“Was that their names? And what was going on in there, anyway? What was Hall doing?”
“It’s a secret,” Leaphorn said.
“Like hell it’s a secret,” McKee said. “If you want me to tell some phony story about Canfield getting killed in a truck wreck, you don’t have secrets.”
“I’m not really supposed to know all of it myself.”
“But you do,” McKee said.
Leaphorn looked at him a long moment.
“Well,” he said. “You cut one of his cables so I guess you know Hall had portable radar sets staked out on that plateau. And you know that plateau is under the route from the Tonepah Range up in Utah down to White Sands Proving Grounds.”
“Yeah,” McKee said. “I knew that much.” He wondered why he hadn’t thought of radar.
“Hall was sitting with his radar right under what the military calls its ‘Bird Path,’ and when the birds flew from Tonepah the radar was feeding information into a computer in the van. Hall was putting it into tapes.”
“What were they testing?”
“The military intelligence people don’t tell a Navajo cop things like that.”
“I’ll bet you can guess.”
Leaphorn looked at him again. “Maybe the MIRV. The Multiple Intercontinental Re-entry Vehicle. Read about it in Newsweek. One missile, but it drops off five or six warheads and some decoys. I’d guess that if I was guessing.”
“It still doesn’t make sense. What was he doing with the information and how’d a guy like Hall get tied up with that bunch?”
“If you’ll shut up and listen, I’ll tell you.”
From what they now knew, Leaphorn explained, Hall, Poher, and Jackson had arrived on the Reservation separately almost two months ago. A fingerprint check had been enlightening. Poher was relatively unknown. One arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to rob a bank, some East Coast Mafia associations, but no convictions. Jackson was another story. He was also known as Amos Raven, and Big Raven and George Thomas, with a long and violent juvenile record dating back into the late thirties in Los Angeles, and one adult conviction for armed robbery, and a half-dozen arrests for questioning in an assortment of crimes of violence—all Mafia-connected.
“A Relocation Indian. Jackson seems to have been born in Los Angeles.” Leaphorn laughed. “California Navajo. That’s what had me hung up. I was expecting him to act like The People and all he knew about The People he must have got out of a book.”
“Case Studies in Navajo Ethnic Aberrations, for one,” McKee said, “by John Greersen.”
“Anyway,” Leaphorn continued, “Jackson had apparently been picked for this assignment simply because he was a Navajo and looked like one. His job must have been to help Hall set up his equipment and make sure that nobody knew what was going on. It wouldn’t have seemed difficult, for the very reason the military chose this route for its overland missile. The country was almost completely deserted. Hall set up in Many Ruins Canyon complex, which The People avoid because of the Anasazi ghosts, and Jackson scared the few stragglers out by pretending to be a witch.”
“Except Horseman,” McKee said.
“Yeah. Except Horseman.” Leaphorn’s voice was flat.
“It wasn’t your fault,” McKee said.
“Remember what I said to Jackson at the trading post? I said if Horseman don’t come out we’ll come in looking for him. So Jackson brought him out for us and laid him out where we couldn’t miss him.”
“Use your head, Joe. There was no way you could have stopped it from happening.”
“I was slow figuring it out,” Leaphorn said. “I smelled something about Jackson. But I figured him to act like a Navajo and he was acting like a white man.”
“Thanks a lot,” McKee said.
“If he was a Navajo, no matter what he was doing in there, killing Horseman would have screwed it up for him. He would have gone off somewhere and had a sweat bath, and then he would have found himself a Singer and got himself cured and forgot about it.”
Leaphorn told McKee about the Enemy Way and about finding the place where Jackson had built the road up Ceniza Mesa.
“He had put one of the radar sets up there and then he was improving his road so he could get it down fast, without using the winch. When he missed his hat, he knew someone had seen him, so he moved the radar back over to the plateau. I didn’t know about the radar but it was beginning to be clear by then that there had to be a lot of money involved somewhere. You put it together—a lot of money and a killing. It’s not natural, and it’s not Navajo.”
“All right,” McKee said. “I’ll buy that. But how did Hall get into it?”
“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “I hear the federals are looking into a little West Coast electronics company with Mafia ownership. I think Hall did some work for them before—something legitimate.” He looked at McKee pensively. “Didn’t that business about Jackson wanting you to write the letter tell you something?”
“It told me he didn’t want anybody coming in there looking for us,” McKee said. “What else?”
“Think about it,” Leaphorn said. “If you have a bunch of computer tapes giving you the exact performance of the other guy’s ballistic missile system, it’s worth a bunch of money. But it’s worth a lot more if the other side doesn’t suspect you’ve got it. Right?”
“Because if he suspects he changes the system,” McKee said. “Eddie said something about that. About the letter being worth a lot of money.”
A nurse came in then, a Navajo girl, in the uniform of the Indian Service Hospital. She scolded Leaphorn for staying too long, took McKee’s temperature and gave him a capsule and a drink of water.
When McKee awoke again, there was a tray beside his bed with a covered dish of food on it, and beside the dish was an envelope.
He turned the envelope in his good hand, aware before he opened it of the familiar feeling of his common sense struggling with his perennial incurable optimism. The note inside was from Ellen Leon. Tomorrow, it began, the doctor would let her come to visit him. It was not just fourteen blunt words in blue ink on blue paper. It was a long letter.
Acknowledgment
While ethnological material as used in this book is not intended to meet scholarly and scientific standards, the author wishes to acknowledge information derived from publications of Willard W. Hifi, Leland C. Wyman, Mary C. Wheelwright, Father Berard Haile, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Washington Matthews; and the advice and information provided by his own friends among the Navajo people.
About the Author
TONY HILLERMAN is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received its Edgar and Grand Master Awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian’s Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for the best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe’s Special Friend Award. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Books by Tony Hillerman
FICTION
The Wailing Wind
Hunting Badger
The First Eagle
The Fallen Man
Finding Moon
Sacred Clowns
Coyote Waits
Talking God
A Thief of Time
Skinwalkers
The Ghostway
The Dark Wind
People of Darkness
Listening Woman
Dance Hall of the Dead
The Fly on the Wall
The Blessing Way
The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (for children)
NONFICTION
Seldom Disappointed
Hillerman Country
The Great Taos Bank Robbery
Rio Grande
New Mexico
The Spell of New Mexico
Indian Country
Credits
Cover illustration by Peter Thorpe
Copyright
&nb
sp; This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BLESSING WAY. Copyright © 1970 by Anthony G. Hillerman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780061795206
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