Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 05] (20 page)

Chee moved as quickly as caution and the darkness would allow toward where his memory told him he'd seen the entrance to the back room. He'd be out of sight there, even if the patrolman checked this house. He moved his fingertips along the rough plaster, found the wooden doorframe, and moved through the opening, placing his feet cautiously in the darkness. The smell now was strong. A distinctly chemical smell. Chee frowned, trying to identify it. He moved carefully, back into the blackness. Then stopped. Within a few feet of him, someone breathed.

It was a low sound, the simple exhalation of a deep breath. Chee froze. A long way over the mesa, thunder thumped and rumbled and died away. Silence. And into the silence the faint sound of breath taken, breath exhaled. Easy, steady breathing. It seemed to come from the floor. Someone asleep? Chee took the flashlight from his back pocket, wrapped several thicknesses of his shirttail over the lens, squatted, pointed the light toward the sound. He flicked it on, and off again.

The dim light showed a small, elderly man sprawled on his back on the floor. The man wore only boxer shorts, a blue shirt, and moccasins. He seemed to be asleep. Still squatting, Chee edged two steps closer and flicked on the light again. The man wore his hair in the short bangs of old-fashioned Hopi traditionalists, and seemed to have some sort of ceremonial decoration painted on his forehead and cheeks. Where were his trousers? Chee risked the flashlight again. The room was bare. No sign of clothing. What was the man doing here? Drunk, most likely. In here to sleep it off.

Chee put the flashlight back in his pocket. From outside he heard the ceremonial question being called by the patrolman. He returned to the outer room. Still forty minutes to wait. It would be safe again to resume his watch of the Lincoln.

Chee stood just inside the exterior doorway. It was full night now, but the open plaza, even on this cloudy night, was much lighter than the interior from which Chee watched. He could see fairly well, and he saw the patrolman-priest of the Two Horn Society walking slowly toward the Lincoln. The priest stopped beside the car, standing next to the door where the man in the straw hat sat, leaning toward him. In the silence, Chee heard a voice, low and indistinct. Then another voice. The watchman asking straw hat what he was doing there? Or telling him to move? What would straw hat do? And why hadn't West, or whoever had set this up, foreseen this snag in their plans?

As that question occurred to him, Chee thought of the answer to an earlier question. Several earlier questions. The man in the back room wasn't drunk. He wouldn't be drunk on such a ceremonial occasion. The sweet chemical smell was chloroform. The man hadn't been wearing trousers. He'd been wearing a ceremonial kirtle. And tortoise shell rattles. He'd been knocked out, and stripped of his Two Horn costume.

At the blue Lincoln, the Two Horn priest was moving away from the car window now, moving fast. No longer did he rattle as he walked.

There was a blinding flash of blue-white light, followed almost instantly by an explosive crash of thunder. The flash illuminated the Two Horn priest. He was hurrying past the kiva toward a gap in the buildings which led to the upper plaza. He must be West. But he should have been carrying two briefcases. He should have been carrying five hundred thousand dollars. He was carrying nothing. Chee hesitated a moment and then sprinted to the Lincoln. The first drops struck him as he ran across the plaza. Huge, icy blobs of water, scattered at first, and then a cold, thunderous torrent.

Again there was lightning. A tall blond man emerged from a ruined building just beyond where the Lincoln was parked. He had something in his hand, perhaps a pistol. He was moving fast, like Chee, toward the car. The flash told Chee little more than that—just the blond man in the blue and gray shirt and a glimpse of the Lincoln, where the hat was no longer visible.

The blond got to the car perhaps three seconds before Chee did. Chee didn't intend to stop—didn't have time to stop. The blue Lincoln, the straw hat, didn't concern Chee now. But the blond man stopped him.

He put up his left hand. "Help him," the blond man said. The rain was a downpour now. Chee extracted his flashlight, turned it on. The rain beat against the back of his head, streamed down the face of the blond man, who stood motionless, looking stunned. A pistol hung from his right hand, water dripping from it.

"Put away your gun," Chee said. He pulled open the front door of the Lincoln. The straw hat had fallen on the floorboards under the steering wheel and the middle-aged man who had worn it had fallen too, sideways, his head toward the passenger's side. In the yellow light of the flash, the blood that was pouring from his throat across the pale-blue upholstery looked black. Chee leaned into the car for a closer look. The damage seemed to have been done with something like a hunting knife. Mostly the throat, and the neck—at least a dozen savage slashing blows.

