A Thief of Time jlajc-8

by Tony Hillerman

  'Is this the only way up?' Leaphorn asked.

  'Only one I could see,' Elliot said. 'It's not as bad as it looks. We can take it slow.'

  'I'll wait here with the lady,' Leaphorn said. 'You fly the copter down here, land it somewhere where we don't have to make the climb.'

  You could land a copter on this shelf if you had to, Leaphorn guessed. You'd have to be good, but someone who'd flown evacuations in Vietnam would be very good.

  Elliot seemed to consider. 'That's a thought,' he said.

  He reached into his jacket, extracted a small blue automatic pistol, and pointed it at Leaphorn's throat. 'Unbuckle your belt,' he said.

  Leaphorn unbuckled it.

  'Pull it out.'

  Leaphorn pulled it out. His holster fell to the ground.

  'Now kick the gun over here to me.'

  Leaphorn did.

  'You make it tough,' Elliot said.

  'Not tough enough.'

  Elliot laughed.

  'You'd rather not have a bullet hole in me,' Leaphorn said. 'Or her either.'

  'That's right,' Elliot said. 'But I don't have any choice now. You seem to have figured it out.'

  'I figured you were going to get us far enough up the rocks to make it count and then tumble us down.'

  Elliot nodded.

  'I'm not sure of your motive for all this. Killing so many people.'

  'Maxie told you that day,' Elliot said. The good humor was suddenly gone, replaced by bitter anger. 'What the hell can a rich kid do to impress anyone?'

  'Impress Maxie,' Leaphorn said. 'A truly beautiful young woman.' And he was thinking, maybe I'm like you. I don't want this to go wrong now because of Emma. Emma put little value on finding people to punish them. But this would really have impressed her. You love a woman, you want to impress her. The male instinct. Hero finds lost woman. The life saved. He didn't want it to go wrong now. But it had. In a very little while, wherever and whenever it was most convenient, Randall Elliot would kill Eleanor Friedman-Bernal and Joe Leaphorn. He could think of nothing to prevent it. Except maybe Brigham Houk.

  Brigham must be somewhere near. It had taken him only minutes to get the poles and return. He had seen his devil, recognized him, and slipped away. Brigham Houk was a hunter. Brigham Houk was also insane, and afraid of this devil. What would he do? Leaphorn thought he knew.

  'We'll leave her here for now and we'll walk over there,' Elliot said, pointing with the pistol toward the edge of the shelf. It was exactly the direction Leaphorn wanted to go. It was the only way that led to convenient shelter. It must be the way Brigham had gone.

  'It's going to look funny if too many people fall off things,' Leaphorn said. 'Two is too many.'

  'I know,' Elliot said. 'Do you have a better idea?'

  'Maybe,' Leaphorn said. 'Tell me your motive for all this.'

  'I think you guessed,' Elliot said.

  'I guess Maxie,' Leaphorn said. 'You want her. But she's a self-made, class-conscious woman with a lot of bad memories of being put down by the upper class. On top of that, she's a tough one, a little mean. She resents you, and everybody like you, because it's all handed to you. So I think you're going to do something that has nothing to do with being born to the upper, upper, upper class. Something that neither Maxie nor anybody else can ignore. From what you told me at Chaco it's something to do with tracing what happened to these Anasazi by tracking genetic flaws.'

  'How about that,' Elliot said. 'You're not as dumb as you try to act.'

  'You found the flaw you were hunting in the bones here, and over at the site on the Checkerboard, too, I guess. You were digging here illegally, and our friend here came in and caught you at it.'

  Elliot held up his empty hand. 'So I tried to kill her and screwed it up.'

  'Curious about something,' Leaphorn said. 'Were you the one who called in the complaint about Eleanor being a pot hunter?'

  'Sure,' Elliot said. 'You figured why?'

  'Not really,' Leaphorn said. Where the devil was Brigham Houk? Maybe he'd run. Leaphorn doubted it. His father wouldn't have run. But then his father wasn't schizophrenic.

  'You can't get a permit to dig,' Elliot said. 'Not in your lifetime. These asshole bureaucrats are always saving it for the future. Well, if a site is being vandalized, that puts it in a different category. Not so tough then, after it's already been messed up. I was going to follow up later with some hints about where to find digs Eleanor was stealing from. They'd find her body, so they'd have their Thief of Time. They wouldn't have to be looking for one and maybe suspecting me. And then I'd get my dig permit.' He laughed. 'Roundabout way, but I've seen it work.'

  'You were getting your bones anyway,' Leaphorn said. 'Buying some, digging some up yourself.'

