Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 06 - The Ghostway

by The Ghostway(lit)

  About then, Jim Chee began thinking of who the man he'd been calling Leroy Gorman might really be, and the implication of what this man was doing. And he realized that if things went as planned he might not leave Mesa Gigante alive.

  And neither would Margaret Billy Sosi.

  Chapter 26

  Chee unlocked the glove box, fumbled among the maps, tools, and papers in it, and pulled out his pistol. It was a short-barreled.38 caliber revolver, and Chee looked at it without pleasure. Nothing against this particular pistol; it was just that Chee had no fondness for any of them and wasn't particularly good at using them. Keeping up his marksmanship certification, a condition of employment, was an annual chore. While he always managed to pass, there was never any margin to spare. Now, however, the heft of the pistol was reassuring in his hand. He examined it, made sure it was loaded, and cocked and uncocked it. Then he dropped it into the side pocket of his coat. That out of the way, it was time to make a plan. That involved trying to figure out what was likely to happen here.

  The key to it all was simple: Leroy Gorman was not Leroy Gorman. He might be Beno, or whatever his name was-the Navajo Shaw said the grand jury had indicted and who had never been picked up. That made sense. Shaw had said finding him was tough because he had no arrest record, which meant no pictures or fingerprints, and no useful information. Thus nobody was going to recognize him. And when the time came for McNair to go to trial, a Navajo identified as Leroy Gorman would be placed on the witness stand, and how would they work it then? Chee guessed he knew. When the D.A. examined him, he'd recite his testimony in a halting, uncertain way, raising doubt in the jury. Then, under cross examination, he'd say that he'd been coached in what to say by Upchurch; that Upchurch had given him all this information, and assured him it was true, and warned him that if he didn't recite in court he'd be sent to prison as a thief. He would say that he actually knew none of it; he was simply passing along what the fbi agent had told him. And that, of course, would taint everything any other prosecution witness said, and raise at least a reasonable doubt, and McNair would go home free.

  The genuine Leroy Gorman was undoubtedly dead. Carefully dead. They would never want his body found.

  Chee reconsidered. Sharkey? No problem.

  Leroy's warning had been mailed almost immediately after he was put in place. There was almost no chance that Sharkey would have seen him. So Leroy Gorman was not Gorman. Chee found himself thinking of the man as Grayson once again. What to do about Grayson?

  Chee climbed out of his pickup and looked toward the hogan. The chanting of Littleben was silent now. Chee imagined him on his knees, building the final sand painting. With the exception of two men and a very fat woman talking beside the fire, those waiting for dawn to bring the ceremony's end were waiting in the relative warmth of their cars. Chee stared at Gorman's Chevy, trying to see if the man was in it. He couldn't tell. He put his hand on the pistol in his coat pocket, took two steps toward Gorman's car. Then he stopped. The entire theory suddenly was nonsense-the product of being hit on the head and too many hours without sleep. He imagined himself arresting Gorman.

  "What's the charge?"

  "I think you're impersonating a federal witness."

  "That's a crime?"

  "Well, it might be."

  And he imagined himself standing in front of Largo's desk, Largo looking at him, wordless, sad, stricken with the latest Chee stupidity. And Sharkey, maybe, at the back of the room, too furious to be coherent.

  Chee walked back to his pickup truck and leaned against it, trying to think. If Gorman was a plant working for McNair, what would he have done when Chee called him and told him the Sosi girl was found, and invited him to come and meet her? He wouldn't have come. Of course not, because Margaret Sosi would have seen Leroy Gorman's picture and would recognize he wasn't Leroy Gorman, and that would screw everything up. He came, so of course he was the genuine Leroy Gorman.

  Chee thought some more. His theory, wrong as it was, made everything click into place. Everything. It explained what had happened at the Begay hogan. Nothing else explained that. So the man was an imposter and he'd come anyway.

  But of course! Grayson had to come. Here Chee would meet Sosi, see the photograph, know Grayson wasn't Leroy Gorman, and everything would collapse around him. So he'd come, late enough so that Margaret Sosi wouldn't see him in any decent light. And so far, for that matter, she hadn't seen him at all. He'd come because it was a last chance to get the picture back before it did any serious harm, and to eliminate Sosi, who'd seen the picture.

  Chee had a second chilling thought. Whoever he was, he wouldn't have come alone if he could help it. He would have called Los Angeles and had Vaggan sent to help. How long would that take? A chartered plane, a rented car. Chee tried to calculate. Plenty of time to fly to Albuquerque and then drive. An even worse thought occurred to him. Vaggan hadn't waited around Los Angeles all the time Chee was mending in the hospital there. More likely he'd have confirmed, somehow, that the Sosi girl had left and he had driven directly to the reservation to look for her. That would have made getting here simple indeed. He might have driven out with Gorman. Chee doubted that. He'd have brought his own vehicle. And where would he have left it?

