Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] (22 page)

“Put down the gun!” Father Tso shouted it, and the cavern echo-boomed: “Gun … gun … gun … gun.” He walked toward Jackie. “Put it down.”

“Hold it,” Jackie said. “Hold it or I’ll kill you.” He took a step backward. “Come on,” he shouted. “Jesus, you’re as crazy as Tull.”

“I’m as immortal as Tull,” Father Tso shouted. He walked toward Jackie, hands outstretched, reaching for the shotgun.

Leaphorn was running now—knowing what would happen, knowing how Father Tso planned it to happen, knowing it was the only way it could work. “God forgive—was Father Tso was shouting and that was all Leaphorn heard. Jackie fired from a crouch. The gunshot boomed like a bomb, surrounding Leaphorn with a blast of sound. The impact knocked Father Tso backward. He fell on his side. Only after Father Tso lay still did Jackie hear through the booming echoes the sound of Leaphorn running, and spin with his catlike quickness so that the walkie-talkie struck not the back of his head, where Leaphorn had aimed it, but across his temple. Jackie seemed to die instantly, the shotgun spinning from his hand as he fell. Father Tso lived perhaps a minute. Leaphorn picked up the shotgun—it was a Remington automatic—and knelt beside Tso. Whatever the priest was saying, Leaphorn couldn’t understand it. He put his ear close to Father Tso’s face, but now the priest was saying nothing at all. Leaphorn could hear only the echoes of the gunshots dying away and over that the sound of Theodora Adams screaming. There was no time to plan anything. Leaphorn moved as quickly as he could. He felt rapidly through Jackie’s pockets, finding the padlock key but no additional ammunition for the shotgun. He glanced at the cage. A quick impression of a dozen frightened faces staring at him—and of Theodora Adams, sobbing in the corner. “The other one’s going to be coming and I’m going to take him,” Leaphorn said. “Get everybody to sit back down. Don’t give him any hint I’m out here.” And with that, Leaphorn ran back into the darkness. He stopped behind the stalagmites and stared in the direction from which Tull would come.

Nothing but blackness. But Tull would surely come. The sound of the shot would have reached him at the cave entrance. And he would have heard the Adams woman screaming. If he came at a run, he should be arriving now. Leaphorn held the shotgun ready, looking down its barrel into the darkness. He swung it toward the glow of light, noticing with satisfaction that the bead sight was lined exactly in the V of the rear sight. He could hear Theodora Adams’s sobbing— less hysterical now and more the sound of simple sorrow. For the first time, Leaphorn became conscious of the smell of burned gunpowder. As soon as Tull came well between him and the light—as soon as he could line up the sights on his silhouette—he would shoot for the center of the body. There’d be no warning shout. In this darkness, Tull was far too dangerous for that. Leaphorn would simply try to kill him. Time ticked silently away. But where was Tull? Leaphorn was belatedly conscious that he had underestimated the man. Tull had not jumped to the obvious conclusion that Jackie had shot someone and come running to see about it. If Tull was coming at all, he was coming quietly, with his light turned off, stalking the lighted place to learn what had happened. Leaphorn lowered himself slightly behind the stony barrier, aware that Tull might be somewhere behind him—looking for Leaphorn’s shape against the glow exactly as Leaphorn had looked for Tull’s. But even as he crouched, even as he registered this increased respect for John Tull as an adversary, Leaphorn felt a fierce exultant certainty of the outcome. No matter how cautious Tull was, the odds had shifted now.

Tull would see Jackie and Father Tso on the cave floor and the surviving hostages in the cage. That would account for everyone. He would have to come into the light to get the answers. And he would want to find out what had happened, how Jackie and Tso had died.

With his weapon ready, with everyone accounted for, there’d be no reason for him to hold back. “Hey.” Tull’s voice came from Leaphorn’s right—well out of the periphery of the lantern light.

“What happened?” The voice echoed, and died away, and silence resumed. “They fought.” It was the voice of the scout leader named Symons. “The priest attacked your man and I think they killed each other.” A good answer, Leaphorn thought. Smart. “Where’s Jackie’s gun?” Tull shouted. “Where’s the shotgun?”

