The Ghostway

Mrs. Day looked stubborn.

"When we find this girl, if she's got her throat cut, like maybe she will have from what we know now, and you haven't helped us, then that makes you an accessory to murder. I don't guess we could prove it, but we can get you downtown, and book you in, and then you have to deal with the bonding company, and get a lawyer hired, and show up for the grand jury, and—"

"She was looking for Gorman," Mrs. Day said.

"We know that," Shaw said. "What did she say about him?"

"Nothing much. I told her Gorman wasn't here."

"What else—" Shaw began, but the telephone cut him off.

Mrs. Day looked at Shaw. On the wall behind her, the telephone rang again.

Shaw nodded.

Mrs. Day said hello into the mouthpiece, listened, said no, said I'll call you back. "Just a sec," she said. She reached behind her and wrote a number on a calendar mounted to the wall beside the phone. "I don't know. Maybe fifteen minutes," she said, and hung up.

"What else did she say?" Shaw continued.

"She was trying to find some old man. I don't remember his name. Her grandfather. Wanted to know if the old man had come here looking for Gorman."

"Had he?" Shaw asked.

"I never seen him if he did. Then she wanted to know if I had any other address for Gorman, and I gave her what I had and she went away."

"What did you give her?"

"Next of kin," Mrs. Day said. "I make my renters fill out a little card for me." She took a metal box from the desk, fingered through it, and handed Shaw a file card. "Gives them the idea that if they steal everything you got a way at getting back at 'em."

Shaw copied information into his notebook.

"Jacaranda Street? That right?"

Mrs. Day nodded.

"Never heard of it," Shaw said. "And the name's Bentwoman Tsossie? Could that be right?"

"What he said," Mrs. Day said. "Who knows about Indians?"

Shaw returned the card. Chee was looking at the calendar pad beside the telephone. It was divided into the thirty-one days of October, and Mrs. Day had written the telephone number of whoever had just called her in the October 23 space—which was today. October 22 was blank, as were many of the days. Others bore terse notations, accompanied by numbers. In the October 3 square, the word Gorman was written, with a number under it. A line ran from Gorman to another number in the margin. Chee recognized the second number. It was on a card in his billfold—the number of Shaw's telephone. Whose phone would the first number ring?

Now, as he sat in his pickup amid the tumbleweeds beside this rundown service station, the significance of all this began to take shape in Jim Chee's mind. The date was wrong. Too early. Days too early.

There was a pay phone booth at the sidewalk adjoining the station. Chee opened the truck door, swung his legs out, and stopped to think it through again. Mrs. Day had written Gorman's name in the October 3 box, at least a week before Shaw had recruited her as a watcher. Then she had written the number of Shaw's arson office number in the margin and linked it to Gorman's name with a line. But someone had contacted her a week before that and arranged for her to call a number relative to Gorman. Had she been watching him for someone else before she had watched his apartment for Shaw? What was the number? Chee recalled the number, as he was expected to recall it, without feeling particularly proud of the feat. Chee had been taught to remember when he emerged from infancy, and it was a skill his training as a yataalii had honed. He climbed out of the truck.

Chee called the arson number, hoping only to extract Shaw's home number. But the detective answered.

"It don't mean a thing to me," Shaw said. "It's a downtown telephone, judging from the prefix. Have you tried it?"

"No. I thought I'd ask you. It's after five so nobody is going to be there."

"Who knows?" Shaw said. "We'll just give a try. I'm going to put you on hold a minute and call it." The telephone clicked.

Chee waited. Through the dirty window of the telephone booth, he could see a row of rundown residences scattered down a street that was mostly weedy vacant lots. From across the hills, smoke rose white and gray. A brush fire, Chee guessed. Shaw had called this "poor boy territory," the habitat of losers, of transients and bums and other marginal people. He'd warned Chee not to expect the streets to match the street maps.

"I wish I could get off and go along," Shaw had said. "It's a good place to get lost, if you want to get lost. Or to lose something if you got something you don't want nobody to find. Including bodies. Every once in a while we get one reported from out there. They just turn up. Dumped behind the brush. Or somebody notices a foot sticking out after a mudslide, or old bones in a rotten sleeping bag."

The telephone clicked again. "Turned out to be an answering service," Shaw said. "And of course nobody knew anything about anything except the boss and he wasn't in. Sort of establishment you have to go down and show a badge to find out something. I'm going to put you on hold again and call the landlady."

The telephone booth smelled dusty. Chee pushed open the door to admit the outside air and got with that the aroma of warm asphalt. There was also the smell of smoke, the perfumed smoke of the desert burning that drifted down from the fire over the ridge. Through that, faintly and only now and then, he could detect an acrid chemical taint—the bad breath of the city. Last night's Santa Ana wind had blown the Los Angeles smog far out over the Pacific. But that was many hours ago. The city had exhaled again. Through the window of the cashier's cage, the service station attendant was watching Chee, openly curious. Chee thought about Mary Landon. About now she'd be in her little Crownpoint teacherage preparing her supper. He saw her, as he had often seen her from his favorite chair in that tiny living-dining room, working at the drainboard, hair pulled to the top of her head, slender, intent, talking as she did whatever she was doing to the vegetable she was working on.

Chee closed his eyes, rested his head against the cool metal of the telephone box, and recreated the scene and his feeling for it. Anticipation. A good meal. But not that, really. Anticipation of a good meal in good company. Mary across from him, checking his response to whatever she had given him, caring whether he liked it, her knee against his knee. Her—

Click. "You still there?" Shaw asked and went on without waiting. "Day said that some fellow had called her on the phone and told her that if she was willing to keep an eye on Gorman's apartment and let him know anything interesting, he was going to mail her a hundred bucks, and there would be another hundred anytime she called with anything interesting."

"Like what?"

"Like any visitors. Like Gorman packing up, moving out. Anything unusual."

"Did she make any calls?"

"She said just one. The day Gorman left for Shiprock."

"You believe her?"

"No," Shaw said. "But it might be true. Far as we know, nothing else happened."

"That's true," Chee agreed.

"Call me if you locate the girl," Shaw said. He gave Chee his home telephone number.

The service station attendant, with considerable gesturing, showed Chee that if he drove directly north on Jaripa he would inevitably drive right past its junction with Jacaranda.

"Map's screwed up," he said. "Jacaranda runs up into the hills about a mile from here. Access to some jackleg housing development, but the city never put in the utilities so the whole thing went down the tube. You bought in there, you got burned."

"I'm trying to find some people at thirteen thousand two hundred and seventy-one Jacaranda," Chee said. "That sound like it would be back in there?"

"God knows," the attendant said. "They got all sorts of street names and numbers back in there. Just no house to put 'em on."

"But some people do live back there," Chee said. "That right?"

"There's some," the man said. "Beats sleeping under a bridge. But if you're sleeping under a bridge, at least somebody didn't sell it to you." He laughed and glanced at Chee to see if he enjoyed the humor.

But Chee was thinking something else. He was thinking that whoever had paid Mrs. Day to keep track of Albert Gorman almost certainly knew all about this address.

Chapter 17

Chee found 13271 jacaranda street just as the setting sun was converting the yellow-gray smog along the western horizon into oddly beautiful layers, pink-gray alternated with pale rose, making a milder, more pastel display than the garish sunsets of the high desert country. He had enjoyed the hunt. The scenery was different: desert, but low-altitude desert, and without the bitter winters of the Big Reservation it produced a different kind of vegetation. He had decided fairly early that he wouldn't find the Jacaranda address, that it was simply a number Gorman had pulled from the air to satisfy Mrs. Day's requirement. Tomorrow morning he would get up early, drive back to Shiprock, and put out feelers at St. Catherine and Two Gray Hills and here and there, to make sure he'd know if and when Margaret Sosi returned to home country. And he'd drive over to Crownpoint and talk to Mary Landon. And, having time to think about it, Mary Landon would have decided that raising their children Dinee and among the Dinee was, after all, what she really wanted to do. Or maybe not. Probably not. Almost certainly not. And what then? What would he do?

Meanwhile Chee drove. The junction of Jacaranda Drive was marked by a huge billboard that rose from a fieldstone base and was topped by the legend j c R ND EST TES in raised wooden letters, once red. Even expecting it, it took Chee a moment to recognize jacaranda estates with the A'S stolen. And to wonder who had such a specialized need for letters. Below the defaced name the billboard featured a map. A great green blob in the middle was labeled Golf Course, and a dim blue oblong near the center of the green was marked Trout Lake. Other landmarks included Shopping Center, Post Office, School, and Country Club. Nothing on the map seemed to bear any relationship to the reality of lonely desert foothills around him, but Chee studied the network of streets it displayed. Jacaranda meandered east-southeast, a main artery. He felt encouraged.

The encouragement was brief. Jacaranda's asphalt surface, already cracked and weedy, gave way to gravel within a quarter mile, and the gravel that replaced it was soon replaced in turn by graded dirt, replaced by a rutted track from which streets led, streets which were nothing more than a few passes made by a bulldozer years ago. Chee passed street signs (Jelso, Jane, Jenkins, Jardin, Jellico), warped plywood boards mounted on two-by-fours with their paint weathered almost beyond the point of legibility. Jane Street had offered a half dozen dilapidated mobile homes clustered near a rusty water tank. On Jenkins he passed a concrete foundation, on Jellico an abandoned frame house from which doors and window frames had been looted. But mostly there was only emptiness. Judy, July, Jerri, and Jennifer streets offered nothing but creosote brush, sandstone, and cacti. Beyond Jennifer, the erosion of an arroyo had erased Jacaranda.

Chee detoured, and detoured again, and rediscovered Jacaranda—worse than ever. And finally, over a ridge, there were homes again—a dented aluminum mobile home on a foundation of cinder blocks and, beyond it, a frame shanty partly covered with roofing shingles, and beyond that a charred jumble of partly burned boards. In front of the mobile home, three old cars and a school bus were parked. A middle-aged man, shirtless, a blue bandanna tied around his head, had the front wheel off the bus and seemed to be replacing a brake lining. Chee stopped, rolled down his window.

"Thirteen two seventy-one Jaracanda," he shouted. "You know where it is?"

The man looked up from his work, squinted, wiped sweat from his eyebrow.

"That them Indians?" he asked. "That old woman and all?" He had a high-pitched, whining voice.

"Sounds right," Chee said. "Name's Tsossie, or something like that."

"I don't know about that," the man said. "But their place is over that ridge yonder." He gestured down the track.

Over the ridge was a house. It was a patchwork affair, apparently built by a series of owners with diminishing ambitions, money, and hope. The front section was made of neat red bricks. A subsequent builder had tried to finish it with cinder-block walls and an addition to the pitched roof, using asphalt shingles that didn't quite match the original. To this a lean-to of planks had been added, with a roof of corrugated sheet metal. The lean-to jutted from the side, and behind it was the framework skeleton of another room, roofless, floorless, and open to the wind. Judging from the collection of dead weeds the framework had accumulated, this project must have been abandoned years ago.

Beyond this house, the rusted corpses of three vehicles stood in a neat row—a delivery van, a pickup truck too cannibalized for easy identification, and a red Dodge sedan with its hood and engine missing. Beside the house, an old Chevy sedan was parked, the window of its driver's-side door held together with tape.

Chee parked on the side of the track in front of the house, tapped twice on the horn, and waited.

Almost five minutes passed. The front door opened just a little and a face peered out. A woman. Chee got out and walked slowly toward the house.

The woman at the door was old, with a round, plump face framed with graying hair. She was obviously a Navajo, and Chee introduced himself in their language—telling her his mother's clan and his father's clan and naming various aunts and uncles—both maternal and paternal—old enough or prominent enough in affairs ceremonial or political that this old woman might have heard of them.

She listened, nodded when he was finished, and motioned him inside.

"I am born to the Turkey Clan," she said. "My mother is Bentwoman Tsossie of the Turkey Clan and my father was Jefferson Tom of the Salt Dinee." She spoke in a rusty old-person's voice, giving Chee the rest of her clan genealogy, mentioning relatives and clan connections, a litany of names of her extended family and its ancestors. Chee recognized a few of them: a woman who had served long before he was born on the Tribal Council, a singer of the Mountain Way Chant whom his own father had sometimes mentioned, and a man who had been, long, long ago, a tribal judge. When she had finished all the formalities and offered him a bottle of cold Pepsi-Cola, Chee accepted it, and sipped from it, and allowed the proper amount of time to pass, and then put the bottle on the floor beside his chair.

"My grandmother," he said, "I come here from Shiprock in the hope that I can find a woman of your clan. She calls herself Margaret Billy Sosi." Chee paused. "I hope you can help me find her."

"The girl isn't here," Bentwoman's Daughter said. "Why do you wish to see her?"

"I work for the Dinee," Chee said. "I am a member of the Navajo Tribal Police. We hope to find a man of the Turkey Clan who is called Hosteen Ashie Begay. He is the grandfather of Margaret Billy Sosi. She is hunting for him too." Chee paused, noticing the expression on the old woman's face. It was skeptical. He would not look to her like a Navajo Tribal Policeman—out of uniform, in a travel-rumpled plaid shirt and blue jeans. Chee had the usual Navajo's propensity for personal cleanliness, plus a little more. But his only packing for this journey had been to stick his toothbrush holder in his shirt pocket and a spare pair of socks and shorts in the glove box of his pickup. Now he looked like he'd spent two nights in jail. He extracted from his hip pocket and displayed his police credentials.

The expression of Bentwoman's Daughter did not change. Perhaps, Chee thought belatedly, her skepticism was not of Chee, the rumpled stranger, but of Chee, the Navajo Policeman. The relationship between the Dinee and their police force was no more universally serene than in any other society.

"You should talk to Bentwoman," the old woman said.

Chee said nothing. Bentwoman? When he'd seen the age of Bentwoman's Daughter, he'd presumed that Bentwoman would be dead. Chee was not good at guessing age, particularly of women. But she must be eighty. Perhaps older.

Bentwoman's Daughter was waiting, her wrinkled hands folded motionless in the folds of her voluminous skirt.

"If she will talk to me," Chee said. "Yes. That would be good."

"I will see," said Bentwoman's Daughter. She raised herself painfully from her chair and hobbled past the heavy blanket that hung over the doorway leading to the rear of the house.

Chee examined the room. The blanket was a black-and-gray design popular among weavers of the Coyote Canyon area and looked very old. The only furniture was the worn overstuffed sofa where the old woman had put him, a rocking chair, and a plastic-topped dinette table. A calendar hung on the wall opposite him—a color print of the gold of autumn cottonwoods in Canyon de Chelly issued by a Flagstaff funeral home. The calendar page was August, and seven years old. Two cases of Pepsi-Cola bottles were stacked against the wall and, beside them, three five-gallon jerricans that Chee guessed held water. A kerosene lamp, its glass chimney smudged with soot, stood on the table. Obviously, such amenities as water, gaslines, electricity, and telephone service had not yet been provided by whoever had sold this addition.

Chee heard the voice of Bentwoman's Daughter, loud and patient, explaining the visitor to someone who apparently was deaf, saying that he wanted to see "Ashie Begay's granddaughter." So she's been here, Chee thought. Almost certainly, she's been here. And then the blanket curtain pushed aside and a wheelchair emerged.

The woman in the chair was blind. Chee saw that instantly. Her eyes were open, aimed past him at the front door, but they had the clouded look of the glaucoma that takes such a heavy toll among the old of his people. Blind, and partially deaf, and immensely old. Her hair was a cloud of fluffy white, and her face, toothless, had collapsed upon itself into a mass of wrinkles. This was Bentwoman.

Chee stood and introduced himself again, talking slowly and very loud, and making sure he followed all of the traditional courtesies his mother had taught him. With that out of the way, he paused a moment for a response. None came.

