The sound of the car starting was close. It came from beyond the tamarisks. Chee trotted around the pool toward it, conscious that the driver was probably armed. The car, he saw when he reached the screen of brush, was a green-and-white Plymouth—the one that had been parked beside Charley’s car. It was moving away from him down the track. He couldn’t see the driver. Chee turned and scrambled up the lava formation. When the Plymouth reached the place where the tracks forked, it would angle left, back toward the highway and Grants. Then Chee could see the driver. And he would need only a glimpse to confirm what he already knew. It would be the blond man in the yellow jacket.
But the Plymouth didn’t angle left. It turned right and jolted slowly toward Chee’s patrol car.
He could see Mary at the passenger-side window, looking at the approaching car and then at him.
He cupped his hands and shouted: “Run. Mary. Run.”
She emerged from the driver’s-side door, running toward the new lava flow. She was carrying his 30-30 carbine. Chee raced toward the patrol car, doing what he could to keep out of sight behind the humps and hillocks of old lava. The Plymouth stopped and the driver got out. He was a blond man wearing a yellow jacket, and he raised his right arm and aimed the pistol he held at Mary Landon. It seemed to Chee to have a remarkably long and heavy barrel. The barrel smoked, or seemed to, but Chee heard nothing. Mary was in the new lava and out of sight. Chee’s plan took no thought at all. He would circle around the patrol car, find Mary in the new lava, and get the rifle. The blond man would think he was armed and wouldn’t come after him. The risks were relatively light. In the first place, the chances of being hit at one hundred yards by a pistol were small, unless the man was a hell of a lot better shot than most. And in the second place, a .22 bullet at that range wouldn’t be lethal. Chee ran.
The pain was sudden and intense. Chee stumbled, lost his footing, and fell to his hands and knees. The pain was in his left chest. A heart attack, he thought for one illogical moment. And then he felt blood running down his side and made a quick inspection. A bullet seemed to have struck a rib. He inspected the place with cautious fingers and grimaced with the pain. The bullet had apparently broken the bone. But he didn’t seem to be hurt in any critical way. No reason to change his plans, except for a more realistic view of the blond man’s marksmanship. He raised himself cautiously. He’d locate his adversary exactly, and then he’d resume his run toward the new lava, on a wider, safer circle.
The blond man was trotting directly toward him across the worn waves of gray stone, the long-barreled pistol held in front of him. Chee ducked. The blond either didn’t care if the Navajo policeman was armed, or knew that he wasn’t. Perhaps he had seen that Chee wasn’t wearing his holster. And now he came to finish the job, as he had finished it with Tomas Charley. Chee felt panic, choked it off, and started a scrambling zigzag run. He’d worry about reaching Mary Landon and his rifle later. Now the problem was to stay alive, to put some distance between himself and the blond, to find a place to hide. He vaulted over a ridge of stone and heard the sharp snap of a bullet whipping past him. He heard no gunshot. Behind the ridge, the lava had hardened into a wide trough perhaps five feet deep. Chee sprinted down it, the rib feeling like a knife in his chest. Then he heard the booming crack of a shot, and the whine of a ricocheting bullet. And then another, and another. Those were not the blond’s silent .22. It was the muzzle blast of his 30-30. The trough ended at a grassy pothole catch basin. He was back at Emerson Charley’s spring. Chee stopped and looked over the rim. The blond man was moving back toward his car, keeping low in a dodging run. From the escarpment of new lava, Chee saw a puff of blue smoke and heard again the cracking boom of the 30-30. Then the blond was behind Chee’s patrol car. For a moment Chee lost sight of him. Then he was visible again, getting into the Plymouth. The Plymouth backed around the patrol car with a squeal of tires on rock and then was jolting down the track, far faster than was safe for tires or springs.
About then Chee realized that his patrol car was burning. The flames came from under the rear of it, apparently fed by fuel leaking out of the gas tank. The fire mushroomed abruptly, engulfing the rear half of the vehicle. Chee watched it grimly. The tank was about half full as he remembered it—perhaps twelve gallons. There was another twenty in the auxiliary tank. When that heated up, it would go off like a bomb.
