The Witch's Tongue

by James D. Doss

  Moon shook his head. “It’s more than that.” He’s scared of whoever it was that left him on the Witch’s Tongue. That’s why he won’t talk about how he got onto the ledge or how somebody made sure he stayed there. He’s worried that same person will come back. And stop his clock for good.

  Parris pressed the Play button.

  FELIX NAVARONE eyed the fed’s glass of water.

  The U.S. attorney took note of this. “Want something to drink?”

  “Could I have a beer?”

  The fed laughed out loud, the defense counsel smiled.

  Even Navarone seemed amused at his request. “Then how about a Coke?”

  “Sure.” Sour Face raised an eyebrow at the opposition. “Anything for you, counsel?”

  “Coffee would be nice. With cream.”

  The fed nodded to someone off camera. The courtesies disposed of, he asked the prisoner why he and his partner had selected that particular hiding place.

  “We figured it would be the perfect spot. Almost nobody ever goes into Snake Canyon.”

  The latter assertion piqued the fed’s curiosity. “Why is that, Mr. Navarone?”

  The Apache stared at the pitifully ignorant white man. “It’s a very bad place.”

  “I see.” Sour Face penciled Bad Place on his yellow pad. “What happened after you had hidden the stolen property on the ledge?”

  The prisoner shrugged under the loosely fitting orange jumper. “Well, me and Eddie Ganado are about to leave the mesa when we hear—uh—someone coming. Turns out it was Jacob Gourd Rattle. Ol’ Jake, he must’ve saw the light from our Coleman lantern. Anyway, Jake yells, ‘Who’re you two yahoos—and what’re you doin’ here?’ Me’n Eddie, we’re so freaked we don’t say nothing. Then Jake, he shakes his finger at us and says, ‘You’re not Utes—you got no right to be on Ute land.’” Felix Navarone ducked in an attempt to avoid the U.S. attorney’s stare. “I couldn’t tell you exactly who threw the first punch. It might’ve been Jake, it might’ve been Eddie.”

  “But it certainly wasn’t you.” There was a sarcastic smile on the fed’s face. “And just for the record, you are not claiming self-defense in the Gourd Rattle homicide.”

  Navarone’s counsel responded, “My client is merely stating that he does not remember who initiated the unfortunate altercation.”

  “So understood.” The fed nodded at the prisoner. “You may continue.”

  “What happened,” Navarone said, “was Eddie bopped Jake upside of the head—knocked him right off the ledge and down into Snake Canyon.”

  “KING KONG,” Moon said.

  Parris turned to his friend with a quizzical look. “What?”

  “The lady under the spotted lizard may’ve been a little bit drunk, but Kicks Dogs wasn’t quite asleep and she wasn’t altogether dreaming. She saw King Kong fall off the Empire State Building. Heard him hit the street with a thump!”

  The chief of the GCPD shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

  ON THE video display, Felix Navarone continued his narrative.

  “WHEN HE knocked Jake off the edge of the mesa, dopey old Eddie tripped over his own feet and fell down and banged his knee on a rock. He was limping some, but he followed me down the trail into the canyon to check on Jake. Right off we could tell that nasty old Ute was dead. Eddie says, ‘Felix—we gotta get outta here.’ I says, ‘Look, this Ute must have a camp around here someplace. And unless he walked ten miles in or rode a horse, he must have some wheels up there on the mesa, ‘cause that’s the only way to drive in.’ Then I searched Jake, and found a car key in his pocket. ‘When he turns up missing,’ I says to Eddie, ‘those Ute cops will send some people out to look for him. Maybe somebody knows he’s here, maybe not. But either way we’ll be a lot better off if there’s no sign left of his camp. And we gotta move his car a few miles up the road.’ Eddie says, ‘Yeah—we need to make it look like Jake was somewhere else.’ I say, ‘Eddie, I’ll hide Jake’s body someplace. And if I can find his camp, I’ll clean it up so nobody’ll know he was in the canyon. While I’m doing that, you go up on the mesa and look for his wheels.’ Eddie complains some about his knee, but says he guesses he can make it back up the trail if he takes his time. So I give Eddie Jake’s car key and that’s what we did. After Eddie hikes back up onto the mesa, it didn’t take him very long to find Jake’s clunky old Dodge van. And it didn’t take me but a coupla minutes to find the place where Jake was camped. It was right there in Snake Canyon, and not far from where he landed when he fell off the mesa. But this is the strange part—Jake had dug a big hole where he’d set up camp, and he’d covered it up with a buffalo robe. It looked like a grave.” Felix Navarone’s face twisted into a puzzled expression. “Maybe he knew he was gonna die that night.” He turned to his lawyer. “Sometimes they do.”