Chee backed out of the front seat.

"Help him," the blond man said.

"I can't help him," Chee said. "Nobody can help him. He killed him."

"That goddamned Indian," the blond man said. "Why did he?"

There were two briefcases on the floorboards on the passenger side. Blood was dripping off the front seat onto one of them. West could have taken them by simply reaching in and picking them up. He'd asked for five hundred thousand dollars. Why hadn't he taken it?

"It wasn't an Indian," Chee said. "And I don't know why."

But as he said it, he did know why. West wanted vengeance, not money. That's what all this had been about. The dark wind ruled Jake West. Chee left the blond man standing by the Lincoln and ran across the plaza. West would head for his jeep. He wouldn't know anyone knew where he'd parked it.

T
he first leg
of the trip to the place where West had left his jeep Chee covered at a run. That phase ended when he ran into a piñon limb, which knocked him off his feet and inscribed a bloody scratch across the side of his forehead. After that he alternated a fast walk, where visibility was bad, with a cautious trot, where it wasn't. The rain squall passed away to the east, the sky lightened a little, and Chee found himself doing more running than walking. He wanted to reach the jeep before West got there. He wanted to be waiting for West. But when he found the thickets where the jeep was parked, and pushed his way through them as quietly as he could, West was already climbing into the driver's seat.

Chee pulled out his pistol and flicked on the flash.

"Mr. West," he said. "Hold your hands up where I can see them."

"Who's that?" West said. He squinted into the brightness. "Is that you, Chee?"

Chee was remembering the bloody throat of the man in the Lincoln. "Get your hands up," he said. "That sound you hear is me cocking this pistol."

West raised his hands, slowly.

"Get out," Chee said.

West climbed out of the jeep.

"Put your hands on the hood. Spread your legs apart." Chee searched him, removed a snub-nosed revolver from his hip pocket. He found nothing else. "Where's the knife?" he asked.

West said nothing.

"Why didn't you take the money?" Chee asked him.

"I wasn't after money," West said. "I wanted the man. And I got the son of a bitch."

"Because your son was killed?"

"That's right," West said.

"I think maybe you killed the wrong one," Chee said.

"No," West said. "I got the right one. The one who gave the orders."

"Put your hands behind your back," Chee said. He handcuffed West.

Chee was suddenly dazzled by a beam of light.

"Drop the gun," a voice ordered. "Now! Drop it!"

Chee dropped his pistol.

"And the flashlight!"

Chee dropped the flashlight. It produced a pool of light at his feet.

"You're a persistent bastard," the voice said. "I told you to stay away from this."

It was Johnson's voice. And it was Johnson's face Chee could see now in the reflected light. "Hands behind your back," he said, and cuffed Chee's hands behind him.

He picked up Chee's pistol, and West's, and tossed them into the back of West's jeep.

"Okey dokey," Johnson said. "Let's get this over with and get out of the rain. Let's go get the coke." He gestured with the pistol toward West. "Where've you got it?"

"I guess I'll get me a lawyer and talk to him first," West said.

Chee laughed, but he didn't feel like laughing. He felt stupid. He should have expected Johnson. Johnson would have found a way to intercept West's instructions about the meeting. Certainly if another telephone call was involved, tapping a line would be no problem for the
dea
agent. "I don't think Johnson is going to read your rights to you," Chee said.

"No, I'm not," Johnson said. "I'm going to leave him with the same deal he made the organization. He keeps the five hundred thousand dollars. I get the coke."

"How do you know he hasn't already delivered it?" Chee asked.

"Because I've been watching him," Johnson said. "He hasn't picked the stuff up."

"But maybe he had it stashed out in the village up there," Chee said.

Johnson ignored him. "Come on," he said to West. "We'll take my car. We'll go get the stuff."

West didn't move. He stared through the flashlight beam at Johnson. Johnson hit him with the pistol—a smashing blow across the face. West staggered backward, lost his balance, fell against the jeep.

Johnson chuckled. There was lightning again, a series of flashes. The rain came down harder. "That surprised him," Johnson said to Chee. "He still thinks I'm your regular-type cop. You don't think that, do you?"

"No," Chee said. "I haven't thought that for a while."

West was trying to get to his feet, awkwardly because of his arms cuffed behind him. "Not since when?" Johnson asked. "I'm curious."