  'Wrong category, friend,' Elliot said. 'Those are unofficial bones. Not in site.' I was findingem unofficially, so I'd know where to find 'em officially when I got my permit. You understand that?' Elliot peered at him, grinning. He was enjoying this. 'When I get my permit to excavate, I come back and the bones I find then are registered in place. Photographed. Documented.' He grinned again. 'Same bones, maybe, but now they're official.'

  'How about Etcitty,' Leaphorn asked, 'and Nails?' Over Elliot's shoulder, Leaphorn had seen Brigham Houk. He saw Houk because the man wanted Leaphorn to see him. He was behind a fallen sandstone slab, screened by brush. He held something that might have been a curved staff and he motioned Leaphorn toward him.

  'That was a mistake,' Elliot said.

  'Killing them?'

  Elliot laughed. 'That was correcting the mistake. Nails was too careless. And too greedy. Once the silly bastards stole that backhoe they were sure to get caught.' He glanced at Leaphorn. 'And Nails was sure to tell you guys everything he knew.'

  'Which would have been bad for your reputation,' Leaphorn said.

  'Disastrous,' Elliot said. He waved the pistol. 'But hurry it up. I want to get out of here.'

  'If you're working on what I think,' Leaphorn said, 'there's something I want to show you. Something Friedman-Bernal found. You're interested in jaw deformities. Something like that?'

  'Well, a little like that,' Elliot said. 'You understand how the human chromosome works? Fetus inherits twenty-three from its mother, twenty-three from its father. Genetic characteristics handed down in the genes. Once in a while polyploidy occurs in the genetic crossover points. Someone gets multiple chromosomes, and you get a characteristic change. Inheritable. But you need more than one to do a trace which has any real meaning. At Chaco, in some of the early Chaco burials, I found three that were passed along. A surplus molar in the left mandible. And that went along with a thickening of the frontal bone over the left eye socket, plus--' Elliot stopped. 'You understanding this?'

  'Genetics wasn't my favorite course. Too much math,' Leaphorn said. What the devil was Brigham Houk doing? Was he still behind that slab up ahead?

  'Exactly,' Elliot said, pleased by this. 'It's one percent digging and ninety-nine percent working out statistical models for your computer. Anyway, the third thing, which sort of mathematically proves the passalong genes, is that hole in the mandible through which the blood and nerve tissue passes. At Chaco, from about 650 A.D. until they turned out the lights, this family had two holes in the left mandible and the usual one in the right. Plus those other characteristics. And out here, I'm still finding it among these exiles. Can you see why it's important?'

  'And fascinating,' Leaphorn said. 'Dr. Friedman must have known what you were looking for. She saved a lot of jawbones.' He was almost to the great sandstone slab. 'I'll show you.'

  'I doubt if she found anything I overlooked,' Elliot said. He followed Leaphorn, keeping the pistol level. 'But this is the way we were going anyway.'

  They were passing the sandstone now. Leaphorn tensed. If nothing happened here, he would have to try something else. It wouldn't work, but he wouldn't simply stand still to be shot.

  'Right over here,' Leaphorn said.

  'I thin
k you're just--'

  The sentence ended with a grunt, a great exhalation of breath. Leaphorn turned. Elliot was leaning slightly forward, the pistol hanging at his side. About six inches of arrow shaft and the feathered tip protruded from his jacket.

  Leaphorn reached for him, heard the whistle and thump of the second arrow. It went through Elliot's neck. The pistol clattered on the stone. Elliot collapsed.

  Leaphorn retrieved the pistol. He squatted beside the man, turned him on his back. His eyes were open but he seemed to be in shock. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  There was snow in the wind now, little dry flakes that skittered along the surface like white dust. Leaphorn tested the arrow. It was the sort of bow hunters buy in sporting goods stores and it was lodged solidly through Elliot's neck. Pulling it out would just make things worse. If they could be worse. Elliot was dying. Leaphorn stood, looking for Brigham Houk. Houk was standing beside the slab now, holding a great ugly bow of metal, wood, and plastic, looking upward. From somewhere Leaphorn heard the clatter of a helicopter. Brigham Houk had heard it earlier. He stood very close to cover, ready to vanish.

  The helicopter emerged over the rim of the mesa almost directly overhead. Leaphorn waved, saw an answering wave. The copter circled and disappeared over the mesa again.

