Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 07 - Skinwalkers

by Skinwalkers(lit)

  "Mr. Leaphorn?" a woman's voice said at Leaphorn's elbow. "She asked me to get you. Dr. Vigil."

  Dr. Vigil had come to the door to meet him. "I can give you the statistics now," she said, smiling slightly. "Recovery from the actual surgery, close to ninety-nine percent. Nature of tumor: malignant twenty-three-plus percent, benign seventy-six-plus percent."

  And so Joe Leaphorn allowed himself again the heavy risk of hope. He went to Emma's room to tell her, found her sleeping, and left her a note. It told her what Dr. Vigil had told him, and that he loved her, and that he would be back as soon as he could be.

  Then he left on the long drive to the Badwater Clinic. He wanted to be there when Chee recovered from the anesthesia. And he wanted to talk to Yellowhorse about Irma Onesalt's list, and learn what Onesalt had said to Yellowhorse about it; specifically if she had told him why she wanted the dates of death of people who had not yet died. The Cambodian doctor who had been in charge when they'd brought Chee in had said Yellowhorse was in Flagstaff-that he would be driving back today, that he should be back by early afternoon.

  Leaphorn stopped for gas at Ganado and called the clinic while his tank was being filled. Yes, Chee had survived the surgery. He was still in the recovery room. No, Yellowhorse was not back from Flagstaff yet. But he'd called and they expected him sometime after lunch.

  Leaphorn was finding it difficult to think about homicides. He was preoccupied, indeed fascinated, by his own emotions. He had never felt quite like this before-this immeasurable joy. This relief. Emma, who had been lost forever, was found again. She would live. She would be herself again. He thought of Dr. Vigil, watching him receive her hopeful news. Doctors must see a lot of such violent emotional reaction-even more than policemen do. Understanding the intensity love can produce would be a by-product of that profession. Dr. Vigil would understand how a dying infant could motivate a murder. If not yet, she would when she was older. Leaphorn was thinking this as he passed the turnoff to Blue Gap. He moved from that into analyzing his own emotions. Watching what was happening to Emma had caused everything else to recede into triviality. Other values ceased to exist for him. Had there been anything he could do to help her, anything, he would have done it. Beyond the turnoff to Whippoorwill School, his thoughts moved back to a question that had intrigued him earlier. Why had the woman told Chee her baby was dying? He seemed to know the answer. She had told Chee to explain why she was killing him. She was killing him to reverse the witchcraft that was killing her baby. Logical. Why did something keep tugging him back to this?

  Just then, Leaphorn saw how it all had worked. All the pins on his map came together into a single cluster at the Badwater Clinic. Four and a half homicides became a single crime with a single motive. His car fishtailed on the muddy road as he jammed down the accelerator. If he didn't reach the clinic before Dr. Yellowhorse, the four and a half homicides would become five.

  Chapter 23

  it was all very vague to Chee. The nurse who moved him down the hall from the recovery room had shown him a paper cup containing a spoonful of shot. "What Dr. Wu dug out of your back and your neck and your head," she explained. "Dr, Wu thought you'd want to keep it."

  Chee, woozy, could think of nothing to say to that. He raised his eyebrows.

  "Sort of a souvenir," she explained. "To help you remember." And then she had added something about Dr. Wu being Chinese, but actually a Cambodian Chinese, as if this would clarify why he thought Chee would want a souvenir.

  "Um," Chee said, and the nurse had looked at him quizzically and said, "Only if you want to."

  The nurse had talked a lot more, but Chee remembered little of it. He recalled wanting to ask her where he was, and what had happened, but he didn't have the energy. Now the back of his head was helping him remember. Whatever painkiller they had used to numb it was wearing off and Chee could isolate and identify about seven places where the surgeon had dug a piece of shot out of the thick bone at the back of his skull. It reminded Chee of a long time ago when a yearling horse they were branding had kicked him squarely on the shinbone. Bruised bone seemed to issue a peculiarly painful protest to the nervous system.

