Something bumped against metal. Then silence. Then a creaking noise. Silence again. His rib stabbed him with pain, and his lungs cried out for air. The curtain rustled. What should he do? What could he do?
Then there was another sound. A thump. A knuckle whacked against wood? And then a sort of sigh and a rasping intake of breath. Silence again, followed finally by the whisper of soft soles on a polished floor. The room door clicked shut.
Chee took in some air as quietly as he could. Relief flooded through him. He felt himself shaking. The man had gone. Not far, perhaps. Perhaps only to check other rooms. Perhaps he would be back. But at least for the moment, death had walked away. Perhaps the blond man wouldn’t come back. Perhaps Chee would live. He felt a kind of crazy joy. He would wait. He would lie there motionless forever—until morning came, until he heard the voice of a nurse below him, arriving with his morning medicine. He would take no chance at all that the blond man was waiting somewhere for him to move.
Chee waited, and listened. He heard absolutely nothing but the natural sounds of the night. Time ticked away. Perhaps three minutes. Chee became aware of an odor. It was acrid—faint but unmistakable. The smell of gun smoke. What could have caused it? He knew the answer almost instantly. The thumping sound had been a shot from the blond man’s pistol.
Chee reached down from the conduit, carefully moved a ceiling tile aside, and looked down. To eyes adjusted to darkness above the ceiling, the room was comparatively bright. He could see only his bed and an expanse of floor beside it. He gripped the conduit braces and lowered himself. The blond man was gone. Chee pulled back the curtain by his roommate’s bed. The man’s dark head lay on the pillow, neatly, face toward the ceiling, eyes closed in the profound sleep that follows surgery. But behind the curtain the smell of smoke was stronger. Chee reached out a tentative hand. He touched the sleeping face. His forefinger rested just under the nose. His fingertip felt warm skin. But there was no breath. He moved his hand downward, letting the palm rest over the sheet against the chest, holding it there. The man’s face, illuminated dimly by the city night through the window, was young and clean-shaven, a longish face with a slightly sardonic cast. Chee had been training himself away from seeing all non-Navajos as looking very much alike. This one looked mostly Spanish in blood, with a little Pueblo Indian. The chest under Chee’s palm moved not at all. No lung stirred, no heartbeat. The mouth Chee saw was a dead mouth. He shifted his eyes away from it and looked for a moment out into the night. Then he walked quickly to the door and pulled it open. There was no fear now. He ran to the nurse’s station and picked up the telephone beside the hand of the sleeping nurse, and dialed past the switchboard to the Albuquerque Police Department’s number.
While he talked, quickly describing the deed, the man, and the pistol, and suggesting that the gunman was probably in a new green-and-white Plymouth sedan, his free hand touched the hair of the nurse, felt the cap, and found the small round hole burned in the crest of it.
“Make it two homicides,” Chee said. “He also shot the fifth-floor nurse.”
20
Even as he trotted down the stairs toward the laundry level something troubled Colton Wolf about the policeman’s room. Why was the unused bed rumpled? Had a visitor sprawled on it? It seemed too unkempt for that. But there was something else out of tune. He had left the loading dock and was walking toward the car he was using when he realized what it was. The smell around the face of the man he had shot was an anesthetic. Natural enough. But it was too strong. It was still being exhaled. Chee had been out of surgery far too long to smell like that.
“Son of a bitch!” Colton said. He ran back to the loading dock and was through the door before his caution stopped him. How had Chee escaped? Where was he now? He would have called for help. Certainly he’d be alert. And Chee was a very smart cop—that was clear. A second try now would be too risky. There wasn’t time.
He was out of the parking lot and heading westward on Lomas Avenue when he heard the first siren. But he wasn’t worried. No one had seen the car. He left it three blocks from where he had stolen it, walked to his pickup, and drove slowly back to his trailer. By the time he had reached it, his new plan for killing Jimmy Chee was taking shape. It was a good plan. This time Chee wouldn’t escape.