What had been Tomas Charley still knelt, forehead to grass. Chee walked past the body and picked up the sack containing the thermos of coffee and the picnic lunch. They had a long walk ahead of them. He spent another few minutes making a methodical search of the spring area for the box. Charley had said he’d left it in plain view on the rock just beside the water. There was no box now. Behind him, he heard the muffled boom of the gas tank exploding.
“Boy,” Mary Landon said when he walked up. “You Navajos give exciting picnics.” She laughed, but it was a shaky laugh. The fire flared up again with a whoosh of flame as a front tire exploded, and she raised her hand to shade her face from the heat. Her sleeve was torn and her wrist was smeared with blood from a long scratch on her forearm.
“You all right?” he asked. “Thank God you took the rifle with you.”
“I knew you’d say that.” Suddenly Mary Landon was furious. “Why wouldn’t I take it? Because I was stupid, that would be why. I’d just seen a tied-up dead body, and the man who must have killed him coming right toward me, and you yelling at me to run, and the rifle right there in the scabbard. Why wouldn’t I take it?” Her voice was fierce. “Because I’m a half-wit woman? I wouldn’t have said that if you’d taken the rifle. I’d take it for granted. But no. I’m a woman, so I’m stupid.”
“Sorry,” Chee said.
“What’s wrong with this damned rifle anyway?” Mary said. She handed it to him, which reminded Chee that his spare ammunition was in the glove box and would be exploding any minute.
“Let’s back away a little,” he said. As he said it, the 30-30 rounds began exploding, no louder than firecrackers.
“I’m a pretty good shot, I thought,” Mary said. “I was missing him a mile.”
“Sorry about that, too,” Chee said. “When I’m not using it I let the rear sight down.” He showed her, pushing the leaf sight up with his thumb and sliding the calibrated wedge forward to the 200-yard mark.
Mary looked from Chee’s thumb to Chee’s face, her glance asking: Is this man for real? She shook her head. “Why? Why would you do that?”
“Takes the strain off the spring,” Chee said lamely.
Suddenly she leaned against him. He felt her shaking. “Sorry I’ve been so bitchy,” she said, talking into his coat. “I’m not used to this.”
“Me either,” Chee said.
“That man back there. Was that Mr. Charley? The one you were looking for? He was dead, wasn’t he? Did that blond man kill him? Do you know what’s going on?”
“Yes,” Chee said. “And no. It was Charley. He was dead. And I don’t have any idea what the hell is going on.”
While he was saying it, Mary became aware of the blood on his shirt. Childish as he knew it was, being wounded made him feel a little less foolish. If the rib hadn’t hurt so much, and if he hadn’t had a five-mile walk back to the highway ahead of him, it would have been almost worthwhile.