  She nodded, as if this made perfect sense.

  The Apache proceeded with his confession: “Anyway, I put Jake’s body in the hole and covered it up with rocks and dirt and smoothed it over real nice. Right then, it starts to snow, and it’s about time for the sun to come up. So I picked up his gear and lugged it up the trail to the top of Three Sisters Mesa. I found Eddie, and we stashed Jake’s stuff in his Dodge van.”

  PARRIS STOPPED the tape, turned to eye the tribal investigator. “You have any idea why Mr. Gourd Rattle dug a trench in ground?”

  Moon got up to refill his coffee cup. “Like the Apache said—it was a grave.”

  “Grave for who?”

  “Jacob dug it for himself.”

  “You figure he intended to commit suicide?”

  “No.” Moon stirred in six spoons of sugar. “Jacob went into Snake Canyon on a vision quest. He must’ve needed some kind of healing. The pit is used to ‘bury’ the visionary’s body—this is supposed to encourage the soul to go free. And the man seeking the vision must be alone. That’s why Jacob sent his wife away.”

  “If you say so.” Parris glanced at the video monitor where the talkative Apache was frozen with his mouth gaped open. He pushed the VCR Play button. Navarone’s affliction with electronic lockjaw was instantly cured.

  THE VERBAL deposition was interrupted when a tough-looking young man brought a tray to the table. There was coffee and cream for the defense counsel, a Cherry Coke for the prisoner, a bowl of Ginger Snaps for anyone who wished to indulge. After the Justice Department employee disappeared off camera, Sour Face tapped his pencil on the table, waited for the prisoner to take a couple of swigs of the sugary drink. “So now you had possession of the dead man’s vehicle and his camping gear.”

  Felix Navarone’s head bobbed in a nod. “Right.”

  “Did you find any weapons in Mr. Gourd Rattle’s vehicle?”

  Navarone got the go-ahead nod from his lawyer. “Yeah,” he said. “Eddie found a .22 pistol in the glove compartment. It was wrapped in a rag.”

  The federal attorney reached under the table, produced a transparent evidence bag, pushed it across the table. “Mr. Navarone, is this the firearm your partner found in Mr. Gourd Rattle’s van?”

  A shrug from the Apache. “Looks like it.”

  “Who took possession of this firearm?”

  “Eddie did.” An amused shrug. “That Navajo liked guns.”

  The fed withdrew the evidence. “You have already stated that your intention was to leave Mr. Gourd Rattle’s vehicle and camping gear at some distance from the general area where his body and the stolen goods might be found.”

  “That was the plan all right.” The prisoner seemed to be reading the fine print on the Coke can. “But sometimes things don’t work out the way you expect.” The videotaped felon paused to shake his head, grin at the beginning of his long string of bad luck. “It was stupid, I guess, but we never thought of Jake having somebody with him in Snake Canyon. It was two or three days later we heard about his woman waking up the next morning and finding her old man gone. I guess the snow must’ve covered up his grave by then. If Kicks Dogs hadn’t reported him missing—t
hings might’ve turned out all right for me and Eddie.”

  CHARLIE MOON snatched the VCR control off Parris’s desk, pressed the Pause button.

  Annoyed at this unseemly appropriation of his “clicker,” the chief of police glared at the presumptuous Ute. “Why did you do that?”

  “It must be all the sugar and caffeine—I seem to have lost some of my excessive modesty.”

  “I sense that you are about to make a brag.”

  “I would rather make a buck.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Give it your best shot.”

  “Felix Navarone is about to tell us how Eddie Ganado lost his hair.” Charlie Moon grinned at Parris. “But you know that, ’cause you’ve already seen the tape. I, on the other hand, am not an overpaid administrator who waits to hear a confession. I am a real, working cop who has to figure out what’s going on before the bad guy spills his guts.”