  But he kept the pain at bay by celebrating being alive. It surprised him. He could only dimly remember the woman coming hesitantly into the hogan, the shotgun pointing at him. He remembered the seconds when he had thought she would simply shoot him again and that would be the end of it. Perhaps that was what she'd intended to do. But she had let him talk, and he had forced himself into a kind of coherence. Now it was all hazy, much of it simply blank. The medics called it temporary post-trauma amnesia, and Chee had seen it in enough victims of knife fights and traffic accidents to recognize it in himself. He didn't try to force his memory. What was important, obviously, was that the woman had believed him. She seemed to have brought him here, although Chee couldn't remember that happening, or imagine how she had gotten him from the hogan to her truck. The last he remembered was describing for her what must have happened, relying on his recollection of the time he himself had been taken to a crystal gazer as a child, remembering the old man's eye, immensely magnified and distorted, looking into his own eye, remembering his own fear.

  "I think I know what happened," Chee had told her. "Yellowhorse pretends to be a crystal gazer. I think you took your sick baby to the Badwater Clinic and Yellowhorse looked at it, and then Yellowhorse got out his crystal, and pretended to be a shaman, and he told you that the baby had been witched. And then he did the sucking ceremony, and he pretended to suck a bone out of your baby's breast." Chee remembered that at this point he began to run out of strength. His eyes were no longer focusing and it was difficult to generate the breath to form the guttural Navajo words. But he had gone on. "Then he told you that I was the skinwalker who had witched your baby and that the only way to cure it was to kill me. And he gave you the bone and told you to shoot it into me."

  The woman, hazy and distant, had simply sat there, holding the shotgun. He couldn't see well enough to know if she was listening.

  "I think he wants to kill me because I have told people that he is not really a shaman. I told people he had no real powers. But maybe there is some other reason. That doesn't matter. What matters is that I am not the skinwalker. Yellowhorse is the skinwalker. Yellowhorse witched you. Yellowhorse turned you into someone who kills." He had said a lot more, or he thought he had, but maybe that was part of the dream that he had drifted into as he fell asleep. He couldn't separate it.

  The nurse was back in the room. She put a tray on the table beside his bed-a white towel, a syringe, other paraphernalia. "You need some of this by now," she said, glancing at her watch.

  "First I need to do some things, know some things," Chee said. "Are there any policemen here?"

  "I don't think so," the nurse said. "Quiet morning."

  "Then I need to make a call," Chee said.

  She didn't bother to look at him. "Fat chance," she said.

  "Then I need somebody to make a call for me. Call the tribal police headquarters at Window Rock and get a message to a Lieutenant Leaphorn."

  "He's one of them who brought you in. With the ambulance," she said. "If you want to tell him who shot you, I'll bet that can wait until you're feeling a little better."

  "Is Yellowhorse here? Dr. Yellowhorse?"

  "He's in Flag," the nurse said. "Some sort of meeting at the Flagstaff hospital."

  Chee felt dizzy, and a little nauseated, and vastly relieved. He didn't understand why Yellowhorse wanted to kill him-not exactly, anyway. But he knew he didn't want to be sleeping in his hospital when Yellowhorse was here.

  "Look," he said. Trying to sound like a policeman when your head and your arm and shoulder and side were encased in bandages and you were flat on your back wasn't easy. "This is important. I have to tell Leaphorn some things or a murderer might get away. Might kill somebody again."

  "You're serious?" the nurse asked, still doubting it.

  "Dead serious."


  "What's the number?"

  Chee gave her the number at Window Rock. "And if he's not in, call the substation at Pi¤on. Tell 'em I said we need a policeman out here right away." Chee tried to think of who was stationed at Pi¤on now, and drew a blank. He was conscious only that his eyes were buzzing and that his head hurt in at least seven places.

  "You know that number?"

  Chee shook his head.

  The nurse went out the door, leaving the tray. "Here he comes now," she said.

  Leaphorn, Chee thought. Great!

