The Dark Wind

THE DARK WIND

Tony Hillerman

The Sixth Leaphorn and Chee novel

This book is dedicated to the good people of Coyote Canyon, Navajo Mountain, Littlewater, Two Gray Hills, Heart Butte, and Borrego Pass, and most of all to those who are being uprooted from their ancestral homes in the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use country.

AUTHOR'S NOTES

The reader should be aware that I make no claims to being an authority on Hopi theology. Like Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, I am an outsider on the Hopi Mesas. I know only what one learns from long and respectful interest, and suggest that any of you who wish to learn more of the complex Hopi metaphysics turn to more knowledgeable writers. I particularly recommend The Book of the Hopi by my good friend Frank Waters.

The liturgical year of the Hopi religion is divided into seasonal halves which are more or less mirror images and which involve an elaborate calendar of ritual observances. These include the events which provide some of the background for this novel, but the calendar I use is not accurate.

Time has been even crueler to the village of Sityatki than is suggested herein. It was abandoned long ago and sand has drifted over what remains of its ruins.

All characters in this book are products of my imagination. None is based in any way on any living person.

Chapter One

The flute clan boy was the first to see it. He stopped and stared.

"Somebody lost a boot," he said.

Even from where he stood, at least fifteen yards farther down the trail, Albert Lomatewa could see that nobody had lost the boot. The boot had been placed, not dropped. It rested upright, squarely in the middle of the path, its pointed toe aimed toward them. Obviously someone had put it there. And now, just beyond a dead growth of rabbit brush which crowded the trail, Lomatewa saw the top of a second boot. Yesterday when they had come this way no boots had been here.

Albert Lomatewa was the Messenger. He was in charge. Eddie Tuvi and the Flute Clan boy would do exactly what he told them.

"Stay away from it," Lomatewa said. "Stay right here."

He lifted the heavy pack of spruce boughs from his back and placed it reverently beside the path. Then he walked to the boot. It was fairly new, made of brown leather, with a flower pattern stitched into it and a curved cowboy heel. Lomatewa glanced past the rabbit brush at the second boot. It matched. Beyond the second boot, the path curved sharply around a weathered granite boulder. Lomatewa sucked in his breath. Jutting from behind the boulder he could see the bottom of a foot. The foot was bare and even from where Lomatewa stood he could see there was something terribly wrong with it.

Lomatewa looked back at the two his kiva had sent to guard him on this pilgrimage for spruce. They stood where he had told them to stand—Tuvi's face impassive, the boy's betraying his excited curiosity.

"Stay there," he ordered. "There is someone here and I must see about it."

The man was on his side, legs bent stiffly, left arm stretched rigidly forward, right arm flexed upward with the palm resting beside his ear. He wore blue jeans, a jean jacket, and a blue-and-white-checked shirt, its sleeves rolled to the elbows. But it was a little while before Lomatewa noticed what the man was wearing. He was staring at his feet. The soles of both of them had been cut away. The bottom of the socks had been cut and the socks pushed up around the ankles, where they formed ragged white cuffs. Then the heel pads, and the pads at the balls of the feet, and the undertips of the toes had been sliced away. Lomatewa had nine grandchildren, and one great-grandchild, and had lived long enough to see many things, but he had never seen this before. He sucked in his breath, exhaled it, and glanced up at the hands. He expected to find them flayed, too. And he did. The skin had been sliced from them just as it had been from the feet. Only then did Lomatewa look at the man's face.

He had been young. Not a Hopi. A Navajo. At least part Navajo. There was a small, black-rimmed hole above his right eye.

Lomatewa stood looking down at the man, thinking how this would have to be handled. It had to be handled so that it would not interfere with the Niman Kachina. The sun was hot on him here, even though it was still early morning, and the smell of dust was in his nostrils. Dust, always dust. Reminding him of why nothing must interfere with the ceremonial. For almost a year the blessing of rain had been withdrawn. He had thinned his corn three times, and still what little was left was stunted and withering in the endless drought. The springs were drying. There was no grass left for the horses. The Niman Kachina must be properly done. He turned and walked back to where his guardians were waiting.

"A dead Tavasuh," he said. Literally the word meant "head-pounder." It was a term of contempt which Hopis sometimes used for Navajos and Lomatewa chose it deliberately to set the tone for what he must do.

"What happened to his foot?" the Flute Clan boy asked. "The bottom was cut off his foot."

"Put down the spruce," Lomatewa said. "Sit down. We must talk about this." He wasn't worried about Tuvi. Tuvi was a valuable man in the Antelope Kiva and a member of the One Horn Society—a prayerful man. But the Flute Clan boy was still a boy. He said nothing more, though, simply sitting on the path beside his spruce bundle. The questions remained in his eyes. Let him wait, Lomatewa thought. Let him learn patience.

"Three times Sotuknang has destroyed the world," Lomatewa began. "He destroyed the First World with fire. He destroyed the Second World with ice. He destroyed the Third World with flood. Each time he destroyed the world because his people failed to do what he told them to do." Lomatewa kept his eyes on the Flute Clan boy as he talked. The boy was his only worry. The boy had gone to school at Flagstaff and he had a job with the post office. There was talk that he did not plant his corn patches properly, that he did not properly know his role in the Kachina Society. Tuvi could be counted on but the boy must be taught. Lomatewa spoke directly to him, and the boy listened as if he had not heard the old story a thousand times before.

"Sotuknang destroyed the world because the Hopis forgot to do their duty. They forgot the songs that must be sung, the pahos that must be offered, the ceremonials that must be danced. Each time the world became infected with evil, people quarreled all the time. People became powaqas, and practiced witchcraft against one another. The Hopis left the proper Road of Life and only a few were left doing their duty in the kivas. And each time, Sotuknang gave the Hopis warning. He held back the rain so his people would know his displeasure. But everybody ignored the rainless seasons. They kept going after money, and quarreling, and gossiping, and forgetting the way of the Road of Life. And each time Sotuknang decided that the world had used up its string, and he saved a few of the best Hopis, and then he destroyed all the rest."

Lomatewa stared into the eyes of the Flute Clan boy. "You understand all this?"

"I understand," the boy said.

"We must do the Niman Kachina right this summer," Lomatewa said. "Sotuknang has warned us. Our corn dies in the fields. There is no grass. The wells are drying out. When we call the clouds, they no longer hear us. If we do the Niman Kachina wrong, Sotuknang will have no more patience. He will destroy the Fourth World."

Lomatewa glanced at Tuvi. His face was inscrutable. Then he spoke directly to the boy again. "Very soon it will be time for the kachinas to leave this Earth Surface World and go back to their home in the San Francisco Peaks. When we deliver this spruce back to our kivas, it will be used to prepare for the Going Home Dances to honor them. For days it will be very busy in the kivas. The prayers to be planned. The pahos to be made. Everything to be done exactly in the proper way." Lomatewa paused, allowing silence to make the effect he wanted. "Everybody thinking in the proper way," he added. "But if we report this body, this dead Navajo, to the police, nothing can be done right. The police will come, the bahana police, to ask us questions. They will call us out of the kivas. Everything will be interrupted. Everybody will be thinking about the wrong things. They will be thinking of death and anger when they would be thinking only holy thoughts. The Niman Kachina will be messed up. The Going Home Dances would not be done right. Nobody would be praying."

He stopped again, staring at the Flute Clan boy.

"If you were the Messenger, what would you do?"

"I would not tell the police," the boy said.

"Would you talk of this in the kiva?"

"I would not talk of it."

"You saw the feet of the Navajo," Lomatewa said. "Do you know what that means?"

"The skin being cut away?"

"Yes. Do you know what it means?"

The Flute Clan boy looked down at his hands. "I know," he said.

"If you talk about that, it would be the worst thing of all. People would be thinking of evil just when they should be thinking of good."

"I won't talk about it," the boy said.

"Not until after the Niman dances," Lomatewa said. "Not until after the ceremonial is over and the kachinas are gone. After that you can tell about it."

Lomatewa picked up his bundle of spruce and settled the straps over his shoulders, flinching at the soreness in his joints. He felt every one of his seventy-three years, and he still had almost thirty miles to walk across Wepo Wash and then the long climb up the cliffs of Third Mesa. He led his guardians down the path past the body. Why not? They had already seen the mutilated feet and knew the meaning of that. And this death had nothing to do with the Hopis. This particular piece of evil was Navajo and the Navajos would have to pay for it.

Chapter Two

Just as he reached the rim of Balakai Mesa, Pauling checked the chronometer. It was 3:20:15. On time and on course. He held the Cessna about two hundred feet above the ground and the same distance below the top of the rimrock. Ahead, the moon hung yellow and slightly lopsided just above the horizon. It lit the face of the man who sat in the passenger's seat, giving his skin a waxy look. The man was staring straight ahead, lower lip caught between his teeth, studying the moon. To Pauling's right, not a hundred yards off the wingtip, the mesa wall rushed past—a pattern of black shadows alternating with reflected moonlight. It gave Pauling a sense of speed, oddly unusual in flight, and he savored it.

On the desert floor below, the sound of the engine would be echoing off the cliffs. But there was no one to hear it. No one for miles. He had chosen the route himself, flown it twice by daylight and once by night, memorized the landmarks and the terrain. There was no genuine safety in this business, but this was as safe as Pauling could make it. Here, for example, Balakai Mesa protected him from the radar scanners at Albuquerque and Salt Lake. Ahead, just to the left of the setting moon, Low Mountain rose to 6,700 feet and beyond that Little Black Spot Mesa was even higher. Southward, blocking radar from Phoenix, the high mass of Black Mesa extended for a hundred miles or more. All the way from the landing strip in Chihuahua there was less than a hundred miles where radar could follow him. It was a good route. He'd enjoyed finding it, and he loved flying it low, with its landmarks rising into the dying moon out of an infinity of darkness. Pauling savored the danger, the competition, as much as he delighted in the speed and the sense of being the controlling brain of a fine machine.

Balakai Mesa was behind him now and the black shape of Low Mountain slid across the yellow disk of the moon. In the darkness he could see a single sharp diamond of light—the single bulb which lit the gasoline pump at Low Mountain Trading Post. He banked the Cessna slightly to the left, following the course of Tse Chizzi Wash, skirting away from the place where the sound of his engine might awaken a sleeper.

"About there?" the passenger asked.

"Just about," Pauling said. "Over this ridge ahead there's Oraibi Wash, and then another bunch of ridges, and then you get to Wepo Wash. That's where we're landing. Maybe another six or seven minutes."

"Lonely country," the passenger said. He looked down upon it out of the side window, and shook his head. "Nobody. Like there was nobody else on the planet."

"Not many. Just a few Indians here and there. That's why it was picked."

The passenger was staring at the moon again. "This is the part that makes you nervous," he said.

"Yeah," Pauling agreed. But what part of "this part" did the man mean? Landing in the dark? Or what was waiting when they landed? For once Pauling found himself wishing he knew a little more about what was going on. He thought he could guess most of it. Obviously they weren't flying pot. Whatever was in the suitcases would have to be immensely valuable to warrant all the time and the special care. Picking this special landing place, for example, and having a passenger along. He hadn't had anyone riding shotgun with him for years. And when he had, when he'd first moved into this business—cut off from flying for Eastern by the bad reading on his heart—the passenger had been just one of the other hired hands sent along to make sure he didn't steal the load. This time the passenger was a stranger. He'd driven up to the motel at Sabinas Hidalgo with the boss just before it was time to go to the landing strip. Pauling guessed he must represent whoever was buying the shipment. The boss had said that Jansen would be at the other end, at the landing point with the buyers. "Two flashes, then a pause, and then two flashes," the boss had said. "If you don't see it, you don't land." Jansen representing the boss, and this stranger representing the buyers. Both trusted. It occurred to Pauling that the passenger, like Jansen, was probably a relative. Son or brother, or something like that. Family. Who else could you trust in this business, or in anything else?

Oraibi Wash flashed under them, a crooked streak of shadowed blackness in the slanting moonlight. Pauling eased the wheel slightly backward to move the aircraft up the desert slope, and then forward as the land fell away again. Broken ground under him now, a landscape cut by scores of little watercourses draining Black Mesa's flash floods into Wepo Wash. He had the engine throttled down to just above stalling speed now. To his left front he saw the black upthrust of basalt which was the right landmark shape in the right place. And then, just under his wingtip, there was the windmill, with the shadowed bottom of the wash curving just ahead. He should see the lights now. He should see Jansen blinking his… Then he saw them. A line of a dozen points of yellow light—the lenses of battery lanterns pointing toward him. And almost instantly, two flashes of white light, and two more flashes. Jansen's signal that all was well.

He made a slow pass over the lights and began a slow circle, remembering exactly how the wash bottom looked as his wheels approached it, concentrating on making his memory replace the darkness with daylight.

Pauling became conscious that the passenger was staring at him. "Is that all you have?" the passenger asked. "You land by that goddamn row of flashlights?"

"The idea is not to attract any attention," Pauling said. Even in the dim light, he could see the passenger's expression was startled.

"You've done this before?" the man asked. His voice squeaked a little. "Just put it down blind in the dark like this?"

"Just a time or two," Pauling said. "Just when you have to." But he wanted to reassure the man. "Used to be in the Tactical Air Force. We had to practice landing those transport planes in the dark. But we're not really landing blind here. We have those lights."

They were lined up on the lights now. Pauling trimmed the plane. Wheels down. Flaps down. His memory gave him the arroyo bottom now. Nose up. He felt the lift going mushy under the wings, the passenger bracing himself in the seat beside him, that brief moment before touch down when the plane was falling rather than flying.

"You do this on trust," the passenger said. "Jesus. Jesus." It was a prayer.

They were below the level of the wash banks now, the lights rushing toward them. The wheels touched with a jounce and a squeal as Pauling touched the brakes. Perfect, he thought. You have to learn to trust. And in the very split second that he had the thought, he saw that trust was a terrible mistake.

Chapter Three

At first jim chee ignored the sound of the plane. Something had moved beyond Windmill Number 6. Moved, and moved again, making a small furtive sound which carried much farther than it should have in the predawn stillness. A half hour earlier he'd heard a car purring up the sandy bottom of Wepo Wash, stopping perhaps a mile downstream. This new sound suggested that whoever had driven it might now be approaching the windmill. Chee felt the excitement of the hunt rising in him. His mind rejected the intrusive hum of the aircraft engine. But the engine sound became impossible to ignore. The plane was low, barely a hundred feet off the ground, and moving on a path that would take it just west of the nest Chee had made for himself in a growth of stunted mesquite. It passed between Chee and the windmill, flying without navigation lights but so close that Chee could see reflections from the illumination inside the cabin. He memorized its shape—the high wing, the tall, straight rudder; the nose sloping down from the cabin windshield. The only reason he could think of for such a flight at such an hour would be smuggling. Narcotics probably. What else? The plane purred away toward Wepo Wash and the sinking moon, quickly vanishing in the night.

Chee turned his eyes, and his thoughts, back toward the windmill. The plane was none of his business. Navajo Tribal Policemen had absolutely no jurisdiction in a smuggling case, or in a narcotics case, or in anything involving the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency or the white man's war against white man's crime. His business was the vandalism of Windmill Subunit 6, the steel frame of which loomed awkward and ugly against the stars about one hundred yards west of him and which, on the rare occasions when the breeze picked up on this still summer night, made metallic creaking sounds as its blades moved. The windmill was only about a year old, having been installed by the Office of Hopi Partitioned Land to provide water for Hopi families being resettled along Wepo Wash to replace evicted Navajo families. Two months after it was erected, someone had removed the bolts that secured it to its concrete footings and used a long rope and at least two horses to pull it over. Repairs took two months, and three days after they were completed—with the bolts now securely welded into place—it had been vandalized again. This time, a jack handle had been jammed down into the gearbox during a heavy breeze. This had provoked a complaint from the Office of Hopi Partitioned Land to the Joint Use Administration Office at Keams Canyon, which produced a telephone call to the fbi office at Flagstaff, which called the Bureau of Indian Affairs Law and Order Division, which called the Navajo Tribal Police Headquarters at Window Rock, which sent a letter to the Tuba City subagency office of the Navajo Tribal Police. The letter resulted in a memo, which landed on the desk of Jim Chee. The memo said: "See Largo."

Captain Largo had been behind his desk, sorting through a manila folder.

"Let's see now," Largo had said. "Where do you stand on identifying that John Doe body up on Black Mesa?"

"We don't have anything new," Chee had said. And that, as Chee knew Captain Largo already knew, meant they had absolutely nothing at all.

"I mean the fellow somebody shot in the head, the one with no billfold, no identification," Largo said, exactly as if the Tuba City subagency was dealing in wholesale numbers of unidentified victims, and not this single exasperating one.

"No progress," Chee said. "He doesn't match anyone reported missing. His clothing told us exactly zero. Nothing to go on. Nothing."

"Ah," Largo said. He shuffled through the folder again. "How about the burglary at the Burnt Water Trading Post? You doing any good on that one?"

"No, sir," Chee said. He kept the irritation out of his voice.

"The employee stole the pawn jewelry, but we can't get a trace on him? Is that the way it stands?"

"Yes, sir," Chee said.

"Musket, wasn't it?" Largo asked. "Joseph Musket. On parole from the New Mexico State Penitentiary at Santa Fe. Right? But the silver hasn't turned up sold anywhere. And nobody's seen anything of Musket?" Largo was eyeing him curiously. "That's right, isn't it? You staying on top of that one?"

"I am," Chee had said. That had been midsummer, maybe six weeks after Chee's transfer from the Crownpoint subagency, and he didn't know how to read Captain Largo. Now summer was ending and he still didn't know.

"That's a funny one," Largo had said. He had frowned. "What the hell did he do with all the pawn goods? Why doesn't he try to sell it? And where'd he go? You think he's dead?"

The same questions had been nagging Chee ever since he'd gotten the case. He didn't have any answers.

Largo noticed that. He sighed; peered back into the folder. "How about bootlegging?" he asked without looking up. "Any luck nailing Priscilla Bisti?"

"Just one near miss," Chee said. "But she and her boys got all the wine out of the pickup before we got there. No way to prove it was theirs."

Largo was looking at him, lips pursed. Largo's hands were folded across his ample stomach. The thumbs waved up and down, patiently. "You going to have to be smart to catch old Priscilla." Largo nodded, agreeing with himself. "Smart," he repeated.

Chee said nothing.

"How about all that witchcraft gossip out around Black Mesa?" Largo asked. "Doing any good with that?"

"Nothing I can pin down," Chee said. "Seems to be more of it than's natural, and maybe it's because so many people are going to be uprooted and moved out to make room for the Hopis. Trouble is I'm still too new around here for anybody to be telling me anything about witches." He wanted to remind Largo of that. It wasn't fair of the captain to expect him, still a stranger, to learn anything about witches. The clans of the northwestern reservation didn't know him yet. As far as they knew, he might be a skinwalker himself.

Largo didn't comment on the explanation. He fished out another manila folder. "Maybe you'll have some luck on this one," he said. "Somebody doesn't like a windmill." He slipped a letter out of the folder and handed it to Chee.

Chee read what Window Rock reported, with half of his mind trying to analyze Largo. The way the Navajos calculate kinship, the captain was a relative through clan linkage. Chee's crucial "born to" clan was the Slow Talking Dinee of his mother, but his "born for" clan—the clan of his father—was the Bitter Water People. Largo was born to the Standing Rock Dinee, but was "born for" the Red Forehead Dinee, which was also the secondary "born for" clan of Chee's father. That made kinsmen. Distant kinsmen, true enough, but kinsmen in a culture that made family of first importance and responsibility to relatives the highest value. Chee read the letter and thought about kinship. But he was remembering how a paternal uncle had once cheated him on a used-refrigerator sale, and that the worst whipping he'd ever taken in the Two Gray Hills Boarding School was from a maternal cousin. He handed the letter back to Largo without any comment.

"Whenever there's any trouble out there in the Joint Use Reservation it's usually the Gishis," Largo said. "Them and maybe the Yazzie outfit." He paused, thinking about it. "Or the Begays," he added. 'They're into a lot of trouble." He folded the letter back into the file and handed the file to Chee. "Could be just about anybody," he concluded. "Anyway, get it cleared up."

Chee took the folder. "Get it cleared up," he said.

Largo looked at him, his expression mild. "That's right," he said. "Can't have somebody screwing up that Hopi windmill. When the Hopis move onto our land, they got to have water for their cows."