"Do I speak clearly enough, my grandmother?" he asked. The old woman nodded, a barely perceptible motion.

"I will tell you then why I have come here," Chee said. He started at the beginning, with going to the hogan of Ashie Begay, and what he found there, and of meeting Margaret Billy Sosi there later, and what Margaret had told him, and what he had forgotten to ask her. Finally he was finished.

Bentwoman was motionless. She's gone to sleep, Chee thought. This is going to take time.

Bentwoman's Daughter stood behind the chair, holding its handles. She sighed.

"The girl must go home," Bentwoman said in Navajo. Her voice was slow and faint. "There is nothing for her here but trouble. She must go back to her family and live among them. She must live in Dinetah."

"I will take her back to her people," Chee said. "Can you help me find her?"

"Stay here," Bentwoman said. "She will come."

Chee glanced at Bentwoman's Daughter, inquiring.

"She took the bus," Bentwoman's Daughter said. "She went into the city when the sun came up. She said she would be back before it gets dark."

"It's getting dark now," Chee said. He was conscious of how elusive Margaret Sosi had been. Something was making him uneasy. The number written on Mrs. Day's calendar hung in his mind.

"Has anyone else been here looking for the girl?" Chee said. "Asking about her?"

Bentwoman's Daughter shook her head.

"When do you think she'll be back?"

"The bus comes every hour," Bentwoman said. "It stops down there where the map is. Every hour until midnight."

"About when does it stop?"

"Twenty minutes after the hour," Bentwoman's Daughter said. "When it's on time."

Chee glanced at his watch. It was five thirty-five. Two and a half miles to the bus stop, he guessed. She might be home in fifteen or twenty minutes. If she walked fast. If the bus was on time. If—

Bentwoman made a noise in her throat. "She should go home to her family," Bentwoman said. "She wants to find Ashie Begay, my grandson. Ashie Begay is dead."

It was an unequivocal statement. A fact stated without emotion.

Bentwoman's Daughter sighed again. She looked at Chee. "He was my nephew," she explained.

"Ashie Begay is dead?" Chee asked.

"He is dead," Bentwoman said.

"Did Margaret Sosi tell you this?"

"The girl thinks he is still alive," Bentwoman said. "I told her, but she believes what she wants to believe. The young sometimes do that."

Chee opened his mouth. Closed it. How should he frame the question?

"When I was young, I too believed what I wanted to believe. But you learn," the old woman said.

"Grandmother," Chee said. "How did you learn that Ashie Begay is dead?"

"From what you told me," Bentwoman said. "And from what the girl told me."

"I thought he might be alive," Chee said. "The girl is sure he is alive."

Bentwoman's eyes were closed now. She was asleep, Chee thought. Or dead. If she was breathing under those layers of blankets and shawls, Chee could see no trace of it. But apparently Bentwoman was simply mustering her strength for what she had to tell him.

"Ashie Begay has Tewa blood in him," Bentwoman said. "His grandmother was from Jemez. The Salt Clan went out toward the morning sun, beyond the Turquoise Mountain, to get some sheep one winter, and they came back with some children from Jemez. Some of them they sold back for corn and horses, but Ashie Begay's grandmother became the wife of one of the men in the Salt Clan and bore the child who was Ashie Begay's mother. So Ashie Begay has the blood in him of the People Who Call the Clouds. Tewa blood, and Salt Clan blood, and his father married into the Turkey Clan, and his mother's lineage was Standing Rock on her father's side. And all that has to be considered when you understand why I know Ashie Begay is dead."

Bentwoman paused, to catch her breath—which was laboring by now—or perhaps to allow Chee to comment. Chee had no comment to make. He didn't understand why Ashie Begay had to be dead. None of this had helped.

Bentwoman inhaled a labored breath, stirring her layers of coverings. She began explaining Ashie Begay's lineage in terms of the character of ancestors. Bentwoman's Daughter stood patiently behind the wheelchair, thinking her thoughts. Chee glanced at his watch. If the bus was on time, if Margaret Sosi had been on it, if she had walked rapidly, she should be within half a mile of here by now.

"So you see," Bentwoman was saying, "Ashie Begay, my grandson, has my blood in him too. All this blood combines, and it makes a certain kind of man. It makes the kind of man who would not have allowed the Gorman boy to die in his hogan. He would have been prudent. The Tewas are prudent. The Salt Clan is a prudent clan. He would have taken the Gorman boy out of the hogan so he could die in the safe, clean air. So the hogan would not be ruined by the chindi."

It had taken Bentwoman a long time to say all of this, with many pauses. Now she was silent, breathing heavily.

"But the hogan was broken," Chee said. "The smoke hole was closed. The north wall was broken open. Everything in it was gone."

"Was everything gone?" Bentwoman asked. "Nothing was left?"

"Nothing but trash," Chee said.

"Did you look?" Bentwoman asked.

"It was a chindi hogan," Chee said. "I did not go inside."

Bentwoman breathed. She coughed. She exhaled a long breath. She turned her blind eyes toward Chee, as if she could see him. "So only a belacani looked?"

"Yes," Chee said. "A white policeman." He knew what Bentwoman was suggesting.

She sat for a long time, her eyes closed again. Chee was aware of the changing light outside the window. The sky turning red with sunset. Darkness gathering. Margaret Sosi would be walking through that darkness. He remembered the telephone number on Mrs. Day's calendar. He wanted urgently to go and meet Margaret. He would ask her immediately what was said on that postcard. He would take no more chances.

"If Ashie Begay is alive," Bentwoman said, "one day I will hear it. Someone in the family will know and the word will come to me. If he is dead, it would not matter. But it matters because this child believes he is alive, and she will always look for him." Bentwoman paused again, catching her breath, turning her face toward Chee again. "She should be looking for other things. Not for a dead man."

"Yes," Chee said. "Grandmother, you are right."

"You think Ashie Begay is alive?"

"I don't know," Chee said. "Maybe not."

"If someone killed him, would it have been one of the People? Or would it have been a belacani?"

"A white man," Chee said. "I think it would have been a white man."

"Then a white man buried Albert Gorman. And a white man broke the hogan?"

"Yes," Chee said. "If Ashie Begay is dead, that must have been what happened."

"I don't think a belacani would know how to do it right," Bentwoman said.

"No," Chee said. He was thinking of Albert Gorman's unwashed hair.

"Somebody should find out for sure," Bentwoman said. "They should do that so this child can know her grandfather is dead. So this child can finally rest."

"Yes," Chee said. And who else would there be to do that but Jim Chee. And doing it meant going into the ghost hogan, climbing through the black hole in the north wall. It meant stepping through the doorway into darkness.

Bentwoman was facing him, awaiting his answer. Chee swallowed. "Grandmother," he said, "I will go and do what I can do."

Chapter 18

Chee drove slowly through a darkening landscape under a glowing copper-colored sky. He was something of a connoisseur of sunsets, a collector of memories of gaudy cloudscapes and glowing western horizons that the Colorado Plateau produces in remarkable season-changing variety. But Chee had never seen a sunset like this one—with the slanting evening light filtering through an atmosphere of ocean-side humidity and chemical fumes. It gave a golden tint to objects that should be gray or tan or even blue; and made the cool evening seem warmer than it was, and caused Jim Chee to feel somehow that he was in a strange land, and that the bird call he was hearing from somewhere to his right was not produced by a bird at all but by something unknown, and that when he topped the ridge he would not look down upon the billboards proclaiming the entrance to Jacaranda Estates but upon God knows what.

At the top of the ridge, Chee pulled his pickup off the track and turned off the engine. A small figure was walking up the slope toward him. He took his binoculars from the glove box and focused them on the walker. It was Margaret Billy Sosi, as he'd guessed, looking tired. Down the slope far below a car moved along the asphalt, its lights on. Through his open window he could hear the muted roar of freeway traffic somewhere beyond the next hill. Another vehicle, driving with its parking lights, slowed to a stop past the Jacaranda entrance billboard, backed, and turned onto the development road. Chee watched it a moment, then switched back to the girl. She'd left her pea jacket somewhere and was wearing jeans and a white shirt. She was even smaller than he'd remembered. And thinner. Would she be willing to come back to the reservation with him? Maybe not. Bentwoman would help if he needed help. But first he would get the answers to the questions he had failed to ask at Begay's hogan. He would get the answer to that mean little puzzle.

The vehicle coming up the dirt track was a van, dark brown or maybe dark green. Its lights came on, illuminating the girl with backlighting. She moved off the track. The van drew even with her and stopped. The driver leaned out the window, talking to Margaret. Then the dooropened, and the man stepped out. A big man, blond, maybe six-two or -three and bulky. He towered over Margaret, showing her something in his hand. Through the binoculars, the object seemed to be a wallet. Chee sucked in his breath. The big man's other hand, dangling stiffly by his side, was marked by something white. One finger was bandaged.

Chee put down the binoculars, remembering Mr. Berger's pantomimed account of the blond man who had come for Albert Gorman and had his finger slammed in the car door. He also thought of his own pistol, locked in a drawer beside his bed in Shiprock. He turned on the ignition and started the pickup rolling down the hill.

Chapter 19

Vaggan had noticed the pickup truck parked on the ridge almost the moment he'd turned on the cracked asphalt at the entrance of Jaca-randa Street. It registered in his attention merely as a nuisance. If it was occupied, the occupant would be a witness. That would affect, necessarily, the way Vaggan conducted his business. The immediate business was determining if the female figure trudging up the hill in the direction of the pickup truck was Margaret Billy Sosi, as Vaggan suspected. If it was, it was good luck. Much better to pick her up here than at whatever residence he'd find at that address McNair had given him. Here it should be simple enough to get the woman in the van and to do it without arousing any alarm. Thus Vaggan had been conscious of the pickup, but only as a minor irritant. Now, suddenly, the truck engine had started and it was rolling down the hill toward him.

Vaggan had stopped the van so that when he leaned out of its driver-side window he was just behind the woman. He had said "Miss Sosi" in a clear, emphatic voice. She had stopped and turned, and stood staring at him doubtfully.

"I'm Officer Davis, Los Angeles County Sheriffs Office," Vaggan had said, holding out the leather folder of credentials he used when the situation called for him to be police. "I need to talk to you."

"What about?" Margaret Billy had asked. "Is it about my grandfather?"

"Yes," Vaggan had said, and, sure now that she'd stand there and wait for him, he opened the van door and stepped toward her. "It's about your grandfather. I need to take you to him."

Vaggan had held out the identification folder again and, as she looked at it, taken her forearm in his hand. It was a skinny arm—a bone—and Vaggan's confidence that this girl would be no problem at all was reinforced. The girl made no attempt to pull away.

"Where is he?" she asked, looking into Vaggan's eyes. "Is he all right?"

"At the hospital," Vaggan said. "Come along." It was then that Vaggan heard the truck, its motor racing suddenly, bumping erratically down the hill. It ran off the rutted track, bumping across a hummock of cactus, and then jolted back onto the road, rolling directly for them.

"Crazy son of a bitch!" Vaggan shouted. He jumped toward the van door, then jumped back. There wouldn't be time to move it. He pulled the girl away from it.

"What's wrong with him?" she said.

Vaggan didn't respond. He'd reached under his jacket, extracted his pistol, cocked it, and held it against his back.

The pickup engine died as suddenly as it had started. It ran off the road again and slid to a stop, the door opening while it was still rolling. A man was leaning out the door, and as he leaned his hat fell off.

"Ya-tah-hey!" the man shouted. He half fell out the door, straightened himself, and retrieved his hat. "Ya-tah-hey!" he shouted again.

"I think he's drunk," the woman said.

"Yes," Vaggan said. Some of the tension left him. The man reset his hat, a worn felt cowboy job, and said something to Vaggan. The man was smiling broadly, and the words were Navajo. He stopped, laughed, and repeated them.

"What'd he say?" Vaggan asked. He kept his eyes on the drunk. The man was youngish, early thirties, Vaggan guessed, and slightly stooped. His shirttail was out on one side and one of the legs of his jeans was caught in the top of a dusty boot. A streak of spittle had run down from the corner of his mouth.

The woman said nothing for a moment. She was staring at Vaggan, her expression strange. Then she said, "He said he's having trouble with his truck. It won't drive straight. He wants you to help him with it."

"Tell him to screw off," Vaggan said. He slipped the pistol back under his belt, suddenly aware he had a headache. He hadn't gotten his sleep out. Last night had been exciting. It would take him hours to unwind.

Vaggan had studied his Greater Los Angeles street map after he left McNair. Jacaranda Drive was nowhere on it. It had taken, finally, a call to the Los Angeles County Road Maintenance Department to pin down its location. Vaggan's policy was to arrive at a scene where he expected to engage in any sort of action just at dusk—when it was still light enough to see, if you knew what you were looking for, but dim enough so that witnesses would be doubtful about what they'd witnessed. Under some circumstances he would have made a preliminary trip to the site, looked it over, learned the ground. This time he located the street, but when he realized its isolation he stayed away and waited for evening. He wanted no one in Jacaranda Drive remembering that they'd seen the van twice, the first time in clear daylight.

Vaggan had tuned in the all-news station, carried the radio outside, and put it on the concrete retaining wall beside his second cup of coffee. Like everything Vaggan owned which required power, the radio was battery-operated. In the future as Vaggan anticipated it, the radio battery would have to last only about three weeks after the day. Broadcasting would be restored within hours after the bombs—and the devastating electrical surge of the nuclear explosions—had erased civilization's grid of electrical power. The emergency generators would take over, and the frequencies would be babbling with panic: civil defense orders and, mostly, cries for help. Vaggan estimated that phase would last several weeks and then die away, and there would be no more use for his radio receiver. For that brief but important period, Vaggan kept four silicon radio batteries in a little box in his freezer. More than enough.

The local news led with an account of Vaggan's operation. Vaggan sipped his coffee and listened.

"Police report a bizarre crime in Beverly Hills—with TV talk show host Jay Leonard maimed by an intruder who broke into his palatial home and drove staples through his ears.

"Police say the intruder called local newspapers and television stations after the attack to tell them that Leonard was being taken to the emergency room at Beverly Hills General. Leonard was reported in good condition at the hospital but was not available for comment. Here's what Detective Lieutenant Allen Bizett of the lapd had to say."

Bizett said very little, reporting in a gravelly voice that Leonard said he didn't know the motive of the attack, that he had received an anonymous telephone threat, and that he had hired a guard to protect him. Bizett said the guard had been overcome by the intruder, who had also killed two guard dogs. He described the suspect as a "large Caucasian male."

With that subject exhausted, the announcer skipped to the continued hunt for an armed robber who had killed a customer and wounded a clerk in a convenience store robbery the day before, and from that to the record-breaking traffic snarl on the San Diego Freeway caused by a two-truck accident. The item had been brief, but it had been enough, and it would be bigger for both the afternoon papers and the evening TV shows. They'd have the dogs' head business, with the bodies missing, and more of the odd stuff he'd worked in, and his telephone calls, and that would give them the motive.

Enough to earn him his bonus, but he'd never had any doubt of earning that.

He finished the coffee, considered having another cup, rejected the idea. Coffee was his only deviation from his father's rule. He'd slipped into the habit his first year at West Point and rationalized its use as a stimulant his nervous system needed. Even so, even now, twenty years since the Commander had last spoken to him, he drank with a sense of uneasiness he'd never quite defined. "Weakness," the Commander had said, sitting across the breakfast table. "People make being a child an excuse for it. But it's no excuse. In Sparta they started their males at the age of eight. Took 'em away from the women. Enduring the pain. Enduring the cold. Enduring hunger. Weeding out the weakness. We encourage weakness." Vaggan could see it clearly. His father in his perfect whites, his bristling blond hair, his trim mustache, his row of ribbons. His blue eyes staring at Vaggan, proud of Vaggan, teaching Vaggan to be strong. The thought led Vaggan, as it almost always did, into ground he didn't want to enter: to West Point, and being caught, and to Roser, Cadet Captain Roser. Vaggan considered it again—just a glance at the memory for something that might have been overlooked. No. Nothing changed. The decision was correct: to kill Roser quickly, before he could make any report. The tactic had been proper. The blow with the soft-ball bat should have been both lethal and untraceable. But somehow Roser hadn't died. Expulsion hadn't really mattered. The Point had been a disappointment, with its endless homilies about the old, dead verities which were no longer verities—if they ever had been. But the report had gone to the Commander. And the Commander had sent the telegram.

i have buried you beside the woman.

