mercedes roaring toward him. Begay rubbed his wrists. “They’re just white man’s sheep. They don’t hardly miss ‘.”

“And slipping off from jail. Do that again and it’s your ass!” Begay shrugged.

“Stop to think about it, though,” he said. “And about the worst they can do to you for getting out of jail is get you back in again.”

“This is three times,” Leaphorn said. The patrol car skidded around a flat turn, swayed, and straightened. Leaphorn jammed down on the accelerator. “That bird sure didn’t want a ticket,” Begay said. He glanced at Leaphorn, grinning. “Either that, or he just likes running over cops. I believe a man could learn to enjoy that.” They covered the last twenty miles to the Red Lake intersection in just under thirteen minutes and slid to a gravel-spraying stop on the shoulder beside Charley’s patrol car. “What happened?” Leaphorn shouted. “Did he get past you?”

“Never got here,” Charley said. He was a stocky man wearing a corporal’s stripes on the sleeves of his uniform shirt. He raised his eyebrows. “Ain’t no place to turn off,” he said. “It’s fifty-something miles back up there to the Kayenta turnoff—was

“He was past that when I started chasing him,” Leaphorn interrupted. “He must have pulled it off somewhere.” Begay laughed.

“That dog in the back. Maybe that was a Navajo Wolf.” Leaphorn didn’t say anything. He was spinning the car across the highway in a pursuit turn. “Them witches, they can fly, you know,” Begay said.

“Reckon they could carry along a big car like that?” It took more than half an hour to find where the Mercedes had left the highway.

It had pulled off the north shoulder on the upslope of a hill— leaving the roadbed and plowing through a thin growth of creosote bush. Leaphorn followed the track with his flashlight in one hand and his .38 in the other. Begay and Charley trotted along behind him— Begay carrying Leaphorn’s 30-30. About fifty yards off the highway, the car had bottomed on an outcrop of sandstone. After that, its path was blotched with oil spurting from a broken pan. “Hell of a way to treat a car,” Begay said. They found it thirty yards away, rolled into a shallow arroyo out of sight from the highway. Leaphorn studied it a moment in the beam of his flashlight. He walked up to it cautiously. The driver’s door was open. So was the trunk. The front seat was empty. So was the back seat. The front floorboards were littered with the odds and ends of a long trip—gum wrappers, paper cups, the wrapper from a Lotaburger. Leaphorn picked it up and sniffed it. It smelled of onions and fried meat. He dropped it. The nearest Lotaburger stand he could remember was at Farmington—about 175 miles east in New Mexico. The safety inspection sticker inside the windshield had been issued by the District of Columbia. It bore the name of Frederick Lynch, and a Silver Spring, Maryland, address.

Leaphorn jotted it in his notebook. The car, he noticed, smelled of dog urine. “He didn’t leave nothing much back here,” Charley said.

“But here’s a muzzle for a dog. A big one.”

“I guess he went for a walk,” Leaphorn said. “He’s got a lot of room for that.”

“Thirty miles to a drink of water,” Charley said. “If you know where to find it.”

“Begay,” Leaphorn said. “Take a look in back and give me the license number.” As he said it, it occurred to Leaphorn that his bruised leg, no longer numb, was aching. It also occurred to him that he hadn’t seen Begay since after they’d found the car. Leaphorn scrambled out of the front seat and made a rapid survey of the landscape with the flashlight. There was Corporal Charley, still inspecting the back seat, and there was Leaphorn’s 30-30 leaning against the trunk of the Mercedes, with Leaphorn’s key ring hung on the barrel. Leaphorn cupped his hands and shouted into the darkness: “Begay, you dirty bastard!” Begay was out there, but he would be laughing too hard to answer.

The file clerk in the Tuba City subagency of the Navajo Tribal Police was slightly plump and extremely pretty. She deposited a yellow Manila folder and three brown accordion files on the captain’s desk, flashed Leaphorn a smile and departed with a swish of skirt. “You already owe me one favor,” Captain Largo said. He picked up the yellow folder and peered into it. “This will make two, then,” Leaphorn said. “If I do it, it will,” Largo said. “I may not be that dumb.”

“You’ll do it,” Leaphorn said. Largo ignored him.

“Here we have a little business that just came in today,” Largo said from behind the folder. “A discreet inquiry is needed into the welfare of a woman named Theodora Adams, who is believed to be at Short Mountain Trading Post. Somebody in the office of the Chairman of the Tribal Council would appreciate it if we’d do a little quiet checking so he can pass on the word that all is well.” Leaphorn frowned. “At Short Mountain? What would anyone—was Largo interrupted him. “There’s an anthropological dig out there. Maybe she’s friendly with one of the diggers. Who knows? All I know is her daddy is a doctor in the Public Health Service and I guess he called somebody in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the BIA called somebody in …”

“Okay,” Leaphorn said. “She’s out in Indian country and daddy’s worried and would we look out after her—right?”

“But discreetly,” Largo said. “That would save me a little work, if you’d take care of that. But it won’t look like much of an excuse to ask Window Rock to let you off guarding those Boy Scouts.” Largo handed Leaphorn the Manila folder and pulled the accordion files in front of him. “Maybe there’s an excuse in these,” he said. “You can take your pick.”

“I’ll take an easy one,” Leaphorn said. “Here we have a little heroin stashed in the frame of a junk car over near the Keet Seel ruins,” said Largo as he peered into one of the files. He closed the folder. “Had a tip on it and staked it out, but nobody ever showed up. That was last winter.”

“Never any arrests?”

“Nope.”

Largo had pulled a bundle of papers and two tape cassettes out of another folder. “Here’s the Tso-Atcitty killing,” he said. “You remember that one? It was last spring.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “I meant to ask you about that one. Heard anything new?”

“Nada,” Largo said. “Nothing. Not even any sensible gossip. Little bit of witch talk now and then. The kind of talk something like that stirs up.

Not a damn thing to go on.” They sat and thought about it. “You got any ideas?” Leaphorn asked. Largo thought about it some more. “No sense to it,” he said finally. Leaphorn said nothing. There had to be sense to it. A reason. It had to fit some pattern of cause and effect. Leaphorn’s sense of order insisted on this. And if the cause happened to be insane by normal human terms, Leaphorn’s intellect would then hunt for harmony in the kaleidoscopic reality of insanity.