"Got any other suggestions about suspects?"

Largo pursed his lips. "We have to move about nine thousand Navajos off that Joint Use land," he said. "I'd say you could cut it down to about nine thousand suspects."

"Thanks," Chee said.

"Glad to help," Largo said. "You take it from there and get it narrowed down to one." He grinned, showing crooked white teeth. "That'll be your job. Narrow it down to one and catch him."

Which was exactly what Chee had been spending this long night trying to do. The plane was gone now, and if anything stirred around the windmill, Chee could neither see nor hear it. He yawned, unholstered his pistol, and used its barrel to scratch an otherwise unreachable place between his shoulder blades. The moon was down and the stars blazed without competition in a black sky. It was suddenly colder. Chee picked up the blanket, untangled it from the mesquite, and draped it around his shoulders. He thought about the windmill, and the sort of malice involved in vandalizing it, and why the vandal didn't spread his attentions among windmills 1 through 8, and then he thought about the perplexing affair of Joseph Musket, who had stolen maybe seventy-five pounds of silver concha belts, squash blossom necklaces, bracelets, and assorted pawn silver, and then done absolutely nothing with the loot. Chee had already worked the puzzle of Joseph Musket over in his mind so often that all the corners were worn smooth. He worked it over again, looking for something overlooked.

Why had Jake West hired Musket? Because he was a friend of West's son. Why had West fired him? Because he had suspected Musket of stealing. That made sense. And then Musket came back to the Burnt Water Trading Post the night after he was fired and looted its storeroom of pawned jewelry. That, too, made sense. But stolen jewelry always turned up. It was given to girl friends. It was sold. It was pawned at other trading posts, or in Albuquerque, or Phoenix, or Durango, or Farmington, or any of those places surrounding the reservation which traded in jewelry. It was so logical, inevitable, predictable, that police all through the Southwest had a standard procedure for working such cases. They posted descriptions, and waited. And when the jewelry started turning up, they worked back from that. Why hadn't the inevitable happened this time? What was different about Musket? Chee considered what little Musket's parole officer had been able to tell him about the man. Even his nickname was an enigma. Ironfingers. Navajos tended to match such labels with personal characteristics, calling a slim girl Slim Girl or a man with a thin mustache Little Whiskers. What would cause a young man to be called Iron-fingers? More important, was he still alive? Largo had asked that, too. If he was dead, that would explain everything.

Except why he was dead.

Chee sighed, and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, and found himself thinking of another of his unresolved cases. John Doe: cause of death, gunshot wound in the temple. Size of bullet, .38 caliber. Size of John Doe, five feet, seven inches. Weight of John Doe, probably 155 pounds, based on what was left of him when Chee and Cowboy Dashee brought him in. Identity of John Doe? Who the hell knows? Probably Navajo. Probably mature young adult. Certainly male. He had been Chee's introduction to duty in the Tuba City district. His first day after his transfer from Crownpoint. "Go out and learn the territory," Largo had said, but a few miles west of Moenkopi the dispatcher had turned him around and sent him into Joint Use country. "Subject at Burnt Water Trading Post has information about a body," the dispatcher said. "See Deputy Sheriff Dashee. He'll meet you there."

"What's the deal?" Chee had asked. "Isn't that outside our territory now?"

The dispatcher hadn't known the answer to that, but when he got to the Burnt Water Trading Post and met Deputy Sheriff Albert (Cowboy) Dashee, the deputy had the answer.

"The stiffs a Navajo," he explained. "That's what we hear. Somebody's supposed to have shot him, so somebody figured one of you guys ought to go along." When they had finally got to the body it was hard to imagine how anyone had guessed his tribe, or even his sex. Decay was advanced. Scavengers had found the body—animal, bird, and insect. What was left was mostly a tattered ragbag of bare bone, sinew, gristle, and a little hard muscle. They had looked at it awhile, and wondered why the boots had been removed and left on the path, and made a fruitless search for anything that would identify the man, or explain the bullet hole in his skull. And then Cowboy Dashee had done something friendly.

He'd unrolled the body bag they'd carried along and when Chee had bent to help him, he'd waved Chee away.

"We Hopis have our hang-ups," he said, "but we don't have the trouble you Navajos got with handling dead bodies." And so Dashee had tucked John Doe into the body bag while Chee watched. That left nothing to do but discover who he'd been, and who had killed him, and why he took off his boots before they did it.

A sound from a long way off brought Chee back to the present. It came from about where the car had stopped down in the wash—the sound of metal striking metal, perhaps, but too dim and distant to identify. And then he heard the plane again. This time it was south of him, moving eastward. Apparently it had circled. The moonset had left a bright orange glow outlining the ridge of Big Mountain. For a moment the plane was high enough to reflect moonlight from a wing. It was turning. Completing a circle. Once again it came almost directly toward him, sinking out of the moonlight and down into the darkness. Chee heard a clanking sound over the low purr of the engine. The wheels being lowered? It was too dark to tell. The plane passed within two hundred yards of him, downhill and not much above eye level. It flew just above Wepo Wash and then it disappeared.

Abruptly the purr of the engine stopped. Chee frowned. Had the pilot cut the engine? No. He heard it again, muted now.

It takes about five seconds for sound to travel a mile. Even after a mile, after five seconds of dilution by distance, the sound reached Chee's ear like a thunderclap. Like an explosion. Like tons of metal striking stone.

There was silence again for a second or two, perhaps even three. And then a single sharp snapping sound, from a mile away but instantly identifiable. The sound of a gunshot.

Chapter Four

The raw smell of gasoline reached Jimmy Chee's nostrils. He stopped, aiming the flashlight down the arroyo ahead of him, looking for the source and regaining his breath. He'd covered the distance from his clump of mesquite in less than fifteen minutes, running when the terrain permitted it, scrambling up and down the dry watercourses, dodging through the brush and cactus, keeping the glow of the setting moon to his left front. Once, just before he had reached the cliff edge of Wepo Wash, he had heard the grind of a starter, an engine springing to life, and the receding sound of a vehicle moving down the dry watercourse away from him. He had seen a glow where the vehicle's lights had reflected briefly off the arroyo wall. He'd seen nothing else. Now the flashlight beam reflected from metal, and beyond the metal, more metal in a tangled mass. Chee stood inspecting what the light showed him. Over the sound of his labored breathing, he heard something. Falling dirt. Someone had scrambled up the cliff and out of the wash. He flicked the light beam toward the noise. It picked up a residue of dust, but no movement. Whatever had dislodged the earth was out of sight.

Cautiously now, Chee walked to the wreckage.

The plane's left wing had apparently struck first, slamming into a great outcrop of rock which had forced the wash into an abrupt northward detour. Part of the wing had torn off, and the force had pivoted the plane, slamming its fuselage into the rock at about a forty-five degree angle. Chee's flash reflected from an unbroken cabin window. He peered through it. His light struck the side of the head of a man with curly blond hair. The head was bowed forward as if the man were sleeping. No sign of blood. But lower, the front of the cabin had been crushed backward. Where the man's chest had been, there was metal. Beyond this, Chee could see a second man, in the pilot's seat. Dark hair with gray in it. Blood on the face. Movement!

Chee ducked through the torn gap in the aluminum where the cabin door had been, forced a bent passenger seat out of the way, and reached the pilot. The man was still breathing, or seemed to be. Chee, squatting awkwardly amid the torn metal, reached forward and unfastened the pilot's safety belt. It was wet and warm with blood. He eased himself between the seats, far enough forward to examine the pilot in the light of his flash. The man had bled copiously from a tear on the right side of his neck—a ragged gash which now barely seeped. It was too late for a tourniquet. The heart had run out of anything to pump.

Chee sat back on his heels and assessed the situation. The pilot was dying. If this cramped space were an operating room with a surgeon at work and blood being pumped back into the pilot, the man might have a chance. But Chee was helpless to save him.

Yet there's the human urge to do something. Chee eased the man out of the pilot's seat and slid the limp form between the seats and out of the torn cabin. He laid the pilot carefully, face up, on the packed sand. He took the pilot's wrist and felt for a pulse. There was none. Chee switched off his flashlight.

With the moon down, at the bottom of Wepo Wash the darkness was total. Overhead, freed now from competition with the moon, a billion stars blazed against black space. The pilot no longer existed. His chindi had slipped away to wander in the darkness—one more ghost to infect the People with sickness and make the nights dangerous. But Chee had come to terms with ghosts long ago when he was a teenager in boarding school.

He gave his eyes time to adjust to the darkness. At first there was only the line of the clifftop, which separated the starscape from the black. Gradually forms took shape. The upthrust surviving wing of the plane, the shape of the basalt outcrop which had destroyed it. Chee felt cold against the skin of his hands. He put them into his jacket pockets. He walked to the outcrop and around it, thinking. He thought of the car he had heard driving away and of the person, or persons, who must be in it. Persons who had walked away from the pilot and left the man to die alone in the dark. Now the starlight gave the canyon shape, defining a difference between its sandy bottom and its walls, even suggesting brush at the base of its cliffs. It was absolutely windless now, utterly silent. Chee leaned his hip against the basalt, fished out a cigaret and a kitchen match.

He struck the match against the stone. It made a great flare of yellow light which illuminated the gray-yellow sand around his feet, the slick black of the basalt, and the white shirtfront of a man. The man sat on the sand, legs outthrust, and the quick flare of the sulfur flame reflected from the lenses of his eyeglasses.

Chee dropped the match, stepped back, and fumbled out his flashlight. The man was wearing a dark-gray business suit with a vest and a neatly knotted blue necktie. His feet had slid from under him, leaving heel tracks in the sand and pulling up his trouser legs, so that white skin was bared above the top of black socks. In the yellow beam of Chee's flash he looked perhaps forty-five or fifty, but death and yellow light ages the face. His hands hung at his sides, resting on the sand. Between thumb and forefinger of his right hand he held a small white card. Chee knelt by the hand and focused his light on it. It was a card from the Hopi Cultural Center. Holding it by the edges, Chee slipped it out and turned it over. On the reverse side someone had written: "If you want it back, check into here." Chee slipped the card back between the fingers. This would be a federal case. Very much a federal case. None of this would be any of his business.

Chapter Five

Captain largo was standing at the wall map, making calculations.

"The plane's here," he said, punching a stubby finger against the paper. "And your car was parked here?" He touched the paper again. "Maybe two miles. Maybe less."

Chee said nothing. It had occurred to him about three questions back that something unusual was happening.

"And you called your first report in at twenty minutes after five," the man named Johnson said. "Say it takes forty minutes to walk to your car, that would leave another fifty minutes from the time you said the plane crashed." Johnson was a tall, lean, red-haired man, his face a mass of freckles. He wore black cowboy boots of some exotic leather, and denims. His pale mustache was well trimmed and his pale-blue eyes watched

Chee. They had watched Chee since the moment he'd entered the office, with the impersonal unblinking stare policemen tend to develop. Chee reminded himself that it was one of several professional habits that he must try to avoid.

"Fifty minutes," Chee said. "Yeah. That sounds about right."

Silence. Largo studied the map. Johnson was sitting with his chair tilted back against the wall, his hands locked behind his head, staring at Chee. He shifted his weight, causing the chair to creak.

"Fifty minutes is a lot of time," Johnson said.

A lot of time for what? Chee thought. But he said nothing.

"You say before you got to the wreck you heard a car engine starting, or maybe it was a pickup truck, and somebody driving away. And then when you got there, you heard somebody climbing out of the wash behind the plane." Johnson's tone made the statement into a question.

"That's what I say," Chee said. He caught Largo glancing at him. Largo's face was full of thought.

"Our people turned in a report a lot like yours," Johnson said. "You don't count your own tracks, of course, so you were looking at four sets and they were looking at five. Someone climbing out of the wash, like you said." Johnson held up one finger. "And the smooth-soled, pointy-toed shoes of the stiff." Johnson held up a second finger. "And a set of waffle soles, and a set of cowboy boots." Two more fingers went up. "And the boot soles we now know were yours." Johnson added his thumb to complete the count at five. He stared at Chee, waiting for agreement.

"Right," Chee said, looking into Johnson's cold blue stare.

"It looked to our people—that's the fbi—that the cowboy-boot tracks stepped on your tracks some places, and in some places you stepped on them," Johnson said. "Same with the waffle soles."

Chee considered what Johnson had said for about five seconds.

"Which would mean that the three of us were there at the same time," Chee said.

"All together," Johnson said. "In a bunch."

Chee was thinking he'd just been accused of a crime. And then he thought that someone had once said a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and how well that axiom applied to reading tracks. Trackers tend to forget that people step on their own footprints. It was something his uncle had taught him to watch for—and to read.

"Any comments on that?" Johnson asked.

"No," Chee said.

"You saying you weren't there at the same time as the other fellows?"

"Are you saying I was?" Chee said. "What you seem to be saying is that the fbi hasn't had much luck finding somebody who can read tracks."

Johnson's stare was totally unself-conscious.

Chee looked into it, curious about the man. The face was hard, intelligent, grim—a confident face. Chee had seen the look often enough to recognize it. He'd seen it in the Hopi boy who'd set the Arizona High School cross-country track record at the Flagstaff marathons, and on the face of the rodeo cowboy who won the big belt at Window Rock, and elsewhere in people who were very, very good at what they were doing, and knew it, and let a sort of arrogant confidence show in the careless way they used their eyes. Chee's experience with federal cops had not left him with any illusions of their competence. But Johnson would be another matter altogether. If Chee were a criminal, he would not want Johnson hunting him.

"You're sticking to your report, then," Johnson said finally. "Anything you can add that would help us?"

"Help you what?" Chee asked. "Maybe I could help your man learn something about tracking."

Johnson let the chair legs hit the floor, unlocked his hands, and stood.

"Nice to meet you folks," he said. "And, Mr. Chee, I'll probably be talking to you again. You going to be around?"

"Most likely," Chee said.

The door closed behind Johnson. Largo was still examining the map.

"I can't tell you much about that," Largo said. "Just a little."

"You don't need to tell me much," Chee said. "I would say that the narcs don't think it was a coincidence that I was out there by the wash when the plane landed. They think I was really out there to meet the plane and that me and waffle soles and cowboy boots hauled off the drug shipment—or whatever it was. Spent the missing fifty minutes loading the stuff. That about it?"

"Just about," Largo said mildly.

"There's more?"

"Nothing much," Largo said. "Nothing they exactly told me."

"But something that makes them suspicious of me?"

"Makes 'em suspicious of somebody local," Largo said. "I get an impression that the Drug Enforcement Agency don't think that shipment got hauled very far. They think it's hidden around there someplace close."

Chee frowned. "How would they know that?"

"How does the dea know anything?" Largo asked. "I think they got about half of the drug smuggling industry on their payroll. Ratting for them."

"Seems like it," Chee said.

"And then they do a hell of a lot of guessing," Largo added.

"I noticed that, too," Chee said.

"Like about you helping haul away the shipment."

"You think that was a bad guess?"

"Most likely," Largo said.

"Thanks," Chee said. "Johnson tell you who was in the plane?"

"I gather the pilot was somebody they know. One of the regulars who flies stuff in from Mexico for one of the big outfits. Fellow named Pauling. I don't think they have an identification on the passenger yet. The guy on the ground, the guy who got shot, his name was Jerry Jansen. Lawyer from Houston. Supposed to be in the narcotics business."

"I didn't move him," Chee said. "Shot, was he?"

"In the back," Largo said.

"It looks simple enough," Chee said. "A plane's hauling in dope. Somebody comes in a vehicle to accept the delivery, right? Only the plane crashes. Two of the guys receiving the shipment decide to steal it. They shoot their partner in the back, leave a note to the owners, or maybe the buyers, to tell them how to make contact to buy their stuff back. Then they haul it away. Right? But the dea doesn't seem to think the shipment got hauled out. They think it's hidden out there somewhere. Right?"

"That's what Johnson seemed to be thinking," Largo said.

"Now why would they think that?" Chee asked.

Largo was looking out his window. He seemed not to have heard the question. But finally he said, "I'd guess the dea had this shipment wired. I think they had themselves an informer in the right place."

Chee nodded. "Yeah," he said. "But for some reason beyond the understanding of this poor Indian, the dea didn't want to move in and grab the plane and arrest everyone."

Largo was still looking out the window. He glanced back at Chee. "Hell," he said. "Who knows. The feds work in strange and mysterious ways and they don't explain things to the Navajo Tribal Police." He grinned. "Especially they don't when they think maybe a Navajo Tribal Policeman got off with the evidence."

"Makes you curious," Chee said.

"It does," Largo said. "I think I'll do some asking around."

"I'm thinking about that card," Chee said. "That could be why the feds think the shipment's still around here. Why else would the hijacker do his dealing through the Hopi motel? Why not contact 'em in Houston, or wherever they operate?"

"I wondered when that was going to occur to you," Largo said. "If Jim Chee stole the shipment, he wouldn't know how to get in touch with the owners. So Jim Chee would leave a note telling them how to contact him."

"Thinking the press would report the note? Is that what I'd think? Wouldn't it occur to me that maybe the dea would keep the note secret?"

"It might," Largo said. "But if you thought of that, you'd be smart enough to know they'd have lawyers nosing around. Whoever owned that plane has a legal, legitimate interest in that crash. They'd ask to see the investigating officer's report, and we'd show it to them. So Jim Chee would be sure to put what it said on the card in his report. Like you did."

Jim Chee, who actually hadn't thought of that at all, nodded. "Pretty slick of Jim Chee," he said.

"Got a call about forty-five minutes ago," Largo said. "From Window Rock. Your buddy did it again. To the windmill."

"Last night?" Chee's tone was incredulous. "After the crash?"

Largo shrugged. "Joint Use Office called Window Rock. All I know is somebody screwed up the machinery again and Window Rock wants it stopped."

Chee was speechless. He started for the door, then stopped. Largo was standing behind his desk, reading something in Chee's folder. He was a short man with the barrel-chested, hipless shape common among western Navajos, and his round face was placid as he read. Chee felt respect for him. He wasn't sure he would like him. Probably he wouldn't.

"Captain," he said.

Largo looked up.

"Johnson had trouble with that lost fifty minutes at the airplane. Do you?"

"I don't think so," Largo said. His expression was totally neutral. "I know something Johnson doesn't." He held up the folder. "I know how slow you work."

Chapter Six

Jake west was behind the counter explaining the ramifications of money orders to a teenaged Navajo girl who seemed to want to buy something out of the Sears catalog. West had acknowledged Chee's presence with a nod and a grin but had done nothing to hurry his dealings with his customer. Nor did Chee expect him to. He leaned against the metal of the frozen foods cabinet, and waited for West, and thought his thoughts, and listened to the three gossips who were talking about witches on the porch just outside the open door. The three were a middle-aged Navajo woman (a Gishi, Chee had deduced), an elderly Navajo woman, and an even older Navajo man, whom the younger woman had called Hosteen Yazzie. She was doing most of the talking, loudly for the benefit of a hard-of-hearing audience. The subject was witchcraft in the Black Mesa-Wepo Wash country. The witchcraft gossip sounded typical of what one expected to hear in a season of drought or hard times—and for the Joint Use Reservation Navajos this was indeed a season of hard times. The usual pattern. Somebody had been out at dusk hunting a ram and had seen a man lurking around, and the man had turned into an owl and flown away. One of the Gishi girls had heard her horses all excited and had gone out to see about it, and a dog had been bothering them, and she shot at the dog with her .22, and the dog had turned into a man and disappeared in the darkness. An old man back on the mesa had heard sounds on the roof of his hogan during the night, and had seen something coming down through the smoke hole. Maybe it was dislodged dirt. Maybe it was corpse powder dropped by the witch. Chee's attention wandered. He heard Hosteen Yazzie say, "I guess the witch got the corpse powder from that man he killed," and then Chee was listening again, intently now. The Gishi woman said, "I guess so," and the conversation drifted away, to another day and another subject. Chee shifted his weight against the refrigerator case and considered the witch who had killed a man. If he walked through the door and asked Hosteen Yazzie to explain himself, he would meet only blank silence. These Navajos didn't know him. They'd never talk of witchcraft to a person who might be the very witch who was worrying them.

