Leaphorn looked away from the screen to complete a scanning of the room. He sucked in his breath. Someone was slumped in the chair in front of the computer, leaning away, against an adjoining desk. Asleep? He doubted it. The position was too awkward for sleep.
Leaphorn hurried back across the porch, opened the door, shouted, “Hello. Hello. Anyone home?” and trotted through the living room into the bedroom.
The form in the chair was a small, gray-haired man, wearing a white T-shirt with HANG UP AND DRIVE printed across the back, new-looking jeans and bedroom slippers. His left arm rested on the tabletop adjoining the computer stand, and his head rested upon it with his face illuminated by the light from the monitor. The light brightened as the screen saver presented a new set of birds. That caused the color of the blood that had seeped down from the hole above his right eye to change from almost black to a dark red.
Everett Jorie, Leaphorn thought. How long have you been dead? And how many years as a policeman does it take for me to get used to this? And understand it? And where is the person who killed you?
He stepped back from Jorie’s chair and surveyed the room, looking for the telephone and seeing it behind the computer with two stacks of the red Ute Casino chips beside it. Jorie was irrevocably dead. Calling the sheriff could wait for a few moments. First he would look around.
A pistol lay partly under the computer stand, beside the dead man’s foot—a short-barreled revolver much like the one Leaphorn had carried before his retirement. If there was a smell of burned gunpowder in the room, it was too faint for him to separate from the mixed aromas of dust, the old wool rug under his feet, mildew and the outdoor scents of hay, horse manure, sage and dry-country summer invading through the open window.
Leaphorn squatted beside the computer, took his pen from his shirt pocket, knelt, inserted it into the gun barrel, lifted the weapon and inspected the cylinder. One of the cartridges it held had been fired. He took out his handkerchief, pushed the cylinder release and swung it open. The cartridge over the chamber was also empty. Perhaps Jorie had carried the pistol with the hammer over a discharged round instead of an empty chamber, a sensible safety precaution. Perhaps he didn’t. That was something to be left to others to determine. He returned the pistol to its position beside the victim’s foot, slid out the ballpoint, then stood for a moment, holding the pen and studying the room.
It held a small, neatly made double bed. Beyond the bed, an automatic rifle leaned against the wall, an AK-47. A little table beside it held a lamp, an empty water glass and two books. One was The Virtue of Civility, with the subtitle of“Selected Essays on Liberalism.” The other lay on its back, open.
Leaphorn checked the page, used the pen to close it. The cover title read: Cato’s Letters: Essays on Liberty. He flipped the book open again, remembering it from a political science course in his undergraduate days at Arizona State. Appropriate reading for someone trying to go to sleep. The bookshelves along the wall were lined with similar fare: J.F. Cooper’s The American Democrat, Burke’s Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, along with an array of political biographies, autobiographies and histories. Leaphorn extracted The Servile State from its shelf, opened it and read a few lines for the sake of Hilaire Belloc’s poetic polemics. He’d read that one and a few of the others thirty years or so ago in his period of fascination with political theory. Most of them were strange to him, but the titles were enough to tell him that he’d find no socialists among Jorie’s heroes.
He located Jorie’s telephone book in an out basket beside the phone, found he could still remember the proper sheriff’s number and picked up the telephone receiver. From the computer came an odd gargling sound. The screen was displaying a long V of sandhill cranes migrating against a winter sky. Leaphorn put down the phone, took his ballpoint pen, and tapped the computer mouse twice.
The cranes and their gargling vanished—instantly replaced on the screen by text. Leaphorn leaned past the body and read:
NOTICE: To anyone who might care, if such person exists, I declare 1 am about to close in appropriate fashion my wasted life. Fittingly, it ends with another betrayal. The sortie against the Ute Casino, which 1 foolishly believed would help finance our struggle against federal despotism, has served instead to finance only greed—and that at the needless cost of lives.
My only profit from this note will be revenge, which the philosophers have told us is sweet. Sweet or not, I trust it will remove from society two scoundrels, betrayers of trust, traitors to the cause of liberty and American ideals of freedom, civil rights and escape from the oppression of an arrogant and tyrannical federal government.
The traitors are George (Badger) lronhand, a Ute Indian who runs cattle north of Montezuma Creek, and Alexander (Buddy) Baker, whose residence is just north of the highway between Bluff and Mexican Hat. It was lronhand who shot the two victims at the casino and Baker who shot at the policeman near Aneth. Both of these shootings were in direct defiance of my orders and in violation of our plan, which was to obtain the cash collection from the casino without causing injury. We intended to take advantage of the confusion caused by the power failure and the darkness and to cause injury to no one. Both lronhand and Baker were aware of the policy of gambling casinos, following the pattern set in Las Vegas, of instructing security guards not to use their weapons due to the risk of injury to clients and to the devastating publicity and loss of revenue such injuries would produce. Thus the deaths at the casino were unplanned, unprovoked, unnecessary and directly contrary to my instructions.
By the time we reached the point where we had planned to abandon the vehicle and return to our homes it had become clear to me that this violence had been privately planned by lronhand and Baker and that their plan also included my own murder and their appropriation of the proceeds for their private and personal use. Therefore, I slipped away at the first opportunity.
I have no apologies for the operation. Its cause was just—to finance the continued efforts of those of us who value our political freedom more than life itself, to forward our campaign to save the American Republic from the growing abuses of our socialist government, and to foil its conspiracy to subject American citizens to the yoke of a world government.
It would not serve our cause for me to stand the pseudo trial which would follow my arrest. The servile media would use it to make patriots appear to be no more than robbers. I prefer to sentence myself to death rather than endure either a public execution or life imprisonment.
However, arrest of lronhand and Baker and the recovery of the casino proceeds they have taken would demonstrate to the world that their murderous actions were those of two common criminals seeking their own profits and not the intentions of patriots. If you do not find them at their homes, I suggest you check Recapture Creek Canyon below the Bluff Bench escarpment and just south of the White Mesa Ute Reservation, lronhand has relatives and friends among the Utes there, and I have heard him talking to Baker about a free flowing spring and an abandoned sheepherder’s shack there.