  “And you’re telling me you know.”

  “If the price is right.”

  A smile crinkled the corners of Parris’s mouth. “Are you suggesting a wager?”

  Moon’s grin got wider. “You bet.”

  “Very well, I think I will.” Parris reached for his billfold, emptied it of bills, laid all his money down.

  The Ute took a look at the attractive stack of greenbacks. “How much is that?”

  The chief of police assumed a superior expression. “I am so sure of winning that I did not bother to count it.”

  Moon hesitated. “At the moment, I am a little short of hard cash.”

  This produced a smirk on the white man’s face. “Go ahead—backwater if you’re having second thoughts.”

  “Will you take my IOU?”

  “Natch. Now tell me—how did Mr. Ganado lose his hair?”

  “It was those little white spots on his skin that got me to thinking. It looked to me like Ganado was splashed with something hot.”

  “Splashed?”

  “As with a liquid. The kind which—when it’s under pressure—has a boiling point well in excess of two hundred and twelve Fahrenheit degrees. Naturally, this varies with the concentration of antifreeze.”

  Parris looked glumly at his money, said a silent good-bye.

  Moon was very pleased with himself. “Way I figure it, either Felix Navarone or Eddie Ganado was driving Jacob’s van away from Three Sisters Mesa when it broke down. But it must’ve been Eddie that stuck his head under the hood, trying to see was wrong—and Eddie’s hair got caught in the fan belt. Aside from getting scalped by an engine—”

  “What?”

  “Not Injun—engine.”

  “Oh.”

  “Like I was saying, aside from getting scalped by an internal combustion engine, that poor accident-prone Navajo got his head banged pretty hard against the radiator about six dozen times before Felix Navarone could shut off the motor and—”

  “Take my money, Charlie. But please—don’t say another word about how the Navajo lost his hair.”

  The Ute picked up the stack of greenbacks, resisted the impulse to count them.

  Parris snatched back the VCR controller.

  THE ELECTRONIC facsimile of Felix Navarone helped itself to a digitized representation of a cookie and began to talk. “What happened was this. I got the van key back from Eddie, cranked up the old Dodge. Eddie gets in my pickup—he follows me on that little road off of Three Sisters Mesa. But we haven’t gone a quarter mile when that stinkin’ Dodge coughs and dies on me. There’s big boulders on both sides of the road so Eddie can’t get around the van with my pickup. Well, there we are—stranded with Jake’s van blocking the lane. We can’t just walk away and leave the dead man’s van and my truck behind it. We’re in ten kinds of trouble if we can’t get Jake’s old box of bolts started again. Eddie, he gets out of my pickup and goes around to the front of the van. I pull the latch and he pops the hood. At first, Eddie says, ‘I can’t see nothing wrong here.’ Then he says, ‘Hey, Felix—I think I found the trouble. Try it now.’ So I cranks the engine and I hear this bang-bang-bang. I thought for sure we’d throwed a rod—but it’s Eddie’s head bopping on the radiator. He yells bloody murder, I shut off the engine. But by that time, he was bunged up pretty bad. Turns out a big hank of his hair has got caught in the fan belt.”

  Neither of the lawyers was able to suppress a smile.

  Navarone shuddered at the memory. “It was awful. Eddie has cuts and burns all over his face and a bunch of his hair is wrapped around the fan shaft and the pulleys on the generator and I don’t know what else. His blood is splattered all over the engine. He’s not yelling now and I think maybe he’s dead, but after I cut his hair loose with my Buck knife, he’s not only alive—he’s really mad at me for taking so long to shut off the engine.” Navarone shook his head and snickered. “He starts cussing and chunking rocks at me. I laugh so hard I fall down in the snow. After a while, Eddie runs out of swear words and he can’t find any more rocks to throw, so he sits down on the ground and starts to cry. Blubbers like a baby. I says, ‘Eddie, get a hold of yourself—we got to figure out what to do. Way things are now, we can’t leave this van anyplace where it’ll be spotted. If the police find it with all your blood and hair on it—they’ll know you killed Jake Gourd Rattle.’ He says, ‘You are in this too.’ I say, ‘Eddie—you’re the one who bopped Jake and knocked him off the cliff.’ He says, ‘Felix, it don’t matter who bopped Jake—we’re in this together.’ And I tell him that the police will be able to do tests on the blood and hair and trace it straight to him. He says, ‘They’d better not, Felix—or your goose gets cooked right along with mine.’” Navarone took a sip of Cherry Coke. “Because his head is all bunged up, Eddie don’t know what to do. So I say, ‘Eddie, we’ll take Jake’s van to your place and hide it there while we clean it up real good, so there’s none of your hair or blood left on it.’ Eddie sees the sense in this, and says, ‘Right—we will detail this old rust bucket!’ So we take Jake’s van to Eddie’s place, stash it in his garage. We was awfully tired by then, so we decide to clean it up the next night and then get rid of it. Eddie was still in a ugly mood, so I thought I’d drive back to the place I share with my brother Ned over by Pagosa. But later on that day, when I was coming back to Eddie’s place to help him get his hair and blood offa Jake’s van—I got stopped at the roadblock.”