From across the store, West's laugh boomed out. He was leaning over the teenager now, his bulk making her seem a scaled-down model of a girl. He'd weigh 275 pounds, Chee guessed, maybe 300—some of it fat and some of it muscle, built on a barrel-like frame which made him seem short until he stood close to you. The laughter showed a great row of teeth through a curly beard. Where the beard and mustache didn't hide it, Jake West's face was a moonscape of pits and pockmarks. Only his forehead, revealed by a central baldness, was smooth—a placid lake of pink skin surrounded by a mass of graying curls.

Jim Chee had first met West when Chee was brand new in the district—the day they'd recovered John Doe's body. And the day after they'd brought the body in, the dispatcher had relayed a message to drop in at the Burnt Water store because West had something to tell him. The something hadn't been much—a little information which suggested the location one of the area's bootleggers might be using to deliver to his customers. But it was that day that Chee had seen, actually seen, Joseph Musket. It isn't often that a cop gets to see the burglar the day before the burglary.

Chee had parked in front, come in, seen West in his office in conversation with a young man wearing a red shirt. West had shouted something like "Be with you in a minute," and in a minute the young man had walked out of West's office and past Chee and out the front door. West stood at the office door, glaring after him.

"That son of a bitch," West had said. "I fired him."

"He didn't look like he cared much," Chee had said.

"I guess he didn't," West said. "I give him a job so he can qualify for parole and the bastard shows up for work whenever it damn well pleases him. And that ain't often. And I think he was stealing from me."

"Want to file a complaint?"

"Let it go," West said. "He used to be a friend of my son's. My boy wasn't ever good at picking friends."

And the very next morning, there'd been another call. Somebody had unlocked the storage room where West kept jewelry pawned by his customers, and walked out with about forty of the best pieces. Only West and Joseph Musket had access to the key. Since then Chee had learned a little about West. He'd operated the Burnt Water store for twenty years. He'd come from Phoenix, or Los Angeles, depending on your source, and he'd once been married to a Hopi woman, but no longer was. He'd had a son, maybe two, by a previous marriage, and had established a fairly good reputation, as reputations go among trading post operators. He was not on Captain Largo's list of known bootleggers, had never been nailed fencing stolen property, paid relatively fair prices for the jewelry he took in pawn and charged relatively fair interest rates, and seemed to get along well with both Navajo and Hopi customers. The Hopis, Chee had been told, considered him a powaqa—a "two-heart"—one of those persons in whom dwelled the soul of an animal as well as the soul of a human. This was the sophisticated Hopis' version of a witch. Chee had asked two Hopis he'd met about this rumor. One said it was nonsense—that only descendants of the Fog Clan could be two-hearts and that the Fog Clan was almost extinct among the Hopi villages. The other, an elderly woman, thought West might be a two-heart, but not much of one. Now West had collected his money from the Navajo girl and given her the money order.

He loomed down the counter toward Chee, teeth showing white through the beard in a huge grin.

"Officer Chee," he said, offering his hand. It engulfed Chee's hand, but the handshake, like the voice, was surprisingly gentle. "You're just a little bit late. I expected you five minutes ago." The grin had been converted to sternness.

Chee had seen West's playfulness before. He wasn't fooled. But he played along.

"How'd you know when I was coming?"

"Mind power," West said. "And because you Navajos won't believe in powers like that, I planted a thought in your mind so I could prove it to you." West stared down at Chee, his eyes fierce. "You are thinking of a card."

"Nope," Chee said.

"Yes you are," West insisted. "It's subconscious. You don't even know it yourself, but I planted the thought. Now quit wasting our time and tell me the card."

Chee found himself thinking of cards. A deck of cards spilled across a table. A bunch of spades. No particular card.

"Come on," West said. "Out with it."

"Three of diamonds," Chee said.

West's fierceness modified itself into smiling self-satisfaction. "Exactly right," he said. West wore blue-and-white-striped coveralls, large even for his bulk. He fished into one of their pockets. "And since you Navajos are such skeptical people, I arranged some proof for you." He handed Chee a small envelope of the sort used to mail notes and invitations.

"The three of diamonds," West said.

"Wonderful," Chee said. He noticed the envelope was sealed and put it in his shirt pocket.

"Aren't you going to open it?"

"I trust you," Chee said, "and I really came in to see if you can help me."

West's eyebrows rose. "You working on that plane crash? The drug business?"

"That's a federal case," Chee said. "fbi, Drug Enforcement Agency. We don't handle such things. I'm working on a vandalism case."

"That windmill," West said. He looked thoughtful. "Yes. That's a funny business."

"You been hearing anything?"

West laughed. "Naturally. Or I was. Now everybody's talking about the plane crash, and drug smuggling, and killing that guy—a lot more interesting than a vandalized windmill."

"But maybe not as important," Chee said.

West looked at him, thinking about that.

"Well, yes," he said. "From our point of view, yes. Depends on who gets killed, doesn't it?" He motioned Chee around behind the counter and led him through the doorway from store into living quarters. "They ought to kill them all," West said to the hallway in front of him. "Scum."

The West living room was long, narrow, cool, dark. Its thick stone walls were cut by four windows, but vines had grown so thickly over them that they let in only a green dimness. "Sit down," West said, and he lowered himself into a heavy plastic recliner. "We'll talk about windmills, and airplanes, and men who get themselves shot in the back."

Chee sat on the sofa. It was too soft for him and he sank into its lumpy upholstery. Such furniture always made him uneasy. "First we need to settle something," Chee said. "That fellow wrecking that windmill might be a friend of yours; or it could be that you think wrecking that windmill isn't such a bad idea under the circumstances. If that's the way it is, I'll go away and no hard feelings."

West was grinning. "Ah," he said. "I like the way your mind works. Why waste the talk? But the way it is, I don't know who's doing it, and I don't like vandalism, and worse than that, maybe it's going to lead to worse trouble and God knows we don't need any of that."

"Good," Chee said.

"Trouble is, the thing has me puzzled." West put his elbows on the armrests of the chair, made a tent of his fingers. "Common sense says one of your Navajo families is doing it. Who'd blame 'em? I guess the Gishi family has been living along that wash for four generations, or five, and the Yazzies something like that, and some others maybe as long. Toughing it out, hauling water in, and as soon as the federal court turns it over to the Hopis, the feds drill 'em a bunch of wells." West had been studying his fingers. Now he looked at Chee. "Sort of adds insult to the injury." Chee said nothing. West was an old hand at communicating with Navajos. He would talk at his own pace until he said what he had to say, without expecting the social feedback of a white conversation.

"You got a few mean sons-a-bitches out there," West went on. "That's a fact. Get too much to drink in Eddie Gishi and he's a violent man. Couple of others as bad or worse. So maybe one of them would pull down a windmill." West examined his tented fingers while he considered the idea. "But I don't much think they did."

Chee waited. West would explain himself when he had his thoughts sorted out. On the mantel of the stone fireplace behind West's chair a clutter of photographs stood in an uneven row: a good-natured-looking boy in Marine blues, the same boy in what Chee guessed was a blowup of a high school yearbook photograph, a picture of West himself in a tuxedo and a top hat, looking a great deal younger. All the other photographs included more than one person: West with a pretty young Hopi woman who was probably West's second wife, West and the same woman with the boy, the same trio with assorted persons whom Chee couldn't identify. None of the pictures looked new. They had collected dust—a sort of gallery out of a dead period from the past.

"I don't think they did," West continued finally, "because of the way they're acting. Lot of gossip about it, of course. Lots of talk." He looked up at Chee, wanting to explain. "You come from Crownpoint. Over in New Mexico. It's more settled around there. More people. More things to do. Out here, the nearest movie show's a hundred miles away in Flagstaff. Television reception's poor and most people don't have electricity anyway. Nothing much happens and nothing much to do. So if somebody pulls down a windmill, it breaks the monotony."

Chee nodded.

"You hear a lot of speculation. You know—guessing about who's doing it. The Hopis, they're sure they know. It's the Yazzies, or it's the Gishi bunch, or somebody. They're mad about it. And nervous. Wondering what will happen next. And the Navajos, they think it's sort of funny, some of them anyway, and they're guessing about who's doing it. Old Hosteen Nez, he'll say something speculative about a Yazzie boy, or Shirley Yazzie will make a remark about the Nezes being in the windmill-fixing business. So forth."

West took down his tent of fingers and leaned forward. "You hear a little of that from everybody." He stressed the word. "If one of the Navajos was doing it, I think they wouldn't be speculating. I think they'd be keeping quiet about it. That's the way I've got these Wepo Wash Navajos figured." West glanced at Chee, looking slightly embarrassed. "I've been living with these people twenty years," he said. "You get to know 'em."

"So who's breaking the windmill?" Chee asked. "Rule out us Navajos and that doesn't leave anybody but the Hopis, and you."

"It's not me," West said, grinning his great, irregular grin. "I got nothing against windmills. When all the Navajos get moved out of here, most of my customers are going to be Hopis. I'm in favor of them having all their windmills in good working order."

"Always the same mill," Chee said. "And over on the Gishi grazing permit. You'd think that would narrow it down to the Gishis."

"The former Gishi grazing permit," West corrected. "Now it's Hopi territory." He shook his head. "I don't think it's the Gishis. Old Emma Gishi runs that bunch. She's tough and you don't push her. But she's practical. Knocking down a windmill don't do her no good. She wouldn't do it out of meanness, and if Emma says don't do it, none of the Gishis does it. She runs that bunch like a railroad. You want a drink of something? I heard you don't drink whiskey."

"I don't," Chee said.

"How about coffee?"

"Always," Chee said.

"I'll mix up some instant," West said. "What I meant was she runs that bunch like they used to run railroads. Not like they run 'em now."

West disappeared through the doorway into what Chee presumed was the kitchen. Something clattered. Chee pulled the envelope out of his pocket and inspected it. A perfectly plain white envelope without a mark on it. Inside he could see the shape of a playing card. He was absolutely certain it would be the three of diamonds. How had West done that? Chee felt faintly guilty. He shouldn't have denied West the pleasure of seeing the finale of the trick. He slipped the card back into the pocket of his uniform shirt and examined the room. Three Navajo rugs, two of them fine examples of collector-quality Two Gray Hills weaving. An old dark-stained bookcase along the wall away from the windows held a few books and a gallery of kachina figures. Chee recognized Masaw, the guardian spirit of this Fourth World of the Hopis, and the god of fire and death, and the lord of Hell. It was a beautiful job, almost a foot tall and probably worth a thousand dollars. Most of the other kachinas were also Hopi, but the Zuni Shalako figures were there, and the Zuni Longhorn spirit, and two grotesque members of the Mudhead fraternity. All good, but Masaw was clearly the feature of the collection. It held a torch and its face was the traditional blood-spotted mask.

West reappeared in the doorway, bearing mugs. "Hope it's hot enough. I didn't let the water boil."

Chee sipped. The coffee was one stage past lukewarm and tasted muddy. "Fine," he said.

"Now," West said, easing himself back into the recliner. "We have talked about windmills. Now we talk a little about airplane crashes and dead gangsters."

Chee took another sip.

"From what was in the paper, and on TV last night, and what dribbles in from here and there, I get the impression that somebody got off with the shipment."

"That seems to be what the feds are thinking," Chee said.

"Two men killed in the plane crash," West said.

"A third man shot and left sitting there with a message in his hand. So the dea figures the dope got hijacked. Right?"

"I'll bet you know as much about it as I do," Chee said. "Maybe more. It's not our jurisdiction."

West ignored that. "From what I hear, you fellows figure the dope is hidden back in there someplace. That whoever got off with it didn't haul it away with him?"

Chee shrugged. West waited expectantly. "Well," Chee said finally, "I do get that kind of impression. Don't ask me why."

"Why wouldn't it be hauled out?" West asked. "They came in there to haul it off. Why not haul it off? Where would they hide it? How big is it?"

"I don't know," Chee said. "You thinking about finding it?"

West's huge grin split his beard. "Wouldn't that be fine? To find something like that. It'd be worth a fortune. They say it's cocaine, and that stuff sells for thousands of dollars an ounce. I heard the pure stuff would bring five hundred thousand dollars a pound, time you dilute it down and sell it to the customer."

"Where you going to find a buyer?"

"There's a will, there's a way," West said. He finished his coffee, put down the cup, grimaced. "Terrible-tasting stuff," he said. "How about the pilot? Somebody said he was still alive when you got there."

"Just barely," Chee said. "Who is this somebody that's telling you all this?"

West laughed. "You're forgetting the first rule of collecting gossip. You never tell anybody who told you, or they stop telling."

Probably Cowboy Dashee, Chee thought. Cowboy was a talker, and it was the sort of information he'd have. But a half-dozen various kinds of cops would have been through the trading post since the crash. It could have been any of them, or it could have been second or third hand, or it could just be an educated guess.

West changed the subject. Had any of his stolen pawn silver turned up? Had any trace been found of Joseph Musket? Had Chee heard the latest witchcraft gossip, which concerned one of the Gishi girls' seeing a big dog bothering her horses, and shooting at it with her .22, and the dog turning into a man and running away. Chee said he'd heard it. Then West switched the conversation back to Musket.

"Reckon he had anything to do with any of this?"

"With the dope business or the witch business?"

"Dope," West said. "You know he was a con. Maybe he got wind of it some way. Jailhouse telegraph. I've heard of that. Maybe he's into it. You think of that?"

"Yes," Chee said. "I've thought of that. Something else I've thought of. If you're serious about trying to find whatever it is we're looking for, I think I'd forget it. Whoever has that stuff is going to have the worst kind of trouble. If the feds don't get him, the owner will."

"You're right," West said.

Chee got up. He took the envelope out of his pocket.

"Is this really the three of diamonds in here?"

"Whatever you said it was. Three of diamonds, I think you said."

Chee opened the envelope. He pulled out the three of diamonds.

"How do you do that?"

"Magic," West said, grinning.

"I can't figure out the angle."

West spread his great hands. "I'm a magician," he said. "For years, a professional. With the circus in the good days and then many years with the carnivals."

"But you're not going to tell me how it works?"

"Takes the fun out of it," West said. "Just think about it as mind over matter."

"Thanks for the coffee," Chee said. He put on his hat. "Fine-looking boy you've got there." Chee nodded toward the photographs. "Is he still in the Marines?"

All the easy mobility left West's big face. It froze. "He was killed," he said.

"I'm sorry," Chee said. "In the Marines?"

He wished he hadn't asked the question. West wasn't going to answer it. But he did.

"After he got out," West said. "He made some bad friends in El Paso. They killed him."

Chapter Seven

At dawn, Chee parked the pickup at the windmill. He slammed the door behind him and stood facing the glow on the eastern horizon. He yawned and stretched and inhaled deeply of the cold early air. He felt absolutely fine. This was hozro. This was the beauty that Changing Woman taught them to attain. This was the feeling of harmony, of being in tune. The orange glow in the east turned to a hot yellow as Chee sang his dawn chant. There was no one in miles to hear him. He shouted it, greeting Dawn Boy, greeting the sun, blessing the new day. "Let beauty walk before me," Chee sang. "Let beauty walk behind me. Let beauty walk all around me." He opened his shirt, extracted his medicine pouch, took out a pinch of pollen, and offered it to the moving air. "In beauty it is finished," Chee sang.

The mood continued through breakfast—hot coffee from his stainless-steel thermos and two sandwiches of bologna and thin, hard Hopi piki bread. As he chewed he reviewed. Did Joseph Musket disappear to set up a narcotics hijacking? Was the burglary done simply to provide a cover motive for his disappearance? That would explain why none of the missing jewelry had turned up. Or had Joseph Musket's disappearance some connection with the murder of John Doe? The burglary had been two nights after they'd brought in Doe's body. Could Musket have intentionally provoked West into firing him because—once the body was found—there was some reason he had to run and he wanted to run without causing suspicion? For a moment that seemed to make some sense. But only for a moment. Then Chee remembered that there hadn't been any genuine effort to hide the body. It had been left along the path to Kisigi Spring. Isolated and not often used, but the only route to an important Hopi shrine, if Dashee knew what he was talking about. That provoked another thought. If you could learn from the Hopis when the shrine was visited, you could get a closer estimation—or maybe you could—of when the man had been killed there. All they had now was the medical examiner's casual estimate of "dead not more than a month, not less than two weeks." Would knowing when the body appeared on the trail help?

Chee took another bite, chewed, and thought about it. He couldn't see how. But who knows? At the moment he felt supremely optimistic. A brace of horned larks were singing their morning song beyond the windmill and the air was cool against his face and the crusty piki bread was tasting of wheat and bacon fat in his mouth. Someday he would unravel John Doe. Someday he would find Joseph Musket. (Why do they call you Ironfingers?) Someday, perhaps even today, he would catch the man who was vandalizing this windmill. He felt in harmony with all such things this morning—capable even of persuading these strange Black Mesa Navajos to confide in him about their witch. In a moment the sun would be high enough to give him the slanting light he needed to read even the faintest tracks. Then he would see what he could learn about this latest vandalism. Probably he would learn nothing very much. But even if the hard-packed, drought-baked earth told him nothing at all, that, too, would be right and proper, in tune with his relationship with this ugly windmill and the vandal who so hated it. Sooner or later he would understand this business. He'd find the cause. Senseless as it seemed, there'd be a reason behind it. The wind did not move, the leaf did not fall, the bird did not cry, nor did the windmill provoke such violent anger without a reason. All was part of the universal pattern, as Changing Woman had taught them when she formed the first four Navajo clans. Jim Chee had ingested that fact with his mother's milk, and from the endless lessons his uncle taught him. "All is order," Hosteen Nakai taught him. "Look for the pattern."

Chee left half the coffee in the thermos and wrapped a towel around the bottle. That, with two more bologna sandwiches still in his sack, would serve for lunch. A covey of Gambel's quail, their long topknot feathers bobbing, paraded single file along the slope below the windmill, heading for the arroyo a hundred yards to the north. The quail would be after an early-morning drink. Far down the arroyo three cottonwoods stood—two alive and one a long-dead skeleton. They were the only such trees in miles and must mark a shallow water table. Perhaps a spring. Without some source of water, the drought would force all birds away from here.

Chee found scuff marks on the earth, left by the vandal and by the Hopi who had discovered the vandalism. They told him nothing useful. Then he examined the mill itself. This time the vandal had used some sort of lever to kink the long connecting rod that tied the gear mechanism overhead to the pump cylinder in the well casing. It was an efficient means of destruction which left the force of the turning blades and the pumping action to strip the gears. But the vandal was exhausting such opportunities. Now the footing bolts were securely brazed into place, and the gearbox was secured. The custodians of the windmill could easily prevent a repetition of this new outrage by using a two-inch pipe to provide a protective sleeve for the pump rod. Chee scrutinized the mill thoughtfully, looking for weak points. He found nothing that could be damaged without some sort of special equipment. A portable cutting torch, for example, could take a slice out of one of the metal legs and topple the whole affair again, or make hash out of the gearbox once more. But the vandal so far hadn't used anything sophisticated. Horses, a rope, a steel bar—nothing complicated. What could a man without equipment do now to cause serious damage? The best he could find involved putting the mill in neutral to stop pump action, then pouring cement down the pump shaft. That would require only a small plastic funnel, a sack of cement, some sand, and a bucket. Maybe a ten-dollar investment. And the solution would be permanent. The sun was higher now and Chee broadened his search, covering the ground in widening circles. He found hoofprints and human tracks, but nothing interesting. Then he dropped into the arroyo and scouted it—first upstream and then down. Someone who wore moccasins had used its sandy bottom often as a pathway. The moccasins were surprising. Navajos—even old people—almost never wore them, and as far as Chee knew, Hopis used them only when ceremonial occasions demanded.

The path ended at the cottonwoods. As Chee had guessed, there was water seepage here in wetter seasons and the moisture had produced a robust growth of tamarisk bushes, chamiso, Russian olives, and assorted arid country weeds. The path disappeared into this cover and Chee followed it. He found the origin of the seep. Here the arroyo had cut its way past an outcropping of hard gray shale. Seeping water had eaten away at this formation, leaving a cavity perhaps four feet high, three times as wide, and as deep as Chee's vision would go into the shaded darkness. The rock here was stained green with now-dead algae and covered with a heavy growth of lichen. Chee squatted, studying the shale. The morning breeze moved through the brush around him, died away, and rose again. Chee's eye caught movement back in the shadowy cavity. He saw a feather flutter and two tiny yellow eyes.

"Ah," Chee said. He moved forward on hands and knees. The eyes were painted on a stick—a tiny semi-face framed by two downy feathers. Behind this stick in an irregular row were others, scores of them—a little forest of feathered plumes.