Vaggan hadn't known the woman. She had borne him. She must have given him the genes that accounted for his size, because the Commander was a small man. But even his earliest memories did not include her. The Commander had never mentioned her. Asking the Commander was unthinkable.

The newscaster was talking about Berlin, a subject that always caught Vaggan's attention. The Commander had believed it would begin over Berlin and Vaggan never doubted it. But this item was inconsequential—a vote of confidence in the Bundestag. And so was the rest of the newscast. The avalanche would not begin today. And so he had finished his coffee, and made a quick check of his hillside and the redoubt he was building into it, and—when the time was right—had left to find Jacaranda Drive, and now he was facing this drunken Indian who was grinning at him foolishly and ignoring his order to leave.

"Beat it," Vaggan repeated. "Or you're spending the night in the tank."

The Indian said something in Navajo and laughed. He walked around Vaggan's van, opened the passenger side door, and climbed in.

"Son of a bitch," Vaggan snarled. He would have to deal with the Indian the hard way, apparently, which would take time and maybe even attract attention. But with any luck he could pull him out by the feet, whack him, and be done with it and gone with the girl with no problems. It was almost dark, and that would help. He rushed around the van, jerking the pistol from under his belt.

He saw what was coming far too late to avoid it. A split-second awareness of the Indian launched out of the van door, the flashlight swinging, and then the burst of pain. He had time only for reflex action. His reflexes were fine, but they only flinched him away from the full force of the blow. The flashlight—four D batteries in a heavy Bakelite tube—smashed against his upper jaw, staggered him away from the door, slammed him into the side of the van.

The shock of the blow blinded him for a moment, caused him to lose awareness. Then he was on the ground, the Indian atop him. Vaggan reacted with explosive violence before the Indian could hit him again. He grabbed the man's elbow, jerked, twisted his body. The blow missed.

After that it was no contest. Vaggan weighed himself every morning just before he began his routine of pre-breakfast exercises. That morning he had weighed 225 pounds—three pounds off the weight he considered his standard. All of it was bone, muscle, and gristle, conditioned and disciplined by a regimen the Commander had started him on before he could remember. In fact, his very first memory of this part of his life was the time he had cried. He had been doing leg lifts, the Commander standing over him, the Commander's voice chanting, "Again, again, again, again…" and the pain of the straining muscles had come through the haze of his fatigue and started his tear ducts flowing. He hadn't been able to control it, and the Commander had noticed, and it had been an experience of searing shame. "It doesn't help you if it doesn't hurt you," the Commander always said. The pain of that experience had taught him to control his tears. Vaggan had never cried again.

Now he made no sound at all. The Indian was quick. The Indian was strong for his size. The Indian definitely was not drunk. That illusion had vanished from Vaggan's mind with the pain of the blow. But the Indian was younger than Vaggan, and fifty pounds lighter, and without Vaggan's skills at this sort of business. It took only a matter of seconds—a brief flurry of struggle—and the Indian was pinned under him. Vaggan could feel the flashlight against his knee. He'd dropped his pistol somewhere, so he'd use the light. He slammed the heel of his hand against the side of the Indian's head, twice, stunning the man. Then he snatched the light, raised it and struck.

"Drop it," the voice said. Margaret Billy Sosi was standing just behind him, his pistol held in both hands, pointed at his head. Vaggan let the flashlight drop on the Indian's chest.

"Get off of him," the girl ordered. Instantly Vaggan was studying her. Would she shoot him? Probably not. He could get the gun from her, but it would take a little time. Vaggan rose. He touched a fingertip to the cheekbone where the blow of the flashlight had broken the skin. "He hit me," Vaggan said. He held out his hand. "Here," he said. "Give me the pistol before you shoot somebody."

The girl took two steps backward, keeping the pistol aimed at his stomach. "He told me who you are," she said. "You're no policeman."

"Yes I am," Vaggan said. "And if you—"

"Pick him up," she said, not taking her eyes off Vaggan's face. "Put him in your truck. We've got to get him to a hospital."

"First," Vaggan said. "I've got to have my gun back." He took a step toward her.

"I'll kill you," she said.

"No you won't," Vaggan said. He laughed and took another step toward her, hand reaching.

The shot burned past his face and struck the side of the van with a thumping sound almost as loud as the muzzle blast.

Vaggan stopped, hands held open, chest high.

"The next one hits you," the girl said. "Put him in your truck."

Vaggan stopped, and slid one arm under the Indian's shoulders and the other under his knees, and lifted him gently into the passenger's side seat. The girl slid in behind him, the pistol held carefully, and they drove away.

Chapter 20

Chee had been awake perhaps forty-five minutes when he heard the voice of Shaw loud in the corridor. He'd had plenty of time to attract a nurse's aide. The girl had been willing to make a call to Shaw's office and leave word about where Chee was and to tell Shaw the hospital he was in. But Chee hadn't felt up to explaining exactly why he was in it, or how. The why was clear enough. His head was bandaged, and under the protection he could feel a great sore knot over his left eye, and a throbbing pain about at the hinge point of his jaw on the opposite side, and a persistent internal ache. Aside from that, his left hip hurt—the burning sensation of a bruised abrasion—and his nose was swollen. When he had tried to remember exactly how each of these misfortunes had occurred he found, at first, a total alarming blank. But then he recalled that injured persons, especially those suffering head injuries, often go through a brief period of amnesia. A doctor at Flagstaff had explained it to him in typical medical fashion once. "We don't understand it, but we know it doesn't last long." And gradually the details became willing to be remembered if he tried. But he didn't try much, because the headache was spectacular. Obviously the big blond man had clobbered him. That was enough to know for the moment.

Earlier, when he had first awakened, Chee had tried to get up. That mistake had touched off explosive pain behind his forehead and waves of nausea—enough to convince him that he was in no shape to do anything even if he could remember what he should be doing. So he had sent word to Shaw, and now Shaw was beside his bed, looking down at him, eyes curious.

"You found her," Shaw said. "What'd you find out?"

"What?" Chee asked. Everything seemed sort of foggy.

"The Sosi girl. The one who brought you here," Shaw said. "Who was the man with her? What'd she tell you?"

Chee began framing questions. It made his head hurt. "Just tell me about it," he said. "This end of it. How did I get here?"

Shaw pulled back the curtain screening off the adjoining bed, confirming it was empty. He sat. "From what I can find out so far, a vehicle arrived at the emergency entrance a little after eight last night." Shaw paused, extracted a notebook from his coat pocket, and checked it. "Eight ten, you were admitted. Admitted by a girl, late teens. Thin. Dark. Probably Indian or Oriental. Large blond man driving the vehicle. He drove away while the girl was admitting you. The girl signed the admission papers as Margaret Billy Sosi." Shaw restored the notebook to his pocket. "What'd you find out?" he asked. "And how're you feeling?"

"Wonderful," Chee said. "And nothing."

He told Shaw what had happened, up to the point of hitting the blond man with the flashlight. After that it was misty.

Shaw had listened without a word, face blank, eyes on Chee's eyes.

"Describe the van," he said.

Chee described it.

"You saw the gun. No doubt about it?"

"None. And he had an arsenal in the back of the van. I just had time for a glance, but he had a rack of weapons. Automatic rifles, maybe two different kinds, shotgun, long-barreled sniper rifle with a telescopic sight, other stuff."

"Well," Shaw said. "That's interesting."

"And a metal cabinet. God knows what was in that."

"And the girl thought he was a policeman?"

Chee nodded. And wished he hadn't. His head throbbed.

Shaw took a huge breath, exhaled it. "Well, hell," he said. "You got any notions?"

"I've got a headache," Chee said.

"I'll make a phone call," Shaw said, getting up. "Get somebody to that Jacaranda address and see if we can pick up Sosi." He glanced back from the doorway. "Too bad you didn't hit him harder."

Chee didn't comment on that. Through the general haziness, he was becoming aware of what the girl had done. She'd gotten the big man to bring him to the hospital. How the hell had she managed that? He had given up looking for an answer when Shaw returned.

"Okay," he said. "They'll find her."

"I doubt it."

"Whatever," Shaw said. He stared down, peered at Chee. Made a quizzical face. "What's going on here? Have you figured it out?"

"No," Chee said.

"I know the man in the van," Shaw said. "Eric Vaggan. That guy I told you about who works for McNair. Or he has, now and then. And for other people, I guess. Sort of an enforcer."

Chee didn't say anything. He was wishing Shaw would go away.

"The girl has something to do with the McNair business," Shaw said. "No other reason for any of this. Why else would Vaggan be out there looking for her?" He waited for Chee to tell him.

"Why don't you pick up this guy? Ask him?" Chee said.

"We don't know him all that well," Shaw said. "Don't have a file on him to amount to anything. No address. Just some stuff off some telephone taps from the other end of the call. Things like that. Witnesses describing a guy who looks like that, and so forth. Nothing concrete. You said he was taking her in?"

"She said he said he was a cop."

"Had to be a reason for it. What could it be?"

Chee closed his eyes. It didn't help much.

"What we need to do," Shaw said slowly, "is go see Farmer about this."

"Farmer?"

"The Assistant u.s.d.a. The man handling the McNair case. Maybe it fits something he knows. When can you get out of here?"

"I don't know," Chee said.

"I'll handle it, then," Shaw said. "I'll do it right now."

It was late afternoon when Shaw called. A nurse's aide had brought Chee his lunch, and a doctor had come in and removed the bandage and inspected him, and said something about not trying to knock down walls with his head. This had caused the nurse attending to chuckle. Chee had asked when he could check out, and the doctor had said he was suffering from concussion and should stay another day to see how things went. They seemed to be going well, physically. He felt better after the meal; his vision was no longer blurred, and the headache had become both intermittent and tolerable. When the woman came up from the business office to talk to him about who was going to pay for all this, he found his memory had regained full Chee-like efficiency. He rattled off the name of his Tribal Police medical insurance company, the amount of the deductible, and even the eight digits of his account number. By the time the telephone beside his bed rang, the only thing bothering him much was the scraped bruise on his hip.

Shaw hadn't had much luck.

"Typical," he said. "Farmer's long gone. He quit the Justice Department and went to work with some law firm up in San Francisco. The man who has the case now apparently hasn't even read the file on it."

The noise Chee made must have sounded incredulous.

"What's the hurry?" Shaw said, sounding a little bitter. "McNair doesn't come to trial for a couple of months, and then there'll probably be an extension. So I sit there in his office cooling my heels while he reads through the file, and then he looks up and says, 'Okay, now, what was it you want?' Like I was asking him some damn favor."

Chee made a sympathetic sound.

"So I tell him all about the business with Margaret Sosi, and so forth, and he listens politely and gets rid of me."

"Did you tell him about the Leroy Gorman angle, and Grayson, and the trailer?"

"I mentioned it," Shaw said. "Yes."

"What'd he say."

"He opened the file again, and looked through it, and then he changed the subject."

"What'd ya think?"

"Well," Shaw said, slowly, "I think that Grayson showed up in his file as one of his protected witnesses. Namely, Leroy Gorman."

"Yeah," Chee said. "I don't see how it could be any other way."

"Wasted time," Shaw said. "Wasted time. We could already guess that." There was silence on the telephone while Shaw considered this. He sighed. "Ah, well," he said. "I don't guess that lawyer was as dumb as he acted. At least he's alerted now that they're after Gorman. Either he'll move him someplace safer or watch him."

Chee didn't comment on that. He hadn't had enough experience with Assistant U.S. District Attorneys to judge.

"What I think I'll do now is try to get a line on this Vaggan. I'd like to find out where he lives and pick him up on something. I'll get you to sign a complaint. Pick him up and see if I can learn something. What are you going to do?"

"I guess I'm going to keep trying to find Margaret Sosi. Unless you found her?"

"No," Shaw said. "She'd got back to that place on Jacaranda and got her stuff and took off. At least that's what the old woman out there said. And she wasn't around." Shaw paused. "Where you going to look for her now?"

Chee's head was aching again.

"It takes too long to explain," he said.

Chapter 21

He called mary landon that afternoon and told her what had happened to him, and that he'd come home as soon as they'd let him out of the hospital, which would probably be tomorrow. And when he'd finished the conversation he felt much better. Mary had been suitably upset: alarmed at first, then angry that he'd let it happen, then concerned. She'd take time off from school and come right out. No, he'd told her. By the time she got to Los Angeles, he'd probably be on his way back to Shiprock. She'd come anyway. Don't, he told her. Far too much hassle and there'd be nothing she could do. And then they'd talked of other things, never allowing the talk to drift anywhere near the central core of their problem. It was like their old warm, happy times, and when the nurse came in and Chee said he had to hang up, Mary Landon said, "I love you, Jim," and Chee, conscious of the nurse watching him and listening, said, "I love you, Mary."

He really did. More important, he sometimes thought, he liked her, too. Admired her. Enjoyed her company, her voice, her laugh, the way she touched him, the way she understood him. He was right, this decision he was making. And he'd made it without even being conscious of it. He would be wrong to lose her. Having made his decision, he set about confirming it—thinking of all the things that were wrong with his job, with the reservation, with the Navajo culture. Making comparisons: This hospital room and the cold discomfort of his grandmother's hogan; the security of life with a regular paycheck and the sheep rancher's endless nerve-wracking dependence on rain that wouldn't fall, comparing the comforts of white society with the unemployment and poverty of the People. Perversely, these thoughts led him to the Silver Threads, and Mr. Berger, and the woman whose son was coming to see her, and to the old women who lived on Jacaranda Street, Bentwoman Tsossie and Bentwoman's Daughter.

In fact, it was three days before he could get out of the hospital. The next day the headache returned, fierce and persistent. That provoked another round of X-rays and a renewed verdict that he was suffering from concussion. Mary called in the afternoon and had to be persuaded again not to drop everything and visit him. The following day he felt fine, but the doctors weren't finished with some test or other. Shaw dropped in and reported he had nothing to report. Vaggan had proved surprisingly invisible. He was suspected of being involved in a bizarre assault case involving one of Southern California's television personalities; the description fit and it seemed to involve a welshed bet, which was the sort of work Vaggan did. But there was no hard proof. A witness hadn't gotten a look at him, and the victim and his girlfriend reported he was wearing a stocking mask. He dropped a copy of the Los Angeles Times on Chee's bed so he could read about it. Shaw looked tired and defeated.

Driving home the next day, Chee felt the same way. He also felt depressed, nervous, frustrated, irritated, and generally miles from that condition for which the Navajo word is hozro. It means a sort of blend of being in harmony with one's environment, at peace with one's circumstances, content with the day, devoid of anger, and free from anxieties. Chee thought of his neglected studies to become a yataalii, a shaman whose work it would be to restore his fellow Navajos to hozro. Physician, heal thyself, he thought. He drove eastward on Interstate 40 faster than he should, glum and disgruntled. Mary Landon hung in his mind—a problem he had solved but which refused to stay solved. And when he turned away from that, it was to the frustration of the postcard, which seemed to have come from no one to Albert Gorman, and on to Ashie Begay, and then to disappear—unless Margaret Sosi had it.