  Chee had a possible answer for that. He trotted down Mr. Yellow's entrance track to the road that had brought him up Mesa Gigante. And then he walked, keeping well away from it. The ruined hogan the girl in the police station had described to him was about a mile away, near the rim of the mesa. Chee approached it cautiously, keeping behind the cover of junipers when he could, keeping low when there was no cover. Where the track forked off from the road toward the ruin, Chee stopped, knelt, and studied the ground. Tire tracks. The moonlight was dim now, slanting from near the western horizon, but the tracks were plain enough. Made today. Made only hours ago, with neither wind nor time to soften them. Still on his knees, Chee started toward the hogan, out of sight just over a fold of land. No Ca¤oncito Navajo would drive in there at night and brave a ghost. The hogan had been marked on the map he'd left for the man who wasn't Leroy Gorman. The man must have left the map for Vaggan, and Vaggan-obviously, from what had happened at the Begay place-had taken the trouble to educate himself about Navajo attitudes about ghosts and ghost hogans.

  Chee moved cautiously down the track, keeping behind the junipers. He didn't have to go far. After less than fifty yards he had enough visibility over the hillock to see the top of what remained of the hogan's wall. And over the wall, the top of a dark van. Chee stared at it, remembering the last time he had seen it-and what he had seen in the frantic moment he had been inside it, remembering the locked gun rack behind the driver's seat and what it had held. He'd seen an automatic shotgun, something that had looked like an M16 automatic rifle, and at least two smaller automatic weapons-an arsenal.

  It occurred to Chee, fairly early in his walk back to the Yellow place, that if things went bad here-as they seemed likely to-it was purely because of Jim Chee's stupidity. He had found Margaret Sosi for them, and then he had called them down on her. Two other things also seemed apparent. Vaggan would do nothing overt here, at this sing, because he was smart enough to know how long it would take him to drive from here to anyplace he could lose himself. Empty, roadless country made troubles for law enforcement, but it also had advantages, and one of them was that roadblocks are extremely efficient. If you have a wheeled vehicle, there's no place to go with it. If you don't, hiding is easy enough, but there's no water. So Vaggan would wait. Follow them away from here, probably. Pass them on the highway, perhaps, and finish it all with a burst of fire from that automatic rifle. Or at least follow Margaret Sosi. Chee, until he saw the photograph, would be harmless. And he'd told the substitute Gorman that the picture was in Santa Fe.

  Finally it occurred to him that he had one advantage. He knew Grayson was the enemy. He knew Vaggan was out there waiting. What he didn't know, not yet, was how to use that advantage. He moved rapidly through the snakeweed and
cactus, back toward Yellow's hogan. On the eastern horizon now he could make out the ragged outline of the Sandias and the Manzano Mountains, back-lighted by the first glimmer of dawn. He had very little time to decide.

  The fire had been rebuilt with a fresh supply of logs and was sending sparks high above the hogan when Chee returned. Everybody was up, waiting for the final act of the drama that would free Margaret Sosi from the ghost that rode her and return her to the ways of beauty. Chee searched through the crowd, looking for Grayson. He spotted him at the edge of the cluster just as the sound of Littleben's chanting stopped. It was a moment too early. Chee ducked back into the crowd, away from Grayson's vision.

  The door of the hogan opened out, and Littleben emerged, trailed by Margaret Sosi. He held a small clay pot in his right hand and a pair of prayer sticks, elaborately painted and feathered, in the other. He held the feathered pahos high, their shafts crossed in an X. "Now our daughter will drink this brew, " he chanted.

  "Now our daughter, she being daughter of Black God,

  Now our daughter, she being daughter of Talking God,

  Now our daughter, she being Blue Flint Girl,

  Now our daughter, she being White Shell Girl,

  Now our daughter will drink away the evil,

  Now our daughter will return to hozro,

  Now our daughter will walk again in the male rain falling,

  Now our daughter will walk with the dark mist around her,

  Now our daughter will go with beauty above her.

  Now our daughter."

  Chee had lost sight of Grayson again. He turned away from the poetry of the chant to look for him. When the time was right, he wanted to know exactly where he could find the man. He wanted Grayson close. And Grayson was close. He had simply moved a little nearer the hogan. But he was still keeping himself where Margaret Sosi couldn't see him-or so it seemed to Chee. It also seemed to Chee that Margaret Sosi would hardly notice him. She had drunk the steaming emetic now and was staring at the east. She was supposed to vomit just as the red first rim of the sun was visible on the horizon. It was apparent from the strained look on her face that her inclination was to vomit instantly. But there, suddenly, was the rim of the sun. It was time to use his one advantage.

  Chee hurried through the onlookers to Grayson and grabbed him by the elbow.

  "Leroy," he said. "Trouble."

  "What?" Grayson looked startled.

  "Vaggan is here," Chee said. "Big blond man who's a killer for McNair. He's got his van parked out there."

  "Vaggan?" Grayson said. "My God."

  "He must be waiting until this is over. Until the crowd breaks up. Or he's waiting for you to leave and he'll follow you."

  "Yeah," Grayson said. He looked suitably nervous.

  "There's another way out of here," Chee said. "On past this place, the road winds down the other side of the mesa. It's bad but it's passable."

  Around them the spectators were laughing and clapping. Margaret Sosi had gotten rid of her evil and was returned to hozro. Her relatives crowded around her.

