Hunting Badger jlajc-14

by Tony Hillerman

  Leaphorn pointed, noted the entrance door was probably to their left, pointed out the route down the gentle slope that Chee should take, noting the cover available in the event anyone came out of the structure. Any pretense of being a civilian, of being anything except the Navajo Tribal Police officer in charge, had ceased to exist.

  “I’ll move down to the right,” Leaphorn concluded. “Watch for a signal. If anyone comes out, we’ll let them get far enough from the structure. They, or he, will probably be walking toward Gershwin’s truck. We’ll see what opportunity presents itself.”

  “Yes sir,” Chee said. He rechecked his pistol and did exactly as told.

  About five minutes, and fifty cautious yards later, Chee first heard a voice.

  He stood, waved at Leaphorn, pointed to the wall and made talking motions with his hand. Leaphorn nodded.

  A moment later, the sound of laughter.

  Then the sharp door-slam sound of a pistol shot. Then another, and another.

  Chee looked at Leaphorn, who was looking at him. Leaphorn signaled him to stay down. They waited. Time ticked past. Leaphorn signaled him to close in and moved slowly toward the wall. Chee did the same.

  A tall, elderly man emerged from behind the wall. What seemed to be a student’s backpack dangled from one hand. He was wearing a white shirt with the tail out, jeans and a tan straw hat. As Leaphorn had predicted, he walked toward Gershwin’s truck.

  Chee ducked back out of sight behind a growth of salt bush, following the man with his pistol. No more than twenty yards. An easy shot if a shooting was called for.

  Leaphorn was standing in the open, the rifle cradled across his arm.

  “Mr Gershwin,” he shouted. “Roy. What are you doing way out here?”

  Gershwin stopped, stood frozen for a moment, then turned and looked at Leaphorn.

  “Well now, I don’t hardly know what to tell you about that. If I had noticed you first, I’d have asked you the same thing.”

  Leaphorn laughed. “I probably would have told you I’m out here hunting quail. But then you’d have noticed this is a rifle and not something you use to shoot birds. And you wouldn’t have believed me.”

  “Prob’ly not,” Gershwin said. “I’d guess you were thinking about all that money taken out of that casino and how it had to be hidden someplace and maybe this old mine was it.”

  “Well,” Leaphorn said, "it’s true that the Navajo Nation doesn’t offer high retirement pay. How about you? You looking for some extra unmarked paper money?”

  “Are you talking as an officer of the law, or are you still a civilian?”

  “I’m the same civilian you brought your list of names to,” Leaphorn said. “Once you’re out they don’t let you back in.”

  “Well, then, I hope you have better luck than I did. There’s no money back there. I turned over every piece of junk. Nothing. Just a waste of time." Gershwin started walking again.

  “I heard some shots fired,” Leaphorn said. “What was that about?”

  Gershwin turned around and started back toward the mine. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you. And I’ll tell you, too. Remember me telling you I was pulling out. Going to move into a motel somewhere. Not wait around for those militia bastards to come after me. Well, I decided to hell with that. I’m too old a dog to let those punks run me out. I decided I’d have a showdown.”

  “Hold it a minute,” Leaphorn said. “I want you to meet a friend of mine.“ He motioned to Chee.

  Chee holstered his pistol, came out from behind the brush, raised a hand in greeting. If Gershwin was carrying a weapon it wasn’t visible. If it was any size, he’d probably be carrying it under his belt, hidden by his shirt and not in a pocket. The sound of the gunshots suggested a serious weapon. Certainly not a pocket-sized twenty-two.

  “This is Sergeant Jim Chee,” Leaphorn said. “Roy Gershwin.”

  Gershwin looked shocked. “Yes,” he said, and nodded to Chee.

  “Chee’s short of money, too,” Leaphorn said. “He’s a single man, but he’s trying to live on a police salary.”

  Gershwin gave Chee another look, nodded again, and resumed his walk, toward the mine. “Well, as I was telling you, I drove out here thinking I was going to have it out with these bastards. Either take ‘em in for the reward money, or run ’em off, or shoot ‘em if I had to. That reward’s supposed to be for dead or alive. I just decided not to run. I’m way too damned old to be running.”

  “You shot ’em?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Just one. I shot Baker. George Ironhand, he got away.”