  PARRIS PRESSED the Pause button, turned to eye the tribal investigator.

  The Ute had counted the take. Eighty-six dollars. Not bad for a few minutes’ work. He folded the wad, put it in his pocket.

  “Go ahead,” Parris said. “Get it said.”

  “You sure you won’t mind?”

  Moon’s victim nodded.

  “Okay. Here goes. ‘You are an easy mark.’”

  “Charlie—mark my word. Your time is coming.”

  “That’s what you’ve been telling me for about a dozen years now.”

  “Let’s change the subject.” Parris’s wallet felt as thin as tissue. “I heard a rumor that you tipped off the FBI. Told ’em about the ignition key they found in Wolfe’s raincoat pocket.”

  The tribal investigator frowned. “Who told you such a thing?”

  “Stan Newman. He thinks you were trying to help his partner along, probably because she’s prettier than he is.”

  “A ninety-year-old warthog that slobbers is prettier than Stan is.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” Parris said. “Stan admitted he was guessing.”

  Moon was relieved to know that McTeague had not revealed her source.

  “Don’t hold out on your best friend. Did Newman guess right?”

  The Ute nodded.

  “So how’d you know about the key in Jim Wolfe’s raincoat pocket?”

  “At the roadblock, when Felix Navarone jumped out of that tree onto Wolfe, a passerby was making a videotape, which fell into the tribal chairman’s hands. I watched a part of it over and over, one frame at a time.”

  “And?”

  “And while Wol
fe and Navarone were rolling around on the ground, I saw Navarone slip his hand into Wolfe’s raincoat pocket. Way I see it, the Apache should have been way too busy to be picking the cop’s pocket. So it got me to wondering—what’d Felix have on him that he wanted to get rid of so bad that he’d run from the state police, climb up a tree, then jump off the limb to assault an SUPD officer? I recalled that it was when the state cop asked him for the ignition key that Felix got spooked. He would’ve had no reason to get panicky about giving the Smokey the key out of his truck. So I figured he had somebody else’s ignition key in his pocket. And Jacob’s van was missing from Three Sisters Mesa.” He grinned. “Pretty good, huh?”

  “Nobody likes a show-off.” Parris restarted the video of the Ganado confession, fast-forwarded to the point of interest.

  “AT FIRST, I wasn’t too scared by the roadblock,” Felix Navarone said, “because there’s nothing in my pickup to connect me to the museum heist or to Jake’s killing. But when that tough-looking state cop asks me for the ignition key, I remember that I still have Jake’s van key in my pocket. I figure if these cops frisk me and find that key, I am dead meat and cold bones. So I make a run for it, hoping to toss the key before they can catch me. But I see them hot-footed cops is gaining on me and I know I can’t make it into the brush where I can throw the key away without it being noticed. So I have to climb that tree. And while I’m out on that cottonwood limb, I have me a little time to think. What I think is, If I can jump onto one of these cops, maybe I can plant the key on him. Once I do that, there’ll be no way they can prove I ever had Jake’s van key unless I’ve left some fingerprints on it, but that’s the only chance I have. So I jump on that white cop who is working for the Ute police. And while we’re rassling, I slip the key into his coat pocket. That white man was one dirty fighter—I thought he was gonna chew my face off before those other cops finally pulled him offa me.” Felix Navarone rubbed at his bitten nose, which still had not healed.