Chee touched nothing. He perched on hands and knees and studied the shrine and the prayer plumes which decorated it. The Hopis called them pahos, he remembered, and offered them as gifts to the spirits. Those that Chee could see well from his position seemed to have been made by one man. The carved shapes were similar and the mix of colors was the same. One, he noticed, had toppled. Chee examined it. One of the feathers was bent but the paint was fresh. It seemed to be the newest of the pahos. An unhappy kachina rejecting this season's gift? Or had some clumsy intruder knocked the pahos over?

Back at his pickup at noon, Chee fished his lunch out of the glove box. He sat with his feet out the open door and ate slowly, sorting the odds and ends of information he had accumulated during the morning. Nothing much. But not a total waste. The spring, for example, provided a good view of the windmill. Whoever tended it might have seen the vandal. He washed down the sandwich with a sip of coffee. How had West done the card trick? Name a card. Chee had named the three of diamonds. West had handed him the three sealed in a little envelope. There seemed no way it could be done. He went over it again, in his memory. He'd said, "Three of diamonds," and West's hand had dipped into the left-hand pocket of his coveralls and extracted the envelope. What would West have done if Chee had said jack of clubs? He thought about it. Then he chuckled. He knew how the trick was done. He glanced at his watch. A little after noon. A flock of red-winged blackbirds had been foraging along the arroyo. They moved from one growth of Russian olive toward another, veered suddenly, and settled in another growth, farther up the arroyo. Chee was chewing the first bite of his second sandwich. His jaws stopped. His eyes examined the area. They saw nothing. The chewing began again. Chee finished the sandwich, drained the thermos. A dove flew down the gully. It banked abruptly away from the same growth of olives. Chee drank. The only thing that would arouse such caution in birds would be a human. Someone was watching him. Was there a way he could approach the olive brush without alerting the watcher? Chee could see none.

He put the thermos on the seat. Who would the watcher be? Perhaps Johnson, or one of Johnson's people from the dea, hoping Chee would lead them to the stolen stuff. Perhaps the windmill vandal. Perhaps the Hopi who tended the shrine. Or perhaps God knows who. The air was almost motionless here, but a swirl of breeze started a dust devil across Wepo Wash. It moved into the wash, and across it, coming obliquely toward Chee. Over his head, the windmill groaned as its blades began turning. But the pump rod was motionless. The gearing mechanism which connected the rod to the fan was gone now—away to have its vandalism repaired—and the mill pumped nothing. Chee tried again to calculate who the vandal might be. Not enough information. He tried again to calculate who might be watching him. No luck. He reexamined his solution to the card trick and found it correct. Why had the pilot flown into the rocks? Chee locked the truck and began walking toward Wepo Wash. He walked parallel to the arroyo, watching the blackbirds. If the birds were startled out of the olive grove where they were now feeding, it would signal that his watcher was following him—moving down the arroyo toward the wash. If not, he'd guess the watcher was more interested in the windmill than in a Navajo cop. The birds rose with a clatter of sound and flew back up the arroyo to the trees they had been avoiding. Chee had expected them to do exactly that.

Chapter Eight

The only reasons Jimmy Chee would have admitted for climbing down into Wepo Wash was to give himself a chance to identify—and perhaps even confront—whoever was watching him. He'd give the watcher time to follow. Then he would drop out of sight—probably by moving into a side arroyo somewhere up the wash. Once Chee was out of sight, the watcher would have to make a decision: to follow or not. However he made it, Chee would be able to reverse the roles. He'd become the stalker.

That was the plan. But now he was in the wash, and just a hundred yards up the hard-packed sandy bottom from where he stood, the sun glinted from the remains of the aircraft. The wreckage was fbi and dea business. A Navajo Tribal Policeman would not be welcome here without a specific invitation. But Chee was curious. And to his watcher, a visit to the wreckage would seem a logical reason for this walk.

The ground around the site was thoroughly trampled now and the plane itself had been ransacked. Wing and stabilizer panels had been peeled open, a gas tank removed, and holes punched in the thin aluminum skin of the rudder, in what must have been a search for the cargo it had carried. Chee stared up the wash, up the plane's landing path, frowning. As he remembered, it had struck an upthrust of basalt which jutted from the floor of the wash. The wash had flowed around the extrusion on both sides, eroding the earth and leaving a black stone island in a sea of sand. If there wasn't room to land up-wash from this wall of stone, and there seemed to be plenty of space, there was obviously room enough to miss it to the right or left. Why hadn't the pilot avoided it? Surely he hadn't simply landed blindly in the dark. Chee walked upwash, out of the trampled area. He kept his eyes on the sand, looking for the answer. The watcher could wait.

A little more than an hour later, he heard the sound of a car engine. By then he knew why the plane had crashed. But he had new questions.

The car was a dark-blue Ford Bronco. It pulled to a stop beside the wreckage. Two persons emerged. A man and a woman. They stood a moment, looking upwash toward Chee, and then walked to the aircraft. Chee walked toward them. The man was tall, hatless, gray-haired, wearing jeans and a white shirt. The woman was hatless, too. She was rather small, with short dark hair that curled around her face. Not fbi. Probably not dea, although anybody could be dea. They stood beside the wreckage, looking at the plane but waiting for him. Chee saw the man was older than he had looked from a distance—perhaps in his early fifties. One of those men who take care of themselves, join racquet clubs, jog, lift weights. His face was long, with deep lines along the nose, and eyes which, because of large black pupils, looked somewhat moist and luminous. The woman glanced at Chee and then stared at the wreckage. Her oval face, drained of color, looked shocked. She was in her fifties, Chee guessed, but at the moment she looked as old as time. Something about her tugged at Chee's memory. The man's expression was defensive, the look of someone caught trespassing, who expects to be asked who he is and what he's doing. Chee nodded to him.

"We came out to see the aircraft," the man said. "I was his attorney and this is Gail Pauling."

"Jim Chee," Chee said. He shook the man's hand and nodded to the woman.

"Jim Chee," the woman said. "You're the one who found my brother."

Chee knew now what she reminded him of. Her brother was the pilot. "I don't think he had any suffering," Chee said. "It must have happened in an instant. Too quick to know what happened."

"And what did happen?" Miss Pauling asked. She gestured toward the outcrop. "I can't believe he would just fly right into this."

"He didn't, exactly," Chee said. "His wheels touched down about fifty yards up there. He was on the ground."

She was staring at the wreckage, her face still stunned. Chee wasn't sure she had heard him. "Something must have happened to him," she said, as if to herself. "He would never have flown right into this."

"It was in the dark," Chee said. "Didn't they tell you that?"

"They didn't tell me anything," Miss Pauling said. She seemed to really see Chee for the first time. "Just that he crashed, and he was dead, and the police think he was flying in some contraband, and that a policeman named Jim Chee was the one who saw it all."

"I didn't see it," Chee said. "I heard it. It was a couple of hours before dawn. The moon was down." Chee described what had happened. The lawyer listened intently, his moist eyes studying Chee's face. Chee didn't mention hearing the shot, or the other sounds.

The woman's face was incredulous. "He landed in the pitch dark?" she asked. "He used to be in the Tactical Air Force. But on an airfield. And with radar. I worried about it. But I can't believe he'd just land blind."

"He didn't," Chee said. He gestured up the bed of the wash. "He'd landed at least three times before. Just a day or two earlier, the way the tracks look. Probably in the daylight. Practicing, I'd guess. And then when he made this landing, he had lights."

"Lights?" the lawyer asked.

"It looks like battery lanterns," Chee said. "A row of them on the ground."

Miss Pauling was staring up the wash, looking baffled.

"They left their marks," Chee explained. "I'll show you."

He led them down the side of the wash. Was the watcher still out there somewhere? If he was, what would he think of all this? If the watcher was Johnson, or one of Johnson's dea people assigned to follow Chee, he'd never believe this meeting was not prearranged. Chee considered that. It didn't bother him.

They walked along the narrow strip of shade cast by the almost vertical wall of the wash. Beyond this shadow, the sunlight glittered from the gray-yellow surface of the arroyo bottom. Heat waves shimmered from the flatness and the only sound was boot soles on the sand.

Behind him the lawyer cleared his throat. "Mr. Chee," he said. "That car you mentioned in your report, driving away—did you get a look at it?"

"You read the report?" Chee asked. He was surprised, but he didn't look around. It was exactly what Largo had predicted.

"We stopped at your police station at Tuba City," the attorney said. "They showed it to me."

Of course, Chee thought. Why not? The man was the attorney of the accident victim. The attorney and the next of kin.

"It was gone," Chee said. "I heard the engine starting. A car or maybe a pickup truck."

"The shot," the attorney asked. "Rifle? Shotgun? Pistol?"

That's an interesting question, Chee thought. "Not a shotgun. Probably a pistol," he said. The memory of the sound echoed in his mind. Probably a large pistol.

"Would you say a twenty-two, or something larger? A thirty-two? A thirty-eight?"

Another interesting question. "I'd be guessing," Chee said.

"Would you mind?"

"I'd guess a thirty-eight, or larger," Chee said. What would the next question be? Chee's guess at who pulled the trigger, maybe.

"I've always been interested in guns," the lawyer said.

And then they were opposite the place where the plane had first touched down. Chee moved out of the shade and walked into the glittering heat. He squatted beside the marks.

"Here," he said. "See? Here's where the right wheel first touched." He pointed. "And there the left wheel. He had the plane almost exactly level."

Near this touchdown point, a line about two inches deep had been drawn across the sand. Chee rose and took a dozen steps down the track. "Here the nose wheel touched," he said. "I think Pauling drew that line to mark the place. And over there… See the tracks?" Chee pointed toward the center of the wash. "That's where he took off both times."

"Or maybe he landed over there and took off here," the lawyer said in his soft voice. He laughed a mild, soft sound. "But what difference is it?"

"Not much," Chee said. "But he did land here. Deeper impression at the impact point, and the bounce marks. And if you go over there and take a close look, you notice the sand is blown back more on the tracks where he lifted off. Engine really revving up then, you know, and idling when he landed."

The attorney's soft eyes were examining Chee. "Yes," he said. "Of course. Can you still read that in the sand?"

"If you look," Chee said.

Miss Pauling was staring down the wash toward the wreckage. "But if he touched down here, he had plenty of time to stop. He had more room than he needed."

"The night he crashed, he didn't touch down here," Chee said. He walked toward the wreckage. A hundred yards, two hundred yards. Finally he stopped. He squatted again, touched a faint indentation in the sand with a fingertip. "Here was the first lantern," he said. He glanced over his shoulder. "And his wheels touched right there. See? Just a few feet past the lantern."

Miss Pauling looked at the wheel tracks and then past them at the wreckage, looming just ahead of them. "My God," she said. "He didn't have a chance, did he?"

"Somebody put out five lanterns in a straight line between here and the rock." Chee pointed. "There were five more lanterns on the other side of the rock."

The lawyer was staring at Chee, lips slightly parted. He read the implications of the lantern placement instantly. Miss Pauling was thinking of something else. "Did he have his landing lights on? Your report didn't mention that."

"I didn't see any light," Chee said. "I think I would have seen the glow."

"So he was depending on whoever put the lanterns out," Miss Pauling said. Then what Chee had said about the lanterns beyond the rock finally reached her. She looked at him, her face startled. "Five more lanterns beyond the rock? Behind it?"

"Yes," Chee said. He felt a pity for the woman. To lose your brother is bad. To learn someone killed him is worse.

"But why…?"

Chee shook his head. "Maybe somebody wanted him to land but not to take off," he said. "I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong about the lanterns. All I found was the little depressions. Like this one."

She stared at him wordlessly. Studying him. "You don't think you're wrong."

"Well, no," Chee said. "This little oval shape, with these sharp indentations around the edge—it looks just the size and shape for those dry-cell batteries you attach the lantern bulb to. I'll measure it and check, but I don't know what else it would be."

"No," Miss Pauling said. She released a long breath, and with it her shoulders slumped. A little life seemed to leave her. "I don't know what else it would be, either." Miss Pauling's face had changed. It had hardened. "Somebody killed him."

"These lanterns," the lawyer said. "They were gone when you got here? They weren't mentioned in your report."

"They were gone," Chee said. "I found the trace of them just before you drove up. When I was here before, it was dark."

"But they weren't in the follow-up report either. The one that was made after the airplane was searched and all that. That was done in the daytime."

"That was federal cops," Chee said. "I guess they didn't notice the marks."

The lawyer looked at Chee thoughtfully. "I wouldn't have," he said finally. He smiled. "I've always heard that Indians were good trackers."

A long time ago, in his senior year at the University of New Mexico, Chee had resolved never to let such generalizations irritate him. It was a resolution he rarely managed to keep.

"I am a Navajo," Chee said. "We don't have a word in our language for 'Indians.' Just specific words. For Utes, and Hopis, and Apaches. A white is a belacani, a Mexican is a nakai. So forth. Some Navajos are good at tracking. Some aren't. You learn it by studying it. Like law."

"Of course," the lawyer said. He was still observing Chee. "But how do you learn it?"

"I had a teacher," Chee said. "My mother's brother. He showed me what to look for." Chee stopped. He was not in the mood to discuss tracking with this odd stranger.

"Like what?" the lawyer said.

Chee tried to think of examples. He shrugged. "You see a man walk by. You go look at the tracks he made. You see him walk by, carrying something heavy in one hand. You look at the tracks. You go again tomorrow to look at the tracks after a day. And after two days. You see a fat man and a thin man squatting in the shade, talking. When they leave, you go and look at the marks a fat man makes when he squats on his heels, and the marks a thin man makes." Chee stopped again. He was thinking of his uncle, in the Chuska high country tracking the mule deer. Showing how the bucks dragged their hooves when rutting, how to estimate the age of a doe by reading the splaying of its cloven toes in its tracks. Of his uncle kneeling beside the track left in the drying mud by a pickup truck, testing the moisture in a ridge of dirt, showing him how to estimate how many hours had passed since the tire had left that print. Much more than that, of course. But he had said enough to satisfy courtesy.

The lawyer had taken out his billfold. He extracted a business card and handed it to Chee.

"I'm Ben Gaines," he said. "I'll be representing Mr. Pauling's estate. Could I hire you? In your spare time?"

"For what?"

"For pretty much what you'd do anyway," Ben Gaines gestured toward the wreck. "Putting together just exactly what happened here."

"I won't be doing that," Chee said. "This isn't my case. This is a first-degree felony. It involves non-Navajos. This was part of the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use Reservation, but now it's Hopi. Outside my territory. Outside my jurisdiction. I'm here working on something else. Came down here because I was curious."

"All the better," Gaines said. "There won't be any question of conflict of interest."

"I'm not sure the rules would allow it," Chee said. "I'd have to check with the captain." It occurred to Chee that one way or another he'd be doing what the lawyer wanted. His curiosity would demand it.

Gaines was chuckling. "I was just thinking that it might be just as well if your boss didn't know about this arrangement. Nothing wrong with it. But if you ask a bureaucrat if there's a rule against something, he'll always tell you there is."

"Yeah," Chee said. "What do you want me to do?"

"I want to know what happened to Pauling here," Gaines said. "The report sounded like there were three people here when it happened. I want to know for sure. You heard a shot. Then you heard a car, or maybe a truck, driving away. I want to know what went on." Gaines waved around him. "Maybe you can find some tracks that'll tell."

"Plenty of tracks now," Chee said. "About a dozen federal cops, Arizona State Police, county law, so forth, trampling all around. And yours and mine and hers." Chee nodded to Miss Pauling. She had walked back to the wreckage and stood staring at the cabin.

"My law firm pays forty dollars an hour for work like this," Gaines said. "Find out what you can."

"I'll let you know," Chee said, making the answer deliberately ambiguous. "What else you want to know?"

"I get the impression," Gaines said slowly, "that the police aren't sure what happened to the car you heard driving away. They don't seem to think it ever left this part of the country. I'd like to know what you can find out about that."

"Find out what happened to the car?"

"If you can," Gaines said.

"It would help if I knew what I was looking for," Chee said.

Gaines hesitated a long moment. "Yes," he said. "It would. Just tell me what you find out."

"Where?"

"We'll be staying at that motel the Hopis run. Up on Second Mesa," Gaines said.

Chee nodded.

• Gaines hesitated again. "One other thing," he said. "I've heard there was a cargo on that plane. If you happened to turn that up, there'd be a reward for that. I'm sure some pay-out would be available from the owners if that turned up." Gaines smiled at Chee, his eyes friendly and moist. "A big one. If you happen onto that, let me know about it. Quietly. Then I'll get to work and find out a way to get into contact with whoever owned whatever it was. You find the stuff. I find the owners. Sort of a partnership between the two of us. You know what I mean?"

"Yes," Chee said. "I know."

Chapter Nine

The late-afternoon sun slanted through the windows of the Burnt Water Trading Post, breaking the cavernous interior into a patchwork of harsh contrasts. Dazzling reflected sunlight alternated with cool darkness. And in the sunlight, dust motes danced. They reminded Chee of drought.

"Shrine?" Jake West said. "Hell, between you people and the Hopi, this country is covered up with shrines." West was sitting in a patch of darkness, his heavy bearded head silhouetted against an oblong of sunlight on the wall.

"This one is in the arroyo just east of the windmill," Chee said. "By a dried-up spring. It's full of prayer plumes. Some of 'em fresh, so somebody's been taking care of it."

"Pahos," West said. "You call 'em prayer plumes, but for the Hopis they're pahos."

"Whatever," Chee said. "You know anything about it?"

Through the open front door came the sound of a car, moving fast, jolting into the trading post yard. Over the noise, West said he didn't know anything about the shrine. "Never heard of that one," he said. There was the sound of a car door slamming. The smell of aroused dust drifted to their nostrils.

"That Cowboy?" Chee asked.

"Hope so," West said. "Hope there's not somebody else that parks like that. You'd think they'd teach the sons-a-bitches how to park without raising a cloud of dust. Ought to teach that before they let 'em into a car."

At the door a bulky young man in a khaki uniform paused to exchange remarks with a cluster of old men passing the afternoon in the shade. Whatever he said provoked an elderly chuckle.

"Come on in, Cowboy," West said. "Chee here needs some information."

"As usual," Cowboy said. He grinned at Chee. "You caught your windmill vandal yet?"

"Our windmill vandal," Chee corrected. "You solved the great airplane mystery?"

"Not quite," Cowboy said. "But progress has been made." He extracted an eight-by-ten glossy photograph from a folder he was carrying and displayed it. "Here's the dude we're looking for. You guys see him, promptly inform either Deputy Sheriff Albert Dashee or call your friendly Coconino County Sheriff's Department."

"Who is he?" West said. The photograph obviously had been blown up from a standard police mug identification shot. It showed a man in his middle forties, with gray hair, close-set eyes, and a high, narrow forehead dominating a long, narrow face.

"Name's Richard Palanzer, also known as Dick Palanzer. What the feds call a 'known associate of the narcotics traffic.' All they told me is he was indicted a couple of years ago in Los Angeles County for conspiracy, narcotics. They want us looking for him around here."

"Where'd the picture come from?" Chee asked. He turned it over and looked at the back, which turned out to be bare.

"Sheriff," Cowboy said. "He got it from the dea people. This is the bird they think drove off with the dope after the plane crash." Cowboy accepted the photograph back from Chee. "That is if Chee didn't do the driving. I understand the feds can't decide whether Chee rode shotgun or drove."

West looked puzzled. He raised his eyebrows, looked from Dashee to Chee and back.

Dashee laughed. "Just a joke," he said. "Chee was out there when it happened, so the dea was suspicious. They're suspicious of everybody. Including me, and you, and that fellow over there." Dashee indicated a geriatric Hopi who was easing himself out of the front door with the help of an aluminum walker and a solicitous middle-aged woman. "What was it Chee wanted to know?"

"There's a little shrine in that arroyo by the windmill," Chee said. "By a dried-up spring. Lots of pahos in it. Looks like somebody's taking care of it. You know anything about it?"

At the word "shrine," Cowboy's expression changed from joviality to neutrality. Cowboy was listed on the payroll of the Coconino County, Arizona, Sheriffs Department as Albert Dashee, Jr. He'd accumulated sixty hours credit at Northern Arizona University before saying to hell with it. But he was Angushtiyo, or "Crow Boy," to his family, a member of the Side Corn Clan, and a valuable man in the Kachina Society of his village of Shipaulovi. Chee was becoming a friend, but Crow Boy was Hopi and Chee Navajo, and shrines, any shrines, involved the Hopi religion.

