Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 17 - Skeleton Man

by Skeleton Man(lit)

  "For what?" she said.

  "For what we came for," he said, and pointed to the double line of diamonds.

  She shook her head.

  "Hell with it, then," Chandler said. He tucked one of the socks under his belt, went to the shelf where the bone had been erected, and began picking snuff tins off the sand there, dropping the diamonds into the other sock and tossing aside the empty containers. It took longer than it might have because he was keeping his pistol ready.

  Diamond after diamond clicked into the sock. Bernie watched and counted, conscious of the time, aware that the runoff stream was widening fast, thinking of how much water that dam of fallen stones up the slot must be holding back. What was flowing past now was merely what was running under the slab where she had been sitting. If it came over the dam, if the dam washed out, everything here would be swept down the slot canyon.

  Chandler stopped. All the tins on the sand were emptied now and the foot of the sock, from heel to toe, bulged with diamonds. He tucked the pistol in his belt, knotted the sock at the ankle, and began extracting diamonds from the tins fastened to the sandstone wall, dropping them into the second sock, knotting it above the diamonds, tying the two socks into a single strand with each end a bulging knot of diamonds.

  Job done, he faced the women.

  "Here we have a big bunch of diamonds," he said, gripping the combined socks where they were knotted, and swinging the bulges back and forth and laughing. "Big diamonds. Perfect blue-whites with expensive cuts. About thirty or so in this sock and"-he pointed-"maybe forty or so in this one. Call it seventy, and multiply that by maybe twenty thousand dollars on the average, and I have let's say a million and a half dollars."

  Thunder drowned out what else Chandler was telling them. The storm now must have moved directly overhead. Water was dripping down from the rim of the slot above. The light popcorn hail was peppering directly on them now. The flow down the slot floor was widening fast.

  Bernie made a "wait" gesture to Chandler with an open palm, rushed to his backpack, and pulled it away from the spreading water. She reached under the shirt, extracted Joanna's little pistol, slipped it into her pocket, zipped the pack shut, picked it up, and deposited it on high ground well away from the flood. Then she exhaled. The man hadn't noticed, so he hadn't shot her. Not yet. She glanced at him. He was grinning at her.

  "Thanks," he said.

  "It would have washed away," she said. "There's sort of a dam up there where rocks fell down. If the runoff sweeps that out, everything is going to wash away. We better get out of here."

  "Nice of you to warn me," Chandler said. "And thank you for saving Joanna's little pistol from getting wet."

  "Oh," Bernie said.

  "In return for your kindness, I guess I should tell you that when you get a chance to shoot me, and try to do it, just don't try. It won't work. I unloaded Joanna's pistol, just in case she got careless with it."

  He laughed. "However, if you try to shoot me anyway, then I want you to know that I will shoot you. Probably several times. And"-he pointed to the shriveled body of the Skeleton Man-"leave your body here with our deceased friend."

  "Thanks for the warning," Bernie said.

  While she was saying it, lightning flashed again, followed a moment later by the crack of a nearby strike, and booming echoes of thunder. And as that faded, another sound emerged.

  "Oooh!" said Joanna, in something between a shout and a shriek. It was a rumbling, creaking, crashing sound of boulders being swept along by the overpowering surge of flash waters rushing down-slope. With the sound came the sight of the slot-bottom stream abruptly rising, spreading, sweeping along with it the variety of leaves, twigs, assorted debris the bottom had collected in the years since the last "male rain" downpour had settled over this section of the Coconino Plateau and sent untold tons of water pouring off the rocky surface into the canyon.

  Bernie had expected this, but in a more gradual and less violent form, and had decided what she had to do when it happened.

  Chandler had not waited for a plan to reveal itself. He was running down the slot, splashing along the edge of the stream against the cliff. Looking for a place to climb, she guessed, or hoping to reach the exit where the slot would pour its water into the canyon. He was clutching his diamond-filled socks as he ran.

  Bernie grabbed Joanna Craig's arm. "Come on!" she shouted. "I know a place we'll be safe."

  Saying it, Bernie was wishing she felt as confident as she tried to sound. The place she had in mind was the basalt shelf where the Skeleton Man had made his bed. He must have known the canyon, perched there to be safe from such flash floods. And coming in here, she had noticed on the walls of the slot how high flood debris had been deposited by previous floods. Maybe the Skeleton Man's shelf wasn't totally safe, but it would be safer than here.

  And Joanna Craig seemed to trust her. She was following, splashing along with the rushing water. Knee-deep now, it was pushing them along, hurrying them, trying to sweep their feet off the bottom. And then they were at the edge of the sloping shelf.

  Bernie pulled herself onto it, feeling as she did the water sweeping her feet out of its way, helping Joanna pull herself up, then helping her hoist the man's bright yellow backpack up with her.

  They sat for a moment, regaining their breath.

  "Why did you save that?" Bernie asked, tapping the wet backpack.

  Joanna Craig unzipped it, reached in, extracted the arm bone, showed it to Bernie. Smiling.