21
Chee kept the control lever of the viewer pressed halfway to the right. Above his forehead, the microfilm reels hummed. The pages of the Grants Daily Beacon fled past his eyes like the boxcars of a freight passing a traffic signal. They moved too fast to be read, but not too fast to tell a front page from a grocery ad, or to spot the sort of black banner headline that would signal the kind of story he was looking for. Half of Chee’s attention focused on the moving image under his eyes. But he was aware of the silence of this huge basement room in Zimmerman Library, of the new .38 caliber revolver that weighted his coat pocket, and of Hunt pretending to be studying beyond the glass pane of the carrel door behind him. He was also aware of the nearness of Mary Landon.
The page that flashed below his eyes had a heavy black streak across the top. He stopped the reel and pushed the lever to the left to back it up. The head-line read:
POLLS PROJECT DEWEY LANDSLIDE
“Ha!” Mary Landon said. “Wrong disaster.” She was sitting beside and a little behind him, saying nothing much. She brought to his sensitive nostrils the scent of clothing dried in sunlight, and of soap.
Chee pushed the lever to the right again and glanced up. A librarian moved down the aisle to his left, pushing a cart loaded with bound periodicals. A slender white girl with a fur-collared coat was hunting something in the microfilm files. Beyond her, movement caught Chee’s eye. An elbow, covered with blue nylon, jutted out from behind one of the square white pillars. It retracted, jutted out again, retracted, jutted. Doing what? Someone scratching himself?
Chee wanted suddenly to look over his shoulder, to make sure that Hunt was still in the carrel, alert and ready. He resisted the urge. Theoretically, Hunt was tagging along as a guard. But while it hadn’t exactly been spoken, it was understood that purpose number one was to get the blond man. Protecting Chee was a by-product. It sounded cold-blooded but it made sense. One protected Chee and Mary Landon by catching the blond man. There was no other way to do it. The law wanted very, very badly to catch the blond man. On the other hand, the world was full of tribal policemen.
Under his eyes, the record of June 1948 raced past and became July. The reels overhead hummed, paused, hummed again, paused again. On this pause the banner read:
WELL EXPLOSION KILLS CREW
“Here it is,” Chee said.
The subhead added:
TWELVE FEARED DEAD
IN BLAST ON RIG FLOOR
“Scoot over a little,” Mary said. She leaned over the projected page, pressed against him, reminding him again of sunshine and soap.
All members of an oil well drilling crew were apparently killed instantly northwest of Grants several days ago in what authorities believe to have been the premature explosion of a nitroglycerin charge.
Valencia County Sheriff Gilberto Garcia said the toll may be as high as twelve men, including ten working on the drilling crew on the east slope of Mount Taylor and two employees of the oil field supply company, who had brought in the nitro charge.
Garcia said the death toll is uncertain because the force of the blast “blew everything apart and scattered bits and pieces of people for half a mile.”
“It looks like they had the nitro on the floor of the well when it went off,” Garcia said. “It didn’t leave much.” He said the explosion probably took place Friday, which was the day the crew from Petrolab, Inc., delivered the explosive to the site. The accident was not discovered until Monday, when a deputy sheriff went to the site to investigate why men working there had not been heard from.
Garcia said the well is about 25 miles north and west of Grants near the border of the Checkerboard district of the Navajo reservation. “We haven’t f
ound anyone who heard the explosion,” the sheriff said. “No one lives for miles around out there.”
The sheriff said coyotes, other predators, and scavenger birds had complicated the problem of identifications. “We think we have one identification positive now, and we expect we have enough to pin down a couple of others, but we’re not too optimistic about the rest.”
He said payroll records named the drilling crew as Nelson Kirby, about 40, of Sherman, Texas, the crew chief; Albert Novitski, age and address unknown; Carl Lebeck, age unknown, a geologist who was logging the well; Robert Sena, 24, of Grants, and six as yet unidentified Navajos working on the well as a roustabout crew.