"What do you want to know?" Cowboy asked.

"From where it is, you can see the windmill," Chee said. "Whoever tends it might have seen something." He shrugged. "Long shot. But I've got nothing else."

"The pahos," Cowboy said. "Some of them new? Like somebody is taking care of it now?"

"I didn't look at them real close," Chee said. "I didn't want to touch anything." He wanted Cowboy to know that. "But I'd say some were old and some were new and somebody is taking care of it."

Cowboy thought. "It wouldn't be one of ours. I mean not Shipaulovi village. That's not our village land. I think that land down there belongs either to Walpi or to one of the kiva societies. I'll have to see what I can find out."

As the Navajos saw it, the land down there was Navajo land, allotted to the family of Patricia Gishi. But this wasn't the time for renewing the old Joint Use arguments.

"Just a long shot," Chee said. "But who knows?"

"I'll ask around," Cowboy repeated. "Did you know they're fixing that windmill again today?" He grinned. "You ready for that?"

Chee was not ready for that. It depressed him. The windmill would be vandalized again—as certain as fate. Chee knew it in his bones, and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop it from happening. Not until he understood what was happening. When the new vandalism happened it would be Cowboy's fault as much as his own, but Cowboy didn't seem to mind. Cowboy wouldn't have to stand in Captain Largo's office, and hear Captain Largo reading the indignant memo from the pertinent bureaucrat in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and have Largo's mild eyes examining him, with the unspoken question in them relative to his competence to keep a windmill safe.

"With the bia doing it, I thought it would be Christmas before they got it done," Chee said. "What the hell happened?"

"Something must have gone wrong," West said.

"The bia got efficient. It happens every eight or ten years," Cowboy said. "Anyway, I saw a truck going in there. They said they had all the parts and they was fixing it today."

"I think you can relax," West said. "They probably got the wrong parts."

"You going to stake it out again?" Cowboy asked.

"I don't think that will work now," Chee said. "The plane crash screwed that up. Whoever it was learned I was out there. They'll make damn sure next time nobody's watching."

"The vandal was out there the night the plane crashed?" West asked.

"Somebody was," Chee said. "I heard somebody climbing out of the wash. And then while I was busy with the crash, somebody screwed up the windmill again."

"I didn't know that," West said. "You mean the vandal was right down there by the wreck? After it happened?"

"That's right," Chee said. "I'm surprised everybody didn't know that by now. They're handing the report around for everybody to read." Chee told West and Cowboy about the lawyer and the sister of the pilot.

"They was in here yesterday morning, asking for directions," West said. "They wanted to find the airplane, and they wanted to find you." West was frowning. "You mean to tell me that fellow had read the police report?"

"That's not so unusual," Cowboy said. "Not if he is the lawyer for somebody involved. Lawyers do that all the time if there's something they want to know."

"So he said he was the pilot's lawyer," West said. "What was his name?"

"Gaines," Chee said.

"What did he want to know?" West asked.

"He wanted to know what happened."

"Hell," West said. "Easy enough to see what happened. Fellow ran his airplane into a rock."

Chee shrugged.

"He wanted to know more than that?" West persisted.

"He wanted to find the car. The one that drove away after the crash."

"He figured it was still out there somewhere, then?"

"Seemed to," Chee said. He wanted to change the subject. "Either one of you heard any gossip about a witch killing a man out in Black Mesa somewhere?"

Cowboy laughed. "Sure," he said. "You remember that body was picked up last July—the one that was far gone?" Cowboy wrinkled his nose at the unpleasant memory.

"John Doe?" Chee asked. "A witch killed him? Where'd that come from?"

"And it was one of your Navajo witches," Dashee said. "Not one of our powaqa."

Chapter Ten

Cowboy dashee didn't know much about why the gossipers believed John Doe had been killed by a witch. But once he got over his surprise that Chee was sincerely interested, that Chee would attach importance to such a tale, he was willing to run the rumor to earth. They took Dashee's patrol car up Third Mesa to Bacobi. There Cowboy talked to the man who had passed the tale along to him. The man sent them over to Second Mesa to see a woman at Mishongovi. Dashee spent a long fifteen minutes in her house and came out smiling.

"Struck gold," Cowboy said. "We go to Shi-paulovi."

"Find where the report started?" Chee asked.

"Better than that," Cowboy said. "We found the man who found the body."

Albert Lomatewa brought three straight-backed chairs out of the kitchen, and set them in a curved row just outside the door of his house. He invited them both to sit, and sat himself. He extracted a pack of cigarets, offered each of them a smoke, and smoked himself. The children who had been playing there (Lomatewa's greatgrandchildren, Chee guessed) moved a respectful distance away and muted their raucous game. Lomatewa smoked, and listened while Deputy Sheriff Dashee talked. Dashee told him who Chee was, and that it was their job to identify the man who had been found on Black Mesa, and to find out who had shot him, and to learn everything they could about it. "There's been a lot of gossip about this man," Dashee said, speaking in English, "but we were told that if we came to Shipaulovi and talked to you about it, you would tell us the facts."

Lomatewa listened. He smoked his cigaret. He tapped the ash off on the ground beside his chair. He said, "It is true that there's nothing but gossip now. Nobody has any respect for anything anymore." Lomatewa reached behind him, his hand groped against the wall, found a walking cane which had been leaning there, and laid it across his legs. Last week he'd gone to Flagstaff with his granddaughter's husband, he told them, and visited another granddaughter there. "They all acted just like bahanas," Lomatewa said. "Drinking beer around the house. Laying in bed in the morning. Just like white people." Lomatewa's fingers played with the stick as he talked of the modernism he had found in his family at Flagstaff, but he was watching Jim Chee, watching Cowboy Dashee. Watching them skeptically. The performance, the attitude, were familiar. Chee had noticed it before, in his own paternal grandfather and in others. It had nothing to do with a Hopi talking of sensitive matters in front of a Navajo. It involved being on the downslope of your years, disappointed, and a little bitter. Lomatewa obviously knew who Cowboy was. Chee knew the deputy well enough to doubt he was a solidly orthodox Hopi. Lomatewa's statement had drifted into a complaint against the Hopi Tribal Council.

"We weren't told to do it that way," Lomatewa said. "The way it was supposed to be, the villages did their own business. The kikmongwi, and the societies, and the kiva. There wasn't any tribal council. That's a bahana idea."

Chee allowed the pause to stretch a respectful few moments. Cowboy leaned forward, raised a hand, opened his mouth.

Chee cut him off. "That's like what my uncle taught me," Chee said. "He said we must always respect the old ways. That we must stay with them."

Lomatewa looked at him. He smiled his skeptical smile. "You're a policeman for the bahanas," he said. "Have you listened to your uncle?"

"I am a policeman for my own people," Chee said. "And I am studying with my uncle to be a yataalii." He saw the Navajo word meant nothing to Lomatewa. "I am studying to be a singer, a medicine man. I know the Blessing Way, and the Night Chant, and someday I will know some of the other ceremonials."

Lomatewa examined Chee, and Cowboy Dashee, and Chee again. He took the cane in his right hand and made a mark with its tip in the dust. "This place is the spruce shrine," he said. He glanced at Cowboy. "Do you know where that is?"

"It is Kisigi Spring, Grandfather," said Cowboy, passing the test.

Lomatewa nodded. He drew a crooked line in the dust. "We came down from the spring at the dawn," he said. "Everything was right. But about midmorning we saw this boot standing there in the path. This boy who was with us said somebody had lost a boot, but you could see it wasn't that. If the boot had just fallen there, it would fall over on its side." He looked at Chee for agreement. Chee nodded.

Lomatewa shrugged. "Behind the boot was the body of the Navajo." He pursed his lips and shrugged again. The recitation was ended.

"What day was that, Grandfather?" Chee asked.

"It was the fourth day before the Niman Kachina," Lomatewa said.

"This Navajo," Chee said. "When we got the body, there wasn't much left. But the doctors said it was a man about thirty. A man who must have weighed about one hundred sixty pounds. Is that about right?"

Lomatewa thought about it. "Maybe a little older," he said. "Maybe thirty-two or so."

"Was it anyone you had seen before?" Cowboy asked.

"All Navajos—" Lomatewa began. He stopped, glanced at Chee. "I don't think so," he said.

"Grandfather," Cowboy said. "When you go for the sacred spruce, you use the same trail coming and going. That is what I have been taught. Could the body have been there under that brush the day before, when you went up to the spring?"

"No," Lomatewa said. "It wasn't there. The witch put it there during the night."

"Witch?" Cowboy Dashee asked. "Would it have been a Hopi powaqa or a Navajo witch?"

Lomatewa looked at Chee, frowning. "You said that you and this Navajo policeman got the body. Didn't he see what had been done?"

"When we got the body, Grandfather, the ravens had been there for days, and the coyotes, and the vultures," Cowboy said. "You could only tell it had been a man and that he had been dead a long time in the heat."

"Ah," Lomatewa said. "Well, his hands had been skinned." Lomatewa threw out his hands, palms up, demonstrating. "Fingers, palms, all. And the bottoms of his feet." He noticed Cowboy's puzzled surprise and nodded toward Chee. "If this Navajo respects his people's old ways, he will understand."

Chee understood, perfectly. "That's what the witch uses to make corpse powder," Chee explained to Cowboy. "They call it anti'l. You make it out of the skin that has the individual's soul stamped into it." Chee pointed to the fingerprint whorls on his fingertips and the pads of his hands. "Like on your palms, and fingers, and the soles of your feet, and the glans of your penis." As he explained, it occurred to Jim Chee that he could finally answer one of Captain Largo's questions. There was more than the usual witchcraft gossip on Black Mesa because there was a witch at work.

Chapter Eleven

By the time chee drove back to Tuba City, typed up his report, and left it on Captain Largo's desk, it was after 9:00 p.m. By the time he let himself into his trailer house and lowered himself on the edge of his bunk, he felt totally used up. He yawned, scrubbed his forearm against his face, and slumped, elbows on knees, reviewing the day and waiting for the energy to get himself ready for bed. He had tomorrow off, and the day after. He would go to Two Gray Hills, to the country of his relatives in the Chuska Mountains, far from the world of police, and narcotics, and murder. He would heat rocks and take a sweat bath with his uncle, and get back to the job of mastering the sand paintings for the Night Chant. Chee yawned again and bent to untie his boot laces, and found himself thinking of John Doe's hands as the old Hopi had described them.

Bloody. Flayed. In his own mind the only memory he could recall was of bones, sinew, and bits of muscle ends which had resisted decay and the scavengers. Something about what the Hopi had said bothered him. He thought about it and couldn't place the incongruity, and yawned again, and removed his boots. John Doe had died on the fourth day before the Niman Kachina, and this year the ceremonial had been held on July 14. He'd confirmed that with Dashee. So John Doe's body had been dumped onto the path on July 10. Chee lay back on the bunk, reached out, and fished the Navajo-Hopi telephone book off the table. It was a thin book, much bent from being carried in Chee's hip pocket, and it contained all telephone numbers in a territory a little larger than New England. Chee found the Burnt Water Trading Post listed along with a dozen or so telephones on Second Mesa. He pushed himself up on one elbow and dialed it. It rang twice.

"Hello."

"Is Jake West there?"

"This is West."

"Jim Chee," Chee said. "How good is your memory?"

"Fair."

"Any chance you remembering if Musket was at work last July eleventh? That would have been four days before the Home Dances up on Second Mesa."

"July eleventh," West said. "What's up?"

"Probably nothing," Chee said. "Just running down dead ends on your burglary."

"Just a minute. I don't remember, but I'll have it written down in my payroll book."

Chee waited. He yawned again. This was wasting his time. He unbuckled his belt and slid out of his uniform pants and tossed them to the foot of the bed. He unbuttoned his shirt. Then West was back on the line.

"July eleventh. Let's see. He didn't show up for work July tenth or the eleventh. He showed up on the twelfth."

Chee felt slightly less sleepy.

"Okay," he said. "Thanks."

"That mean anything?"

"Probably not," Chee said.

It meant, he thought after he had removed the shirt and pulled the sheet over him, that Musket might have been the man who killed John Doe. It didn't mean he was the one—only that the possibility existed. Drowsily, Chee considered it. Musket possibly was a witch. The killing of John Doe possibly was the reason Musket had departed from the Burnt Water Trading Post. But Chee was too exhausted to pursue such a demanding exercise. He thought instead of Frank Sam Nakai, who was his maternal uncle and the most respected singer along the New Mexico-Arizona border. And thinking of this great shaman, this wise and kindly man, Jim Chee fell asleep.

When he awakened, there was Johnson standing beside his bunk, looking down at him.

"Time to wake up," Johnson said.

Chee sat up. Behind Johnson another man was standing, his back to Chee, sorting through the things Chee kept stored in one of the trailer's overhead compartments. The light of the rising sun was streaming through the open door.

"What the hell?" Chee said. "What are you doing to my trailer?"

"Some checking," Johnson said.

"Nothing here either," the man said.

"This is Officer Larry Collins," Johnson said, still looking at Chee. "He's my partner on this case." Officer Collins turned and looked at Chee. He grinned. He was perhaps twenty-five. Big. Unkempt blond hair dangled from under a dirty cowboy hat. His face was a mass of freckles, his eyes reckless. "Howdy," he said. "If you got any dope hidden around here, I haven't come up with it. Not yet."

Chee couldn't think of anything to say. Disbelief mixed with anger. This was incredible. He reached for his shirt, put it on, stood up in his shorts.

"Get the hell out of here," he said to Johnson.

"Not yet," Johnson said. "We're here on business."

"We'll do any business we have over at the office," Chee said. "Get out."

Collins was behind him now and it happened too quickly for Chee to ever know exactly how he did it. He found himself face down on the bunk, with his wrists twisted high behind his shoulders. He felt Johnson's hand pinning him while Collins snapped handcuffs on his wrists. It must have been something the two of them practiced, Chee thought.

They released him. Chee sat up on the bunk. His hands were cuffed behind him.

"We need to get something straight," Johnson said. "I'm the cop and you're the suspect. That Indian badge don't mean a damn thing to me."

Chee said nothing.

"Keep on looking," Johnson said to Collins. "It's got to be bulky and there can't be many places it could hide in here. Make sure you don't miss any of them."

"I haven't." Collins said. But he moved into the kitchen area and began opening drawers.

"You had a little meeting yesterday with Gaines," Johnson said. "I want to know all about that."

"Go screw yourself," Chee said.

"You and Gaines arranged a little deal, I guess. He told you what they'd be willing to pay to buy their coke back. And he told you what would happen to you if you didn't cough it up. That about right?"

Chee said nothing. Collins was looking in the oven, checking under the sink. He poured a little detergent into his palm, examined it, and rinsed it off under the tap. "I already looked everyplace once," Collins said.

"Maybe we're not going to find that coke stashed here," Johnson said. "Maybe we're not going to find the money here either. It don't look like you were that stupid. But by God you're going to tell me where to find it."

Johnson struck Chee across the face, a stinging, back-handed blow.

"The best way to do it would be unofficial," Johnson said. "You just tell me right now, and I forget where I heard it, and you can just go on being a Navajo cop. No going to jail. No nothing. We do a lot of unofficial business." He grinned at Chee, a wolfish show of big, even white teeth in a sunburned red face. "Get more work done that way."

Chee's nose hurt. He felt a trickle of blood start from it, moving down his lip. His face stung and his eyes were watering. But the real effect of the blow was psychological. His mind seemed detached from all this, working at several levels. At one, it was trying to remember the last time anyone had struck him. He had been a boy when that happened, fighting with a cousin. At another level his intelligence considered what he should do, what he should say, why this was happening.

And at still another, he felt simple animal rage—an instinct to kill.

He and Johnson stared at each other, neither blinking. Collins finished in the kitchen and disappeared in the tiny bath. There was the noise of him taking something apart.

"Where is it?" Johnson asked. "The plane had the stuff on it, and the people who came to get it haven't got it. We know that. We know who took it, and we know he had to have some help, and we know you were it. Where'd you take it?"

Chee tested the handcuffs behind him, hurting his wrists. The muscles in his left shoulder were cramping where Collins had strained it. "You son of a bitch," Chee said. "You're crazy."

Johnson slapped him again. Same backhand. Same place.

"You were out there," Johnson said. "We don't know how you got onto the deal, but that doesn't matter. We just want the stuff."

Chee said nothing at all.

Johnson removed his pistol from its shoulder holster. It was a revolver with a short barrel. He jammed the barrel against Chee's forehead.

"You're going to tell me," Johnson said. He cocked the pistol. "Now."

The metal of the gun barrel pressed into the skin, hard against the bone. "If I knew where that stuff was, I'd tell you," Chee said. He was ashamed of it, but it was the truth. Johnson seemed to read it in his face. He grunted, removed the pistol, lowered the hammer, and stuck the gun back in the holster.

"You know something," Johnson said, as if to himself. He looked around at Collins, who had stopped his hunt to watch, and then stared at Chee again, thinking. "When you know a little more, there's a smart way for you to handle it. Just see to it that I get the word. An anonymous note would do it. Or call me. That way, if you don't trust the dea not to hammer you, you'd know we couldn't prove you tried to steal the stuff. And I couldn't turn you in for killing Jerry Jansen."

Chee had his mind working again. He remembered Jansen was the body left at the plane. But how much would Johnson tell him?

"Who's Jansen?" he asked.

Johnson laughed. "Little late to ask," he said. "He's the brother of the big man himself, the one who put this all together. And the one killed on the airplane, he was big medicine, too. Relative of the people buying the shipment."

"Pauling?"

"Pauling was nothing," Johnson said. "The taxi driver. You worry about the other one."

There was the sound of breaking glass in the shower. Collins had dropped something.

"So you see, I haven't got much time to work with you," Johnson said. He was smiling. "You've got two sets of hard people stirred up. They're going to make the connection right away and they're going to be coming after you. They're going to twist that dope out of you and if you can't deliver it, they'll just keep twisting."

Chee could think of nothing helpful to say to that.

"The only way to go is the easy way," Johnson said. "You tell me where you and Palanzer put it. I find it. Nobody is any wiser. Any other way we handle it, you're dead. Or if you're lucky you get ten to twenty in the federal pen. And with those two people killed, you wouldn't last long in federal pen."

"I don't know where it is," Chee said. "I'm not even sure what it is."

Johnson looked at him, mildly and without comment. A smell of cologne seeped into Chee's nostrils. Collins had broken his aftershave lotion. "What did Gaines want?" Johnson said. He pulled Gaines's card out of his shirt pocket and looked at it. It had been in Chee's billfold.

"He wanted to know what happened to the car. The one I heard driving off."

"How'd he know about that?"

"He read my report. At the station. He told 'em he was the pilot's lawyer."

"Why'd he give you the card?"

"He wanted me to find the car for him. I said I'd let him know."

"Can you find it?"

"I don't see how," Chee said. "Hell, it's probably in Chicago by now, or Denver, or God knows where. Why would it stay around? From what I hear, you're circulating the picture of the guy that's supposed to be driving it. This Palanzer. Why would he stick around?"

"I'll ask the questions," Johnson said.

"But don't you think Palanzer got off with the stuff? Why else are you looking for him?"

"Maybe Palanzer got it and maybe he didn't, and maybe he had a lot of help if he did. Like a Navajo tribal cop who knows this country and knows a hole they can hide it in until things cool off some."

"But—"

"Shut up," Johnson said. "This is wasting time. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to wait just a little while. Give you some time to think it over. I figure you've got a day or two before the people who own that dope decide to come after you. You give some thought to what they'll do to you and then you get in touch with me and we'll deal."

"One thing," Collins said from just behind Chee. "It damn sure ain't hid in here."

"But don't wait too long," Johnson said. "You haven't got much time."

Chapter Twelve

When captain largo worried, his round, bland face resolved itself into a pattern of little wrinkles—something like a brown honeydew melon too long off the vine. Largo was worried now. He sat ramrod straight behind his desk, an unusual position for the captain's plump body, and listened intently to what Jim Chee was saying. What Chee was saying was angry and directly to the point, and when he finished saying it, Largo got up from his chair and walked over to the window and looked out at the sunny morning.

"They pull a gun on you?" he asked.

"Right."

"Hit you? That right?"

"Right," Chee said.

"When they took off the cuffs, they told you that if you filed a complaint, their story would be you invited them in, invited them to search, they didn't lay a hand on you. That right?"

