But if he comes this way, McKee thought, this might be the best place to face him. I could probably knock him down with my rock before he saw me. Unless he has a flashlight as well as the gun. Then there wouldn't be much chance.
And, while he thought this, the utter irrationality of it all occurred to him. It was unreal. Like some crazy childhood nightmare.
But the man was there, real enough, back by the tent now and no longer seeming to make any effort at concealment. He raised the hood of McKee's truck and McKee had a sudden wild hope that he would start it, climb in, and race away, nothing more than a thief. Instead, he closed the hood and walked back and into the tent. A moment later a spot of light showed through the canvas. The flashlight beam shifted, held steady, shifted again, and then stopped. He's looking through my papers, McKee thought. He wondered what the man would make of his notes on the witchcraft interviews. And he had a sudden impulse to walk into the tent, confront the man, and demand to know what the devil he was doing. Then the light snapped off and the man appeared again in front of the tent, staring almost directly toward McKee's hiding place. McKee felt the impulse die.
"Doctor McKee?"
The man called in an even, sonorous voice, not much above a conversational tone. But in the stillness the sound seemed obscenely loud. And the canyon walls said "Kee-Kee-Kee" in a receding echo of his name.
"Bergen McKee," the voice repeated. "I need to…" The echoes drowned the rest of it. "I need to talk to you about Doctor Canfield," the voice said. And the man stood silent until the echoes died again. Who is he? McKee wondered. The Navajo bitten by the snake? Or was this man a Navajo? He couldn't tell anything from the voice. There was no trace of accent. But then educated Navajos rarely had accents, except for sometimes dropping the "th" sound.
The man stood silent a long moment, staring up, and then down, the canyon. Listening. And he won't hear a damn thing, McKee thought. Not from me.
"John's hurt," the voice said. The voice was louder now and the cliffs bounced the "hurt" between them until it blended into a single note. "He needs help."
John. John, not Jeremy. The man standing down there in the darkness, the man with the wolf skin, the man who had stalked like an animal, had some connection with Canfield's note, with Canfield's peculiar signature.
"I should go down there," McKee thought, but he remembered the thing that had reflected the moonlight in this man's hand as he had crossed the canyon floor. Why the pistol? Why the dog skin? And he leaned motionless against the boulder, feeling the rough coldness of the rock against his legs and the cold sweat on his palms, knowing he would go nowhere near this man. Not alone in this dark canyon. Not without a weapon.
And then the man was gone. Suddenly he was no longer beside the tent. And then McKee saw him, trotting diagonally across the canyon bottom, the wolf skin dangling from one hand.
McKee relaxed against the boulder, suddenly aware that he was cold and that his shirt was wet with sweat. Far down canyon the saw-whet owl made its strange, rasping cry. Signaling a kill, McKee thought.
Chapter 12
It was well after midnight when Leaphorn finally learned who had collected the scalp for the ceremonial. He had talked until he was tired of talking—tired and frustrated and irritated at his close-mouthed people. And then a girl had told him, proudly and without prompting, that Billy Nez—whom he still hadn't located—had stolen the hat. Billy Nez had tracked the truck of the witch and had watched from hiding until he finally had the opportunity. Leaphorn had been captured by the girl, a plump and pretty youngster wearing a T-shirt with " Chinle High School " printed across it, during the Girl Dance. She had grabbed his arm while he was talking to an old man.
"Come on, Blue Policeman," she had said. I've got you and you've got to dance." And Leaphorn had let her tow him to the great fire, because he had already decided the old man would tell him nothing, and because it was the tradition at this ceremonial. He would dance with the girl a little, and after a while he would pay her the proper ransom for his release, and then he would continue wandering through the crowd asking for Billy Nez but no longer really expecting to find him here.
Blue Policeman, he thought. A hell of a lot of good it does to leave your uniform at home. There's not an adult at this Sing by now who doesn't know I'm the law.
The chant rose in the firelight. Ya Ha He Ya Na He. Rising and falling with the rhythm of the pot drums. And then the words. "Lie closer to me," the singers chanted. "Bring your sheepskin and we will go into the darkness. What are you going to do out there?" Leaphorn glanced at his partner, curious whether the ribald suggestion of the song would embarrass a boarding-school girl. She danced gracefully, gripping his left arm with her right.
"I wonder why Hosteen Policeman looks at me," she said. "Are you going to arrest me?"
Leaphorn returned the smile. "I would if I thought you could tell me anything."
"Who are you after? What do you want to know?"
"I'd like to know all about a witch," Leaphorn said.
"I'll bet you don't even believe in witches."
"I believe in a witch who used to wear a big black Stetson hat until somebody got it away from him."
"That was Billy Nez," the girl had said. There it was, as simple as that. Billy Nez was around here somewhere (the girl glanced over her shoulder into the darkness, frowning).
"I'd like to talk to Hosteen Nez," Leaphorn said.
"So would I. I caught him and made him dance and he just paid me twenty-five cents. And he said he'd let me catch him again." The girl frowned into the darkness again and then looked up at Leaphorn. "But he's no Hosteen yet. He's just a boy."
"How old is just a boy?"
"He's just sixteen."
And you're about fifteen, Leaphorn thought, and if Billy Nez isn't careful his clan is going to lose itself a boy, and a bride's price to boot.
"Just a boy," Leaphorn said.
"But he's the one who got the hat. Billy was the Scalp Carrier. He followed that man's pickup, and he watched from where the witch couldn't see him, and when he went away Billy was the one who got the scalp."
And that seemed to be exactly all the girl knew about it. She knew Nez was Red Forehead, and that he raised sheep with his uncle over on Cotton-wood Flats near Chinle, and that he was wearing a red-checked shirt and a red baseball cap, and some of the other things that fifteen-year-old girls learn about sixteen-year-old boys. And then suddenly the pot drums and the chanting stopped, and there were much haggling and laughing and banter as the women collected their ransom fees. Leaphorn gave the girl a dollar.
"That's the most I got all night," she said. But she wouldn't come with him to point out Nez.
Leaphorn spotted the Carrier of the Scalp a half hour later. The Sway Dancing had started then and he saw Nez in his ball cap among the line of dancers from the Stick Receiver's camp. The rhythm was faster now and the rising, falling in sound of the voices was as old as the earth. But the words were about a rocket.
"Belacani's rocket fell on the mesa," the singers chanted.
And then the line of men from the patient's camp began the rhythmic swaying and the words changed.
"Belacani's rocket start the brush burning."
Track down the man who started that one, Leaphorn thought, and you'd find the missile the Army spent half the winter looking for four years ago. Trouble was it would be easier to find the missile than the song writer.