14
Colton Wolf had left tracks. Two witnesses had seen him. Close and clearly. They could identify him. They could connect him with murder and with a rented car. The car-rental connection would provide other witnesses and uncover the false identity. He gunned the Plymouth down the access acceleration lane and onto Interstate 40 west. There was no time wasted deciding what to do. He’d decided that before he’d left his trailer. This was Plan B. Plan B was what he did if the operation created the sort of disturbance that made the routine withdrawal in some way risky. There had been a Plan B and variations of Plan B for each of his previous operations. But he’d never used one before because there had never been a disturbance. Previously,
the targets had died unobserved, quietly and unobtrusively. The only exception had been the old CPA in Reno. The man had suspected something. Perhaps it had been the product of a guilty conscience, perhaps the product of age and wisdom. At any rate, part of the information provided to Colton had been the detail that the target would be alert and wary. And he had been. Colton had spent an extra day scouting because of that. And the set-up had seemed perfect. The accountant’s office had been on the fifth floor of a downtown bank building. At midmorning for three consecutive days the old man had emerged from his office, crossed the corridor to the men’s rest room, and relieved himself. Rest rooms were ideal. And this had been the best kind. A single-stall men’s room. The jimmy blade flicking the latch open. The victim startled, embarrassed, refusing to credit what his eyes were telling him—that the intruder upon his privacy was pointing a pistol at his forehead. The victim starting to blurt some banality like “This booth is occupied.” The voice being stopped by the thud of the silenced .22. The bullet fired into the hair, where it would go undetected for a time. The body propped on the stool. The unhurried departure. But this time it had been different. The old man had sensed something when Colton had come into the room. Through the gap beside the booth door, Colton had seen a single eye peering out at him, and the screaming had started the moment the jimmy touched the latch. The man was up from the stool, pants around ankles, trying to resist. It had taken three bullets and a little more time, and then, as he was propping up the body, the door had swung open and the old man’s secretary had burst in. He had shot her twice, and wedged her body in with the old man’s, and walked away. It had been tense for a moment, but when he emerged from the elevator, there had been absolutely no tracks left behind. He had dumped the pistol by opening the emergency hatch and putting it on top of the elevator car. When he stepped through the doors into the bank lobby, there was no chance of connecting him with the bodies in the men’s room. He had hated to lose the pistol, but it couldn’t be traced. There had been absolutely no tracks.
This time there were tracks everywhere. He drove west on Interstate 40 past the Grants interchange, thinking about them. Out here tracks were easy to follow. Too few people in too much space. Had all gone smoothly, Colton would have driven back to Albuquerque, checked in the car at the airport, picked up his truck, and returned to his trailer. That was Plan A, simple and quick. Then, after a few days, he would have hitched the trailer to the truck and moved along. Somewhere warmer. Maybe Houston, or maybe somewhere in California. It didn’t matter where. Until he could find his mother. Then there would be a home place. A place to settle.
But now he had to use Plan B. That took him in the other direction—to Gallup. There he would check the car into a garage for a major tune-up, leaving a Gallup number to be called when repairs were completed and telling the mechanic that there wasn’t any hurry. That would mean days before the car surfaced. He’d walk to the bus station, take the next bus to Phoenix, and fly back to Albuquerque.
He drove exactly five miles above the speed limit—the margin highway patrolmen allow. There was no serious hurry. He’d bought himself some hours by burning the policeman’s car and radio. He’d wounded the man, probably in the abdomen. And it would take the woman at least three hours to walk out of the lava rock and turn in the alarm. By the time any serious search could be organized, he’d be well into Arizona. Outside the circle.
A semi-trailer rig breezed past him, going perhaps fifteen miles above the limit. That would mean the trucker’s CB had assured him he was safe from the state police. But Colton held the rental Plymouth at a steady sixty. He was thinking how he would erase his tracks. Not since he was a boy had Colton felt so vulnerable. He knew the Indian policeman had seen him at the auction, clearly and close up. The policeman and the woman had seen him again on the lava. The policeman and the woman had to be killed just as quickly as Colton could manage it.
15
The way Jimmy Chee was propped against the pillows, he could shift his eyes to the left and look out the window of his fifth-floor room in the Bernalillo County Medical Center and see, across Lomas Avenue, the tan book tower of the University of New Mexico library and the modern-sculpture form of the Humanities Building. If he shifted his eyes to the right, he’d see on the TV screen the has-beens and never-would-bes of Hollywood Squares pretending to enjoy themselves. The TV screen was silent, the sound turned off. All Chee could hear was the voice of Sheriff Gordo Sena, whose face Chee could see when he turned his eyes straight ahead. Voice and face were angry. “What I want you to do,” Sena was saying, “is drop all the bullshit. Just tell me some by-God truth for once. I want to know how you knew Tom Charley had that box. And what was in it. And what happened to it. And how come that feller in the Plymouth was after him.”
And what I’d like to know, Chee was thinking, is how Gordo Sena got past the nurse. The FBI people had come earlier, while he was trying to eat his breakfast, and the nurse had peered in at him and said, “You’re not ready to talk to police, are you,” and that had been the end of the FBI. But thirty minutes later, Sena had simply pushed the door open, stalked in, turned off the TV volume, sat in the bedside chair, and said, “By God, we’re going to get some things straightened out.” It was now about thirty questions later.