  "This is what I came here for," she said, and Bernie could tell she was crying. "Now I can prove I'm my father's daughter."

  27

  The first time he had been to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Jim Chee had thought of the Colorado River system as a sort of reverse copy of a human vascular arrangement, with the Colorado being the artery and the scores of smaller canyons leading down into it the capillaries. Gravity made it all work backward, of course. The little gullies and arroyos collected water from all over the Kaibab and Coconino plateaus to feed their area streams across the immense Colorado Plateau. Then these creeks and rivers poured it down into the Colorado a mile or more below. Having seen the velocity that gravity gave the torrents coming off the lava mesas in northern New Mexico, he guessed he'd find runoff into the Grand Canyon (with ten times more gravity behind it) absolutely spectacular.

  He was right.

  Chee was huddled into a modest overhang at the cliff where the canyon he'd followed from the big river was joined by runoff pouring out of a small slot. He was wet to the skin from the pounding rain-mixed now and then with bits of hail. He was also scratched and bruised from a futile attempt to buck the runoff from the smaller stream. The racing water had knocked him out of the way and deposited him, half drowned, beside the cliff where he now stood. And that stream was puny compared to the roaring runoff it was joining.

  He was as certain as the situation allowed that the slot he'd tried to enter was the one into which Bernie had disappeared. She and whoever she was with must be in that slot now. Maybe they were already drowning. If they drowned, they would wash out here. He had already seen part of a wooden bucket flash by on the flood.

  Now came what looked like some sort of cloth and what might have been a soggy hat. Behind that, bobbing and turning, came what seemed to be a dried and terribly emaciated corpse. It was clad in a torn blue shirt and ragged denim pants. The hair plastered to the skull was white and the body was so wasted that the bones pressed against the skin. The torrent quickly swept it past to disappear in the foam where the stream pouring out of the slot joined the much larger main canyon flood.

  "Skeleton Man," Chee said. Well, they had finally found him. Or Bernie had found him. And all he could do about her being up there in the slot, and in danger, was wait and worry until the flood subsided.

  The water pouring out of the slot, and the flood racing down the canyon, produced a roaring bedlam made even more deafening by the echoes bouncing off the cliffs. But suddenly Che
e heard what seemed to be a yell. Brief, and suddenly choked off.

  A moment later a man shot out of the slot, head out of the water, trying to swim.

  Chee jumped to his feet, scrambled away from the wall and down the slope toward the flood.

  The man grabbed at the branches of cat's claw acacia he was being swept past, managed to catch a branch, held on. The force of the water swept his legs downstream. He was on his back now, seeing Chee.

  "Help!" he screamed. "Help me!"

  "Coming," Chee shouted. "Hold on."

  The man was holding on only with his left hand, clutching what seemed to be a sort of rope in the other.

  "Use both hands!" Chee yelled. "I'll wade in as far as I can. When I get close enough, you push off and I'll try to catch you."

  The man looked at Chee, expression desperate, tried to say something, couldn't. Then he swung his right arm, trying for a hold on another limb. The rope he was holding swung upward, caught in the brambles. The man grabbed at it.

  Trying to pull himself up, Chee thought. Impossible. The brush wouldn't hold his weight. Chee took another step into the water, almost to his knees now, struggling to keep a foothold on the rock below, leaning against the pressure of the water.

  The man was frantically jerking at the rope.

  "For God's sake, don't jerk it loose," Chee told him, "Just get yourself braced and push off and try to swim toward me. Hey, stop jerking!"

  The rope tore free, bringing a piece of cat's claw limb with it. The man went under, bobbed up, turned sideways to the force of the flow. It swept him past Chee's hands, beyond any hope of Chee's reaching him.

  Chee staggered back into shallow water, turned to look.

  The torrent was rolling the man now. He disappeared under it for a second or two, then bobbed up with his hand still clutching the rope. Then the torrent from the slot reached the flood roaring down the canyon. In the foam and confusion, the man disappeared.

  Chee leaned against the cliff, regaining his breath. No sign of the man now. He imagined what would be happening to him. The big flood in the canyon was rolling boulders along with it. He could hear the crashing and banging they produced as they knocked away impediments. He might be floating high enough to escape that kind of death. At least for a while. Chee remembered the big dropoff a mile or so down the canyon. That would be a violent waterfall by now. The current would sweep the man to its bottom there, churn him around with those rolling boulders, and spit out what was left of him to continue the trip down to the next waterfall, and the next one, and through the various rapids, and on to the canyon's confluence with the Colorado. Unless some rafters saw what was left of him caught in the flotsam at the foot of a rapids somewhere, he'd make it all the way down to Boulder Dam.

  But the rain had almost finished drenching this part of the Grand Canyon and was drifting northeastward, leaving the Coconino Plateau to dump its tons of water across the Colorado on the Kaibab Plateau. Now the canyons draining the other rim of the great river would be roaring with flood.

  Chee took a hard look at the torrent pouring out of the slot. In a few minutes he could buck it. In a few hours it would be a mere trickle. In a few days the stone floor of the slot would be dry again, collecting dust, waiting for the next male rain to flush it clean.

