I must also warn that after the business was done at the casino, these two men swore a solemn oath in my presence not to be taken alive. They accused me of cowardice and boasted that they would kill as many policemen as they could. They said that if they were ever surrounded and threatened with capture, they would continue killing police under the pretext of surrendering.
Long Live Liberty and all free men. Long live America.
I now die for it. Everett Emerson Jorie
Leaphorn read through the text again. Then he picked up the telephone, dialed the sheriff’s office number, identified himself, asked for the officer in charge and described what he had found at the residence of Everett Jorie.
“No use for an ambulance,” Leaphorn said. And yes, he would wait until officers arrived and make sure that the crime scene was not disturbed.
That done, Leaphorn walked slowly through the rest of Jorie’s home—looking but not touching. Back in Jorie’s office, the sandhill cranes were again soaring across the computer screen saver, projecting an odd flickering illumination on the walls of the twilight room. Leaphorn tapped the mouse with his pen again, and reread the text of Jorie’s note a third time. He checked the printer’s paper supply, click on the PRINT icon, and folded the printout into his hip pocket. Then he went out onto the front porch and sat, watching the sunset give the thunderclouds on the western horizon silver fringes and turn them into yellow flame and dark red, and fade away into darkness.
Venus was bright in the western sky when he heard the police cars coming.
Chapter Ten
Jim Chee turned down a side road on the high side of Ship Rock and parked at a place offering a view of both the Navajo Tribal Police district office beside Highway 666 and his own trailer house under the cottonwoods beside the San Juan River. He got out, focused his binoculars and examined both locations. As he feared, the NTP lot was crowded with vehicles, including New Mexico State Police black-and-whites, some Apache and Navajo County Sheriffs’ cars, and three of those shiny black Fords instantly identifiable by all, cops and criminals alike, as the unmarked cars used by the FBI. It was exactly what the newscasts had led him to expect. The word was out that the missing L-17 had been found resting in a hay shed near Red Mesa. Thus the fervent hope of all Four Corners cops that the Ute Casino bandits had flown away to make themselves someone else’s problem in another and far-distant jurisdiction had been dashed. That meant leaves would be canceled, everybody would be working overtime—including Sergeant Jim Chee unless he could keep out of sight and out of touch.
He focused on his own place. No vehicles were parked amid the cottonwoods that shaded his house trailer, so maybe no one was there waiting to order him back to duty. Chee had time left on his leave. He’d spent the morning making the long drive to the west slope of the Chuska range and then into high country to the place where Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai had always spent his summers tending his sheep, and where he now spent them doing the long slide into death by lung cancer. But Nakai wasn’t there. And neither was his wife, Blue Woman, nor their truck.
Chee was disappointed. He’d wanted to tell Nakai that he’d been right about Janet Pete—that marriage with his beautiful, chic, brilliant silver-spoon socialite lawyer would never work. Either she would give up her ambitions, stay with him in Dinetah and be miserable, or he’d take the long bitter step out of the Land Between the Sacred Mountains and become a miserable success. In his gentle, oblique way, Nakai had tried to show him that, and he wanted to tell the man that he’d finally seen it for himself. Chee hung around for a while, thinking Nakai would be back soon. Even with his cancer in one of its periodic remissions, he wouldn’t be strong enough for any extended travels. Certainly Nakai wouldn’t be strong enough to conduct any of the curing ceremonials that his role as a yataalii required of him.
When the sun dipped behind the thunderheads over Black Mesa on the western horizon, Chee gave up and headed home. He would try again tomorrow unless Captain Largo located him. If that happened, he’d be spending what was left of his vacation trudging up and down canyons, serving as live bait for three fellows armed with automatic rifles and a demonstrated willingness to shoot cops.
Now he put his binoculars back into their case, drove down the hill and left his pickup behind a screen of junipers behind his trailer. A note was fastened to his screen door with a bent paper clip.
“Jim — The Captain says for you to report in right away.”
Chee repinned it to the door and went in. The light on his telephone answering machine was blinking. He sat, took off his boots, and punched the answering-machine button.
The voice was Cowboy Dashee’s:
“Hey, Jim. I filled the sheriff in on us finding Old Man Timms’s airplane. He called the feds, they got me on the phone, too. (Sound of Cowboy chuckling.) The agent quizzing me didn’t want to believe it was the same airplane, and I don’t blame him. I didn’t want to believe it either. Anyway, they sent somebody down there to make sure us indigenous people can tell an old L-17 from a zeppelin, and now the same old manhunt circus is getting organized just like in ‘98. If you want to save what’s left of your vacation, I’d recommend you keep a long way from your office.”
The next call was brief.
“This is Captain Largo. Get your ass down here. The feds located that damned airplane, and we’re going to be the beagles on one of their fox hunts again.“ Largo, who normally sounded grouchy, sounded even grouchier than usual.
The third call was his insurance dealer telling him he needed to add an uninsured motorists clause to his policy. The fourth and final one was Officer Bernadette Manuelito.
“Jim. I talked to Cowboy, and he told me what you did. And I want to thank you for that. But I was at the hospital in Farmington this morning, and they have Hosteen Nakai there. He’s very sick, and he told me he needs to see you. I’m going to come by your place. It’s ah, it’s almost six. I should be there by six-thirty or so.”
Chee spent a moment considering what Bernie had said. Then he erased calls one, three and four, leaving the Largo call (in case the captain needed to think he hadn’t heard it). Why would Nakai be in the hospital? It was hard to imagine that. He was dying of lung cancer, but he would never, never want to die in a hospital. Nakai was an ultra-traditional. A famous yataalii, a shaman who sang the Blessing Way, the Mountain Top Chant, the Night Way, and other curing ceremonials. As the older brother of Chee’s mother, he was Chee’s ‘little father,' the one who had given Chee his secret 'war name,' his mentor, the tutor who had tried to teach Chee to be a singer himself. Hosteen Nakai would hate being in a hospital. Dying in such a place would be intolerable for him. How could this have happened? Blue Woman was smart and tough. How could she have allowed anyone to take her husband from their place in the Chuska Mountains?
He was trying to think of an answer to that when he heard the sound of tires on gravel, looked up and saw through the screen door Bernie’s pickup rolling to a stop. Maybe she could tell him.
She couldn’t.
“I just happened to see him,” Bernie said. “They rolled him up on a gurney to where I was waiting for the elevator, and I thought he looked like your uncle, so I asked him if he was Hosteen Nakai, and he nodded, and I told him I worked with you, and he reached out for my arm and said to tell you to come, and I said I would, and then he said to tell you to come right away. And then the elevator came, and they put him on it.“ Bernie shook her head, her expression sad. “He looked bad.”