Chee stopped at a Flagstaff motel. The weathercast at the close of the ten o'clock news was on, the map showing a high-pressure area centered over northern Utah that promised to hold winter at bay for at least another day. Chee fell into bed, tired but not sleepy, and found himself reviewing it again.

Simple enough on the Los Angeles end. A car-theft operation broken, some indicted, some persuaded to be witnesses. One was Leroy Gorman. That much seemed sure. Leroy Gorman tucked away under the Witness Protection Program under the name of Grayson, and denying he was Gorman because the Federals had told him to deny it. If Shaw's information was correct, Albert Gorman had refused to cooperate. Upchurch had nothing to scare him with. But something—apparently that photograph/postcard of the trailer—had caused Albert to decide to come to Shiprock to find his brother. He'd been pursued. Why? Presumably because his employers wanted him to lead them to Leroy so that Leroy could be eliminated as a witness. Albert Gorman had resisted. Albert Gorman had been shot.

Chee lay listening to the truck traffic rumble on the Interstate, thinking of that. One odd hole in the Los Angeles end. Albert Gorman hadn't been followed to Shiprock. They'd known he was going there. Lerner had flown directly to Farmington and driven directly to Shiprock. And if what Berger had told him was true, Vaggan had come to Gorman's apartment to keep him from going to Shiprock. So much for that. So much for the reasonable, logical explanation. But at least he knew now why Lerner had gone to do the dirty work instead of Vaggan. Vaggan was having a splint put on a finger broken when Albert slammed the car door on it. Fat lot that helped.

Chee groaned, punched the pillow into better shape, rolled over. Nothing fit. Tomorrow morning he'd call Captain Largo, and tell him he'd be back in Shiprock by midafternoon, and see if Largo had learned anything while Chee was wasting his time in California. And he would complain about his headache and ask for a week of sick leave. He had some work he wanted to do.

Chapter 22

From flagstaff, near the western edge of the Navajo Big Reservation, to Shiprock, near its northern border, is about 230 miles if you take the most direct route through Tuba City. Chee took that route, checking out of his motel before sunrise and stopping briefly at Gray Mountain to call Largo.

First he dealt with official business. He was going to apply for a week of sick leave to let his head heal. Would it be approved? All right, Largo said, sounding neutral.

He'd told Largo in a call from the hospital the basics about what had happened to him and what he'd learned. Now he told him a little more, including what Shaw had learned, or failed to learn, in his visit to the u.s.d.a.'s office. "Shaw doesn't have any doubt that this Grayson is really Leroy Gorman," Chee said. "Neither do I. But it would be a good thing to confirm it. Is there a way you could do that? Find out for sure he's a protected witness?"

"He is," Largo said.

"You checked?"

"I checked," Largo said. "Grayson is Leroy Gorman. Or I should say Leroy Gorman is Grayson and will be until they haul him back to Los Angeles and have him testify. Then he'll be Leroy Gorman again."

Chee wanted to ask Largo how he'd found out. Obviously the fbi would not tell Largo or anyone else anything about this supersecret witness business. It was a long-time sore point with the local law that the Federals moved all sorts of known felons into their jurisdiction under false identities with no warning to anybody. The Justice Department said it was essential to the safety of witnesses. Local law saw the insult built into it—another statement from the Federals that locals couldn't be trusted. So how had Largo checked? The first possibility that occurred to Chee was a visit to the local telephone office to find out who ordered the telephone line connected to the trailer.

"Is Sharkey paying Grayson's telephone bill?" Chee asked.

Largo chuckled. "He is. And the bill for hauling that trailer in there from Farmington—the hauling company sent that right to the fbi. But when I told Sharkey what we know about all this, you'd have thought he couldn't imagine why I thought he'd be interested."

"Well," Chee said. "I'll see you next week."

"When you come back to work," Largo said, "I want you to make one more try to find that Sosi girl. And this time handcuff her to your steering wheel or something to get her to hold still long enough to find out about that postcard. You think you can do that?"

Chee said he could try, and he asked the captain to switch him to the dispatcher.

"Dispatcher?" Largo said.

"Yeah," Chee said. "If I haven't had any mail, I'll skip coming in."

Largo switched the call.

Chee didn't have any mail. He hadn't expected to. Then he arranged to have a horse saddled and a horse trailer ready for him for the afternoon. Captain Largo could have arranged that, but Captain Largo would have wanted to know why he wanted the horse.

Outside the Gray Mountain store, Chee stretched, yawned, and sucked in a huge lungful of air. It was cold here, frost still riming the roadside weeds, and the snowcapped shape of the San Francisco Peaks twenty miles to the south looked close enough to touch in the clear, high-altitude air. The winter storm being held at bay by the Utah high in last night's weathercast was still hung up somewhere over the horizon. The only clouds this morning were high-altitude cirrus so thin that the blue showed through them. Beautiful to Chee. He was back in Dine' Bike'yah, back Between the Sacred Mountains, and he felt easy again—at home in a remembered landscape. He stood beside his pickup, postponing for a moment the four or five hours he still had to spend driving, and studied the mountain. It was something Frank Sam Nakai had instructed him to do. "Memorize places," his uncle had told him. "Settle your eyes on a place and learn it. See it under the snow, and when first grass is growing, and as the rain falls on it. Feel it and smell it, walk on it, touch the stones, and it will be with you forever. When you are far away, you can call it back. When you need it, it is there, in your mind."

This was one of those places for Chee—this desert sloping away to the hills that rose to become Dook'o'oosli'id, Evening Twilight Mountain, the Mountain of the West, the mountain built by First Man as the place where the holy Abalone Shell Boy would live, guarded by the Black Wind yei. He had memorized this place when he worked out of the Tuba City agency. He leaned his elbows against the roof of his pickup and memorized it again, with rags of fog drifting away from the snowy peaks and the morning sun making slanting shadows across the foothills. "Touch it with your mind," Frank Sam Nakai had told him. "Inhale the air that moves across it. Listen to the sounds it makes." The sounds this place was making this morning were the sounds of crows, hundreds of them, moving out of the trees around the trading post back toward wherever this flock spent its winter days.

Chee climbed back into the truck and rolled it onto U.S. 89 North. He wanted to get where he had to go a long time before dark.

He got there about midafternoon, driving steadily and fast despite a quickening north wind, which told him the storm was finally bulging down out of Utah. He made a quick stop at his trailer in Shiprock to strap on his pistol, get his heavy coat, and collect a loaf of bread and what was left of a package of bologna. He picked up the horse and trailer at the tribal barns and ate on the long bumpy drive back into the Chuskas, trailed now by a cold north wind. He parked where Albert Gorman had abandoned his ruined Plymouth, unloaded the horse, and rode the rest of the way to the Begay hogan. The sky was clouding now, a high gray overcast moving down from the northwest. Chee tied the horse in the shelter of Begay's empty corral and quickly scouted the hogan yard. If anyone had been here since he'd left the place, they'd left no sign. Then he walked around the hogan to its broken north wall.

The wind was gusty now, whipping dust around his feet and making sibilant noises in the corpse hole. Chee squatted and peered inside. In the gray light of the stormy afternoon, he could see just what he'd seen by the light of his flash when he'd been here before: the rusty iron stove, the stove pipe connecting it to the smoke hole, odds and ends of trash. The wind hooted through the hole and sent a scrap of paper scuttling across the hard-packed earthen floor. The wind eddied around the collar of his padded coat, touching his neck with cold. Chee shivered and pulled the collar tight. By Navajo tradition, Albert Gorman now would have completed his journey to the underworld, would have vanished into the dark unknown which the metaphysics of the People had never tried to explain or explore. But his chindi would be here, an unhappy, discordant, malevolent evil—whatever in Gorman had been out of harmony—trapped forever inside the hogan when Gorman had died.

Chee took a deep breath and stepped through the hole.

He was instantly aware that it was warmer inside, and of the smell of dust and of something sharper. He paused a moment, trying to identify the aroma. Old grease, old ashes, old sweat—the smell of human occupation. Chee opened the stove door. Nothing in the oven. He opened the fire box. The ashes had already been stirred, probably by Sharkey. He picked up the scrap of paper the wind had moved. A torn bit of old envelope with nothing written on it. He found the place at the west side of the hogan where Begay had habitually laid his sheepskins for sleeping. He took out his knife and dug into the packed earth, looking for he knew not what. He found nothing at all, and paused, squatting on his heels, thinking.

Jim Chee was aware of the sound of the wind outside, whispering around the corpse hole and at the blocked smoke hole over his head. He was very much aware of the ghost of Albert Gorman in the air around him, and suddenly he was aware, clearly and surely, of the nature of the Gorman chindi. Like Gorman—of course like Gorman since it was Gorman—it was Los Angeles, and the little girl whores he'd seen along Sunset Boulevard, and the impersonal precision of the herds on the freeways, and the chemical gray air, and Albert Gorman's landlady, and the pink-faced aide at the Silver Threads. And now it was Jim Chee's ghost because Jim Chee had chosen it—stepped through the corpse hole into the darkness freely and willingly, having decided to do so rationally. Having chosen Los Angeles over Shiprock, and Mary Landon over the loneliness and poverty and beauty of hozro. Chee squatted on his heels, and looked around him, and tried to think of what he should be looking for. Instead, he remembered the song from the hogan blessing ceremonial.

This hogan will be a blessed hogan.

It will become a hogan of dawn,

Dawn Boy will live in beauty in it,

It will be a hogan of white corn,

It will be a hogan of soft goods,

It will be a hogan of crystal water,

It will be a hogan dusted with pollen,

It will be a hogan of long-life happiness,

It will be a hogan with beauty above it,

It will be a hogan with beauty all around it.

The words of Talking God came back to Chee. They would have been sung here, when Begay's family had gathered to help him bless this hogan a long time ago. Chee got to his feet, took out his knife again, and walked to the east wall. Here, under the end of the base log just atop the foundation stones, the singer hired by Ashie Begay to conduct his hogan ceremonial would have placed a choice piece of Begay's turquoise. Chee chipped away with the knife tip at the dried adobe plaster, dislodged a chunk of it, and crumbled it in his fingers. The turquoise was there, a polished oval of clear blue gemstone. Chee wiped it on his shirt, inspected it, and put it back under the log. He walked to the west wall, dug under the end of the foundation log, and extracted a white seashell. The abalone shell symbolized the great yei Abalone Boy, just as the turquoise represented the Turquoise Boy spirit. But what had finding them told him? Nothing, Chee thought, that he hadn't believed he knew—that Begay was orthodox, that this hogan had been properly blessed, that Begay, in abandoning his home, had left these ritual jewels behind. Would that be orthodox? Probably, Chee thought. Unless Begay had thought to remove them before Albert Gorman died they wouldn't be removed at all—just as no wood from this hogan would ever be used again, not even for a fire. But removing them before Gorman died would have been prudent, and Begay must have seen the death coming, and Bentwoman had described her grandson as a prudent man. What would a prudent man salvage from his hogan if he saw death approaching it?

What had Bentwoman expected him to find in here?

Of course! Chee walked around the stove to the east-facing entrance. He felt along the log lintel above the door, running his fingers through the accumulated dust. Nothing. He tried to the right of the door. There, his fingers probing into the space over the log encountered something.

Chee held it in his left hand, a small brown pouch of dusty doeskin tied at the top with a leather thong. His fingers squeezed it, feeling exactly what he expected to feel. The pouch contained four soft objects. Chee untied the thong and dumped into his palm four smaller pouches, also of doeskin. He held Ashie Begay's Four Mountains Bundle.

The instant he saw it, he knew that Ashie Begay was dead.

Chee stepped through the corpse hole into snow. The wind now was carrying small, light flakes, which blew across the yard of Ashie Begay's hogan as dry as dust. He climbed down to the corral, the Four Mountains Bundle tucked in his coat pocket, to where he had tied his horse—thinking about what he'd found. The bundle represented weeks of work, a pilgrimage to each of the four sacred mountains to collect from each the herbs and minerals prescribed by the Holy People. Chee had collected his own the summer of his junior year at the University of New Mexico. Mount Taylor and the San Francisco Peaks had been easy enough, thanks to access roads to Forest Service fire lookouts on both of their summits. But Blanca Peak in the Sangre de Cristos and Hesperus Peak in the Las Platas had been a different matter. Begay would have gone through that ordeal in harder times, before roads led into the high country. Or he might have inherited it from his family. Either way, he would never have left it behind in a death hogan. It would have been his most treasured belonging, an heirloom beyond price.

So what had happened at Ashie Begay's hogan?

Chee had brought the horse because he intended, no matter what he might find in the hogan, to make a general search of Ashie Begay's home territory. Now that search took on new purpose. The horse stomped and whinnied as he approached, cold and ready to move. Chee untied it, dusted the snow off its haunches, and swung into the saddle. What had happened at this hogan? Could Begay have gone away, returned to find Gorman dead, and forgot the sacred pouch when he abandoned the hogan?

That was inconceivable. So what had happened?

Had someone else come after Albert Gorman after Lerner had failed to stop him, and found him at Ashie Begay's hogan, and killed them both, and then taken the time for Gorman's ceremonial burial, emptying the hogan and hiding Begay's body? Chee considered that. Possibly. In fact, something like that must have happened. But what would be the motive? He could think of none that made sense.

Chee circled the hogan yard and then rode east on a sheep trail leading down the arroyo rim. He rode slowly, looking for anything that might deviate in any way from normal. After more than a mile of finding absolutely nothing, he trotted the horse back to the hogan yard. It was snowing more heavily now and the temperature was dropping sharply. The second trail he tried led up past the talus slope, past the place where Gorman's body had been left, and followed under the cliff west of the hogan. It took him into the wind, making the horse reluctant and visibility difficult. He pulled his hatbrim down and rode with head bowed to keep the snowflakes out of his eyes—plodding along studying the ground, knowing what he was looking for without letting the thought take any exact shape in his mind. The snow was sticking, accumulating fast. Soon it would cover everything and make his search futile. He should have done this long ago. Should have used his head. Should have attended his instinctive knowledge that Hosteen Ashie Begay would not have abandoned this place to a ghost, would not have left his nephew half prepared for the journey to the underworld. There was this trail to check out, and at least two more, and there wouldn't be time to do it all before the snow covered everything.

There almost wasn't time.

Chee saw the horse without realizing he was seeing anything more than a round boulder coated with snow. But there was something a little wrong with the color where the snow hadn't stuck, a redness that was off-key for the gray granite of this landscape. He pulled up on the reins, and wiped the snowflakes out of his eyebrows, and stared. Then he climbed down out of the saddle. He saw the second horse only when he'd walked down into the trail-side gully to inspect the first one.

Whoever had shot them had led them both far enough down from the trail so that, if they had both fallen as he must have intended, they would have been out of sight. But the one Chee had seen apparently hadn't cooperated. It was a big bay gelding, and the bullet fired into its fore head apparently had touched off a frantic struggle. It had lunged uphill, two or three bounding reflex jumps judging from the dislodged stones, before its brain turned off in death.

Hosteen Begay's belongings were dumped out of sight farther down the wash, behind a screen of piñons. Chee sorted through them quickly, identifying bedding, clothing, boxes of cooking utensils, and two sacks of food. Begay's furniture was also here. A kitchen chair, a cot, a light chest of drawers, enough other odds and ends of living to convince Chee that even with two horses hauling, it must have taken more than one trip to move it all here. He stood beside the cache and looked around. This was what he'd expected, had expected since his mind had time to calculate what finding the Four Mountains Bundle had meant. He'd expected it, but it still left him sick. And there was one more thing to be found.

He found Ashie Begay a bit farther down the wash, his body dumped as unceremoniously as the furniture. Begay had been shot in the head, just like his horses.