"That's it," Chee said.

Largo looked out the window some more. Chee waited. From where he stood he could see through the glass past the captain's broad back. He could see the expanse of bunch grass, bare earth, rocks, scattered cactus, which separated the police building from the straggling row of old buildings called Tuba City. The sky had the dusty look of a droughty summer. Far across the field a cloud of blue smoke emerged from the sheet-metal garage of the Navajo Road Department—a diesel engine being test run. Largo seemed to be watching the smoke.

"Two days, they said, before the people who owned the dope figured you had it. Right?"

"That's what Johnson said," Chee agreed.

"He sound like he was guessing, or like he knew?" Largo was still looking out the window, his face away from Chee.

"Of course he was guessing," Chee said. "How would he know?"

Largo came back and sat at the desk again. He fiddled with whatever odds and ends he kept in the top drawer.

"Here's what I want you to do," he said. "Write all this down and sign it, and date it, and give it to me. Then you take some time off. You got two days coming. Take a whole week. Get the hell away from here for a while."

"Write it down? What good will that do?"

"Good to have it," Largo said. "Just in case."

"Shit," Chee said.

"These white men got you screwed," Largo said. "Face it. You file a complaint. What happens? Two belacani cops. One Navajo. The judge is belacani, too. And the Navajo cop is already under suspicion of getting off with the dope. What good does it do you? Go back in the Chuskas. Visit your folks. Get away from here."

"Yeah," Chee said. He was remembering Johnson's hand stinging across his face. He would take time off, but he wouldn't go to the Chuskas. Not yet.

"These drug police, they're hard people," Largo said. "Don't work by the rules. Do what they want to do. I don't know what they're going to do next. Neither do you. Take your time off. This isn't our business. Get out of the way. Don't tell anybody where you're going. Good idea not to."

"Okay," Chee said. "I won't." He walked to the door. "One other thing, Captain. Joseph Musket didn't show up for work at Burnt Water the day John Doe was killed and dumped up on the mesa. Not that day or the day before. I want to go to Santa Fe—to the state pen—and see what I can find out about Musket. Will you set it up?"

"I read your report this morning," Largo said. "You didn't mention that."

"I called Jake West later. After it was written."

"You think Musket is a witch?"

Largo might have smiled very faintly when he asked it. Chee wasn't sure.

"I just don't understand Musket," Chee said. He shrugged.

"I'll get a letter off today," Largo said. "Meanwhile you're on vacation. Get away from here. And remember this drug case is none of our business. It's a federal felony. Where it happened, it's Hopi reservation now, not joint jurisdiction. It doesn't concern Navajo Tribal Police. It doesn't concern Jim Chee." Largo paused and looked directly at Chee. "You hear me?"

"I hear you," Chee said.

Chapter Thirteen

It seemed to chee, under the circumstances, that the wise and courteous thing to do was to make the telephone call from somewhere where there was no risk of Captain Largo's learning of it. He stopped at the Chevron station on the corner where the Tuba City road intersects with Arizona 160. He called the Hopi Cultural Center on Second Mesa.

Yes, Ben Gaines was registered at the motel. Chee let the telephone ring eight or nine times. Then placed the call again. Did they have a woman named Pauling registered? They did. She answered on the second ring.

"This is Officer Chee," Chee said. "You remember. The Navajo Tribal…"

"I remember you," Miss Pauling said.

"I'm trying to get hold of Ben Gaines," Chee said.

"I don't think he's in his room. The car he rented has been gone all day and I haven't seen him."

"When I talked to you, he wanted me to find a vehicle for him," Chee said. "Do you know if that's turned up yet?"

"Not that I've heard about. I don't think so."

"Would you tell Gaines I'm looking into it?"

"Okay," the woman said. "Sure."

Chee hesitated. "Miss Pauling?"

"Yes."

"Have you known Gaines a long time?"

There was a pause. "Three days," Miss Pauling said.

"Did your brother ever mention him?"

Another long pause.

"Look," Miss Pauling said. "I don't know what you're getting at. But no. That wasn't the sort of thing we talked about. I didn't know he had a lawyer."

"You think you should trust Gaines?"

In Chee's ear the telephone made a sound which might have passed for laughter. "You really are a policeman, aren't you," Miss Pauling said. "How do they teach you not to trust anybody?"

"Well," Chee said, "I was…"

"I know he knew my brother," Miss Pauling said. "And he called me and offered to help with everything. And then he came, and arranged to get the body brought back for the funeral, and told me what to do about getting a grave site in a national cemetery, and everything like that. Why shouldn't I trust him?"

"Maybe you should," Chee said.

Chee went home then. He put on his walking boots, got a fresh plastic gallon jug of ice out of the freezer and put it in his old canvas pack with a can of corned beef and a box of crackers. He stowed the bag and his bedroll behind the seat in his pickup and drove back down to the Chevron station. But instead of turning east toward New Mexico, the Chuska Mountains, and his family, he turned west and then southward on Navajo Route 3. Route 3 led past the cluster of Hopi stone huts which are Moenkopi village, into the Hopi Reservation, to Burnt Water Trading Post, and Wepo Wash, and that immensity of empty canyon country where a plane had crashed and a car might, or might not, have been hidden by a thin-faced man named Richard Palanzer.

Chapter Fourteen

The first thing chee learned about the missing vehicle was that someone—and Chee guessed it was the Drug Enforcement Agency—had already searched for it. Chee had worked his way methodically down from the crash site, checking every point where a wheeled vehicle could have left the wash bottom. Since the walls of the wash were virtually vertical and rarely rose less than eighteen to twenty feet, these possible exit points were limited to arroyos which fed the wash. Chee had checked each of them carefully for tire tracks. He found none, but at every arroyo there were signs that he wasn't the first to have looked. Two men had done it, two or three days earlier. They had worked together, not separately—a fact taught by noticing that sometimes the man wearing the almost new boots stepped on the other's tracks, and sometimes it worked the other way.

From the nature of this hunt, Chee surmised that if the truck, or car, or whatever it was, was hidden out here anywhere, it had to be someplace where it couldn't be found from the air. Whoever was looking this hard would certainly have used an airplane. That narrowed things down.

When it became too dark to work, Chee rolled out his bedroll, dined on canned meat, crackers, and cold water. He got his book of U.S. Geological Survey Quadrangle Maps of Arizona out of his truck and turned to page 34, the Burnt Water Quadrangle. The thirty-two-mile-square section was reduced to a twenty-four-inch square, but provided a map scale at least twenty times larger than a road map, and the federal surveyors had marked in every detail of terrain, elevation, and drainage.

Chee sat on the sand with his back against the bumper, using the truck headlights for illumination. He checked each arroyo carefully, coordinating what the map showed him with his memory of the landscape. Behind him, there was a sudden pinging sound—the sound of the pickup engine cooling. From beyond the splash of yellow light formed by the truck lights, an owl screeched out its hunting call, again, and again, and then lapsed into silence. All quiet. And now, faint and far away, somewhere south toward the Hopi Mesas, the purr of an aircraft engine. From Chee's own knowledge, only three of the arroyos that fed Wepo Wash drained areas where a car might easily be hidden. He had already checked the mouth of one and found no tracks. The other two were downstream, both draining into the wash from the northwest, off the slopes of the great eroded hump with the misleading name Big Mountain. Both would lead high enough to get into the big brush and timber country and into the steeper slopes where you could expect to find undercuts and overhangs. In other words, where something as large as a car might be hidden. Tomorrow he would skip down the wash and check them both.

And, he thought, find absolutely nothing. He would find that whoever the dea was using as a tracker had been there first and had also found nothing. There would be nothing to find. A plane had flown in with a load of dope and a car had come to meet it. The dope had been taken out of the plane and the car had driven away with it. Why keep it out here in the Painted Desert? The only answer Chee could think of to that question led him to Joseph Musket. If Musket was making the decisions, keeping it here would make sense. But Musket was a third-level, minor-league police character involved in a very big piece of business. Richard Palanzer would be the man making the decisions—or at least giving the orders. Why wouldn't Palanzer simply haul the lead away to some familiar urban setting?

Or was he underestimating Joseph Musket? Was the young man they called Ironfingers more than he seemed to be? Was there a dimension in this which Chee hadn't guessed at? Chee considered the shooting of John Doe. Was this dead Navajo a loose end to something that Musket had taken the day off to tie up with a bullet? And if so, why leave the body out to be found? And why remove the parts a witch would use to make his corpse powder?

From the darkness beyond the range of the headlights he heard the sound of a dislodged pebble rolling down the wall of the wash. Then the sound of something scurrying. The desert was a nocturnal place—dead in the blinding light of sun but swarming with life in the darkness. Rodents came out of their burrows to feed on seeds, and the reptiles and other predators came out to hunt the rodents and each other. Chee yawned. From somewhere far back on Black Mesa he heard a coyote barking and from the opposite direction the faint purr of an aircraft engine. Chee reexamined the map, looking for anything he might have missed. His vandalized windmill was too new to have been marked, but the arroyo of the shrine was there. As Chee had guessed, it drained the slope of Second Mesa.

The plane was nearer now, its engine much louder. Chee saw its navigation lights low and apparently coming directly toward him. Why? Perhaps simple curiosity about why a car's lights would be burning out here. Chee scrambled to his feet, reached through the driver-side window, and flicked off the lights. A moment later the plane roared over, not a hundred yards off the ground. Chee stood for a moment, looking after it. Then he rerolled his blanket, and picked up his water jug, and walked up the arroyo. He found a place perhaps two hundred yards from the truck, where a cul-de-sac of smooth sand was screened from sight by a heavy growth of chamiso. He scooped out a depression for his hips, built a little mound of sand for his head, and rolled his blanket around this bed. Then he lay looking up at the stars. His uncle would tell him that wherever the car was driven, it was driven there for a reason. If it had been hidden out here, the act was a product of motivation. Chee could not think of what that motivation might be, but it must be there. If Palanzer had done this deed, as it seemed, he surely wouldn't have done it casually, without forethought and planning. He would have run for the city, for familiar territory, for a place where he could become quickly invisible, for a hideaway which he surely would have prepared. He'd want a safe place where he could keep the cargo until he could dispose of it. Hiding the car and the cargo out here made sense only if Musket was heavily involved. Musket must be involved. He would be the logical link between this isolated desert place and the narcotics business. Musket had been in the New Mexico prison on a narcotics conviction. He was a friend of West's son, probably he had visited here, probably he had seen Wepo Wash and remembered its possibilities as a very secret, utterly isolated landing strip. Musket had suggested it. Musket had used his old friendship to get a parolee job at Burnt Water so he could be on the site and complete the arrangements. That's where he had been when he was missing work at the trading post—up the wash, doing whatever had to be done to pave the way. But what in the world would there have been to do? Setting out the lanterns would have taken only a few minutes. Chee was worrying about that question when he drifted off to sleep.

He wasn't sure what awakened him. He was still on his back. Sometime during the night, without being aware of doing it, he had pulled the blanket partly over him. The air was chilly now. The stars overhead had changed. Mars and Jupiter had moved far down toward the western horizon and a late-rising slice of moon hung in the east. The darkness just before the dawn. He lay still, not breathing, straining to hear. He heard nothing. But a sort of memory of sound—a residue of whatever had awakened him—hung in his mind. Whatever it had been, it provoked fear.

He heard the sound of insects somewhere up the arroyo and down in Wepo Wash. Nothing at all nearby. That told him something. Something had quieted the insects. He could see nothing but the gray-green foliage of the chamiso bush, made almost black by the darkness. Then he heard the sighing sound of a breath exhaled. Someone was standing just beyond the bush, not eight feet away from him. Someone? Or something? A horse, perhaps? He'd noticed hoof marks in the wash bottom. And earlier he'd seen horses near the windmill. Horses tend to be noisy breathers. He strained to hear, and heard nothing. A man, most likely, just standing there on the other side of the bush. Why? Someone in the plane obviously had seen his truck. Had they come, or sent someone, to check on him?

Click. From just beyond the bush. Click. Click. Click. Click. A small metallic sound. Chee couldn't identify it. Metal- against metal? And then another exhalation of breath, and the sound of feet moving on the sand. Footsteps moving down the arroyo toward its intersection with the wash. Toward Chee's truck.

Chee rolled off the bedroll, careful not to make a sound. His rifle was on the rack across the back window of the truck. His pistol was in its holster, locked in the glove box. He raised his head cautiously above the bush.

The man was walking slowly away from him. He could only presume it was a man. A large shape, a little darker than the darkness surrounding it, a sense of slow movement. Then the movement stopped. A light flashed on—a yellow beam probing the boulders along the wall of the arroyo. The moving light silhouetted first the legs of whoever held the flashlight, then the right arm and shoulder and the shape of a pistol held, muzzle down, in the right hand. Then the light flicked off again. In the renewed darkness Chee could see only the shape of the yellow light imprinted on his iris. The shape of the man was lost to him. He ducked behind the chamiso again, waiting for vision to return.

When it did, the arroyo was empty.

Chee waited for the first dim light before he made his move for his truck. His first impulse was to abandon it. To slip away in the darkness and make the long walk back to the Burnt Water Trading Post and thereby avoid the risk that the man who had hunted him in the darkness was waiting for him at the truck. But as time ticked away, the urgency and reality of the danger diminished with it. Within an hour, what his instincts had told him of danger had faded along with the adrenaline it had pumped into his blood. What had happened was easy enough to read. Someone interested in recovering the drugs had rented a plane to keep an eye on the area. Chee's lights had been seen. Someone had been sent to find him and learn what he was doing. The pistol in hand was easily explained. The hunter was seeking the unknown in a strange and lonely darkness. He was nervous. He would have seen Chee's rifle on its rear-window rack but he'd have had no way of knowing Chee's pistol was locked away.

Even so, Chee was cautious. He moved along the arroyo rim to a point where he could look down at the truck. He spent a quarter of an hour sitting in the shelter of the rocks there, watching for any sign of movement. All he saw was a burrowing owl returning from its nocturnal hunt to its hole in the bank across from him. The owl scouted the truck and the area around it. If it saw anything dangerous, it showed no sign of it until it saw Chee. Then it shied violently away. That was enough for Jim Chee. He got up and walked to the truck.

With his pistol back on his belt, Chee checked the area around the arroyo mouth to confirm what the burrowing owl had told him. Nothing human was watching the area. Then he took a look at the tracks his hunter had left. The man wore boots with worn waffle soles, the same soles he'd noticed at the site of the crash. Someone in these same boots had placed the fatal lanterns. He'd approached the truck from downwash, left tracks all around it, and then walked almost a half mile up the arroyo and back again. Finally he'd left the way he had come.

Chee spent the rest of the morning examining the two downwash arroyos which the map suggested might have offered hiding places for a car. Nothing that left tire tracks had gone up either of them. He sat in the truck cab, finished the last of his crackers with the last of his water, and thought it all through again. Then he went back to both arroyos, walked a half mile up from their mouths, and made an intensive hands-and-knees spot check of likely places. Nothing. That eliminated the possibility that Palanzer, or Musket, or whoever was driving, had done a thorough and meticulous job of wiping out tracks at the turn-in point. With that out of the way, he drove back up to the arroyo where he'd spent the night.

Once it had been his favorite prospect. But he'd written it off, just as he had first written off the downstream arroyos when he'd found no trace of tracks at the mouth. Now he intended to be absolutely sure, and when he was finished, he would be equally sure that no car was hidden up Wepo Wash. Chee skipped the first hundred yards, which he'd already studied fruitlessly. Upstream the arroyo had cut through an extensive bed of hard-packed caliche. Here there were only occasional pockets of sand and Chee inspected those which couldn't have been avoided by a wheeled vehicle. He took his time. He found lizard tracks, and the trail left by a rattlesnake, the tiny paw marks of kangaroo rats, the marks left by birds and a variety of rodents. No tire marks. At a broad expanse of packed sand another hundred yards upstream, he made the same sort of check. Here he found a scratch curving across the sandy surface. Parallel with it were other lines, almost invisible. Chee squatted on his heels, looking. What had caused this? A porcupine might have dragged his tail across here. But this wasn't porcupine country. It would starve a porcupine.

Chee reached behind him, broke a limb off a growth of rabbit bush. He swept it across the sand. It produced a half-dozen scratches and a pattern of tiny parallel furrows. Chee examined them. Given a week for wind and gravity to soften their edges, these furrows would look much like what he had found. The sand had been swept.

Chee walked rapidly up-arroyo with hardly a glance at its bed. Sooner or later whoever had done the sweeping would have run out of time, or of patience, and decided enough had been done. About a thousand yards later, he found where that had happened.

He noticed the broom first. It was dried now, its color changed from its normal gray-green to gray-white, which made it instantly visible in the growth of healthy brush where it had been thrown. Chee salvaged it, inspected it, and confirmed that it had been used as a broom, then he tossed it away.

He found tire tracks at the next stretch of sand. They were faint, but they were unmistakable. Chee dropped to his hands and knees and studied the pattern of marks. He matched them in his memory with the tracks he had seen at the site of the wreckage. They were the same tread pattern.

Chee rocked back on his heels, pushed his hat off his forehead, and wiped away the sweat. He had found the invisible car. Unless it could fly, it was somewhere up this arroyo.

Chapter Fifteen

After that there was no need for tracking. Chee paused only to check the few places where small gullies drained into the arroyo, places which might conceivably provide an exit route. He walked steadily up-arroyo toward the Black Mesa. The arroyo wound through increasingly rough country, its bed narrowing, becoming increasingly rocky and brush-choked. At places now the vehicle had left a trail of broken branches. Late in the afternoon, Chee heard the airplane again, droning miles away over the place where he had left his truck parked. When it approached up the arroyo he stood out of sight under an overhang of brush until it disappeared. It was just sundown when he found the vehicle, and then he almost walked past it. He was tired. He was thirsty. He was thinking that within another hour it would be too dark to see. He saw not the vehicle itself but the broken brush it had left in its wake. Its driver had turned it up a narrow gully that fed the arroyo, forced it into a tangle of mountain mahogany and salt brush, and closed the growth as well as possible behind it.

It was a dark-green gmc carryall, apparently new. In a little while Chee would find out if it was loaded with cocaine, or perhaps with bales of currency intended to pay for cocaine. But there was no hurry. He took a moment to think. Then he scouted the area carefully, looking for tracks. If he could find the tracks of waffle soles and of cowboy boots, it would confirm what he already knew—that those men had driven away in the car he'd heard leaving. The area around the carryall was a mat of leaves and twigs, and the gully bottom was granular decomposed granite where it wasn't solid rock. Impossible for tracking. Chee found scuff marks but nothing he could identify.

The carryall was locked, its windows rolled all the way up, and totally fogged with interior moisture. With a sealed vehicle, some such fogging was usual, even in this arid climate, but these windows were opaque. There must be some source of moisture locked inside. Chee sat on a boulder and considered what to do.

Not only wasn't this his case; he'd been specifically warned away from it by the people whose case it was. Not only had he been warned off by the feds; Captain Largo had personally and specifically ordered him to keep clear of it. If he broke into the carryall, he'd be tampering with evidence.

Chee took out a cigaret, lit it, and exhaled a plume of smoke. The sun was down now, reflecting from a cloud formation over the desert to the south. It added a reddish tint to the light. To the northwest, a thundercloud that had been building over the Coconino Rim had reached the extreme altitude where its boiling upcurrents could no longer overcome the bitter cold and the thinness of the air. Its top had flattened and been spread by stratospheric winds into a vast fan of ice crystals. The sunset striped the cloud in three color zones. The top several thousand feet were dazzling white—still reflecting the direct sunlight and forming a blinding contrast against the dark-blue sky. Lower, the cloud mass was illuminated by reflected light. It was a thousand shades of pink, rose, even salmon. And below that, where not even reflected light could reach, the color ranged from dirty gray to blue-black. There, lightning flickered. In the Hopi villages the people were calling the clouds. It was already raining on the Coconino Rim. And the storm was moving eastward, as summer storms always did. With any luck, rain would be falling here within two hours. Just a little rain—just a shower—would wipe out tracks in this sandy country. But Chee was desert-bred. He never really believed rain would fall.