  They were in the structure by then, through a double doorway that pierced a partly tumbled wall and into the patterned light and darkness of a huge room. Sunlight streaming through gaps in its roof illuminated the cluttered earthen floor in streaks. It was about as Special Agent Cabot had described it.

  Empty except for a jumble of junk and scattered debris. Where the floor wasn’t hidden by fallen roofing material and sheets of warped plywood, it was covered by layers of drifted sand, dust and trash drifted in by years of wind. Tumbleweeds were piled against the back wall, and beside them was the body of a man dressed in gray-green camouflage coveralls.

  Gershwin gestured toward the body. “Baker,” he said. “Son of a bitch tried to shoot me.”

  “Tell us about how it went,” Leaphorn said.

  “Well, I parked back there a ways so they wouldn’t hear me coming. And walked up real quiet and looked in and that one"—Gershwin pointed to the body by the wall—"he seemed to be sleeping. The tall one was sitting over there, and when I came in he made a grab for his gun and I hollered for him to stop, but he got it, and then I shot him and he fell down. That woke up the other guy and he jumped up and pulled out a pistol and I hollered for him to drop it and he took a shot at me so I shot him, too.”

  “The first one you shot,” Chee said. “Where did he go?”

  “Be damned if I know,” Gershwin said. “I thought he was down for good and I was busy with the other one, and when I was going to check on him, he wasn’t there. I guess he just got out of here somehow. Didn’t you fellas see him running away?”

  “We didn’t,” Leaphorn said, "and we better be getting to our car. We need to call this in, and get the law out here to collect the body and get a search going for the one that got away.”

  “Surprised you didn’t see him,” Gershwin said.

  “Where’s your weapon?” Leaphorn asked. “You need to hand that over to Sergeant Chee here.”

  “I threw it away,” Gershwin said. “I never had shot a man before, and when I realized what I’d done I just felt sick. Went to that side door over there and threw up and then I threw my pistol down in the canyon.”

  They had moved out through the broken doorway into the sunlight. Chee kept his hand near the butt of his pistol, thinking Leaphorn couldn’t possibly believe that, thinking the weapon was probably a hand gun and it was probably in the backpack Gershwin was carrying. Or perhaps stuck in Gershwin’s belt, hidden by the shirt.

  “It’s a terrible feeling,” Gershwin was saying, "shooting a man." And as he was saying that his hand flashed under the shirt and came out fumbling with a pistol.

  Chee’s pistol was pointed at Gershwin’s chest. “Drop it,” Chee said. “Drop it or I kill you.”

  Gershwin made an angry sound, dropped his pistol.

  Leaphorn shouted, “Look out.” There was a blast of sound from the darkness. Gershwin was knocked sprawling into the dirt.

  “He’s under that big sheet of plywood,” Leaphorn shouted. “I saw a side of it rise. Then the muzzle flash.”

  The plywood was directly under the A-frame of timbers that rose through what was left of the building’s roof. Chee and Leaphorn approached it as one approaches a prairie rattler, with caution. Chee did his stalking via the side door, a route with better cover. He got there first, motioned Leaphorn in. They stood on opposite sides of it, looking down at it.

  “Gershwin is de
ad,” Leaphorn said.

  “I thought it looked like that,” Chee said.

  “If you pulled that plywood back, you’d expect to look right down into a vertical shaft,” Leaphorn said. “But whoever pushed it up and stuck out that rifle barrel had to be standing on something.”

  “Probably some sort of rope ladder at least,” Chee said. “Or maybe they dug out some sort of niche." He tried to visualize what would be under the plywood without much luck.

  Leaphorn was studying him. “You want to pull it away and take a look?”

  Chee laughed. “I think I’d rather just wait until Special Agent Cabot gets here with his people and let him do it. I wouldn’t want to mess up the Bureau’s crime scene.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Jim Chee sprawled across the rear seat of Unit 11, his throbbing ankle high on a pillow reminding him of what the doctor had said about putting weight on a sprain before it’s healed. Otherwise, Chee was feeling no pain. He was at ease. He was content. True, George Ironhand was still at large in the canyons, either wounded or well, but he wasn’t Chee’s problem.

  Chee relaxed, listened to the windshield wipers working against the off-and-on rain shower, eaves-dropped now and then on the conversation the Legendary Lieutenant was having with Officer Manuelito (Leaphorn was calling her Bernie) and rehashing the events of a tense and tiring day.