Also feared killed were R. J. Mackensen, about 60, and Theo Roff, about 20, both employees of Petrolab, a Farmington company which supplied the explosive.
Chee scanned the remaining paragraphs.
“Pretty much what Sena told you?” Mary asked. “The names ring any bells?”
“Just Robert Sena,” Chee said. “He was Gordo’s big brother.”
Mary was reading over his shoulder. “Carl Lebeck,” she said. “My cousin used to date a boy named Carl Lebeck. Or maybe it was Le Bow. Something like that.”
“Let’s see what they said when they found the Navajos were alive,” Chee said.
It was on the front page of the Wednesday edition, a brief item reporting that the crew of six Navajo laborers, originally believed killed in the explosion, hadn’t gone to work that day. The story included their names, which Chee copied off in his notebook. It didn’t mention why they had missed work. Chee found that in the following day’s paper. Again the headline stretched black across the top of the page:
ARREST MADE IN WELL BLAST
SHERIFF REPORTS NAVAJOS
GIVEN ADVANCE TIP
One of the Navajo workers who escaped last week’s fatal explosion at a Valencia County oil drilling site was being questioned today about reports that he had advance knowledge the explosion would occur.
Sheriff Gilberto Garcia identified the man as Dillon Charley. He said Charley has admitted warning five other Navajo co-workers at the well not to go to work last Friday “because something bad was going to happen.”
“He claims he got the warning from God in some sort of religious vision,” Garcia said. He said that Charley is the “peyote chief” in the Native American cult and that the five other Navajos on the work crew were also members of the religious organization.
Members of the cult chew seed buttons from the peyote cactus as part of their rites. A narcotic in the peyote reportedly affects the nervous system, causing hallucinations in some users. Possession of the substance is illegal, and the Navajo Tribal Council has passed specific legislation banning its use or possession on the reservation.
The sheriff also revealed that Charley had been injured in what Garcia called “an attempt to resist arrest.” He said Deputy Sheriff Lawrence Sena had been placed under suspension “until we can determine if undue force was used.” Deputy Sena’s brother, Robert Sena, was one of the men blown to bits when a nitroglycerin charge went off prematurely at the well last Friday.
“Notice that?” Chee asked. He poked his finger at the proper paragraph. “Gordo roughed up Dillon Charley. He must have really roughed him up to get suspended for it. Beating up a Navajo wasn’t considered such a big deal in those days.” He leaned back, away from the microfilm projector hood, and looked at Mary. Her expression was quizzical.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think you’re strange,” she said. “I think you’re weird. You have this creepy murderer trying to shoot you, and you’re down here all excited, reading about something that happened thirty years ago.”
“You, too,” Chee said. “How about you?”
“I’m not excited,” she said.
“I mean he’s trying to shoot you, too.”
“I don’t believe that,” Mary said. “You’re the one who got a good look at him. You’re the one he came after.” She looked away from him, leaning again into the microfilm reader. A nice profile, Chee thought. Nice. She was looking down, reading the projected type. Her eyes were very blue and the lashes curved away from them in a long, graceful sweep. Her hair fell across her cheek. Soft hair. Soft cheek.
“Another thing,” Mary said without glancing up. “What’s all this concern about a cop beating up a Navajo? From what I heard at Laguna, the worst cops for beating up Navajos were Navajo cops.”
“We’d rather beat up Anglos,” Chee said, “but we don’t have jurisdiction over you folks.” He watched her profile as he said it, looking for the reaction that would tell him something about her. Her jibe about Navajo police was partly serious—probably mostly serious. Navajo police, like most police, had a reputation of being toughest on their own people. Her eyes were still on the projected page. “You haven’t really told me what happened up in the hospital. How you got away. And you haven’t told me your secret name.”
The elbow had reappeared from behind the pillar. Motionless now. Its owner must be leaning on the pillar. Reading, perhaps.
“I hid,” Chee said. “Like a rabbit.”
