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was moving its wings. It seemed to fall from one branch to a lower one, recover itself, flap its wings, and begin a sort of frantic flight. A very short flight. Abruptly its effort stopped, and it dropped behind the wall.
“Poisoned, I guess,” said Tommy Vang. “I guess you were right about those little puncture holes.” Delonie was standing beside them now, watching.
“That one on the ground there, too,” he said. “Look at that.”
The crow was on the grass, trying to stand, trying to get its wings moving. Dying.
“I guess that would have been me,” Delonie said. “I guess I owe you gentlemen a thank-you or something.”
“What we need from you,” Leaphorn said, “is to tag along with us to visit Mr. Delos, make sure he is the man you remember as Ray Shewnack so we can get him arrested and indicted and get him put away.” But even as he said it, Leaphorn was thinking he’d need a lot of luck to make any of those things happen.
“Where we going to get me a chance to look at him?” Delonie asked. “That means driving to Flagstaff, I guess.”
“Mr. Vang is going to help us with that,” Leaphorn said. “Mr. Delos left home to go hunting. Hunting elk. He was going after a big trophy bull elk up on one of those hunters’ ranch places along the Colorado-New Mexico border. Vang’s supposed to drive up there tomorrow and give him a bunch of information about you. About where you live, alone or what, where you work, your habits, what your vehicle looked like. Stuff like that.” Delonie was studying Vang while receiving this information. “Supposed to get acquainted, sort of, or just snoop around?”
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“He said better if you didn’t see me,” Vang said. “I was supposed to just find out when you weren’t home and leave those cherries in your mailbox, or by your front door, and then go away.”
Delonie considered this. “That son of a bitch,” he said.
“He sure had me all figured out, didn’t he? He figured I’d be eating those cherries while I sat there wondering who the hell had sent them. He was right, too. I wouldn’t have had the brains to stop and think about it.” Leaphorn shrugged. “Why would you? You didn’t have any reason to be suspecting anything. You knew Shewnack was dead. Formally certified by the Federal Bureau of Identification.”
Delonie nodded. “Now let’s figure out how we’re going to nail him. If we want to catch him out hunting, we’ll need to get there early. That’s when the elk and the deer are coming out of the cover to get themselves a wake-up drink of water. And that’s when those hunting-camp-type hunters are all set up waiting for them. We need to start getting ourselves ready for this. It’s a long drive up there.”
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Getting ready for the venture first involved cleaning off enough of the table so that Tommy Vang could spread out his old road map, let them inspect the marks Delos had drawn on it, and expose the notes of instruction he had written for Tommy. They sat in the three straight-backed chairs, with Delonie in the middle.
Delonie tapped the area Delos had circled.
“That’s where he’s doing his hunting? Is that it?” he asked. “If it is, then our best bet would be to drive over to Cuba on 550.” He paused, shook his head. “But there we got a choice. Either the long way on pavement on 537
through the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, or take the short way. Just keep going north out of Cuba to La Jara on old Highway 112 straight up to Dulce. Both get you to the same place. The first way is a lot longer, but it’s all paved road. That county road 112 gets you going over a lot of dirt.”
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Leaphorn was trying to remember the shorter route.
Terrible when snow was melting, but probably not bad this time of year. While he was pondering this, Delonie muttered something negative about the old Delos map, got up, disappeared into what was probably a bedroom, and emerged with other maps. One was a bound volume of reproductions of U.S. Geological Survey section surveys, another was an oil field pipeline route map that Leaphorn didn’t recognize, and the third was a copy of the AAA Indian Country map like the one Leaphorn used himself. Delonie put them all on the table, pushed aside the USGA volume and the pipeline maps, and folded the Indian Country version to expose the pertinent portion of the Colorado-New Mexico border. On it, he carefully pencil-sketched the circle from Delos’s map. Checked his work with the Delos map, made some slight corrections, and stared at the Delos notes.
“Can you read this scribbling here,” he asked Tommy Vang.
Vang leaned over the map, looking surprised. He picked up the pencil Delonie had dropped on the map.
“Sure,” he said, and tapped a scribble with the pencil tip. “Right here he says ‘Wash cuts across road here. Park in wash. Wait in car. I come.’ And this right here that sort of looks like a big M. Those lines beside it is ‘Lazy W.’” Vang laughed. “I think lazy because it’s not an M but a W
laying on its back.”
“It’s probably the rancher’s cattle brand,” Delonie said, studying Vang, frowning. “How long you been working for this man? Brought you over from Asia when you were a boy, did he? That would have been close to thirty years ago. Did you already know English then?” THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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Vang laughed. “I was just nine or ten, I think. Just talked Hmong, and a little bit of Vietnamese, and some words of Chinese. But I studied English on the television in San Francisco. On the programs they had for children.” Vang laughed. “Funny stuff. Clowns and puppets and little things supposed to be like animals. But it taught you numbers and if you paid attention you could get the meaning of the words they were saying.”
“Never went to any regular school then,” Delonie said, sounding incredulous.
“But you learn a lot on television. Like you watch Law and Order, and NYPD Blue, and those other ones, and you learn a lot about how policemen like Mr. Leaphorn here do their work. And you learn about different kind of guns.
The only ones we had when I was a boy were the rifles the Americans brought for us, and some my uncles had taken from the Vietcong and the Pathet Lao.” Delonie considered that, now looking grim. “Are you telling me that miserable bastard never put you into any regular school? You never did really have anybody teaching you anything?”
“Oh, no,” Vang said, looking shocked. “Mr. Delos put me in a cooking school. I helped in the kitchen and the people there taught me how to make bread, and cookies, and soups, and . . . well just about everything.”
“But nobody taught you how to read. Or write, or anything like that?”
“Well, not sit behind a desk in a regular classroom like I see they do on television. Not anything like that.
But I learned all sorts of other things. Mr. Delos and the woman who ran the food place where I was learning how to cook, they got me into a dry cleaner’s place. Where 222
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they work on making clothing fit better.” Thinking of that caused Vang to smile.
“I learned how to mend, and patch, and iron, and do what they called ‘destaining.’ I was very good at that.” Delonie was looking somber. “Never did send you to a regular sort of school then,” he said. “Just kept you home and you worked for him. Did his cooking, and was sort of like a housekeeper.” He glanced at Leaphorn. “I guess that’s about what you were telling me, wasn’t it. But I wasn’t taking it seriously.”
“Well, that’s the way it was,” Leaphorn said. “Mr. Vang was Mr. Delos’s cook, housekeeper, and sort of secretary, too. Arranged his trips. Things like that.”
“Worked for the bastard about twenty-five years or so, then, I’d estimate. What kind of wages did he pay you?”