Chapter 23

It took chee three hours to get his pickup out of the Chuskas. Twice it involved digging through drifts, and twice he had to unload the horse and lead it up slopes where the truck lacked the traction to pull the load. By the time he reached the graded road leading to the Toadlena boarding school he was weary to the bone, with another thirteen miles through the snow to Highway 666 and thirty more to Shiprock. The snow blew steadily from the north-north-west, and he drove northward alternately through a narrow white tunnel formed by his headlights reflecting off the driven flakes and brief blinding oblivions of ground blizzards. His radio told him that Navajo Route 1 was closed from Shiprock south to Kayenta, and Navajo Route 3 was closed from Two Story to Keams Canyon, and that U.S. 666 was closed from Mancos Creek, Colorado, to Gallup, New Mexico. That helped explain why Chee's pickup truck had the highway to itself. He drove about twenty-five miles an hour, slowing as well as he could when he sensed the ground blizzards coming, his fingers sensitive to traction under his wheels and his shoulder muscles aching with fatigue. He'd covered the body of Hosteen Ashie Begay with Begay's bedroll, thinking that he, like Gorman, had had to make his journey into the underworld with his hair unwashed—without even the imperfect preparations Gorman's corpse had received. But the man who killed him had at least sent along with Begay the spirits of his horses. Had he known that sacrifice of the owner's horse had been an ancient Navajo custom? Possibly. But Chee had no illusions that this was why the horses had been killed. They were killed for the same reason Begay was killed, and his hogan emptied, and Gorman's corpse prepared for burial—a great deal of trouble to make it seem that nothing unusual had happened at Begay's hogan. But why? Why? Why?

There seemed to Chee to be little enough mystery about who the killer was. It was Vaggan, or some surrogate Vaggan—one of those who, in white society, did such things for pay. But it was probably the man Shaw had identified as Vaggan. This seemed to be his job, whatever its purpose. And it would have been easy enough to learn about Navajo burial customs. They would be covered in any of a half-dozen books available in the Los Angeles library. Anyone who could read could have learned enough to fake what had happened at the Begay hogan. Who had done it didn't matter—Vaggan or someone like him. The question was why.

Chee was finding he couldn't make his mind work very well. The headache had returned. Fatigue, probably, and eyestrain induced from staring into the reflecting snow. He put Begay's body out of his consciousness and thought only about driving. And finally there to his right was the sign indicating the entrance road to the Shiprock landing strip, and he could feel the highway sloping downward into the San Juan river bottom, and Shiprock was just ahead.

He turned the horse into the shelter of the tribal barn, and left the horse trailer in the lot, and drove into the village. Across the bridge he hesitated a moment. A left turn at the junction would take him to his trailer home, to hot coffee, food, his bed. To a telephone to report to Captain Largo what he had found. To deal again with the question of why. The postcard would come up again. Inevitably. It lay at the center of all of this. Had, apparently, triggered it. What had been written on that postcard? Chee turned right, downriver toward the place where the aluminum trailer was parked under a cottonwood tree.

It looked different, somehow, in this storm. Before temperatures had dropped, snow had crusted on the cold aluminum and collected more snow, and cost the trailer its machine-made look. It loomed in Chee's headlights now as a great white shape, tied to the earth by a drift, as natural as a snow-caked boulder and looking as if it had stood below its tree forever. Light glowed from the small windows. Grayson, or somebody, was home. Chee honked the pickup's horn and waited a moment before it occurred to him that Grayson was a city man who wouldn't be aware of this rural custom of giving warning before invading privacy. He turned up his coat collar and stepped out into the blowing snow.

If Grayson had heard his horn, there was no evidence of it. Chee rapped his knuckles against the aluminum door panel, waited, and rapped again. The wind worked under the bottom of his coat and around the collar and up his pants legs, as cold as death. It reminded Chee of the corpse of Hosteen Ashie Begay lying frozen under the old man's bedroll. And then the voice of Grayson, through the door.

"Who is it?"

"It's Chee," Chee shouted. "Navajo Police."

"What do you want?"

"We found your uncle's body," Chee said. "Ashie Begay. I need to talk to you."

Silence. The cold gripped Chee's ankles, numbed his cheeks. Then Grayson's voice shouted, "Come on in."

The door opened. It opened outward, as trailer doors open to conserve inside space, no more than six inches, and then the wind pushed it shut again. Chee stood a moment, looking at it, wondering what Grayson was doing and finally understanding. Grayson was playing it safe, as a protected witness might be expected to do. He opened the door and stepped in.

Grayson was sitting behind the table, his back against the wall, examining Chee. Chee shut the door and stood against it, enjoying the warmth and letting Grayson see his hands were empty.

"You found whose body?" Grayson said. "Where? What happened?"

Grayson's hands were out of sight beneath the table. Would he have a weapon? Would a protected witness be allowed to have a gun? Perhaps even be encouraged to keep one? Why not?

"Not far from his hogan," Chee said. "Somebody had shot him."

Grayson's face registered a kind of dismay. He looked a little older than Chee had remembered, a little more tired. Maybe it was the artificial light. More likely it was Chee's mood. The corner of his mouth pulled back in the beginning of one of those wry clicks of sympathy or surprise or sorrow, but Grayson stopped it. He brought his hands out from under the table, rubbed his face with the right one. The left one lay on the table, limp and empty. "Why would anyone want to kill that old man?" Grayson said.

"Your uncle," Chee said.

Grayson stared at him.

"We know who you are," Chee said. "It saves time if we get that out of the way. You're Leroy Gorman. You're in the Department of Justice Witness Protection Program under the name of Grayson. You're living here under the Grayson name until it's time to go back to Los Angeles to testify in federal court."

The man who was Leroy Gorman, older brother of Albert Gorman, nephew of Ashie Begay, stared at Chee, his expression blank. And bleak. And Chee thought, What is his real name? His war name? The name his maternal uncle would have given him, privately and secretly when he was a child, the name he would have whispered through the mask at the Yeibichi ceremonial where he changed from boy to man? The name that would label his real identity, that no one would know except those closest to him, what was that? This Los Angeles Navajo doesn't have a war name, Chee thought, because he doesn't have a family. He isn't Dinee. He felt pity for Leroy Gorman. Part of it was fatigue, and part of it was pity for himself.

"So much for the goddam promises," Leroy Gorman said. "Nobody knows but one guy in the Prosecutor's office and your fbi guardian angel. That's what they tell you. Nobody else. Not the local fuzz. Not nobody, so there's no way it can leak." He rapped his hand sharply on the Formica tabletop. "Who'd they tell? They have something about it on TV? Front page of the Times? On the radio?"

"They didn't tell anybody as far as I know," Chee said. "The postcard you wrote gave you away. The one you sent to your brother."

"I didn't write any postcard," Gorman said.

"Let me see your camera," Chee said.

"Camera?" Gorman looked surprised. He stood, opened the overhead cabinet behind him, and extracted a camera from its contents. It was a Polaroid model with a flash attachment. Chee inspected it. It was equipped with an automatic tinier.

"Not exactly a postcard," Chee said. "You set this thing up, and took a picture of yourself and this trailer house, and sent it to your brother.

Whatever you wrote on it, it caused him to come running out here to Shiprock looking for you. And when Old Man Begay saw it, something on it, or something Albert told him, caused him to send it along to his granddaughter to tell her to stay away."

Gorman was looking at him, thinking. He shook his head.

"What did you write on it?" Chee asked.

"Nothing, really," Gorman said. "I don't remember, exactly. I just figured Al would be worried about me. Just wrote a little note. Like wish you were here."

"Did you say where 'here' was?"

"Hell, no," Gorman said.

"Just a little note," Chee said. "Then what do you think it was that brought your brother running?"

Gorman thought. He clicked his tongue. "Maybe," he said, "maybe he heard something I need to know about."

"Like what?" Chee said.

"I dunno," Gorman said. "Maybe he heard they were looking for me. Maybe he heard they knew where to find me."

That had a plausible sound. Albert had heard Leroy's hiding place had leaked. When Leroy's card arrived, he'd seen the Shiprock postmark and had hurried here to warn his brother and hadn't quite made it. And then someone had been sent to make sure that Albert Gorman didn't survive his gunshot wound. How had Albert Gorman really died? The coroner had said gunshot wound, which was obvious and what they'd expected, and what they'd have looked for. But if they were looking for something else, what would they have found? That Albert Gorman had been suffocated, or something like that, which didn't show but would hurry the death from the gunshot wound along? Or had whoever had come to the hogan found him already dead and killed Ashie Begay because of what Albert might have told him? It didn't really matter. Chee's head ached, his eyes burned. He was thinking maybe Albert Gorman died outside the hogan after all. Maybe he hadn't stepped through the corpse hole into a chindi hogan. Maybe he wasn't contaminated with ghost sickness. But that didn't matter either. The ghost sickness came when he made the step—out of hozro and into the darkness. Out of being a Navajo, into being a white man. For Chee, that was where the sickness lay.

"Any idea who killed him," Leroy Gorman asked, "or why?"

"No," Chee said. "Do you?"

Gorman was slumped back in his chair, his hands on the table in front of him, looking over them at nothing. He sighed, and the wind outside picked up enough to remind them both of the storm. "Could be just meanness," Gorman said. He sighed again. "Did you find that girl?"

"Not exactly," Chee said.

"I don't guess she'll be coming here," Gorman said. "Didn't you say her grandfather told her to stay away? Something dangerous?"

"Yeah," Chee said. "But it didn't stop her the first time."

"What did he tell her?" Gorman was still looking past his hands, his eyes on the door. The wind pressed against it, letting in the cold. "She know I'm a car thief?"

"I don't know what he told her," Chee said. "I intend to find out."

"She's kinfolk of mine," Gorman said. "I don't have many. Not much family. Just Al and me. Dad run off and our mother was sickly and we never got to know nobody. She's my niece, isn't she? Begay's granddaughter. That'd be my mother's sister. I knew she had one out here somewhere. I remember she mentioned that. Wonder if that aunt of mine would still be alive. Wonder where that little girl went."

Chee didn't comment. He wanted a cup of coffee badly. And food, and sleep. He tried to think of what else he could ask this man, what he could possibly learn that would keep this from being just another in a long line of dead ends. He could think of nothing.

"I'd like to get acquainted with her," Leroy Gorman said. "Meet her family. I didn't make much of a white man. Maybe when I get through with all this I could make some sort of Navajo. You know where I could find the Sosi family?"

Chee shook his head. He got up and thanked Leroy Gorman for his time and went through the aluminum door into the driving snow, leaving Gorman sitting there looking at his hands, his face full of thought.

Chapter 24

He called largo from his trailer while the coffee perked and told the captain what he had found at Begay's hogan. It took Largo something like a micromillisecond to get over his sleepiness and then he was full of questions, not all of which Chee could answer. Finally that part of it was over, and it was a little after 2 a.m. and Chee was full of hot coffee, and two sandwiches, and in bed, and asleep almost before he could appreciate the sound of the winter outside.

He awoke with the sun on his face. The storm had moved fast, as early winter storms tend to move in the Mountain West, and had left in its wake a cold, bright stillness. Chee took his time. He warmed himself some leftover mutton stew for his breakfast and ate it with corn tortillas and refried beans. He ate slowly and a lot, because he had a lot to do and a long way to go, and whether or not he had another hot meal this day would depend on road conditions. He put on his thermal underwear, his wool socks, the boots he used for mud. He made sure that his tire chains were in the box behind the seat in his pickup, that his shovel, his hand winch, and his tow chain were in their proper places. He stopped at the gas station beside the San Juan bridge and topped off his gas tank and made sure the auxiliary tank was also full. And then he drove westward out of Shiprock to find Frank Sam Nakai. Nakai was his teacher, his friend since earliest boyhood, and, most important of all in the Navajo scheme of things, the brother of his mother—his key clan uncle.

The first seventy miles, through Teec Nos Pos, Red Mesa, Mexican Water, and Dennehotso, was easy enough going over the snow-packed asphalt of Route 504. Beyond Dennehotso, reaching the winter hogan of Frank Sam Nakai involved turning southward off the highway on a dirt road that wandered across Greasewood Flats, dipped across the usually dry Tyende Creek Canyon, and then climbed Carson Mesa. Five miles down this doubtful route, Chee decided it wasn't going to work. The air was still cold but the hot sun was turning the snow pack into mush. He had put his chains on before he left the highway, but even with them, the truck slipped and slid. As the day wore on it would get steadily worse until sundown froze it all again. He made it back to the highway and made the hundred-mile circle back through Mexican Water and southward to Round Rock and Many Farms and Chinle, and then the long, slippery way to the south side of Black Mesa past the Cottonwood Day School and through Blue Gap, to an old road which led to Tah Chee Wash. It was as bad as the road south from Dennehotso but, from where the passable stretch ended near Blue Gap, much shorter. Chee drove down it in second, at a cautious ten miles an hour. He'd drive as far as the melting snow would allow, walk in the remaining miles, and walk out again when the cold darkness turned the snow into ice and the mud into frozen iron.

The walking part turned out to be a little less than ten miles—a hard four hours in the soft snow. It gave Chee time to think, to sort it all out again. It resolved itself into a single central puzzle. Why had someone gone to so much trouble to conceal the murder of Ashie Begay? Chee could understand why Gorman might have been followed to the Begay hogan. That simply continued the effort to find Leroy Gorman. McNair, somehow, seemed to have learned that Leroy was in Shiprock, learned that Albert was going there, decided that Albert's arrival would scare the fbi into moving Leroy before his exact location could be pinned down, and sent someone to catch Albert and learn from Albert where Leroy could be found. Albert had resisted, been wounded, fled. Albert had been tracked down at Begay's place by someone (probably Vaggan) seeking an answer to the same question. Vaggan had either found Albert dead, or dying, or had killed him, and had killed Ashie Begay to eliminate a witness to the crime. That was all plausible enough. It left questions, true. How had Vaggan found Albert Gorman so quickly at the Begay hogan? Probably because the McNair people knew enough about Albert's connections on the reservation to make an educated guess. After all, one of those involved was a Navajo: Beno. Robert Beno, Upchurch had said. High enough in the organization to warrant grand jury action, and the only one who managed to run. Another relative, perhaps. Another member of the Turkey Clan. Someone who could guess the only place Albert Gorman could find refuge. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Albert surely had intended to visit his uncle when he came to the reservation—to Chee's Navajo mind such a visit by a nephew was certain and inevitable—and he had told Mrs. Day, who had passed the information along. Anyway, that didn't seem to matter. What mattered was why all the trouble to make the crime at Begay's hogan invisible.

Chee plodded along through ankle-deep snow, examining possibilities. Because Vaggan didn't want the law to know he was looking for Leroy and was within a hundred miles of finding him? That looked good for a moment, but the shooting in the parking lot had already alerted the fbi. What other motive could there be? Chee could think of none and skipped over to another question. If the McNair people knew, or even suspected, that Leroy was hidden away in Shiprock, why weren't they looking for him? Largo had said there was no sign at all of that. No strangers asking around. Largo had put the word out, at the gas stations, and trading posts, and convenience stores, the post office, the laundry, everywhere. It was an old and simple and absolutely efficient system, and Chee had no doubt that if anyone—anyone at all—had shown up in Shiprock, or anywhere near Shiprock, asking questions, Largo would have known it within fifteen minutes. And unless McNair knew about the aluminum trailer and had some idea of where it was parked, Leroy Gorman couldn't be found without questions—hundreds of them. Chee had hunted enough people on the reservation to know how many weary hours of questions. And if McNair did know about the aluminum trailer and the cottonwood tree, Leroy would have been found with no questions at all. And Leroy would be just as dead as Albert.