She looked at him. “Why like a rabbit? You think you should have come on like Monster Slayer?” She grabbed his wrist and raised his hand. “Me mighty redskin. Me take on gun with bare hands. Me big hero. Me dead, but me hero.” She dropped his hand. “If you didn’t have time to do a little ghost dance to make your hospital gown bulletproof, I think the smart thing to do was get under the bed.”
“The way it worked, I guess I was hiding behind another guy. My roommate.” He gave her a quick sketch of what had happened, from the furtive trip downstairs to find out how the body had been stolen from the morgue. He told it quickly, without interpretation and without speculation. Just the facts, he thought. Just the facts. And while he told them, he watched her face.
She pursed her lips into a soundless whistle and shuddered. “I’d have been terrified.” She looked at him a moment, her lower lip caught between her teeth. “How did you think to climb up into the ceiling?”
“That’s not the point,” Chee said. “The point is I got away because I left the blond man somebody to shoot. He came into the room to shoot himself an Indian. Nobody home but a Mexican. So the Chicano gets shot instead of me.”
She was frowning at him again. “So?”
“So? What do you mean, so?”
“So what,” she said. “You on some guilt trip? You think you should have stayed behind? Bared your chest and said, ‘Here I am. Don’t shoot this other guy.’ Come on.” Her voice was scornful. “He shot the nurse, didn’t he? The only difference would have been he’d have shot both of you.”
“Maybe,” Chee said.
“You really are weird,” Mary Landon said. “Either that, or you want me to think you are.”
“Well,” Chee said. “No use talking about it now. Let’s see what else we can find.”
They found very little. There was a lengthy story about the Native American Church, the ceremony, and what the members said about Dillon Charley’s vision of warning. There was a short item in which the sheriff reported that one of the victims had been definitely identified from dental work as an employee of Petrolab. But the story seemed quickly to die away for lack of new information.
If Sena, or any of the other victims, was identified, it wasn’t mentioned in the Beacon. Nor was there any follow-up story on the arrest of Dillon Charley. His release, whenever it happened, went without notice in the paper.
They worked through the microfilm slowly now, page by page, looking for the remainders of a story that was no longer banner headline news. Halfway through the September editions, after an hour of finding nothing, Mary had an idea.
“Hey,” she said. “Newspapers do anniversary stories. You know. They start, ‘A year ago today…’ and then they rehash it all. Why don’t we skip ahead a year?”
Chee stood and stretched. He pushed the lever to the left. The reels humme
d with the rewinding. The young woman had left the microfilm area. The elbow was missing from the pillar. Protruding now into Chee’s line of vision was the tip of a nose and a shock of hair. The hair was blond. Very blond. Chee felt his stomach muscles tighten. He released the lever and moved his right hand into his coat pocket. The hand found the pistol grip. The thumb found the hammer.
“What?” Mary said. She was staring at him.
The man emerged from behind the pillar. He glanced at Mary. He was very blond, but he wasn’t the blond man. Far too young. No resemblance at all. He moved to the microfilm file and began rummaging.
“Nothing,” Chee said. “I’m just jumpy.”
They found the anniversary story. It reported little new.
By the time the copying desk had made Xeroxes of the microfilmed stories for them, it was five o’clock.
“Now what?” Mary asked. “It occurs to me that Sergeant Chee of the Mounties has just wasted one afternoon, plus the afternoon of one Crownpoint schoolteacher, and isn’t going to have the slightest idea of what to do next. This is a dead end. Right?”
“No,” Chee said. They were climbing the stairway that spiraled upward through the four levels of the working end of the university library. An artist had used the stairwell walls to depict in paint and plaster the history of man’s efforts to record his communication with his fellows. Here, below the ground floor, they climbed past pictographs and petroglyphs. The Phoenician alphabet was far overhead, and the symbolic language of computers even higher. “Maybe it doesn’t lead anywhere, but I’d like to talk to some of those men who got warned away from that explosion. I’d like to find out what Dillon Charley told them.”
People of Darkness Page 12