  Leaphorn checked Elliot's pulse. He didn't seem to have one. He looked for Brigham Houk, who seemed never to have existed. He walked over to the litter where Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal lay. She opened her eyes, looked at him without recognition, closed them again. He tucked the rabbit fur cloak around her, careful to apply no pressure. Now it was snowing harder, still blowing like dust. He walked back to Elliot. No pulse now. He opened his jacket and shirt and felt for a heartbeat. Nothing. The man was no longer breathing. Randall Elliot, graduate of Exeter, of Princeton, of Harvard, winner of the Navy Cross, was dead by arrow shot. Leaphorn gripped him under the arms and pulled him into the cover of the slab where Brigham Houk had hidden. Elliot was heavy, and Leaphorn was exhausted. By pulling hard and doing some twisting, he extracted the arrows. He wiped the blood off as well as he could on Elliot's jacket. Then he picked up a rock, hammered them into pieces, and put the pieces in his hip pocket. That done, he found dead brush, broke it off, and made an inefficient effort to cover the body. But it didn't matter. The coyotes would find Randall Elliot anyway.

  Then he heard the clatter of someone scrambling down the cut. It proved to be Officer Chee, looking harassed and disheveled. It took some effort for Leaphorn not to show he was impressed. He pointed to the litter. 'We need to get Dr. Friedman to the hospital in a hurry,' he said. 'Can you get that thing down here to load her?'

  'Sure,' Chee said. He started back toward the cut at a run.

  'Just a second,' Leaphorn said.

  Chee stopped.

  'What did you see?'

  Chee raised his eyebrows. 'I saw you standing beside a man slumped down on the ground. I guess it was Elliot. And I saw the litter over there. And maybe I saw another man. Something jumping out of sight back there just as we came over the top.'

  'Why did you think it was Elliot?'

  Chee looked surprised. 'The helicopter he rented is parked up there. I figured when he heard she was still alive he'd have to come out here and kill her before you got here.'

  Leaphorn again was impressed. This time he made a little less effort to conceal it. 'Do you know how Elliot knew she was alive?'

  Chee made a wry face. 'I more or less told him.'

  'And then made the connection?'

  'Then I found out he had filed for permission to dig this site, and the site where he killed Etcitty. Turned down on both of them. I went out there to talk to him and found--you remember the box of plastic wastebasket liners at the Checkerboard site. One missing from it. Well, it was hidden in Elliot's kitchen. Had jawbones in it.'

  Leaphorn didn't ask how Chee had gotten into Elliot's kitchen.

  'Go ahead, then, and get the copter down here. And don't say anything.'

  Chee looked at him.

  'I mean don't say anything at all. I'll fill you in when we get a chance.'

  Chee trotted toward the cut.

  'Thank you,' Leaphorn said. He wasn't sure if Chee heard that.

  It was snowing hard by the time they had the litter loaded and the copter lifted off the shelf. Leaphorn was jammed against the side. He looked down on a stone landscape cut into vertical blocks by time and now blurred by snow. He looked quickly away. He could ride the big jets, barely. Something in his inner ear made anything less stable certain nausea. He closed his eyes, swallowed. This was the first snow. They would come when the weather cleared to recover the copter and look for Elliot. But they wouldn't look hard because it was so obviously hopeless. Snow would have covered everything. After the thaw, they would come again. Then they would find the bones, scattered like the Anasazi skeletons he looted. There would be no sign of the arrow wounds then. Cause of death unknown, the coroner would write. Victim eaten by predators.

  He glanced back. Chee was jammed in the compartment beside the litter, his hand on Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's arm. She seemed to be awake. I will ask him what curing ceremony he would recommend, Leaphorn thought, and knew at once that his fatigue was making him silly. Instead he said nothing. He thought of the circumstances, of how proud Emma would be of him tonight if she could be home to hear about this woman brought safely to the hospital. He thought about Brigham Houk. In just about twenty-four more days, the moon would be full again. Brigham would be waiting at the mouth of Many Ruins Canyon, but Papa wouldn't come.

  I will go, Leaphorn thought. Someone has to tell him. And that meant that he would have to postpone his plan to leave the reservation, probably a long postponement. Solving the problem of what to do about Brigham Houk would take more than one trip down the river. And if he had to stick around, he might as well withdraw that letter. As Captain Nez had said, he could always write it again.

  Jim Chee noticed Leaphorn was watching him.

  'You all right?' Chee asked.

  'I've felt better,' Leaphorn said. And then he had another thought. He considered it. Why not? 'I hear you're a medicine man. I heard you are a singer of the Blessing Way. Is that right?'

  Chee looked slightly stubborn. 'Yes sir,' he said.

  'I would like to ask you to sing one for me,' Leaphorn said.

  TONY HILLERMAN is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received their Edgar and Grand Master Awards Among his other honors are the Center for the American Indian's Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe's Special Friend Award His many novels include Finding Moon, Sacred Clowns, Coyote Waits, Talking God, A Thief of Time, and Dance Halt of the Dead He is also the author of The Great Taos Bank Robbery He lives with his wife, Mane, in Albuquerque, New Mexico

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