“I didn’t know Charley had the box,” Chee said for the third time. “It was an educated guess. I told you what Mrs. Vines told me. About thinking the burglary had a religious connection. Well, the religion is peyote, and Charley is the peyote chief. One plus one is two.”
“Was,” Sena corrected. “Was the peyote chief. So you just walk up to Charley and ask him if he’s the burglar, and he admits it. That’s what you’re trying to get me to believe.”
“That’s what happened,” Chee said. “Not quite, but just about.” His ears were ringing, and his rib hurt, and the nausea that had come and gone all morning was coming again. He didn’t feel like talking. He closed his eyes. Sena’s glowering face went away, but not the voice. Question after question about why Charley had stolen the box, what Charley had said was in the box, what Charley had said about the Vineses. Questions that explored from every possible angle what Chee knew about the blond man in the green-and-white Plymouth.
“What kind of voice did he have?” Sena asked.
Chee opened his eyes. “Never talked to him.” He’d told Sena that before. Twice, in fact.
“That’s right, you didn’t,” Sena said. His alert eyes were studying Chee’s face. Why did Sena think they had talked? Why was that so important to the sheriff?
More questions. Why had the blond man burned Chee’s car? The answer seemed obvious to Chee, but he answered it. To prevent pursuit and the quick radio call that would have inevitably snared the Plymouth at a roadblock. Why did the blond man seem inclined to pursue Mary Landon? Obvious again. She and Chee had had a good look at the killer. He was trying to eliminate witnesses.
Sena hitched his chair closer to the bed. He leaned forward. “Did you find the box?”
“No,” Chee said.
“Had Tomas Charley opened it? Did he tell you that?”
“He opened it,” Chee said. They had already covered this.
“What was in it?”
Chee was dizzy. He wanted Sena to go away. The sheriff’s avid face went slightly out of focus.
“Did he tell you that? What was in the box?”
“What I said; mostly just some rocks,” Chee said. “A bunch of black rocks, and some old military stuff—medals, a paratroop badge, a shoulder patch, and a few old photographs of people. Family, Charley thought they were.”
“Rocks?” Sena said.
“Mostly full of black rocks,” Chee said.
Sena was silent. His hard dark eyes stared at Chee. “You got any brothers?”
“No,” Chee said. “Two sisters. No brothers.” The question surprised him.
“I had one,” Sena said. “Older brother. His name was Robert. He was smart. Smartest kid in Grants H
igh School. Made the valedictorian speech. First time in years it hadn’t been some Anglo girl. Got a scholarship to the university here, but he didn’t go at first. Our old man had heart trouble. Robert worked in the onion fields, in the oil fields, things like that. He looked after us kids. Took care of us. Kept us out of trouble. The old man died and left some social security, so Robert finally went to the university. He was studying engineering.”
Sena had delivered that information in a flat staccato. Now his voice trailed off. He looked down at his hands, drew in a long breath, held it and then let it go. When he looked up again, his eyes were no longer hard. “I’m going to ask you a favor,” he told Chee. “I don’t do that much.”
Chee nodded.
“I want to tell you how Robert died,” Sena said. He described the oil well explosion and how the chief of the Navajo roustabout crew had kept his men away that day. “For a while I thought he did it. Now I just think he was in on it somehow. Knew about the plan. Knew Robert was going to be killed. That fella was Dillon Charley, Tomas’ granddaddy.”
Sena looked down at his hands. The muscles in his jaw were working.
“What do you want me to do?” Chee asked.
Sena didn’t look up. “I want to know who killed Robert,” he said. “I want to nail the sons of bitches. You talked to Mrs. Vines. You talked to Dillon Charley’s grandson. There’s some secret here that’s got to do with being Indian, and with that peyote religion. One of them told you something. You’ve figured something out. You know more than you’re telling. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have found Vines’ box so quick.”
People of Darkness Page 9