He took a long drag off the cigaret, savored the taste of the smoke, exhaled it slowly through his nostrils, watched the blue haze dissipate. He was thinking of Chee in the grand jury room, under oath, the Assistant U.S. District Attorney staring at him. "Officer Chee, I want to remind you of the penalty for perjury; for lying under oath. Now I want to ask you directly: Did you, or did you not, locate the gmc carryall in which…" Chee switched from that thought to another. The memory of Johnson smiling at him, Johnson's hand stinging across his face, Johnson's voice, threatening. Anger returned, and shame. He inhaled another lungful of smoke, putting anger aside. Anger was beside the point. The point was the puzzle. Here before his eyes was another piece of it. Chee stubbed out the cigaret. He put the remains carefully in his pocket.

Jimmying the wing window would have been easy with a screwdriver. With Chee's knife it took longer. Even shaded as the vehicle was, the day's heat had built up inside, and when the leverage of the steel blade broke the seal, pressurized air escaped with a sighing sound. The odor surprised him. It was a strong chemical smell. The heavy, sickish smell of disinfectant. Chee slid his hand through the wing, flicked up the lock, and opened the door.

Richard Palanzer was sitting on the back seat. Chee recognized him instantly from the photograph Cowboy had shown him. He was a smallish white man, with rumpled iron-gray hair, close-set eyes, and a narrow bony face over which death and desiccation had drawn the skin tight. He was wearing a gray nylon jacket, a white shirt, and cowboy boots. He leaned stiffly against the corner of the back seat, staring blindly at the side window.

Chee looked at him through the open door, engulfed by the escaping stench of disinfectant. The smell was Lysol, Chee guessed. Lysol fog and death. Chee's stomach felt queasy. He controlled it. There was something funny about the man's left eye, an odd sort of distortion. Chee eased himself into the front seat, careful of what he touched. At close range he could see the man's left contact lens had slipped down below the pupil. Apparently he had been shot where he sat. On the left side, from just above the waist, both jacket and trousers were black with dried blood, and the same blackness caked the seat and the floor mat.

Chee searched the carryall, careful not to smudge old fingerprints or to leave new ones. The glove box was unlocked. It contained an operating manual and the rental papers from the Hertz office at Phoenix International Airport. The vehicle had been rented to Jansen. Cigaret butts in the ashtray. Nothing else. No bundles of hundred-dollar bills. No great canvas sacks filled with dope. Nothing except the corpse of Richard Palanzer.

Chee rolled the side vent shut as tightly as he could, reset the door lock and slammed it shut. The vehicle was left exactly as he had found it. A careful cop would notice the vent had been forced, but maybe there wouldn't be a careful cop on the job. Maybe there wouldn't be any reason for suspicion. Or maybe there would be. Either way, there was nothing he could do about it. And if the pattern continued, he could count on the feds screwing things up.

He walked back down the arroyo in the thickening darkness. He was tired. He was nauseated. He was sick of death. He wished he knew a lot more than he did about Joseph Musket. Now he was all there was left. Ironfingers alive, and four men dead, and a fortune in narcotics missing.

"Ironfingers, where are you?" Chee said.

Chapter Sixteen

The man who answered the telephone at the Coconino County Sheriffs Office in Flagstaff said wait a minute and he'd check. The minute stretched into three or four. And then the man reported that Deputy Sheriff Albert Dashee was supposed to be en route to Moenkopi—which was good news for Jim Chee since Moenkopi was only a couple of miles from the telephone booth he was calling from, at the Tuba City Chevron station. He climbed into his pickup truck, and rolled down U.S. 160 to the intersection of Navajo 3. He pulled off at a place from which he could look down into the patchy Hopi cornfields along the bottom of Moenkopi Wash and onto the little red stone villages, and at every possible route Cowboy Dashee could take if he was going anywhere near Moenkopi. Chee turned off the ignition, and waited. While he waited he rehearsed what he would say to Cowboy, and how he would say it.

Cowboy's white patrol car drove by, stopped, backed up, stopped again beside Chee's truck.

"Hey, man," Cowboy said. "I thought you were on vacation."

"That was yesterday," Chee said. "Today I'm wondering if you've caught your windmill vandal yet."

"One of the Gishis," Cowboy said. "I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. Trouble is, all Navajos look alike, so we don't know who to arrest."

"In other words, no luck. No progress," Chee said.

Cowboy turned off his ignition, lit a cigaret, relaxed. "Tell you the truth," he said, "I been sort of laying back on that one. Wanted to see how you could do with not much help."

"Or maybe not any help?"

Cowboy laughed. He shook his head. "Nobody's ever going to catch that son of a bitch," he said. "How you going to catch him? No way."

"How about your big drug business?" Chee said. "Doing any good?"

"Nothing," Cowboy said. "Not that I know of, anyway. But that's a biggy. The sheriff and the undersheriff, they're handling that one themselves. Too big a deal for just a deputy."

"They take you off of it?"

"Oh, no," Cowboy said. "Sheriff had me in yesterday, wanting me to tell him where they had the stuff hid. He figured I'm Hopi, and it happened on the Hopi Reservation, so I gotta know."

"If it happened in Alaska, he'd ask an Eskimo," Chee said.

"Yeah," Cowboy said. "I just told him you probably got off with it. Reminded him you were out there when it happened, had your truck and all. They ought to look in the back of your truck."

The conversation was going approximately in the direction Chee wanted to take it. He adjusted it slightly.

"I think they already have," he said. "I didn't tell you about the dea people talking to me. They had about the same idea."

Cowboy looked startled. "Hell they did," he said. "Seriously?"

"Sounded serious," Chee said. "Serious enough so Largo reminded me about Navajo Police not having jurisdiction. Warned me to stay completely away from it."

"He don't want you distracted from our windmill," Cowboy said. "The crime of the century."

"Trouble is, I think I can guess where they put that car the feds are looking for."

Cowboy looked at him. "Oh, yeah?"

"It's up one of those arroyos. If it's out there at all, that's where it is."

"No it ain't," Cowboy said. "The sheriff was talking about that. The dea and the fbi had that idea, too. They checked them all."

Chee laughed.

"I know what you mean," Cowboy said. "But I think they did a pretty good job this time. Looked on the ground, and flew up and down 'em in an airplane."

"If you were hiding a car, you'd hide it where an airplane couldn't see it. Under an overhang. Under a tree. Cover it up with brush."

"Sure," Cowboy said. He was looking at Chee thoughtfully, his elbow propped on the sill of the car window, chin resting on the heel of his hand. "What makes you think you could find it?"

"Look here," he said, motioning to Cowboy. He dug his Geological Survey map book out from beneath the seat.

Cowboy climbed out of his patrol car and climbed into Chee's truck. "I need me a book of those," he said. "But the sheriff would be too tight to pay for 'em."

"You're hiding a car," Chee said. "Okay. God knows why, but you're hiding it. And you know the law's going to be looking for it. The law has airplanes, helicopters, all that. So you've got to get it someplace where it can't be seen from the air."

Cowboy nodded.

"So what do you have?" Chee ran his finger down the crooked blue line which marked Wepo Wash on the map. "He drove down the wash. No tracks going up. Personally, I'd bet he drove right down here to where it goes under the highway bridge, and then drove off to Los Angeles. But the feds don't think so, and the feds have got some way of knowing things they aren't telling us Indians about. So maybe he did hide his car. So where did he hide it? It's not in the wash. I'd have seen it. Maybe you'd have seen it." Chee made a doubtful face. "Maybe even the feds would have seen it. So it's not in the wash. And it's somewhere between where the plane crashed and the highway. Gives you twenty-five miles or so. And it gives you three arroyos which are cut back into country where you've got enough brush and trees and overhang so you could hide a car." He pointed out the three, and glanced at Cowboy.

Cowboy was interested. He leaned over the map, studying it.

"You agree?"

"Yeah," Cowboy said slowly. "Those other ones don't go anywhere."

"These two lead back into the Big Mountain Mesa," Chee said. "This one leads into Black Mesa. In fact, it leads back up toward Kisigi Spring. Back up toward where we found John Doe's body dumped."

Cowboy was studying the map. "Yeah," he said.

"So if Largo hadn't promised to break my arm and fire me if I didn't stay away from this, that's where I'd be looking."

"Trouble is, they already looked," Cowboy said. But he didn't sound convinced.

"I can see it. They drive along the wash and when they get to an arroyo, somebody gets out and looks around for tire tracks. They don't find any, so he climbs back in and drives along to the next one. Right?"

"Yeah," Cowboy said.

"So if you're going to hide the car, what do you do? You think that if you leave tracks they're going to just follow them and find you. So you turn up the arroyo, and you get out, and you take your shirttail or something, and you brush out your tracks for a little ways."

Cowboy was looking at Chee.

"I don't know how hard the feds looked," Cowboy said. "Sometimes they're not the smartest bastards in the world."

"Look," Chee said. "If by chance that car does happen to be hidden out in one of those arroyos, you damn sure better keep quiet about this. Largo'd fire my ass. He was sore. He said I wasn't going to get a second warning."

"Hell," Cowboy said. "He wouldn't fire you."

"I mean it," Chee said. "Leave me out of it."

"Hell," Cowboy said. "I'm like you. That car's long gone by now."

It was time to change the subject. "You got any windmill ideas for me?" Chee asked.

"Nothing new," Cowboy said. "What you've got to do is convince Largo that there's no way to protect that windmill short of putting three shifts of guards on it." He laughed. "That, or getting a transfer back to Crownpoint."

Chee turned on the ignition. "Well, I better get moving."

Cowboy opened the door, started to get out, stopped. "Jim," he said. "You already found that car?"

Chee produced a chuckle. "You heard what I said. Largo said keep away from that case."

Cowboy climbed out and closed the door behind him. He leaned on the sill, looking in at Chee. "And you wouldn't do nothing that the captain told you not to?"

"I'm serious, Cowboy. The dea climbed all over Largo. They think I was out there that night to meet the plane. They think I know where that dope shipment is. I'm not kidding you. It's absolutely goddamn none of my business. I'm staying away from it."

Cowboy climbed into his patrol car, started the engine. He looked back at Chee. "What size boots you wear?"

Chee frowned. "Tens."

"Tell you what I'll do," Cowboy said. "If I see any size ten footprints up that arroyo, I'll just brush 'em out!"

Chapter Seventee

Black mesa is neither black nor a mesa. It is far too large for that definition—a vast, broken plateau about the size and shape of Connecticut. It is virtually roadless, almost waterless, and uninhabited except for an isolated scattering of summer herding camps. It rises out of the Painted Desert more than seven thousand feet. A dozen major dry washes and a thousand nameless arroyos drain away runoff from its bitter winters and the brief but torrential "male rains" of the summer thunderstorm season. It takes its name from the seams of coal exposed in its towering cliffs, but its colors are the grays and greens of sage, rabbit brush, juniper, cactus, grama and bunch grass, and the dark green of creosote brush, mesquite, piñon, and (in the few places where springs flow) pine and spruce. It is a lonely place even in grazing season and has always been territory favored by the Holy People of the Navajo and the kachinas and guarding spirits of the Hopis. Masaw, the bloody-faced custodian of the Fourth World of the Hopis, specifically instructed various clans of the Peaceful People to return there when they completed their epic migrations and to live on the three mesas which extend like great gnarled fingers from Black Mesa's southern ramparts. Its craggy cliffs are the eagle-collection grounds of the Hopi Flute, Side Corn, Drift Sand, Snake, and Water clans. It is dotted with shrines and holy places. For Chee's people it was an integral part of Dinetah, where Changing Woman taught the Dinee they must live in the beauty of the Way she and the Holy People taught them.

Chee was familiar with only a little of the eastern rim of this sprawling highland. As a boy, he had been taken westward by Hosteen Nakai from Many Farms into the Blue Gap country to collect herbs and minerals at the sacred places for the Mountain Way ceremony. Once they had gone all the way into Dzilidushzhinih Peaks, the home of Talking God himself, to collect materials for Hosteen Nakai's jish, the bundle of holy things a shaman must have to perfect his curing rituals. But Dzilidushzhinih was far to the east. The camp of Fannie Musket, the mother of Joseph Musket, was near the southern edge of the plateau, somewhere beyond the end of the trail that wandered southward from the Cottonwood day school toward Balakai Point. It was new country to Chee, without landmarks that meant anything to him, and he'd stopped at the trading post at Cottonwood to make sure the directions he'd gotten earlier made sense. The skinny white woman running the place had penciled him a map on the page of a Big Chief writing tablet. "If you stay on that track that leads past Balakai arroyo you can't miss it," the woman said. "And you can't get off the track or you'll tear the bottom outa your truck." She laughed. "Matter of fact, if you're not careful you tear it out even if you stay on the track." On his way out Chee noticed "Fannie Musket" scrawled in chalk on the red paint of a new fifty-gallon oil drum which sat on the porch beside the front door. He went back in.

"This barrel belong to the Muskets?"

"Hey," the woman said. "That's a good idea. You want to haul that out for them? They're dried up out there and they're hauling water and they had me get 'em another drum."

"Sure," Chee said. He loaded it into the back of his pickup, rolled the truck to the overhead tank that held the post's water supply, rinsed out the drum, and filled it.

"Tell Fannie I put the barrel on her pawn ticket," the woman said. "I'll put the water on there, too."

"I'll get the water," Chee said.

"Two dollars," the woman said. She shook her head. "If it don't rain we ain't going to have any to sell."

Fannie Musket was glad to get the water. She helped Chee rig the block and tackle to lift the barrel onto a plank platform where two other such barrels sat. One was empty and when Chee tapped his knuckles against the other, the sound suggested no more than ten gallons left.

"Getting hard to live out here," Mrs. Musket said. "Seems like it don't rain anymore." She glanced up at the sky, which was a dark, clear blue with late summer's usual scattering of puffy clouds building up here and there. By midafternoon they would have built up to a vain hope of a thundershower. By dark, both clouds and hope would have dissipated.

Chee and Mrs. Musket had introduced themselves, by family, by kinship, and by clan. (She was Standing Rock, born for the Mud Clan.) He had told Mrs. Musket that he hoped she would talk to him about her son.

"You are hunting for him," she said. Navajo is a language which loads its meanings into its verbs. She used the word which means "to stalk," as a hunted animal, and not the form which means "to search for," as for someone lost. The tone was as accusing as the word.

Chee changed the verb. "I search for him," Chee said. "But I know I will not find him here. I am told he is a smart man. He would not come here while we search for him, and even if he had, I would not ask his mother to tell me where to find him. I just want to learn what kind of a man he is."

"He is my son," Mrs. Musket said.

"Did he come home after they let him out of the prison? Before he went to work at Burnt Water?"

"He came home. He wanted to have an Enemy Way done for him. He went to see Tallman Begay and hired Hosteen Begay to be the singer for it. And then after the sing, he went to Burnt Water."

"It was the right thing to do," Chee said. It was exactly what he would have done himself. Purified himself from prison, and all the hostile, alien ways the prison represented. The character of Joseph Musket took on a new dimension.

"Why do you come to ask me questions this time? Before, another policeman came."

"That's because the police station at Chinle is closer," Chee explained. "A policeman came from there to save money and time."

"Then why do you come now?"

"Because there are many odd things about that burglary," Chee said. "Many questions I can't answer. I am curious."

"Do you know my son did not steal that pawn?"

"I don't know who stole it," Chee said.

"I know he didn't. Do you know why? Because he had money!" Mrs. Musket said it triumphantly. The ultimate proof.

"There are people among the belacani who steal even when they don't need to steal," Chee said.

Mrs. Musket's expression was skeptical. The concept was totally foreign to her.

"He had hundred-dollar bills," she said. "Many of them." She held up six fingers. "And other money in his purse. Twenty-dollar bills." She looked at Chee quizzically, waiting for him to concede that no one with hundred-dollar bills could be suspected of stealing. Certainly no Navajo would be likely to.

"He had this money when he first got here?"

Mrs. Musket nodded. "He wrote us that he was coming and my husband took the pickup truck on the day and drove out to Window Rock to meet the bus. He had all that money then."

Chee was trying to remember what prisoners were given when they left the penitentiary. Twenty dollars, he thought. That and whatever they might have in the canteen fund. A maximum of another fifty dollars, he suspected.

"It doesn't sound like he would steal the jewelry if he had all that money," Chee said. "But where did he go? Why doesn't he talk to us and tell us he didn't steal it?"

Mrs. Musket wasn't going to answer that question. Not directly at least. Finally she said, "They put him in prison once."

"Why was that?"

"He made bad friends," Mrs. Musket said.

Chee asked for a drink of water, got it, drank it, changed the subject. They talked of desperate difficulties of sheepherding in a drought. All her sons-in-law were out with their herds, as was her husband, and now they had to drive them so far for grass and water that they could not return to their hogans at night. The women took them food. And already they had lost eleven lambs and even some of the ewes were dying. With Chee guiding it, the conversation gradually edged back to Joseph Musket. He had always been good with sheep. A careful hand with the shears, adept at castration. Reliable. A good boy. Even when he had been thrown from his horse and smashed his fingers and had to wear metal splints for so long, he could still shear faster than most young men. And he had told her that when he finished working at Burnt Water—by the end of summer—he would have plenty of money to buy his own herd. A big herd. He planned to buy two hundred ewes. But first he would go to all the squaw dances, find himself a young woman to marry. Someone whose family had plenty of grazing rights.

"He said that after he worked for the trading post a little while he didn't want to have anything else to do with the white men after that," Mrs. Musket said. "He said he only had one white man who had ever been a friend, and that all the others just got you in trouble."

"Did he say who the friend was?"

"It was a boy he knew when he went to the Cottonwood school," Mrs. Musket said. "I can't remember what he called him."

"Was it West?" Chee asked.

"West," Mrs. Musket said. "I think so."

"Does he have any other friends? Navajo friends?"

Mrs. Musket examined Chee thoughtfully. "Just some young men around here," she said vaguely. "Maybe some friends he made when he was away with the white people. I don't think so."

Chee could think of nothing more to ask. Not with any hope of getting an answer. He gave Mrs. Musket the message about the cost of the water barrel being added to her pawn ticket and climbed back in the truck.

Mrs. Musket stood in the yard of the hogan, watching him. Her hands clasped together at her waist, twisting nervously.

"If you find him," she said, "tell him to come home."

Chapter Eighteen

Chee spent the next day as Largo had arranged, a long way from Tuba City and Wepo Wash. He drove fifty miles north toward the Utah border to see a woman named Mary Joe Natonabah about her complaint that her grazing right on Twenty-nine Mile Wash was being trespassed by somebody else's sheep. She identified the trespasser as an old man called Largewhiskers Begay, who had his camp in the Yondots Mountains. That took Chee to Cedar Ridge Trading Post and down the horrible dirt road which leads westward toward the Colorado River gorge. He found the Begay camp, but not Largewhiskers, who had gone to Cameron to see about something or other. The only person at the camp was a surly young man with his arm in a cast, who identified himself as the son-in-law of Large-whiskers Begay. Chee told this young man of the Natonabah complaint, warned him of the consequences of violating another person's grazing right, and told him to tell Largewhiskers he'd be back one day to check it all out. By then it was noon. Chee's next job took him to Nipple Butte, where a man named Ashie McDonald had reportedly beaten up his cousin. Chee found the camp but not Ashie McDonald. McDonald's mother-in-law reported that he'd got a ride down to Interstate 40 and was hitchhiking into Gallup to visit some relatives. The mother-in-law claimed to know nothing of any beating, any fight, any cousin. By then it was a little after 4:40 p.m. Chee was now sixty miles as the raven flew, ninety miles by unpaved back roads, or 130 miles via the paved highway from his trailer at Tuba City. He took the more direct dirt route. It wandered northeast across the Painted Desert, past New-berry Mesa, and Garces Mesa, and Blue Point, and Padilla Mesa. The country was dead with drought, no sign of sheep, no trace of green. He was off duty now, and he drove slowly, thinking what he would do. This route would take him through the Hopi villages of Oraibi, Hotevilla, and Bacobi, and near the Hopi Cultural Center. He would stop at the café there for his supper. He would learn if Ben Gaines was still in the motel, or the Pauling woman. If Gaines was there, Chee would see what he could learn from him. Maybe he would tell Gaines where to find the car. Most likely he wouldn't. Cowboy had two days to get there and find it, but maybe something had interfered. Most likely he wouldn't risk telling Gaines yet. He'd tell him only enough to determine if he could learn anything from the lawyer.

The parking area at the Hopi Cultural Center held about a dozen vehicles—more than usual, Chee guessed, because the upcoming ceremonials were beginning to draw tourists. Or was it that a missing cocaine shipment was beginning to draw in the hunters? Before he parked, Chee circled the motel, looking for the car Gaines had been driving. He didn't find it.