And so the thinking went, leading around in the same circle back to the picture of the aluminum trailer mailed as a postcard with something, apparently, written on its back that had brought Albert running and started all this. Something, even though Leroy didn't remember writing such a stirring message—or claimed he didn't remember it. What would Leroy have written that he'd refuse to admit? Chee would know, he hoped, when he found Margaret Billy Sosi again—for the third time—and pinned her down long enough to extract from her either the card itself or her exact and detailed memory of what was written on it, and what her grandfather had told her about why Gorman (which Gorman?) was dangerous to be around. And just about when Chee was thinking this, he smelled smoke.

It was the smell of burning piñon, the sweet, perfumed smell of hot resin. Then a blue wisp of the smoke against the junipers on the next hillside, and the place of Frank Sam Nakai was in view. It was an octagonal log hogan, a rectangular frame house covered with black tarpaper, a flatbed truck, a green pickup, a corral with a sheep pen built beyond it, the tin building where Nakai kept his cattle feed, and, off against the hillside, the square plank building where the mother of Frank Sam Nakai's late wife lived with Frank Sam Nakai's daughter. The smoke was coming from stovepipes in both houses, making wisps of blue as separate as the suppers the occupants were cooking. Chee's uncle and his uncle's mother-in-law were following the instructions of Changing Woman, who had taught that when men look upon the mothers of the women they marry it may cause blindness and other more serious problems. To Jim Chee it seemed perfectly natural.

It also seemed natural to Chee that Frank Sam Nakai was absolutely delighted to see him. Nakai had been shoveling snow into barrels, where the sun would convert it into drinking water, when he saw Chee approaching. His shout of welcome brought Chee's aunt out of the house. His aunt by white man's reckoning was Mrs. Frank Sam Nakai. Her Navajo friends, neighbors, and clansmen called her Blue Woman in honor of her spectacular turquoise jewelry. But to Chee she was and always had been and would be Little Mother, and in honor of his visit she opened cans of peaches and candied yams to augment the spicy mutton tacos she served him for his supper. Only when all that was finished, and the utensils cleared from the table, and news of all the family covered, did Chee bring up what had brought him here.

"My father," he said to Frank Sam Nakai, "how many yataalii are left who know how to cure someone of the ghost sickness?"

Behind him, where she was sitting beside the stove, Chee heard Little Mother draw in her breath. His uncle digested the question.

"There are two ways it can be done," he said finally. "There is the nine-day sing and the five-day. I think not many know the nine-day any more. Maybe only an old man who lives up by Navajo Mountain. Up in Utah. You could find somebody to do the five-day cure a little easier. There was a man who knew it, I remember, when we were teaching young people to be yataalii at the Navajo Community College. I remember he said he learned it from his uncle, and his uncle lived over on the Moenkopi Plateau, over there by Dinnebito Wash. So that would be two. But the uncle was old even then. Maybe he is dead by now."

"How could I find this man? The younger one?"

"Tomorrow we will go to Ganado. To the college. They kept a list there of everybody who knew the sings, and where they lived." His uncle's face was asking the question that his courtesy would never allow him to put in words. Who suffered from ghost sickness? Was the victim Jim Chee?

"I'm trying to find a girl of the Turkey Clan who people call Margaret Billy Sosi," Chee said. "She was in a chindi hogan, and I think she will be having a sing." He heard a sigh from Little Mother, a sound of relief. He didn't want to tell these two that he, too, was infected. He didn't want to tell his uncle what he had done. He didn't want to tell him that he was going to get a job with the fbi, and leave the People, and give up his idea of being a yataalii like his uncle. He didn't want to see the sadness in that good man's face.

They'd had coffee and bread and had three horses saddled before it was time for his uncle to take a pinch of pollen and a pinch of meal and go out to bless the rising sun with the prayer to Dawn Boy. Little Mother rode with them to lead their horses back, and everything went very rapidly. The drive back over the now-frigid snow was like driving over ground glass, squeaking and crunching under Chee's tires. They were on the good road past Blue Gap in thirty minutes. Before noon, they were in the library at Navajo Community College, working their way through the roster of men and women who are shamans of the Navajos.

Chee hadn't known it existed. He should have known, he thought. It would be useful to any policeman. And even while he was thinking that, another part of his consciousness was shocked and dismayed. So few names. And so many of them listed as knowing only the Blessing Way, or the Enemy Way, or the Yeibichi, the Night Chant, or the more common and popular curing rituals. He glanced at Frank Sam Nakai, who was running his finger slowly down the page. His uncle had told him that the Holy People had taught the Dinee at least sixty such rituals, and that many of them were lost in those grim years when the People had been herded into captivity at Fort Sumner. And he could see by this that more were being lost. He looked down the list to see how many singers knew the Stalking Way, which he had been trying to learn. He saw only the name of his uncle and one other man.

"Just two know the Ghostway," his uncle said. "That fellow I told you about and his old uncle, way over there west of Hopi country. Just two."

"It would probably be the younger man," Chee said. "The Turkey Clan seems to be eastern Navajos—mostly on this side of the Chuskas."

"You can see why we need you," Frank Sam Nakai said. "Everybody is forgetting everything. There won't be anybody left to cure anybody. Nobody to keep us being Navajos."

"Yeah," Chee said. "That's the way it looks." He'd have to tell Frank Sam Nakai soon. Very soon. But today he just couldn't do it.

The fellow who knew the Ghostway (and the Blessing Way and Mountaintop Way) was on the book as Leo Littleben, Junior. And he lived not way the hell a thousand miles down a dirt track on the other side of the reservation but at Two Story, just twenty-five miles down the highway toward Window Rock. And—rarity of rarities on the reservation—he was listed in the Navajo-Hopi telephone book.

"I think my luck's changing," Chee said.

Somebody answered the telephone at the Littleben residence. A woman.

"He's not here," she said.

"When do you expect him back?" Chee asked.

"I don't know. Three-four more days, I think."

"Anyplace I can reach him?"

"He's doing a sing."

"Do you know where?"

"Way over there on the Cañoncito Reservation."

His luck hadn't changed much, Chee thought. Cañoncito was as far as you could get from Ganado and still be in Navajo country. It was a fragment of reservation separated from the Big Reservation by miles of private land and by the Acoma and Laguna Indian reservations. It was practically in Albuquerque. In fact, it was outside Dine' Bike'yah, on the wrong side of the Turquoise Mountain. Some strictly orthodox medicine men would refuse to hold a sing there.

"Do you know who it's for?" Chee said. "Who hired him?"

"For some woman named Sosi, I think it is."

"A Ghostway?"

"A Ghostway," the woman agreed. "He's doing the five-day sing. Be back in another three-four days."

So Chee's luck had changed, after all.

Chapter 25

It was almost dark when Chee turned off Exit 131 from Interstate 40 and took the worn asphalt that led northward. For the first miles the road ran between fences bearing the No Trespassing signs of the Laguna Indian Pueblo—grass country grazed by Herefords. But the land rose, became rockier. More cactus now, and more juniper and chamiza and saltbush, and then a fading sign:

welcome to the cañoncito reservation

Home of the Cañoncito Band of Navajos

Population 1600

Leroy Gorman would have no trouble getting this far, Chee thought, not if he could read road signs well enough to navigate the Los Angeles freeways. Chee had called him from the college, using his Tribal Police identification number to wring Grayson's unlisted number from the information operator's supervisor.

"You said you wanted to meet some kinfolks," Chee said. "You want to enough to drive a couple of hundred miles?"

"What else have I got to do?" Gorman said. "Where do I go?"

"South to Gallup. Then take Interstate forty east through Grants, and after you pass Laguna start looking for the Cañoncito Reservation interchange. Get off there and head into the reservation and look for the police station. I'll leave a map or something for you there to tell you where to go."

"You found the girl? They're having a curing thing for her?"

"Exactly," Chee said. "And the more of her relatives are there, the better it works."

Five miles beyond the entrance sign, a green steel prefabricated building, a shed, a mobile home, a parked semi-trailer, and a Phillips 66 gasoline sign marked the site of a trading post. Chee stopped. Anyone know the Sosi family? No Sosi family at Cañoncito. Anyone know where a sing was being held? Everybody did. It was way back on Mesa Gigante, at the place of Hosteen Jimmie Yellow. Easy to find it. How about the police station, where was that? Just down the road, three-four miles, before you get to the chapter house. Can't miss it.

It would, in fact, have been hard to miss—a small frame building not fifty feet from the road wearing a sign that read simply police station. It was manned, as Chee recalled the situation, not by the Navajo Tribal Police but by the Law and Order Division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a parttime patrolman who also worked the east side of Laguna territory. On this particular afternoon it was manned by a young woman wearing bifocals.

Chee showed her his identification. "I'm trying to find a sing they're having at Jimmie Yellow's place," Chee said. "You know how to get there?"

"Sure," the woman said. "Up on Mesa Gigante." She extracted a piece of typing paper from the desk, wrote North at the top of it and East on the right-hand side, and drew a tiny square near the bottom and labeled it Cops. Then she drew a line past the square northward. "This is Route Fifty-seven. Stay on it past"—she drew a cluster of tiny squares west of the line—"the chapter house and the Baptist Church off here, and then you angle westward on Road Seventy forty-five. There's a sign." The map took precise shape under her pen, with unwanted turns identified and blocked off with X's, and landmarks such as windmills, watertanks, and an abandoned coal mine properly indicated.

"Finally it winds around up here, under this cliff, and then you're on top of the mesa. Only road up there so you don't have any choice. There's an old burned-out truck there right at the rim, and about a mile before you get to Yellow's place, you pass the ruins of an old hogan on the left. And you can see Yellow's place from the road."

"And I can't miss it," Chee said, grinning.

"I don't think so. It's the second turnoff, and the first one is to the old torn-down hogan." She looked up at him over her glasses, somberly. "Somebody died there, so nobody uses that track anymore. And after the turnoff to Yellow's place, that's all of them for miles because Jimmie Yellow's people are about the only ones up there any more."

Chee told her about Gorman driving down from Shiprock, instructed to stop here for directions. Would that be any problem? It wouldn't be. But as Chee drove away, he was nagged by a feeling that something would be a problem, that he was forgetting something, or overlooking something, or making some sort of mistake.

Jimmie Yellow's place, even more than Ashie Begay's, seemed to have been selected more for the view than for convenience. It was perched near the rim of the mesa, looking down into the great empty breaks that fell away to the Rio Puerco. To the west, across the Laguna Reservation, the snowy ridges of Turquoise Mountain reflected the light of the rising moon. To the east, the humped ridge of the Sandia Mountains rose against the horizon, their base lit by the glowing lights of Albuquerque. To the north, another line of white marked the snowcap on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the bright smudge of yellow light below them was Santa Fe, one hundred miles away. A spectacular view, but no water, and only a scattered stand of juniper to provide firewood, and the snake-weed around Chee's boots indicated what too many sheep a long time ago had done to the grazing on the mesa top.

Still, the view was impressive, and normally Jim Chee would have enjoyed it and added it to his internal file of beautiful places memorized. Not tonight. Tonight, when Chee allowed himself to think of it, he looked at the mountains with a sense of loss. He had no illusions about where his career in the fbi would take him. They would identify him as an Indian, he was sure enough of that. And that would mean he'd be used in some apparently appropriate way. But they wouldn't send him home to work among people who were family, his kinsmen and clansmen. Too much risk of conflict of interest in that. He'd work in Washington, probably, at a desk coordinating the Agency's work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Or he'd be sent north to be a cop among the Cheyennes, or south to deal with federal crime on Seminole land in Florida. Aside from that dismal thought, Chee was not enjoying the view because he was not in the mood to enjoy anything. He had found Margaret Billy Sosi for the third time, and extracted from her the last missing piece of the puzzle, and it told him absolutely nothing. He took Ashie Begay's Four Mountains Bundle from his coat pocket and tossed it in his hand. From behind him, the sound of a pot drum drifted on the cold, still air, and with it the sound of Littleben's voice, rising and falling in the chant which told how the Hero Twins had decided that Old Man Death must be spared and not eliminated in their campaign to cleanse Dinetah of its monsters. The same faint breeze which carried the sound brought the perfume of woodsmoke from the fire in the hogan, reminding Chee that it was warm in there, and that the cold out here at this slab of sandstone on which he was sitting was seeping into his bones. But he didn't want to be inside, sitting with his back to the hogan wall, watching Littleben build the last of the great sand paintings of this ceremonial, sharing the music and the poetry and the goodwill of these people. He wanted to be out here in the cold, trying to think, going over it all again.

He'd done his talking to Margaret Sosi when Littleben finished the segment that recounted how Monster Slayer and Born for Water had returned to the Earth Surface World with the weapons they had stolen from their father, the Sun. Littleben had come out of the hogan, wiping perspiration from his forehead, under the red headband, and looking curiously around him as people do who've been indoors too long. Then the others who were sharing in the blessing of the ceremony came out, and with them was Margaret Sosi, with her face covered with the blackening that made her invisible to ghosts. Margaret Sosi seemed exhausted and thin, but the eyes that looked out through the layer of soot were alive and excited. Margaret Sosi is being cured, Chee thought. Someday, perhaps, he could be.

Margaret Sosi was delighted to see him. She asked him about his head and told him he shouldn't be out of the hospital.

"I want to thank you for getting me there," Chee said. "How in the world did you do it?"

"When you hit him, he dropped his gun. I just picked it up and told him to take us to the hospital."

"As easy as that?"

Margaret Sosi shivered. "I was scared," she said. "I was scared to death."

"Before anything like that happens again," Chee said, "I need to ask you some questions. Did Hosteen Begay send you a postcard he'd gotten from Albert Gorman? A picture—"

"Yes," Margaret said.

"I'd like to see it."

"Sure," Margaret said. "But it's in my room. At St. Catherine. We went back there before we came here for the sing."

Of course, Chee thought. It wouldn't be here. He would never, ever actually see that postcard. Never.

"What did it say on it?"

Margaret Sosi frowned. "It just said, 'Don't trust nobody.' That's all. There was Mr. Gorman's name, and an address in Los Angeles, and that 'Don't trust nobody.' That's all there was. And at the bottom 'Leroy.'"

Chee didn't know what to say, so he said, "No return address?"

"No," Margaret said, "and not even a stamp. The postman had put that 'Postage Due' stamp on it."

"Well," Chee said. "Hell."

"Have you found my grandfather yet?"

Chee knew the question would be coming. He had prepared himself for it. He had decided that the best thing for all concerned was simply to tell Margaret that her grandfather was dead. Straight out. Get it over with. He drew a deep breath. "Margaret," he said. "Uh, well…"

"He's dead, isn't he," Margaret Billy Sosi said. "I guess I knew it all along and just couldn't face it. I knew he would never abandon his hogan like that. Not and just go away with no word to anyone."

"Yes," Chee said. "He's dead."

Tears were streaking the soot on her face, a line of wetness that reflected the cold moonlight, but her voice didn't change. "Of course he was," she said. "Of course. He was killed, wasn't he? I guess I really knew it."

"And I don't think it was really a ghost hogan you were in," Chee added. "I think Gorman died outside. It was just made to look like Hosteen Begay had buried him, and broke the hogan wall, and abandoned it. So nobody would be looking around for him."

"But why?"

"I don't know," Chee said. "I don't know why." But he knew there must be a reason. Had to be. If he could just be smart enough to figure it out. And that brought him back to the picture.

"Was the address on that picture…" he began, but Margaret Sosi was talking.

"It doesn't matter now," she said. "Whether it was a ghost hogan or not. In just a few hours I'll be cured of that. Mr. Littleben will finish just when the sun comes up. And I feel cured already."

Chee did not feel cured. The ghost sickness clung to him as heavy as a rain-soaked saddle blanket. He felt dizzy with it. Sick.

"The address on that picture," he continued. "Was it the same place you went when you went to Los Angeles?"

"Yes. That's how I knew to go there. I wanted to find the family, and that woman there told me what bus to catch to get to the place of Bentwoman and Bentwoman's Daughter."