  "Just turn left where Yellow's drive comes off the road and keep driving. I'll get Margaret and follow you."

  "Left," Grayson said. "Okay."

  He ran for his car. Chee hurried through the crowd to Margaret Sosi. She was talking to an old woman, with Littleben standing beside her.

  "Come on," Chee said. "Vaggan is here. We've got to run."

  Margaret Sosi looked puzzled. With the ghost blacking washed away, she also looked pale. "Vaggan?"

  "The big man back in L.A. Remember? The one who pretended to be a cop. The one who hit me."

  "Oh," Margaret Sosi said. She hurried along with him. "Good-by. Good-by. And thank you."

  Grayson's Chevy was roaring down the track away from the Yellow place. Chee started his pickup, backed it around in a flurry of dust, and roared down the track. At the bottom of the arroyo, he slid the pickup to a stop, shifted into low gear, and edged it carefully up the wash, banging and slamming over the rocks and scraping through the thickets of mountain mahogany and chamiza that flourished in the stream bottom. When he was far enough from the track to be out of sight he turned off the engine. Margaret Sosi was looking at him, the question on her face.

  He had time enough to explain it all to her, because now there was nothing to do but wait.

  "And so," Chee concluded, "I told the guy who's pretending to be Gorman that I'd spotted Vaggan, and I told him to make a run for it on a road down the other side of the mesa, and I told him you and I would follow. He drove right off, but where he'll go is to tell Vaggan we've seen him, and that we're running."

  "But when he goes after us-" Margaret Sosi began.

  "We give him time to do that, and then we run ourselves."

  "But why didn't we just go down the other side?"

  "The road doesn't go anywhere. That's what they told me at the police station. It wanders around a little up here and turns into wagon tracks. But there's no other way down off the mesa; just back the way we came. The only way down is right past where Vaggan is parked."

  "Oh," Margaret Sosi said. "Okay."

  They sat in silence.

  "How long do we wait?"

  Exactly the question in Chee's mind. Chee had counted four of the seven vehicles that had been parked at the Yellow place passing on the track behind them. Now track and road were silent. The other three, he guessed, must be staying for breakfast and a visit. He had to allow enough time for Grayson to reach the old hogan, and give Vaggan the word, and for them to drive back past Yellow's turnoff. More than that was time wasted-because it probably would not take Vaggan long to realize the road was playing out into nothing. But less than that would be fatal. Chee had no illusions about the outcome of any shooting match between his pistol and Vaggan's automatic weapon.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to estimate time elapsed and match it with Vaggan's actions.

  "About now, I think." He started the engine again and bumped the pickup backward down the arroyo floor. At the intersection, nothing was in sight on the road in either direction. He had allowed a little more time than necessary, which meant pursuit would be a little quicker than it might have been. He roared down the rutted dirt. Dawn was bright enough now to make headlights needless, but still dim enough to make it hard to see the uneven road surface. He skidded the pickup around the sharp turn where the road dipped suddenly over the mesa rim, braked again where it made another hairpin bend around a great upthrust of sand-stone and slate, then jerked the wheel sharply to the right to bend it around the wall of stone.

  Just behind the wall, the big brown van was parked, blocking the way. Vaggan was standing behind it, the automatic rifle aimed at Chee's windshield. Chee stood on the brakes, sending the truck into a sidewise skid that stopped it parallel to the van. He shifted frantically into reverse, spinning the rear wheels in the roadside sand. Grayson was standing beside the road, not fifteen feet away, a pistol pointed at Chee.

  "Kill the engine," Vaggan shouted. "Or I kill you now."

  Chee killed the engine.

  "Stick your hands out the window where I can see them," Vaggan ordered.

  Chee put his hands out the window.

  "Now reach down, outside the door where I can see the hand, and open the door, and get out, and keep your hands where I can see them. Your hand gets out of my sight and I kill you right then."

  Chee opened the door and stepped out on the ground. He was conscious of the weight of the.38 in the right-hand pocket of his coat. How long would it take him to reach it and shoot Vaggan? Far, far, far too long.

  "I'm going to handcuff you and put you in the van here with me," Vaggan said. He was walking toward Chee, the automatic rifle aimed at Chee's midsection. "And then you and the girl and all of us will go someplace where it's quieter and we can talk this all over. Where's your pistol?"

  "No pistol," Chee said. "I'm off duty. It's back at my place in Shiprock."

  "I'm not stupi
d," Vaggan said. "If I was stupid I'd be off chasing down that road where you told Beno you'd be. Lay down on your face. On the ground. Hands and feet spread. Beno, come here and get his gun. Probably a shoulder holster or under his belt."

  Chee stood, trying to think of something useful.

  "Down," Vaggan said. He speared Chee in the chest with the rifle barrel.

  Chee dropped to his knees gasping. He knew exactly what was coming. Vaggan would take them to some more isolated spot, where the gunshots would not bring someone immediately to check. Then he would kill them. Just two shots, Chee guessed. One each. The less shots, the less chance of arousing curiosity.

  "Down," Vaggan ordered, jabbing Chee in the back with the rifle. Chee dropped to his belly.

  "There it is," Vaggan said. "In his coat pock-."