In the restaurant he took a table beside one of the west windows, ordered a bowl of what the menu called Hopi Stew, and coffee. The Hopi girl who served it was maybe twenty, and pretty, with her hair cut in the short bangs that old-fashioned Hopis wore. She had dazzled the group of tourists at the next table with her smile. With Chee, she was strictly business. The Hopi dealing with the Navajo. Chee sipped his coffee, and studied the other dining room patrons, and thought of the nature of the drought, and where Ironfingers Musket might be, and of ethnic antagonisms. This one was part abstraction, built into the Hopi legends of warfare: The enemy killed by the Hopi Twin War Gods were Navajo, as the enemy killed by the Navajo Holy People were Utes, or Kiowas, or Taos Indians. But the long struggle over the Joint Use Reservation lands lent a sort of reality to the abstraction in the minds of some. Now, at last, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled, and the Hopis had won, and 9,000 Navajos were losing the only homes their families could remember. And the anger lingered, even among the winners. The windowpane beside him reflected red. The sun had gone down behind the San Francisco Peaks and turned the bottom of the clouds that hung over it a luminous salmon-pink. The mountain, too, was contested territory. For the Hopis, it was Mount Sinai itself—the home of the kachina spirits from August until February, when they left this world and returned underground where the spirits live. For Chee's people it was also sacred. It was Evening Twilight Mountain, one of the four mountains First Man had built to mark the corners of Dinetah. It was the Mountain of the West, the home of the great yei spirit, Abalone Girl, and the place where the Sacred Bear of Navajo legend had been so critically wounded by the Bow People that the ritual songs described him as being "fuzzy with arrows"—verbal imagery which had caused Chee as a child to think of the spirit as looking like a gigantic porcupine. The mountain now was outlined blue-black against a gaudy red horizon and the beauty of it lifted Chee's mood.

"Mr. Chee."

Miss Pauling was standing beside his table.

Chee stood.

"No. Don't get up. I wanted to talk to you."

"Why don't you join me?" Chee said.

"Thank you," she said. She looked tired and worried. It would be better, Chee thought, if she looked frightened. She shouldn't be here. She should have gone home. He signaled for the waitress. "I can recommend the stew," he said.

"Have you seen Mr. Gaines?" she asked.

"No," Chee said. "I haven't tried his room, but I didn't see his car."

"He's not here," she said. "He's been gone since yesterday morning."

"Did he say where he was going?" Chee asked. "Or when he'd be back?"

"Nothing," Miss Pauling said.

The waitress came. Miss Pauling ordered stew. The reflection from the fiery sunset turned her face red, but it looked lined and old.

"You should go home," Chee said. "Nothing you can do here."

"I want to find out who killed him," she said.

"You'll find out. Sooner or later the dea, or the fbi, they'll catch them."

"Do you think so?" Miss Pauling asked. The tone suggested she doubted it.

So did Chee. "Well, probably not," he said.

"I want you to help me find out," she said. "Just whatever you can tell me. Like things that the police know that don't get into the newspapers. Do they have any suspects? Surely they must. Who do they suspect?"

Chee shrugged. "At one time they suspected a man named Palanzer. Richard Palanzer. I think he was one of the people the dope was being delivered to."

"Richard Palanzer," Miss Pauling said, as if she was memorizing it.

"However," Chee said. He stopped. He'd been out of touch all day. Had Cowboy found the car? Was it known that Palanzer was no longer a suspect? Almost certainly.

"He was flying in narcotics, then," Miss Pauling said. "Is that what they think?"

"Seems to be," Chee said.

"And Palanzer was supposed to pay for it, and instead he killed him. Was that the way it went? Who is this Palanzer? Where does he live? I know there are times when the police know who did something but they can't find the evidence to prove it. I'd just like to know who did it."

"Why?" Chee asked. He wanted to know, too, because he was curious. But that wasn't her reason.

"Because I loved him," she said. "That's the trouble. I really loved him."

The stew arrived. Miss Pauling stirred it absently. "There was no reason for killing him," she said, watching the spoon. "They could have just pointed a gun at him and he would have given it to them with no trouble at all. He would have just thought it was funny."

"I guess they didn't know that," Chee said.

"He was always such a happy boy," she said.

"Everything was fun for him. I'm five years older and when our mother left… You know how it is—I sort of took care of him until Dad remarried."

Chee said nothing. He was wondering why it was so important for her to know who was to blame. There was a puzzle here to be solved, but after that, what did it matter?

"There was no reason to kill him," she said. "And whoever did it is going to suffer for it." She said it with no particular emphasis, still moving the spoon mechanically through the well-stirred stew. "They're not going to kill him and just walk away from it."

"But sometimes they do," Chee said. "That's the way it is."

"No," she said. The tone was suddenly vehement. "They won't get away with it. You understand that?"

"Not exactly," Chee said.

"Do you understand 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'?"

"I've heard it," Chee said.

"Don't you believe in justice? Don't you believe that things need to be evened up?"

Chee shrugged. "Why not?" he said. As a matter of fact, the concept seemed as strange to him as the idea that someone with money would steal had seemed to Mrs. Musket. Someone who violated basic rules of behavior and harmed you was, by Navajo definition, "out of control." The "dark wind" had entered him and destroyed his judgment. One avoided such persons, and worried about them, and was pleased if they were cured of this temporary insanity and returned again to hozro. But to Chee's Navajo mind, the idea of punishing them would be as insane as the original act. He understood it was a common attitude in the white culture, but he'd never before encountered it so directly.

"That's really what I want to talk to you about," Miss Pauling said. "If this Palanzer did it, I want to know it and I want to know where to find him. If somebody else was responsible, I want to know that." She paused. "I can pay you."

Chee looked doubtful.

"I know you say you're not working on this. But you're the one who found out how he was killed. And you're the only one I know."

"I tell you what I'll do," Chee said. "You go home. If I can find out whether Palanzer is the one, I'll call you and tell you. And then if I can find out where you could look for Palanzer, I'll let you know that, too."

"That's all I can ask," she said.

"Then you'll go home?"

"Gaines has the tickets," she said. "It was all so sudden. He called me at work, and told me about the crash and arranged to meet me. And he said he was Robert's lawyer and we should fly right out and see about it. So he took me home and I put some things in a bag and we went right out to the airport and all the money I have is just what was in my purse."

"You have a credit card?" Chee asked. She nodded. "Use that. I'll get you a ride to Flagstaff."

Two men at a table near the cash register had been watching them. One was about thirty—a big man with long blond hair and small eyes under bushy blond eyebrows. The other, much older, had thin white hair and a suntanned face. His pin-striped three-piece suit looked out of place on Second Mesa.

"Do you know who Gaines is?" Chee asked.

"You mean besides being my brother's attorney? Well, I guess from what I hear that he must be somebody involved in this drug business. I guess that's the real reason he wanted me along." She chuckled, without humor. "To make him legitimate in dealing with people. Is that right?"

"So it would seem," Chee said.

Cowboy Dashee came through the walkway, paused a moment by the cash register, spotted Chee, and came over.

"Saw you parked out there," he said.

"This is Deputy Sheriff Albert Dashee," Chee said. "Miss Pauling is the sister of the pilot of that plane."

Cowboy nodded. "Everybody calls me Cowboy," he said. He pulled a chair over from an adjoining table and sat down.

"Why don't you pull up a chair and join us?" Chee asked.

"You knpw this guy's a Navajo?" he asked Miss Pauling. "Sometimes he tries to pass himself off as one of us."

Miss Pauling managed a smile.

"What's new?" Chee asked.

"You talked to your office this afternoon?"

"No," Chee said.

"You haven't heard about finding the car, or turning up the necklace?"

"Necklace?"

"From the Burnt Water burglary. Big squash blossom job. Girl over at Mexican Water pawned it."

"Where'd she get it?"

"Who else?" Cowboy said. "Joseph Musket. Old Ironfingers playing Romeo." Cowboy turned to Miss Pauling. "Shop talk," he said. "Mr. Chee and I have been worrying about this burglary and now a piece of the loot finally turned up."

"When?" Chee asked. "How'd it happen?"

"She just pawned it yesterday," Cowboy said. "Said she met this guy at a squaw dance over there somewhere, and he wanted to…" Cowboy flushed slightly, glanced at Miss Pauling. "Anyway, he got romantic and he gave her the necklace."

"And it was Ironfingers."

"That's what she said his name was." Cowboy grinned at Chee. "I notice with intense surprise that you're not interested in the car."

"You said you found it?"

"That's right," Cowboy said. "Just followed a sort of hunch I had. Followed up an arroyo out there and believe it or not, there it was—hidden up under some bushes."

"Good for you," Chee said.

"I'll tell you what's good for me," Cowboy said. "I jimmied my way into it through the vent on the right front window, pried it right open."

"That's the best way to get in," Chee said.

"I thought you'd say that," Cowboy said.

Miss Pauling was watching them curiously.

Chee turned to her.

"You remember me telling you that the plane crash and the narcotics case wasn't my business? Well, it's in the jurisdiction of Mr. Dashee's sheriff's department. Coconino County. And now Cowboy has found that car that everyone's been wondering about. The one that drove away from the plane crash."

"Oh," she said. "Can you tell us about it?"

Cowboy looked slightly doubtful. He glanced at Chee again. "Well," he said. "I guess so. Not much to tell, really. Green gmc carryall. Somebody drove it way up that arroyo and jammed it under the brush where it couldn't be seen. Been rented at Phoenix to that guy Jansen—the one that was found out there by the plane crash. Bloodstains on the back seat. Nothing in it. I think the fbi's out there now, checking it for fingerprints and so forth."

"Nothing in it?" Chee said. He hoped he'd kept the surprise out of his voice. Cowboy looked at him.

"Few butts in the ashtray. Rental papers in the glove box. Owner's manual. No big bundles labeled cocaine. Nothing like that. I guess we'll be hunting around there tomorrow."

Chee became aware that Miss Pauling was staring at him.

"You all right?" she asked.

"I'm fine," Chee said.

"Funny thing," Cowboy said. "The inside had a funny smell. Like disinfectant. I wonder why that would be."

"Beats me," Chee said.

Chee considered it as he drove back to Tuba City. Obviously the body had been gone when Cowboy found the vehicle. Obviously someone had come and taken it. Why? Perhaps because whoever had seen him parked at the arroyo mouth had become nervous and decided the body might be found. But why preserve it in the first place? And who had moved it? Joseph Musket, it would seem. But tonight he felt very disappointed in Ironfingers. Disillusioned. Musket should be smarter than the run-of-the-mill thief. In his mind Chee had built him up to be much too clever to do the same thing that always trips up small-time thieves. And the facts as Chee knew them seemed to make him too smart to give a girl that stolen necklace. Someone seemed to have thought so. Someone had given him something close to seven hundred dollars—probably, Chee guessed, an even thousand—to do something when he left the prison at Santa Fe. And whatever it was, it involved working until the end of summer at Burnt Water. Doing what? Setting up and watching the landing strip for a multimillion-dollar narcotics delivery. That seemed to be the answer. But if he had seven hundred dollars in his pocket, if he had coming a payoff big enough to buy a wealth in sheep, why would he steal the pawn jewelry? Chee had been over all of that before, and the only motive he could think of was to provide what would seem to be a logical reason for disappearing from the trading post. Something which might put off the hunters if he intended to steal the shipment. And that meant he was too damn smart to give an instantly identifiable piece of squash blossom jewelry to some girl he'd picked up.

"Ironfingers, where are you?" Chee asked the night.

And oddly, just as he said it, aloud, to himself, another little mystery solved itself in his mind. He knew suddenly what had caused the clicking sound he'd heard in the darkness on the other side of the chamiso bushes. To make certain, he slid his .38 out of its holster. With his thumb he moved the hammer back and forth—off safety, to full cock, and back to safety. Click. Click. Click. He glanced at the pistol and back at the highway again. It was the kind of nervous thing a man might do if he was tensely ready to shoot something. Or someone.

The thought of Musket, pistol cocked, hunting him in the dark aroused a surprising anger in Chee. It made the abstraction intensely personal. Well, Largo wanted him away from Tuba City. He'd quit postponing that trip to the prison in New Mexico. He'd take another step down the trail of Ironfingers.

Chapter Nineteen

The drive from tuba city to the New Mexico State Penitentiary on the Santa Fe plateau is about four hundred miles. Chee, who had risen even earlier than usual and cheated a little on the speed limit, got there in the early afternoon. He identified himself through the microphone at the entrance tower and waited while the tower checked with someone in the administration building. Then the exterior gate slid open. When it had closed behind him, and locked itself, another motor purred and the inside gate rolled down its track. Jim Chee was inside the fence, walking up the long, straight concrete walk through the great flat emptiness of the entrance yard. Nothing living was visible except for a flight of crows high to the north, between the prison and the mountains. But the long rows of cell block windows stared at him. Chee looked back, conscious of being watched. Above the second-floor windows of the second block to his right, the gray concrete was smudged with black. That would be cell block 3, Chee guessed, where more than thirty convicts were butchered and burned by their fellow prisoners in the ghastly riot of 1980. Had Joseph Musket been here then? If he'd been among the rioters, he'd concealed his role well enough to justify parole.

Another electronic lock let Chee through the door of the administration building, into the presence of a thin, middle-aged Chicano guard who manned the entrance desk. "Navajo Tribal Police," the guard said, eyeing Chee curiously. He glanced down at his clipboard. "Mr. Armijo will handle you." Another guard, also gray, also Chicano, led him wordlessly to Mr. Armijo's office.

Mr. Armijo was not wordless. He was plump, and perhaps forty, with coarse black hair razor-cut and blow-dried into this year's popular shape. His teeth were very, very white and he displayed them in a smile. "Mr. Chee. You're not going to believe this, but I know this Joseph Musket personally." Armijo's smile became a half inch broader. "He was a trusty. Worked right here in our records section for a while. Have a seat. I guess we'll be getting him back now." Armijo indicated a gray steel chair with a gray plastic cushion. "Violated his parole, is that it?"

"Looks like it," Chee said. "I guess you could say he's a suspect in a burglary. Anyway, we need to know more about him."

"Here he is." Armijo handed Chee a brown cardboard accordion file. "All about Joseph Musket."

Chee put the file on his lap. He'd read through such files before. He knew what was in them, and what wasn't. "You said you knew him," Chee said. "What was he like?"

"Like?" The question surprised Armijo. He looked puzzled. He shrugged. "Well, you know. Quiet. Didn't say much. Did his work." Armijo frowned. "What do you mean, what was he like?"

A good question, Chee thought. What did he mean? What was he looking for? "Did he tell jokes?" Chee asked. "Was he the kind of guy who sort of takes over a job, or did you have to tell him everything? Have any friends? That sort of thing."

"I don't know," Armijo said. His expression said he wished he hadn't started the conversation. "I'd tell him what to do and he'd do it. Didn't ever say much. Quiet. He was an Indian." Armijo glanced at Chee to see if that explained it. Then he went on, explaining the job—how Musket would come in each afternoon, how he'd set up the files on the new prisoners received that day and then sort through the File basket and add whatever new material might have developed to the folders of other inmates. "Not a very demanding job," Armijo said. "But he did it well enough. Didn't make mistakes. Got good reports."

"How about friends?" Chee asked.

"Oh, he had friends," Armijo said. "In here, you got money, you got friends."

"Musket had money? " That surprised Chee.

"In his canteen account," Armijo said. "That's all you can have. No cash, of course. Just credit for smokes, candy, and stuff like that. All the little extras."

"You mean more money than he could earn in here? Outside money?"

"He had connections," Armijo said. "Lots of narcotics dealers have connections. Some lawyer depositing money into their account."

And that seemed to be all Armijo knew. He showed Chee into an adjoining room and left him with the file.

In the file there were first the photographs.

Joseph Musket stared out at Chee: an oval face, clean shaven, a line extending down the center of the forehead, the expression blank—the face a man puts on when he has cleared everything out of his mind except the need to endure. He hadn't changed a lot, Chee thought, beyond the change caused by the thin mustache, a few added pounds, and a few added years. But then maybe he had changed. Chee turned his eyes away from the stolid eyes of Musket and looked at his profile. That was all he had seen of Joseph Musket—a quick disinterested glance at a stranger walking past. The profile showed Chee a high, straight forehead—the look of intelligence. Nothing more.

He looked away from the face and noted the vital statistics. Musket today would be in his early thirties, he noticed, which was about what he had guessed. The rest checked out with what he had already learned from Musket's probation officer: born near Mexican Water, son of Simon Musket and Fannie Tsossie, educated at Teec Nos Pos boarding school and the high school at Cottonwood. As he'd remembered from what the probation officer had shown him at Flagstaff, Musket was doing three-to-five for possession of narcotics with intent to sell.

Chee read more carefully. Musket's police record was unremarkable. His first rap had been at eighteen in Gallup, drunk and disorderly. Then had come an arrest in Albuquerque for grand theft, dismissed, and another Albuquerque arrest for burglary, which had led to a two-year sentence and referral to a drug treatment program, suspended. Another burglary charge, this one in El Paso, had led to a one-to-three sentence in Huntsville; and then came what Chee had been (at least subconsciously) looking for—Joe Musket's graduation into the more lethal level of crime. It had been an armed robbery of a Seven-Eleven Store at Las Cruces, New Mexico. On this one, the grand jury hadn't indicted, and the charge had been dismissed. Chee sorted through the pages, looking for the investigating officer's report. It sounded typical. Two men, one outside in a car, the other inside looking at the magazines until the last customer leaves, then the gun shown to the clerk, money from the register stuffed into a grocery bag, the clerk locked in the storeroom, and two suspects arrested after abandoning the getaway car. Musket had been found hiding between garbage containers in an alley, but the clerk wasn't ready to swear he was the man he'd seen waiting in the car outside. At the bottom of the page, a Xerox out of the Las Cruces police files, was a handwritten note. It said: "True bill on West—no bill on Musket." Chee glanced quickly back up the page, found the suspect-identification line. The man who'd gone into the store with the gun while Joseph Musket waited in the car was identified as Thomas Rodney West, age 30, address, Ideal Motel, 2929 Railroad Avenue, El Paso.

It didn't really surprise Chee. West had said Musket was a friend of his son's. That was the reason he'd given Musket the job. And West had said his son had bad friends and had been in trouble, and had been killed. But how had he been killed? Chee hurried now. He found Thomas Rodney West once again in the investigation report which covered the drug bust that had sent Musket to the Santa Fe prison. He had been nailed along with Musket in the pickup truck carrying eight hundred pounds of marijuana. The pot had been unloaded off a light aircraft in the desert south of Alamogordo, New Mexico. The plane had eluded the dea trap, the pickup hadn't. Chee put down the Musket file and stared for a long moment at the gray concrete wall. Then he went into Armijo's office. Armijo looked up from his paperwork, teeth white.

"Do you keep files on inmates after they're dead?"

"Sure." Armijo's smile widened. "In the dead file."

"I'm not sure he was here," Chee said. "Fellow named Thomas Rodney West."

Armijo's smile lost its luster. "He was here," he said. "Got killed."

"In here?"

"This year," Armijo said. "In the recreation yard." He got up and was stooping to pull open the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. "Things like that happen now and then," he said.

"Somebody?" Chee said. "It wasn't solved?"

"No," Armijo said. "Five hundred men all around him and nobody saw a thing. That's the way it works, usually."

The accordion file of Thomas Rodney West was identical to that of Joseph Musket (a.k.a. Ironfingers Musket), except that the string which secured its flap was tied with a knot, giving it the finality of death, instead of a bow, which suggested the impermanence of parole. Chee carried it back into the waiting room, put it beside the Musket file, and worked the knot loose with his fingernails.

Here there was no question of recognizing the mug shots that looked glumly out from the identification sheet. Thomas Rodney West, convict, looked just like Tom West, schoolboy, and Tom West, Marine, whose face Chee had studied in the photographs in the Burnt Water Trading Post. He also looked a lot like his father. The expression had the suffering blankness that police photographers and the circumstances impose on such shots. But behind that, there was the heavy strength and the same forcefulness that marked the face of the older West. Chee noticed that West had been born the same month as Musket, West was nine days younger. Chee corrected the thought. The knife in the recreation yard had changed that, sparing young West the aging process. Now Musket was a month or so older.