  Dr. Yellowhorse came through the door, moving fast.

  Chee opened his mouth, began a yell, and found Yellowhorse's hand clamped across his jaws, cutting off all sound.

  "Keep quiet," Yellowhorse said. With his other hand he was pressing something hard against Chee's throat. It was another source of pain-but no competition for the back of his head.

  "Struggle and I cut your throat," Yellowhorse said.

  Chee tried to relax. Impossible.

  Yellowhorse's hand came off his mouth. Chee heard it fumbling in the tray.

  "I don't want to kill you," Yellowhorse said. "I'm going to give you this shot so you'll get some sleep. And remember, you can't yell with your windpipe cut."

  Chee tried to think. Whatever was pressing against his throat was pressing too hard to make yelling practical. Almost instantly he added the feel of the needle going into his shoulder to the battery of other pains. And then Yellowhorse's hand was over his mouth again.

  "I hate to do this," Yellowhorse said, and his expression said he meant it. "It was that damned Onesalt woman. But in the long run, it more than balances out."

  Chee's expression, as much as Yellowhorse could see of it around his smothering hand, must have seemed skeptical.

  "It balances way out in favor of saving the clinic," Yellowhorse said, voice insistent. "Four lives. Three of them were men past their prime and one of them was dying fast anyway. And on the balance against that, I know for sure we've saved dozens of lives already, and we'll save dozens more. And better than that, we're stopping birth defects, and catching diabetes cases early." Yellowhorse paused, looking into Chee's eyes.

  "And glaucoma," he said. "I know we've caught a dozen cases of that early enough to save good vision. That Onesalt bitch was going to put an end to all that."

  Chee, who was in no position to talk, didn't.

  "You feeling sleepy?" Yellowhorse said. "You should be by now."

  Chee was feeling-despite an intense effort of will-very sleepy. There was no question at all that Yellowhorse was going to kill him. If there were any other possibility, Yellowhorse would not be telling him all this, making this apology. Chee tried to gather his strength, tense his muscles for a lunge against the knife. All he had to muster was a terrible weakness. Yellowhorse felt even that and tightened his grip.

  "Don't try it," he said. "It won't work."

  It wouldn't. Chee admitted it to himself. Time was his only hope, if he had a hope. Stay awake. He made a questioning sound against Yellowhorse's palm. He would ask him why Onesalt and the rest had to be killed. It was to cover up something at the clinic, clearly, but what?

  Yellowhorse eased the grip on Chee's mouth.

  "What?" he said. "Keep it low."

  "What did Onesalt know?" he asked.

  The hand gripped again. Yellowhorse looked surprised. "I thought you had guessed," he said. "That day when you came and got the wrong Begay. Onesalt guessed. I figured you would. Or she would tell you."

  Chee mumbled against the palm. "You gave us the wrong Begay. I wondered what had happened to the right one. But I didn't guess you were keeping him on your records."

  "Well, I thought you were guessing," Yellowhorse said. "I always knew you would guess sooner or later. And once you did, it would take time but it would be inevitable. You would find out."

  "Overcharging?" Chee asked. "For patients who weren't here?"

  "Getting the government to pay its share," Yellowhorse said. "Have you ever read the treaty? The one we signed at Fort Sumner. Promises. One schoolteacher for every thirty children, everything else. The government never kept any promises."

  "Charging for people after they were dead?" Chee mumbled. He simply could not keep his eyes open any longer. When they closed, Yellowhorse would kill him. Not immediately, but soon enough. When his eyes closed they would never open again. Yellowhorse would keep him asleep until he could find a way to make it look normal and natural. Chee knew that. He must keep his eyes open.

  "Getting sleepy?" Yellowhorse asked, his voice benign.

  Chee's eyes closed. He went to sleep, a troubled sleep, dreaming that something was hurting the back of his head.