“I don’t know,” Symons said. “I don’t see it.” A bright light blinked on suddenly, its beam emerging from behind a screen of stalagmites far beyond the cage. It played over the bodies, searching. Leaphorn felt a sick disappointment. Tull was even smarter than he’d guessed. “You son-of-a-bitch,” Tull shouted. “You’ve got the shotgun in there. Throw it out. If you don’t, I’m going to start shooting people.” The light had blinked quickly off, but Leaphorn had him located now. A hint of reflected light, perhaps one hundred yards away. Leaphorn tried to line his sights on it, then lowered the gun. The odds of an effective hit at this range were terrible. “We don’t have the gun,” Symons shouted. In the dim light, Leaphorn could see Tull had already—without a word—raised his pistol. It was still a high-odds shot, but there was no choice now. Leaphorn steadied the gun, trying to keep the dim form visible over the bead. He squeezed the trigger.

The muzzle flash was blinding. Leaphorn wanted desperately to know if he had hit Tull, but he could see only the whiteness burned on his retina and hear nothing but the reverberating thunder of the gunshot booming down the corridors of the cavern. Then there was the sound of another shot. Tull’s pistol. Leaphorn crouched behind the stone barrier, waiting for sight and hearing to return. He became aware that the butane lantern was out. The darkness here now was total. Tull must have shot out the light. A quick-thinking man.

Leaphorn stared into the darkness. What would Tull do? The gunman would know now that another person had somehow gotten into the cave.

He might guess that the person was the Navajo policeman. He’d know the policeman had Jackie’s shotgun and … how many rounds of ammunition? Leaphorn opened the magazine, poured three shells out into his hand, and carefully reloaded them. A round in the chamber and three in the magazine. Knowing this, what would Tull do? Not, Leaphorn thought, stand and fight in this blackness with a pistol against a shotgun. The darkness minimized the effect of the pistol’s range and magnified the effect of the shotgun’s scattered pattern.

Tull would head for the entrance, for the light and the radio. He would call Goldrims for help. And would Goldrims come? Leaphorn thought about it. Goldrims had probably intended to radio to the copter as it passed and order it to land, order the pilot out, and then, if he could fly a copter, fly a few miles, abandon the aircraft and begin a well-planned escape maneuver. If he couldn’t fly a copter, he’d disable it and its radio, fix the pilot so he couldn’t follow, and run. Why return to the cave? Leaphorn could think of no reason. Would he come back to help Tull in the cave?

Leaphorn doubted it. Tull had been expendable at the Santa Fe robbery. Why wouldn’t he be expendable now? The contest in this cave would be between John Tull and Joe Leaphorn. Leaphorn felt along the top of the rocky ledge for a flat place, put his flashlight on it, aimed it at the place where Tull had been, and flicked it on. He ducked three long steps to his right and then looked over the top.

The flashlight beam shone through a blue haze of gunpowder smoke into a gray-white emptiness. Where Tull had been, there was nothing now. Leaphorn slipped back to the flashlight, flicked it off, aimed it at the place the hostages had been kept, and snapped it on again.

The beam fell directly on the body of Father Benjamin Tso and illuminated Theodora Adams, kneeling inside the cage. She covered her eyes against the glare. Leaphorn turned off the flash, and felt his way through the blackness to the cage. He unlocked the padlock with the key he had taken from Jackie’s pocket. “Get the lantern off Jackie’s body,” he said. “Get everybody away from this place. Find a place to hide until I call for you.” He didn’t wait to answer any questions. The speed with which Leaphorn followed John Tull toward the cave’s mouth was reduced by a healthy respect for Tull. He skirted far to the left of the direct route, carrying the shotgun at ready. When he finally reached the area where light from the entrance turned the blackness into mere dimness, he found droplets of blood on the gray-white calcite floor. At another point, a smear of reddish brown discolored a limestone outcrop. Leaphorn guessed it was where Tull had put a bloody hand against the stone. Leaphorn hadn’t missed. The shotgun blast had hit Tull, and hit him hard.

Leaphorn paused and digested this. In a sense, time was now on his side. A shotgun would make a multiple wound, hard to stop bleeding— and Tull seemed to be bleeding freely. As time passed, he would weaken. But was the crucial measurement of time here being made by Tull’s pumping heart or by a clockwork mechanism attached to about twenty sticks of dynamite still unaccounted for? Leaphorn decided he couldn’t wait. Somewhere in the darkness around him, Leaphorn was sure that missing timer—and perhaps other timers he had never seen- -was counting away the seconds. He found Tull where he thought he would find him -comat the radio. The man had moved the butane lantern some fifty feet back into the cave from the place where Leaphorn had first seen him and Goldrims, and he’d turned on a battery lantern and adjusted its beam toward part of the cavern. The range of light thus extended substantially beyond the effective range of the shotgun. Leaphorn circled, trying to find an approach that offered some close-in cover. There wasn’t one. The floor here was as dead level as a ballroom. From it ragged rows of stalagmites rose like a patchwork of volcanic islands from the surface of a still, white sea. Tull had moved the radio behind one such island and the lantern was beside it—giving Tull the advantage of deep shadow. From there, he could have a clear shot at anyone trying to get out of the cave mouth via the water. The lake protected one flank and the cave wall another. Approaching him meant walking into the lantern light and into the barrel of his pistol. Leaphorn glanced at his watch, and considered. His hip now throbbed with a steady pain. “Hey, Tull,” he shouted. “Let’s talk.” Perhaps five seconds passed. “Fine,” Tull said. “Talk.”

