A Thief of Time

The helicopter emerged over the rim of the mesa almost directly overhead. Leaphorn waved, saw an answering wave. The copter circled and disappeared over the mesa again.

Leaphorn checked Elliot's pulse. He didn't seem to have one. He looked for Brigham Houk, who seemed never to have existed. He walked over to the litter where Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal lay. She opened her eyes, looked at him without recognition, closed them again. He tucked the rabbit fur cloak around her, careful to apply no pressure. Now it was snowing harder, still blowing like dust. He walked back to Elliot. No pulse now. He opened his jacket and shirt and felt for a heartbeat. Nothing. The man was no longer breathing. Randall Elliot, graduate of Exeter, of Princeton, of Harvard, winner of the Navy Cross, was dead by arrow shot. Leaphorn gripped him under the arms and pulled him into the cover of the slab where Brigham Houk had hidden. Elliot was heavy, and Leaphorn was exhausted. By pulling hard and doing some twisting, he extracted the arrows. He wiped the blood off as well as he could on Elliot's jacket. Then he picked up a rock, hammered them into pieces, and put the pieces in his hip pocket. That done, he found dead brush, broke it off, and made an inefficient effort to cover the body. But it didn't matter. The coyotes would find Randall Elliot anyway.

Then he heard the clatter of someone scrambling down the cut. It proved to be Officer Chee, looking harassed and disheveled. It took some effort for Leaphorn not to show he was impressed. He pointed to the litter. 'We need to get Dr. Friedman to the hospital in a hurry,' he said. 'Can you get that thing down here to load her?'

'Sure,' Chee said. He started back toward the cut at a run.

'Just a second,' Leaphorn said.

Chee stopped.

'What did you see?'

Chee raised his eyebrows. 'I saw you standing beside a man slumped down on the ground. I guess it was Elliot. And I saw the litter over there. And maybe I saw another man. Something jumping out of sight back there just as we came over the top.'

'Why did you think it was Elliot?'

Chee looked surprised. 'The helicopter he rented is parked up there. I figured when he heard she was still alive he'd have to come out here and kill her before you got here.'

Leaphorn again was impressed. This time he made a little less effort to conceal it. 'Do you know how Elliot knew she was alive?'

Chee made a wry face. 'I more or less told him.'

'And then made the connection?'

'Then I found out he had filed for permission to dig this site, and the site where he killed Etcitty. Turned down on both of them. I went out there to talk to him and found--you remember the box of plastic wastebasket liners at the Checkerboard site. One missing from it. Well, it was hidden in Elliot's kitchen. Had jawbones in it.'

Leaphorn didn't ask how Chee had gotten into Elliot's kitchen.

'Go ahead, then, and get the copter down here. And don't say anything.'

Chee looked at him.

'I mean don't say anything at all. I'll fill you in when we get a chance.'

Chee trotted toward the cut.

'Thank you,' Leaphorn said. He wasn't sure if Chee heard that.

It was snowing hard by the time they had the litter loaded and the copter lifted off the shelf. Leaphorn was jammed against the side. He looked down on a stone landscape cut into vertical blocks by time and now blurred by snow. He looked quickly away. He could ride the big jets, barely. Something in his inner ear made anything less stable certain nausea. He closed his eyes, swallowed. This was the first snow. They would come when the weather cleared to recover the copter and look for Elliot. But they wouldn't look hard because it was so obviously hopeless. Snow would have covered everything. After the thaw, they would come again. Then they would find the bones, scattered like the Anasazi skeletons he looted. There would be no sign of the arrow wounds then. Cause of death unknown, the coroner would write. Victim eaten by predators.

He glanced back. Chee was jammed in the compartment beside the litter, his hand on Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's arm. She seemed to be awake. I will ask him what curing ceremony he would recommend, Leaphorn thought, and knew at once that his fatigue was making him silly. Instead he said nothing. He thought of the circumstances, of how proud Emma would be of him tonight if she could be home to hear about this woman brought safely to the hospital. He thought about Brigham Houk. In just about twenty-four more days, the moon would be full again. Brigham would be waiting at the mouth of Many Ruins Canyon, but Papa wouldn't come.

I will go, Leaphorn thought. Someone has to tell him. And that meant that he would have to postpone his plan to leave the reservation, probably a long postponement. Solving the problem of what to do about Brigham Houk would take more than one trip down the river. And if he had to stick around, he might as well withdraw that letter. As Captain Nez had said, he could always write it again.

Jim Chee noticed Leaphorn was watching him.

'You all right?' Chee asked.

'I've felt better,' Leaphorn said. And then he had another thought. He considered it. Why not? 'I hear you're a medicine man. I heard you are a singer of the Blessing Way. Is that right?'

Chee looked slightly stubborn. 'Yes sir,' he said.

'I would like to ask you to sing one for me,' Leaphorn said.

TONY HILLERMAN is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received their Edgar and Grand Master Awards Among his other honors are the Center for the American Indian's Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe's Special Friend Award His many novels include Finding Moon, Sacred Clowns, Coyote Waits, Talking God, A Thief of Time, and Dance Halt of the Dead He is also the author of The Great Taos Bank Robbery He lives with his wife, Mane, in Albuquerque, New Mexico