“Wages?” Vang asked. “Nothing much when I was just a boy, I guess, but later on when I went out to do the shopping for things, Mr. Delos told me to just use the charge for stuff I needed.”
“For stuff you needed,” Delonie said. “Like what?” Vang shrugged. “Like socks and underwear, and when I got older, razor blades, and that deodorant for under your arms. Sometimes I would buy chewing gum, or candy bars, things like that. Mr. Delos didn’t seem to mind.”
Delonie recovered the pencil and began jotting figures on the corner of the map.
“I’m figuring minimum wage at an average of $5 an hour in California ’cause it goes up and down. Higher now. Lower then. Figure him a forty-hour, five-day week, even though he was working full time and seven days, just figure it at forty. That would be two hundred bucks a THE SHAPE SHIFTER
223
week. Now maybe we should cut that in half because he got room and board. Make it a hundred per week. That fair?”
Without waiting for Vang or Leaphorn to answer, Delonie was doing the math.
“I’m calling it twenty years—knocking off those years before Vang was in his late teens. Then knocking two weeks off each year for vacation time, even though Vang didn’t get any vacation. That gives us an even thousand weeks. Right? Multiply that by a hundred dollars a week, and it comes out Delos owes Vang a hundred thousand dollars. Right? Now if we figure in some interest, compounded annually, then it means that Mr. Delos—” Leaphorn, who almost never interrupted anyone, interrupted. “Mr. Delonie,” he said. “We see your point. But don’t you think we should be sort of changing the subject and getting back to what we’ve got to do tomorrow?” Delonie stared at Leaphorn. Put down the pencil.
Picked it up again.
“All right. I guess so. I can’t get it in my mind though, that this Delos is really going to be Ray Shewnack. If I see him, and it really is Shewnack, what I think I’m going to do is just shoot him.”
“You do that, you’ll be right back in prison again,” Leaphorn said. “And not just for parole violation.” Delonie nodded. “I know. But it would damn sure be worth it.”
“Trouble is, I’d be going in there with you. Me and Tommy Vang here.”
“You think you can go up there, catch him, take him in, and get him convicted of anything? Damned if I see how. Me, a convicted felon, as your only witness.” 224
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“Let the jury decide,” Leaphorn said. “Anyway, you can’t cook the rabbit until you catch it.” Delonie made a wry face, bent over the map again.
“Well,” he said. “If Delos wants to meet Mr. Vang right here where he marked that spot, it must mean he’d have his hunting stand pretty close. I guess we can drive up there, though. He must know that area pretty well.”
“Mr. Delos has been there before,” Tommy Vang said. “He took me once, when I was a lot younger.” He smiled at the thought. “I got to learn how to cook on the woodstove. Mostly just frying meat and boiling stuff and mixing drinks for people. But the cooking wasn’t easy until you know how to control the heat. Be way too hot, or then too cold.” He shrugged. “The way my mother had to do it.”
“Has a kitchen then,” Delonie said. “I guess they have a cabin up there handy for those permit hunters to keep dry and comfortable.”
“A little log house,” Tommy said. “Mostly just one big room and a little kitchen place and then there was a water tank on the roof. You turned a big valve and the water came down in a sink in the kitchen.” His expression registered disapproval. “It didn’t look very clean. Everything dirty. The water, too, I mean. Sort of rusty looking.”
“You were a mountain boy, weren’t you?” Delonie said. “Maybe that sort of reminded you of home. Log cabin, wood fire, and all.”
“It did,” Vang said, and looked down. “But we weren’t dirty like that.”
Delonie was staring at him, expression grim. “That son of a bitch,” he said. “He should have taken you home again.”
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“He said he would,” Vang said. “Said he was going to do that.”
“Do you still believe that?” Delonie asked.
Vang considered. “I used to believe it. For a long time I believed it,” he said. Then he bent over the map, either studying it or, Leaphorn guessed, not wanting them to see that he was about to cry.
“Right here,” Vang said, tapping an ink dot beside a line which, in the map marking code, identified a road as
“doubtful” and to be avoided in bad weather.
“I guess that’s where we’re going,” Leaphorn said.
“Shouldn’t be any problem this time of year.”
“I think that’s going to be on the old T.J.D. Cater spread,” Delonie said. “I hunted up fairly near to there when I was a lot younger. The old man owned a lot of his own land and then his grazing permit spread out over a bunch of National Forest leases. Went way up into the mountains, I remember. It was all posted. No trespassing. Had a deal with the Game Department people to let the deer and elk graze on his leased grass and drink his water. Then they’d give him a bundle of hunting permits he could sell.”
“But Mr. Delos said he’d be hunting on the Wither-spoon Ranch,” Vang said. “And that’s where he went last year. That mark he made right there, that little squiggle, he said that was a big sign by the road. It tells people that anybody who goes on the property without permission will be prosecuted. Big sign says Posted, and then there’s what Delos said they call ‘The Lazy W,’ painted on a board nailed to a tree.”
“Yeah,” Delonie said. “When old Cater died, With-erspoon’s the one who bought out the estate. And that 226
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sounds like his brand. That’s what I heard. Anyway, whoever has it, to hunt up there you still had to either sneak in, or pay the bastards their fee.”
“Okay,” Leaphorn said. “Now let’s figure out the best way to get there.”
Delonie pushed back his chair and rose.
“I’ll leave that to you, Lieutenant Leaphorn,” he said.
“I’m going to fix us some supper. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day and probably pretty interesting. We should eat something and then get some sleep.”
19
For Leaphorn, getting some sleep had been easier said than accomplished. After feeding them overfried pork chops with bread, gravy, and more coffee, Delonie had put him and Tommy Vang in a space once apparently used as a second bedroom but now stacked full of odds and ends of mostly broken furniture. Vang fit himself neatly onto a sagging sofa against the wall, leaving Leaphorn to retire upon a stack of three old mattresses on the floor.
It was comfortable enough, and certainly Leaphorn was tired enough, but his mind was occupied with setting up plans for the various unpleasant situations he kept imagining. Ideally, Delonie would get an early look at Delos, would clearly identify him as the man who called himself Ray Shewnack, the one who had murdered the Handys in cold blood and then gone on to earn high rank-ing on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted felons. In that case, he would manage to persuade Delonie to choke down 228
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his long-building hatred and come back with Leaphorn to get a warrant for the arrest of Delos. An even happier outcome involved Delonie staring through his telescopic sight a bit and declaring that Delos was not Shewnack, that he didn’t resemble Shewnack in any way at all, and asking what in the world had provoked Leaphorn into taking them on this foolish wild-goose chase. Whereupon Leaphorn would apologize to Delonie, head for home, and try to forget this whole affair.
But what about Tommy Vang then? And what if Delonie simply kept looking through that telescopic sight on his rifle until he was certain it was Shewnack and then shot the man? Even worse, what if Delos, who had clearly demonstrated his tendency to be cautious, saw them first, recognized the danger, and initiated shooting himself ?