"And all it said on the picture was 'Don't trust anybody'?"

"'Don't trust nobody'," Margaret corrected. "That was all, and 'Leroy' down at the bottom."

That was exactly all he had learned. He told Margaret Sosi that when this was over he would drive her back to Santa Fe and pick up the picture card. But even as he said it, his instinct told him that even if he held the card in his hand it would tell him nothing he didn't already know. The final piece of the puzzle found; the puzzle unresolved.

They had eaten then, about thirty altogether, from two pots of mutton stew and a basket of fry bread. They ate bakery-made oatmeal cookies for dessert, and drank Pepsi-Cola and coffee. Hosteen Littleben came over and agreed to purify the Begay Four Mountains Bundle, a rite that involved rinsing it with some of the emetic made for the patient to drink when the ceremonial ended.

"Frank Sam, he tells me you're going to be a yataalii. Said you already know most of the Blessing Way and you're learning some of the others. That's a good thing." Hosteen Littleben was short and fat, and when he walked he tilted a little because of a stiff leg. His two pigtails were black, but his mustache was almost gray and his face was a map of deep-cut lines. If Frank Sam Nakai was right, if Hosteen Littleben was the youngest medicine man left who knew the Ghostway, then the People would be losing another piece of their inheritance from the Holy People.

"Yes," Chee said. "Learning the songs is a good thing." Was a good thing, he thought. The verb is "was."

And then it was time for the final segment of the Ghostway chant. The very last glow of twilight was gone, the moon climbing, the mesa dark, and the lights of Albuquerque glowing against Sandia Mountain forty miles (and a world) away. Hosteen Littleben would twice cover the earthen floor of the hogan with the ceremonial's elaborate dry paintings, illustrating episodes in the mythic adventures by which the Holy People resolved the problem caused by death's disruptive residue. Margaret Sosi would sit surrounded by this abstract imagery, and by the love and care of this ragtag remnant of the Turkey Clan, and be returned to beauty and hozro, cleansed of the ghost. Chee didn't follow the participants back into the hogan. To do that properly, one's mind must be right—free of wrong thoughts, anger, and disappointment and all things negative. Chee stayed out in the cold, his mind full of wrong thoughts.

Leroy Gorman arrived a little later, parking a white Chevy among the cluster of vehicles in the yard of the Yellow place. Chee watched him walk up the slope to the hogan, the moonlight reflecting from the crown of his Stetson and the blue and white plaid of his mackinaw.

"Hell of a place to find," he said. "The police station was closed, but they had your map pinned there on the door. But even with a map, I've been all over the landscape. Taking the wrong turns. How do they make a living out here?"

"They don't make much of one," Chee said.

Gorman was staring at the hogan, from which the sound of Littleben's chant was issuing again, and then back down the slope at the shabby cluster of shacks and outbuildings that housed the families of the Yellow outfit. He shook his head. "My kinfolks," he said.

"What did you mean when you wrote 'Don't trust nobody' on that picture?"

Gorman was staring at the hogan again. For a moment, the question didn't seem to register. "What?" he said.

"The picture you mailed to Albert, back in Los Angeles. Why did you write that on it?"

"I didn't," Leroy Gorman said. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"You said you'd written to your brother back in L.A. Just good wishes. That sort of stuff. We find this card. It's addressed to Albert, and it says 'Don't trust nobody.'"

"Not me," Leroy Gorman said.

Chee studied him, trying to see his face in the moon shadow under the broad felt brim. He could see only the glint of reflection from the lens of his glasses.

"I wrote right after I got to Shiprock. I sent Albert a letter and I told him I was all right. And I asked him to call somebody for me and tell 'em I'd be away for a while, and not to worry."

"Who?"

Leroy Gorman didn't say anything for a while. Then he shrugged. "Friend of mine. A woman." He shrugged again. "Didn't want her worried and all pissed off. Had her phone number but I wasn't sure of her address, so I sent Al the number and asked him to tell her."

"So how did Albert get this photograph of you standing there by your trailer, with the note on the back?"

"Part of that's easy," Leroy said. "I sent him the photograph. Put it in the letter. But I didn't write nothing on it."

"You mailed him the Polaroid photo then?"

"Yeah. Set the camera over on the hood of my car, and set the timer and stood over by the trailer while it took the picture. But I didn't write on the back of it. I think if you do that it spoils the picture. The ink works through."

Chee digested that. The final piece dropped into the puzzle and created a new puzzle. Who had written Don't Trust Nobody on the back of that damned photograph? And when? And how had they gotten it. And why? Why? Why?

"Somebody sent it," Chee said. "In the mail. It had a 'Postage Due' thing stamped on it. And somebody signed it 'Leroy.'"

"Said 'Don't trust anybody'? Nothing else?"

"Right," Chee said.

"Who could it have been?" Gorman asked. He pushed his hat brim back, and the moonlight lit his lined face and reflected from his glasses. "And why?"

Those were exactly the questions in Chee's mind.

They hung in his mind, unanswered. He and Gorman had poked at the questions for a while, adding nothing to their understanding. And Chee had explained to Gorman that it wouldn't be proper for Gorman, a stranger, to enter the hogan at this stage of the ceremony. If he'd arrived an hour earlier, he could have met his niece and his other kinsmen at their supper. Now he would have to wait until dawn, when the ritual ended. Gorman wandered over to the fire, where spectators who weren't joining in the hogan ceremonial were visiting. Chee heard him introducing himself and, a little later, the sound of laughter. Leroy Gorman had found at least the fringes of his family.

Chee went back to his pickup and turned on the engine. No place left to look now. He'd drive Margaret Sosi to Santa Fe, get the picture and look at it, and see what had already been described to him. That would be the end of that. There were no loose ends, nothing. Just a sequence of murderous incidents which seemed to violate reason. They certainly violated Frank Sam Nakai's basic rules for the universe—which had become Jim Chee's rules. Everything is connected. Cause and effect is the universal rule. Nothing happens without motive or without effect. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.

"Don't trust nobody," Chee said aloud. He turned on the heater, confirmed that the engine was still too cold to help, and switched it off again. People were sleeping in the cars and trucks around Yellow's house, and in bedrolls on the ground, waiting for dawn, when Margaret Sosi would emerge from the hogan with the soot washed from her face. She would drink the bitter emetic Hosteen Littleben would have prepared for her, vomit up the last traces of her ghost sickness, and be happily returned to the beauty of her way.

Chee's mind wouldn't leave it alone. Why the warning against trust? he thought. Who wasn't to be trusted? Should he take the advice himself? Just who was he trusting in this affair?

There was Shaw. The cop motivated by love for a friend and desire for justice. Was that credible? Chee thought about Shaw for a while and came up with nothing helpful. There was Sharkey. Chee could think of no reason not to trust what he'd learned from the fbi agent—which was nothing much. There was even Upchurch. Had he done something untrustworthy before he died? Who else was Chee depending on? Leroy Gorman. He'd learned nothing much from Leroy, except for Leroy's denial that he'd written the warning on the picture. Chee considered that a moment. Did he trust Gorman? Of course not, no more than he trusted Albert Gorman's landlady. He simply trusted them to behave in the way they were conditioned to behave. Just as you trusted the mailman to deliver mail. Chee remembered Albert Gorman's mailbox, shielding it with his body so Gorman's landlady couldn't see that he was checking its contents. Abruptly a whole new line of thought opened. The letter Leroy Gorman had mailed would have been delivered to that mailbox, visible to Mrs. Day—the landlady who was being paid to keep McNair informed. But the picture, mailed as a postcard with an address, but no stamp and no return address, would have been delivered just a little differently. The mailman would have tapped at the door and collected the postage due. Mrs. Day would have had no chance to intercept that. Was that important? Chee could see how it might be. He considered. "Ah," he said. If he was thinking correctly, the McNair people would have known Leroy Gorman was hidden at Shiprock very soon after he got there. Mrs. Day would have seen the letter Leroy Gorman had mailed in Albert's mailbox, and noted the return address, and made her $100 call. And in such a small community they could have found a stranger. Not quickly, perhaps, because Albert obviously had the photograph and they didn't. But they could have found him. Apparently they didn't try. Why not?

Chee sighed. What about the card? Leroy Gorman said he'd mailed the Polaroid photograph in an envelope and hadn't written the warning on it. But the photograph had "Postage Due" stamped on it, and an address. What explained that? Two photographs? Hardly possible with a Polaroid print. Albert Gorman had told old man Berger he received the photograph from his brother, that he was worried. The "Wish you were here" note Leroy said he'd written would hardly provoke worry. The "Don't trust nobody" message would.

Chee closed his eyes, shutting out the moonlight and the sound of Mr. Littleben's chanting as best he could to better reproduce the scene on the Silver Threads lawn. There was Mr. Berger, using his hands to tell the story of the blond man coming, of Albert Gorman slamming the door on the blond man's hand. Gorman had told Berger that he wasn't supposed to go to Shiprock, but he was going anyway. Berger believed the blond man had come to prevent that. That hadn't made sense to Chee then, and it made no sense now. If they hadn't found Leroy, they would have wanted Al to go find him for them. What if they had found him. Would it matter then? Perhaps.

Abruptly Chee sat bolt upright, eyes open. It would matter a lot if the man Albert Gorman found when he found the trailer was not his brother. What if the McNair people had found Leroy in his trailer, and removed him, and replaced him? But that couldn't possibly work. Chee did a quick scan of his memory for reasons it couldn't work.

There were none. Upchurch, who would have recognized the switch instantly, was dead. Farmer, the only man in the u.s.d.a's office Upchurch had trusted with his witnesses, was far away working for a private law firm in San Francisco. Who did that leave who would know Leroy Gorman? Sharkey? Not likely. Sharkey would know he had one under his wing, would be in telephone contact, would be alert. But he would also stay away to avoid drawing any attention to the man.

Looking back on it, Chee could never say exactly when enlightenment came. First he finally really understood how the postcard had originated. Leroy Gorman must have realized he had been found. They must have sent Vaggan to dispose of him. Perhaps he'd seen Vaggan first. He would have known instantly that the Witness Protection Program had failed. He had been trying to talk his brother into cooperating with the Feds. Now he knew that was a fatal mistake. He'd be desperate to warn his brother. He'd managed to jot the address and the warning on the only thing he had with him that would drop through a mailbox slot—the Polaroid print. "Don't trust nobody" included the fbi, the McNair bunch, and everyone else.

After that breakthrough, the rest of it became clear and simple. The death of Upchurch must have triggered it, and it didn't matter whether Shaw was right, or the coroner. Probably the death had been natural. What mattered was that McNair knew of it quickly, and recognized the chance it offered. Upchurch's secrecy had been the downfall of Clan McNair, but now it presented McNair a way out, a witness switch. It made what had happened at the Begay hogan totally logical. Everything had to be done to avoid raising any question, drawing any attention to the man in the aluminum trailer at Shiprock. Once again Frank Sam Nakai's immutable law of cause and motivation was confirmed.

About then, Jim Chee began thinking of who the man he'd been calling Leroy Gorman might really be, and the implication of what this man was doing. And he realized that if things went as planned he might not leave Mesa Gigante alive.

And neither would Margaret Billy Sosi.

Chapter 26

Chee unlocked the glove box, fumbled among the maps, tools, and papers in it, and pulled out his pistol. It was a short-barreled .38 caliber revolver, and Chee looked at it without pleasure. Nothing against this particular pistol; it was just that Chee had no fondness for any of them and wasn't particularly good at using them. Keeping up his marksmanship certification, a condition of employment, was an annual chore. While he always managed to pass, there was never any margin to spare. Now, however, the heft of the pistol was reassuring in his hand. He examined it, made sure it was loaded, and cocked and uncocked it. Then he dropped it into the side pocket of his coat. That out of the way, it was time to make a plan. That involved trying to figure out what was likely to happen here.

The key to it all was simple: Leroy Gorman was not Leroy Gorman. He might be Beno, or whatever his name was—the Navajo Shaw said the grand jury had indicted and who had never been picked up. That made sense. Shaw had said finding him was tough because he had no arrest record, which meant no pictures or fingerprints, and no useful information. Thus nobody was going to recognize him. And when the time came for McNair to go to trial, a Navajo identified as Leroy Gorman would be placed on the witness stand, and how would they work it then? Chee guessed he knew. When the D.A. examined him, he'd recite his testimony in a halting, uncertain way, raising doubt in the jury. Then, under cross examination, he'd say that he'd been coached in what to say by Upchurch; that Upchurch had given him all this information, and assured him it was true, and warned him that if he didn't recite in court he'd be sent to prison as a thief. He would say that he actually knew none of it; he was simply passing along what the fbi agent had told him. And that, of course, would taint everything any other prosecution witness said, and raise at least a reasonable doubt, and McNair would go home free.

The genuine Leroy Gorman was undoubtedly dead. Carefully dead. They would never want his body found.

Chee reconsidered. Sharkey? No problem.

Leroy's warning had been mailed almost immediately after he was put in place. There was almost no chance that Sharkey would have seen him. So Leroy Gorman was not Gorman. Chee found himself thinking of the man as Grayson once again. What to do about Grayson?

Chee climbed out of his pickup and looked toward the hogan. The chanting of Littleben was silent now. Chee imagined him on his knees, building the final sand painting. With the exception of two men and a very fat woman talking beside the fire, those waiting for dawn to bring the ceremony's end were waiting in the relative warmth of their cars. Chee stared at Gorman's Chevy, trying to see if the man was in it. He couldn't tell. He put his hand on the pistol in his coat pocket, took two steps toward Gorman's car. Then he stopped. The entire theory suddenly was nonsense—the product of being hit on the head and too many hours without sleep. He imagined himself arresting Gorman.

"What's the charge?"

"I think you're impersonating a federal witness."

"That's a crime?"

"Well, it might be."

And he imagined himself standing in front of Largo's desk, Largo looking at him, wordless, sad, stricken with the latest Chee stupidity. And Sharkey, maybe, at the back of the room, too furious to be coherent.

Chee walked back to his pickup truck and leaned against it, trying to think. If Gorman was a plant working for McNair, what would he have done when Chee called him and told him the Sosi girl was found, and invited him to come and meet her? He wouldn't have come. Of course not, because Margaret Sosi would have seen Leroy Gorman's picture and would recognize he wasn't Leroy Gorman, and that would screw everything up. He came, so of course he was the genuine Leroy Gorman.

Chee thought some more. His theory, wrong as it was, made everything click into place. Everything. It explained what had happened at the Begay hogan. Nothing else explained that. So the man was an imposter and he'd come anyway.

But of course! Grayson had to come. Here Chee would meet Sosi, see the photograph, know Grayson wasn't Leroy Gorman, and everything would collapse around him. So he'd come, late enough so that Margaret Sosi wouldn't see him in any decent light. And so far, for that matter, she hadn't seen him at all. He'd come because it was a last chance to get the picture back before it did any serious harm, and to eliminate Sosi, who'd seen the picture.

Chee had a second chilling thought. Whoever he was, he wouldn't have come alone if he could help it. He would have called Los Angeles and had Vaggan sent to help. How long would that take? A chartered plane, a rented car. Chee tried to calculate. Plenty of time to fly to Albuquerque and then drive. An even worse thought occurred to him. Vaggan hadn't waited around Los Angeles all the time Chee was mending in the hospital there. More likely he'd have confirmed, somehow, that the Sosi girl had left and he had driven directly to the reservation to look for her. That would have made getting here simple indeed. He might have driven out with Gorman. Chee doubted that. He'd have brought his own vehicle. And where would he have left it?