  Ten minutes later, Chee was splashing wearily upstream against the diminishing flow. Calling for Bernie.

  28

  "I think it would be safe enough," Bernie said. "The water's not so deep now. Not running so fast. Let's climb down and get out of here."

  Joanna Craig looked doubtful. "How about that man?" she asked. "He's down there somewhere. And he has his pistol."

  "I think he's gone," Bernie said. "Gone forever. And we have your pistol, too."

  "I don't know, though. What if he comes back?"

  "If he comes back, we shoot him," Bernie said. "Let's get out of here before there's more rain and it gets worse again."

  "He said he unloaded the pistol."

  "He said it, but he didn't do it. I checked. It's still loaded."

  "Do you know how to shoot it?"

  "I'm a policewoman," Bernie said, and was surprised to hear the pride in her voice. Noticing she hadn't said "former policewoman." She'd thought she'd gotten over that.

  They eased their way down off the platform into the water flow. Not much more than ankle-deep now, but cold. No matter how hot the summer day, these male rains in the high country were always icy. If Jim was here to hear her, she'd be tempted to say "cold as a police sergeant's heart."

  Even as she thought that, she heard his voice, and her name. The echoes off the slot's cliffs were repeating it: "Bernie, Bernie, Bern, Ber." But even in the echoes she recognized Jim's voice.

  "Jim!" she shouted. "We're up here. We're coming down the wash."

  That, too, immediately translated itself into a clamor of echoes. But he would have understood enough of it.

  "Come on," Bernie said, leading Joanna on a splashing run down the stream. With Bernie thinking she didn't really know whether the blond man with the gun was actually gone forever. Thinking she should have warned Jim. Thinking it was too late for that now. Stopping to get Joanna's pistol out of her pocket, just in case.

  And when they started running again there was Jim Chee, splashing toward them.

  "Bernie!" he shouted, still running. "Thank God."

  "Jim," she said, gesturing toward Joanna, "this is Joanna Craig and-"

  Their reunion was too violent for that sentence to be completed. He splashed into Bernie, partly due to enthusiasm, partly because he had lost his balance. The impact of a soggy man with a fairly dry woman was forceful enough to send out a spray. Then they were hugging each other with force and enthusiasm.

  "Jim," Bernie said, when she had recovered enough breath to say it. "Where have you been? I was afraid you-"

  "I thought I had lost you, Bernie," Chee blurted out. And, alas, added: "Why didn't you wait for me? I thought I told you-" He was smart enough to end it there.

  Bernie backed away a little. "Ms. Craig," she said, "this is Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. He used to be my boss. Sometimes he thinks he still is."

  "How do you do," Chee said to Joanna. "And we're going to be married right away," and he hugged Bernie again.

  Bernie found herself talking directly into his left ear. "Jim, there's a man in here. With a pistol. Claims to be a deputy from California. Big blond man."

  "He's gone," Chee said, still hugging Bernie. "Washed down the canyon out there, and on down into the Colorado."

  "It's good to meet you, Mr. Chee," Joanna said. "But if it's safe now, we should get out of this water. Get someplace out in the open air."

  They started down the runoff flow, which was diminishing quickly, with Bernie talking fast about how she had gotten here, about the diamonds, about the arrival of Joanna and Chandler, about the dried, emaciated corpse, about Chandler taking the diamonds.

  "That body washed by me," Chee said. "And so did the blond man, carrying some sort of rope knotted on the ends. In fact, I think I might have been able to save him, but the rope got caught in that cat's claw brush at the mouth of this slot. Instead of trying to get to where I could pull him to the bank, he was trying to jerk it loose."

  "That rope had all those diamonds in it," Bernie said, and explained how Chandler had rigged two long wool hiker's socks together to carry them.

  "Well, they're gone now," Chee said. "Maybe they'll sink to the bottom of the Colorado River, or wash all the way down to Lake Mead."

  "They were Ms. Craig's diamonds," Bernie said. "Or would have been. I saved one of them for Billy Tuve to use as evidence-if he needs it."

  She took the snuff can from her pocket, handed it to Chee. "Be careful, Jim. Don't you drop it."

  Chee grinned at her. "Now, Bernie, you're not supposed to talk to me like that until after I'm your husband."

  But he was careful with it, taking out the folder pouch, putting diamond
in pouch, pouch in can, and can in his pocket.

  The early twilight of the world outside the slot greeted them now. They ducked under the cat's claw brush and walked out of the now-shallow flow to the cliff-side bank where Chee had waited.

  "Free at last," Bernie said, and they began their trek down the canyon to its confluence with the Colorado. The big canyon flow was also sharply diminished now. Chee finished his account of Dashee's misfortune just as they reached the big river. There they heard a helicopter over the rim.

  "That will be the one coming for Dashee," Chee said. "I hope he's smart enough to get them to wait a little while in case we show up."

  He was. On the flight back to the Park Service landing pad, Chee presented Dashee with the snuff can, pouch, and diamond, Billy Tuve's evidence to get the charges against him dismissed.