"Well," Chee said, "when you were hunting for the shipment down by the crash site, down in Wepo Wash, one of those guys hunting with you was one of the hoods. Or at least I thought he might be. But I was already suspicious."

"Because I knocked you around?"

West was on his feet now, blood running down his cheek. Chee delayed his answer a moment. He wanted to make sure West was listening to it.

"Because of the way you set up West's boy in the penitentiary. You take him away from the prison, and somehow or other you get him to talk, and then you put him back with the regular population. If you'd have put him in a segregation cell to keep him safe, then the organization would have known he'd talked. They'd have called off the delivery."

"That's fairly clear thinking," Johnson said. He laughed again. "You know for sure the son of a bitch is going to have to absolutely guarantee everybody that he didn't say one damn word."

In the yellow light of the flash, West's face was an immobile mask staring at Johnson.

"And you know for sure they're not going to let him stay alive, not with you maybe coming back to talk to him again," Chee said.

"I can't think of any reason to keep you around," Johnson said. "Can you think of one?"

Chee couldn't. He could only guess that Johnson was stalling just a little so that the shot that killed Chee would be covered by thunder. When the next flash of lightning came, Johnson would wait a moment until the thunderclap started, and then he would shoot Chee.

"I can think of a reason to kill you," Johnson said. "West, here, he'll see me do it and then he'll know for sure that I won't hesitate to do it to him if he don't cooperate."

"I can think of one reason not to kill me," Chee said. "I've got the cocaine."

Johnson grinned.

There was a flicker of lightning. Chee found himself hurrying.

"It's in two suitcases. Aluminum suitcases."

Johnson's grin faded.

"Now, how would I know that?" Chee asked him.

"You were out there when the plane crashed," Johnson said. "Maybe you saw West and Palanzer and that goddamn crooked Musket unloading it and hauling it away."

"They didn't haul it away," Chee said. "West dug a hole in the sand behind that outcrop and put in the two suitcases and covered them over with sand and patted the sand down hard, and the next morning you federals walked all over the place and patted it down some more."

"Well, now," Johnson said.

"So I went out and took the jack handle out of my truck and did some poking around in the sand until I hit metal and then dug. Two aluminum suitcases. Big ones. Maybe thirty inches long. Heavy. Weight maybe seventy pounds each. And inside them, all these plastic packages. Pound or so each. How much would that much cocaine be worth?"

Johnson was grinning again, wolfishly. "You saw it," he said. "It's absolutely pure. Best in the world. White as snow. Fifteen million dollars. Maybe twenty, scarce like it is this year."

Lightning flashed. In a second it would thunder.

"So you've got a fifteen-million-dollar reason to keep me alive," Chee said.

"Where is it?" Johnson asked. Thunder almost drowned out the question.

"I think we better talk business first," Chee said.

"A little bit of larceny in everybody's heart," Johnson said. "Well, there's enough for everybody this time." He grinned again. "We'll take your car. Police radio might come in handy. If Mr. West here stirred up any trouble back there in the village, it'd be nice to know about it."

"My car?" Chee said.

"Don't get cute," Johnson said. "I saw it. Parked right down the slope in all those bushes. Let's go."

The rain was a downpour again now. The Navajos have terms for rain. The brief, noisy, violent thunderstorm is "male rain." The slower, enduring, soaking shower is "female rain." But they had no word for this kind of storm. They walked through a deafening wall of falling water, breathing water, almost blinded by water. Johnson walked behind him, West stumbling dazedly in front, the beam of Johnson's flash illuminating only sheets of rain.

They stopped beside Chee's car.

"Get out your keys," Johnson said.

"Can't," Chee said. He had to shout over the pounding of rain on the car roof.

"Try," Johnson said. He had the pistol pointed at Chee's chest. "Try hard. Strain yourself. Otherwise I whack you on the head and get 'em out myself."

Chee strained. Twisting hips and shoulders, he managed to hook his trigger finger into his pants pocket. Then he pulled his trousers around an inch or two. He managed to fish out the key ring.

"Drop it and back off," Johnson said. He picked up the keys.

Chee became aware of a second sound, even louder than the pounding of the rain. Polacca Wash had turned into a torrent. This cloudburst had been developing over Black Mesa for an hour, moving slowly. Behind it and under it, millions of tons of water were draining off the mesa down dozens of smaller washes, scores of arroyos, ten thousand little drainage ways—all converging on Polacca, and Wepo, sending walls of water roaring southwestward to pour into the Little Colorado River. The roaring Chee could hear was the sound of brushwood and dislodged boulders rumbling down Polacca under the force of the flood. In two hours, there wouldn't be a bridge, or a culvert, or an uncut vehicle crossing between the Hopi Mesa and the river canyon.