Chee had a possible answer for that. He trotted down Mr. Yellow's entrance track to the road that had brought him up Mesa Gigante. And then he walked, keeping well away from it. The ruined hogan the girl in the police station had described to him was about a mile away, near the rim of the mesa. Chee approached it cautiously, keeping behind the cover of junipers when he could, keeping low when there was no cover. Where the track forked off from the road toward the ruin, Chee stopped, knelt, and studied the ground. Tire tracks. The moonlight was dim now, slanting from near the western horizon, but the tracks were plain enough. Made today. Made only hours ago, with neither wind nor time to soften them. Still on his knees, Chee started toward the hogan, out of sight just over a fold of land. No Cañoncito Navajo would drive in there at night and brave a ghost. The hogan had been marked on the map he'd left for the man who wasn't Leroy Gorman. The man must have left the map for Vaggan, and Vaggan—obviously, from what had happened at the Begay place—had taken the trouble to educate himself about Navajo attitudes about ghosts and ghost hogans.

Chee moved cautiously down the track, keeping behind the junipers. He didn't have to go far. After less than fifty yards he had enough visibility over the hillock to see the top of what remained of the hogan's wall. And over the wall, the top of a dark van. Chee stared at it, remembering the last time he had seen it—and what he had seen in the frantic moment he had been inside it, remembering the locked gun rack behind the driver's seat and what it had held. He'd seen an automatic shotgun, something that had looked like an M16 automatic rifle, and at least two smaller automatic weapons—an arsenal.

It occurred to Chee, fairly early in his walk back to the Yellow place, that if things went bad here—as they seemed likely to—it was purely because of Jim Chee's stupidity. He had found Margaret Sosi for them, and then he had called them down on her. Two other things also seemed apparent. Vaggan would do nothing overt here, at this sing, because he was smart enough to know how long it would take him to drive from here to anyplace he could lose himself. Empty, roadless country made troubles for law enforcement, but it also had advantages, and one of them was that roadblocks are extremely efficient. If you have a wheeled vehicle, there's no place to go with it. If you don't, hiding is easy enough, but there's no water. So Vaggan would wait. Follow them away from here, probably. Pass them on the highway, perhaps, and finish it all with a burst of fire from that automatic rifle. Or at least follow Margaret Sosi. Chee, until he saw the photograph, would be harmless. And he'd told the substitute Gorman that the picture was in Santa Fe.

Finally it occurred to him that he had one advantage. He knew Grayson was the enemy. He knew Vaggan was out there waiting. What he didn't know, not yet, was how to use that advantage. He moved rapidly through the snakeweed and cactus, back toward Yellow's hogan. On the eastern horizon now he could make out the ragged outline of the Sandias and the Manzano Mountains, back-lighted by the first glimmer of dawn. He had very little time to decide.

The fire had been rebuilt with a fresh supply of logs and was sending sparks high above the hogan when Chee returned. Everybody was up, waiting for the final act of the drama that would free Margaret Sosi from the ghost that rode her and return her to the ways of beauty. Chee searched through the crowd, looking for Grayson. He spotted him at the edge of the cluster just as the sound of Littleben's chanting stopped. It was a moment too early. Chee ducked back into the crowd, away from Grayson's vision.

The door of the hogan opened out, and Littleben emerged, trailed by Margaret Sosi. He held a small clay pot in his right hand and a pair of prayer sticks, elaborately painted and feathered, in the other. He held the feathered pahos high, their shafts crossed in an X. "Now our daughter will drink this brew, " he chanted.

"Now our daughter, she being daughter of Black God,

Now our daughter, she being daughter of Talking God,

Now our daughter, she being Blue Flint Girl,

Now our daughter, she being White Shell Girl,

Now our daughter will drink away the evil,

Now our daughter will return to hozro,

Now our daughter will walk again in the male rain falling,

Now our daughter will walk with the dark mist around her,

Now our daughter will go with beauty above her.

Now our daughter…"

Chee had lost sight of Grayson again. He turned away from the poetry of the chant to look for him. When the time was right, he wanted to know exactly where he could find the man. He wanted Grayson close. And Grayson was close. He had simply moved a little nearer the hogan. But he was still keeping himself where Margaret Sosi couldn't see him—or so it seemed to Chee. It also seemed to Chee that Margaret Sosi would hardly notice him. She had drunk the steaming emetic now and was staring at the east. She was supposed to vomit just as the red first rim of the sun was visible on the horizon. It was apparent from the strained look on her face that her inclination was to vomit instantly. But there, suddenly, was the rim of the sun. It was time to use his one advantage.

Chee hurried through the onlookers to Grayson and grabbed him by the elbow.

"Leroy," he said. "Trouble."

"What?" Grayson looked startled.

"Vaggan is here," Chee said. "Big blond man who's a killer for McNair. He's got his van parked out there."

"Vaggan?" Grayson said. "My God."

"He must be waiting until this is over. Until the crowd breaks up. Or he's waiting for you to leave and he'll follow you."

"Yeah," Grayson said. He looked suitably nervous.

"There's another way out of here," Chee said. "On past this place, the road winds down the other side of the mesa. It's bad but it's passable."

Around them the spectators were laughing and clapping. Margaret Sosi had gotten rid of her evil and was returned to hozro. Her relatives crowded around her.

"Just turn left where Yellow's drive comes off the road and keep driving. I'll get Margaret and follow you."

"Left," Grayson said. "Okay."

He ran for his car. Chee hurried through the crowd to Margaret Sosi. She was talking to an old woman, with Littleben standing beside her.

"Come on," Chee said. "Vaggan is here. We've got to run."

Margaret Sosi looked puzzled. With the ghost blacking washed away, she also looked pale. "Vaggan?"

"The big man back in L.A. Remember? The one who pretended to be a cop. The one who hit me."

"Oh," Margaret Sosi said. She hurried along with him. "Good-by. Good-by. And thank you."

Grayson's Chevy was roaring down the track away from the Yellow place. Chee started his pickup, backed it around in a flurry of dust, and roared down the track. At the bottom of the arroyo, he slid the pickup to a stop, shifted into low gear, and edged it carefully up the wash, banging and slamming over the rocks and scraping through the thickets of mountain mahogany and chamiza that flourished in the stream bottom. When he was far enough from the track to be out of sight he turned off the engine. Margaret Sosi was looking at him, the question on her face.

He had time enough to explain it all to her, because now there was nothing to do but wait…

"And so," Chee concluded, "I told the guy who's pretending to be Gorman that I'd spotted Vaggan, and I told him to make a run for it on a road down the other side of the mesa, and I told him you and I would follow. He drove right off, but where he'll go is to tell Vaggan we've seen him, and that we're running."

"But when he goes after us—" Margaret Sosi began.

"We give him time to do that, and then we run ourselves."

"But why didn't we just go down the other side?"

"The road doesn't go anywhere. That's what they told me at the police station. It wanders around a little up here and turns into wagon tracks. But there's no other way down off the mesa; just back the way we came. The only way down is right past where Vaggan is parked."

"Oh," Margaret Sosi said. "Okay."

They sat in silence.

"How long do we wait?"

Exactly the question in Chee's mind. Chee had counted four of the seven vehicles that had been parked at the Yellow place passing on the track behind them. Now track and road were silent. The other three, he guessed, must be staying for breakfast and a visit. He had to allow enough time for Grayson to reach the old hogan, and give Vaggan the word, and for them to drive back past Yellow's turnoff. More than that was time wasted—because it probably would not take Vaggan long to realize the road was playing out into nothing. But less than that would be fatal. Chee had no illusions about the outcome of any shooting match between his pistol and Vaggan's automatic weapon.

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to estimate time elapsed and match it with Vaggan's actions.

"About now, I think." He started the engine again and bumped the pickup backward down the arroyo floor. At the intersection, nothing was in sight on the road in either direction. He had allowed a little more time than necessary, which meant pursuit would be a little quicker than it might have been. He roared down the rutted dirt. Dawn was bright enough now to make headlights needless, but still dim enough to make it hard to see the uneven road surface. He skidded the pickup around the sharp turn where the road dipped suddenly over the mesa rim, braked again where it made another hairpin bend around a great upthrust of sand-stone and slate, then jerked the wheel sharply to the right to bend it around the wall of stone.

Just behind the wall, the big brown van was parked, blocking the way. Vaggan was standing behind it, the automatic rifle aimed at Chee's windshield. Chee stood on the brakes, sending the truck into a sidewise skid that stopped it parallel to the van. He shifted frantically into reverse, spinning the rear wheels in the roadside sand. Grayson was standing beside the road, not fifteen feet away, a pistol pointed at Chee.

"Kill the engine," Vaggan shouted. "Or I kill you now."

Chee killed the engine.

"Stick your hands out the window where I can see them," Vaggan ordered.

Chee put his hands out the window.

"Now reach down, outside the door where I can see the hand, and open the door, and get out, and keep your hands where I can see them. Your hand gets out of my sight and I kill you right then."

Chee opened the door and stepped out on the ground. He was conscious of the weight of the .38 in the right-hand pocket of his coat. How long would it take him to reach it and shoot Vaggan? Far, far, far too long.

"I'm going to handcuff you and put you in the van here with me," Vaggan said. He was walking toward Chee, the automatic rifle aimed at Chee's midsection. "And then you and the girl and all of us will go someplace where it's quieter and we can talk this all over. Where's your pistol?"

"No pistol," Chee said. "I'm off duty. It's back at my place in Shiprock."

"I'm not stupid," Vaggan said. "If I was stupid I'd be off chasing down that road where you told Beno you'd be. Lay down on your face. On the ground. Hands and feet spread. Beno, come here and get his gun. Probably a shoulder holster or under his belt."

Chee stood, trying to think of something useful.

"Down," Vaggan said. He speared Chee in the chest with the rifle barrel.

Chee dropped to his knees gasping. He knew exactly what was coming. Vaggan would take them to some more isolated spot, where the gunshots would not bring someone immediately to check. Then he would kill them. Just two shots, Chee guessed. One each. The less shots, the less chance of arousing curiosity.

"Down," Vaggan ordered, jabbing Chee in the back with the rifle. Chee dropped to his belly.

"There it is," Vaggan said. "In his coat pock-…"

The sound of the gunshot drowned out the rest of it. Vaggan had shot him, but he felt nothing except the pain where Vaggan's rifle barrel had stuck him. For a crazy split second Chee's mind searched for the point of impact, for the feeling that the bullet must be causing. He saw, past the clump of snakeweed in which his cheek was pressed, the motion of Vaggan falling, falling sideways, arms thrown out.

"Don't," someone screamed. "Don't."

In another fragment of that moment, Chee realized he had not been shot. The voice was Grayson's, and as he scrambled up from the dirt, his mind was making the automatic correction from Grayson to Beno. He staggered to his feet, trying to tear the pistol out of his coat pocket, trying to cock it. But he didn't need the pistol.

Margaret Sosi was leaning out of the driver's side of the pickup, a huge revolver gripped in both hands. The revolver was aimed at Beno. Vaggan was sprawled on his side, face turned toward the earth, one leg slowly bending toward his chest, his rifle in the dirt beside him.

"Don't," Beno screamed again. "Don't shoot." Beno held his arms stretched high over his head.

Chee finally got his own pistol untangled from the jacket pocket. Beno had no weapon now. He'd dropped his pistol beside Vaggan's leg. Chee picked it up. He heard a metallic rapping sound. Margaret Sosi was shaking, the barrel of her pistol rattling against the metal of the pickup window. Where had she gotten the gun? And then he remembered. It must be the same pistol Vaggan had dropped when Chee had hit him with the flashlight back in Los Angeles. She'd kept it. That was the sensible sort of thing Margaret Billy Sosi could be expected to do. And she had shot Vaggan with his own gun.

Chapter 27

When chee got back to shiprock, the letter was in his mailbox. He saw immediately that the handwriting on the envelope was Mary Landon's and that it was thick enough to contain two or three sheets of paper. A long letter. He put it in his jacket pocket along with what seemed to be a solicitation from an insurance company.

Back in his trailer, he put the letter on the table. He hung up his jacket and his hat, locked his pistol in the drawer, and poured a pot of water into his Mr. Coffee machine. He stripped and took a hot shower. That left him feeling clean and a little more relaxed. But he was tired. Absolutely, utterly tired, and it was that, probably, that was causing his head to ache. He sat beside the table in his bathrobe and looked at the letter. In a moment, he would open it. Was there anything else he needed to do first—any loose ends? He could think of none. The helicopter ambulance had come from the University of New Mexico Medical Center and its attendants had inspected Vaggan, their faces grim. And then they had flown away with him. The New Mexico State Policemen had come to the Cañoncito Police Station with two fbi agents Chee had never met. They had taken Beno off Chee's hands. Margaret Sosi had eaten breakfast with him in the Albuquerque bus station, and had made a telephone call, and had shortly thereafter been picked up by a middle-aged woman who Chee gathered was the mother of a schoolmate from Isleta Pueblo. The woman had not seemed to approve of Chee and had fussed over Margaret and taken her away to get some sleep. And then he'd checked into a motel intending to sleep a little himself. But he was too tense to sleep. So he'd made the 200-mile drive back to Shiprock, and called Captain Largo to tell him what had happened, and picked up his mail and come home.

No loose ends. Nothing. All finished. He pushed the envelope with his finger, turning it around so that he could read his name, right side up, in Mary Landon's bold, reckless handwriting.

Then he opened it.

My darling Jim,

Why am I writing you a letter? Because I want to make sure I manage to say just what I want to say so that you understand it. Maybe that will help me understand it, too.

What I have to say is that I have a friend named Theresa McGill who when she was in college fell in love with a man who was just finishing with the seminary—learning to be a Catholic priest. She loved him, maybe not as much as I love you, but she loved him a lot. And they got married, which meant, of course, he didn't go through with being ordained a priest. He got a job teaching, and they had a daughter, and I thought for a long time that she was happy. But last summer she told me how it really was. She'd notice him being very quiet. Maybe just looking out the window or sitting out in the backyard alone. Or taking long walks by himself. And one Saturday afternoon she followed him, and she saw him go into a church. An empty church. No services. No one there. But he stayed inside for an hour. Theresa told me that she has been living with that. She loves her husband, and she knows she deprived him of something that was terribly important to him. And always will be important.

Well, that's what I'm trying to say. I don't want that to happen to us, so I want to tell you that I've changed my mind. I won't marry you on my terms—that we get off the reservation and raise our family somewhere else. Maybe I will marry you on your terms—that we live here among your people. If you still want to. But I've got to have time to think about it. So I'm going home—back to Wisconsin. I'm going to talk to my family, and walk around in the snow, and go ice skating, and see what happens to my mind. But I'm not going to change my mind about one thing—I'm not going to force my Jim Chee to be a white man…

Chee put the letter on the tabletop beside the envelope and tried to examine himself for a reaction. He was tired, and suddenly sleepy as well. He was not surprised, particularly. This letter was exactly in character for Mary. Exactly. He should have known it. Perhaps he did. Otherwise, why the lack of surprise? And what else did he feel? A sort of blank numbness, as if all this concerned someone else. That was fatigue too, he guessed. Tomorrow the numbness would be gone. And tomorrow he'd decide what to do. Call Mary, probably. But what would he say to her? He couldn't seem to think what it would be. He found himself thinking, instead, of Leo Littleben, Junior, and wondering if Littleben really was going to be the last man alive to know the Ghostway ceremony.

He got up, already stiff, poured himself a cup of coffee, and leaned against the sink while he sipped it. When he finished it, he would go to bed and sleep until spring. And when he awoke, whenever that was, he would think about Mary Landon's letter and what he should do about it. He would also get in touch with Frank Sam Nakai and ask his uncle to arrange for Hosteen Littleben to sing a Ghostway cure for him. And then, he thought, he would talk to Littleben. Feel him out about what he would charge Chee to teach him the ritual. It would be a good thing for a younger man to know it.

And thinking that, Chee fell across his bed with his bathrobe still on and went, almost instantly, to sleep.

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