  Chapter 24

  Contents - Prev

  leaphorn parked right at the door, violating the blue handicapped-only zone, and trotted into the clinic. He'd made his habitual instant eyeball inventory of the vehicles present. A dozen were there, including an Oldsmobile sedan with the medical symbol on its license plate, which might be Yellowhorse's car, and three well-worn pickup trucks, which might include the one driven by the woman determined to kill Chee. Leaphorn hurried through the front door. The receptionist was standing behind her half-round desk screaming something. A tall woman in a nurse's uniform was standing across the desk, hands in her hair, apparently terrified. Both were looking down the hallway that led to Leaphorn's right, down a corridor of patients' rooms.

  Leaphorn's trot turned into a run.

  "She has a gun," the receptionist shouted. "A gun."

  The woman stood in the doorway four rooms down, and she did, indeed, have a gun. Leaphorn could see only her back, a traditional dark blue blouse of velvet, the flowing light blue skirt which came to the top of her squaw boots, her dark hair tied in a careful bun at the back of her head, and the butt of the shotgun protruding from under her arm.

  "Hold it," Leaphorn shouted, digging with his left hand for his pistol.

  Aimed as the shotgun was into the room and away from him, the sound it made was muted. A boom, a yell, the sound of someone falling, glass breaking. With the sound, the woman disappeared into the room. Leaphorn was at the door two seconds later, his pistol drawn.

  "The skinwalker is dead," the woman said. She stood over Yellowhorse, the shotgun dangling from her right hand. "This time I killed him."

  "Put down the gun," Leaphorn said. The woman ignored him. She was looking down at the doctor, who sprawled face-up beside Jim Chee's bed. Chee seemed to be sleeping. Leaphorn shifted his pistol to the fingers that protruded from his cast and lifted the shotgun from the woman's hand. She made no effort to keep it. Yellowhorse was still breathing, unevenly and raggedly. A man in a pale blue hospital smock appeared at the door-the same Chinese-looking doctor who had been on duty when they delivered Chee. He muttered something that sounded like an expletive in some language strange to Leaphorn.

  "Why did you shoot him?" he asked Leaphorn.

  "I didn't," Leaphorn said. "See if you can save him."

  The doctor knelt beside Yellowhorse, feeling for a pulse, examining the place where the shotgun blast had struck Yellowhorse's neck at point-blank range. He shook his head.

  "Dead?" the woman asked. "Is the skinwalker dead? Then I want to bring in my baby. I have him in my truck. Maybe now he is alive again."

  But he wasn't, of course.

  It took Jim Chee almost four hours to awaken and he did so reluctantly-his subconscious dreading what he would awaken to. But when he came awake he found himself alone in the room. Sunset lit the foot of his bed. His head still hurt and his shoulder and side ached, but he felt warm again. He removed his left hand from under the covers, flexed the fingers. A good strong hand. He moved his toes, his feet, bent his knees. Everything worked. The right arm was another matter. It was heavily bandaged elbow to shoulder and immobilized with tape.

  Where was Yellowhorse? Chee considered that. Obviously he had guessed wrong about the doctor. The man hadn't killed him, as commo
n sense said he should have. Apparently Yellowhorse had run for it, or turned himself in, or went to talk to a lawyer, or something. It seemed totally unlikely that Yellowhorse would come back now to finish off Chee. But just in case, he decided he would get up, put on his clothes, and go somewhere else. Call Leaphorn first. Tell him about all this.

  Just about then it also occurred to Chee how he would solve the problem of the cat. He would put the cat in the forty-dollar case, and take it to the Farmington airport and send it off to Mary Landon. But first he would write her and explain it all-explain how this belagana cat simply wasn't going to make it as a Navajo cat. It would starve, or be eaten by the coyote, or something like that. Mary was a very smart person. Mary would understand that perfectly. Probably better than Chee.

  Carefully, slowly, he turned himself onto his good side, swung his feet off the bed, pushed himself upright. Almost upright. Before he completed the move, weakness and faintness overcame him. He was on his side again, the back of his head throbbing, and a metal tray he'd tumbled from the bedside stand still clattering on the floor.