  The reinforcements had arrived a little before sundown. First came two big Federal Bureau of

  Investigation copters, hovering a while to find a place to put down among the hummocks of Mormon tea, the Special Agents swarming out, looking warlike in their official bulletproof costumes, pointing their automatic weapons at Leaphorn and looking miffed when Leaphorn ignored them. Then the business of trying to explain what had happened there. Explaining Gershwin to the Special Agent in Charge, who wanted to question everything, who wanted answers which would prove the Bureau was right in its Everett Jorie suicide/gang-leader conclusion, and who looked downright thunderstruck when he learned that the fellow instructing otherwise was just a civilian.

  Chee grinned, remembering that. Leaphorn had cut off the SAC’s arguments by suggesting he could end his doubts by sending a few of his troops over to Gershwin’s truck and having them unpack some of the bundles, in which Leaphorn was confident they would find about one hundred seven pounds and eleven ounces of the paper money taken from the casino. The SAC did, and they did; some of the money was neatly double-sacked in eight of those Earth-Smart white-plastic kitchen trash bags stacked under Gershwin’s luggage, and a bunch of the bigger bills was layered into the suitcases with his clothing. While that was happening the ground troops arrived—two sheriff’s cars, a Utah State Police car and a BIA law-enforcement unit bringing an assortment of cops—including Border Patrol trackers with their dogs. The trackers nervously eyed the cumulus clouds, their tops backlit by the setting sun and their black bottoms producing lightning and promising the long-overdue rain. Trackers prefer daylight and dry ground and were making their preference obvious. Finally, the explaining stopped, an ambulance arrived to take away the much-photographed bodies, and now here Chee was, dry and comfortable, on his way home and an interested listener to the Legendary Lieutenant revealing a human side.

  “I’ve only met her recently,” Bernie was saying. “But she seemed very nice.”

  “An interesting person,” Leaphorn said. “A real friend, I think." He chuckled. “At least she’s willing to listen to me when I talk. When you’re an old widower, and you haven’t gotten used to living alone yet, that’s something you need.”

  Which is why, Chee was thinking, Leaphorn has been chattering like this. He’d always thought of him as taciturn, hard to talk to. A silent man. But then Bernie was Bernie. He liked to talk to her, too. Or, come to think of it, he liked to talk while Bernie listened. He skipped backward into memories of conversations with Janet Pete. No problem there. Then came another memory, another comparison. Bernie putting ice on his swollen ankle, leaning over him, her soft hair brushing past his face. Janet kissing him. Janet’s hair carried the perfume of flowers, Bernie’s the scent of juniper and the wind.

  “You don’t seem old to me,” Bernie was saying. “No older than my father, and he’s still young.”

  “It’s more than age,” Leaphorn said. “Emma and I were married longer than you’ve been alive. One of those love-at-first-sight things when we were students at Arizona State. And when she died -" He didn’t finish that.

  The rain stopped. Bernie switched off the wipers. “I’ll bet you she wouldn’t have approved of you living alone, like a hermit. I’ll bet she would want you to get married again.”

  Wow, Chee thought. That took nerve. How will Lieutenant Leaphorn react to that?

  Leaphorn laughed. “Exactly. She did. But not Professor Bourebonette. At the hospital before her surgery she told me if anything went wrong, I should remember Navajo tradition.”

  “Marry her sister?” Bernie said. “You have a single sister-in-law.?”

  “Yep,” Leaphorn said. “Emma almost always gave good advice, but her sister didn’t like that idea any better than I did.”

  “I’ll bet your wife would have approved of Professor Bourebonette,” Bernie said. “I mean as your wife.”

  If Chee hadn’t been watching while Bernie refused to surrender her sidearm to Leaphorn a few hours ago, he wouldn’t have believed he was hearing this. He waited. Silence. Then Leaphorn said, “You know, Bernie, now you mention it, I’m sure she would.”

  What a woman, this Officer Bemadette Manuelito. Chee remembered the sort of subconscious uneasiness he’d felt when Bernie showed up at his trailer and asked him to help her wounded boyfriend. It was jealousy, of course, though he didn’t want to admit it then. And he was feeling it again now.

  “Bernie,” Chee said, "what’s the condition report on Teddy Bai?”

  “Much better,” Bernie said.

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Rosemary did,” she said. “She said he’s going to be well enough so they won’t have to postpone their wedding.”

  “Well, now,” Chee said. “Wow. That’s really good news." And he meant it.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  [scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

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