Johnson was tossing the keys in his palm, staring thoughtfully at Chee and West. The flashlight beam bobbed up and down. In the light, Chee could see how much the flood had already risen. The turbulent water was tearing at the junipers no more than twenty-five feet down the slope from where he'd parked.

"I've just been having some interesting thoughts," Johnson said. "I think I know where you've got that cocaine."

"I doubt it," Chee said.

"I've been asking myself why you two guys didn't come together. You know, save gasoline, wear and tear on the tires. And I tell myself that West, he wanted to come early and scout things out to make sure nobody's got you set up. So he don't bring the cocaine. Where do you hide it in a jeep?"

As Johnson talked, he let the beam of the flash drift to the windows of Chee's patrol car. He looked inside.

"Then after West has everything scouted out and it's safe—and if anybody grabs him they gotta just turn him loose because he doesn't have the stuff and they want it—after all that, along comes Mr. Chee here in his police car. And what could be a safer place to hide cocaine than in a police car?"

Johnson shone the flash into Chee's eyes.

"Where's safer than that?" he insisted.

"Sounds great," Chee said. He was trying desperately to make some sort of plan. Johnson would open the trunk and look. Then there would be no reason at all to keep Chee alive. Or West alive. The flash left Chee's face and moved to West. Bloody water was streaming down from the cut across West's cheekbone, running into his beard. Chee thought he'd never seen so much hate in a face. West understood now why his son had died. West understood he'd knifed the wrong man.

"Sounds like a good little theory," Johnson said. "Let's see how it works out in real life."

He put the flash under his armpit and kept the pistol pointed at Chee while he fumbled with getting the key into the lock. The trunk lid sprang open. The trunk lights lit the scene.

Johnson laughed, a joyful chortle of a laugh. "One little problem remains," Chee said. "What if what you see there are two suitcases containing Pillsbury's Best wheat flour. It doesn't weigh as much as the cocaine, but if you don't know how heavy those things are supposed to be, you could never tell the difference by looking."

"We'll just take a look, then," Johnson said. "I can tell the difference and I'm getting a little tired of you."

He put the flash in the trunk, kept the pistol aimed at Chee. He didn't look at the suitcases, but Chee could hear him fumbling with a catch.

"Where's the key?" he asked.

"I don't think they sent one along," Chee said. "Maybe they mailed the key to the buyers. Who knows?"

"Keep back," Johnson said. He pulled both suitcases upright, unfastened the tire tool, and jammed the screwdriver end into a joint. He pried. The lock snapped. The suitcase fell open. Johnson stared.

"Looky there," he chortled.

Chee moved, but West moved faster. Even so, Johnson had time to swing the pistol around and fire twice before West reached him. West was screaming—an incoherent animal shriek. Johnson tried to step away, slipped on the wet surface. West's shoulder slammed him against the open trunk. There was the sound of something breaking. Chee moved as fast as he could, off balance because of his pinned arms. The collision had knocked Johnson off his feet and West, too, had fallen. Chee stood with his hands in the trunk, fumbling for the tire tool, for anything his hands could grasp that he could use—hands behind him—to kill a man.

The unopened aluminum suitcase had been knocked on its side. His hands found its handle. He pulled it out of the trunk, staggering momentarily as the weight swung free. Johnson was regaining his feet now, feeling around him in the darkness for the fallen pistol.

Chee spun, swinging the suitcase behind him, guessing, releasing it at the point where he hoped it would hit Johnson. It missed.

The suitcase bounced just past Johnson's legs, and tumbled down the slope toward the roaring water of Polacca Wash.

"My God," Johnson screamed. He scrambled after it.

West was on his feet again now, running clumsily after Johnson. The rain pounded down. Lightning flashed, illuminating falling water with a blue-white glare.

The suitcase had stopped just above the water's edge, held by a juniper. Johnson had reached it and was pulling it to safety when he realized what West was doing. He turned and was struck by West's body, and went sprawling backward downhill into what was now Polacca River.

West was lying, head down, feet high, beside the suitcase. Chee struggled down the slope, slipping and sliding.