“He’s not coming back, you know,” Leaphorn said. “He’ll take the money and run. You get stuck.”

“No,” Tull said. “But I tell you what. You throw that shotgun out there where I can see it, and we’ll just make you one more hostage. When we cut out of here, you’re a free man. Otherwise, when my friend gets back, he’s going to be behind you, and I’m going to move in from the front, and we’re going to kill you.” And that was about the way it would work, if Goldrims did come back, Leaphorn thought. He would be fairly easy to handle by two men— even with the shotgun. But he didn’t think Goldrims would be coming back.

“Let’s quit kidding each other,” Leaphorn said. “Your friend is taking the ransom and running. And you’re supposed to wait around for some more broadcasts, and then you’ll run. And when you run, you’re blowing this place up.” Tull said nothing. “How bad did I hit you?”

“You missed,” Tull said. “You’re lying. I hit you and you’ve been losing blood. And that’s another reason you’re not going to get out of here unless we make a deal. I can keep you in here, and you can keep me in here. It’s a Mexican standoff, and we can’t afford a standoff because your boss has a bomb set to go.” Leaphorn paused, thinking about where he had found the bomb and the circumstances.

“He didn’t tell you about the bomb, did he?”

“Screw you,” Tull said.

No, Leaphorn thought, he didn’t tell you about the radio setup and the bomb in the room with the sacred paintings. Tull’s tracks hadn’t shown up there, and six sticks of dynamite had been missing when Leaphorn had first found the cache. Probably that bomb had been set up separately. This was a Buffalo Society operation, but part of it, Leaphorn was increasingly certain, might be a very private affair of Goldrims himself. “I’m going to play a tape recording for you,” Leaphorn said. He took the recorder from under his shirt and adjusted it. “Haven’t heard it myself yet, so we can listen to it together. It was fastened to a Hallicrafters radio transceiver way back in a side room. There was this radio, with a timer set to turn it on to broadcasting, and let it warm up and then turn on this tape recorder. And after the tape ran, the timer was set to detonate some dynamite in a sack there. You ready for it?” There was silence.

Seconds ticked away. “Okay,” Tull said. “Let’s hear it. If it exists.

” Leaphorn pushed the on button. Goldrims’s voice boomed out again.

We … have seen policemen in the territory you agreed would be kept clear of police. You have broken your promise. The Buffalo Society never breaks a promise. Remember this in the future. Remember and learn. We promised that if police came into this corner of the Navajo Nation, the hostages would die. They will now die, and we warriors of the Buffalo Society will die with them. You will find our bodies in our sacred cavern, the mouth of which opens into the San Juan River arm of Lake Powell less than a mile below the present lake-level mouth of the river, approximately twenty-three miles east by northeast of Short Mountain, and exactly at north latitude 36, 11, 17, and west longitude 110, 29, 3. To those of the Buffalo Society who seized these white hostages, know that we three warriors kept our honor and our promise. To the white man, come to this cave and recover the bodies of three of your adults and eleven of your young.

They died to avenge the deaths of three of our adults and eleven children in the Olds Prairie Murders. With them will be bodies of three warriors of the Buffalo Society: Jackie Noni of the Potawatomi Nation, and John Tull, of the Seminole, and myself, whom the white men call Hoski, or James Tso, a warrior of the Navajo Nation. May our memories live in the glory of the Buffalo Society.” The clear, resonant voice of Goldrims stopped and there was only the faint hiss of the blank tape winding into the take-up reel. Leaphorn pushed the off button and rewound the tape. He felt numb. His logic had told him that Goldrims might kill the hostages to eliminate witnesses, but now he realized that he hadn’t really believed it. The impact of hearing Goldrims’s pleasant, unemotional voice declare this mass murderstmass suicide was stunning. And in that split second, he also became aware that the name of Father Benjamin Tso was missing from the catalog of the dead. He confronted the implications of that gap in the roster. It meant that Goldrims had planned even better than Leaphorn had guessed. “You want to hear it again?” Leaphorn shouted.